The

way which from this dead and dark abode
Leads up to God,

A way where you might tread the Sun, and be
More bright than he.

But as I did their madness so discusse

One whisper'd thus,

This Ring the Bride-groome did for none provide
But for his bride."

That vast numbers have so believed is only another symptom of the ludicrous conceit of men, who actually deny a future beyond death to the sinless and life-intoxicated birds and beasts, while complacently assuming it for their muddled and systematized selves.

I hardly think that the pundits of mysticism have led the revulsion of the age against an over-blown materialism. The process must be intellectual and not sentimental. True mysticism is something very different from a lisping simplicity or a perfervid vagueness sometimes tempted to "fiddling harmonics on the sensual string." But I fancy I hear you dryly remark that this new preoccupation of literature with mystical truth, simply as a matter of subject, is of little enough integral value. How it is going to serve social or literary ends, you cannot imagine. Nor can I, but I prefer to hope that it will.

Consider genius for a moment (in all irrelevance) in its relation to the Elizabethans. The phenomenon is not that of an unusual number of inspired men herded by chance into a little pen of time, but that of a society, a community, almost a nation of genius. A London householder, who has succeeded in cultivating a sunflower in his back garden, is gratified but not bewildered. But if

he looks out of his window one morning and sees the neighbouring common pressed down and running over with sunflowers, as though the sun had descended and taken to his majesty a bride, he will gape. That the Elizabethans laid the foundations of an imperial destiny and all the rest of it is regrettable. But, after all, these things are trifles compared with the miracle of this flowering of the mustard tree. There is the still more remarkable example of the cathedrals of the Middle Ages built by the collective inspiration of Tom, Dick and Harry. Of course there are historical explanations, and the whining schoolboy is familiar with them. But the historian cannot encompass this inspiration. It is no superstition that it transcends rational argument and hypothesis Some extraordinarily consonant readjustments and recombinations of intellectual substances took place—and lo, Shakespeare was, the Authorized Version of the Bible was. Remember that for the moment I am dealing with the metaphysics of genius itself, not with the results. The fact that the Elizabethan inspiration took a secular course and that the religious literature of the earlier time was notably deficient in any attribute except that of dullness, does not affect the point. Genius is always irrational, whatever its utterance and whatever sublunary pains and labour are necessary for giving it utterance. The earthly visitation of genius is of vital moment to any discussion of metaphysics.

I have long thought that a metaphysical study of Shakespeare, probing even deeper than Coleridge and Professor Bradley, was needed in England. After all, what a remarkable thing it is that practically nothing is known of the life of Shakespeare. Even the work of Sir

Sidney Lee, the least diaphanous and fantastic of the existing lives as it is, is based not on fact but on inference, conjecture, reasonable supposition, and analogy. The Baconians, were they not confronted by their universalist's own goose-step in verse, might be allowed a case. Yet why should Shakespeare's life be so crowned with the cap of darkness? He was not a Stratford recluse; he lived and wrote well within the circumference of London literary activity; he was patronized by the Court; he was a personal friend of Drayton and Ben Jonson; he collaborated with John Fletcher; he was a shareholder in the Globe; he was a country gentleman with the deeds. of his estate surviving; he left Mrs. Shakespeare his second best bed in his will. But as for any substantial evidence about his life-we know even less of him than of Massinger, whose two-worded epitaph celebrates the triumph of obscurity. That nobody bothered to write about him only partly explains it. We know a great deal about Chaucer.

Then again, look at some of his characters. Is Iago a man? Is Hamlet a man? Is Lear a man? Aie they even supermen? No, they are metaphysical entities, anthropomorphic shapes, representations of incomprehensible, imponderable forces. Call me if you will, a thing I detest -a dabbler in the occult. I still maintain that there is something transcendental about Shakespeare; something outstepping and excelling common experience. Even a certain commonplaceness about him, his often vulgar prejudice (I do not refer here to his contempt of the mob-in which, to my mind, he was perfectly right: the mob or the man in the street is always the bulwark of corruption and despotism in high places), his habits of

bombast and pot-boiling, his loose artistic conscience, his business eye glistening for the main chance, throw into relief and contrast the surpassing beauty of his best work, as though he wrote it not only as a conscious but a subconscious artist. All art, of course, works through this subconscious experience, and it is one of the uses of tradition that it is gathered up subconsciously by the artist. But the example of Shakespeare throws the whole thing into dazzling illumination.

Or take the Bible. Granted that the versions published before 1611 provided the translators with a stock of idiomatic phrase, literary feeling, and well-directed industry of which they made every use. Granted that the conditions and environment in which they laboured were of unique advantage. Granted that the English language at the beginning of the seventeenth century was at its maturest development, highly cultivated and yet free on the other hand from the cliché of eld and overpractice, and on the other from the necessary but wasteful and clumsy experiments of an archaic past. Granted the fresh and spontaneous enthusiasm for the classics; granted the value of rhythmic divisions in the text, which imposed a healthy restraint upon the vicious Elizabethan habit of cumbering a sentence with shapeless, graceless, convoluted paragraphs, and punctuating its mazy windings with a dust-storm of commas.

For all that the miracle (there is no other word for it) of the Authorized Version-the prose work whose perfection is unique in any language and in any epoch—was accomplished by a company, a committee of learned divines, unofficered by a personality of literary genius and none of whose other work approached within conti

nents of it in literary quality. The Elizabethans were notable collaborators, and half a dozen of them could turn out a creditable play. But forty-seven scholarsof whom only a few are known at all, and one onlyAndrewes-to fame-who are they to issue a masterpiece which "lives in the ear like a music that can never be forgotten," whose "felicities seem to be almost things instead of words "; which "is a part of the national mind and the anchor of national seriousness"?"The memory of the dead passes into it; the potent traditions of childhood are stereotyped in its verses; the power of all the griefs and trials of a man is hidden beneath its words."

As if this were not an oddity enough—we have another company, another committee in method and constitution not unlike the conquering forty-seven. I refer to the egregious authors of the Revised Version, the theological pirates, who commandeered the Authorized Version and "emended it " with their hatchets and choppers. Saintsbury (a virile, genuine critic, whatever his style) points out that these children of Attila made "the pedantic substitution of 'mirror' for 'glass"" in the first Epistle to the Corinthians, "it having apparently occurred to some wiseacre that glass was not known to the ancients, or at least used for mirrors. Had this wiseacre had the slightest knowledge of English literature, a single title of Gascoigne's 'The Steel Glass' would have dispensed him at once from any attempt at emendation; but this is ever and always the way of the sciolist." "Steel glass," I may add, also occurs in Hackluyt.

But I must pull up my steeds, ere they clothe their necks with thunder, ere they go on to meet the armed