Hence comes what is perhaps the chief difficulty in interpreting his works.  Where his power or art is fully exerted it really does resemble that of nature.  It organises and vitalises its product from the centre outward to the minutest markings on the surface, so that when you turn upon it the most searching light you can command, when you dissect it and apply to it the test of a microscope, still you find in it nothing formless, general or vague, but everywhere structure, character, individuality.  In this his great things, which seem to come whenever they are wanted, have no companions in literature except the few greatest things in Dante; and it is a fatal error to allow his carelessness elsewhere to make one doubt whether here one is not seeking more than can be found.  It is very possible to look for subtlety in the wrong places in Shakespeare, but in the right places it is not possible to find too much.  But then this characteristic, which is one source of his endless attraction, is also a source of perplexity.  For in those parts of his plays which show him neither in his most intense nor in his most negligent mood, we are often unable to decide whether something that seems inconsistent, indistinct, feeble, exaggerated, is really so, or whether it was definitely meant to be as it is, and has an intention which we ought to be able to divine; whether, for example, we have before us some unusual trait in character, some abnormal movement of mind, only surprising to us because we understand so very much less of human nature than Shakespeare did, or whether he wanted to get his work done and made a slip, or in using an old play adopted hastily something that would not square with his own conception, or even refused to trouble himself with minutiae which we notice only because we study him, but which nobody ever notices in a stage performance.  We know well enough what Shakespeare is doing when at the end of Measure for Measure he marries Isabella to the Duke—­and a scandalous proceeding it is; but who can ever feel sure that the doubts which vex him as to some not unimportant points in Hamlet are due to his own want of eyesight or to Shakespeare’s want of care?

FOOTNOTES: 

[Footnote 16:  The famous critics of the Romantic Revival seem to have paid very little attention to this subject.  Mr. R.G.  Moulton has written an interesting book on Shakespeare as a Dramatic Artist (1885).  In parts of my analysis I am much indebted to Gustav Freytag’s Technik des Dramas, a book which deserves to be much better known than it appears to be to Englishmen interested in the drama.  I may add, for the benefit of classical scholars, that Freytag has a chapter on Sophocles.  The reader of his book will easily distinguish, if he cares to, the places where I follow Freytag, those where I differ from him, and those where I write in independence of him.  I may add that in speaking of construction I have thought it best to assume in my hearers no previous knowledge of the subject; that I have not attempted to discuss how much of what is said of Shakespeare would apply also to other dramatists; and that I have illustrated from the tragedies generally, not only from the chosen four.]