of Claudio to his sister about death, were not composed in an hour and
tossed aside; and if they have defects, they have not what Shakespeare
thought defects. Nor is it possible that his astonishingly individual
conceptions of character can have been struck out at a heat: prolonged
and repeated thought must have gone to them. But of small
inconsistencies in the plot he was often quite careless. He seems to
have finished off some of his comedies with a hasty and even
contemptuous indifference, as if it mattered nothing how the people got
married, or even who married whom, so long as enough were married
somehow. And often, when he came to parts of his scheme that were
necessary but not interesting to him, he wrote with a slack hand, like a
craftsman of genius who knows that his natural gift and acquired skill
will turn out something more than good enough for his audience: wrote
probably fluently but certainly negligently, sometimes only half saying
what he meant, and sometimes saying the opposite, and now and then, when
passion was required, lapsing into bombast because he knew he must
heighten his style but would not take the trouble to inflame his
imagination. It may truly be said that what injures such passages is not
inspiration, but the want of it. But, as they are mostly passages where
no poet could expect to be inspired, it is even more true to say that
here Shakespeare lacked the conscience of the artist who is determined
to make everything as good as he can. Such poets as Milton, Pope,
Tennyson, habitually show this conscience. They left probably scarcely
anything that they felt they could improve. No one could dream of saying
that of Shakespeare.

Hence comes what is perhaps the chief difficulty in interpreting his
works. Where his power or art is fully exerted it really does resemble
that of nature. It organises and vitalises its product from the centre
outward to the minutest markings on the surface, so that when you turn