faults little affected the value of the work in which they abounded. And so it were better that in reading Shakespeare you should begin by paying least attention to the language and most attention to the action-or, to be more explicit, the living incident of the plays. Of course there is a language-study of Shakespeare. The texts of Shakespeare can not be ignored in any scientific study of Elizabethan English. There is a Shakespearean grammar; there are many Shakespearean glossaries; there are many Shakespearean concordances; and there are countless commentaries and dissertations and analyses. But all this represents not so much philology as philological specialism; and unless you have made up your minds to devote twenty or twenty-five years of study to Tudor English alone, I should plainly advise you to pay no attention whatever to all this. The first object of literary training ought to be, even if it is not, to enable the student to produce literature. Otherwise his studies are apt to be merely ornamental. Now the value of a rational and careful study of Shakespeare should be in the effect that such study will have upon the creative faculty of the student, teaching him how to use his imagination, how to define his ideas into living realities, how to write an incident of real life so as to make it seem real to the person who reads it.

Careful reading of the plays ought to help a great deal in this direction; but everything will depend upon the natural faculty of the student. Not everybody can create. This is the privilege of the very few; but it is to such very few that I particularly address these remarks.

What you are now, is no indication of what you may be in future time. I doubt whether any one of you knows; for the higher literary faculties,-the creative faculties,―are seldom developed to any great extent at your age. Except in the case of extraordinary genius, such faculties seldom show themselves in any marked form before the age of thirty-five or even later; their development depends a very

great deal upon relative experience, and a very young man can seldom have such experience except at the expense of education. So in recommending to you the study of Shakespeare as the most important of all possible literary studies, I do not wish you to imagine that you are going to obtain any extraordinary immediate results from that study. The effect of it you can not hope even to feel within another ten years; and some of you may find the benefit only at a much later period in life.

Now I am almost sure that somebody is going to ask me what would be the best play to study first. This would be a very sensible question, and I shall consider it. First of all, let me tell you that those texts of Shakespeare which you have already studied-such as "Hamlet" or "Julius Cæsar" -ought not to be looked at again for a number of years. The obligatory study of a Shakespearean play not only teaches a boy nothing about Shakespeare, but very commonly disgusts him with the subject. My own personal experience of having been obliged as a boy to study and to recite "Hamlet" was that I could not bear to look at the play for twenty-five years after. I had learned it by heart -parts of it; but I did not understand it at all, nor did I understand it until I reached middle age. I did not even want to understand it. The reason is that our study of "Hamlet" had been merely rhetorical and grammatical; we were kept to the letter of the text, nothing being done to cultivate the student's imagination, or to interest him emotionally in the incidents of the great tragedy. I am convinced that, for literary purposes, this system of teaching and studying is entirely wrong; and for that reason I warn you against it. Should any of you really wish to make a sensible study of Shakespeare, I should say, take the play that you like best and translate it into your own language; but not into classic form,-try to translate it into the living speech of to-day, into the ordinary language of conversation. It is by doing this that the power of the thing will first show

itself to you. At a later time you might wish, for other and obvious reasons, to give it another literary form; but you will be able to do this better by first putting it into colloquial form. Otherwise you are very likely to waste time in a struggle with words, which will oblige you to remain temporarily indifferent to the ideas—that is, to the emotional value of the whole.

But I have not yet touched the question of my own preference in the selection of a play for study. Some years ago, when conversing with a foreign professor, I asked him why so little attention had been given in the higher study of Shakespeare by university students to "Measure for Measure." It is not of course a play to be read by little boys, but there is no play which seems to me to deserve more attention from a literary class of young men. After some conversation on the subject he remarked that in Japan the play could hardly be understood. Now the remark, as far as the popular theatre is concerned, was very true. It would require a great deal of changing to make that play acceptable to a Japanese public. Even in England it has been very seldom heard of on the stage in modern times. But I should recommend the study of this play to you just because the dominant moral idea in it is very different from the corresponding moral idea in oriental countries, and because to understand the ethical spirit of western literature in general, the eastern students must begin by getting a perfect understanding of these foreign ideas. It is not at all necessary that you should be in sympathy with them; it is only necessary that you should comprehend them sufficiently to sympathise with the pain or pleasure of the characters who in a drama are influenced by them. For example, in this play that I speak of, the actions of Isabel can be perfectly understood only by one who perfectly understands the mediæval idea of chastity, the superstitions relating to it, the enormous exaggeration of its importance in religious teaching and especially in ascetic doctrine. To help in a

thorough understanding of this, I should especially recommend the reading of the remarkable chapters on this subject in Lecky's "History of European Morals." But once understood, I think that any intelligent student could not fail to be very much impressed by the sombre and powerful passion of the play, by its terrible yet truthful picture of human weakness in the person of a judge, and of moral strength on the part of a weak girl who has to meet and master one of the most cruel problems that could be offered to a woman during the middle ages. This play is my own favourite among what are usually called the comedies; and I think that the very difficulties connected with the studies of it are difficulties important for you to master. Next to this, I believe that I should recommend the much lighter comedy of "Twelfth Night." It is charmingly adapted for a study by translation into the colloquial, and the varieties of characters in it are unusually large. Here on the other hand you would find scarcely anything in the human nature depicted which is not as much Japanese as European. Of course the customs and manners are those of another country and another time, but the characters belong to universal humanity. I think you will agree with me that the roisterers Sir Toby Belch and Sir Andrew Aguecheek, the clever and malicious Maria and the stupid and conceited Malvolio, as types of servants, and not a few other personages in the play, can be partly paralleled in Japanese drama and in the old Japanese romances.

This, for the time being, is the best advice that I can offer you. No possible study in English literature can be so valuable to you as that of Shakespeare, if you follow it upon the sensible lines which I have attempted to indicate; for nothing has appeared since the age of Elizabeth that can bear comparison with even the worst of his work, nor is it likely that in another hundred years anything of equal genius can be produced.

CHAPTER III

THE BIBLE IN ENGLISH LITERATURE

It is no exaggeration to say that the English Bible is, next to Shakespeare, the greatest work in English literature, and that it will have much more influence than even Shakespeare upon the written and spoken language of the English race. For this reason, to study English literature without some general knowledge of the relation of the Bible to that literature would be to leave one's literary education very incomplete. It is not necessary to consider the work from a religious point of view at all; indeed, to so consider it would be rather a hindrance to the understanding of its literary excellence. Some persons have ventured to say that it is only since Englishmen ceased to believe in the Bible that they began to discover how beautiful it was. This is not altogether true; but it is partly true. For it is one thing to consider every word of a book as the word of God or gods, and another thing to consider it simply as the work of men like ourselves. Naturally we should think it our duty to suppose the work of a divine being perfect in itself, and to imagine beauty and truth where neither really exists. The wonder of the English Bible can really be best appreciated by those who, knowing it to be the work of men much less educated and cultivated than the scholars of the nineteenth century, nevertheless perceive that those men were able to do in literature what no man of our own day could possibly do.

Of course in considering the work of the translators, we must remember the magnificence of the original. I should not like to say that the Bible is the greatest of all religious books. From the moral point of view it contains very much that we can not to-day approve of; and what is good