live in the world as Goethe did. His occupation was an absorbing one, his social world limited, his friends mostly of one class. Goethe, on the other hand, had travelled extensively, was the prime-minister of a German duchy, petty, it is true, but the intellectual centre of the nation; he had nobility, artists, literati, savants, men and women of every grade of society and culture, for his life-long friends and companions. We cannot follow the life of a single celebrated personage of that era without stumbling, sooner or later, upon some point of contact with the inevitable, the omnipresent Goethe. What can we offer in Shakespeare's life as an offset? We know that Shakespeare lived and died comparatively unknown outside the narrow limits of the theatre-world. Law, politics, art, knew him not. He had not the means, then, of judging men and events with that sweep of vision which we admire so much in the great German poet. Goethe's characters, when contrasted with Shakespeare's, appear at first sight cold and somewhat dull; their lines are fainter; they do not carry us away. The more we study them, however, the more our eyes open to the fact that they are wrought most faithfully, not a line too many or too few; nothing strained, unnatural, improbable. They act and express themselves in accordance with every rule not merely of sentiment, but of society. In Goethe, the causal nexus between character and action is always evident; in Shakespeare it is often wanting. The action is powerful, the words are inimitable; but we may have to ask ourselves in vain, why the personage acts and speaks as he does.

For instance, the opening scene in King Lear is simply absurd. As Rümelin says, "a father may gather his children around him and promise the best piece of cake to the one that loves him the most." But that an aged monarch should assemble his grown-up daughters, and divide his kingdom among them upon the same principle, is inconceivable. Again, why does Gloster all at once, upon the flimsiest of suspicions,

chase away his legitimate son and take to his arms the bastard to whom he had always turned the cold shoulder? He does it, and we are made to feel most intensely that he does it, else Shakespeare would not be Shakespeare; but the why remains unanswered. Similarly, in Cymbeline, Posthumus' credibility surpasses the ordinary limits of good sense. In Romeo and Juliet, the plan proposed by Father Lorenzo to prevent Juliet's marriage with the County Paris exceeds the power of imagination to understand it. Why does not Juliet confess her previous marriage and brave the consequences? Or why does she not flee directly, without first locking herself up in a coffin? In Les Misérables, Jean Valjean has a most excellent reason for escaping from the monastery in a coffin. But we cannot say as much of Juliet, who, on every other occasion, seems to have enjoyed perfect freedom of movement.

In his analysis of Hamlet, Rümelin advances the opinion that Shakespeare, in writing the play, had one purpose steadily in view, namely, to ventilate his own reflections upon life in general, and upon the stage. It is thus the most subjective, we may say the only subjective, Shakespearean drama. Hence the delay, the dragging of the entire piece. Had Hamlet acted as Shakespeare's other heroes act, on the spur of the moment, the play would have speedily come to an end, and no room would have been left for such utterance. Whereas, in the old Hamlet-saga, the delay is perfectly motived. Again, in altering the denouement, Shakespeare has again spoiled the consistency of the saga. The Hamlet of the play impresses us as a sensitive, uncertain nature; yet he succeeds in killing two or three innocent persons, en passant, as it were, without seeming to be very deeply affected thereat. How comes it that the same Hamlet who refrains from killing the king at his devotions, in order that the soul of the latter may not ascend into heaven-who has himself seen and conversed with a spirit from the nether world-how can he deliver himself of the celebrated

monologue, "To be, or not to be?" These and many other points that puzzle us and make the play, as a whole, a mystery or a riddle, are to be explained, upon Rümelin's theory, by this double nature that Shakespeare has given to the principal character. He is at once the dramatization of the Hamlet-saga and the mouthpiece whereby the poet proclaims to us his own choicest reflections. Our Hamlet ends tragically, because, like Werther, Clavigo, Eduard, he is the form into which the poet has poured the outflowings of his own diseased soul. He dies as an expiatory offering for the poet himself.

