nse and
efficacy of many transient expressions into one permanent one; that
is, out of many passing lines and shades of transpiration the artist
should so select and arrange and condense as to deliver the right
characteristic truth about him. This is at least one of the ways, I
think it is the commonest way, in which Shakespeare idealizes his
characters; and he surpasses all other poets in the ease, sureness,
and directness with which his idealizing works in furtherance of
truth. It is in this sense that he idealizes from nature. And here, as
elsewhere, it is "as if Nature had entrusted to him the secret of her
working power"; for we cannot but feel that, if she should carry her
human handiwork up to a higher stage of perfection, the result would
be substantially as he gives it. Accordingly our first impression of
his persons is that they are simply natural: had they been literal
transcripts from fact, they would not have seemed more intensely real
than they do: yet a close comparison of them with the reality of
human nature discloses an ideal heightening in them of the finest and
rarest quality. Even so realistic a delineation as Hostess Quickly, or
the Nurse in _Romeo and Juliet_, is not an exception to this rule.

The Poet's idealizing of his characters proceeds, in part, by putting
his own intellectuality into them. And the wonder is, how he could do
this in so large a measure as he often does, without marring or
displacing or anywise obstructing their proper individuality. For they
are never any the less themselves for having so much of his
intelligence in them. Nay, more; whatever may be their peculiarity,
whether wit, dulness, egotism, or absurdity, the effect of that
infusion is to quicken their idiom, and set it free, so that they
become all the more rightly and truly themselves. Thus what he gives
them operates to extricate and enfranchise their propriety, and bring
it out in greater clearness and purity. His intellectuality discovers
them to us just as they are, and translates their mind, or want of
mind, into fitting language, yet remains so transparently clear as to
be itself unseen. He tells more truth of them, or rather makes them
tell more truth of themselves, in a single sentence, than, without his
help, they could tell in a month. The secret of this appears to lie in
sifting out what is most idiomatic or characteristic of a man, purging
and depurating this of all that is uncharacteristic, and then
pre