Shakespeare. With unimportant omissions, these assertions follow: 1

"I. That the idolatry of Shakespeare which prevails now, existed in his own time and got on the nerve of Ben Jonson.

"2. That Shakespeare was not an illiterate poaching laborer, but a gentleman with all the social pretensions of our higher bourgeoisie.

"3. That Shakespeare, when he became an actor, was a member and part proprietor of a regular company, holding himself as exclusively above the casual barnstormer as a Harley Street consultant holds himself above a man with a sarsaparilla stall.

"4. That Shakespeare's aim in business was to make money enough to acquire land in Stratford, and to retire as a country gentleman with a coat of arms and a good standing in the county.

"5. That Shakespeare found that the only thing that paid in the theatre was romantic nonsense, and that when he was forced by this to produce one of the most effective samples of romantic nonsense in existence, he publicly disclaimed any responsibility for its pleasant and cheap falsehood by borrowing the story and throwing it in the face of the public with the phrase 'As You Like It.'

"7. That Shakespeare tried to make the public accept real studies of life and character in- for instance-'Measure for Measure' and 'All's Well That Ends Well;' and that the public would not have them, and remains of the same mind still, preferring a fantastic sugar doll, like Rosalind, to such serious and dignified studies of women as Isabella and Helena.

"8. That the people who spoil paper and waste ink by describing Rosalind as a perfect type of womanhood are the des

'My criticism of Shakespeare is too negative to be of much use except to discredit the senseless eulogies which are current. Perhaps they will lead to something positive. I read "Measure for Measure" through carefully some time ago with some intention of saying something positive myself; but its flashes of observation were so utterly uncoördinated and so stuck together with commonplaces and reach-me-downs that I felt that the whole thing would come to pieces in my hand if I touched it; so I thought it best to leave it as he left it, and let the story and the characters hide the holes in the philosophic fabric.-G. B. S.

cendants of the same blockheads whom Shakespeare had to please when he wrote plays as they liked them.

"9. Not, as has been erroneously stated, that I could write a better play than 'As You Like It,' but that I actually have written much better ones, and in fact never wrote anything, and never intend to write anything, half so bad in matter. (In manner and art nobody can write better than Shakespeare, because he did the thing as well as it can be done within the limits of human faculty).

"10. That to anyone with the requisite ear and command of words, blank verse-written under the amazingly loose conditions which Shakespeare claimed, with full liberty to use all sorts of words, colloquial, technical, rhetorical, and even obscurely technical, and to indulge in the most far-fetched ellipses-is the easiest of all known modes of literary expression, and that this is why whole oceans of dull bombast and drivel have been emptied on the head of England since Shakespeare's time.

"II. That Shakespeare's power lies in his enormous command of word music, which gives fascination to his most blackguardly repartees and sublimity to his hollowest platitudes.

"12. That Shakespeare's weakness lies in his complete deficiency in that highest sphere of thought, in which poetry embraces religion, philosophy, morality, and the bearing of these on communities, which is sociology. That his characters have no religion, no politics, no conscience, no hope, no convictions. of any sort. That there are, as Ruskin pointed out, no heroes in Shakespeare. That his test of the worth of life is the vulgar hedonic test, and that since life cannot be justified by this or any other external test, Shakespeare comes out of his reflective period a vulgar pessimist, oppressed with a logical demonstration that life is not worth living.'

One need not be a Ben Jonson to have present-day Shakespeare worship "get on one's nerves." One may love the Bard "this side idolatry," and still realize that the extravagant Shakespeare cult has become a world-wide convention, an almost ubiquitous tradition operating as potently on the hearts of multitudes who are blissfully ignorant of their deity's works as on the

minds of the esoterics who show us where "more is meant than meets the ear." The judicial reader will not consider the theme exhausted by the twelve articles of our literary Luther. He will find something to dispute from the Shakespearean side of the controversy and not a little to add from the side of Shaw. In this generation, arguments supporting the former side will readily suggest themselves to the well-informed, while statements supplementing the views of Shaw will be uncommon and perhaps novel. An attempt to pursue the discussion from the second standpoint may therefore prove the more profitable.

