they can, they will never get over the wrench that Shakespeare gave
them.

The peculiarity of almost all early literature is that it seems to have
a double meaning, that, underneath its natural, we find ourselves
continually seeing or suspecting a supernatural meaning. In the older
epics the characters seem to be half typical and only half historical.
Thus did the early poets endeavor to make realities out of appearances;
for, except a few typical men in whom certain ideas get embodied, the
generations of mankind are mere apparitions who come out of the dark for
a purposeless moment, and reënter the dark again after they have
performed the nothing they came for.

Gradually, however, the poet as the "seer" became secondary to the
"maker." His office became that of entertainer rather than teacher. But
always something of the old tradition was kept alive. And if he has now
come to be looked upon merely as the best expresser, the gift of seeing
is implied as necessarily antecedent to that, and of seeing very deep,
too. If any man would seem to have written without any conscious moral,
that man is Shakespeare. But that must be a dull sense, indeed, which
does not see through his tragic--yes, and his comic--masks awful eyes
that flame with something intenser and deeper than a mere scenic
meaning--a meaning out of the great deep that is behind and beyond all
human and merely personal character. Nor was Shakespeare himself
unconscious of his place as a teacher and profound moralist: witness
that sonnet in which he bewails his having neglected sometimes the
errand that was laid upon him:

Alas, 't is true I have gone here and there,
And made myself a motley to the view,