And meanwhile the demons of life dance on. Dante may build up his great triple universe in his great triple rhyme, and encase it in walls of brass. But still they dance on. We may tremble at the supreme poet's pride and wonder at the passion of his humility--but "the damned grotesques make arabesques, like the wind upon the sand!"
There is something pathetic about the blind devotion of humanity to its famous names. But how indiscriminate it is; how lacking in discernment!
This is, above all, true of Shakespeare, whose peculiar and quite personal genius has almost been buried under the weight of popular idolatry. No wonder such critics as Voltaire, Tolstoi, and Mr. Bernard Shaw have taken upon themselves to intervene. The Frenchman's protest was an aesthetic one. The more recent objectors have adopted moral and philosophic grounds. But it is the unreasoning adoration of the mob which led to both attacks.
It is not difficult to estimate the elements which have gone to make up this Shakespeare-God. The voices of the priests behind the Idol are only too clearly distinguishable. We hear the academic voice, the showman's voice, and the voice of the ethical preacher. They are all absurd, but their different absurdities have managed to flow together into one powerful and unified convention. Our popular orators gesticulate and clamour; our professors "talk Greek;" our ethical Brutuses "explain;" and the mob "throw up their sweaty night-caps;" while our poor Caesar of Poetry sinks down out of sight, helpless among them all.
Charles Lamb, who understood him better than anyone--and who loved Plays--does not hesitate to accuse our Stage-Actors of being the worst of all in their misrepresentation. He doubts whether even Garrick understood the subtlety of the roles he played, and the few exceptions he allows in his own age make us wonder what he would say of ours.
Finally there is the "Philosophical Shakespeare" of the German appreciation, and this we feel instinctively to be the least like the original of all!
The irony of it is that the author of Hamlet and the Tempest does not only live in a different world from that of these motley exponents. He lives in an antagonistic one. Shakespeare was as profoundly the enemy of scholastic pedantry as he was the enemy of puritan squeamishness. He was almost unkindly averse to the breath of the profane crowd. And his melancholy scepticism, with its half-humorous assent to the traditional pieties, is at the extremest opposite pole from the "truths" of metaphysical reason. The Shakespeare of the Popular Revivals is a fantastic caricature. The Shakespeare of the College Text-Books is a lean scarecrow. But the Shakespeare of the philosophical moralists is an Hob-goblin from whom one flees in dismay.