Great stress has been laid by critics upon the so-called historical sense, as one of the prominent desiderata in the dramatic poet. By historic sense they understand the ability to conceive and embody in concrete forms the characteristic features of some one epoch of national life-to carry back the spectator bodily, as it were, into some half-forgotten golden age. This historic sense has been, almost unanimously, ascribed to Shakespeare in the highest degree. His historical plays have been regarded as the panorama upon which rolls on before our vision all that is great and glorious, horrible, fascinating; all that constitutes the pride of England from the days of King John to Queen Elizabeth. Within the compass of a few brief plays, what wealth of character and incident, what pomp and pathos, what virtue and infamy! And yet, quietly observes our critic, let us not be carried away by their feverish action and magnificent diction beyond the reach of sober judgment. Does Shakespeare reveal to us the real sources and growth of that national character which distinguishes England? France and Germany can point to equally great and valiant kings and barons, equally fair women, like scenes of blood and pageantry. What word, what thought has Shakespeare for the fusion of the Norman stock with the Saxon, that slow tempering which was to render the English metal so weighty and yet so keen-edged? Does Shakespeare lead us to suspect for a moment the ex

istence of that hard hand-to-hand struggle whereby the English people gained, inch by inch, its social and political freedom? Where is any allusion made to the weakening of the military power of the feudal nobility by the introduction of hired and trained foot-soldiers from the folk?

All this, says Rümelin, lies wholly outside the ken of our poet. The characters of the plays are kings and noblemen, with their dependents taken from the lowest classes. Wherever a character from the middle classes appears, a judge, or a teacher, or a clergyman, he is made the object of ridicule. The plays are, it is true, national in their tendency they exalt England, its rulers, its achievements. But the England that is presented to us is not the England of the Magna Charta, but the England of the Plantagenet and Lancasterian dynasties. If we bear in mind for whom the plays were composed, for the young noblemen of the times of Queen Bess and King James, we shall readily understand why they should be conceived in such a spirit. The Puritan element, which we now know to have underlain all that is truly great in English civilization, was altogether foreign to, in many respects hostile to, Shakespeare and his surroundings. There is not, in all the English dramas summed together, any warrant for supposing that Shakespeare was capable of seizing the characteristic spirit of our age and transferring it to the boards of the theatre. We have no good reason to believe that he was gifted with the means or the patience to sift carefully the false from the true, to weigh coolly the respective merits of parties and opinions amid the shock of armies. Shakespeare was, by his nature, a cavalier. He wrote for cavaliers, he depicted the cavaliers of English history. But the life of the English middle classes, those fathers whose sons were to fight and conquer under Cromwell, was, for aught we know, wholly a stranger to him. Moreover, the Englishmen of King John's age are essentially the same as those of Henry VIII. There is no

trace of any change in character or circumstance. This fact alone should make us hesitate before putting too much faith in those who exalt Shakespeare as a delineator of national life.

This consideration, however, as Rüme lin himself observes, need not diminish at all our admiration of Shakespeare's dramatic genius. Granting that the poet does not depict English history as we would look to find it in the work of a professed historian, granting that he was deficient in historic sense, even granting that there is more of that historic sense in Goethe's single play of Egmont than in all the English historical dramas together-we can merely change our admiration without abating it. Indeed, we may claim that Shakespeare, had he been more historically correct, might have run the risk of becoming less universal. Under the mask of this or that court, he has presented to us certain of the eternally recurring forms of human life. Titles and dynasties are with him but trappings; the man is the same yesterday, to-day, and tomorrow. As we all know, Shakespeare was not of an age, but for all time.

The last three chapters are entitled respectively, "Shakespeare's Individuality and the Process of his Development;""Shakespeare's Views of Life;" and "The German Shakespeare Cult and a Comparison of Shakespeare with Schiller and Goethe." They constitute one half of the entire volume. Instead of attempting to take them up separately, I shall give, as briefly as possible, their salient features, without strictly following the author's order.

