that poetry which is absolutely poetic and intimately alive even in its unspoken implications—we feel the lyric. Other forms of literary art, narrative or dramatic, will doubtless appeal for centuries to the higher and lower castes of the incompetent, but as the generations pass they will find less and less approval from those few sensitive minds which after all are the only ones that count, since they are the only ones able to create poetry or understand it.
Shakespeare, a portent of dead ages, is not great enough or pure enough in his lyricism to entitle him to immortality even in anthologies: he moves within the sphere of dramatic action and suffering, in those ambiguous, impure, and external forms which are steadily sinking in esteem. For us the death of Shakespeare is beginning now.
II
But Shakespeare is still great, so devotees and conservatives will reply, in his power of penetrating and representing the human soul, of revealing—through the torments of his characters—the infamy of man, the blind ferocity of fate, the depths and the terrors of life. Such is, or should be, the judgment of those (and they are in the majority) who have not yet reached the most radical conclusions, the most lacerating and
