Page:Hutcheson Macaulay Posnett - Comparative Literature (1886).djvu/51

 clown appears in Cleopatra's Alexandria, why not dismiss the anachronism with a smile? Because to do so would be to accept false views of human nature and of dramatic art; because the historical critic cannot forget that he who mistakes the social life of a group must misinterpret the characters of its individual units, that he who Londonises the public life of the Roman plebs is sure to Christianise or feudalise the private relations, feelings, thoughts of the Roman wife and mother and son and father. We are told by critics who should know better that "Shakspere is profoundly faithful to Roman life and character;" and the most accurate historian will scarcely dislodge the notion that the great dramatist's English "histories" are altogether correct descriptions of the individual and social characters of their times and places. But this shallow universalism is merely a last resource of subjective critics whose method—at least in the hands of such an extremist as Coleridge—is almost as fatal to true historical science as the Moslem belief that the language and ideas of their Bible came direct from God Himself. In opposition to all such critics, we are prepared to maintain not only that Shakspere's historical characters are often highly inaccurate, but that attempts of the kind, if they are to be dramatically successful, must be inaccurate; that the inaccuracy results from the most profound truth about literary and all human ideas—their limitation or relativity; and that the subjective critics are not only mistaken in their views of individual character, through overlooking the social, but that they have failed to grasp the real conditions of dramatic art.

§ 10. The dramatist draws his characters of men and women not for himself, not to be visible only to his own eyes, or to eyes as penetrating as his own, but to live and move and have their being in the sympathies and