For all the many pleasing
esthetic qualities you will find in it--dramatic inventiveness, humor
and pathos, eloquence, elfin glamor and the like--you must bless
the original author: of these things I have only the usufruct. To
me the play owes nothing but the stiffening of civistic conscience
that has been crammed in. Modest? Not a bit of it. It is my civistic
conscience that makes a man of me and (incidentally) makes this play
a masterpiece.
Nothing could have been easier for me (if I were some
one else) than to perform my task in that
God-rest-you-merry-gentlemen-may-nothing-you-dismay spirit which
so grossly flatters the sensibilities of the average citizen by its
assumption that he is sharp enough to be dismayed by what stares
him in the face. Charles Dickens had lucid intervals in which he was
vaguely conscious of the abuses around him; but his spasmodic efforts
to expose these brought him into contact with realities so agonising
to his highstrung literary nerves that he invariably sank back into
debauches of unsocial optimism. Even the Swan of Avon had his glimpses
of the havoc of displacement wrought by Elizabethan romanticism in the
social machine which had been working with tolerable smoothness under
the prosaic guidance of Henry 8.
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