The peculiarity of almost all early literature is that it seems to have a double meaning, that, underneath its natural, we find ourselves continually seeing or suspecting a supernatural meaning.  In the older epics the characters seem to be half typical and only half historical.  Thus did the early poets endeavor to make realities out of appearances; for, except a few typical men in whom certain ideas get embodied, the generations of mankind are mere apparitions who come out of the dark for a purposeless moment, and reenter the dark again after they have performed the nothing they came for.

Gradually, however, the poet as the “seer” became secondary to the “maker.”  His office became that of entertainer rather than teacher.  But always something of the old tradition was kept alive.  And if he has now come to be looked upon merely as the best expresser, the gift of seeing is implied as necessarily antecedent to that, and of seeing very deep, too.  If any man would seem to have written without any conscious moral, that man is Shakespeare.  But that must be a dull sense, indeed, which does not see through his tragic—­yes, and his comic—­masks awful eyes that flame with something intenser and deeper than a mere scenic meaning—­a meaning out of the great deep that is behind and beyond all human and merely personal character.  Nor was Shakespeare himself unconscious of his place as a teacher and profound moralist:  witness that sonnet in which he bewails his having neglected sometimes the errand that was laid upon him: 

  Alas, ’t is true I have gone here and there,
  And made myself a motley to the view,
  Gored mine own thoughts, sold cheap what is most dear,
  Made old offences of affections new;
  Most true it is that I have look’d on truth
  Askance and strangely;

the application of which is made clear by the next sonnet, in which he distinctly alludes to his profession.

There is this unmistakable stamp on all the great poets—­that, however in little things they may fall below themselves, whenever there comes a great and noble thing to say, they say it greatly and nobly, and bear themselves most easily in the royalties of thought and language.  There is not a mature play of Shakespeare’s in which great ideas do not jut up in mountainous permanence, marking forever the boundary of provinces of thought, and known afar to many kindreds of men.

And it is for this kind of sight, which we call insight, and not for any faculty of observation and description, that we value the poet.  It is in proportion as he has this that he is an adequate expresser, and not a juggler with words.  It is by means of this that for every generation of man he plays the part of “namer.”  Before him, as before Adam, the creation passes to be named anew:  first the material world; then the world of passions and emotions; then the world of ideas.  But whenever a great imagination comes, however it may delight