less the women who had charmed him, set living
in ideal scenes to charm others. And it resulted from this specialty of
structure that the greater reality of his earlier male historic figures,
as compared with those of most of his rivals, is largely a matter of
saner and more felicitous declamation--the play of his great and growing
faculty of expression--since he had no more special knowledge of the
types in hand than had his competitors. It is only when his unequalled
receptive faculty has been acted upon by a peculiarly concentrated and
readily assimilated body of culture, the English translation by Sir
Thomas North of Amyot's French translation of Plutarch's Lives, that we
find Shakspere incontestably superior to his contemporaries in the
virile treatment of virile problems no less than in the sympathetic
rendering of emotional charm and tenderness and the pathos of passion.
The tragedy of ROMEO AND JULIET, with all its burning fervours and
swooning griefs, remains for us a picture of the luxury of woe: it is
truly said of it that it is not fundamentally unhappy. But in JULIUS
CAESAR we have touched a further depth of sadness. For the moving tragedy
of circumstance, of lovers sundered by fate only to be swiftly joined in
exultant death, we have the profounder tragedy of mutually destroying
energies, of grievously miscalculating men, of failure and frustration
dogging the steps of the strenuous and the wise, of destiny searching
out the fatal weakness of the strong. To the poet has now been added the
reader; to the master of the pathos of passion the student of the
tragedy of universal life. It is thus by culture and experience--culture
limited but concentrated, and experience limited but intense--that the
man Shakspere has been intelligibly made into the dramatist Shakspere as
we find him when he comes to his greatest tasks. For the formation of
the supreme artist there was needed alike the purely plastic organism
and the special culture to which it was so uniquely fitted to respond;
culture that came without search, and could be undergone as
spontaneously as the experience of life itself; knowledge that needed no
more wooing than Ann Hathaway, or any dubious angel in the sonnets. In
the English version of Plutarch's LIVES, pressed upon him doubtless by
the play-making plans of other men, Shakspere found the most effectively
concentrated history of ancient humanity that could possibly have
reached him; and he responded