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An 
 Estimate of Shakespeare 
 
 By 
 
 John A. IVIcClorey, S. J. 
 
 St. Louis University 
 
 SCHWARTZ, KIRWIN & FAUSS 
 NEW YORK 
 

 Copyright, 1918, by 
 Schwartz, Kirwin & Fauss 
 
 FEB 27 1918 
 
 ©C1.A481842 
 
 46'^ 
 
 n^xf^. 
 
PREFACE 
 
 The author of this book wishes to acknowledge 
 his indebtedness to Bradley, Dowden, and sev- 
 eral other writers on Shakespeare and dramatic 
 poetry. 
 
 He resorted to them to substantiate and com- 
 plement his own ideas in drawing up a lecture on 
 Shakespeare, of which the present publication is 
 a development. 
 
 As the lecture was largely made up of matter 
 taught by the writer in the Junior English Class 
 of St. Louis University, it is hoped that the fol- 
 lowing pages will be of use to professors and 
 students of Junior English. 
 
 In the composition of "An Estimate of Shake- 
 speare" the requirements of the Junior English 
 Class have been especially but not exclusively 
 kept in view. Hence it is thought that for pro- 
 fessors and students of lower classes of English, 
 and indeed for readers of Shakespeare beyond 
 the pale of College and High School, the "Esti- 
 mate" will not be devoid of interest and profit. 
 
 The Author. 
 
 St. Louis University, 
 July3i, 1917. 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 Part I 
 SHAKESPEARE IN GENERAL 
 
 PAGE 
 
 I Poet of Nature . 7 
 
 II Poet of the Preternatural .... 17 
 
 III Creator of Woman's World .... 21 
 
 IV The Myriad-Minded 28 
 
 V Poet of Miraculous Power of Expres- 
 
 sion 32 
 
 Part II 
 
 SHAKESPEARE AND TRAGEDY 
 
 I Representation of Providence ... 43 
 
 II Male Characters . 49 
 
 III Tragic Causality in Shakespeare . . 55 
 
 IV Shakespeare and the Improbable . . 58 
 
 V Dramatic Action, Conflict, Climax, and 
 
 Catastrophe 64 
 
 VI Irony, Atmosphere, and Omens ... 72 
 
 VII Unities, Borrowed Plots, Suicide . . 7S 
 
 VIII Inarticulate Eloquence 83 
 
 IX The Art, Morality and Emotional Effect 
 
 of Tragedy 88 
 
An Estimate of Shakespeare 
 
 PART I 
 SHAKESPEARE IN GENERAL 
 
 I. POET OF NATURE 
 
 Before taking up the particular study of Shake- 
 speare as a writer of tragedies, we shall engage in a 
 general consideration of some of his more prominent 
 characteristics. 
 
 A pretty fair estimate of Shakespeare can be 
 formed by analyzing the meaning of four or five 
 phrases commonly applied to him. He has been set 
 apart by universal acclaim as the poet of nature, the 
 poet of the preternatural, the creator of woman's 
 world, the myriad-minded, and the poet of miracu- 
 lous power of expression. 
 
 He is a poet of nature in the sense tha't the heart 
 of nature was clearly revealed to him. The ''ser- 
 mons in stones and books in running brooks" of 
 "As You Like It," he himself had intently listened 
 to and read. Woods were voluble, every leaf had 
 a tongue, the tumultuous sounds of the sea to him 
 were articulate, and the earth and sky which to 
 most men are pages written with invisible ink were 
 inscribed for Shakespeare in letters of crimson, 
 purple and gold. 
 
 But the naturalness of Shakespeare means more 
 than this ; and the further meaning of the word we 
 can gather by considering how he followed the lead 
 of the Renaissance. 
 
