on. Of course, Shakespeare was neither Macbeth, nor
Hamlet, nor Othello; still, he MIGHT HAVE BEEN these several characters
if the circumstances of the case on the one hand, and the consent of
his will on the other, had caused to break out into explosive action
what was nothing more than an inner prompting. We are strangely
mistaken as to the part played by poetic imagination, if we think it
pieces together its heroes out of fragments filched from right and
left, as though it were patching together a harlequin's motley. Nothing
living would result from that. Life cannot be recomposed; it can only
be looked at and reproduced. Poetic imagination is but a fuller view of
reality. If the characters created by a poet give us the impression of
life, it is only because they are the poet himself,--multiplication or
division of the poet,--the poet plumbing the depths of his own nature
in so powerful an effort of inner observation that he lays hold of the
potential in the real, and takes up what nature has left as a mere
outline or sketch in his soul in order to make of it a finished work of
art.

Altogether different is the kind of observation from which comedy
springs. It is directed outwards. However interested a dramatist may be
in the comic features of human nature, he will hardly go, I imagine, to
the extent of trying to discover his own. Besides, he would not find
them, for we are never ridiculous except in some point that remains
hidden from our own consciousness. It is on others, then, that such
observation must perforce be practised. But it; will, for this very
reason, assume a character of generality that it cannot have when we
apply it to ourselves. Settling on the surface, it will not be more
than skin-deep, dealing with persons at the point at which they come
into contact and become capable of resembling one another. It will go
no farther. Even if it could, it would not desire to do so, for it
would have nothing to gain in the process.

To penetrate too far into the personality, to couple the outer effect
with causes that are too deep-seated, would mean to endanger and in the
end to sacrifice all that was laughable in the effect. In order that we
may be tempted to laugh at it, we must localise its cause in some
intermediate region of the soul. Consequently, the effect must appear
to us as an average effect, as expressing an average of mankind. And,
like all averages, this one is obtained by bringing together scatter