three hundred years back. Meanwhile,
it is a perverse and pernicious paradox to maintain that Shakspeare's
consummate genius was in any way connected with his 'little Latin and
less Greek,' or that he might not have portrayed the Romans yet more
successfully if he had known more about them. Believing this, we are not
presuming, as the same absurd reasoning would have it, to set up
ourselves against him. We do not say that any other man in his age or
our own, however great his command of learning, could possibly mend
those plays by touching them; but we say that Shakspeare himself, with
increased knowledge, might have made them yet more perfect. It is easy
to oppose inspiration to scholastic culture; to coin antitheses between
nature and art; and to say that Shakspeare's Romans are more ideally
true than Niebuhr's. There is some truth in all this; but it is not to
the purpose. A poet like Burns may have really known more of classical
life than a critic like Blair; nay, it may be that if Keats or Tennyson
had been a senior medallist at Cambridge, they would not have produced
any thing not only so beautiful but so purely Greek as _Endymion_ or
_Oenone_. In what we were just saying we were thinking of the very
highest minds. And, when we recollect how gracefully Milton could walk
under the weight of his immense learning, we need not fear that the
Alantean shoulders of Shakspeare would have been oppressed by a similar
load. The knowledge of antiquity may operate on the recipient so as to
produce mere bookishness and intellectual sophistication; but in itself
it is a real and legitimate part of all knowledge, a portion of that
truth with which poets are conversant, a lesson set in other schools
than those where man is teacher. We know not what were Shakspeare's
feelings with respect to his own deficiencies; but we cannot believe
that the same modesty which besought his friend to chide with Fortune,
'the guilty goddess of his harmful deeds,' would have shrunk from
confessing want of knowledge as an evil to be lamented, at the same time
that it was imputed to want of opportunity. If he was self-centred, it
was in his strength, not in his weakness. His eulogists may show the
greatness of their faith in him by doubting whether he could have
assimilated the learning which obstructs Ben Jonson's _Catiline_ and
_Sejanus_; but we have no proofs that he thought so meanly of himself or
of that which he happened not to possess. On the con