vation must convince us that every human being is essentially different from every other human being; and that their differences are even greater than their resemblances. We can make only a few very loose and general rules about types of character. For example, it is at least true that individual differentiation increases according to intellectual development, and diminishes as we descend lower in the scale of moral life. Shakespeare has given proof of his instinctive knowledge of both these truths. Each one of his personages is essentially different from every other, but the differences appear greatest in those representatives of the higher classes whom he brings upon the stage, and less in the characters that are lower socially and morally.

Nevertheless, he seems to us-though falsely-greatest in his treatment of humble or of ignoble characters; I say "seems," because the delusion is altogether due to our unfamiliarity with this kind of art. We have been accustomed, for example, to conceive in our own minds a certain vague general idea of what a bad man is; we have been helped to do this partly through religious teaching and partly through personal experience. But our conception is almost certain to be wrong while we are young, and, if still founded upon personal experience, wrong even when we are old. Judging good or bad actions chiefly in their relation to our own pleasure or displeasure, is the very worst way of judging them; yet it is the way in which they have been. judged by nearly every other dramatist except Shakespeare. Shakespeare presents us with the natural man always; and, with few exceptions, the natural man is not entirely bad. The ordinary villain is simply a person in whom the feelings antagonistic to civilised existence dominate the opposite class of feelings. In most cases Shakespeare shows us, what no other dramatist shows us, mainly the secret working of a bad mind,-the reason of the wickedness done. Thus we can not only understand Macbeth, we can almost sympathise with him. He is not a man incapable of good; he

is a man entirely dominated by one furious passion of ambition which urges him to commit crimes otherwise contrary to his nature, as his remorse proves them to be. Or take the case of Cloten. Cloten is one of the most cleverly drawn of Shakespeare's bad characters-a spoiled child developed by over-indulgence into a selfish and brutal man, who is capable of any wickedness when his self-esteem has been wounded.

But these are not the most powerful villains drawn by Shakespeare quite the contrary. The most powerful is unquestionably Iago. It is of Iago that I particularly wish to speak to you. There is a very peculiar fact about the tragedy of "Othello"-that from the beginning of the play until the end we have no real explanation as to why Iago hates Othello and ruins him. Of course Iago says in one passage that he suspects Othello of having committed adultery with his wife. But it is quite evident at the same time that Iago does not believe anything of the sort. He merely offers a suspicion of this sort as a kind of self-justification. At the end of the tragedy when Iago finds himself in the hands of the law-when he is about to be tortured in order to make him tell the truth-he says that he will never speak again; and we know that the tortures will not make him speak. He will die in silence, and the secret of his hate will die with him. Now it seems to me that this mystery of Iago's hatred is Shakespeare's greatest triumph in the portraiture of this scoundrel. This is reality itself. The really bad man, devoid of natural affection and of any generous feeling, is a character extremely difficult to understand. A good man is very easily deceived by a being of this kind, and can not comprehend either how or why he is deceived. Probably all of you will have occasion to meet at least once during your lives a really malevolent character; and if you do, you will discover that you can not comprehend such a character. You can defend yourself from his malevolence only through a kind of intuition; if

sense of morals, and scarcely any sense of pity. He is cruel, he is lustful, he is immensely cunning, but he has affection. This is a very important difference. He loves his black child, and he is ready to fight the whole world to save it; otherwise he is an absolute barbarian. But Iago is the civilised man, the polished Italian villain, entirely ruled by interest and malice, and totally insensible to affection of any possible kind.

Even when Shakespeare brings upon the stage such characters as courtezans, every person is distinctively individual. From Cleopatra to Doll Tearsheet the distance is not greater than the distance which Shakespeare always established between any two types of this sort. Notice the quiet courteous woman-of-the-town in the "Comedy of Errors," and the character of the woman in "Pericles"; they are miles apart. But it is rather in the most charming types of good women that his power to individualize seems most astonishing, as far as female characters are concerned. I shall call your attention to only one group of course I mean "group" simply in my own purely arbitrary sense. Shakespeare gives us three different studies of women disguised as boys in three different plays: "As You Like It," "Twelfth Night" and "Cymbeline."

Nothing could be more difficult than to make three perfectly natural and yet essentially distinct conceptions under these circumstances. But this has been supremely well accomplished. Rosalind, the charming, saucy, mischievous, playful, shrewd but withal very tender, and in the best sense, innocent girl, is a type that any Englishman can recognise as being quite possible to-day. She is a girl of courage and daring, able to master the most difficult situation by goodness of heart and firm resolve combined. She can do very dangerous things; but she is strong enough to do them, and you may be sure that she will never make a moral mistake. Viola in "Twelfth Night" is a much slighter being. She is sweet but timid, and we are kept uneasy about her

until the end of the play. This is the kind of girl that fortune has to help; she is not strong enough to master a difficult situation, as Rosalind would; but she is clever, and her gentleness saves her under circumstances where force would be less successful. Imogene in "Cymbeline" is the childwoman-totally unfit to bear hardship, and still less able to bear unkindness. Under no circumstances could you imagine any two out of these three to be sisters. Each is as different from the rest as if she belonged to a different nation, or rather, a different race. Perhaps Rosalind is the most English type of the three.

CHAPTER II

NOTE ON THE STUDY OF SHAKESPEARE

SUCH advice as I now offer in this connection may be summed up in these few words; the study of Shakespeare, to be profitable in a literary sense, must be study based upon imagination. I mean that the best way to study a play of Shakespeare is to try to understand perfectly, not the language, which is often a matter of very secondary importance, but the situations. All the art of Shakespeare being based upon imagination, being in itself the highest possible expression of the highest power to which the human imagination has yet attained, it is imaginatively that we should study it. To approach Shakespeare, the student ought first to get rid of the idea that he is about to study a monument of language. Certainly in his best moments the language of Shakespeare rises to a height of sublimity which that of no other poet has reached. But such moments do not represent the level of Shakespeare's ordinary work,-a work teeming with faults, faults of a hundred kinds, faults such as no Victorian poet would dare to make. The style and the language of Shakespeare are the least important part of his creations, while in the other poets they form the most important part. The man of genius can afford to write as badly. as he pleases, and Shakespeare is the best example of such license. The ordinary man, on the contrary, has to be very careful how he writes, for his imagination is weak and commonplace; having little to say, everything depends upon how he says it. Ben Jonson long ago recognised Shakespeare's weakness. "He is said," observes Jonson, "never to have blotted a line. Would to God that he had blotted a thousand!" But for all that, Jonson recognised that Shakespeare would live "for all time." He saw that the