of transmuting the recognized materials for happiness into living human joy?  Even these questions he would not have been content to handle in high philosophic fashion; he would have insisted on instances, and would have subscribed to no code that is not carefully built out of case-law.  He knew that sanity is in the life of the senses; and that if there are some philosophers who are not mad it is because they live a double life, and have consolations and resources of which their books tell you nothing.  It is the part of their life which they do not think it worth their while to mention that would have interested Shakespeare.  He loves to reduce things to their elements.  ‘Is man no more than this?’ says the old king on the heath, as he gazes on the naked madman.  ’Consider him well.  Thou owest the worm no silk, the beast no hide, the sheep no wool, the cat no perfume.  Ha! here’s three of us are sophisticated!  Thou art the thing itself:  unaccommodated man is no more but such a poor, bare, forked animal as thou art.  Off, off, you lendings!’ That is how Shakespeare lays the mind of man bare, and strips him of his pretences, to try if he be indeed noble.  And he finds that man, naked and weak, hunted by misfortune, liable to all the sins and all the evils that follow frailty, still has faith left to him, and charity.  King Lear is still every inch a king.

That is not a little discovery, for when his mind came to grips with human life Shakespeare did not deal in rhetoric; so that the good he finds is real good—­’’tis in grain; ‘twill endure wind and weather’.  Nothing is easier than to make a party of humanity, and to exalt mankind by ignorantly vilifying the rest of the animal creation, which is full of strange virtues and abilities.  Shakespeare refused that way; he saw man weak and wretched, not able to maintain himself except as a pensioner on the bounty of the world, curiously ignorant of his nature and his destiny, yet endowed with certain gifts in which he can find sustenance and rest, brave by instinct, so that courage is not so much his virtue as cowardice is his lamentable and exceptional fault, ready to forget his pains or to turn them into pleasures by the alchemy of his mind, quick to believe, and slow to suspect or distrust, generous and tender to others, in so far as his thought and imagination, which are the weakest things about him, enable him to bridge the spaces that separate man from man, willing to make of life a great thing while he has it, and a little thing when he comes to lose it.  These are some of his gifts; and Shakespeare would not have denied the saying of a thinker with whom he has no very strong or natural affinity, that ’the greatest of these is charity’.