ived before organized religious dissent had developed a new
type of character among the weaker brethren. But the Low Church
Protestant, whom Shakespeare certainly knew, is not very different from
the evangelical dissenter of later days; and he did not interest
Shakespeare.

My own impression is that Shakespeare had a free and happy childhood,
and grew up without much check from his elders. It is the child who sees
hypocrites. These preposterous grown-up people, who, if they are
well-mannered, do not seem to enjoy their food, who are fussy about
meaningless employments, and never give way to natural impulses, must
surely assume this veil of decorum with intent to deceive. Charles
Dickens was hard driven in his childhood, and the impressions that were
then burnt into him governed all his seeing. The creative spirit in him
transformed his sufferings into delight; but he never outgrew them; and,
when he died, the eyes of a child were closed upon a scene touched, it
is true, here and there with rapturous pleasure, rich in oddity, and
trembling with pathos, but, in the main, as bleak and unsatisfying as
the wards of a workhouse. The intense emotions of his childhood made the
usual fervours of adolescence a faint thing in the comparison, and if
you want to know how lovers think and feel you do not go to Dickens to
tell you. You go to Shakespeare, who put his childhood behind him, so
that he almost forgot it, and ran forward to seize life with both hands.
He sometimes looked back on children, and saw them through the eyes of
their elders. Dickens saw men and women as they appear to children.

This comparison suggests a certain lack of sympathy or lack of
understanding in those who are quick to see hypocrisy in others. In
Dickens lack of sympathy was a fair revenge; moreover, his hypocrites
amused him so much that he did not wish to understand them. What a loss
it would have been to the world if he had explained them away! But it is
difficult, I think, to see a hypocrite in a man whose intimacy you have
cultivated, whose mind you have entered into, as Shakespeare entered
into the mind of his creatures. Hypocrisy, in its ordinary forms, is a
superficial thing--a skin disease, not a cancer. It is not easy, at
best, to bring the outward and inward relations of the soul into perfect
harmony; a hypocrite is one who too readily consents to their
separation. The English, for I am ready now to return to my point, are a
people of a divi