The Man Shakespeare and His Tragic Life Story Part 43

True, Shakespeare was not the kind of man Englishmen are accustomed to admire. By a curious irony of fate Jesus was sent to the Jews, the most unworldly soul to the most material of peoples, and Shakespeare to Englishmen, the most gentle sensuous charmer to a masculine, rude race.

It may be well for us to learn what infinite virtue lay in that frail, sensual singer.

This dumb struggling world, all in travail between Thought and Being, longs above everything to realize itself and become articulate, and never has it found such width of understanding, such melody of speech, as in this Shakespeare. "I have often said, and will often repeat,"

writes Goethe, "that the final cause and consummation of all natural and human activity is dramatic poetry." Englishmen do not appear yet to understand what arrogance and what profound wisdom there is in this saying; but in a dull, half-conscious way they are beginning dimly to realize that the biggest thing they have done in the world yet is to produce Shakespeare. When I think of his paltry education, his limiting circ.u.mstances, the scanty appreciation of his contemporaries, his indifferent health, and recall his stupendous achievement, I am fain to apply to him, as most appropriate, the words he gave to his _alter ego_, Antony, Antony who, like himself, was world-worn and pa.s.sion-weary:

"A rarer spirit never Did steer humanity; but you, G.o.ds, will give us Some faults to make us men."

THE END.