THE MIND OF SHAKESPERE
other men in a companionable way, without much hint that he or they thought him more than a genial, frank comrade, is no paradox, but the inevitable consequence of his interest in life and his energy; nor should we wonder that his family remembered him in the death record as a gentleman, not as the world's greatest poet. His business was to live, not to write. That we have his plays now, means only that poetry is the most enduring reaction to life. He illustrates the usually forgotten truth that the greatest poets, normal and not too conscious of themselves, are men of action. Like Dante or Milton or Scott, he responded to life in other ways than through poetry—only he set so great value on the other ways and so little on the poetry that we are forced to think him the least conscious and most naive of artists.
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