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 Shakespeare’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 Copernicus.”

Dryden, in one of his occasional pieces, represents the Poet’s ghost as saying,

    “Untaught, unpractis’d, in a barbarous age,
    I found not, but created first, the stage”;

and such has been the common belief.  But the saying is far from true; and Shakespeare’s ghost must have sipped large draughts of Lethe, to be capable of speaking thus.  For, though the least that he did is worth more than all that was done before him, and though his poorest performances surpass the best of his models; it is nevertheless certain that his task was but to continue and perfect what was already begun.  Not only were the three forms of comedy, history, and tragedy in use on the English stage, but the elements of these were to some extent blended in the freedom and variety of the Gothic Drama.  The usage also of dramatic blank-verse stood up inviting his adoption; though no one before or since has come near him in the mastery of its capabilities; his genius being an inexhaustible spring of both mental and verbal modulation.  Nor can all this be justly regarded as any alleviation of his task, or any abatement of his fame.  For, to work thus with materials and upon models already prepared, without being drawn down to their level and subdued to their quality, requires, if possible, a higher order and exercise of power than to strike out in a way and with a stock entirely new.  And so the absorbing, quickening, creative efficacy of Shakespeare’s genius is best seen in this, that, taking the Drama as it came to his hand, a thing of unsouled forms and lack-lustre eyes, all brainless and meaningless, he at once put a spirit into it, tempered its elements in the proportions of truth, informed its shapes with grace and virtue, and made it all alive, a breathing, speaking, operative power.  Thus his work naturally linked in with the whole past; and in his hands the collective thought and wisdom of ages were smelted out of the earth and dross wherein they lay imbedded, and wrought into figures of undecaying beauty.