If, in the name of honesty, you cease to distinguish
between what you are and what you would wish to be, between how you act
and how you would like to act, you are in some danger of reeling back
into the beast. It is true that man is an animal; and before long you
feel a glow of conscious virtue in proclaiming and illustrating that
truth. You scorn the hypocrisy of pretending to be better than you are,
and that very scorn fixes you in what you are. 'He that is unjust, let
him be unjust still; and he which is filthy, let him be filthy still.'
That is the epitaph on German honesty. I have drifted away from
Shakespeare, who knew nothing of the sea of troubles that England would
one day take arms against, and who could not know that on that day she
would outgo his most splendid praise and more than vindicate his
reverence and his affection. But Shakespeare is still so live a mind
that it is vain to try to expound him by selected texts, or to pin him
to a mosaic of quotations from his book. Often, if you seek to know what
he thought on questions which must have exercised his imagination, you
can gather it only from a hint dropped by accident, and quite
irrelevant.
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