The mistakes which beset our modern criticism of Shakespeare are not likely to be the mistakes of carelessness and undervaluation. We can hardly even join in Ben Jonson's confession, and say that we honour his memory "on this side idolatry." "'on this side idolatry." We are idolaters of Shakespeare, born and bred. Our sin is not indifference, but superstition-which is another kind of ignorance. In all the realms of political democracy there is no equality like that which a poet exacts from his readers. He seeks for no convertites nor worshippers, but records his ideas and impressions of life and society in order that the reader may compare them with his own. If the impressions tally, sympathy is born. If not, the courteous reader will yet find matter for thought. The indispensable preliminary for judging and enjoying Shakespeare is not knowledge of his history, not even knowledge of his works, but knowledge of his theme, a wide acquaintance with human life and human passion as they are reflected in a sensitive and independent mind. The poets, and but few others, have approached him from the right point of view, with the requisite ease and sincerity. There is no writer who has been so laden with the impertinences of prosaic enthusiasm and learned triviality. There is no book, except the Bible, which has been so misread, so misapplied, or made the subject of so many idle paradoxes and ingenuities. The most careless and casual lines in his plays have been twisted and squeezed in the hope that they will yield some medicinal secret. His poetry has been cut into minute indigestible fragments, and used like wedding-cake, not to eat, but to dream upon. The greatest poet of the modern world is at this day widely believed to have been also the most irrelevant, and to have valued the golden casket of his verse chiefly as a hiding-place for the odds.

and ends of personal gossip. These are the penalties to be paid by great poets when their works become fashionable.

Even wiser students of poetry have found it hard to keep their balance. Since the rise of Romantic criticism, the appreciation of Shakespeare has become a kind of auction, where the highest bidder, however extravagant, carries off the prize. To love and to be wise is not given to man; the poets themselves have run to wild extremes in their anxiety to find all Shakespeare in every part of him; so that it has come to be almost a mark of insensibility to consider his work rationally and historically as a whole. Infinite subtlety of purpose has been attributed to him in cases where he accepted a story as he found it, or half contemptuously threw in a few characters and speeches to suit the requirements of his Elizabethan audience. Coleridge, for example, finds it "a strong instance of the fineness of Shakespeare's insight into the nature of the passions, that Romeo is introduced already love-bewildered," doting on Rosaline. Yet the whole story of Romeo's passion for Rosaline is set forth in Arthur Brooke's poem, from which Shakespeare certainly drew the matter of his play. Again, the same great critic asserts that "the low soliloquy of the Porter" in Macbeth was "written for the mob by some other hand, perhaps with Shakespeare's consent"; and that "finding it take, he with the remaining ink of a pen otherwise employed, just interpolated the words 'I'll devilporter it no further: I had thought to have let in some of all professions, that go the primrose way to the everlasting bonfire.' Of the rest not one syllable has the ever-present being of Shakespeare." That is to say, Coleridge does not like the Porter's speech,

so he denies it to Shakespeare. But one sentence in it is too good to lose, so Shakespeare must be at hand to write it. This is the very ecstasy of criticism, and sends us back to the cool and manly utterances of Dryden, Johnson, and Pope with a heightened sense of the value of moderation and candour.

There is something noble and true, after all, in these excesses of religious zeal. To judge Shakespeare it is necessary to include his thought in ours, and the mind instinctively recoils from the audacity of the attempt. On his characters we pass judgment freely; as we grow familiar with them, we seem to belong to their world, and to be ourselves the pawns, if not the creatures, of Shakespeare's genius. are well content to share in this dream-life, which is so marvellously vital, so like the real world as we know it; and we are unwilling to be awakened. How should the dream judge the dreamer? By what insolent device can we raise ourselves to a point outside the orbèd continent of Shakespeare's life-giving imagination? How shall we speak of his character, when the very traits of that character are themselves men and women? Almost all the Romantic critics have felt the difficulty; most of them have refused to face it, preferring to plunge themselves deeper under the spell of the enchantment, and to hug the dream. They have busied themselves ardently and curiously with Shakespeare's creatures, and have satisfied their feelings towards the creator by raising to him, from time to time, an impassioned hymn of praise.

Yet Shakespeare was a man, and a writer: there was no escape for him; when he wrote, it was himself that he related to paper, his own mind that he revealed. Some men write so ill that their true selves

are almost completely concealed beneath their ragged and incompetent speech. May it be said that others write so well, with so large and firm a grasp of men and things, that they pass beyond our ken on the other side? In one sense, perhaps, it may. There is much that we do not know about Shakespeare, and it includes almost all that in our daily traffic with our fellows we judge to be significant, characteristic, illuminative. We know so little one of another, that we are thankful for the doubtful information given by thumb-marks and finger-prints, tricks of gesture, and accidental flaws in the clay. It is often by our littlenesses that we are most familiarly known; and here our knowledge of Shakespeare fails us. What we do know of him is so essential that it seems impersonal. All this detective machinery he has made. of no account by opening his mind and heart to us. If we desire to know how he wore his hat, or what were his idiosyncrasies of speech, it is chiefly because we feel that these things might be of value as signs and indications. But a lifetime of such observations and inferences could not tell us one-tenth part of what he has himself revealed to us by the more potent and expressive way of language. If we knew his littlenesses we should be none the wiser: they would lie to us, and dwarf him. He has freed us from the deceits of these makeshifts; and those who feel that their knowledge of Shakespeare must needs depend chiefly on the salvage of broken facts and details, are his flunkeys, not his friends. "Did these bones cost. no more the breeding but to play at loggats with 'em?" It would be pleasant, no doubt, to unbend the mind in Shakespeare's company; to exchange the whiteheat of the smithy for the lazy ease of the villagegreen; to see him put off his magic garment, and

fall back into the dear inanities of ordinary idle conversation. This pleasure is denied to us. But to know him as the greatest of artisans, when he collects his might and stands dilated, his imagination aflame, the thick-coming thoughts and fancies shaping themselves, under the stress of the central will, into a thing of life-this is to know him better, not worse. The rapid, alert reading of one of the great plays brings us nearer to the heart of Shakespeare than all the faithful and laudable business of the antiquary and the commentator.

But here we are met by an objection which is strong in popular favour and has received some measure of scholarly support. It is denied that we can find the man Shakespeare in his plays. He is a dramatic poet; and poetry, the clown says, is feigning. His enormously rich creative faculty has given us a long procession of fictitious persons who are as real to us as our neighbours; a large assembly, including the most diverse characters-Hamlet and Falstaff, Othello and Thersites, Imogen and Mrs. Quickly, Dogberry and Julius Caesar, Cleopatra and Audrey-and in this crowd the dramatist conceals himself, and escapes. We cannot make him answerable for anything that he says. He is the fellow in the cellarage, who urges on the action of the play, but is himself invisible.

It is a plausible objection, and a notable tribute to Shakespeare's success in producing the illusions which are the machinery of his art. But it would never be entertained by an artist, and would have had short shrift from any of the company that assembled at the Mermaid Tavern. No man can walk abroad save on his own shadow. No dramatist can create live characters save by bequeathing the best of himself to the children of his art, scattering among them a largess

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