Even the English fanatic escaped his intelligence; his Jack Cade,
as I have already noticed, is a wretched caricature; no Cade moves his
fellows save by appealing to the best in them, to their sense of
justice, or what they take for justice. The Cade who will wheedle men
for his own gross ambitions may make a few dupes, but not thousands of
devoted followers. These elementary truths Shakespeare never understood.
Yet how much greater he would have been had he understood them; had he
studied even one Puritan lovingly and depicted him sympathetically. For
the fanatic is one of the hinges which swing the door of the modern
world. Shakespeare's "universal sympathy"--to quote Coleridge--did not
include the plainly-clad tub-thumper who dared to accuse him to his face
of serving the Babylonish Whore. Shakespeare sneered at the Puritan
instead of studying him; with the result that he belongs rather to the
Renaissance than to the modern world, in spite even of his Hamlet. The
best of a Wordsworth or a Turgenief is outside him; he would never have
understood a Marianna or a Bazarof, and the noble faith of the sonnet to
"Toussaint l'Ouverture" was quite beyond him.
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