To arrange the most ample materials in the amplest form without overstepping its fair proportions, is a task which no one has accomplished as he has done.  Therein lies a large part of his artistic greatness.  No poet has represented so much in so little space; none has so widely enlarged the space without exceeding the poetical limitations.  In this he did not suffer himself to be perplexed by the example of the ancient tragedy.  He felt that the peculiar poetic material of the new world would perish in those old forms, and that it was therefore better to mould them afresh.  He knew right well that the poet’s task was to represent the very substance of his times, to reflect the age in his poetry, and to give it form and stamp:  he therefore created, for the enlarged sphere of life, an enlarged sphere of Art:  to this end he sought, not a ready-made rule, but the inward law of the given matter,—­a spirit in the things, which in the work of art shaped the form for itself.  For there is no higher worth in a poetical work than the agreement of the form with the nature of the matter represented, and this according to its own indwelling laws, not according to external rule.  If we judge Shakespeare or Homer by any such conventional rule, we may equally deny them taste and law:  measured, however, by that higher standard, Shakespeare’s conformity to the inner law outstrips all those regular dramatists who learned from Aristotle, not the spirit of regularity, but mechanical imitation.—­GERVINUS.

CHARACTERIZATION.

I am next to consider Shakespeare’s peculiar mode of conceiving and working out character; as this stands next in order and importance to the article of Dramatic Composition.

Now, in several English writers before him, we find characters discriminated and sustained with considerable judgment and skill.  Still we feel a want of reality about them:  they are not men and women themselves, but only the outsides and appearances of men and women; often having indeed a good measure of coherence and distinctness, but yet mere appearances, with nothing behind or beneath, to give them real substance and solidity.  Of course, therefore, the parts actually represented are all that they have; they stand for no more than simply what is shown; there is nothing in them or of them but what meets the beholder’s sense:  so that, however good they may be to look at, they will not bear looking into; because the outside, that which is directly seen or heard, really exhausts their whole force and meaning.

Instead, then, of beginning at the heart of a character, and working outwards, these authors began at the surface, and worked the other way; and so were precluded from getting beyond the surface, by their mode of procedure.  It is as if the shell of an egg should be fully formed and finished before the contents were prepared; in which case the contents of course could not be got into it.  It would have to remain a shell, and nothing more:  as such, it might do well enough for a show, just as well indeed as if it were full of meat; but it would not stand the weighing.