chain of signals through all the ages, and men whom times and kindreds have separated ascend from their week-day toil, and hold their sabbaths and synods on those heights. They whisper, and listen, and smile, and shake the head at one another; they laugh, and weep, and complain together; they sing their songs of victory in one key. That machinery is so fine, that the scholar can catch across the ages the smile, or the whisper, which the contemporary tyranny had no instrument firm enough to suppress, or fine enough to detect."

This spiritual machinery we are unwilling to exchange for any gross, mechanical ropes and wires. As well might this world be created by a synod of Olympian gods, as the masterpieces of Shakespeare proceed from a school or an academy. As well might some Bacon or Raleigh paint a Madonna of Rafaelle, or sculpture a Phidian Jove, as write Shakespeare's Hamlet. It is a singular obtuseness to what constitutes the artist, to suppose that what he truly creates is wrought "for artistic effect," an hour's entertainment, or the luxury of "a harmonized impression." This is to caricature the artist and the artist's work. The modern estimate is not very far amiss, which regards Shakespeare as pre-eminently THE ARTIST. It is evidence of progress in a true criticism, when indefinite eulogy, separate delineations of excellences, and long-drawn catalogues of striking points, give place to the characteristic combination of all the details and all the parts as entering into a real product of art, where there is nothing for effect, nothing for a mere dogmatic purpose, no random stroke, no capricious event, and nothing set down for any by-end or any temporary purpose, but where there is an organic whole, to which each smallest member, vein, muscle, rounding of the flesh, shading of the hair, nay, each line of the hand and wrinkle of the face, is essential. Where Hudson, even in his enthusiastic appreciation, sees "in the affair of the caskets only a dramatic device to save Portia from her princely suitors," we must demur; for a deeper insight into the drama as an artistic unity shows this to be no artificial device, but a true invention of the creative imagination that presided over the whole, a striking illustration in a manifold way of the leading theme, a repetition, on another key and with a different accompaniment, of the one strain of melody, –

a necessity in order to develop the thought in all its heights and depths of meaning.

The events and characters of a drama may be very amusing and interesting, may be morally and spiritually edifying; but unless they proceed from some common point of view, some pervading, centralizing principle, and so are related essentially to one another, having a common life, they do not belong to the domain of art. There is, undoubtedly, such a universal "central idea" for each living man. The dramatic poet, like a presiding deity, surveys all the details, and holds in his hands the threads of connection and relation, so that his representation is no patchwork of circumstances and capricious succession of words and deeds, but a regular and pre-planned figure, woven out of many different and variously colored threads, each of which has its place in the finished product, and is essential to a complete embodiment of the ideal pattern. Life exists as an idea before it is concrete in act. Thus, looking at nature and humanity as a whole, we mean, when we speak of the one Divine Artist, something different from a mechanician, a builder, a powerful worker. So the dramatic artist is a creator, and, as far as he is so in truth, will his work have life, permanence, and real effect. No one has, like Shakespeare, attained to the perfect dramatic form; in other words, no one has so truly lived in his representations of life.

The very idea of this perfection of form, this unity of life, presupposes one creative mind, one inspiring, because inspired, genius, alone. There is no dualism or polytheism in creation of any sort. And Shakespeare's plays are most truly organic wholes; they are growths according to an essential law of development, seed, leaf, blossom, fruit, and this including an infinity of new seeds for a more abundant harvest. He obeyed a law of creation within him, instead of holding before himself any specific moral, social, or religious dogma to be inculcated from without, and therefore it must be possible for minds and hearts sufficiently cultivated to deduce the central principle, and trace the minutest threads of development. So far as one is a true artist, he will have no mere pleasing incidents or dramatic devices, no unexpected turns

or well-contrived tricks to bring about particular catastrophes, but the whole will grow out of the characters, the mental and moral states, the sensuous or ideal tendencies. There will be variety, but no irregularity; progression, but no unsteady leaps.

Thus all true poets embody each some necessary phase of the great life of humanity. Life is re-born in their souls; they are the fathers, while the all-surrounding nature and circumstances are the matrix or mould, the maternal soil into which the divine seed falls, and from which are supplied the materials for sustenance and growth. Each artist unfolds himself under specific conditions, but works in freedom under the great law of omnipresent life. The age and time furnish the instrument, while the power to express finer or louder strains depends upon the essential force and skill of the player. The instrument may be now a flute, now a harp, now an organ, and no one can be furnished before its time. Let two thousand years pass away, and the dramatic poet no longer represents humanity as the victim of a relentless, objective destiny impelling from without, but he exhibits the inner workings of man's soul, unfolds his central thought and deep springs of action, shows how tendencies become deeds, how seeds grow into fruits, how character modifies events, becoming a real fate, and how events react upon and form the character. To Eschylus, his time, with its religion, its social state, its theories of God and the world, of man and nature, gave one instrument upon which to body forth this inspired song; to Shakespeare, his time gave a different one. And as the strains from an instrument of a single string differ from those of some weighty organ, with its deep bass and its hundred stops, so does Eschylus differ from Shakespeare.

