of Shakespeare, fixing their attention
on his wonderful gift of expression, have directed their imitation to
this, neglecting his other excellences. These excellences, the
fundamental excellences of poetical art, Shakespeare no doubt
possessed them--possessed many of them in a splendid degree; but it
may perhaps be doubted whether even he himself did not sometimes give
scope to his faculty of expression to the prejudice of a higher
poetical duty. For we must never forget that Shakespeare is the great
poet he is from his skill in discerning and firmly conceiving an
excellent action, from his power of intensely feeling a situation, of
intimately associating himself with a character; not from his gift of
expression, which rather even leads him astray, degenerating sometimes
into a fondness for curiosity of expression, into an irritability of
fancy, which seems to make it impossible for him to say a thing
plainly, even when the press of the action demands the very directest
language, or its level character the very simplest. Mr. Hallam, than
whom it is impossible to find a saner and more judicious critic, has
had the courage (for at the present day it needs courage) to remark,
how extremely and faultily difficult Shakespeare's language often is.
It is so: you may find main scenes in some of his greatest tragedies,
_King Lear_ for instance, where the language is so artificial, so
curiously tortured, and so difficult, that every speech has to be read
two or three times before its meaning can be comprehended. This
overcuriousness of expression is indeed but the excessive employment
of a wonderful gift--of the power of saying a thing in a happier way
than any other man; nevertheless, it is carried so far that one
understands what M. Guizot meant, when he said that Shakespeare
appears in his language to have tried all styles except that of
simplicity. He has not the severe and scrupulous self-restraint of the
ancients, partly, no doubt, because he had a far less cultivated and
exacting audience: he has indeed a far wider range than they had, a
far richer fertility of thought; in this respect he rises above them:
in his strong conception of his subject, in the genuine way in which
he is penetrated with it, he resembles them, and is unlike the
moderns: but in the accurate limitation of it, the conscientious
rejection of superfluities, the simple and rigorous development of it
from the first line of his work to the last, he falls be