With Mr. Whibley's general view of Swift as opposed to his general view of politics, I find myself for the most part in harmony. I doubt, however, whether Swift has been pursued in his grave with such torrential malignity as Mr. Whibley imagines. Thackeray's denigration, I admit, takes the breath away. One can hardly believe that Thackeray had read either Swift's writings or his life. We know that he had, but his passion for the sentimental graces made him incapable of doing justice to a genius of saturnine realism such as Swift's. The truth is, though Swift was among the staunchest of friends, he is not among the most sociable of authors. His writings are seldom in the vein either of tenderness or of merriment. We know of the tenderness of Swift only from a rare anecdote or from the prattle of the Journal to Stella. As for his laughter, as Mr. Whibley rightly points out, Pope was talking nonsense when he wrote of Swift as laughing and shaking in Rabelais's easy chair. Swift's humour is essentially of the intellect. He laughs out of his own bitterness rather than to amuse his fellowmen. As Mr. Whibley says, he is not a cynic. He is not sufficiently indifferent for that. He is a satirist, a sort of perverted and suffering idealist: an idealist with the cynic's vision. It is the essential nobleness of Swift's nature which makes the Voyage to the Houyhnhnms a noble and not a disgusting piece of literature. There are people who pretend that this section of Gulliver's Travels is almost too terrible for sensitive persons to read. This is sheer affectation. It can only be honestly maintained by those who believe that life is too terrible for sensitive persons to live.

(2) Shakespeare.

Mr. Whibley goes through history like an electioneering bill-sticker. He plasters up his election-time shrillnesses not only on Fox's House of Commons but on Shakespeare's Theatre. He is apparently interested in men of

genius chiefly as regards their attitude to his electioneering activities. Shakespeare, he seems to imagine, was the sort of person who would have asked for nothing better as a frieze in his sitting-room in New Place than a scroll bearing in huge letters some such motto as "Vote for Curzon and Down with Down with the Common People" or "Vote for Carson and No League of Nations." Mr. Whibley thinks Shakespeare was like that, and so he exalts Shakespeare. He has, I do not doubt, read Shakespeare, but that has made no difference. He would clearly have taken much the same view of Shakespeare if he had never read him. To be great, said Emerson, is to be misunderstood. To be great is assuredly to be misunderstood by Mr. Whibley.

I do not think it is doing an injustice to Mr. Whibley to single out the chapter on “Shakespeare: Patriot and Tory" as the most representative in his volume of Political Portraits. It would be unjust if one were to suggest that Mr. Whibley could write nothing better than this. His historical portraits are often delightful as the work of a clever illustrator, even if we cannot accept them as portraits. Those essays in which he keeps himself out of the picture and eschews ideas most successfully attract us as coming from the hand of a skilful writer. His studies of Clarendon, Metternich, Napoleon and Melbourne are all of them good entertainment. If I comment on the Shakespeare essay rather than on these, it is because here more than anywhere else in the book the author's skill as a portrait-painter is put to the test. Here he has to depend almost exclusively on his imagination, intelligence, and knowledge of human nature. Here, where there are scarcely any epigrams or anecdotes to quote, a writer must reveal whether he is an artist and a critic, or a pedestrian intelligence with the trick of words. Mr. Whibley, I fear, comes badly off from the test. One does not blame him for having written on the theme that "Shakespeare, being a patriot, was a Tory also." It would be easy to conceive a scholarly and amusing study

of Shakespeare on these lines. Whitman maintained that there is much in Shakespeare to offend the democratic mind; and there is no reason why an intelligent Tory should not praise Shakespeare for what Whitman deplored in him. There is every reason, however, why the portraiture of Shakespeare as a Tory, if it is to be done, should be done with grace, intelligence, and sureness of touch. Mr. Whibley throws all these qualifications to the winds, especially the second. The proof of Shakespeare's Toryism, for instance, which he draws from Troilus and Cressida, is based on a total misunderstanding of the famous and simple speech of Ulysses about the necessity of observing "degree, priority and place." Mr. Whibley, plunging blindly about in Tory blinkers, imagines that in this speech Ulysses, or rather Shakespeare, is referring to the necessity of keeping the democracy in its place. "Might he not," he asks, "have written these prophetic lines with his mind's eye upon France of the Terror or upon modern Russia ?" Had Mr. Whibley read the play with that small amount of self-forgetfulness without which no man has ever yet been able to appreciate literature, he would have discovered that it is the unruliness not of the democracy but of the aristocracy against which Ulyssesor, if you prefer it, Shakespeare-inveighs in this speech. The speech is aimed at the self-will and factiousness of Achilles and his disloyalty to Agamemnon. If there are any moderns who come under the noble lash of Ulysses, they must be sought for not among either French or Russian revolutionists, but in the persons of such sound Tories as Sir Edward Carson and such sound patriots as Mr. Lloyd George. It is tolerably certain that neither Ulysses nor Shakespeare foresaw Sir Edward Carson's escapades or Mr. Lloyd George's insubordinate career as a member of Mr. Asquith's Cabinet. But how admirably they sum up all the wild statesmanship of these later days in lines which Mr. Whibley, accountably enough, fails to quote:

