it.

Therefore I'll none of it. Honour is a mere scutcheon; and so ends my catechism.

Manifestly it would not be safe to quote either Hamlet or Falstaff as expressing Shakespeare's views.

However, there are, here and there, passages which show deep and wide, if not systematic, thinking; glimpses, merely, like the glimpses of character and psychology, but glimpses of infinity. So Lear, shut out by his daughters on the heath, in the storm, soliloquizes:

Poor naked wretches, wheresoe'er you are,
That bide the pelting of this pitiless storm,
How shall your houseless heads and unfed sides,
Your loop'd and window'd raggedness, defend you
From seasons such as these? O, I have ta 'en
Too little care of this! Take physic, pomp;
Expose thyself to feel what wretches feel,
That thou mayst shake the superflux to them
And show the heavens more just.

Thus Lear reveals not only the essential goodness of his own nature, but also the fact that Shakespeare himself was passionately aware of the injustice of the universe. Macbeth, planning the murder of Duncan, meditates upon the inevitability of the punishment of sin:

If it were done when 'tis done, then 'twere well
It were done quickly. If the assassination
Could trammel up the consequence, and catch
With his surcease success; that but this blow
Might be the be-all and the end-all here,

But here, upon this bank and shoal of time,
We'd jump the life to come. But in these cases
We still have judgment here, that we but teach
Bloody instructions, which, being taught, return
To plague the inventor. This even-handed justice
Commends the ingredients of our poison'd chalice
To our own lips.

Finally, in Hamlet's dying request to Horatio, Shakespeare sums up, or suggests, a whole conception of this life and of the life to come:

If ever thou dost hold me in thy heart,

Absent thee from felicity a while

And in this harsh world draw thy breath in pain
To tell my story.

These impassioned comments on life are never present for their own sakes merely. They are the sincere utterances of great personalities under the stress of strong emotions. They spring from the dramatic situation of the moment; their purpose is not to edify us, not to "improve the occasion," but rather to heighten for us the emotional effect of the scene, to move us with pity or with terror, to give us, in a word, pleasure of the deepest and highest sort. For again in these comments on life, as in characters, emotions, and plot, it is effectiveness that Shakespeare aims at, effectiveness of play as play, whether for the hearer or the reader. He was adept, not in scientific management, but in artistic management, of all the means at his disposal.

Shakespeare, Monsieur Pellissier admits, was a great poet. Everybody, I suppose, will agree with him. The passages that I have ventured to quote are perhaps sufficient illustration of his mastery of the mere music of words, of the marvelous suggestiveness of his figures, of his exquisite felicity of diction. Many of his phrases have passed into the language as final perfection of expression of the ideas they convey. With no poet do you get an impression of more masterful ease in the handling of his verse; it was manifestly for him a perfectly natural, as well as a delightful, means of expression. All the more wonderful, then, is the fact that there is so little mere poetry in his plays. Shakespeare's poetic gift itself is scarcely more marvelous than his restraint in the use of it. The temptation must have been enormous, how enormous one can see from the fact that he does, now and then, yield to it, even at the height of his powers. In Hamlet, for example, when the Queen tells Laertes that his sister is drowned, "Drown'd! O, where?" Laertes asks unnaturally enough, clearly to

introduce the Queen's poetic but inappropriate description of the place:

There is a willow grows aslant a brook

That shows his hoar leaves in the glassy stream.
There with fantastic garlands did she come
Of crow-flowers, nettles, daisies, and long purples;
There on the pendant boughs her coronet weeds
Clamb'ring to hang, an envious sliver broke,
When down her weedy trophies and herself
Fell in the weeping brook.

So again in Much Ado, when Ursula and Hero begin the talk which, it is intended, Beatrice shall overhear, Ursula is gratuitously poetic:

The pleasant 'st angling is to see the fish

Cut with her golden oars the silver stream.

But, in his greater plays, Shakespeare seldom sins in this way. There are not many lines of poetry that do not justify their existence by their dramatic value; they express character or emotion; they carry forward the plot. Here, then, is one more reason why we delight in Shakespeare. Anyone who has watched the preparation of a play knows how difficult it is to deal with mere poetry, to render it with animation and variety, to prevent its becoming for the audience merely dull and monotonous. Shakespeare, clearly, was well aware of this danger and restrained his own genius to increase our pleasure-artistic management, again.

And so, through every phase of Shakespeare's work, through the characters, through their emotions, through what they do and what they suffer, through their comments on life and through the poetry they speak, it is universal and abiding human interest that has worked its magic spell for three centuries, that charms us today, that will captivate those who follow us for many years to come.

THE SPIRIT OF HEGEL'S PHILOSOPHY.

J. LOEWENBERG

I suppose you all know the oft-repeated tale about Hegel -attributed to other philosophers as well-who, when a student after a lecture once asked him to explain the meaning of a certain proposition, replied: "When I uttered this proposition, there were two who could understand it, God and myself, and now there is but one, and he won't tell." A story of this sort throws aspersion not only on the intelligibilty of the philosophy of Hegel, but on that of philosophy in general. The popular mind, especially, receives such anecdotes, whether true or not, with great relish, for they sum up its habitual attitude towards philosophic problems. With regard to Hegel, it is one of the great traditional superstitions, not only among the general public, but also among philosophical students and philosophical literature, that Hegel's philosophy is essentially obscure, unintelligible, and puzzling. Now it is true that Hegel's philosophy offers indeed many perplexities and difficulties and puzzles to the technical student; and how could it be otherwise with a new theory which went out to slay the logic on which, as James said, "since Aristotle, all Europe has been brought up"? Nevertheless, the general spirit of Hegelianism should be clear and intelligible to anyone who is at all capable of reflection. It is due in a large measure to Hegel's obscure language, determined by the novelty of his problems, and

to the still obscurer language of philosophic textbooks from which altogether too many obtain their sole wisdom about Hegel, that the obscurity and the unintelligibility of the meaning of the Hegelian problems themselves have become such a wide-spread conviction. But if one takes the trouble to isolate the spirit of Hegel's philosophy from its letter, if one tries to re-word its most general and central thought in simple and plain expressions, one marvels at the clearness and directness of its meaning.

What is the meaning of Hegel's philosophy? The simplest way to approach an appreciation of its spirit is through a consideration of the well-known concepts of permanence and change. Permanence and change are the most fundamental and most profound distinction in life and in thought. Life and nature offer abundant examples of both; there is the tragedy of permanence and there is the tragedy of change, and both have been sufficiently emphasized in poetry and in religion. The thought that there is nothing new under the sun, and that what is and shall be has been from eternity, and the thought that we are but "fair creatures of an hour" in a world of change and chance both are equally depressing. The difference between permanence and change as a temperamental difference is very familiar. Who does not count among his friends the two types of people-the "static" and the "dynamic" types? Who is not familiar with the lover of the permanent things, the lover of the mountains, the rocks, and the conservative political party? It is the old-time religion, the old-time friends, the oldtime books, the old-time traditions he is loyal to. The restless sea and the changes of the seasons depress him. New things-the New Thought, the New Woman, the New Party-he abhors. Methodical in his work, regular in his conduct, stubborn in his opinions, phlegmatic in his feelings, unwavering in his motives and principles such is his character.

Contrast with this the dynamic type, the person of