the whole matter; it is a calmly _seeing_ eye; a great intellect, in
short. How a man, of some wide thing that he has witnessed, will
construct a narrative, what kind of picture and delineation he will
give of it,--is the best measure you could get of what intellect is
in the man. Which circumstance is vital and shall stand prominent;
which unessential, fit to be suppressed; where is the true
_beginning_, the true sequence and ending? To find out this, you task
the whole force of insight that is in the man. He must _understand_
the thing; according to the depth of his understanding, will the
fitness of his answer be. You will try him so. Does like join itself
to like; does the spirit of method stir in that confusion, so that its
embroilment becomes order? Can the man say, _Fiat lux_, Let there be
light; and out of chaos make a world? Precisely as there, is _light_
in himself, will he accomplish this.

Or indeed we may say again, it is in what I called Portrait-painting,
delineating of men and things, especially of men, that Shakespeare is
great. All the greatness of the man comes out decisively here. It is
unexampled, I think, that calm creative perspicacity of Shakespeare.
The thing he looks at reveals not this or that face of it, but its
inmost heart and generic secret: it dissolves itself as in light
before him, so that he discerns the perfect structure of it. Creative,
we said: poetic creation, what is this too but _seeing_ the thing
sufficiently? The _word_ that will describe the thing, follows of
itself from such clear intense sight of the thing. And is not
Shakespeare's _morality_, his valour, candour, tolerance,
truthfulness; his whole victorious strength and greatness, which can
triumph over such obstructions, visible there too? Great as the world!
No _twisted_, poor convex-concave mirror, reflecting all objects with
its own convexities and concavities; a perfectly _level_ mirror;--that
is to say withal, if we will understand it, a man justly related to
all things and men, a good man. It is truly a lordly spectacle how
this great soul takes in all kinds of men and objects, a Falstaff, an
Othello, a Juliet, a Coriolanus; sets them all forth to us in their
round completeness; loving, just, the equal brother of all. _Novum
Organum_, and all the intellect you will find in Bacon, is of a quite
secondary order; earthy, material, poor in comparison with this. Among
modern men, one finds, in strictness, almost nothin