he noble or imaginative handling of
Commonplace. Shakespeare may at first seem an example to the contrary;
and indeed is it not a standing marvel that the greatest writer of a
nation that is distinguished among all nations for the pharisaism,
puritanism, and unimaginative narrowness of its judgments on conduct and
type of character, should be paramount over all writers for the breadth,
maturity, fulness, subtlety, and infinite variousness of his conception
of human life and nature? One possible answer to the perplexity is that
the puritanism does not go below the surface in us, and that Englishmen
are not really limited in their view by the too strait formulas that are
supposed to contain their explanations of the moral universe. On this
theory the popular appreciation of Shakespeare is the irrepressible
response of the hearty inner man to a voice, in which he recognises the
full note of human nature, and those wonders of the world which are not
dreamt of in his professed philosophy. A more obvious answer than this
is that Shakespeare's popularity with the many is not due to those finer
glimpses that are the very essence of all poetic delight to the few, but
to his thousand other magnificent attractions, and above all, after his
skill as a pure dramatist and master of scenic interest and situation,
to the lofty or pathetic setting with which he vivifies, not the
subtleties or refinements, but the commonest and most elementary traits
of the commonest and most elementary human moods. The few with minds
touched by nature or right cultivation to the finer issues, admire the
supreme genius which takes some poor Italian tale, with its coarse plot
and gross personages, and shooting it through with threads of variegated
meditation, produces a masterpiece of penetrative reflection and high
pensive suggestion as to the deepest things and most secret parts of the
life of men. But to the general these finer threads are indiscernible.
What touches them in the Shakesperean poetry, and most rightly touches
them and us all, are topics eternally old, yet of eternal freshness, the
perennial truisms of the grave and the bride-chamber, of shifting
fortune, of the surprises of destiny, and the emptiness of the answered
vow. This is the region in which the poet wins his widest if not his
hardest triumphs, the region of the noble Commonplace.

A writer dealing with such matters as principally occupied Macaulay,
has not the privilege of resort