question as to Monks in Oliver Twist, or the long lost parentage of
Smike, or the relations between the Dorrit and Clennam families so
inopportunely discovered by Monsieur Rigaud Blandois. The truth is, the
world was to Shakespear a great "stage of fools" on which he was utterly
bewildered. He could see no sort of sense in living at all; and Dickens
saved himself from the despair of the dream in The Chimes by taking the
world for granted and busying himself with its details. Neither of them
could do anything with a serious positive character: they could place a
human figure before you with perfect verisimilitude; but when the moment
came for making it live and move, they found, unless it made them laugh,
that they had a puppet on their hands, and had to invent some artificial
external stimulus to make it work. This is what is the matter with
Hamlet all through: he has no will except in his bursts of temper.
Foolish Bardolaters make a virtue of this after their fashion:
they declare that the play is the tragedy of irresolution; but all
Shakespear's projections of the deepest humanity he knew have the same
defect: their characters and manners are lifelike; but their actions
are forced on them from without, and the external force is grotesquely
inappropriate except when it is quite conventional, as in the case of
Henry V. Falstaff is more vivid than any of these serious reflective
characters, because he is self-acting: his motives are his own appetites
and instincts and humors. Richard III, too, is delightful as the
whimsical comedian who stops a funeral to make love to the corpse's
widow; but when, in the next act, he is replaced by a stage villain who
smothers babies and offs with people's heads, we are revolted at the
imposture and repudiate the changeling. Faulconbridge, Coriolanus,
Leontes are admirable descriptions of instinctive temperaments: indeed
the play of Coriolanus is the greatest of Shakespear's comedies; but
description is not philosophy; and comedy neither compromises the author
nor reveals him. He must be judged by those characters into which he