With unrivalled ease and celerity he digested, in the
recesses of his consciousness, the fruit of personal observation and
reading. His only conscious aim was to depict human conduct and human
thought. He interpreted them unconsciously by virtue of an involuntary
intuition.
Shakespeare's intuition pierces life at the lowest as well as at the
highest level of experience. It is coloured by delicate imaginative
genius as well as by robust and practical worldliness. Not his
writings only, but the facts of his private life--his mode of managing
his private property, for example--attest his alert knowledge of the
material and practical affairs of human existence. Idealism and
realism in perfect development were interwoven with the texture of his
mind.
Shakespeare was qualified by mental endowment for success in any
career. He was by election a dramatist, and, necessarily, one of
unmatched versatility. His intuitive faculty enabled him, after
regarding life from any point of view that he willed, to depict
through the mouths of his characters the chosen phase of experience in
convincing, harmonious accord with his characters' individual
circumstances and fortunes.
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