must end so, and he provided accordingly a conventional dénouement, too often showing traces of the perfunctoriness of his interest in such an artificial adjustment. Very different is his treatment of the conclusion of Tragedy. Here the crime or weakness which marks the tragic hero is shown bearing its inevitable fruit in suffering and disaster; and the great Tragedies form the crown of his achievement not only because they deal with the more serious problems of life, but because here are found all the elements of poetry, characterization, and construction, in each of which he had attained mastery in earlier plays, but which now are brought to their loftiest pitch and combined. Nowhere else are the two great dramatic elements of character and plot found in such perfect balance, in such complete interaction; nowhere else are they clothed in language so weighty with thought or so glorified by imagination. But it is in the determination of the catastrophes that the philosophical supremacy of the Tragedies most appears, as it is from these that critics who find evidence of pessimism in Shakespeare produce their proof. "Here," they say, pointing to the fifth act of King Lear, "here, at least, Shakespeare loses faith; here good and bad go down together in indiscriminate disaster." But so to observe is, surely, to lose sight of the most profound distinction running through these plays, the distinction between the spiritual and the physical. From Romeo and Juliet to Coriolanus it is clear that Shakespeare hands over to natural and social law the bodies and temporal fortunes of good and bad alike, and such law is permitted its unrelenting sway. But it is equally clear that he regards the spiritual life of his creations as by no means involved in this welter of suffering and death. Occasionally, as in Macbeth, the hero's spiritual career runs at the end parallel to his worldly fortune; more often, as in Othello or Lear, the moment of physical disaster witnesses a moral purgation, a spiritual triumph; always it is possible to discern two lines of interest, two kinds of value, two clearly distinguished spheres of existence. For the lack of correspondence between these two lines of action, the absence in Tragedy of any control of worldly happiness in the interest of the good, he attempts no explanation. For he is not concerned to construct a philosophical system, to preach a gospel. Even the all-pervading distinction just set forth is not preached or argued. It is merely implied because no treatment of the greater issues of human life could be at once true and profound without this implication. Thus this limitation, as it has been regarded by those who would have the poet an explicit philosopher, is no limitation at all, but the mark of his allegiance to the true artistic ideal, the proof that he played his own game according to its own rules, and devoted himself with unparalleled disinterestedness, unparalleled range and profundity of insight, to the picturing of things as they are. W. A. N. TO THE READER THIS Figure, that thou here seest put, with Nature, to out-doo the life: B. I. |