all
absurd, but their different absurdities have managed to flow together
into one powerful and unified convention. Our popular orators
gesticulate and clamour; our professors "talk Greek;" our ethical
Brutuses "explain;" and the mob "throw up their sweaty night-caps;"
while our poor Caesar of Poetry sinks down out of sight, helpless
among them all.

Charles Lamb, who understood him better than anyone--and who
loved Plays--does not hesitate to accuse our Stage-Actors of being
the worst of all in their misrepresentation. He doubts whether even
Garrick understood the subtlety of the roles he played, and the few
exceptions he allows in his own age make us wonder what he would
say of ours.

Finally there is the "Philosophical Shakespeare" of the German
appreciation, and this we feel instinctively to be the least like the
original of all!

The irony of it is that the author of Hamlet and the Tempest does not
only live in a different world from that of these motley exponents.
He lives in an antagonistic one. Shakespeare was as profoundly the
enemy of scholastic pedantry as he was the enemy of puritan
squeamishness. He was almost unkindly averse to the breath of the
profane crowd. And his melancholy scepticism, with its half-humorous
assent to the traditional pieties, is at the extremest opposite
pole from the "truths" of metaphysical reason. The Shakespeare
of the Popular Revivals is a fantastic caricature. The Shakespeare
of the College Text-Books is a lean scarecrow. But the Shakespeare
of the philosophical moralists is an Hob-goblin from whom one flees
in dismay.

Enjoying the plays themselves--the interpreters forgotten--a
normally intelligent reader cannot fail to respond to a recognisable
Personality there, a Personality with apathies and antipathies, with
prejudices and predilections. Very quickly he will discern the absurd
unreality of that monstrous Idol, that ubiquitous Hegelian God. Very
soon he will recognize that in trying to make their poet everything
they have made him nothing.

No one can read Shakespeare with direct and simple enjoyment
without discovering in his plays a quite definite and personal
attitude towards life. Shakespeare is no Absolute Divinity,
reconciling all oppositions and transcending all limitations. He is not
that "cloud-capped mountain," too lofty to be scanned, of Matthew
Arnold's Sonnet. He is a sad and passionate artist, using his bitter
experiences to intensify his insight, a