They tax our policy, and call it cowardice;
Count wisdom as no member of the war;

ΙΟ

Forestall prescience, and esteem no act
But that of hand; the still and mental parts—
That do contrive how many hands shall strike,
When fitness calls them on, and know, by measure
Of their observant toil, the enemies' weight-
Why, this hath not a finger's dignity.

They call this bed-work, mappery, closet-war :
So that the ram, that batters down the wall,
For the great swing and rudeness of his poise,
They place before his hand that made the engine,
Or those that with the fineness of their souls
By reason guide his execution.

There is not much in the moral of this speech to bring balm to the soul of the author of the Letters of an Englishman.

Mr. Whibley is not content, unfortunately, with having failed to grasp the point of Troilus and Cressida. He blunders with equal assiduity in regard to Coriolanus. He treats this play, not as a play about Coriolanus, but as a pamphlet in favour of Coriolanus. He has not been initiated, it seems, into the first secret of imaginative literature, which is that one may portray a hero sympathetically without making believe that his vices are virtues. Shakespeare no more endorses Coriolanus's patrician pride than he endorses Othello's jealousy or Macbeth's murderous ambition. Shakespeare was concerned with painting noble natures, not with pandering to their vices. He makes us sympathize with Coriolanus in his heroism, in his sufferings, in his return to his better nature, in his death; but from Shakespeare's point of view, as from most men's, the Nietzschean arrogance which led Coriolanus to become a traitor to his city is a theme for sadness, not (as apparently with Mr. Whibley) for enthusiasm. Shakespeare, cries Mr. Whibley, as he quotes some of Coriolanus's antipopular speeches, "will not let the people off. He pursues it with an irony of scorn." "There in a few lines," he writes of other speeches, "are expressed the external folly and shame of democracy. Ever committed to the worse cause, the people has not even the courage of its own

opinions." It would be interesting to know whether in Mr. Whibley's eyes Coriolanus's hatred of the people is a sufficiently splendid virtue to cover his guilt in becoming a traitor. That good Tories have the right to become traitors was a gospel preached often enough in regard to the Ulster trouble before the war. It may be doubted, however, whether Shakespeare was sufficiently a Tory to foresee the necessity of such a gospel in Coriolanus. Certainly, the mother of Coriolanus, who was far from being a Radical, or even a mild Whig, preached the very opposite of the gospel of treason. She warned Coriolanus that his triumph over Rome would be a traitor's triumph, that his name would be "dogg'd with curses," and that his character would be summed up in history in one fatal sentence:

The man was noble,

But with his last attempt he wiped it out,

Destroyed his country, and his name remains
To the ensuing age abhorr'd.

Mr. Whibley appears to loathe the mass of human beings so excessively that he does not quite realize the enormity (from the modern point of view) of Coriolanus's crime. It would, I agree, be foolish to judge Coriolanus too scrupulously from a modern point of view. But Mr. Whibley has asked us to accept the play as a tract for the times, and we must examine it as such in order to discover what Mr. Whibley means.

But, after all, Mr. Whibley's failure as a portrait-painter is a failure of the spirit even more than of the intellect. A narrow spirit cannot comprehend a magnanimous spirit, and Mr. Whibley's imagination does not move in that large Shakespearean world in which illustrious men salute their mortal enemies in immortal sentences of praise after the manner of

He was the noblest Roman of them all.

The author who is capable of writing Mr. Whibley's character-study of Fox does not understand enough about the