New institutions do not flourish in England.  The town is a comparatively modern innovation; it has never, so to say, caught on.  Most schemes of town-planning are schemes for pretending that you live in the country.  This is one of the most persistent of our many hypocrisies.  Wherever working people inhabit a street of continuous red-brick cottages, the names that they give to their homes are one long catalogue of romantic lies.  The houses have no gardens, and the only prospect that they command is the view of over the way.  But read their names—­The Dingle, The Elms, Pine Grove, Windermere, The Nook, The Nest.  Even social pretence, which is said to be one of our weaknesses, and which may be read in such names as Belvoir or Apsley House, is less in evidence than the Englishman’s passion for the country.  He cannot bear to think that he lives in a town.  He does not much respect the institutions of a town.  A policeman, before he has been long in the force, has to face the fact that he is generally regarded as a comic character.  The police are Englishmen and good fellows, and they accept a situation which would rouse any continental gendarme to heroic indignation.  Mayors, Aldermen, and Justices of the Peace are comic, and take it not quite so well.  Beadles were so wholly dedicated to the purposes of comedy that I suppose they found their position unendurable and went to earth; at any rate it is very difficult to catch one in his official costume.

All this is reflected in Shakespeare.  He knew the country, and he knew the town; and he has not left it in doubt which was the cherished home of his imagination.  He preferred the fields to the streets, but the Arcadia of his choice is not agricultural or even pastoral; it is rather a desert island, or the uninhabited stretches of wild and woodland country.  Indeed, he has both described it and named it.  ’Where will the old Duke live?’ says Oliver in As You Like It.  ’They say he is already in the forest of Arden,’ says Charles the wrestler, ’and a many merry men with him; and there they live like the old Robin Hood of England.  They say many young gentlemen flock to him every day, and fleet the time carelessly, as they did in the golden world.’  That is Shakespeare’s Arcadia; and who that has read As You Like It will deny that it breathes the air of Paradise?

It is quite plain that the freedom that Shakespeare valued was in fact freedom, not any of those ingenious mechanisms to which that name has been applied by political theorists.  He thought long and profoundly on the problems of society; and anarchy has no place among his political ideals.  It is by all means to be avoided—­at a cost.  But what harm would anarchy do if it meant no more than freedom for all the impulses of the enlightened imagination and the tender heart?  The ideals of his heart were not political; and when he indulges himself, as he did in his latest plays, you must look for him in the wilds; whether on the road near the shepherd’s