Mr. Whibley is not content, unfortunately, with having failed to grasp the point of Troilus and Cressida.  He blunders with equal assiduity in regard to Coriolanus.  He treats this play, not as a play about Coriolanus, but as a pamphlet in favour of Coriolanus.  He has not been initiated, it seems, into the first secret of imaginative literature, which is that one may portray a hero sympathetically without making believe that his vices are virtues.  Shakespeare no more endorses Coriolanus’s patrician pride than he endorses Othello’s jealousy or Macbeth’s murderous ambition.  Shakespeare was concerned with painting noble natures, not with pandering to their vices.  He makes us sympathize with Coriolanus in his heroism, in his sufferings, in his return to his better nature, in his death; but from Shakespeare’s point of view, as from most men’s the Nietzschean arrogance which led Coriolanus to become a traitor to his city is a theme for sadness, not (as apparently with Mr. Whibley) for enthusiasm.  “Shakespeare,” cries Mr. Whibley, as he quotes some of Coriolanus’s anti-popular speeches, “will not let the people off.  He pursues it with an irony of scorn.”  “There in a few lines,” he writes of some other speeches, “are expressed the external folly and shame of democracy.  Ever committed to the worse cause, the people has not even the courage of its own opinions.”  It would be interesting to know whether in Mr. Whibley’s eyes Coriolanus’s hatred of the people is a sufficiently splendid virtue to cover his guilt in becoming a traitor.  That good Tories have the right to become traitors was a gospel preached often enough in regard to the Ulster trouble before the war.  It may be doubted, however, whether Shakespeare was sufficiently a Tory to foresee the necessity of such a gospel in Coriolanus.  Certainly, the mother of Coriolanus, who was far from being a Radical, or even a mild Whig, preached the very opposite of the gospel of treason.  She warned Coriolanus that his triumph over Rome would be a traitor’s triumph, that his name would be “dogg’d with curses,” and that his character would be summed up in history in one fatal sentence: 

                        The man was noble,
  But with his last attempt he wiped it out,
  Destroyed his country, and his name remains
  To the ensuing age abhorr’d.

Mr. Whibley appears to loathe the mass of human beings so excessively that he does not quite realize the enormity (from the modern point of view) of Coriolanus’s crime.  It would, I agree, be foolish to judge Coriolanus too scrupulously from a modern point of view.  But Mr. Whibley has asked us to accept the play as a tract for the times, and we must examine it as such in order to discover what Mr. Whibley means.

But, after all, Mr. Whibley’s failure as a portrait-painter is a failure of the spirit even more than of the intellect.  A narrow spirit cannot comprehend a magnanimous spirit, and Mr. Whibley’s imagination does not move in that large Shakespearean world in which illustrious men salute their mortal enemies in immortal sentences of praise after the manner of