And what is the inference the poet would have us draw
from this passage? It is, that the life and efficacy of Art
depends on the personality of the artist, which "has informed,
transpierced, thridded, and so thrown fast the facts else free,
as right through ring and ring runs the djereed and binds the loose,
one bar without a break." And it is really this fusion of
the artist's soul, which kindles, quickens, INFORMS those who
contemplate, respond to, reproduce sympathetically within themselves
the greater spirit which attracts and absorbs their own.
The work of Art is apocalyptic of the artist's own personality.
It CANNOT be impersonal. As is the temper of his spirit, so is,
MUST be, the temper of his Art product.* It is hard to believe,
almost impossible to believe, that `Titus Andronicus' could have been
written by Shakespeare, the external testimony to the authorship,
notwithstanding. Even if he had written it as a burlesque
of such a play as Marlow's `Jew of Malta', he could not have avoided
some revelation of that sense of moral proportion which is omnipresent
in his Plays. But I can find no Shakespeare in `Titus Andronicus'.
Are we not certain what manner of man Shakespeare was from his Works
(notwithstanding that critics are ever asserting their impersonality)
-- far more certain than if his biography had been written
by one who knew him all his life, and sustained to him
the most intimate relations? We know Shakespeare -- or he CAN
be known, if the requisite conditions are met, better, perhaps,
than any other great author that ever lived -- know,
in the deepest sense of the word, in a sense other than that in which
we know Dr. Johnson, through Boswell's Biography. The moral proportion
which is so signal a characteristic of his Plays could not have been
imparted to them by the conscious intellect. It was SHED from
his spiritual constitution.