Doubtless Shakespeare, in the heat of dramatic vision, lived his
characters, transported himself to their environment, and felt the
passion of each, as we do in a dream, dictating their unpremeditated
words. But all this is in imagination; it is true only within the
framework of our dream. In reality, of course, Shakespeare never
pierced to Rome nor to Egypt; his elaborations of his data are drawn
from his own feelings and circumstances, not from those of Cleopatra.
This transporting oneself into the heart of a subject is a loose
metaphor: the best one can do is to transplant the subject into one's
own heart and draw _from oneself_ impulses as profound as possible
with which to vivify tradition and make it over in one's own image.
Yet I fear that to speak so is rationalism, and would be found to
involve, to the horror of our philosopher, that life is cognitive and
spiritual, but dependent, discontinuous, and unsubstantial. What he
conceives instead is that consciousness is a stuff out of which things
are made, and has all the attributes, even the most material, of its
several objects; and that there is no possibility of knowing, save by
becoming what one is trying to know. So perception, for him, lies
where its object does, and is some part of it; memory is the past
experience itself, somehow shining through into the present; and
Shakespeare's Cleopatra, I should infer, would have to be some part of
Cleopatra herself--in those moments when she spoke English.

It is hard to be a just critic of mysticism because mysticism can
never do itself justice in words. To conceive of an external actual
Cleopatra and an external actual mind of Shakespeare is to betray the
cause of pure immediacy; and I suspect that if M. Bergson heard of
such criticisms as I am making, he would brush them aside as utterly
blind and scholastic. As the mystics have always said that God was not
far from them, but dwelt in their hearts, meaning this pretty