 The Renaissance was a return in art to the merely 
 7 
 
8 AN ESTIMATE OF SHAKESPEARE 
 
 natural ideals of Rome and Greece. It was a 
 Catholic movement, inaugurated and carried to ful- 
 fillment by the popes. The picture of Nicholas V 
 going about his court, offering purses of gold to 
 literary men for translations of the classics, is 
 familiar to readers of church history. Pius II, Jul- 
 ius II and Leo X followed his example of encour- 
 agement with marvelous results. The spirit of the 
 Renaissance penetrated into France and the Nether- 
 lands and thence worked its way to England. It 
 was fostered there by Erasmus and Thomas More 
 and a few years later received its full development 
 among the Elizabethan dramatists. These men — 
 Marlowe, Peele, Beaumont and Fletcher, Webster, 
 Ben Jonson and Shakespeare — read the classics, 
 either in the original or in translations, learned to 
 admire portrayals of natural beauty wrought by the 
 ancients, and themselves became exponents of the 
 sweetness and power of nature and man. It is just a 
 bit presumptuous therefore for Protestant writers 
 to point to Shakespeare as the work of the Refor- 
 mation! He was the child of the Renaissance. 
 
 Accordingly, he differs radically from the poets 
 of the ages of faith who preceded him. 
 
 The view that the Middle Ages were dark is grad- 
 ually disappearing from the Protestant mind. And 
 well it may ! For the fine arts flourished centuries 
 before the Reformation. Poetry was not behind 
 sculpture, painting and architecture. St. Francis' 
 **Hymn of the Creatures" was highly praised by the 
 aesthetic Matthew Arnold. St. Francis however had 
 two sons in religion who surpassed him as poets. 
 One of them wrote the "Stabat Mater" and the 
 
POET OF NATURE 9 
 
 Other the "Dies Irse," poems which even in the esti- 
 mation of non-CathoHc critics are comparable to the 
 best lyrics of profane literature. The "J^su Dulcis 
 Memoria," the two hymns of the Holy Ghost and 
 the **Lauda Sion Salvatorem" of St. Thomas need 
 no panegyrist. At the head however of all the re- 
 ligious poetry of those centuries are the "Inferno," 
 "Purgatorio" and 'Taradiso" of Dante. 
 
 Now the characteristic of this class of poetic 
 work is religiousness. St. Francis, St. Bernard, 
 Dante and the authors of the morality and mystery 
 plays drew their inspiration from the supernatural. 
 Revelation lent them material. Faith was the foun- 
 dation upon which they reared their art. They rep- 
 resented God as the Rewarder of the good and the 
 Punisher of the evil in this and the next world. 
 Shakespeare stands out in striking contrast to them 
 in that he does not draw his inspiration from Rev- 
 elation, he is not a poet of Faith, he circumscribes 
 his vision with the circle of mortality, beginning 
 with birth and ending with death, and he views men 
 and women in the light of experimental knowledge 
 acquired in this world. In a word, he is mundane 
 and natural, merely human and temporal. 
 
 This characterization however needs to be quali- 
 fied and explained. We do not affirm then that 
 Shakespeare disbelieved in the truths of Faith; he 
 only did not advert to them. He did not doubt nor 
 deny Revelation ; he only refrains from referring to 
 it. Therefore, no normal man can rise from the 
 reading of Shakespeare an infidel or sceptic. The 
 sorrows of heroes and heroines in the catastrophes 
 of his plays are not the cold stony griefs of men and 
 
10 AN ESTIMATE OF SHAKESPEARE 
 
 women who look forward to a vacuity after death : 
 and the emotions aroused in a reader or spectator, 
 though painful, do not degenerate into pessimism. 
 The catastrophes of Lear, Romeo and Juliet and 
 Othello, for instance, are almost universally admit- 
 ted to have an elevating effect. They are not 
 touched by the blight of morbid disbelief. When 
 w^e come to those terrific finales we are deeply 
 moved ; but the sorrow has not a tincture of despair. 
 It is rather accompanied by admiration and love. 
 Our hearts contract with pain, but they also expand 
 with magnanimous feelings. In particular, we see 
 his women in ruin, but triumphant in it. Death glo- 
 rifies their beauty of character and our souls are 
 dilated at the sight. Were death the "be all and end 
 all" in their view of life they could not die as they 
 do and we could not feel about them as we do. 
 
