eal and the signature. He has at all times the freedom of the
well-bred, and being bred to the tact of words can take what theme he
pleases, unlike the linen drapers, who are rightly compelled to be very
strict in their conversation. Who should be free if he were not? for
none other has a continual deliberate self-delighting happiness--style,
'the only thing that is immortal in literature,' as Sainte-Beuve has
said, a still unexpended energy, after all that the argument or the
story need, a still unbroken pleasure after the immediate end has been
accomplished--and builds this up into a most personal and wilful fire,
transfiguring words and sounds and events. It is the playing of strength
when the day's work is done, a secret between a craftsman and his craft,
and is so inseparate in his nature, that he has it most of all amid
overwhelming emotion, and in the face of death. Shakespeare's persons,
when the last darkness has gathered about them, speak out of an ecstasy
that is one half the self-surrender of sorrow, and one half the last
playing and mockery of the victorious sword, before the defeated world.

It is in the arrangement of events as in the words, and in that touch of
extravagance, of irony, of surprise, which is set there after the desire
of logic has been satisfied and all that is merely necessary
established, and that leaves one, not in the circling necessity, but
caught up into the freedom of self-delight: it is, as it were, the foam
upon the cup, the long pheasant's feather on the horse's head, the
spread peacock over the pasty. If it be very conscious, very deliberate,
as it may be in comedy, for comedy is more personal than tragedy, we
call it phantasy, perhaps even mischievous phantasy, recognising how
disturbing it is to all that drag a ball at the ankle. This joy, because
it must be always making and mastering, remains in the hands and in the
tongue of the artist, but with his eyes he enters upon a submissive,
sorrowful contemplation of the great irremediable things, and he is
known from other men by making all he handles like himself, and yet by
the unlikeness to himself of all that comes before him in a pure
contemplation. It may have been his enemy or his love or his cause that
set him dreaming, and certainly the phoenix can but open her young
wings in a flaming nest; but all hate and hope vanishes in the dream,
and if his mistress brag of the song or his enemy fear it, it is not
that either has its