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The Reading Of Shakespeare is enjoined upon all by Professor James M. Hoppin, as conducive to success in various walks of life. His recent little book, the title of which is found in the first four words of this paragraph, tells us that statesmen, political orators, preachers, essayists, journalists, authors, even poets, should speak only what they know and feel from the bases of fact and nature, with Shakespeare's real knowledge; and though they might not become Shakespeares, they would come nearer to him in the plain path he led, and nearer to truth and sources of power. And yet Mr. Bernard Shaw insists that, so far from being a guide to us in practical affairs, Shakespeare could not and would not grapple with reality; that to escape it he ran away and poeticized. Well, what is one man's reality is another man's moonshine. That view of things is real to us with which we are most familiar. As Mr. G. Lowes Dickinson observes in an article on Ibsen in The Independent Review, Shakespeare saw the world broadly, as AEschylus saw it. He saw man in antagonism with a power or fate stronger than himself, and he was fond of choosing such types (like Hamlet, Macbeth, Othello) as should emphasize this antagonism; although he could, and did, with his boundless sympathy and insight, create any kind of character in any sort of situation - a Falstaff or a Doll Tearsheet as readily as a Mark Antony or a Coriolanus. To us of the workaday world, he is, as Mr. Hoppin says he should be, a friend and guide and comforter - next to the Bible a very present help in trouble. How many of us he has helped to bear those ills we have rather than fly to others that we know not of. A solace in vexation, if not in crushing sorrow, is the reflection that there is nothing either good or bad but thinking makes it so ; and when things are at their very worst, we can still be sure that, come what come may, time and the hour runs through the roughest day. --The Dial, Vol. 40

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