age was feebler and more mistaken
than that of any other equally great age. Shakespeare's mind so teemed
with creation that he required the most just, most forcible, most
constant restraint from without. He most needed to be guided of poets,
and he was the least and worst guided. As a whole no one can call his
works finished models of the pure style, or of any style. But he has
many passages of the most pure style, passages which could be easily
cited if space served. And we must remember that the task which
Shakespeare undertook was the most difficult which any poet has ever
attempted, and that it is a task in which after a million efforts
every other poet has failed. The Elizabethan drama--as Shakespeare has
immortalized it--undertakes to delineate in five acts, under stage
restrictions, and in mere dialogue, a whole list of dramatis
personae, a set of characters enough for a modern novel, and with the
distinctness of a modern novel. Shakespeare is not content to give two
or three great characters in solitude and in dignity, like the
classical dramatists; he wishes to give a whole _party_ of characters
in the play of life, and according to the nature of each. He would
'hold the mirror up to nature', not to catch a monarch in a tragic
posture, but a whole group of characters engaged in many actions,
intent on many purposes, thinking many thoughts. There is life enough,
there is action enough, in single plays of Shakespeare to set up an
ancient dramatist for a long career. And Shakespeare succeeded. His
characters, taken _en masse_, and as a whole, are as well-known as any
novelist's characters; cultivated men know all about them, as young
ladies know all about Mr. Trollope's novels. But no other dramatist
has succeeded in such an aim. No one else's characters are staple
people in English literature, hereditary people whom every one knows
all about in every generation. The contemporary dramatists, Beaumont
and Fletcher, Ben Jonson, Marlowe, &c., had many merits, some of them
were great men. But a critic must say of them the worst thing he has
to say; 'they were men who failed in their characteristic aim;' they
attempted to describe numerous sets of complicated characters, and
they failed. No one of such characters, or hardly one, lives in common
memory; the Faustus of Marlowe, a really great idea, is not
remembered. They undertook to write what they could not write, five
acts full of real characters, and in consequence,