that in ridiculing the blind, unreasoning adoration of Shakspeare as an
infallible and impeccable god in whose greater glory all _dii minores_
must hide their diminished heads and pale their uneffectual fires, Mr.
Shaw does well and merits sympathetic attention. Without going so far
as Voltaire, one may venture without irreverence to hold an opinion
of one’s own as to the great Englishman’s barbarous exuberance of
metaphor, pure and mixed, his poverty of invention in the matter of
plots, his love of punning, his tireless pursuit of a quibble to the
ultimate ramifications of its burrow, and a score of other faults which
in others his thick-and-thin protagonists freely condemn. Many of these
sins against art were doubtless the offspring of a giant indolence, and
sole desire to draw the rabble of the streets into his theater. For
literature he cared nothing, of literary ambition knew nothing—just
made plays, played them and flung away the manuscript. Even the sonnets
were left unsigned—which is fortunate, for his unearthly signature
would have misled the compiler.
Whatever may be the other qualities of “As You Like It,” Mr. Shaw will
perhaps admit that in point of mere decency it is pretty fair, which is
more than any but a Shakspearolater will say of “Romeo and Juliet,”
for example. Not greatly caring for the theater, I am not familiar
with “acting versions,” but this play as it came from the hand of its
author is, in a moral sense, detestable. All its men are blackguards,
all its women worse, and worst of all is Juliet herself, who makes no
secret of the nature of her passion for Romeo, but discloses it with
all the candor of a moral idiot insensible to the distinction between
propensity and sentiment. Her frankness is no less than hideous. Yet
one may read page after page by reputable authors in praise of her as
one of the sweetest of Shakspeare’s fascinating heroines. Babes are
named for her and drawing-room walls adorned with ideal portraits of
her, engraved from paintings of great artists. One has only to read
Taine’s description of an Elizabethan theater audience to understand
why dramatists of those “spacious times” did not need seriously to
concern themselves with morality; but that Shakspeare’s wit, pathos and
poetry can make such characters as those of this drama acceptable to
modern playgoers and readers is the highest possible attestation of the
man’s consummate genius.