His large heart was
sympathetic with all, and even most so with the lowly and suffering; he
shows us to ourselves, and enables us to use that knowledge for our
profit. All the virtues are held up to our imitation and praise, and all
the vices are scourged and rendered odious in our sight. To read
Shakspeare aright is of the nature of honest self-examination, that most
difficult and most necessary of duties.
CREATION OF CHARACTER.--Second: He stands supreme in the creation of
character, which may be considered the distinguishing mark of the highest
literary genius. The men and women whom he has made are not stage-puppets
moved by hidden strings; they are real. We know them as intimately as the
friends and acquaintances who visit us, or the people whom we accost in
our daily walks.
And again, in this varied delineation of character, Shakspeare less than
any other author either obtrudes or repeats himself. Unlike Byron, he is
nowhere his own hero: unlike most modern novelists, he fashions men who,
while they have the generic human resemblance, differ from each other like
those of flesh and blood around us: he has presented a hundred phases of
love, passion, ambition, jealousy, revenge, treachery, and cruelty, and
each distinct from the others of its kind; but lest any character should
degenerate into an allegorical representation of a single virtue or vice,
he has provided it with the other lineaments necessary to produce in it a
rare human identity.
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