the most splendid
expression of a taste which was national and universal. As in ancient
Greece, generations before the rise of the great dramas of Athens,
itinerant companies wandered from village to village, carrying their stage
furniture in their little carts, and acted in their booths and tents the
grand stories of the mythology; so in England the mystery players haunted
the wakes and fairs, and in barns or taverns, taprooms, or in the farmhouse
kitchen, played at saints and angels, and transacted on their petty stage
the drama of the Christian faith. To us, who can measure the effect of such
scenes only by the impression which they would now produce upon ourselves,
these exhibitions can seem but unspeakably profane; they were not profane
when tendered in simplicity, and received as they were given. They were no
more profane than those quaint monastic illuminations which formed the germ
of Italian art; and as out of the illuminations arose those paintings which
remain unapproached and unapproachable in their excellence, so out of the
mystery plays arose the English drama, represented in its final
completeness by the creations of a poet who, it now begins to be supposed,
stands alone among mankind. We allow ourselves to think of Shakspeare or of
Raphael or of Phidias, as having accomplished their work by the power of
their own individual genius; but greatness like theirs is never more than
the highest degree of an excellence which prevails widely round it, and
forms the environment in which it grows. No single mind in single contact
with the facts of nature could have created out of itself a Pallas, a
Madonna, or a Lear; such vast conceptions are the growth of ages, the
creations of a nation's spirit; and artist and poet, filled full with the
power of that spirit, have but given them form, and nothing more than form.
Nor would the form itself have been attainable by any isolated talent. No
genius can dispense with experience; the aberrations of power, unguided or
ill-guided, are ever in proportion to its intensity, and life is not long
enough to recover from inevitable mistakes. Noble conceptions already
existing, and a noble school of execution which will launch mind and hand
at once upon their true courses, are indispensable to transcendent
excellence; and Shakspeare's plays were as much the offspring of the long
generations who had pioneered his road for him, as the discoveries of
Newton were the offspring of those of