Page:Moral Obligation to be Intelligent.djvu/113

 there seems to be constant though uneven evidence of design, and in the later plays especially the poet seems to speak as a philosopher, passing conscious verdicts upon life. It was this philosophical matter that led Coleridge and his school to see in Shakspere a profound nature.

This paper does not intend, of course, to announce the great dramatist as a sort of automaton, who had no sense of the quality or purport of his work. In the sonnets and the early plays Shakspere is artificially self-conscious. But he is the most uneven of great writers; even in his artificial moments he is capable of naïve utterance, of that penetrating truth which is his characteristic; on the other hand, in his noblest passages of this sort he sometimes indulges in palpable tricks of style or artifice of idea. Without raising the mooted questions of the sonnets, we can agree with those many