'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.
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