SHAKESPEARE THE UNIVERSALITY OF SHAKESPEARE He who attempts to write about Shakespeare may well feel as Hamlet did: he undertakes a task that transcends his powers. No great name in literature has had so much written about him, and this of itself shows that he is the greatest name. When all the lesser orbs have been circling around this sun and striving in their measure to reflect his light, it may seem hopeless to propound anything that is both new and true. In dealing with Shakespeare we seem to be dealing with one of the great operations of nature. There is a mysterious largeness about him. He is not merely an individual poet, he is a great elemental force in the world's thought. He has been called the myriadminded. His own personality is well-nigh lost in his work, and that work absorbs into itself, while it represents and relumes for us all the varied secular life of his time. But his merit is a deeper and more vital one than this. He has struck the fundamental tones of secular human life everywhere and always. His poetry, more than any other, holds the mirror up to nature as it now is, and answers to Aristotle's definition of poetry as "an expression of the universal." There was a day when schoolboys were set to writing essays on "Virtue." Their wrestlings with the vast abstract theme were pitiful. Yet to some there was an attraction in the very greatness of the subject, and later years have seen them bending sharper powers of analysis to its comprehension. To write on Shakespeare is like writing on virtue. Success is possible by no schoolboy methods. Only the application of a broad philosophy will bring out valuable results. I propose therefore to preface what I have to say about Shakespeare with a brief statement of the true place and function of imagination, and of dramatic poetry as a means of imaginative expression. It is a great error to regard imagination as an illegitimate child of reason, to be disowned and kept out of sight as much as possible. This was the view of Plato. He loved knowledge; he desired to see things as they are. Imagination, in his view, coins only fiction, and fiction is untruth; imagination and philosophy are inconsistent with each other; hence he banishes all poets from his ideal republic. Modern narrowness and asceticism have often reproduced the error of Plato, and have put their ban upon the novel and upon the fine arts. The cure for all this is to be found in a proper apprehension of the relation between imagination and other operations of the mind. Imagination in its most obvious meaning is the image-making power of the intellect. In this sense it is a help and condition of all the more advanced mental processes. Our earliest perceptions of the self and the not-self are doubtless direct contacts, but our later knowledges are really combinations of direct perception with the images which past experiences have given us. I see a bit of red light among the leaves. Only when THE FUNCTION OF IMAGINATION 161 I add an image stored up in the mind, can I call it an apple. Memory itself is impossible without imagination; there must be an image of the past, as well as a recognition of that image as representing a former state of the self. All judgment with regard to the new involves imagination, for only imagination can enable us to compare the new with the old. Only the imagemaking faculty can bring together the present and the absent, the particular thing and the general standard to which it is to be referred. Brutes have percepts and they can recall them. Even dogs have a low imagination and can dream. Imagination becomes rational and human, only when it is able to distinguish between dream images and the actual percepts of present experience. But there is also a rational imagination which is free-a power of recombining the percepts of the past in an order determined by the mind itself. Imagination has a constructive power, as well as a reproductive power. It leaves out the irrelevant; it puts together the essential. Just in proportion to men's breadth of experience and insight into truth is their use of imagination in construing the world about them and reducing it to order and unity under its typical forms. Napoleon said well that the men of imagination rule the world. Tyndall can speak very properly of the scientific use of the imagination: Nourished," he says, "by knowledge partially won, and bounded by co-operant reason, imagination becomes the mightiest instrument of the physical discoverer." Great inductions, like Sir Isaac Newton's, are only the ventures of the rational imagination into the world of truth that is hidden from the multi |