That is the epitaph on German honesty. I have drifted away from Shakespeare, who knew nothing of the sea of troubles that England would one day take arms against, and who could not know that on that day she would outgo his most splendid praise and more than vindicate his reverence and his affection. But Shakespeare is still so live a mind that it is vain to try to expound him by selected texts, or to pin him to a mosaic of quotations from his book. Often, if you seek to know what he thought on questions which must have exercised his imagination, you can gather it only from a hint dropped by accident, and quite irrelevant. What were his views on literature, and on the literary controversies which have been agitated from his day to our own? He tells us very little. He must have heard discussions and arguments on metre, on cla.s.sical precedent, on the ancient and modern drama; but he makes no mention of these questions. He does not seem to have attached any prophetic importance to poetry. The poets who exalt their craft are of a more slender build. Is it conceivable that he would have given his support to a literary academy,--a project which began to find advocates during his lifetime? I think not. It is true that he is full of good sense, and that an academy exists to promulgate good sense. Moreover his own free experiments brought him nearer and nearer into conformity with cla.s.sical models. _Oth.e.l.lo_ and _Macbeth_ are better constructed plays than _Hamlet_. The only one of his plays which, whether by chance or by design, observes the so-called unities, of action and time and place, is one of his latest plays--_The Tempest_. But he was an Englishman, and would have been jealous of his freedom and independence. When the grave-digger remarks that it is no great matter if Hamlet do not recover his wits in England, because there the men are as mad as he, the satire has a sympathetic ring in it. Shakespeare did not wish to see the mad English altered. Nor are they likely to alter; our fears and our hopes are vain. We entered on the greatest of our wars with an army no bigger, so we are told, than the Bulgarian army. Since that time we have regimented and organized our people, not without success; and our soothsayers are now directing our attention to the danger that after the war we shall be kept in uniform and shall become tame creatures, losing our independence and our spirit of enterprise. There is nothing that soothsayers will not predict when they are gravelled for lack of matter, but this is the stupidest of all their efforts. The national character is not so flimsy a thing; it has gone through good and evil fortune for hundreds of years without turning a hair. You can make a soldier, and a good soldier, of a humorist; but you cannot militarize him. He remains a free thinker.
New inst.i.tutions do not flourish in England. The town is a comparatively modern innovation; it has never, so to say, caught on. Most schemes of town-planning are schemes for pretending that you live in the country.
This is one of the most persistent of our many hypocrisies. Wherever working people inhabit a street of continuous red-brick cottages, the names that they give to their homes are one long catalogue of romantic lies. The houses have no gardens, and the only prospect that they command is the view of over the way. But read their names--The Dingle, The Elms, Pine Grove, Windermere, The Nook, The Nest. Even social pretence, which is said to be one of our weaknesses, and which may be read in such names as Belvoir or Apsley House, is less in evidence than the Englishman"s pa.s.sion for the country. He cannot bear to think that he lives in a town. He does not much respect the inst.i.tutions of a town.
A policeman, before he has been long in the force, has to face the fact that he is generally regarded as a comic character. The police are Englishmen and good fellows, and they accept a situation which would rouse any continental gendarme to heroic indignation. Mayors, Aldermen, and Justices of the Peace are comic, and take it not quite so well.
Beadles were so wholly dedicated to the purposes of comedy that I suppose they found their position unendurable and went to earth; at any rate it is very difficult to catch one in his official costume.
All this is reflected in Shakespeare. He knew the country, and he knew the town; and he has not left it in doubt which was the cherished home of his imagination. He preferred the fields to the streets, but the Arcadia of his choice is not agricultural or even pastoral; it is rather a desert island, or the uninhabited stretches of wild and woodland country. Indeed, he has both described it and named it. "Where will the old Duke live?" says Oliver in _As You Like It_. "They say he is already in the forest of Arden," says Charles the wrestler, "and a many merry men with him; and there they live like the old Robin Hood of England.
They say many young gentlemen flock to him every day, and fleet the time carelessly, as they did in the golden world." That is Shakespeare"s Arcadia; and who that has read _As You Like It_ will deny that it breathes the air of Paradise?
