discover the protean vanities, greeds and aspirations of men, and to lay
bare, as with a scalpel, the hidden motives and springs of action. We
dream of an art that shall take into account the natural daily decay and
up-building of cell-life; the wars that go on in the blood; the fevers
of the brain; the creeping paralysis of nerve-exhaustion; above all, we
must be able even now from a few bare facts, to re-create a man and make
him live and love again for the reader, just as the biologist from a few
scattered bones can reconstruct some prehistoric bird or fish or mammal.

And we student-artists have no desire to paint our subject as better or
nobler or smaller or meaner than he was in reality; we study his
limitations as we study his gifts, his virtues with as keen an interest
as his vices; for it is in some excess of desire, or in some
extravagance of mentality, that we look for the secret of his
achievement, just as we begin to wonder when we see hands constantly
outstretched in pious supplication, whether a foot is not thrust out
behind in some secret shame, for the biped, man, must keep a balance.

I intend first of all to prove from Shakespeare's works that he has
painted himself twenty times from youth till age at full length: I shall
consider and compare these portraits till the outlines of his character
are clear and certain; afterwards I shall show how his little vanities
and shames idealized the picture, and so present him as he really was,
with his imperial intellect and small snobberies; his giant vices and
paltry self-deceptions; his sweet gentleness and long martyrdom. I
cannot but think that his portrait will thus gain more in truth than it
can lose in ideal beauty. Or let me come nearer to my purpose by means
of a simile. Talking with Sir David Gill one evening on shipboard about
the fixed stars, he pointed one out which is so distant that we cannot
measure how far it is away from us and can form no idea of its