"Genius consists in understanding better, penetrating better, surrounding with more light, what every one does superficially, or understands by half. One of the singular traits of Shakespeare is his supreme indifference as to the subject he is to treat of. He never cares about it; the excellent artisan knows how to find material in everything. He takes up at hap-hazard a pebble, a bit of wood, a block of granite, a block of marble. Little he cares for his predecessor's having made an old king disinherited by his daughters, act and talk upon the stage; it is a fact like any other fact, that counts for no more and no less. Shakespeare goes on to find whatever of tears and of power there is in the soul of this old man."
"People to-day are running after an inventiveness which real originality lacks; it dwells in the artist, not in the materials he employs. With all great men it is tradition, it is the people, it is the common heritage of ideas and customs that has gathered the materials. They have taken them as they came, and then laid their foundations, transmuted them, immortalized them.
"If what is called invention were not a deceptive quality, we should have to rate much higher than Dante, the first idle monk, who wrote, in lumbering style, a vision of Paradise and Hell; the coarse authors of certain Italian delineations would carry the day over Molière; the unknown writers of certain chronicles, divided into acts, would eclipse Shakespeare.
"In the epochs of literary decadence those are taken for inventors who, impelled by a certain ardor of temperament, and a certain fieriness of phrase, dislocate words and images, and think they have launched ideas. These folk proclaim themselves orators. Montaigne, Shakespeare, Molière took to themselves no merit but that of studying nature, the world, and man."
"The true function of genius is to second. —Etudes sur IV. Shakespeare, etc., par Philarète Chasles. 1851; p. 88, sqq.
There is no labor like making up one's mind, (unless it be, keeping it made up,) and we own ourselves charmed to find in this acute and able reasoning an outlet of escape from the whole duty of decision. And we think, too, that the many friends of the old Pilgrim—those who love him because (tenderest tie!) he was one of the picture-books of their infancy, those assuredly who have laughed at him in his French dress, converted to a good Catholic Palmer; [Footnote 53] and above all, the large Baptist connection of this magazine, will thank us; and if not, we assure them they ought to thank us, for this third horn of his sore dilemma.
[Footnote 53: Petite Bibliothèque de Catholique, tom. xix. This is a translation of the first part of The Pilgrim's Progress, and is duly modified to doctrinal fitness, and embellished with a frontispiece head of the Blessed Virgin. Southey speaks also of a Portuguese translation of 1782. Nil admirari … !]