onstruct a narrative, what kind
of picture and delineation he will give of it,--is the best measure you
could get of what intellect is in the man. Which circumstance is vital
and shall stand prominent; which unessential, fit to be suppressed;
where is the true _beginning_, the true sequence and ending? To find out
this, you task the whole force of insight that is in the man. He must
_understand_ the thing; according to the depth of his understanding,
will the fitness of his answer be. You will try him so. Does like join
itself to like; does the spirit of method stir in that confusion, so
that its embroilment becomes order? Can the man say, _Fiat lux_, Let
there be light; and out of chaos make a world? Precisely as there is
light in himself, will he accomplish this.

Or indeed we may say again, it is in what I called Portrait-painting,
delineating of men and things, especially of men, that Shakspeare is
great. All the greatness of the man comes out decisively here. It is
unexampled, I think, that calm creative perspicacity of Shakspeare. The
thing he looks at reveals not this or that face of it, but its inmost
heart, and generic secret: it dissolves itself as in light before him,
so that he discerns the perfect structure of it. Creative, we said:
poetic creation, what is this too but _seeing_ the thing sufficiently?
The _word_ that will describe the thing, follows of itself from such
clear intense sight of the thing. And is not Shakspeare's _morality_,
his valor, candor, tolerance, truthfulness; his whole victorious
strength and greatness, which can triumph over such obstructions,
visible there too? Great as the world. No _twisted_, poor convex-concave
mirror, reflecting all objects with its own convexities and concavities;
a perfectly _level_ mirror;--that is to say withal, if we will
understand it, a man justly related to all things and men, a good man.
It is truly a lordly spectacle how this great soul takes in all kinds
of men and objects, a Falstaff, an Othello, a Juliet, a Coriolanus;
sets them all forth to us in their round completeness; loving, just, the
equal brother of all. _Novum Organum_, and all the intellect you will
find in Bacon, is of a quite secondary order; earthy, material, poor in
comparison with this. Among modern men, one finds, in strictness, almost
nothing of the same rank. Goethe alone, since the days of Shakspeare,
reminds me of it. Of him too you say that he _saw_ the object; you may
say what