nd all he did and
thought. Shakespeare's Myth, it may be, describes a wise man who was blind
from very wisdom, and an empty man who thrust him from his place, and saw
all that could be seen from very emptiness. It is in the story of Hamlet,
who saw too great issues everywhere to play the trivial game of life, and
of Fortinbras, who came from fighting battles about 'a little patch of
ground' so poor that one of his Captains would not give 'six ducats' to
'farm it,' and who was yet acclaimed by Hamlet and by all as the only
befitting King. And it is in the story of Richard II., that unripened
Hamlet, and of Henry V., that ripened Fortinbras. To poise character
against character was an element in Shakespeare's art, and scarcely a
play is lacking in characters that are the complement of one another, and
so, having made the vessel of porcelain Richard II., he had to make the
vessel of clay Henry V. He makes him the reverse of all that Richard was.
He has the gross vices, the coarse nerves, of one who is to rule among
violent people, and he is so little 'too friendly' to his friends that he
bundles them out of doors when their time is over. He is as remorseless
and undistinguished as some natural force, and the finest thing in his
play is the way his old companions fall out of it broken-hearted or on
their way to the gallows; and instead of that lyricism which rose out of
Richard's mind like the jet of a fountain to fall again where it had
risen, instead of that phantasy too enfolded in its own sincerity to make
any thought the hour had need of, Shakespeare has given him a resounding
rhetoric that moves men, as a leading article does to-day. His purposes
are so intelligible to everybody that everybody talks of him as if he
succeeded, although he fails in the end, as all men great and little fail
in Shakespeare, and yet his conquests abroad are made nothing by a woman
turned warrior, and that boy he and Katherine were to 'compound,' 'half
French, half English,' 'that' was to 'go to Constantinople and take the
Turk by the beard,' turns out a Saint, and loses all his father had built
up at home and his own life.

Shakespeare watched Henry V. not indeed as he watched the greater souls in
the visionary procession, but cheerfully, as one watches some handsome
spirited horse, and he spoke his tale, as he spoke all tales, with tragic
irony.

VI

The five plays, that are but one play, have, when played one after
another, somethin