Part 21 (2/2)

In ht of such day As after sunset fadeth in the west: Which by and by black night doth take away, Death's second self that seals up all in rest

And this feeling, though not often so sole sentiht

It corresponds with the analogy between the times of the day and the periods of hue; but he rises in the strength and freshness of youth, firing the proud tops of the eastern pines, and turning the hills and the sea into burnished gold, while jocund day stands tiptoe on the ate of heaven In almost all the familiar lines about dawn one seeusto' which Keats heard in Kean's delivery of the words:

Stir with the lark to-estions s towards four-footed animals The first must be very tentative We do not expect in a writer of that age the sympathy with animals which is so beautiful a trait in much of the poetry of the last hundred and fifty years And I can ren of _fondness_ for an anih he wrote so often of horses But there are rather frequent, if casual, expressions of pity, in references, for exa, or to the spurred horse:[25] and it e in _As You Like It_ about the wounded deer is quite devoid of personal significance No doubt Shakespeare thought the tears of Jaques sentimental; but he put a piece of himself into Jaques And, besides, it is not Jaques alone who dislikes the killing of the deer, but the Duke; and we may surely hear some tone of Shakespeare's voice in the Duke's speech about the life in the forest Perhaps we may surmise that, while he enjoyed field-sports, he felt them at times to be out of tune with the harret to say, I can feel no doubt Shakespeare did not care for dogs, as Homer did; he even disliked them, as Goethe did Of course he can write eloquently about the points of hounds and the music of their voices in the chase, and humorously about Launce's love for his cur and even about the cur hinificant on the one side than is his conventional use of 'dog' as a ternificant is the absence of allusion, or (to be perfectly accurate) of sys, and the abundance of allusions of an insulting kind Shakespeare has observed and recorded, in some instances profusely, every vice that I can think of in an ill-conditioned dog He fawns and cringes and flatters, and then bites the hand that caressed him; he is a coho attacks you froo; he knows neither charity, huratitude; as he flatters power and wealth, so he takes part against the poor and unfashi+onable, and if fortune turns against you so does he[26]

The plays sith these charges Whately's excla of Chapter, I forget which--'The s,' would never have been echoed by Shakespeare The things he ht go for nothing if we could set anything of weight against it But what can we set? Nothing whatever, so far as I re, bull-baiting mastiffs

For I cannot quote as favourable to the spaniel the appeal of Helena:

I am your spaniel; and, Demetrius, The more you beat me I will fawn on you: Use lect ive me leave, Unworthy as I am, to follow you

This may show that Shakespeare was alive to the baseness of a spaniel-owner, but not that he appreciated that self-less affection which he describes It is more probable that it irritated hi fidelity, there is no reference, I believe, to the fidelity of the dog in the whole of his works, and he chooses the spaniel hiratitude: his Caesar talks of

Knee-crooked court'sies and base spaniel-fawning;

his Antony exclaiave Their wishes, do discandy,Caesar

To all that he loved s And then we call him universal!

This line of research into Shakespeare's tastes ood deal further, but we htier matters We saw that he could sympathise with anyone who erred and suffered from impulse, affections of the blood, or even such passions as were probably no danger to himself,--avirtues or types of character hich he appears to feel little syh he may approve them? He certainly does not show this imperfect sympathy towards self-control; we seeain for Horatio, who has suffered much, is quietly patient, and has mastered both himself and fortune But, not to speak of coldly selfish natures, he seems averse to bloodless people, those who lack, or those who have deadened, the natural desires for joy and sympathy, and those who tend to be precise[27] Nor does he appear to be drawn to men who, as we say, try to live or to act on principle; nor to those who aim habitually at self-improvement; nor yet to the saintly type of character I mean, not that he _could_ not sympathise with them, but that they did not attract him Isabella, in _Measure for Measure_, is drawn, of course, with understanding, but, it seems to me, with little sy for Claudio, out of horror at his sin and a sense of the justice of Angelo's reasons for refusing his pardon, is doubtless in character; but if Shakespeare had sympathised more with her at this point, so should hile, as it is, we are tempted to exclaim,