 But, though Shakespeare does not question nor deny 
 the next life, neither does he advert to it as a rule in 
 the substance of his tragedies. In some of his plays 
 of English history which represent the days of Faith 
 ideas of Faith abound. Even in his tragedies inci- 
 dental flashes of Faith lighten the page; and in 
 "Hamlet" and "Macbeth" the presence of the spirit 
 of Faith is more than merely incidental. But in the 
 
 / substantial part — i.e., in the catastrophe of most of 
 his tragedies — he refrains from looking beyond the 
 
 \ boundary of death at the life to come. We never 
 think of Romeo and Juliet being happily reunited 
 after their tragic end ; though we are not led on by 
 the poet to deny or question the union. The loss of 
 Cordelia to Lear is not represented as being fol- 
 lowed by her eternal restoration to him; although 
 
POET OF NATURE II 
 
 such a delightful sequel is not doubted nor denied. 
 Our hearts are not exhilarated by the thought of 
 heaven where all the wrongs endured here by hero 
 and heroine are righted ; nor on the other hand are 
 we depressed by the idea that no final readjust- 
 ment of earthly wrongs is possible. We are allowed 
 by the poet simply to see sufferings sweetly or hero- 
 ically borne on earth, no reference being made to an 
 after-world of happiness. 
 
 Of course this is a nice distinction between non- 
 advertence to heavenly truth and denial of it. Per- 
 haps the distinction may seem to some at first sight 
 too nice : in fact only imaginary. But I am confident 
 that a close analysis of one's emotions at the end of 
 a Shakespearean tragedy, and of the tragic factors 
 productive of them, will justify the distinction. No 
 reader is fully satisfied on finishing a play, as he 
 would be in case the light of heavenly joy were let 
 in to dissipate the shadows of the doleful finale. 
 The villain, it is true, always partially justifies the 
 governance of a good Providence by his fall. Some 
 able and virtuous persons always survive the ruin, 
 to carry on the good work left undone by hero and 
 heroine and hampered by the evil geniuses of the 
 play. The destruction of the amiable figures of the 
 tragedy in most cases may be largely attributed to 
 faults of their own, and may not, therefore, be em- 
 ployed by anybody as an indictment of the benev- 
 olence of the Power that rules the world. In all 
 cases the downfall of the good is mostly the work 
 of merely human agencies. These are redeeming 
 views of life; but they do not fully satisfy. They 
 are only natural and incomplete : and the hopes and 
 
12 AiN ESTIMATE OF SHAKESPEARE 
 
 aspirations which they engender in our hearts in 
 regard to the ultimate righting of earthly wrongs 
 and a final soothing of the sufferings of the world 
 are halting, groping and uncertain. 
 
 But while complete satisfaction is impossible to 
 one closing the pages of a Shakespearean tragedy, 
 at the same time, because of the reasons just given, 
 cynical or rebellious feelings of infidelity or scepti- 
 cism, sprung of an absolute denial or questioning of 
 God's Providence and particularly of a future life, 
 cannot legitimately be drawn from the catastrophes 
 of the great poet. 
 
 Now, Shakespeare is justified in taking a purely 
 mundane view of life in his tragedies. Life, it is 
 true, particularly Christian life, is, in the real order 
 of things, permeated by the truths of eternity. But 
 tragedy as an earthly art may be permitted to give 
 only a partial view of life. All arts give only par- 
 tial views of things. In fact, all ideas, even the most 
 truthful, give only partial views of truth. Now un- 
 doubtedly life in its purely mundane character is 
 worth portraying. For the manifold and intricate 
 movements of the heart, its aspirations and hopes, 
 its joys and loves and hates, its exaltations and 
 titanic griefs, centering around earthly excellence, 
 are not beneath a poet's genius. Out of these he can 
 weave a thing of beauty albeit only natural. 
 
