aters

There is even an advantage in having a book on Shakespear with the
Shakespearian irony left out of account. I do not say that the
missing chapter should not be added in the next edition: the hiatus
is too great: it leaves the reader too uneasy before this touching
picture of a writhing worm substituted for the invulnerable giant.
But it is none the less probable that in no other way could Mr Harris
have got at his man as he has. For, after all, what is the secret of
the hopeless failure of the academic Bardolaters to give us a credible
or even interesting Shakespear, and the easy triumph of Mr Harris in
giving us both? Simply that Mr Harris has assumed that he was dealing
with a man, whilst the others have assumed that they were writing
about a god, and have therefore rejected every consideration of fact,
tradition, or interpretation, that pointed to any human imperfection
in their hero. They thus leave themselves with so little material
that they are forced to begin by saying that we know very little about
Shakespear. As a matter of fact, with the plays and sonnets in our
hands, we know much more about Shakespear than we know about Dickens
or Thackeray: the only difficulty is that we deliberately suppress it
because it proves that Shakespear was not only very unlike the
conception of a god current in Clapham, but was not, according to the
same reckoning, even a respectable man. The academic view starts with
a Shakespear who was not scurrilous; therefore the verses about "lousy
Lucy" cannot have been written by him, and the cognate passages in the
plays are either strokes of character-drawing or gags interpolated by
the actors. This ideal Shakespear was too well behaved to get drunk;
therefore the tradition that his death was hastened by a drinking bout
with Jonson and Drayton must be rejected, and the remorse of Cassio
treated as a thing observed, not experienced: nay, the disgust of
Hamlet at the drinking customs of Denmark is taken to establish
Shakespear as the superior of Alexander in self-control, and the
greatest of teetotallers.

Now this system of inventing your great man to start with, and then
rejecting all the materials that do not fit him, with the ridiculous
result that you have to declare that there are no materials at all
(with your waste-paper basket full of them), ends in leaving
Shakespear with a much worse character than he deserves. For though
it does not greatly matter whether