THE UNIVERSAL ADVOCATE.

ON Shakespeare's day it is natural and permissible to ask: What is Shakespeare's greatest quality ? To such a question our reply would be : Advocacy—advocacy raised to the highest possible power, advocacy so sublimated that it rises to a height of almost Divine comprehension. Shakespeare sees all, under- stands all, and almost, though happily not quite, pardons all. To carry his advocacy to that point would be to court self-deception, and self-deception is a foundation upon which nothing great can ever be built. That Shakespeare never deliberately sat down to apologize for, or put the case for, this or that type of mankind, or to elucidate this or that element in human nature, we fully admit, He was, of course, in the first intention always a story-teller, and a story-teller under dramatic conditions. He set out to tell ot tha world and all its glory and of the men and women who move on its face, and to tell of them in terms of action. He was a dramatist, a playwright, before he was anything else. But the moment he began to create his characters the sense of justice that burned in him with so inextinguishable a flame, his warm love oi mankind, and his deep knowledge of the human heart made him the supreme advocate. There is no reason to believe that Shakespeare wan above the prejudices of his age, or that he had any liking for Jews, yet when he came to draw a picture of the Jew we see him com- pelled, as it were by some inner force, to put the case for the Jew usurer as well as it could possibly be put, and, what is more, to show the Jew where he is always at his best—in his domestic rela- tions. Nothing really moves Shyloek, not even the loss of him ducats, like the treason of his daughter to the charities of tin Jewish hearth—the domestic Holy of Holies. In words that are perhaps the most pathetic in all literature Shakespeare reminds se how Jewish ideals make the Jews the best of fathers and the be of husbands :-- " Shylock. Thou torturest me. Tubal ; it was my ta-quoise; I had it

of Leah when I was a bachelor : I would not have given it for a wilderness of monkeys."

The whole Hebrew way of life seems to be called into the circle by the magician's words.

Shylock may be the capital instance, but hundreds of other examples might be given where Shakespeare shows that the man arraigned at the bar of history or of morals is not the simple sinner that he first appears, but that there is something to be said on the other side. No matter how great the crime, how apparently plain the evidence or hopeless the defence, the universal advocate when he brings us in touch with the accused forces us to give him his rights even while we condemn him. There is something to be said even for Macbeth, though we admit it is said so allusively that, swept away as we are by the tide of horror, we are apt to ignore it. Macbeth, Shakespeare hints, is like a man blasted by the all-dreaded thunderstroke. If the "weird sisters" had not crossed his path, he might have remained an honest soldier. It is true that ambition had somewhat tainted his mind, but the microbe might easily have remained dormant in him as it remains dormant in thousands of ordinary men till Death " blows out their lights." It was just the evil chance that he crossed the blasted heath fresh from the exalta- tion of battle which was his undoing. We get in effect the only plea for mitigation of sentence that could in the circumstances be said for him, and said in the most skilful way. He owed his fall, it is suggested, not altogether to innate wickedness, but partly to ill-fortune.

In the case of Lady Macbeth the supreme advocate makes no attempt at defence. All he can do with her is to make her, at any rate, the most splendid criminal in the world. The only thing that can be said about her is that she is possessed by a kind of euper-insanity. Her appeal to the "sightless substances "—" you spirits that tend on mortal thoughts "—to unsex her suggests a depravity and aberration of mind which pass all bounds human and divine, and makes her fascinate even while she most repels. Though her counsel knows that it would be useless to pretend that she had any weaknesses of the kind which she saw in Macbeth when she told him that he "would not play false and yet wouldst wrongly win," he can at any rate, and does, save her from our contempt as the mere sordid murderess. If ever criminal was heroic, it is she. Very differently does Shakespeare treat the pure criminal like Iago. Here, indeed, counsel throws up his brief. There is nothing to be said for him except to suggest that he was like one of the brutal forces of Nature :—

" More fell than hunger, anguish, or the sea."

Shakespeare in his treatment of abstract subjects shows his universality, his sympathy of comprehension, his power of facing

the facts of the world as they are and not as he or we would like them to be. Take, for example, his incidental treatment of the problems of peace and war. In the case of a lesser man, but one who had all Shakespeare's milk of human kindness and intense humanity, we may feel sure that we should have found the subject treated in conventional terms. The poet would have written of it as if Peace were on a par with such ideas as those of Mercy and Justice. When Shakespeare comes to discuss what we now call Pacificism, he shows us by implication that peace is a relative term, and that we must not treat it as an absolute good. When Hamlet

and the Captain talk of the action which is to be taken by the expeditionary force sent by the King of Norway against the Polack, Hamlet takes the obvious point that men are not going to be so foolish as to fight for a tiny piece of ground which is of no real value

to any one :— " Hamlet. Why, then the Polack never will defend it. Captain. Yes, it is already garrisoned."

Then Hamlet catches fire and sees the true position. The wonder is not that men will fight over so insignificant a matter, but that the soldiers at the call of duty "go to their graves like beds."

Another example of the way in which Shakespeare will suddenly and as by a flash of lightning put the arguments for a particular view is contained in that strange scene in Cymbeline," in a British prison," in which Posthumus argues on death and the after life with the "First Gaoler." The First Gaoler tells Posthumus that he is to die, and is astounded at the prisoner's equanimity. On this Shakespeare slips in, as it were, the intellectual apology of the agnostic, not of course because he was himself an agnostic, but because it was his business to put forward the best case discoverable, not only for every man, but for every cause, good or bad :— "First Gaoler. Look you, sir, you know not which way you shall go. Posthamus. Yes, indeed do I, fellow.

First Gaoler. Your death has eyes in his head, then ; I have not seen him so pictured ; you must either be directed by some that take upon them to know, or do take upon yourself that which I am sure you do not know, or jump the after inquiry on your own peril ; and how you shall speed in your journey's end, I think you'll never return to tall one:'

It is characteristic that Shakespeare, having set out the case for the agnostic with such amazing zest and insight, does not leave it at that, but through the mouth of the drunken Posthumus gives us the true corrective :—

" I tell thee, fellow, there are none want eyes to direct them the way I am going, but such as wink and will not use them."

Though we do not want to say anything which will derogate from our plea that Shakespeare is the universal advocate, this turn of the dialogue makes us recognize how utterly false it is to suggest that Shakespeare had no views of his own, no convictions, but was merely an Aeolian harp upon which the winds of time and life could play any tune desired. Depend upon it, Shakespeare, though he did not set himself up to be a judge, never confused the right with. the wrong, never was an indifferentist, never thought that one man or one view was as good or as bad as another. What he wanted to do was to make us recognize things in their true proportions, to understand everything, and as far as he could to make the world see life steadily and see it whole. He did not want to murder or encourage murderers because he saw the murderer's case, to be a tyrant because he saw the case for authority, or to trample upon liberty because he was able to see the consequences of licence.

If we read Shakespeare as a whole and not in patches, it is absolutely impossible to come to any other conclusion than that he was always in the end on the side of truth, religion, and justice—was in the battle of life, to use his own phrase, "God's soldier." Bacon, in that strangest and most pedantic of all his essays, the essay on" Tho Regimen of Health," tells us that in the region of the body we ought to "vary and exchange contraries," "fasting and full eating," "watching and sleep," "sitting and exercise," but always "with an inclination to the more benign extreme." That seems to us the last word when we try to estimate Shakespeare's own opinions. He shows us life in every possible form, but when it comes to judgment he invariably leans to the benign extreme. He is always in the last resort on the side of what he might have called, nay, did call, "High Heaven."