uote him.

Has it occurred to you, gentle reader, to note how "Protestant" this
New Artistic Movement is? Shakespeare, in his aesthetic method, as
well as in his piety, had a Catholic soul. In truth, the hour has
arrived when a "Renaissance" of the free spirit of Poetry in Drama is
required. Why must this monstrous shadow of the Hyperborean
Ibsen go on darkening the play-instinct in us, like some ugly,
domineering John Knox? I suspect that there are many generous
Rabelaisian souls who could lift our mortal burden with oceanic
merriment, only the New Movement frightens them. They are afraid
they would not be "Greek" enough--or "Scandinavian" enough.
Meanwhile the miserable populace have to choose between
Babylonian Pantomimes and Gaelic Mythology, if they are not
driven, out of a kind of spite, into the region of wholesome
"domestic sunshine."

What, in our hearts, we natural men desire is to be delivered at one
blow from the fairies with weird names (so different from poor
Titania!), and from the three-thousand "Unities!" What "poetry" we
do get is so vague and dim and wistful and forlorn that it makes us
want to go out and "buy clothes" for someone. We veer between the
abomination of city-reform and the desolation of Ultima Thule.

But Shakespeare is Shakespeare still. O those broken and gasped-out
human cries, full of the old poignancy, full of the old enchantment!
Shakespeare's poetry is the extreme opposite of any "cult." It is the
ineffable expression, in music that makes the heart stop, of the
feelings which have stirred every Jack and Jill among us, from the
beginning of the world! It has the effect of those old "songs" of the
countryside that hit the heart in us so shrewdly that one feels as
though the wind had made them or the rain or the wayside grass; for
they know too much of what we tell to none! It is the "one touch of
Nature." And how they break the rules, these surpassing lines, in
which the emotions of his motley company gasp themselves away!

It is not so much in the great speeches, noble as these are, as in the
brief, tragic cries and broken stammerings, that his unapproachable
felicity is found. "Upon such sacrifices, my Cordelia, the gods
themselves throw incense." Thick and fast they crowd upon our
memory, these little sentences, these aching rhythms! It is with the
flesh and blood of the daily Sacrifice of our common endurance that
he celebrates his strange Mass. Hands that "smell of mortalit