fact that art is the imitation of an imitation, and had therefore condemned it as unreal. Now this menial service of despair is commended as a means of grace. The historical reason for this lame conclusion to the splendid career of Greek art is not far to seek. In their higher development the Greeks stood quite alone. Their relations to their predecessors in Egypt and Mesopotamia were such as of necessity seemed to them chiefly negative. Their art life appeared unique, the flowering of a plant, originated by a strange saltus of mutation which left it alone and incapable of perpetuating itself. We have learned enough of the principles of human progress to know that such a view is very wide of the truth. Unsurpassed as Greek art is in its kind, it is only one of the forms in which the art instinct may embody itself.

Because of their isolation it is easy to excuse the Greeks for their want of historical perspective; it is otherwise with those who have essayed to interpret their art and literature to the modern world. Too often these critics have regarded the ancient masterpieces merely as unapproachable models, which the artist of to-day must nevertheless imitate if he would accomplish anything worthy of praise. It is customary to apply to the Greeks their own standards only, thus passing summary sentence of condemnation upon those who, like Euripides, were laying, however imperfectly, the foundations of an art with other ideals. Criticism, to be just, should consider both the worth of the ideal, as judged by its relation to the development of the human spirit, and the measure of success with which the artist's work embodies that ideal. In any such survey the universality and the intellectuality of Greek art, due to its devotion to the ideal type, may be trusted to win for it the enthusiastic recognition and approval of those who know it best.

M. Arthur Bridal

ART. V.-SHAKESPEARE'S CONTEMPT FOR THE COMMON PEOPLE

THE infallibility of Shakespeare is an article in every orthodox literary creed. The righteousness of democracy is another. It may have far less than thirty-nine articles, but these two it must contain. For consistency, then, Shakespeare must speak as a prophet of democracy. "The strength of civil wisdom" and a "collected system of civil and economical prudence" ought to be culled from his pages, yet there, written plain upon many of them, is a contempt for the common people that laughs our modern ideas to scorn.

His fancy, like Ariel's flight, could wing its way whither it would, but it could not outstrip the Middle Age prejudice against the working masses, nor in its loftiest sweep catch one hint of the modern estimate of the common man. Every sort of villain is seen upon those deep-dyed pages, from the assassin hired for the night to the serpent-like Iago and the trembling Lady Macbeth. But his common people are not even capable of villainy, they are simply stupid. Every sort of wag and fool, from Justice Shallow to the melancholy Jacques and the incomparable Jack Falstaff, is depicted, but the working men are only blunderers. The aristocratic merchants of Italy, the patricians of Rome, the nobles of France, the lords and kings of England, from viper-like Richard to sublime old Lear, all these of the purple and fine linen crowd that splendid stage at any lifting of his magic wand, and around the feet of these crouch and crawl "the mutable rank-scented many." Heroes, from Cæsar to Hotspur, hold the destinies of nations at the point of their swords, for the battles are all won by generals and the nations saved by kings. His dramas are wrought out in courts and palaces; the populace is only the stupid onlooker or the coarse and cowardly destroyer. He perverts the whole story of Plutarch to degrade the Roman populace. Coriolanus, single-handed, can turn the fate of Rome. Blows may fall upon his dauntless head-they pain him not; blood flows in copious streams-it never weakens

such a hero; valor and strength are in every move. Opposed to him are "the souls of geese that bear the shapes of men." Jack Cade's rebellion was a protest of manly and rough-handed peasants that had reasons enough in harsh measures long suffered; but in Shakespeare's page this pathetic and ill-guided outburst is treated as a savage revel of raw anarchists. King John marches with red hands across the stage, but there is not a word of the Magna Charta. Norman and Saxon are all one to Shakespeare. He knows nothing of Alva or St. Bartholomew. The Field of the Cloth of Gold, however, is sacred soil because an English king won victory there. He drew his materials from the chronicles of old England steeped in a chivalry that knew only knights and ladies. The Italian sources from which he transcribed much has as little heart in their intrigues and passions as Iago himself. Shakespeare found an historic basis for all he wrote. He kept close to reality in all this. In the Greek and Latin plays and histories from which he gleaned there were citizens and slaves. In all the Middle Age world a back-ground of peasantry stood sullen and changeless. In his own world of the theater there were groundlings on the benches, well-to-do in the boxes, and the nobles crowded the edge of the stage itself. This picture of the world he saw no reason to alter. The "greasy cap," the "stinking breath" of "the million," he scorned. Tender, just, and wise he was, looking with open eyes into the soul; yet one of the noblest efforts of that inner life to make better his nation-the laying of the foundations of the new era of the Puritan and the democrat-was lying at his feet, and he saw it not. The reasons why his eyes were holden are not hard to find. Shakespeare was the voice of the Elizabethan era. He was a man of his time; a man of all time indeed, for no age can ever listen to those gorgeous and affluent sentences or hear the wisdom of those deathless phrases without seeing itself anew. But he was distinctly the voice of this wonderful Elizabethan age.