Rümelin endeavors to ascertain what Shakespeare was, by first determining what he was not and could not have been; what his beliefs and views were, by what he has not expressed. Shakespeare has not depicted any characters that strive after culture, knowledge, or truth, none who are actuated by zeal for the public good, or even the good of others. He has, furthermore, no gemüthliche characters in real life, no comfortable, harmless natures. His idyllic personages are all located in

fairy-land. Again, while giving, on the one hand, no self-satisfying, healthily introspective characters, he gives, on the other hand, none whose efforts are directed toward a practical vocation in life. There are no characters taken from the producing classes, but only from the ruling and consuming classes. Moreover, he depicts only the conflict of passion with passion, or passion with duty; the bitter struggle between duty and duty is sometimes touched upon, but never elaborated or made the main theme. His characters think clearly and act energetically, but within a circumscribed range of idea and emotion. Shakespeare never alludes to the power of poetry to console and soothe the soul; scarcely even in his sonnets does he speak of the inward happiness conferred by the poetic faculty. In the few instances where he has put a professional poet upon the stage, it has been only to make him a butt. Finally, Shakespeare represents the love of solitude as something morbid, gives no expression to the pleasure attendant upon search after knowledge, and seldom, if ever, moves the purely touching, sentimental chords of the heart.

As an actor and a dramatist by pro fession, gifted by nature with the rarest powers of utterance and the sharpest insight into the souls of men, writing for a lively, clamorously applauding audience of gay youth, no wonder that Shakespeare's plays are full of life. They tingle with emotion. The dramatist finds the models for his heroes among his aristocratic young patrons and his fellow-actors and theatre-folk. No mean field of character, we may be assured. For those gay men are the flower of the court at a time when life ran high. And the theatre is, and ever will be, a microcosm of passion and intrigue, youthful hope and decayed ambition. On the other hand, the disadvantages of such a position are not small. In our days, when society is undergoing a levelling process, the actor and the dramatist may obtain much wider views of life than were possible in the times of Shakespeare. To prevent any misconception,

I shall quote Rümelin's own words on this point: "Shakespeare stood, as we have seen, outside the pale of society, the parish, the church, the state; he had not access to respectable and cultivated families; he was denied intercourse with noble women; he became acquainted with only certain classes of the people. It is conceivable that, in all the course of his life, he never once became clearly conscious of what was at bottom separating him from the kernel of the nation, what ideas were really agitating his contemporaries most profoundly, what the then men of the future, those Puritans whom he knew only to ridicule as hypocrites, what they really wished. The true world of society, in its manifold ramification and concatenation, always stood afar off from him. He knew men most thoroughly as they are, but not as they act; to speak more accurately, he knew how they would like to act and would act, were it not for a thousand opposing influences; but he did not know the form that their real action would take upon the solid footing of society. Hence the want of motive and the uncertainty whenever an action is located within social and historical limits, and, on the contrary, his brilliant success when his Pegasus, with eyes turned heavenward, bears us into the world of pure fancy. From the theatre it is possible, at least it was possible at that time, to gain a knowledge of men, indeed, but not the experience of the world."

Here, I apprehend, the reader will think that the critic has gone altogether too far. It certainly would grate upon the feelings of even the most dispassionate admirer, to hear the great dramatist spoken of as without access to respectable society or intercourse with noble women. I suspect, however, that Rümelin does not wish his words construed too literally. It is against all probabil ity to suppose that a man of such prodigious gifts should not find somewhere a sweet nook of refuge from the turmoil of the world, some noble and cheering friends, men and women. Rümelin's object undoubtedly has been to destroy

the halo with which we have surrounded the man. Were Shakespeare to appear bodily among us, every heart would beat in welcome, every door would be thrown open. Was such the case, however, three centuries ago? In our day, the social position of theatre-managers and actors has been greatly advanced, and still, even now, there are many prejudices yet to overcome. Of Shakespeare we must say, in candor, that the doors of what we call first-class society were not open to him; or, if open, scarcely more than ajar. If we wish to realize the disadvantages under which he labored,-and this, again, may serve to heighten our wonder at his genius-we have only to compare him for a moment with Goethe, or, to make the antithesis still more striking, with that prodigy of our century, Lord Byron, before his downfall.

