ven in Sec. 5), I might have quoted
multitudes of passages wholly concurring with that, of which the "fair
Portia's counterfeit," with the following lines, and the implied ideal
of sculpture in the Winter's Tale, are wholly unanswerable instances.
But Shakespere's evidence in matters of art is as narrow as the range of
Elizabethan art in England, and resolves itself wholly into admiration
of two things,--mockery of life (as in this instance of Hermione as a
statue), or absolute splendor, as in the close of Romeo and Juliet,
where the notion of _gold_ as the chief source of dignity of aspect,
coming down to Shakespere from the times of the Field of the Cloth of
Gold, and, as I said before, strictly Elizabethan, would interfere
seriously with the pathos of the whole passage, but for the sense of
sacrifice implied in it:

"As _rich_ shall Romeo by his lady lie
Poor sacrifices of our enmity."

Sec. 32. And observe, I am not giving these examples as proof of any
smallness in Shakespere, but of his greatness; that is to say, of his
contentment, like every other great man who ever breathed, to paint
nothing but _what he saw_; and therefore giving perpetual evidence that
his sight was of the sixteenth, and not of the thirteenth century,
beneath all the broad and eternal humanity of his imagination. How far
in these modern days, emptied of splendor, it may be necessary for great
men having certain sympathies for those earlier ages, to act in this
differently from all their predecessors; and how far they may succeed in
the resuscitation of the past by habitually dwelling in all their
thoughts among vanished generations, are questions, of all practical and
present ones concerning art, the most difficult to decide; for already
in poetry several of our truest men have set themselves to this task,
and have indeed put more vitality into the shadows of the dead than most
others can give the presences of the living. Thus Longfellow, in the
Golden Legend, has entered more closely into the temper of the Monk, for
good and for evil, than ever yet theological writer or historian, though
they may have given their life's labor to the analysis: and, again,
Robert Browning is unerring in every sentence he writes of the Middle
Ages; always vital, right, and profound; so that in the matter of art,
with which we have been specially concerned, there is hardly a principle
connected with the mediaeval temper, that he has not struck upon in thos