With commentators on Shakespearean compositions and with popular lecturers on the Shakespearean drama, it is stereotyped routine to affirm that the dramatic poet was a great philosopher. Were this an assertion of fact, it should not be difficult to formulate the philosophical theories which the dramas present. But where can such a formulation be obtained, where among the numberless volumes of Shakespeareana is there a single intelligent work furnishing an acceptable account of Shakespeare's personal opinions concerning this world, his fellow creatures, their doings and misdoings? The skeptical are persuaded to conclude with the late Sir Leslie Stephen that if philosophical theories are concealed in Shakespeare's plays "they are concealed so cleverly that he has had to wait for a profound critic to reveal them." Not that the absence of a determinate philosophy or of a missionary purpose can chill the ardor of the orthodox. Shakespeare is so preeminent, his genius so stupendous, cries a vast concourse of acolytes, he needed not to speak didactically. Through the realistic presentation of his characters, no human virtue but finds its share of praise, no vice but has been put to scorn, no moral lesson but has been preached with more far-reaching effect than the most stirring appeal, the most eloquent sermon could hope to attain. All this, it is contended, can be found in the great dramatist's work; not on the surface, it is true, not expressed in accents to which your ears and mine are attuned, but veiled, implied, delitescent, "between the lines." And when hosts of enthusiastic commentators from the kingdoms of Europe, the despotisms of Asia and the republican dominions of America have read between the thousands of

lines contained in forty long plays, there is nothing so weighty, nothing so pregnant, nothing so momentous but what can be found in the exhaustless Shakespeare. That the prolific interpretations even of an isolated passage from "Hamlet"— not to speak of that work as a whole-are far from concordant, is the expression of a commonplace, for the din of Shakespearean controversy and the clamor of Shakespearean commentators have sounded and still resound to the remotest territories of the earth. The shade of the Elizabethan is thus placed by his votaries in the position assumed by Ibsen, of whom, as Shaw has told us, interrogations were made with respect to the meaning of numerous passages. "What I have said, I have said," replied the stern Norwegian. "Precisely,' "Precisely," retorts Shaw, "but the point is, that what he hasn't said, he hasn't said."

Not the dullest playgoer would make this accusation against Shaw. Indeed, one of the trite disparagements of Shaw, first voiced by Mr. A. B. Walkley, is that he is far too explanatory to take rank as a distinguished member of his profession too explanatory, in fact, to be included in the profession at all. Well may the crew of hacks, ememdators and recensionists nurse a grievance against this modern playwright! He leaves you in no doubt as to what his sentiments are. His opinions on sociological and political questions, on all vital questions arising from the lives of men and women in the twentieth century are expressed in no uncertain terms. His prominent characters are well defined not only in their emotional and romantic aspects, as Shakespeare's are, but in their intellectual and spiritual aspects, as Shakespeare's are not. In short, he provides the commentator with no obscure passages to interpret, no omissions to supply, no unsolved problems upon which to speculate. For him who has eyes to see and ears to hear, the purport of the dramatist's philosophy is revealed by his written sign on printed page, or by his spoken word in actor's mouth. The handwriting on Belshazzar's wall, though blazed in lucid symbols, was unintelligible, nevertheless, to all minds but one. Their reputations endangered, the Chaldean sages invented the convenient fiction of a divinely-blazoned cryptogram, which they said celestial inspiration enabled Daniel to decipher. We know, however, that

any unsophisticated eye could have read the graphic phrases which Daniel clearly saw; and that the Babylonian mind, vitiated by a civilization based on retrospective conservatism, was blind to utterances not dealing with time-worn themes nor couched in hoary formulas inherited from paleolithic man. Not clearer were the fiery signals that ushered in the doom of Babylon, than are the messages of Shaw inscribed in his books and plays. But the Babylonic erudition of modern times is as purblind as the wisdom of ancient Assyria, while few are the solitary Daniels endowed with the clear vision requisite to read aright Shaw's neoteric message.

What is this message, the reader will ask? In a world where the scandalous persistence of social iniquities and the incredible prevalence of debasing poverty render farcical our pretense of an "advanced" civilization, Shaw finds the cankerous root in the middle classes. The great bourgeoisie has cloaked its greed, its lust, its cruelty, its intolerance, its philistinism and its selfworship with a resplendent garb of pseudo-ideals. Reared in an atmosphere where tradition, convention and romantic sentiment are the breath of his nostrils, the middle-class idealist feeds to satiety on these, and round his conscience arise probity, honor, piety, virtue, duty, patriotism and respectability — the masonry of an impregnable rampart, behind which he complacently pursues the egotistic and strictly business rapacities which his self-advancement demands. Away with this mouldy tradition, this worm-eaten convention, this poisonous sentiment, cries Shaw! Away with Pharasaic ideals which enable the rich to exalt probity and spoliate the poor; the priest to sing piety and delude the ignorant; the political schemer to plead patriotism and plunder the public treasury; the Puritan mother to vaunt maternal duty and inflict infamous torture on her liberal daughter; and the clutching billionaire to flourish virtuous respectability and drive into prostitution the factory girls his pittances have famished! All this has an excellent sound, it will be said, but it is all destructive and what is only destructive has little value. The philosophy of Shaw is not, however, destructive merely. The shams of conventional respectability, of sentimental romanticism, and of paleozoic fogyism must first be