It is quite plain that the freedom that Shakespeare valued was in fact freedom, not any of those ingenious mechanisms to which that name has been applied by political theorists. He thought long and profoundly on the problems of society; and anarchy has no place among his political ideals. It is by all means to be avoided--at a cost. But what harm would anarchy do if it meant no more than freedom for all the impulses of the enlightened imagination and the tender heart? The ideals of his heart were not political; and when he indulges himself, as he did in his latest plays, you must look for him in the wilds; whether on the road near the shepherd"s cottage, or in the cave among the mountains of Wales, or on the seash.o.r.e in the Bermudas. The laws that are imposed upon the intricate relations of men in society were a weariness to him; and in this he is thoroughly English. The Englishman has always been an objector, and he has a right to object, though it may very well be held that he is too fond of larding his objection with the plea of conscience. But even this has a meaning in our annals; as a mere question of right we are very slow to prefer the claim of the organized opinions of society to the claim of the individual conscience. We know that there is no good in a man who is doing what he does not will to do.
We are not like our poets or our men of action to be void of inspiration. A gift is nothing if there is no benevolence in the giver:
For to the n.o.ble mind Rich gifts wax poor when givers prove unkind.
We ask for the impulse as well as the deed. Even when he is speaking of social obligations Shakespeare makes his strongest appeal not to force or command, but to the natural piety of the heart:
If ever you have looked on better days, If ever been where bells have knolled to church, If ever sat at any good man"s feast, If ever from your eyelids wiped a tear, And know what "tis to pity and be pitied, Let gentleness my strong enforcement be: In the which hope I blush, and hide my sword.
So speaks Orlando when the Duke has met his threats with fair words; and he adds an apology:
Pardon me, I pray you; I thought that all things had been savage here, And therefore put I on the countenance Of stern commandment.
The ultimate law between man and man, according to Shakespeare, is the law of pity. I suppose that most of us have had our ears so dulled by early familiarity with Portia"s famous speech, which we probably knew by heart long before we were fit to understand it, that the heavenly quality of it, equal to almost anything in the New Testament, is obscured and lost. There is no remedy but to read it again; to remember that it was conceived in pa.s.sion; and to notice how the meaning is raised and perfected as line follows line:
_Portia_. Then must the Jew be merciful.
_Shylock_. On what compulsion must I? Tell me that.
_Portia_. The quality of mercy is not strained.
It droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven Upon the place beneath; it is twice bless"d; It blesseth him that gives and him that takes: "Tis mightiest in the mightiest; it becomes The throned monarch better than his crown.
His sceptre shows the force of temporal power, The attribute to awe and majesty, Wherein doth sit the dread and fear of kings; But mercy is above this sceptred sway, It is enthroned in the hearts of kings, It is an attribute to G.o.d himself, And earthly power doth then show likest G.o.d"s When mercy seasons justice. Therefore, Jew, Though justice be thy plea, consider this, That in the course of justice none of us Should see salvation: we do pray for mercy, And that same prayer doth teach us all to render The deeds of mercy.
That speech rises above the strife of nations; it belongs to humanity.
But an Englishman wrote it; and the author, we may be sure, if he ever met with the doctrine that a man who is called on to help his own people is in duty bound to set aside the claims of humanity, and to stop his ears to the call of mercy, knew that the doctrine is an invention of the devil, stupid and angry, as the devil commonly is. There are hundreds of thousands of Englishmen who, though they could not have written the speech, yet know all that it teaches, and act on the knowledge. It is part of the creed of the Navy. We can speak more confidently than we could have spoken three or four years ago. We know that not the extremest pressure of circ.u.mstance could ever bring the people of England to forget all the natural pieties, to permit official duties to annul private charities, and to join in the frenzied dance of hate and l.u.s.t which leads to the mouth of the pit.
