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“And with a tale, forsooth, he commeth to you.”–For having stripped the Idea bare, he has to reclothe it again and in such shape as will strike forcibly on his hearer’s senses. A while back we broke off midway in a stanza of Sir John Davies. Let us here complete it. There are two versions. As first Davies wrote:–

This doth She when from things particular,
She doth abstract the Universal kinds,
Which bodiless and immaterial are,
And can be lodged but only in our minds.

–the last two lines of which are weak and unnecessary. Revising the stanza, he wrote:–

This does She, when from individual states
She doth abstract the Universal kinds,
Which then reclothed in divers names and fates
Steal access through our senses to our minds,

–which exactly describes the whole process. Having laid bare the Idea, our Poet, turning from analysis to synthesis, proceeds to reclothe it in new particulars of his own inventing, carefully chosen that they may strike home hardest upon the hearer’s perceptions. Now that which strikes home hardest on a man is a tale which he can grasp by the concretest images conveyed in the concretest language. ‘Labor improbus omnia vincit‘ tells him not half so much as a tale of the labours of Hercules; so he will learn more of patience from Job or Griselda; more of chivalrous courage from Hector or Roland or Launcelot or the tale of Palamon and Arcite; more of patriotism from the figures in history–Leonidas, Horatius, Regulus, Joan of Arc, William Tell, Garibaldi, Gordon–that have translated the Idea back into their own lives with the noblest simplicity, so that we say of them that they are “epical figures” or “figures worthy of romance,” thereby paying them the highest compliment in our power: yes and more of Christian simplicity from my Uncle Toby, Colonel Newcome, even Mr. Pickwick; than from a hundred copybook maxims concerning these virtues: all these figures indeed illustrating the tritest copybook maxim of all–that “Example is better than Precept.” Thus Charles Lamb praises the Plays of Shakespeare as “enrichers of the fancy, strengtheners of virtue, a withdrawing from all selfish and mercenary thoughts, a lesson of all sweet and honourable thoughts and actions, to teach courtesy, benignity, generosity, humanity: for,” say he, “of examples, teaching those virtues, his pages are full.”

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The Poet then, having seized on the Idea and purged it of what is trivial or accidental, reclothes it in a concrete dress and so represents it to us. And you will generally remark in the very greatest poets that not only are the images they represent to us extraordinarily definite and concrete and therefore vivid–as Dante, for example, will describe a Scene in Hell or in Paradise with as much particularity as though he were writing a newspaper report; but this concreteness of vision translates itself into a remarkable concreteness of speech. I suppose there was never a more concrete writer than Shakespeare, and his practice of translating all his idea into things which you can touch or see grew steadily stronger throughout his career, so that any competent critic can in a moment distinguish his later writing from his earlier by its compression of images in words, its forcible concretion of the various “parts of speech,” its masterful corvee of nouns substantive to do the work of verbs, and so on. Even in very early work such as Venus and Adonis we cannot but note this gift of vision, how quick and particular it is….

Upon this promise did he raise his chin,
Like a dive-dipper, peering through a wave,
Who, being look’d on, ducks as quickly in….