f life. What marks off the Shakspere of thirty-five, in fine, from all
his rivals, is just his peculiarly true and new[148] expression of the
living grace of womanhood, always, it is true, abstracted to the form of
poetry and skilfully purified from the blemishes of the actual, but none
the less convincing and stimulating. We are here in presence at once of
a rare receptive faculty and a rare expressive faculty: the plastic
organism of the first poems touched through and through with a hundred
vibrations of deeper experience; the external and extensive method
gradually ripening into an internal and intensive; the innate facility
of phrase and alertness of attention turned from the physical to the
psychical. But still it is to the psychics of sex, for the most part,
that we are limited. Of the deeps of human nature, male nature, as apart
from the love of woman, the playwright still shows no special
perception, save in the vivid portrait of Shylock, the exasperated Jew.
The figures in which we can easily recognise his hand in the earlier
historical plays are indeed marked by his prevailing sanity of
perception; always they show the play of the seeing eye, the ruling
sense of reality which shaped his life; it is this visible actuality
that best marks them off from the non-Shaksperean figures around them.
And in the wonderful figures of Falstaff and his group we have a
roundness of comic reality to which nothing else in modern literature
thus far could be compared. But still this, the most remarkable of all,
remains comic reality; and, what is more, it is a comic reality of
which, as in the rest of his work, the substratum was pre-Shaksperean.
For it is clear that the figure of Falstaff, as Oldcastle, had been
popularly successful before Shakspere took hold of it:[149] and what he
did here, as elsewhere, with his uninventive mind, in which the faculty
of imagination always rectified and expanded rather than originated
types and actions, was doubtless to give the hues and tones of perfect
life to the half-real inventions of others. This must always be insisted
on as the special psychological characteristic of Shakspere. Excepting
in the doubtful case of LOVE'S LABOUR LOST, he never invented a plot;
his male characters are almost always developments from an already
sketched original; it is in drawing his heroines, where he is most
idealistic, that he seems to have been most independently creative, his
originals here being doubt