Critical Miscellanies, Vol. I | Page 4

far-shining pre-eminence of Shakespeare, apart from the
incomparable fertility and depth of his natural gifts, arises secondarily
from the larger extent to which he transcended the special forming

influences, and refreshed his fancy and widened his range of sympathy,
by recourse to what was then the nearest possible approach to a historic
or political method. To the poet, vision reveals a certain form of the
truth, which the rest of men laboriously discover and prove by the
tardier methods of meditation and science. Shakespeare did not walk in
imagination with the great warriors, monarchs, churchmen, and rulers
of history, nor conceive their conduct, ideas, schemes, and throw
himself into their words and actions, without strengthening that original
taste which must have first drawn him to historical subjects, and
without deepening both his feeling for the great progression of human
affairs, and his sympathy for those relative moods of surveying and
dealing with them, which are not more positive, scientific, and political,
than they may be made truly poetic.
Again, while in Dante the inspiring force was spiritual, and in Goethe it
was intellectual, we may say that both in Shakespeare and Milton it
was political and social. In other words, with these two, the drama of
the one and the epic of the other were each of them connected with
ideas of government and the other external movements of men in
society, and with the play of the sentiments which spring from them.
We assuredly do not mean that in either of them, least of all in
Shakespeare, there is an absence of the spiritual element. This would be
at once to thrust them down into a lower place; for the spiritual is of the
very essence of poetry. But with the spiritual there mixes in our
Englishmen a most abundant leaven of recognition of the impressions
and impulses of the outer forms of life, as well as of active sympathy
with the every-day debate of the world. They are neither of them
inferior to the highest in sense of the wide and unutterable things of the
spirit; yet with both of them, more than with other poets of the same
rank, the man with whose soul and circumstance they have to deal is
the [Greek: politikon zôon], no high abstraction of the race, but the
creature with concrete relations and a full objective life. In Shakespeare
the dramatic form helps partly to make this more prominent, though the
poet's spirit shines forth thus, independently of the mould which it
imposes on itself. Of Milton we may say, too, that, in spite of the
supernatural machinery of his greatest poem, it bears strongly
impressed on it the political mark, and that in those minor pieces,

where he is avowedly in the political sphere, he still rises to the full
height of his majestic harmony and noblest dignity.
Byron was touched by the same fire. The contemporary and friend of
the most truly spiritual of all English poets, Shelley, he was himself
among the most essentially political. Or perhaps one will be better
understood, describing his quality as a quality of poetical worldliness,
in its enlarged and generous sense of energetic interest in real
transactions, and a capacity of being moved and raised by them into
those lofty moods of emotion which in more spiritual natures are only
kindled by contemplation of the vast infinitudes that compass the
human soul round about. That Shelley was immeasurably superior to
Byron in all the rarer qualities of the specially poetic mind appears to
us so unmistakably assured a fact, that difference of opinion upon it can
only spring from a more fundamental difference of opinion as to what it
is that constitutes this specially poetic quality. If more than anything
else it consists in the power of transfiguring action, character, and
thought, in the serene radiance of the purest imaginative intelligence,
and the gift of expressing these transformed products in the finest
articulate vibrations of emotional speech, then must we not confess that
Byron has composed no piece which from this point may compare with
Prometheus or the Cenci, any more than Rubens may take his place
with Raphael? We feel that Shelley transports the spirit to the highest
bound and limit of the intelligible; and that with him thought passes
through one superadded and more rarefying process than the other poet
is master of. If it be true, as has been written, that 'Poetry is the breath
and finer spirit of all knowledge,' we may say that Shelley teaches us to
apprehend that further something, the breath and finer spirit of poetry
itself. Contrasting, for example, Shelley's Ode to the West Wind, with
the famous and truly noble stanzas on the eternal sea which close the
fourth canto of Childe Harold, who does not