Page:The nature and elements of poetry, Stedman, 1892.djvu/131

Rh Addison and Steele together made a man of genius. Terence and Plautus between them perhaps display the constituents of a master-playwright, but not, I think, of a strongly imaginative poet.

I have alluded to the process by which the epic and dramatic chieftains appear to reach '''The cry of adolescence. Cp. "Poets of America": p. 146.''' their creative independence. As a preliminary, or at certain intervals of life, they seem to rid themselves of self-consciousness by its expression in lyrics, sonnets, and canzonets. Of this the minor works of Dante, Tasso, Boccaccio, Michelangelo, Cervantes, Calderon, Camoëns, Shakespeare are eminent examples. But nothing so indicates the unparalleled success of the last-named poet in this regard, as the fact that, unambiguous as are his style and method, and also his moral, civic, and social creeds, we gather so little of the man's inner and outer life from his plays alone: except as we seem to find all lives, all mankind, within himself,—all experiences,

and Coleridge, when he called him the myriad-minded, should have added, "because the myriad-lived."

The grand drama, then, like the epic, gives us that "feigned history" which is truer than history as written, because it does not attempt to set things right. Its strength must be in ratio to its