much aspiration, so ill-educated a love of refinement; so unarmed a
credulity, noblest of weaknesses, betrayed for the laughter of a
chambermaid. By an actual Bottom the Weaver our pity might be reached
for the sake of his single self-reliance, his fancy and resource
condemned to burlesque and ignominy by the niggard doom of circumstance.
But is not life one thing and is not art another? Is it not the
privilege of literature to make selection and to treat things singly,
without the after-thoughts of life, without the troublous completeness of
the many-sided world? Is not Shakespeare, for this reason, our refuge?
Fortunately unreal is his world when he will have it so; and there we may
laugh with open heart at a grotesque man: without misgiving, without
remorse, without reluctance. If great creating Nature has not assumed
for herself she has assuredly secured to the great creating poet the
right of partiality, of limitation, of setting aside and leaving out, of
taking one impression and one emotion as sufficient for the day. Art and
Nature are separate, complementary; in relation, not in confusion, with
one another. And all this officious cleverness in seeing round the
corner, as it were, of a thing presented by literary art in the flat--(the
borrowing of similes from other arts is of evil tendency; but let this
pass, as it is apt)--is but another sign of the general lack of a sense
of the separation between Nature and the sentient mirror in the mind. In
some of his persons, indeed, Shakespeare is as Nature herself,
all-inclusive; but in others--and chiefly in comedy--he is partial, he is
impressionary, he refuses to know what is not to his purpose, he is an
artist. And in that gay, wilful world it is that he gives us--or used to
give us, for even the world is obsolete--the pleasure of _oubliance_.

Now this fugitive writer has not been so swift but that I have caught him
a clout as he went. Yet he will do it again; and those like-minded will
assuredly also continue to show how much more completely human, how much