passages in which Shakespear spoke of mechanics and even of small
master tradesmen as base persons whose clothes were greasy, whose
breath was rank, and whose political imbecility and caprice moved
Coriolanus to say to the Roman Radical who demanded at least "good
words" from him

He that will give good words to thee will flatter
Beneath abhorring.

But let us be honest. As political sentiments these lines are an
abomination to every democrat. But suppose they are not political
sentiments! Suppose they are merely a record of observed fact. John
Stuart Mill told our British workmen that they were mostly liars.
Carlyle told us all that we are mostly fools. Matthew Arnold and
Ruskin were more circumstantial and more abusive. Everybody,
including the workers themselves, know that they are dirty, drunken,
foul-mouthed, ignorant, gluttonous, prejudiced: in short, heirs to
the peculiar ills of poverty and slavery, as well as co-heirs with the
plutocracy to all the failings of human nature. Even Shelley
admitted, 200 years after Shakespear wrote Coriolanus, that universal
suffrage was out of the question. Surely the real test, not of
Democracy, which was not a live political issue in Shakespear's time,
but of impartiality in judging classes, which is what one demands from
a great human poet, is not that he should flatter the poor and
denounce the rich, but that he should weigh them both in the same
balance. Now whoever will read Lear and Measure for Measure will find
stamped on his mind such an appalled sense of the danger of dressing
man in a little brief authority, such a merciless stripping of the
purple from the "poor, bare, forked animal" that calls itself a king
and fancies itself a god, that one wonders what was the real nature of