ort. 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 Shakspeare is
great. All the greatness of the man comes out decisively here. It is
unexampled, I think, that calm creative perspicacity of Shakspeare.
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
Shakspeare'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; earthly, material, poor in comparison with this.
Among modern men, one finds, in strictness, almost nothing of the same
rank. Goethe alone, since the days of Shakspeare, reminds me