Yet the creation of each has its own peculiar life, and a life separate from the individual, component parts. As life in the human body is not located in any one organ or member, but is a pervading, vivifying principle throughout the whole, so the life of a work of art is not in any one expression, or feature, or peculiar beauty, but is a totality of the influence flowing into each. Hence the difference between a manufactured product and a true work of art. A multiplicity of persons, a school, an association, may manufacture any

thing, a drama as well as a picture or a house, but a single spirit must create. The one will be human and dead; the other, living and divine. The one is put together or made up; the other is born a whole, and is so complete that no part can be removed without real mutilation of the form. Hence a work of art, especially of dramatic art, - the loftiest type, is an expression of the noblest prerogative of humanity, that of being in the lower sphere what God is in the highest, a creative power. How sublime is that representation in the Bible of God as the Creator always and rightly regarded, Creator of worlds and systems of worlds, of every living thing, the reptiles that creep, the birds that fly, the man that embodies and unites in himself all the separate outbirths of thought in the natural sphere, the woman that crowns humanity with grace and beauty, the united man and woman comprising in their dual-oneness the love and wisdom of the great Source of being! Let no one profane this idea of art, under whatever specious plea, or speak of it "as a mere instrumentality, without any independent tribunal, law, ethic, ritual, of its own." Only as such an embodiment of a creative life can any work endure through all generations; only as to such a life can humanity pay its devoutest homage to the poet, and not to the philosopher, -to the fathers of beautiful sons and daughters in the world of spirit, rather than to the compilers of mechanical products, however useful and practical they may be.

There is no statement more false or superficial than that which assigns to art as an end "mere artistic effect," that is, to please. It is to give life. It is by imparting its own life to awaken the slumbering germs of the soul, and to change even the marble statue into a breathing, human form. To dramatic art must hence be assigned the highest place, for that seeks to embody the whole varied life of humanity. If it deals with one age, and individuals of a particular period, it merges all the special and particular in forms of universal statement, so that while each has an intense individual existence, each is also, at the same time, a representative of the great human life. It is you and I, as well as Hamlet the Dane; his blood flows also in our veins, his life in the miVOL. LXXXV. NO. 177. 44

nutest point in our life too. Pretty pieces of machinery may please, but a living production of art causes the soul to thrill with the perception of truth, beauty, and comprehensive

power.

Art cannot have for its end even to instruct. It does better; it informs, animates, quickens, makes divine; its warm, living breath inspires. It shows man, through the awakening within himself of dormant or repressed perceptions, the end of his existence, and of that of all his fellows, the internal and external helps and hinderances, the various joys, hopes, fears, and loves, which rise and fall, contend together and cooperate in making man what he is, under every clime and in every place. This, at least, is the dramatic art of Shakespeare. And therefore no one could borrow his pen, to make it the instrument to work out any moral, metaphysical, social, or philanthropic theory. In him life is infinitely varied and complex. It vexes us, always, to be able to see over, see round, or see through a character at one view, and we cannot do it in real life. Nothing is there in straight lines, but all in curves with different centres and different shapes, mingling with one another, to the carnal view an inextricable involvement of cycles and epicycles, curves and orbits, not to be determined by any known mathematical rules. But there is an order, as surely as there is a God.

Thus varied, thus infinitely complicated, is the drama of human life in Shakespeare, and hence it is that fresh interpretations are continually given, according to our insight and our state. New lights rise where all seemed darkness before; heavenly stars from far distant spaces gleam across the sky; meteors fall, and auroral beams shoot up to brighten the firmament. The unfolding experience and the widening vision reveal to the progressive spirit new combinations, nicer grades of likeness and unlikeness, harmony and discord, good and evil. A deeper insight into character and event exhibits more and more their complex relations, and their infinite variety of light and shade; specks of light enlarge into luminous borders, and dark spots merge into the brightness reflected from some other centre. The childish state knows nothing of this, but calls one thing hateful and another lovely, one form all