Thoughts and After-thoughts

often truer to life than the actual man who ate and drank, and woke and slept, and hoped and feared, and loved and hated. Yet Shakespeare is always impersonal and impartial in the drawing of his characters. His own predilections are never forced upon the listener. To each he gives the vices of his virtues and the virtues of his vices. It is this daring blending of the good and the bad that gives to his characters that truth which the courageous and inspired artist alone is capable of breathing into them. History rarely gives us the true man-it often merely records his actions without revealing to us the motives which inform those actions; but the poet reveals through the Röntgen rays of his genius the hidden depths of the inner man. It is possible to conceive, therefore, that the King Richard and the King John of Shakespeare were more true to life than were the counterfeit presentments of historysubject as these records are to the misrepresentations of flatterers and detractors, and subject as are the individuals themselves to self-deception and hypocrisy. Autobiographies are seldom selfrevelations. Even Mr. Pepys' candour was probably not intended for posthumous consumption. It may, then, truly be said that the creatures of the poet's imagination are our most intimate friends rather than the men and women among whom we move; and that we win from the perusal of the

characters so faithfully drawn a greater insight into our common humanity than can be gained from the snapshots of everyday life. When we study Shakespeare to his depths, we find in his works the key to the myriad cells of the human heart. The longer we look into the mirror which he holds up to us, the more luminously do we see the reflection of ourselves in infinite variety.

FINAL AFTER-THOUGHT

As Homer's songs were immortalised through being sung by father to son, by lover to lover, so does Shakespeare's spirit live not in the printed tomes alone, nor in the musty volumes which hold the countless comments of literary pedants-it lives most triumphantly (I am so bold as to assert) in his irresponsible heirs, Shakespeare's love-children, who sing his songs to each succeeding generation in its own voice, and will yet carry his message to states unborn in accents yet unknown.

As it is the player's chiefest joy to speak the poet's words upon the stage, so is it his high privilege to trace upon the poet's abiding monument his own fleeting name. This modest ambition is my book's apology.