LITERARY VITALITIES 319 



flash, and live and die before us, men of the twinkling eye, women 

 whimsical as the wind, deep, true, tender, comical as Vanity Fair 

 itself! Shakespeare is Life. 



Simplest of biographies is his: lived, wandered, acted, wrote, mar- 

 ried, died; almost anonymous, living and dying only three hundred 

 years ago, almost before our faces, yet little or nothing known of him 

 after all the laborious research of a "Century of Praise"; like all the 

 greater things of nature herself mountains, oceans, sky; like many 

 of the greater things of the spirit, nameless the first chapters of 

 Genesis, the Book of Job, Ruth and Esther, the Beowulf, the Nibe- 

 lungen Lied, the Edda, the Roland Song, the Cid Campeador. More 

 puissant than the magicians of the Pharaoh himself, a waft of Shake- 

 speare's wand evokes the charmed idyll of Rosalind and Arden Wood, 

 Titania and her train, Miranda's fairy isle, the deep things of Ham- 

 let and Macbeth, and the ancient worlds of Caesar, Coriolanus, and 

 Cleopatra: Lear with his wild hair, or that gorgeous picture of 

 Old Venice rising like an exhalation from the sea fantastically bright : 

 this man, of many men and women and children compact, with much 

 of Homer and Dante in him, with more of Aristophanes and Moliere, 

 a bit of Cervantes; here and there, the smile of Chaucer on his lips, 

 the tear of Boccaccio jeweling his eye this man Shakespeare, was 

 all this encyclopedically. And yet more: he was himself, the unique, 

 " der Einzige." By reason of the life that was in him he lives as that 

 wondrous Panathenaic Procession in its triumphal march around the 

 frieze of the Parthenon lives, as the mighty battle sculptures of 

 Pergamon and ./Egina live, as those great splashes of deathless color 

 live that writhe into shape and humanize themselves in the vaulted 

 ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, among the cosmic scenes pictured on the 

 walls of Parma, Florence, the Doge's Palace. 



Contrast the definitions of Life and of Existence : the one is found 

 in the vivid ruins of Rome and Athens, so full of life to-day that one 

 can instantly reconstruct out of them great fragments of two remote 

 worlds and fill the spaces of Colosseum and Acropolis with worship- 

 ing, or with spectacle-loving multitudes; the other is found in those 

 tragically silent, sad, speechless temples and pyramids and obelisks 

 and sphinxes of hundred-gated Thebes, of Luxor, and Karnak, and 

 Memphis, and Ghizeh. 



The one lives even in its death; the other is death, even in its 

 gigantic, in its immeasurable existence. 



Herder's watchword therefore covers the third indispensable ele- 

 ment in any literature or literary work Electricity. The Pygmalion 

 myth comes to life in every true literary masterpiece. " Speak ! " said 

 Michael Angelo as he stood before Donatello's statue of Saint Mark 

 outside the old church in Florence. 



What does not speak in literature, and speak from age to age and 