Yet Germany, where all this seems to have happened, was not very long ago a country where it was easy to find humanity, and simplicity, and kindness. It was a country of quiet industry and content, the home of fairy stories, which Shakespeare himself would have loved. The Germans of our day have made a religion of war and terror, and have used commerce as a means for the treacherous destruction of the independence and freedom of others. They were not always like that. In the fifteenth century they spread the art of printing through Europe, for the service of man, by the method of peaceful penetration. My friend Mr. John Sampson recently expressed to me a hope that our air-forces would not bomb Mainz, "for Mainz", he said, "is a sacred place to the bibliographer". According to a statement published in Cologne in 1499, "the highly valuable art of printing was invented first of all in Germany at Mainz on the Rhine. And it is a great honour to the German nation that such ingenious men are to be found among them....And in the year of our Lord 1450 it was a golden year, and they began to print, and the first book they printed was the Bible in Latin: it was printed in a large character, resembling the types with which the present ma.s.s-books are printed." Gutenberg, the printer of this Bible, never mentions his own name, and the only personal note we have of his, in the colophon of the _Catholicon_, printed in 1460, is a hymn in praise of his city: "With the aid of the Most High, who unlooses the tongues of infants and oft-times reveals to babes that which is hidden from learned men, this admirable book, the _Catholicon_, was finished in the year of the incarnation of our Saviour MCCCCLX, in the foster town of Mainz, a town of the famous German nation, which G.o.d in his clemency, by granting to it this high illumination of the mind, has preferred before the other nations of the world."
There is something not quite unlike modern Germany in that; and yet these older activities of the Germans make a strange contrast with their work to-day. It was in the city of Cologne that Caxton first made acquaintance with his craft. Everywhere the Germans spread printing like a new religion, adapting it to existing conditions. In Bavaria they used the skill of the wood-engravers, and at Augsburg, Ulm, and Nuremberg produced the first ill.u.s.trated printed books. It was two Germans of the old school, Conrad Sweynheym and Arnold Pannartz, who carried the art to Italy, casting the first type in Roman characters, and printing editions of the cla.s.sics, first in the Benedictine monastery of St. Scholastica at Subiaco, and later at Rome. They also cast the first Greek type. It was three Germans, Gering, Kranz, and Freyburger, who first printed at Paris, in 1470. It was a German who set up the first printing-press in Spain, in 1474. The Germans were once the cherishers, as now they are the destroyers, of the inheritance of civilization. I do not pretend to explain the change. Perhaps it is a tragedy of education. That is a dangerous moment in the life of a child when he begins to be uneasily aware that he is valued for his simplicity and innocence. Then he resolves to break with the past, to put away childish things, to forgo affection, and to earn respect by imitating the activities of his elders. The strange power of words and the virtues of abstract thought begin to fascinate him. He loses touch with the things of sense, and ceases to speak as a child. If his first attempts at argument and dogma win him praise and esteem, if he proves himself a better fighter than an older boy next door, who has often bullied him, and if at the same time he comes into money, he is on the road to ruin. His very simplicity is a snare to him. "What a fool I was", he thinks, "to let myself be put upon; I now see that I am a great philosopher and a splendid soldier, born to subdue others rather than to agree with them, and ent.i.tled to a chief share in all the luxuries of the world. It is for me to say what is good and true, and if any of these people contradict me I shall knock them down." He suits his behaviour to his new conception of himself, and is soon hated by all the neighbours. Then he turns bitter. These people, he thinks, are all in a plot against him. They must be blind to goodness and beauty, or why do they dislike him! His rage reaches the point of madness; he stabs and poisons the villagers, and burns down their houses. We are still waiting to see what will become of him.
This outbreak has been long preparing. Seventy years before the War the German poet Freiligrath wrote a poem to prove that Germany is Hamlet, urged by the spirit of her fathers to claim her inheritance, vacillating and lost in thought, but destined, before the Fifth Act ends, to strew the stage with the corpses of her enemies. Only a German could have hit on the idea that Germany is Hamlet. The English, for whom the play was written, know that Hamlet is Hamlet, and that Shakespeare was thinking of a young man, not of the pomposities of national ambition. But if these clumsy allegories must be imposed upon great poets, Germany need not go abroad to seek the likeness of her destiny. Germany is Faust; she desired science and power and pleasure, and to get them on a short lease she paid the price of her soul.