She loves him not, she wants the natural touch;

and perhaps if Shakespeare had liked her better and had not regarded her with some irony, he would not have allowed hi her to the Duke Brutus and Cordelia, on the other hand, are draith the fullest iinative sympathy, and they, it may be said, are characters of principle; but then (even if Cordelia could be truly so described) they are also intensely affectionate, and by no means inhumanly self-controlled

The mention of Brutus may carry us somewhat farther Shakespeare's Brutus kills Caesar, not because Caesar aims at absolute power, but because Brutus fears that absolute power may make him cruel That is not Plutarch's idea, it is Shakespeare's He could fully syentleness of Brutus, with his entire superiority to private aims and almost entire freedom from personal susceptibilities, and even with his resolution to sacrifice his friend; but he could not so sympathise with mere horror of monarchy or absolute power And now extend this a little

Can you iine Shakespeare an enthusiast for an 'idea'; a devotee of divine right, or the rights of Parliaovernment in Church or State; a Fifth Monarchy man, or a Quaker, or a thick-and-thin adherent of any compact, exclusive, abstract creed, even if it were as rational and noble as Mazzini's? This type of htly or wrongly, to have portrayed the Covenanters without any deep understanding of them; it would have been the sa hiest that on this side he was liainst fanaticise would he have been the man to insist with the necessary emphasis on those one-sided ideas which the ive his whole heart to men who join a forlorn hope or are est that anything in the way of iend of Faust, with his longings for infinite power and knowledge and enjoyment of beauty, would have suited him less well than Marlowe; and if he had written on the subject that Cervantes took, his Don Quixote would have been at least as laughable as the hero we know, but would he have been a soul so ideally noble and a figure so profoundly pathetic?

This would be the natural place to discuss Shakespeare's politics if ere to discuss them at all But even if the question whether he shows any interest in the political differences of his tiard to them, admits of an answer, it could be answered only by an examination of details; and I must pass it by, and offer only the briefest reht expect, shows no sign of believing in what is sometimes called a political 'principle' The overn or eht perhaps be put thus National welfare is the end of politics, and the criterion by which political actions are to be judged

It iree'; that is, differences of position and function in the members of the body politic[28] And the first requisites of national welfare are the observance of this degree, and the concordant perforeneral interest

But there appear to be no further absolute principles than these: beyond them all is relative to the particular case and its particular conditions We find no hint, for exaarded a overnment as intrinsically better than a republican, or _vice versa_; no trace in _Richard II_ that the author shares the king's belief in his inviolable right, or regards Bolingbroke's usurpation as justifiable We perceive, again, pretty clearly in several plays a dislike and conteues, and an opinion that rateful But these are sentiments which the most determined of believers in democracy, if he has sense, may share; and if he thinks that the attitude of aristocrats like Volumnia and Coriolanus is inhuman and as inexcusable as that of theand has plenty of good nature in it, he has abundant ground for holding that Shakespeare thought so too That Shakespeare greatly liked and admired the typical qualities of the best kind of aristocrat seehly probable; but then this taste has always been coreat variety of political opinions It is interesting but useless to wonder what his own opinions would have been at various periods of English history: perhaps the only thing we can be pretty sure of in regard to them is that they would never have been extreme, and that he would never have supposed his opponents to be entirely wrong

We have tried to conjecture the impulses, passions, and errors hich Shakespeare could easily sympathise, and the virtues and types of character which he may have approved without much sympathy It remains to ask whether we can notice tendencies and vices to which he felt any special antipathy; and it is obvious and safe to point to those entle, open, and free nature, the vices of a cold and hard disposition, self-centred and incapable of fusion with others Passing over, again, the plainly hideous forms or extremes of such vice, as we see thean, or the Queen in _Cymbeline_, we seem to detect a particular aversion to certain vices which have the common mark of baseness; for instance, servility and flattery (especially when deliberate and practised with a view to self-advanceratitude

Shakespeare's _ani arises froainst them in men are directed the invectives which see There appears to be traceable also a feeling of a special, though less painful, kind against unmercifulness

I do not ness, and even the tendency to prefer justice to mercy From no other draed and heart-felt praises of ly, I think, that instinct and love of justice and retribution which in manypenitent, The sole drift of my purpose doth extend Not a jot further,