[18] The working together of instinct and mind in Shakespeare is not exactly wonderful in itself, but only so from the power and strength of it:  in a less degree it takes place in all continued occupation among men of a healthy nature; and the brightest moments of success in any work are when the thinking mind is in unison with the instinctive feeling of the working man.  It is in this unison that genius really displays itself, and not in the sole rule of an irregular instinct or in a state of pretended inspiration.  For genius does not manifest itself in the predominance of any single power, nor is it in itself a definite faculty; but it is the harmonious combination, the united totality of all the human faculties.  And if in Shakespeare’s works we admire his imaginative power not without his understanding, nor both these without his sense of beauty, nor all of them without his moral sense; if we attribute all together to his genius, we must comprehend in this the union of all those faculties, and not regard it as an isolated power, which excludes judgment and reflection, and whose works do not submit to plan and rule.  Much rather is the idea of rule essentially inherent to that of genius; and the whole conception of genius acting without law is the invention of pedants, which has had the sad effect of begetting that mass of false geniuses who are morally without law, and aesthetically without law, as if to entitle themselves to the name according to this convenient definition.—­GERVINUS.

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As to the time when Shakespeare passed from the apprentice into the master, I place this in the year 1597, or thereabouts, when he was thirty-two or thirty-three years old; and I take The Merchant of Venice and King Henry the Fourth as marking the clear and complete advent of the master’s hand.  And what I have been saying holds altogether true only of the plays written during his mastership.  In all his earlier plays, even in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, King Richard the Second, and King Richard the Third, probably neither the composition nor the characterization can fairly stand the test of any of the principles of Art, as I have noted them.  But especially in the workmanship of that period, along with much that is rightly original, we have not a little, also, of palpable imitation.  The unoriginality, however, is rather in the style than in the matter, and so will be more fitly remarked under the head of Style.  Still worse, because it goes deeper, we have in those plays a want of clear artistic disinterestedness.  The arts and motives of authorship are but too apparent in them; thus showing that the Poet did not thoroughly lose himself in the enthusiasm and truth of his work.  In some cases, he betrays not a little sense of his own skill; at least there are plain marks of a conscious and self-observing exercise of skill.  And perhaps his greatest weakness,