"There you may show a passion, there you may show a passion....
Make me rave, make me cry, make me mad,
Make me well again, make me curse hell,
Invocate, and in the end leave me
In a trance, and so forth."
The same character is attacked by doubt and asks with anxiety: "Can this be done?" and the painter replies: "Yes, Sir."
Such was not the method of Shakespeare, who would have made the painter reply, not with a yes, but with a yes and a no together.
His art, then, was neither defective nor vitiated in any part of its own constitutive character, although certain works are obviously weak and certain parts of other works, in the vast mass that goes under his name. Such youthful plays as Love's Labour's Lost, The Two Gentlemen, the Comedy of Errors, are not notable, save for a certain ease and grace, only manifesting in certain places the trace of his profound spirit. The "historical plays," are as we have already shown, fragmentary and do not form complete poems animated with a single breath of passion. Some of them, and especially the first part of Henry VI, have about them an arid quality and are loosely anecdotal; in others, such as Henry IV and Henry V, is evident the desire to stimulate patriotic feelings, and they are further burdened with scenes of a purely informative nature. Coriolanus too, which was apparently composed later and is derived from a different source, also lacks complete internal justification, for it consists of a study of characters. Timon (assuming that it was his) is developed in a mechanical manner, although it is full of social and ethical observations and possesses rhetorical fervour. Cymbeline and the Winter's Tale contain lovely scenes, but are not as a whole works of the first order; the idyllic and romantic Shakespeare appears in them to have rather declined in comparison to the author of the earlier plays of the same sort, inspired with a very different vigour. Measure for Measure contains sentiments and personages that are profoundly Shakespearean, as the protagonist Angelo, the meter out of inexorable justice, so sure of his own virtue, who yields to the first sensual temptation that occurs, in Claudius, who wishes and does not wish to die, and in the Barnadine already mentioned. This play, which oscillates between the tragic and the comic, and has a happy ending, instead of forming a drama of the sarcastic-sorrowful-horrible sort, fails to persuade us that it should have been thus developed and thus ended. There is something of the composite in the structure of the wonderful Merchant of Venice, and certain of the scenes of Troilus and Cressida, such as those of the speeches of Ulysses and those on the other side of Hector and Troilus, seem to be echoes or even entire pieces taken from historical plays and transported with ironic intention into comedy. Points of this sort are to be found even in the great tragedies. In Lear, for instance, the adventures of Gloucester and his son are not completely satisfactory, grafted as they are upon those of the king and his daughters, either because they introduce too realistic an element into a play with an imaginary theme, or because they create a heavy parallelism, much praised by an Italian critic, who has attempted to express King Lear in a geometrical form; but the origin for this parallelism may perhaps be really due to the need for theatrical variety, complication and suspense, rather than to any moral purpose of emphasising horror at ingratitude. The clown, who accompanies the king, abounds in phrases, which are not all of them in place and significant. But if to set about picking holes in the beauties of Shakespeare's plays has seemed to us a superfluous and tiresome occupation, such too, from another point of view and in addition pedantic and irreverent, seems to be the investigation of defects that we observe in them; they are opaque points, which the eye does not observe in the splendour of such a sun.
Another judgment which also has vogue refers to a constitutive or general defect in Shakespeare's poetry, a certain limit or barrier in it, a narrowness, albeit an ample and a rich narrowness. We must distinguish two forms of this judgment, the first of which might be represented by the epigrams of Platen, who, while recognising Shakespeare's power to move the heart and the strength of his characterisation, declared that "so much truth is a fatal gift," and that Shakespeare draws so incisively, only because he cannot veil his personages in grace and beauty. He greatly admired even what is painful in Shakespeare, looking upon it as beautiful, and was full of admiration for his comical figures, such as Falstaff and Shylock, "an incomparable couple"; but he denied to Shakespeare true tragic power, which "must open the deepest of wounds and then heal them." The second of these forms is the commonest, and Mazzini may stand as its representative. He maintained that Shakespeare was a poet of the real, not of the ideal, of the isolated individual, not of society; that he was not dominated by the thought of duty and responsibility towards mankind, as expressed in politics and history, that his was a voice rather of the Middle Ages than of modern times, which found their origin in Schiller, the poet of humanity and Providence.
Even Harris's book concludes with a series of reservations: he says that Shakespeare was neither a philosopher nor a sage; that he never conceived a personage as contesting and combating his own time; that he had only a vague idea of the spirit by which man is led to new and lofty ideals in every historical period; that he was unable to understand a Christ or a Mahomet; that instead of studying, he ridiculed Puritanism and so remained shut up in the Renaissance, and that for these reasons, in spite of Hamlet; he does not belong to the modern world, that the best of a Wordsworth or of a Tolstoi is outside him, and so on. We may perfectly admit all this and it may even be of use in putting a curb upon such hyperbole and such superlatives as those of Coleridge, to the effect that Shakespeare was anér myriónous, the myriad-minded man (although even this myriad-mindedness may seem to be but a very ample narrowness, if myriads be taken as a finite number).
Shakespeare could never have desired to possess the ideal of beauty, which visited the soul of the hirsute and unfortunate Platen, the social or humanitarian ideals of the Schillers and Tourgueneffs. But he had no need whatever of these things to attain the infinite, which every poet attains, reaching the centre of the circle from any point of the periphery. For this reason, no poet, whatever the historical period at which he was born and by which he is limited, is the poet of only one historical epoch. Shakespeare formed himself during the period of the Renaissance, which he surpasses, not with his practical personality, but with his poetry. There is nothing, then, for these limiters to do, save to manifest their dissatisfaction with poetry itself, which is always limited-unlimited. This, I think, was also the case with Emerson, who lamented that Shakespeare (whom he nevertheless placed in the good company of Homer and of Dante) "rested in the beauty of things and never took the step of investigating the virtue that resides in symbols," which seemed to be inevitable for such a genius, and that "he converted the elements awaiting his commands," into a diversion, and gave "half truths to half men": whereas, according to Emerson, the entire truth for entire men could only be given by a personage whom the world still awaits. To Emerson, this personage seemed most attractive, but to others he may possibly perhaps seem as little amiable as Antichrist: he called him "the poet-priest."