harmony with the laws of mental being it goes right
spontaneously. Sophocles comprehended the whole of what is meant by
powerful genius working unconsciously, when he said of his great
teacher, "AEschylus does what is right without knowing why." And the
true secret of Shakespeare's excellence mainly lies, I take it, in a
perfect co-operative union of instinct and understanding, of purpose
and impulse; nature and art, inspiration and study, so working together
and interpenetrating, that it is impossible to distinguish their
respective shares in the joint result. And the wonder of it is, how the
fruits of creative impulse could so pass through the medium of
conscious reflection, as they seem to have done, and still retain all
the dewy freshness of pure creative nature; insomuch that his art
carries such an air of unstudied ease as gives it the appearance of
perfect artlessness.[18]

[18] The working together of instinct and mind in Shakespeare is
not exactly wonderful in itself, but only so from the power and
strength of it: in a less degree it takes place in all continued
occupation among men of a healthy nature; and the brightest
moments of success in any work are when the thinking mind is in
unison with the instinctive feeling of the working man. It is in
this unison that genius really displays itself, and not in the
sole rule of an irregular instinct or in a state of pretended
inspiration. For genius does not manifest itself in the
predominance of any single power, nor is it in itself a definite
faculty; but it is the harmonious combination, the united
totality of all the human faculties. And if in Shakespeare's
works we admire his imaginative power not without his
understanding, nor both these without his sense of beauty, nor
all of them without his moral sense; if we attribute all
together to his genius, we must comprehend in this the union of
all those faculties, and not regard it as an isolated power,
which excludes judgment and reflection, and whose works do not
submit to plan and rule. Much rather is the idea of rule
essentially inherent to that of genius; and the whole conception
of genius acting without law is the invention of pedants, which
has had the sad effect of begetting that mass of false geniuses
who are morally without law, and aesthetically without law, as if
to entitle themselves to the name according t