Of all writers Shakespeare is the most impersonal. He speaks through others, and the others seem to speak for themselves. The didactic is lost in the dramatic. He does not use the stage as a pulpit to enforce some maxim. He is as reticent as Nature.
He idealizes the common and transfigures all he touches—but he does not preach. He was interested in men and things as they were. He did not seek to change them—but to portray. He was Natures mirror—and in that mirror Nature saw herself.
When I stood amid the great trees of California that lift their spreading capitals against the clouds, looking like Nature's columns to support the sky, I thought of the poetry of Shakespeare.
IX.
THAT a procession of men and women—statesmen and warriors—kings and clowns—issued from Shakespeare's brain! What women!
Isabella—in whose spotless life love and reason blended into perfect truth.
Juliet—within whose heart passion and purity met like white and red within the bosom of a rose.
Cordelia—who chose to suffer loss, rather than show her wealth of love with those who gilded lies in hope of gain.
Hermione—"tender as infancy and grace"—who bore with perfect hope and faith the cross of shame, and who at last forgave with all her heart.
Desdemona—so innocent, so perfect, her love so pure, that she was incapable of suspecting that another could suspect, and who with dying words sought to hide her lover's crime—and with her last faint breath uttered a loving lie that burst into a perfumed lily between her pallid lips.