SHAKESPEARE.

Cromwell Argus, Volume XLIII, Issue 2287, 4 March 1912, Page 7

SHAKESPEARE.

AS SUMMED UP BY A FRENCH MAN OF LETTERS. What Shakespeare expected he did actually attain < his eye was on Stratford, not on posterity. The ide a of his being later to be the Merlin of unborn times, the revealer of the unknown, the life-giver, the pride of his country, never occurred to him, and would probably have made him laugh. All he thought of was how best to please his public ; a warmhearted, boisterous crowd, full-blood-ed ; of unbounded patriotism, a lover of extremes, of coarse buffooneries, of common witticisms easy to understand—men all of them, of encyclopaedic ignorance. The part of such a public as a contributor to his plays can scarcely be overestimated. What such people would like and what they would tolerate is what gaye_these plays—which he never thought of after the performance—the unique, the marvellous, the portentous shape in which we find them. What saved him in spite of himself waß that to the coarse food his groundlings wanted he added the ethereal food which has been for ages the relish of the greatest of mankind. It gave him no more trouble than to put in quibbles, or jokes, or massacres, and, because experience had shown him that while it was not at all necessary to success, it did not hurt. Hence the strange nature of that work, touching all extremes, the model of all that should be aimed at, and all that should be avoided. Its hold in the world increases every year ; it is famous in regions the very name of which was unknown to its author. No works are so familiar to the nations of the world aa those of Shakespeare to-day. In their continued and increasing existence what sort of life are they leading? an anxious note has been sounded from time to time in the midst of boundless admiration and praise. Dr. Johnson had said of him—"He sacrifices virtue to convenience, and is so much more careful to please than to instruct that he seems to write without any moral purpose." Emerson, again, said of Shakespeare—"He was master of the revels to mankind. . . . But when the question is of life a nd its auxiliaries, how does it profit me ?" What, then is it that we possess ? Is the treasure in this bewitching garden of the Hesperides mere glitter, or is it real gold? The plays of Shakespeare were written without any moral purpose. But to conclude that they do not instruct at all is to wander from the truth. No one can escape the lesson to be drawn from the fate of Macbeth, of Ooriolanus, of Anthony, oi Flagstaff and his wild companions. In many cases, however, it seems as if the evil power bo often at play in the Greek tragedies—and in real life, too—were* leading the innocent to their destruction. The fate of Hamlet, Ophelia, Desdemona, Othello carries, to be sure, no concrete moral with it. Their story was written without any moral purpose—but not without any moral effect. It obliges human hearts to melt, it "teaches them pity.—From the Address of M. Jusserand to the English Academy.