class="pgmonospaced">     * Midsummer's Night's Dream.

     ** We are neither recommending nor condemning Shakespeare's
     attitude toward the question of another life, but simply
     endeavoring to represent it.

Nothing is so certain and so effective in Shakespeare as his criticism of the ways of Providence. When Othello, for instance, awakens to a sense of his irreparable loss—when the pity of Desdemona's death, like the incoming tide of the sea, sweeps over him and takes his breath away, he gasps out these significant words with his eyes searching the abysses of space over his head: "Methinks there should now be a huge eclipse of sun and moon, and the affrighted earth should yawn at altercation." He can not understand how "any God" could look down with unmoistened eyes upon such a tragedy. What does God do with his powers if he will not interfere to save men such as Othello from committing ignorantly so heinous a crime? Again he stammers out, "Are there no stones in heaven but what serve for the thunder?" Is God only a spectacular being? Is all he can do to thunder in the clouds and dazzle with his lightning? Where is the God of help? Is he real? Does he exist?

To make effective this indifference or helplessness of the gods, Shakespeare contrasts their stolid unconcern with human sympathy. Emelia, the wife of the man who poisoned Othello's mind, breaks into a heart-rending lamentation when she learns of the death of her innocent mistress, which shames the silent and tearless gods:

I'll kill myself for grief,

she sobs as she sees stretched at her feet the victim of human folly and crime. How eloquent, and how melting are these words! She does not care to live if she can not protect innocence and virtue, beauty and goodness against hate and envy. And this from a woman whose character was not above reproach! How admirable is the seething passion in her human soul compared with the dumbness of the almighty gods!

By the mouth of another frail woman Shakespeare passes the same criticism upon the current conceptions of divine providence. When young Juliet learns that Romeo has killed her cousin, for which rash act he has been banished for life, thus blighting her dearest hopes, she cries:

Can Heaven be so envious?

Later on, when her own parents persecute her and drive her to a desperate experiment with death, and all for the purpose of wresting a little happiness out of life, she exclaims:

Is there no pity sitting in the clouds?

Finally, when all her hopes are turned to ashes, and she realizes the bitterness of her fate, she sobs:

"Alack, alack that Heaven should practice such stratagems upon so soft a subject as myself."

This is a strong criticism of the popular fancy of a "Father in Heaven" who broods over his children as a hen over her young. Unlike the preachers of the conventional faiths, Shakespeare sought to divest people's minds of dreams and fairy stories, that they may learn to cope with reality. This is the answer to the charge that the critic takes away people's comfort when he takes away their "religion." On the contrary, he helps them to replace the shadow with the substance. Men will do more for themselves and their world if they realize that if they do not, no other power will. Man becomes a god when the place is vacated by the idols.

But if there is still any uncertainty about Shakespeare's religious philosophy, we recommend the careful perusal of the scene in Macbeth between Macduff, Malcolm and Rosse. The latter has just informed Macduff that the tyrant has put his entire household to death:

Macduff.—My children, too?

Rosse.—Wife, children, servants, all that could be found.

Macduff.—My wife killed too?

Rosse.—I have said.

Macduff.—All my pretty ones? Did you say all? * * *

All? What, all my pretty chickens, and their dam, at one

fell swoop?

Then follow these significant words of the bereaved and wronged husband:

Did Heaven look on,

And would not take their part?

No wonder the sentiment expressed in the above was considered blasphemous by early Christian critics of Shakespeare. To a believer in God's right to do as He pleases, and in man's duty to bow humbly and uncomplainingly to the hand that smites him, the question which Macduff asks is both impious and wicked, for he openly upbraids Providence for its non-interference, if he does not categorically deny its existence. It is not probable that an honest adherent or even respecter of the current religious teaching of his day could have penned so bold a protest against the popular faith. "Where," Shakespeare seems to ask, "is the Heavenly Father whose tender mercies are over all his children?" What does God do for man? In what sense would a mother and her children, foully murdered, have been worse off, if there had been no Providence? And in what way were they benefited by the existence of a Heavenly Father?

In this same play, the poet has once more described his ideal man, and there is more of the pagan about him than of the Christian. Living in a community which regarded faith as the greatest of virtues, without which no amount of moral excellence could avail anything, Shakespeare draws a picture of his saint which is the very antithesis of Christian ideals. Malcolm asks for the respect of his fellows for his character, not for his religion.

           Never was forsworn;

Scarcely have coveted what was mine own;

At no time broke my faith; would not betray

The devil to his fellow; and delight

No less in truth, than life.

The concluding line—and delight no less in truth than life—we have no hesitation in pronouncing as the most beautiful sentiment in Shakespeare. Malcolm says not a word about his Christian beliefs, without which "no one can be saved." Once more we call attention to the fact that there are in Shakespeare, as there are in Voltaire, nearly all the terms of church and creed, but the underlying philosophy of the poet is, if we may depend upon the above extracts and examples, unequivocally rationalistic. Shakespeare was a freethinker, in that he interrogates the popular faith about God, and the hereafter, and suggests an order of the universe which is the very negation of the supernatural. His indifference to the fundamentals of the Christian faith, then, is not due to the fact that he is not a preacher, as Gervinius suggests, nor because he preferred "nothing" to Christianity, as Santayana concludes, or because of his "tender and delicate reserve about holy things," as Charles Knight, one of the most enthusiastic admirers of Shakespeare suggests, but to his utter want of intellectual sympathy with the religious thought of his day, and to the fact that he had worked out a religion of his own, based on the natural virtues—an ethical religion of Humanity, with its commandments written, not on parchments, but in the blood of the race.

There is undoubtedly a religious atmosphere in Shakespeare, but it is the religion of the Good, the True, and the Beautiful; without dogma and without miracle, and as comprehensive, as true to nature, and as closely in harmony with the rationalistic interpretation of the universe as his own drama. Has not Goethe, in defining his own religion, defined also that of Shakespeare? "Man is born," writes Goethe, "not to solve the problem of the universe, but to find out where the problem begins, and then to restrain himself within the limits of the