8o ARISTOCRA C Y AND E VOL UTION 



Book i conditions of civilised life, and the traditions of 

 England and its language, as they were under Queen 

 Elizabeth, how could these have produced dramas 

 like King Lear and Hamlet, unless England had 

 happened to possess that unique phenomenon a 

 Shakespeare ? Could a Bottom have written these 

 dramas, or a Dogberry, or a Sir Toby Belch ? Or 

 could Sir Thomas Lucy, or any of the " poetasters " 

 satirised by Ben Jonson ? Or could the actors, 

 Kemp, Jones, and Bryan, who assisted in the repre- 

 sentation of these dramas upon the stage ? The 

 answer is, of course, No. And yet these men 

 Shakespeare's inherited the same language that Shakespeare did : 



contemporaries o o 



had the same the three last had the advantage of knowing his 



national ante- _ , , _,. 1111 



cedents that he hnest passages by heart. 1 he weaver, the bellows- 

 could not do 7 mender, the constable, the Justice of Peace, had behind 

 what he did. t h em the same traditions that Shakespeare had, and 

 were surrounded by the same " multitudinous condi- 

 tions" of civilisation. But out of these conditions one 

 man alone was capable of eliciting the results elicited 

 by Shakespeare. The real explanation of the whole 

 difficulty the difficulty involved in the fact that 

 whilst the argument of Mr. Spencer and Mr. 

 Bellamy is, in a speculative sense, not merely true 

 but a truism, it is utterly untrue in any practical 

 sense is as follows : Every human being living at 

 /any given time is, as Mr. Spencer says, an inheritor 

 Men inherit / of the past ; but men inherit the past in very 

 in so far as different degrees. They inherit the knowledge of 

 the past only according to the degree to which they 

 acquire it ; the language of the past only according 



