In _La Peau de Chagrin_ Balzac spends many pages in describing a
coquette, who seems the image of heartlessness, and then invents an
improbable incident that her chief victim may discover how beautifully
she can sing. Nobody had ever heard her sing, and yet in her singing,
and in her chatter with her maid, Balzac tells us, was her true self.
He would have us understand that behind the momentary self, which acts
and lives in the world, and is subject to the judgment of the world,
there is that which cannot be called before any mortal Judgment seat,
even though a great poet, or novelist, or philosopher be sitting upon
it. Great literature has always been written in a like spirit, and
is, indeed, the Forgiveness of Sin, and when we find it becoming the
Accusation of Sin, as in George Eliot, who plucks her Tito in pieces
with as much assurance as if he had been clockwork, literature has
begun to change into something else. George Eliot had a fierceness one
hardly finds but in a woman turned argumentative, but the habit of mind
her fierceness gave its life to was characteristic of her century, and
is the habit of mind of the Shakespearian critics. They and she grew
up in a century of utilitarianism, when nothing about a man seemed
important except his utility to the State, and nothing so useful to
the State as the actions whose effect can be weighed by the reason.
The deeds of Coriolanus, Hamlet, Timon, Richard II. had no obvious
use, were, indeed, no more than the expression of their personalities,
and so it was thought Shakespeare was accusing them, and telling us
to be careful lest we deserve the like accusations. It did not occur
to the critics that you cannot know a man from his actions because
you cannot watch him in every kind of circumstance, and that men are
made useless to the State as often by abundance as by emptiness, and
that a man’s business may at times be revelation, and not reformation.
Fortinbras was, it is likely enough, a better King than Hamlet would
have been, Aufidius was a more reasonable man than Coriolanus, Henry
V. was a better man-at-arms than Richard II., but after all, were not
those others who changed nothing for the better and many things for
the worse greater in the Divine Hierarchies? Blake has said that ‘the
roaring of lions, the howling of wolves, the raging of the stormy sea,
and the destructive sword are portions of Eternity, too great for the
eye of man,’ but Blake belonged by right to the ages of Faith, and
thought the State of less moment than the Divine Hierarchies. Because
reason can only discover completely the use of those obvious actions
which everybody admires, and because every character was to be judged
by efficiency in action, Shakespearian criticism became a vulgar
worshipper of Success. I have turned over many books in the library at
Stratford-on-Avon, and I have found in nearly all an antithesis, which
grew in clearness and violence as the century grew older, between two
types, whose representatives were Richard II., ‘sentimental,’ ‘weak,’
‘selfish,’ ‘insincere,’ and Henry V., ‘Shakespeare’s only hero.’ These
books took the same delight in abasing Richard II. that school-boys do
in persecuting some boy of fine temperament, who has weak muscles and
a distaste for school games. And they had the admiration for Henry V.
that school-boys have for the sailor or soldier hero of a romance in
some boys’ paper. I cannot claim any minute knowledge of these books,
but I think that these emotions began among the German critics, who
perhaps saw something French and Latin in Richard II., and I know that
Professor Dowden, whose book I once read carefully, first made these
emotions eloquent and plausible. He lived in Ireland, where everything
has failed, and he meditated frequently upon the perfection of
character which had, he thought, made England successful, for, as we
say, ‘cows beyond the water have long horns.’ He forgot that England,
as Gordon has said, was made by her adventurers, by her people of
wildness and imagination and eccentricity; and thought that Henry V.,
who only seemed to be these things because he had some commonplace
vices, was not only the typical Anglo-Saxon, but the model Shakespeare
held up before England; and he even thought it worth while pointing
out that Shakespeare himself was making a large fortune while he was
writing about Henry’s victories. In Professor Dowden’s successors
this apotheosis went further; and it reached its height at a moment
of imperialistic enthusiasm, of ever-deepening conviction that the
commonplace shall inherit the earth, when somebody of reputation,
whose name I cannot remember, wrote that Shakespeare admired this
one character alone out of all his characters. The Accusation of
Sin produced its necessary fruit, hatred of all that was abundant,
extravagant, exuberant, of all that sets a sail for shipwreck, and
flattery of the commonplace emotions and conventional ideals of the
mob, the chief Paymaster of accusation.