A Study of Shakespeare.
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case is exactly, as I have already indicated, the fidelity of a reporter to his notes. The fidelity in the other case is exactly the fidelity of Shakespeare in his Roman plays to the text of Plutarch. It is a fidelity which admits—I had almost written, which requires—the fullest play of the highest imagination. No more than the most realistic of reporters will it omit or falsify any necessary or even admissible detail; but the indefinable quality which it adds to the lowest as to the highest of these is (as Lamb says of passion) "the all in all in poetry." Turning again for illustration to one of the highest names in imaginative literature—a name sometimes most improperly and absurdly inscribed on the register of the realistic school,[1]
- ↑ Not for the first and probably not for the last time I turn, with all confidence as with all reverence, for illustration and confirmation of my own words, to the exquisite critical genius of a long honoured and long lamented fellow-craftsman. The following admirable and final estimate of the more special element or peculiar quality in the intellectual force of Honoré de Balzac could only have been taken by the inevitable intuition and rendered by the subtlest eloquence of Charles Baudelaire. Nothing could more aptly and perfectly illustrate the distinction indicated in my text between unimaginative realism and imaginative reality.
"I have many a time been astonished that to pass for an observer should be Balzac's great popular title to fame. To me it had always seemed that it was his chief merit to be a visionary, and a passionate visionary. All his characters are gifted with the ardour of life which animated himself. All his fictions are as deeply coloured as dreams. From the highest of the aristocracy to the lowest
