he giant were to dilute, not develop, the dwarf.

* * * * *

Thus much as to Shakespeare's mode of conceiving and working out
character. Here, again, as in the matter of dramatic composition, we
have the proper solidarity, originality, completeness, and
disinterestedness of Art, all duly and rightly maintained: that is,
what was before found true in reference to all the parts of a drama
viewed as a whole; the same holds, also, in regard to all the parts of
an individual character considered by itself. In both these respects,
and in both alike, the Poet discovers a spirit of the utmost candour
and calmness, such as could neither be misled by any inward bias or
self-impulse from seeing things as they are, nor swayed from
reflecting them according to the just forms and measures of objective
truth; while his creative forces worked with such smoothness and
equanimity, that it is hardly an extravagance to describe him as
another Nature. All this, however, must not be taken as applying, at
least not in the full length and breadth, to what I have before spoken
of as the Poet's apprentice-work. For, I repeat, Shakespeare's genius
was not born full-grown, as a good many have been used to suppose. Ben
Jonson knew him right well personally, and was, besides, no stranger
to his method of working; and, in his noble lines prefixed to the
folio of 1623, he puts this point just as, we may be sure, he had
himself seen it to be true:

"Yet must I not give Nature all; thy art,
My gentle Shakespeare, must enjoy a part:
For a good poet's made, as well as born;
And such wert thou."

As to the question how far his genius went by a certain instinctive
harmony and happiness of nature, how far by a process of conscious
judgment and reflection, this is probably beyond the reach of any
psychology to determine. From the way he often speaks of poets and
poetry, of art and nature, it is evident that he was well at home in
speculative and philosophical considerations of the subject. Then too
the vast improvement made in some of his plays, as in _Hamlet_, upon
rewriting them, shows that his greatest successes were by no means
owing to mere lucky hits of instinct. On the whole, I suspect he
understood the what, the how, and the why of his working as well as
any first-class artist ever did. But genius, in its highest and
purest instances, is a sort of unfallen intellect; so that from its
pre-established