d, as Gordon has said, was made by
her adventurers, by her people of wildness and imagination and
eccentricity; and thought that Henry V., who only seemed to be these
things because he had some commonplace vices, was not only the typical
Anglo-Saxon, but the model Shakespeare held up before England; and he even
thought it worth while pointing out that Shakespeare himself was making a
large fortune while he was writing about Henry's victories. In Professor
Dowden's successors this apotheosis went further; and it reached its
height at a moment of imperialistic enthusiasm, of ever-deepening
conviction that the commonplace shall inherit the earth, when somebody of
reputation, whose name I cannot remember, wrote that Shakespeare admired
this one character alone out of all his characters. The Accusation of Sin
produced its necessary fruit, hatred of all that was abundant,
extravagant, exuberant, of all that sets a sail for shipwreck, and
flattery of the commonplace emotions and conventional ideals of the mob,
the chief Paymaster of accusation.

IV

I cannot believe that Shakespeare looked on his Richard II. with any but
sympathetic eyes, understanding indeed how ill-fitted he was to be King,
at a certain moment of history, but understanding that he was lovable and
full of capricious fancy, 'a wild creature' as Pater has called him. The
man on whom Shakespeare modelled him had been full of French elegancies,
as he knew from Hollingshead, and had given life a new luxury, a new
splendour, and been 'too friendly' to his friends, 'too favourable' to his
enemies. And certainly Shakespeare had these things in his head when he
made his King fail, a little because he lacked some qualities that were
doubtless common among his scullions, but more because he had certain
qualities that are uncommon in all ages. To suppose that Shakespeare
preferred the men who deposed his King is to suppose that Shakespeare
judged men with the eyes of a Municipal Councillor weighing the merits of
a Town Clerk; and that had he been by when Verlaine cried out from his
bed, 'Sir, you have been made by the stroke of a pen, but I have been made
by the breath of God,' he would have thought the Hospital Superintendent
the better man. He saw indeed, as I think, in Richard II. the defeat that
awaits all, whether they be Artist or Saint, who find themselves where men
ask of them a rough energy and have nothing to give but some contemplative
virtue, whether lyric