ith
a wrench as with a purpose. There is no purpose large enough, that one
is likely to find, to connect with them. Shakespeare himself could not
have found one when he wrote them in any small or ordinary sense. The
one possible purpose in producing a work of art--in any age--is to
praise the universe with it, love something with it, talk back to life
with it, and the man who attempts to read what Shakespeare writes with
any smaller or less general, less overflowing purpose than Shakespeare
had in writing it should be advised to do his reading with some smaller,
more carefully fitted author,--one nearer to his size. Of course if one
wants to be a mere authority on Shakespeare or a mere author there is no
denying that one can do it, and do it very well, by reading him with
some purpose--some purpose that is too small to have ever been thought
of before; but if one wants to understand him, get the wild native
flavour and power of him, he must be read in a larger, more vital and
open and resourceful spirit--as a kind of spiritual adventure. Half the
joy of a great man, like any other great event, is that one can well
afford--at least for once--to let one's purposes go.

"To feel one's self lifted out, carried along, if only for a little
time, into some vast stream of consciousness, to feel great spaces
around one's human life, to float out into the universe, to bathe in it,
to taste it with every pore of one's body and all one's soul--this is
the one supreme thing that the reading of a man like William Shakespeare
is for. To interrupt the stream with dams, to make it turn
wheels,--intellectual wheels (mostly pin-wheels and theories) or any
wheels whatever,--is to cut one's self off from the last chance of
knowing the real Shakespeare at all. A man knows Shakespeare in
proportion as he gives himself, in proportion as he lets Shakespeare
make a Shakespeare of him, a little while. As long as he is reading in
the Shakespeare universe his one business in it is to live in it. He may
do no mighty work there,--pile up a commentary or throw on a
footnote,--but he will be a mighty work himself if he let William
Shakespeare work on him some. Before he knows it the universe that
Shakespeare lived in becomes his universe. He feels the might of that
universe being gathered over to him, descending upon him being breathed
into him day and night--to belong to him always.

"The power and effect of a book which is a real work of art seems a