If my suspèct be false, forgive me, God;
For judgment only doth belong to Thee!”
It is by the deathbed of the man self-convicted of Duke Humphrey’s death, that Henry can yet say, even of him, when from so bad a death is argued a monstrous life, Forbear to judge, for we are sinners all.
Are we to infer that Shakspeare was himself for backing to the full this royal veto? That, perhaps, were going too far. The veto is dramatically true to character, and designedly characteristic of the royal speaker. But if Shakspeare himself (we are assuming him to be the author of this disputed play) would or could scarcely in this particular instance have enforced such a lesson of charity, we may at least be assured, from the large tolerance and subtle apprehension so patent in his own kingly nature, that he would in spirit have echoed the king’s forbear. Perhaps his own feeling might be as nearly as possible expressed in other words of his, put into the mouth of quite another character, and referring to quite another occasion:—
“And how his audit stands, who knows, save heaven?
But, in our circumstance and course of thought,
’Tis heavy with him.”
Forbear to judge, is, nevertheless, the moral of this strain, as of the other. Human ignorance in the one case, human frailty in the other, ousts human nature from the judgment-seat.
No man, avers Sir Thomas Browne, can justly censure or condemn another; because, in fact, no man truly knows another. “This I perceive in myself; for I am in the dark to all the world, and my nearest friends behold me but in a cloud.... Further, no man can judge another, because no man knows himself.” In a former section of this his profession of faith, this good physician warns those who, upon a rigid application of the law, sentence Solomon unto damnation,[19] that they condemn not only him, but themselves, and the whole world; “for, by the letter and written word of God, we are without exception in the state of death: but there is a prerogative of God, and an arbitrary pleasure above the letter of His own law, by which alone we can pretend unto salvation, and through which Solomon might be as easily saved as those who condemn him.”
The Vicar of Gravenhurst, in his position of parish priest, owns himself compelled to confess that the best people are not the best in every relation of life, and the worst not bad in every relation of life; so that, with experience, he finds himself growing lenient in his blame, if also reticent in his praise. “Again and again I say to myself that only the Omniscient can be the equitable judge of human beings—so complicated are our virtues with our failings, and so many are the hidden virtues, as well as hidden vices, of our fellow-men.” If judge at all we dare, and do, be it in the spirit and to the letter of Wordsworth’s counsel:—