The general character of Shakespeare's composition may be set down as intense, if not feverish. If we except the editor of the daily newspaper, what literary character could we find whose life compares, for worry and excitement, with that of the dramatist-manager? His brain, that should be relaxed after the labor of composition, is stretched to new energy by the thousand minutiæ of theatre-life. Scarcely an hour of the day or the night can he call his own. With rehearsals and performances, settling the jealous quarrels of the most irritable class of mortals in the world, and pleasing the public, he leads what we may forcibly call a dog's life. Let us then imagine our myriad-minded Shakespeare, with his delicately strung fibres of sympathy ready to be played upon by every passing breeze, his piercing vision from which no secret thought or facial expression could escape-let us imagine him living year in and year out in this superheated, wearing atmosphere. Can we wonder that he died comparatively young, apparently from sheer exhaustion? Must we not be always on the lookout for traces of feverish agitation in his plays? Wonderful as they are for their objectivity, that is, their freedom from any thing like an obtrusion of the poet's own views and

emotions, we may safely say that Shakespeare might have written them better had he been somewhat less driven or more favored in his surroundings.

In dealing with a character such as Shakespeare's, it is peculiarly difficult to ascertain the real thoughts of the man hid so carefully behind the dramatist. Next to Homer, Shakespeare possesses the happy faculty of sinking himself in his creations. Consequently he has been pronounced, by turns, a Protestant, a Catholic, a Spinozist. Like every worldgenius, he is substantially as his reader chooses to find him; and it seems wellnigh impossible, in our utter want of biographical materials, to read the riddle of our English sphinx. What were Shakespeare's views upon so-called poetic justice, human sin and its influence upon character, the philosophy of life? As to the first point, Rümelin shows that Gervinus is mistaken in asserting Shakespeare's practical assent to the claims of this poetic justice. His entire method of treatment shows that he possessed an unprejudiced insight into the ways of the world rather than a deep-seated conviction of a moral order of things. Rümelin also finds much to criticize in the sudden and unmotived conversion of so many of Shakespeare's characters. Not to speak of such glaring instances as The Two Gentlemen of Verona, Measure for Measure, All's Well that Ends Well, the wonderful change in the character of Prince Hal will scarcely bear close inspection. It is too sudden, the steps of transition too imperfectly marked out. Rümelin is disposed to suspect in the play an effort to hold up to the young nobility of the theatre a model for their guidance, an ideal of what they might and should become, if they only would. The character of the Prince is such as to induce us to look for some hidden motive, some in usum Delphini tendency, as Rümelin phrases it, lurking behind the mask.

Every student of German literature knows that it started under the inspiration of Shakespeare's genius. The subsequent career of this influence, however, is not so well known. Rümelin

divides it into three stages. In the first stage, the latter part of the last century, Shakespeare was the hammer with which were broken the fetters that the pseudoclassicism of France had so long imposed upon Germany. To form an approximate estimate of that influence, we need only glance through Lessing's Dramaturgy, or read Goethe's famous harangue quoted in Lewes' biography. All the literary men of the day read and enjoyed Shakespeare without stopping to criticize too closely or attempting to convert his defects into virtues. Goethe and Schiller profited by him without suffering themselves to be crushed by comparison. Then came the age of the Romantic School. The understanding of Shakespeare was sharpened; the poet was studied more carefully in relation to his contemporaries and predecessors. The standard by which he was judged, however, was shifted. Instead of esteeming him for what really made him a classic poet, the school exalted beyond all bounds his disregard of rule, the fantastic element in his compositions, his mingling of the tragic and the comic elements, his strained play of wit. This second stage has passed into the present. Partly in consequence of the Hegelian philosophy, which wishes to rule out as much as possible the expression of individual feeling and opinion, and consequently to make all poetry dramatic, partly owing to the political condition of the country, Shakespeare's position has been strangely exalted. Both tendencies, the philosophical and the political, have combined to make Shakespeare the ideal and the idol of German criticism. He is the dramatist par excellence, the grand patriot-bard of his own land. Schiller has not his strength or his versatility, Goethe has not his patriotism. So Shakespeare is set above them both as the poet for all times, all peoples, and we listen to Gervinus, otherwise a coldblooded critic, proclaiming without hesitation that Shakespeare united all the excellencies of Goethe and Schiller without any of their defects. As I have endeavored to indicate, the symp