The Course of English Poetry – 2 79hints, a multitude, a riot of living images carried on a many-
coloured sea of revealing speech and a never failing surge of
movement. His dramatic method seems indeed to have usually
no other intellectual purpose, aesthetic motive or spiritual secret:
ordinarily it labours simply for the joy of a multiple poetic vision
of life and vital creation with no centre except the life-power
itself, no coordination except that thrown out spontaneously by
the unseizable workings of its energy, no unity but the one unity
of man and the life-spirit in Nature working in him and before
his eyes. It is this sheer creativeananda ̄ of the life-spirit which is
Shakespeare; abroad everywhere in that age, it incarnates itself
in him for the pleasure of poetic self-vision.
All Shakespeare’s powers and limitations — for it is now per-
missible to speak of his limitations — arise from this character of
the force that moved him to poetic utterance. He is not primarily
an artist, a poetic thinker or anything else of the kind, but a great
vital creator and intensely, though within marked limits, a seer
of life. His art itself is life arranging its forms in its own surge and
excitement, not in any kind of symmetry, — for symmetry here
there is none, — nor in fine harmonies, but still in its own way
supremely and with a certain intimately metric arrangement of
its many loose movements, in mobile perspectives, a succession
of crowded but successful and satisfying vistas. While he has
given a wonderful language to poetic thought, he yet does not
think for the sake of thought, but for the sake of life. His way
indeed is not so much the poet himself thinking about life, as life
thinking itself out in him through many mouths, in many moods
and moments, with a rich throng of fine thought-effects, but not
for any clear sum of intellectual vision or to any high power
of either ideal or spiritual result. His development of human
character has a sovereign force within its bounds, but it is the
soul of the human being as seen through outward character,
passion, action, — the life-soul, and not either the thought-soul
or the deeper psychic being, still less the profounder truth of
the human spirit. Something of these things we may get, but
only in shadow or as a partial reflection in a coloured glass,
not in their own action. In his vision and therefore in his poetic