8

and its fickleness. He probably never formulated such an idea: but he would have recognized that the history of man is made up of a series of triumphs of the minority over the majority. And he might have been so undemocratic as to question whether all things, sacred and mundane, are safely to be decided by a show of hands. He would have recognized that art at least cares nothing for dull averages, for the man in the street as the man in the street, but that it is the individual traits that count, not necessarily those of station, but those that indicate the actual man within. We object to Shakespeare's representation of watchmen, servants and other common folk as stupid, vulgar and futile; is stupidity, vulgarity and futility, even in our own day, the exclusive privilege of the well born? And do we pay no deference to the rich, the titled or the powerful? Shakespeare saw his world steadily, far more steadily, we may surmise, than we habitually see ours or than " demi-science" sees it for

us.

The most foolish of books is a book of sentiments and quotations, culled from their context and labelled Shakespeare's. We exclaim "Ah, the universal poet! how wise he is!" "Put money in thy purse." "Neither a borrower nor a lender be." What a worldly-wise old fellow is this! But who said "Put money in thy purse ? Iago, not Shakespeare. And who said "Neither a borrower nor a lender be"? Why, a "tedious old fool," named Polonius. No passage of Shake

8 See F. Tupper, "The Shakespeare Mob," Modern Language Publications, xxvii.

peare, or any veritable dramatist, for that matter, is safe quoted for itself and out of its context. In this kaleidoscopic thing which we call a world, it is never safe to stop and palter over a single broken bit of colored glass. In its place it bears a relation to the pattern of the whole; out of place, it is nothing. Shakespeare saw not only steadily, he saw the world as a whole.

Shakespeare's world was not our world. We do not wear ruffs or farthingales, we do not strike our servants, we haven't any to strike and when we have they do the striking. We do not chop off the heads of our traitors; and we do not believe in God as fervently as the Elizabethans believed in the devil. But these things are in a sense superficial. In a deeper sense, Shakespeare's world was much the world we live in and it will remain such. For in that imaginary world of his, truth, honor, lofty ideals, hope for the future and respect for the past stand as high as the tiniest moralist of us all has ever been able to reach up and place them. Have you ever met two as gallant young gentlemen as Harry Monmouth and Hotspur? Have you ever known as witty and fascinating a rogue as Falstaff; as bewitching a maiden as Rosalind, as adorable a woman as Imogen? These true personages are easier to accept and believe in, easier to understand as alive and breathing than half the historical personages whose existence on this planet can be proved by the evidence of documents. No scientist could compose them, no statistician juggle them together, no criminologist compass their incomparable

perfections by an excursus into their opposite deviations. The poet has breathed his soul into them and they are immortal.

And here let us take leave of Shakespeare and all the "demi-sciences." To be wise in his own generation is the dearest of the follies of man; and perhaps I have drawn up much unnecessary artillery in this case to the demolition of a molehill. Scholarship waxes in its pride, and wanes; and out of its overtoppled towers and ruined battlements of strength new and wiser scholarship arises. Of one thing alone are we certain: Above all this petty turmoil and stirring of the lower air, the greatest poet rears his head as serene and unperturbed as the Sphinx, and in some respects as unfathomable, secure against the little hurricanes of sand that may temporarily bury his feet, eternally triumphant in the imperishability of his art.

A

II

MYTH MAKING

WELL KNOWN TEACHER of homiletics

less learnedly, sermon making -burst into a group of his friends one day with the remark: "My reputation is gone, and a trial for heresy is in order." As he was a clergyman as notable for his piety as for his learning, we expressed our amazement and inquired into the theological point of his unorthodoxy. "I have failed," he replied, "to fix the geographical spot in which the prodigal son shared his husks with the swine. I do not know whether he traveled east or west to the home of his father. I do not know to which of the ten tribes of Israel this interesting family belonged. And I have even questioned the existence, before the feast, of the fatted calf." Our friend had been explaining that the famous parable was a myth, not an historical occurrence; and his class, which had doubtless been carefully innoculated in the Kindergarten with rationalistic views as to Santa Claus, in horror detected a question as to the stated facts, the authenticity of the Bible.

It seems that Professor Abel Lefranc, of the College de France, has elaborated a theory whereby Shakespeare is once more deprived of authorship in his own

plays and they are handed over, this time, to William Stanley, the sixth Earl of Derby.' This earl, like everybody else in his time, was interested in the drama and, like nearly every other earl, was the patron of a theatrical company. There is even a report among the State Papers that, about the time that As You Like It was on the stage, Derby was "busied only in penning comedies for the common players." These are the grounds upon which Professor Lefranc has reared his speculative buttresses, an uncommonly flimsy one among them being the statement that no other Englishman of that age could have given us scenes so French-save the mark-as those of Love's Labour's Lost. But it is not this that is interesting.

Professor Lefranc, it may be observed, is an eminent authority on Rabelais. It is always an eminent authority on something else who makes new and startling discoveries concerning Shakespeare. Now it is an eminent jurist, or a novelist; anon, it is a scientist or a reporter or a spiritualist. There is something about actual knowledge even a little of it as to Shakespeare and his times, which precludes the making of startling discoveries by anybody but an eminent specialist in something else. Wherefore it was reserved for a publisher of books to find one of the dozen or more ciphers elucidating one of the dozen or more "mysteries " as to the authorship of Shakespearean plays; and to a madwoman to suspect that "the whole secret " was hidden away with the poet's bones in Stratford Church. It was an American doctor who "digged

1 A. Lefranc, Sous le Masque de Shakespeare, 1919.