feather, even if it be from an angelic wing.  Only the slime is at the bottom of a pool; the sky is on the surface.  We see this in that very typical process, the Germanising of Shakespeare.  I do not complain of the Germans forgetting that Shakespeare was an Englishman.  I complain of their forgetting that Shakespeare was a man; that he had moods, that he made mistakes, and, above all, that he knew his art was an art and not an attribute of deity.  That is what is the matter with the Germans; they cannot “ring fancy’s knell”; their knells have no gaiety.  The phrase of Hamlet about “holding the mirror up to nature” is always quoted by such earnest critics as meaning that art is nothing if not realistic.  But it really means (or at least its author really thought) that art is nothing if not artificial.  Realists, like other barbarians, really believe the mirror; and therefore break the mirror.  Also they leave out the phrase “as ’twere,” which must be read into every remark of Shakespeare, and especially every remark of Hamlet.  What I mean by believing the mirror, and breaking it, can be recorded in one case I remember; in which a realistic critic quoted German authorities to prove that Hamlet had a particular psycho-pathological abnormality, which is admittedly nowhere mentioned in the play.  The critic was bewitched; he was thinking of Hamlet as a real man, with a background behind him three dimensions deep—­which does not exist in a looking-glass.  “The best in this kind are but shadows.”  No German commentator has ever made an adequate note on that.  Nevertheless, Shakespeare was an Englishman; he was nowhere more English than in his blunders; but he was nowhere more successful than in the description of very English types of character.  And if anything is to be said about Hamlet, beyond what Shakespeare has said about him, I should say that Hamlet was an Englishman too.  He was as much an Englishman as he was a gentleman, and he had the very grave weaknesses of both characters.  The chief English fault, especially in the nineteenth century, has been lack of decision, not only lack of decision in action, but lack of the equally essential decision in thought—­which some call dogma.  And in the politics of the last century, this English Hamlet, as we shall see, played a great part, or rather refused to play it.

There were, then, two elements in the German influence; a sort of pretty playing with terror and a solemn recognition of terrorism.  The first pointed to elfland, and the second to—­shall we say, Prussia.  And by that unconscious symbolism with which all this story develops, it was soon to be dramatically tested, by a definite political query, whether what we really respected was the Teutonic fantasy or the Teutonic fear.