ages of Shakespeare. They are flying
moods which a man with a fixed faith can afford to entertain. That all
is vanity, that life is dust and love is ashes, these are frivolities,
these are jokes that a Catholic can afford to utter. He knows well
enough that there is a life that is not dust and a love that is not
ashes. But just as he may let himself go more than the Puritan in the
matter of enjoyment, so he may let himself go more than the Puritan in
the matter of melancholy. The sad exuberances of Hamlet are merely like
the glad exuberances of Falstaff. This is not conjecture; it is the text
of Shakespeare. In the very act of uttering his pessimism, Hamlet admits
that it is a mood and not the truth. Heaven _is_ a heavenly thing, only
to him it seems a foul congregation of vapours. Man _is_ the paragon of
animals, only to him he seems a quintessence of dust. Hamlet is quite
the reverse of a sceptic. He is a man whose strong intellect believes
much more than his weak temperament can make vivid to him. But this
power of knowing a thing without feeling it, this power of believing a
thing without experiencing it, this is an old Catholic complexity, and
the Puritan has never understood it. Shakespeare confesses his moods
(mostly by the mouths of villains and failures), but he never sets up
his moods against his mind. His cry of _vanitas vanitatum_ is itself
only a harmless vanity. Readers may not agree with my calling him
Catholic with a big C; but they will hardly complain of my calling him
catholic with a small one. And that is here the principal point.
Shakespeare was not in any sense a pessimist; he was, if anything, an
optimist so universal as to be able to enjoy even pessimism. And this is
exactly where he differs from the Puritan. The true Puritan is not
squeamish: the true Puritan is free to say "Damn it!" But the Catholic
Elizabethan was free (on passing provocation) to say "Damn it all!"

It need hardly be explained that Bernard Shaw added to his negative case
of a dramatist to be depreciated a corresponding affirmative case of a
dramatist to be exalted and advanced. He was not content with so remote
a comparison as that between Shakespeare and Bunyan. In his vivacious
weekly articles in the _Saturday Review_, the real comparison upon which
everything turned was the comparison between Shakespeare and Ibsen. He
early threw himself with all possible eagerness into the public disputes
about the great Scandinavian; and