Assuredly no poet ever had more than he: not even the king
of men and poets who fought at Marathon and sang of Salamis: much less
had any or has any one of our own, from Milton on to Campbell and from
Campbell even to Tennyson. In the mightiest chorus of _King Henry V_. we
hear the pealing ring of the same great English trumpet that was yet to
sound over the battle of the Baltic, and again in our later day over a
sea-fight of Shakespeare's own, more splendid and heart-cheering in its
calamity than that other and all others in their triumph; a war-song and
a sea-song divine and deep as death or as the sea, making thrice more
glorious at once the glorious three names of England, of Grenville, and
of Tennyson for ever. From the affectation of cosmopolitan indifference
not AEschylus, not Pindar, not Dante's very self was more alien or more
free than Shakespeare; but there was nothing of the dry Tyrtaean twang,
the dull mechanic resonance as of wooden echoes from a platform, in the
great historic chord of his lyre. "He is very English, too English,
even," says the Master on whom his enemies alone--assuredly not his most
loving, most reverent, and most thankful disciples--might possibly and
plausibly retort that he was "very French, too French, even"; but he
certainly was not "too English" to see and cleave to the main fact, the
radical and central truth, of personal or national character, of typical
history or tradition, without seeking to embellish, to degrade, in either
or in any way to falsify it.
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