ded mind, slow to drive anything through on principle,
very ready to find reason in compromise. They are passionate, and they
are idealists, but they are also a practical people, and they dare not
give the rein to a passion or an idea. They know that in this world an
unmitigated principle simply will not work; that a clean cut will never
take you through the maze. So they restrain themselves, and listen, and
seem patient. They are not so patient as they seem; they must be
hypocrites! A cruder, simpler people like the Germans feel indignation,
not unmixed perhaps with envy, when they hear the quiet voice and see
the white lips of the thoroughbred Englishman who is angry. It is not
manly or honest, they think, to be angry without getting red in the
face. They certainly feel pride in their own honesty when they give
explosive vent to their emotions. They have not learned the elements of
self-distrust. The Englishman is seldom quite content to be himself;
often his thoughts are troubled by something better. He suffers from the
divided mind; and earns the reputation of a hypocrite. But the simpler
nature that indulges itself and believes in itself has an even heavier
penalty to pay. If, in the name of honesty, you cease to distinguish
between what you are and what you would wish to be, between how you act
and how you would like to act, you are in some danger of reeling back
into the beast. It is true that man is an animal; and before long you
feel a glow of conscious virtue in proclaiming and illustrating that
truth. You scorn the hypocrisy of pretending to be better than you are,
and that very scorn fixes you in what you are. 'He that is unjust, let
him be unjust still; and he which is filthy, let him be filthy still.'
That is the epitaph on German honesty. I have drifted away from
Shakespeare, who knew nothing of the sea of troubles that England would
one day take arms against, and who could not know that on that day she
would outgo his most splendid praise and more than vindicate his
reverence and his affection. But Shakespeare is still so live a mind
that it is vain to try to expound him by selected texts, or to pin him
to a mosaic of quotations from his book. Often, if you seek to know what
he thought on questions which must have exercised his imagination, you
can gather it only from a hint dropped by accident, and quite
irrelevant. What were his views on literature, and on the literary
controversies which have been agita