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.