the conscious iconographer of a religion because he had
no conscious religion. He had therefore to exercise his extraordinary
natural gifts in the very entertaining art of mimicry, giving us the
famous 'delineation of character' which makes his plays, like the novels
of Scott, Dumas, and Dickens, so delightful. Also, he developed that
curious and questionable art of building us a refuge from despair by
disguising the cruelties of Nature as jokes. But with all his gifts, the
fact remains that he never found the inspiration to write an original
play. He furbished up old plays, and adapted popular stories, and
chapters of history from Holinshed's Chronicle and Plutarch's
biographies, to the stage. All this he did (or did not; for there are
minus quantities in the algebra of art) with a recklessness which shewed
that his trade lay far from his conscience. It is true that he never
takes his characters from the borrowed story, because it was less
trouble and more fun to him to create them afresh; but none the less
he heaps the murders and villainies of the borrowed story on his own
essentially gentle creations without scruple, no matter how incongruous
they may be. And all the time his vital need for a philosophy drives
him to seek one by the quaint professional method of introducing
philosophers as characters into his plays, and even of making his heroes
philosophers; but when they come on the stage they have no philosophy
to expound: they are only pessimists and railers; and their occasional
would-be philosophic speeches, such as The Seven Ages of Man and The
Soliloquy on Suicide, shew how deeply in the dark Shakespear was as
to what philosophy means. He forced himself in among the greatest of
playwrights without having once entered that region in which Michael
Angelo, Beethoven, Goethe, and the antique Athenian stage poets are
great. He would really not be great at all if it were not that he had
religion enough to be aware that his religionless condition was one of
despair. His towering King Lear would be only a melodrama were it not
for its express admission that if there is nothing more to be said of
the universe than Hamlet has to say, then 'as flies to wanton boys are
we to the gods: they kill us for their sport.'

Ever since Shakespear, playwrights have been struggling with the same
lack of religion; and many of them were forced to become mere panders
and sensation-mongers because, though they had higher ambitions, the