Bergson's view, a sort of glimpse of the remote
reality itself, as if by telepathy he had been made to witness some
part of it; or rather as if the scope of his consciousness had been
suddenly extended in one direction, so as to embrace and contain
bodily a bit of that outlying experience. Thus when the poet sifts his
facts and sets his imagination to work at unifying and completing
them, what he does is to pierce to Egypt, Rome, and the inner
consciousness of Cleopatra, to fetch _thence_ the profound momentum
which is to guide him in composition; and it is there, not in the
adventitious later parts of his own mind, that he should find the
thousand other details which he may add to the picture.
Here again, in an exaggerated form, we have a transcript of the
immediate, a piece of really wonderful introspection, spoiled by being
projected into a theory of nature, which it spoils in its turn.
Doubtless Shakespeare, in the heat of dramatic vision, lived his
characters, transported himself to their environment, and felt the
passion of each, as we do in a dream, dictating their unpremeditated
words. But all this is in imagination; it is true only within the
framework of our dream. In reality, of course, Shakespeare never
pierced to Rome nor to Egypt; his elaborations of his data are drawn
from his own feelings and circumstances, not from those of Cleopatra.
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