mysteries of the human

Before 1550 England had only the sign of literature; four years after Shakespeare's last play the drama had lost its power and was in conscious decay. The surprise came in splendor with Spenser, then swiftly the noon-day came, the air vibrant

and musical with three hundred poets; then the decline as swift; the gloom, decay, and silence. "The age suddenly changed temper." Shakespeare's twenty-five years in London saw it all. There was a freedom to try everything in the new-found use of the English tongue. Freshness, spontaneity, gaiety, are everywhere in that dramatic lyric day. The riotous love of color, the cloying sweetness in sonnets and lyrics, the experiments in plot and meter, all tell of a day when the world was young. The gates of the West had just opened to reveal a new world, the wrecks of the Armada were still upon the shores of England, the classic ages coming through Italy were pouring their wealth of beauty into the English mind; the night and chill of the Middle Ages was gone, but all the glamour of knighthood and romantic love still shimmered in this crisp morning air. But the Queen, the Court, and London filled all that resplendent day. The people looked small and mean to the wayward and brilliant company of men who gathered in the taverns and theaters and palaces to write their sonnets and indite their dramas. It was very much the custom of that frank and youthful age to wear its heart on its sleeve, and the young Shakespeare fell into the poetic habit of his time. After the first sharp struggles came the courtly favor. The player whose honeyed speech and facile wit his fellow poets all celebrate found friends in its gayest circles. The sonnets are clearly autobiographic. They tell how fully he breathed this passionate and this rapturous life. The dark lady and the young nobleman are no abstractions. The lure of these intense attachments drew him to the very heart of this haughty and immoral court. If the sonnets reveal Shakespeare then, as Browning said, "So much the less Shakespeare he;" but the real Shakespeare voice of the Elizabethan age nevertheless. The baffling and elusive personality that has revealed to us a thousand characters who stand transparent has given a single glimpse of his own heart in the sonnets. Under the smile of that court he wrote the early plays. The matchless mirth of his jesters told how lighthearted was the man who was finding his own powers in the spring time of songs, of pageantries, and revels. Shakespeare lived under the spell of the Court and nobility. Essex, Southampton, the

Queen herself, were his friends. The grand manner of the glorious time is stamped upon every page, and on them, too, the contempt of the time for the common people and utter blindness to the destiny of the age. He walked with his back to the future. "Shakespeare," says Wendell, "has more in common with Chaucer, who died in 1400, than with Dryden, who was born only fifteen years after the greatest of modern poets was laid under his quaint epitaph in the Stratford Church."

Puritanism in that day had no voice. The Bible was chained with Fox's Book of Martyrs in every village church. There were harsh brave sermons and stern debatings enough, and Puritanism was fast becoming the conviction of the people. Later it became vocal in the sweetness of the minor poets like Herrick, in the prose of Bunyan, and in the epic splendor of Milton, but in the Elizabethan literature Puritanism was silent. Puritanism stood for equality; for leveling the mighty, and lifting them of low degree. It rebuked the court, closed the theater, pointed its finger of warning at the lustful gayeties of poetry, and preached the simple life. Shakespeare shunned Puritanism with the soul of the artist. Democracy loves averages. It has no place for kings nor villains, for pageantries nor revels. It seeks the middle way. But for the artist, the artist of the Elizabethan age, there is no middle ground. The heart broken by tragedy relaxes in comedy, the delirium of passion is followed by deep melancholy. What could the author of Hamlet make of Richard Baxter? He shuddered at the austere dogmatism and reforming zeal that was to give the world Marston Moor and Plymouth Rock. He knew his Bible, was Protestant in his ideal, interpreted deeply the individual life, but all this Puritanism was a thing of gloom and darkness to him. A ragged abyss was opening the length of England, but as he gazed at the grim crowd on the other side, the democrat and the Puritan, he turned in sorrow, saying it "pleased not the million." To Shakespeare the social classification of the world was fixed as the stars in their courses. He allowed no illusions of hope. To him as he moved through the awful crisis, like the silent Dante among the wretched shades in the Inferno, all hope was gone. Grim inexorable fate rested upon all. He had deep and tender