Shakespeare Commemoration may well be, in spite of our terrible preoccupations, a concern of some national moment in 1916. The whimsical and capricious individual element which has led us astray in various phases of national activity, has caused much diversion from the Major to the Minor Prophets of Letters. Things of wood and stone, the prophets of Baal even, the graves of the sorcerers have bewildered and led us astray. Fashion in these matters has been omnipotent. From the amount of time that we, as a people, devote to Shakespeare, it would be hard to deduce that we really regarded him as our supreme author. And yet just as it is most important that any living society should so arrange matters that its best, most energetic and most able people may emerge and come to the front in the direction of affairs, so for the moral and intellectual perspective of a nation it is most important that we should worship our true gods. Lip service puts Shakespeare invariably first, but there is no small amount of hypocrisy in this, and this hypocrisy has done a good deal of harm.

The line of the elegist Basse is still remembered:

"Sleep, great tragedian, Shakespeare, sleep alone."

We have, it is to be feared, acquiesced too supinely as a nation in this solitary slumber, and have left the tragedian's rest only too severely undisturbed. It is our view, at any rate, that Shakespeare has had too many critics and not enough playgoers. Shakespeare wrote a series of the finest plays in the world upon the most universal and unmistakable subjects, such as Love, Ambition, Pride, Jealousy, Revenge, Fear, Loss of Possessions, most indeed of the

afflictions of Job. The man who could perform these marvels is a marvel himself-a precious stone set in the silver sea of memory The homage of the Scene, "To whom all Scenes of Europe homage owe" is his manifest due and tribute. But poor Shakespeare has been so overloaded with book study and antiquarian lore and secondary-symbolist meanings that he has been dosed at times to within an ace of premature dotage. A contemporary of Queen Victoria found little difficulty in tracing the present war to its ultimate causestraceable in each case to some supreme failing of the several belligerents. France suffered for her Atheism, Russia for her Siberian Severities, Belgium for the Congo, Serbia for her Regicide, Britain for the Opium Traffic, and Germany for the Higher Criticism.

Thus

It

is the Higher Criticism which has imperiled the posthumous life of Shakespeare by setting his would-be admirers against each other, and compromising the cult of our greatest Empire Builder by the menace of Civil War.

A series of eccentric hallucinations and crazes have swept in succession over the study of Shakespeare. Some of these have been due to the busy brains of pedants and illiterates, but others have emanated from critics and philosophers. Most have sprung from ignorance of Shakespeare's aims and the peculiar limitations and idiosyncrasies of the contemporary stage. Ben Jonson, for instance, started the hare of the Dramatic Unities. No one violated them with more nonchalance than Shakespeare. What could be more outrageous than the freedom used in imagining and assuming in the "Winter's Tale"? Then there was the violent intermingling of the Comic and the Tragic as seen in "Othello," "Macbeth," "Lear," "The Merchant of