of the Journal to Stella.  As for his laughter, as Mr. Whibley rightly points out, Pope was talking nonsense when he wrote of Swift as laughing and shaking in Rabelais’s easy chair.  Swift’s humour is essentially of the intellect.  He laughs out of his own bitterness rather than to amuse his fellow-men.  As Mr. Whibley says, he is not a cynic.  He is not sufficiently indifferent for that.  He is a satirist, a sort of perverted and suffering idealist:  an idealist with the cynic’s vision.  It is the essential nobleness of Swift’s nature which makes the voyage to the Houyhnhnms a noble and not a disgusting piece of literature.  There are people who pretend that this section of Gulliver’s Travels is almost too terrible for sensitive persons to read.  This is sheer affectation.  It can only be honestly maintained by those who believe that life is too terrible for sensitive persons to live!

(2) SHAKESPEARE

Mr. Whibley goes through history like an electioneering bill-poster.  He plasters up his election-time shrillnesses not only on Fox’s House of Commons but on Shakespeare’s Theatre.  He is apparently interested in men of genius chiefly as regards their attitude to his electioneering activities.  Shakespeare, he seems to imagine, was the sort of person who would have asked for nothing better as a frieze in his sitting-room in New Place than a scroll bearing in huge letters some such motto as “Vote for Podgkins and Down with the Common People” or “Vote for Podgkins and No League of Nations.”  Mr. Whibley thinks Shakespeare was like that, and so he exalts Shakespeare.  He has, I do not doubt, read Shakespeare, but that has made no difference, He would clearly have taken much the same view of Shakespeare if he had never read him.  To be great, said Emerson, is to be misunderstood.  To be great is assuredly to be misunderstood by Mr. Whibley.

I do not think it is doing an injustice to Mr. Whibley to single out the chapter on “Shakespeare:  Patriot and Tory” as the most representative in his volume of Political Portraits.  It would be unjust if one were to suggest that Mr. Whibley could write nothing better than this.  His historical portraits are often delightful as the work of a clever illustrator, even if we cannot accept them as portraits.  Those essays in which he keeps himself out of the picture and eschews ideas most successfully attract us as coming from the hand of a skilful writer.  His studies of Clarendon, Metternich, Napoleon and Melbourne are all of them good entertainment.  If I comment on the Shakespeare essay rather than on these, it is because here more than anywhere else in the book the author’s skill as a portrait-painter is put to the test.  Here he has to depend almost exclusively on his imagination, intelligence, and knowledge of human nature.  Here, where there are scarcely any epigrams or anecdotes to quote, a writer must reveal whether he is an artist and a critic, or a pedestrian intelligence with the trick of words.