than the tolerance of the
common English soldier, may be well seen in his treatment of his
villains. Is a liar, or a thief, merely a bad man? Shakespeare does not
much encourage you to think so. Is a murderer a bad man? He would be an
undiscerning critic who should accept that phrase as a true and adequate
description of Macbeth. Shakespeare does not dislike liars, thieves, and
murderers as such, and he does not pretend to dislike them. He has his
own dislikes. I once asked a friend of mine, long since dead, who
refused to condemn almost anything, whether there were any vices that he
could not find it in his heart to tolerate. He replied at once that
there were two--cruelty, and bilking; which, if the word is not
academic, I may paraphrase as cheating the helpless, swindling a child
out of its pennies, or leaving a house by the back door in order to
avoid paying your cabman his lawful fare. These exclusions from mercy
Shakespeare would accept; and I think he would add a third. His worst
villains are all theorists, who cheat and murder by the book of
arithmetic. They are men of principle, and are ready to expound their
principle and to defend it in argument. They follow it, without remorse
or mitigation, wherever it leads them. It is Iago's logic that makes him
so terrible; his mind is as cold as a snake and as hard as a surgeon's
knife. The Italian Renaissance did produce some such men; the modern
German imitation is a grosser and feebler thing, brutality trying to
emulate the glitter and flourish of refined cruelty.

With his wonderful quickness of intuition and his unsurpassed subtlety
of expression Shakespeare drew the characters of the Englishmen that he
saw around him. Why is it that he has given us no full-length portrait,
carefully drawn, of a hypocrite? It can hardly have been for lack of
models. Outside England, not only among our enemies, but among our
friends and allies, it is agreed that hypocrisy is our national vice,
our ruling passion. There must be some meaning in so widely held an
opinion; and, on our side, there are damaging admissions by many
witnesses. The portrait gallery of Charles Dickens is crowded with
hypocrites. Some of them are greasy and servile, like Mr. Pumblechook or
Uriah Heep; others rise to poetic heights of daring, like Mr. Chadband
or Mr. Squeers. But Shakespeare's hypocrites enjoy themselves too much;
they are artists to the finger-tips. It may be said, no doubt, that
Shakespeare l