Page:Essays and Studies - Swinburne (1875).pdf/72

 has well answered that it was not his part to imitate Shakespeare or any man; that the proof of vitality and value in the modern drama was that it had a life and a form, a body and a soul of its own. Nevertheless we may notice, with all reverence for the glorious dramatic work and fame of the first poet of our age, that on one point he might in some men's judgment have done well to follow as far as was possible to his own proper genius the method of Shakespeare. The ideal dramatist, an archetype once incarnate and made actual in the greatest of all poets, has no visible preferences; in his capacity of artist he is incapable of personal indignation or predilection; as Keats with subtle truth and sovereign insight has remarked, he "has as much delight in conceiving an Iago as an Imogen." For the time being, throughout the limits of his design, he maintains in awful equanimity of apparent abstraction the high indifference of nature or of God. Evil and good, and things and men, are in his hands as clay in the potter's, and he moulds them to the use and purpose of his art alone. What men are, and what their doings and their sufferings, he shows you face to face, and not as in a glass darkly; to you he leaves it to comment on the action and passion set before you, to love or hate, applaud or condemn, the agents and the patients of his mundane scheme, wide as time and space, hell-deep and heaven-high. It is for you, if you please, to take part with Imogen or Desdemona against Iago or Iachimo, with Arthur or Cordelia against Goneril or King John; he is for all men, inasmuch as all are creatures and parcels of himself as artist, and of