While other poets and dramatists embody isolated
phases of character and work inward from the phenomenon to the special
law which it illustrates, he seems in some strange way unitary with
human nature itself, and his own soul to have been the law- and
life-giving power of which his creations are only the phenomena. We
justify or criticize the characters of other writers by our memory and
experience, and pronounce them natural or unnatural; but he seems to
have worked in the very stuff of which memory and experience are made,
and we recognize his truth to Nature by an innate and unacquired
sympathy, as if he alone possessed the secret of the "ideal form and
universal mould," and embodied generic types rather than individuals.
In this Cervantes alone has approached him; and Don Quixote and Sancho,
like the men and women of Shakspeare, are the contemporaries of
every generation, because they are not products of an artificial and
transitory society, but because they are animated by the primeval and
unchanging forces of that humanity which underlies and survives the
forever-fickle creeds and ceremonials of the parochial corners which we
who dwell in them sublimely call The World.
But the dropping of our _variorum_ volume upon the floor recalls us
from our reverie, and, as we pick it up, we ask ourselves sadly, Is it
fitting that we should have a Shakspeare according to plodding Malone
or coarse-minded Steevens, both of whom would have had the headache all
their lives after, could one of the Warwickshire plebeian's conceptions
have got into their brains and stretched them, and who would have hidden
under their bedclothes in a cold-sweat of terror, could they have
seen the awful vision of Macbeth as he saw it? No! and to every other
commentator who has wantonly tampered with the text, or obscured it
with his inky cloud of paraphrase, we feel inclined to apply the
quadrisyllable name of the brother of Agis, king of Sparta.
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