merely natural talent, and from those Frenchmen, who with intellectual dexterity wrought according to an arbitrary rule; these separate ways seldom lead beyond the point, where true art only begins. When a regularly formed work of art has been accomplished, consciously as it was by Lessing, it is further requisite, that this regularity should be as much as possible concealed, that the intellectual contents should be wrapped up in sensible forms. If we ascribe the regularity of a work of art chiefly to conscious treatment, still that specific faculty of poetic genius, of representing every thing plastically, in sensible representation with living imagery, is an essentially natural gift, an involuntary want and an instinctive force and impulse of the poet's mind. By means of this gift, the work of art bears the stamp of that unstudied ease, which gives it the appearance of artlessness; the intentional varishes at the first impression, as, on the contrary, on closer inspection the apparently unintentional vanishes before the underlying regularity. As in genius itself the opposition between spirit and nature is removed, so in its works the real appearance, and the ideal truth, image, and thought, the spiritual contents and the sentient form, are reconciled and adjusted.

But passing from the regularity in Shakespeare's works to the consideration of their conformity to art, where, in these works so admired for their truth to nature, where is the ideality which makes the true poet, the elevation above the horizon of reality, which we require in the true work of art?

It is essentially the casualties and deficiencies of the real world, its imperfections and deformities, which have generated in the human mind the need of art; on the

ground of this need, art received its law and vocation to free us from all the baseness, unmeaningness, and ugliness, which cleave to actual life, to elevate us to the serene height of a fairer existence, and, imitating nature, to ennoble it. This law was not at all unfamiliar to the people of Shakespeare's time. His contemporary Bacon < gave to poetry this great vocation: as the world of the senses is of lower value, than the human soul, so poetry must grant to men, what history denies: it must satisfy the mind with the appearance of things, as the satisfying reality is not to be had, and thus prove, that the human soul delights in a more perfect order and a nobler greatness, than are to be found in nature. Shakespeare himself appears to have attained to the same views. He is everywhere of Aristotle's opinion, that art consists in the imitation of nature, or as he would have said, in the emulative imitation of nature. Thus we have seen in Antony, that he knew the twofold instance of nature outdoing all the ideal of art, and of art triumphantly defying nature. For he would have shared Goethe's opinion, that the ideal of art coincides with the ideas and types of nature; he would not, like Schiller, besides and beyond this ideal developed out of nature, have admitted another transcendental ideal lying beyond the world of the senses.

But if Shakespeare theoretically held this correct view of art, how does his practice agree with it? Have we not ourselves said, that the interest in moral and psychological truth is always higher with him, than the interest in outer æsthetic beauty? Did we not thereby place ourselves in the ranks of those, who admire nothing in Shakespeare but nature, reality,

the realistic principle? Did he not, in

this striving after truth to nature, often sink to the level of the Dutch painting, entirely forgetting that province of art, which lies in developing the beautiful and the noble, out of the deformed and the mean? Did he not in representing the bad which is discordant and ugly in itself, far overstep the line of beauty? Is not the combination of the noble with the mean, the mixing of jest and earnest, alone sufficient to characterize the common reality of nature in his plays? And did he not too much betray in all this the age, when to expose the nakedness of nature even to its utmost ugliness was the universal business of popular poetry, of that clownish literature of burlesques and satires peculiar to the 16th and 17th centuries, and in higher regions even the business of a Machiavelli and a Spinoza?

In what then is it, (we repeat the question,) in which the ideal vein of the poet could manifest itself?

We would answer this question otherwise than some have done, Ulrici for example, who considered that Shakespeare's only method of giving his works an ideal stamp, lay in the unity of idea in the composition. We believe the ideal vein of a great poet betrays itself as little in single expedients, as his vein of genius in the predominance of a single faculty; we would reply, this ideal vein manifests itself in nothing less than everything.

It shews itself first in the diction, as we have previously remarked, in the use of metaphorical language, and in the nature and object of this. In the double nature of metaphors, in this combination of similar objects, in the blending of the twofold in one, there lies of itself a more powerful and elevated expression, such as is suitable to

the description of mighty passions; the figurative impulse of poetic fancy finds utterance in them, because they contain within the smallest medium of poetry, that embodiment of the spiritual, which is on a large scale the highest aim of all art.

In the second place, the representation essentially contributes to the ideal effect of a Shakespearian drama; by means of this we first perceive the whole power of the poet. However natural the scenic representation of a play may be, it will always raise the spectator above the prose of reality. For no other art works with such united powers and means on human fancy. All other arts take away somewhat from the life of the object represented, in their attempt to imitate life. Painting takes away the full form, sculpture the colour, both, the motion; the epos changes acts into words, music changes words into tones, it is the drama only that uses all the means at once, form, colour, tone, word, look, motion, and action; it gives the full effect of what is represented, and takes away only the narrow boundaries of time and space. The result of this effect can only be laboriously supplied in reading by recollection and imagination; we remain with feelings, considerations, and doubts, suspended at isolated parts, and with difficulty arrive at the total impression of the whole we have read, much less to an idea of the impression, which a representation is able to produce. In representation, on the contrary, single impressions do not take root, they pass away before they can fix; the few inequalities, which arrest us in reading, do no harm to the force and beauty of the body of the drama, when in full movement. During the performance we are not, as in reading, forced to dwell upon the words,

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but on that which the play represents, the action. It is just this, which brings out the ideal effect. For in the man in action all his combined powers are called into play, deeds claim the man's whole being, and bring his best or strongest parts to their height; his sensitiveness and thought, his will, and all the energy and properties of his nature, converge as in a point to the aim of his action, the man moves in his entirety, and this is of itself a poetical moment, one which every deed even in real life bears within itself. The more naturally this is represented by the performer, the greater will be the charm of the performance, the more strongly will the force and depth of the effect, as well as the ideal splendour of the drama stand out, and for this no degree of thought and explanation can compensate.

The ideal in Shakespeare's dramas shews itself further, it is true, in that point also which Ulrici laid stress upon, in the unity of composition, in the close relation of all parts and episodes, of all characters and actions, to the one fundamental idea of the poet's plan; a quality on which especially the spiritualization of the matter rests, which is the essential mark of the ideal nature of a poetic work.

This ideality shews itself, also, in the high moral spirit, which in Shakespeare's plays, controls the complications of fate and the issues of human actions, in that spirit, which develops before us that higher order, which Bacon required in poetry, indicating the eternal and uncorrupted justice in human things, the finger of God, which our dull eyes do not perceive in reality.

Shakespeare's idealizing spirit shews itself also, where it will be most disputed, in his characters. Here the poet indeed clings most firmly to reality, because here the motives