to the stimulus with all his energy of
expression because he received it so freely and vitally, in respect
alike of his own plasticity and the fact that the vehicle of the
impression was his mother tongue. It is plain that to the last he made
no secondary study of antiquity. He made blunders which alone might warn
the Baconians off their vain quest: he had no notion of chronology:
finding Cato retrospectively spoken of by Plutarch as one to whose ideal
Coriolanus had risen, he makes a comrade of Coriolanus say it, as if
Cato were a dead celebrity in Coriolanus' day; just as he makes Hector
quote Aristotle in Troy. These clues are not to be put aside with
aesthetic platitudes: they are capital items in our knowledge of the man.
And if even the idolator feels perturbed by their obtrusion, he has but
to reflect that where the trained scholars around Shakspere reproduced
antiquity with greater accuracy in minor things, tithing the mint and
anise and cumin of erudition, they gave us of the central human forces,
which it was their special business to realise, mere hollow and tedious
parodies. Jonson was a scholar whose variety of classic reading might
have constituted him a specialist to-day; but Jonson's ancients are
mostly dead for us, even as are Jonson's moderns, because they are the
expression of a psychic faculty which could neither rightly perceive
reality, nor rightly express what it did perceive. He represents
industry in art without inspiration. The two contrasted pictures, of
Jonson writing out his harangues in prose in order to turn them into
verse, and of Shakspere giving his lines unblotted to the
actors--speaking in verse, in the white heat of his cerebration, as
spontaneously as he breathed--these historic data, which happen to be
among the most perfectly certified that we possess concerning the two
men, give us at once half the secret of one and all the secret of the
other. Jonson had the passion for book knowledge, the patience for hard
study, the faculty for plot-invention; and withal he produced dramatic
work which gives little or no permanent pleasure. Shakspere had none of
these characteristics; and yet, being the organism he was, it only
needed the culture which fortuitously reached him in his own tongue to
make him successively the greatest dramatic master of eloquence, mirth,
charm, tenderness, passion, pathos, pessimism, and philosophic serenity
that literature can show, recognisably so even though hi