It is he who has made it plain in art, whatever it was before
in nature; and most likely the very simplicity of it in nature was
scarcely observed before he saw it and represented it. And is it not the
glory of art to attain this simplicity? for simplicity is the end of all
things--all manners, all morals, all religion. To say that the thing
could not have been done otherwise, is just to say that you forget the
art in beholding its object, that you forget the mirror because you see
nature reflected in the mirror. Any one can see the moon in Lord Rosse's
telescope; but who made the reflector? And let the student try to
express anything in prose or in verse, in painting or in modelling, just
as it is. No man knows till he has made many attempts, how hard to reach
is this simplicity of art. And the greater the success, the fewer are
the signs of the labour expended. Simplicity is art's perfection.
But so natural are all his plays, and the great tragedies to which we
would now refer in particular, amongst the rest, that it may appear to
some, at first sight, that Shakspere could not have constructed them
after any moral plan, could have had no lesson of his own to teach in
them, seeing they bear no marks of individual intent, in that they
depart nowhere from, nature, the construction of the play itself going
straight on like a history.
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