o not think it is doing an injustice to Mr. Whibley to single out the
chapter on "Shakespeare: Patriot and Tory" as the most representative in
his volume of _Political Portraits_. It would be unjust if one were to
suggest that Mr. Whibley could write nothing better than this. His
historical portraits are often delightful as the work of a clever
illustrator, even if we cannot accept them as portraits. Those essays in
which he keeps himself out of the picture and eschews ideas most
successfully attract us as coming from the hand of a skilful writer. His
studies of Clarendon, Metternich, Napoleon and Melbourne are all of them
good entertainment. If I comment on the Shakespeare essay rather than on
these, it is because here more than anywhere else in the book the author's
skill as a portrait-painter is put to the test. Here he has to depend
almost exclusively on his imagination, intelligence, and knowledge of
human nature. Here, where there are scarcely any epigrams or anecdotes to
quote, a writer must reveal whether he is an artist and a critic, or a
pedestrian intelligence with the trick of words. Mr. Whibley, I fear,
comes badly off from the test. One does not blame him for having written
on the theme that "Shakespeare, being a patriot, was a Tory also." It
would be easy to conceive a scholarly and amusing study of Shakespeare on
these lines. Whitman maintained that there is much in Shakespeare to
offend the democratic mind; and there is no reason why an intelligent Tory
should not praise Shakespeare for what Whitman deplored in him. There is
every reason, however, why the portraiture of Shakespeare as a Tory, if it
is to be done, should be done with grace, intelligence, and sureness of
touch. Mr. Whibley throws all these qualifications to the winds,
especially the second. The proof of Shakespeare's Toryism, for instance,
which he draws from _Troilus and Cressida_, is based on a total
misunderstanding of the famous and simple speech of Ulysses about the
necessity of observing "degree, priority and place." Mr. Whibley, plunging
blindly about in Tory blinkers, imagines that in this speech Ulysses, or
rather Shakespeare, is referring to the necessity of keeping the democracy
in its place. "Might he not," he asks, "have written these prophetic lines
with his mind's eye upon France of the Terror or upon modern Russia?" Had
Mr. Whibley read the play with that small amount of self-forgetfulness
without which no man has ever yet be