For the present, at any rate, the best thing the Germans can do with Shakespeare is to leave him alone. They have divorced themselves from their own great poets, to follow vulgar half-witted political prophets.
As for Shakespeare, they have studied him a.s.siduously, with the complete apparatus of criticism, for a hundred years, and they do not understand the plainest words of all his teaching.
In England he has always been understood; and it is only fair, to him and to ourselves, to add that he has never been regarded first and foremost as a national poet. His humanity is too calm and broad to suffer the prejudices and exclusions of international enmities. The sovereignty that he holds has been allowed to him by men of all parties.
The schools of literature have, from the very first, united in his praise. Ben Jonson, who knew him and loved him, was a cla.s.sical scholar, and disapproved of some of his romantic escapades, yet no one will ever outgo Ben Jonson"s praise of Shakespeare.
Triumph, my Britain, thou hast one to show, To whom all Scenes of Europe homage owe.
He was not-of an ago, but for all time!
The sects of religion forget their disputes and recognize the spirit of religion in this profane author. He cannot be identified with any inst.i.tution. According to the old saying, he gave up the Church and took to religion. Ho gave up the State, and took to humanity. The formularies and breviaries to which political and religious philosophers profess their allegiance were nothing to him. These formularies are a convenient shorthand, to save the trouble of thinking. But Shakespeare always thought. Every question that he treats is brought out of the realm of abstraction, and exhibited in its relation to daily life and the minds and hearts of men. He could never have been satisfied with such a smug phrase as "the greatest happiness of the greatest number". His mind would have been eager for details. In what do the greatest number find their happiness? How far is the happiness of one consistent with the happiness of another? What difficulties and miscarriages attend the business of trans.m.u.ting the recognized materials for happiness into living human joy? Even these questions he would not have been content to handle in high philosophic fashion; he would have insisted on instances, and would have subscribed to no code that is not carefully built out of case-law. He knew that sanity is in the life of the senses; and that if there are some philosophers who are not mad it is because they live a double life, and have consolations and resources of which their books tell you nothing. It is the part of their life which they do not think it worth their while to mention that would have interested Shakespeare.
He loves to reduce things to their elements. "Is man no more than this?"
says the old king on the heath, as he gazes on the naked madman.
"Consider him well. Thou owest the worm no silk, the beast no hide, the sheep no wool, the cat no perfume. Ha! here"s three of us are sophisticated! Thou art the thing itself: unaccommodated man is no more but such a poor, bare, forked animal as thou art. Off, off, you lendings!" That is how Shakespeare lays the mind of man bare, and strips him of his pretences, to try if he be indeed n.o.ble. And he finds that man, naked and weak, hunted by misfortune, liable to all the sins and all the evils that follow frailty, still has faith left to him, and charity. King Lear is still every inch a king.
That is not a little discovery, for when his mind came to grips with human life Shakespeare did not deal in rhetoric; so that the good he finds is real good--""tis in grain; "twill endure wind and weather".
Nothing is easier than to make a party of humanity, and to exalt mankind by ignorantly vilifying the rest of the animal creation, which is full of strange virtues and abilities. Shakespeare refused that way; he saw man weak and wretched, not able to maintain himself except as a pensioner on the bounty of the world, curiously ignorant of his nature and his destiny, yet endowed with certain gifts in which he can find sustenance and rest, brave by instinct, so that courage is not so much his virtue as cowardice is his lamentable and exceptional fault, ready to forget his pains or to turn them into pleasures by the alchemy of his mind, quick to believe, and slow to suspect or distrust, generous and tender to others, in so far as his thought and imagination, which are the weakest things about him, enable him to bridge the s.p.a.ces that separate man from man, willing to make of life a great thing while he has it, and a little thing when he comes to lose it. These are some of his gifts; and Shakespeare would not have denied the saying of a thinker with whom he has no very strong or natural affinity, that "the greatest of these is charity".