* * * * *

Thus much as to Shakespeare’s mode of conceiving and working out character.  Here, again, as in the matter of dramatic composition, we have the proper solidarity, originality, completeness, and disinterestedness of Art, all duly and rightly maintained:  that is, what was before found true in reference to all the parts of a drama viewed as a whole; the same holds, also, in regard to all the parts of an individual character considered by itself.  In both these respects, and in both alike, the Poet discovers a spirit of the utmost candour and calmness, such as could neither be misled by any inward bias or self-impulse from seeing things as they are, nor swayed from reflecting them according to the just forms and measures of objective truth; while his creative forces worked with such smoothness and equanimity, that it is hardly an extravagance to describe him as another Nature.  All this, however, must not be taken as applying, at least not in the full length and breadth, to what I have before spoken of as the Poet’s apprentice-work.  For, I repeat, Shakespeare’s genius was not born full-grown, as a good many have been used to suppose.  Ben Jonson knew him right well personally, and was, besides, no stranger to his method of working; and, in his noble lines prefixed to the folio of 1623, he puts this point just as, we may be sure, he had himself seen it to be true: 

    “Yet must I not give Nature all; thy art,
    My gentle Shakespeare, must enjoy a part: 
    For a good poet’s made, as well as born;
    And such wert thou.”

As to the question how far his genius went by a certain instinctive harmony and happiness of nature, how far by a process of conscious judgment and reflection, this is probably beyond the reach of any psychology to determine.  From the way he often speaks of poets and poetry, of art and nature, it is evident that he was well at home in speculative and philosophical considerations of the subject.  Then too the vast improvement made in some of his plays, as in Hamlet, upon rewriting them, shows that his greatest successes were by no means owing to mere lucky hits of instinct.  On the whole, I suspect he understood the what, the how, and the why of his working as well as any first-class artist ever did.  But genius, in its highest and purest instances, is a sort of unfallen intellect; so that from its pre-established harmony with the laws of mental being it goes right spontaneously.  Sophocles comprehended the whole of what is meant by powerful genius working unconsciously, when he said of his great teacher, “AEschylus does what is right without knowing why.”  And the true secret of Shakespeare’s excellence mainly lies, I take it, in a perfect co-operative union of instinct and understanding, of purpose and impulse; nature and art, inspiration and study, so working together and interpenetrating, that it is impossible to distinguish their respective shares in the joint result.  And the wonder of it is, how the fruits of creative impulse could so pass through the medium of conscious reflection, as they seem to have done, and still retain all the dewy freshness of pure creative nature; insomuch that his art carries such an air of unstudied ease as gives it the appearance of perfect artlessness.[18]