 Moreover, the very nature of tragedy seems to 
 require a nonadvertence to future beatitude. The 
 soul of tragedy is the pathetic. Therefore, the more 
 pathetic the tragedy, all other things being equal, 
 the more nearly it approaches the ideal. Hence the 
 propriety of prescinding from considerations which 
 
POET OF NATURE 1 3 
 
 would suffuse the catastrophe with the radiant light 
 of happiness and dissipate clouds of misfortune. A 
 martyr's death is not a tragedy but a triumph pre- 
 cisely because it is considered by the Faithful in its 
 bearing on eternity. We see the sword at the mar- 
 tyr's throat, but also the nimbus around his head. 
 Choirs of angels await him: and therefore the 
 Office of Martyrs is a paean. "Gaudete, exultate et 
 laetamini" is the burden of the song. But a tragedy 
 is not a triumph and the feelings which it is in- 
 tended to elicit are not triumphant. How then, it 
 may reasonably be asked, can a writer of tragedies 
 do otherwise than refrain from revealing the vision 
 of glory in his finales? How can he but show ex- 
 clusively the pathos of earthly misfortune in its own 
 sombre coloring? Nor can the objection be urged 
 that heavenly hope and joy are more healthful to the 
 moral man than earthly grief : and therefore they 
 ought to be fostered by tragedy. Those feelings are 
 more healthful, but the latter is healthful. Faith is 
 better than tragedy but tragedy is good. The emo- 
 tions which it arouses are refining and inimical to 
 selfishness because they are expended upon the 
 beauty, greatness and misfortunes of others. Tra- 
 gedy teaches us to break through the little circle 
 of self-interest and to expand into the lives of 
 others. Their interests become our interests ; their 
 griefs are shared by ourselves. The tragic KaOapais 
 of which Aristotle speaks consists partially in this 
 obliviousness to self in presence of others' misfor- 
 tunes. And so, though tragedy does not advert to 
 eternal truths which tend to make men moral, it does 
 nevertheless in a complementary way minister to 
 
14 AN ESTIMATE OF SHAKESPEARE 
 
 morality. It is an auxiliary of Revelation. It fits 
 us for sympathy with real sufferings in the world 
 around us. It is the handmaid of Charity. 
 
 Indeed, if one were to object to tragedy on the 
 score of its earthly limitations, he would be obliged 
 to decry, on the same principle many other human 
 arts whose scope is to portray only human beauty, 
 earthly scenes, natural excellence and worldly bear- 
 ings. Statuary and painting are admirable, though 
 they may be limited to the representation of figure 
 and facial expression. Music need not carry a divine 
 theme to be true art. Architecture may satisfy itself 
 with embodying worldly magnificence without de- 
 serving to be condemned. Why, therefore, discoun- 
 tenance tragedy because its last act closes with the 
 grave ? Why, like Tate wish to exclude the crushing 
 catastrophe of Lear because it is unrelieved by a ray 
 of joy? Tragedy is tragedy, and it should be taken 
 ''all in all or not at all." 
 
 So long as men take Shakespeare for what he is 
 worth there will be little harm in the cautious study 
 of him. As a tragic dramatist he is a natural, 
 worldly poet, and nothing more. He sounded the 
 depths of human passion, he knew the heart of man 
 like a book, he threaded all the mazes of natural 
 emotion, following with miraculous precision the 
 almost imperceptible changes in the feelings of men 
 and women — the sudden starts, the gradual waver- 
 ings or quick revulsions. Intuitively he knew, and 
 with unerring exactness he has shown us the half- 
 hidden motives that impel men to action, the little 
 nothings that inspire them, the imaginary obstacles 
 that unman them. Given a certain character in a 
 
POET OF NATURE 1 5 
 
 certain environment, he had an uncanny prophetic 
 vision for the outcome ahead. And he knew the 
 mind of man as well as his heart. He watched its 
 operations — its sudden intuitions of the truth, its 
 contemplative broodings over the mysteries of life, 
 its multitudinous questionings, its painstaking ad- 
 vances along the straight and rigid groove of logical 
 inquiry and its pursuit of truth around the outer- 
 most horizon of human speculation, where the intel- 
 lectual atmosphere is too tenuous to breathe and the 
 light of abstraction is too dim for sight ; where elu- 
 sive ideas play us tricks, slip away from us, vanish 
 into thin air and leave us foiled and disappointed in 
 our quest. 
 
 Moreover, delicacy of feeling, gorgeousness of 
 imagery, the amenities of life, graciousness of dis- 
 position, courtesy of manners and a hundred other 
 ingredients of natural, human, worldly life, all ex- 
 pressed in language so exuberant that we can hardly 
 read him without gradually becoming gold-flecked 
 with his borrowed splendor in our own utterances, 
 these we can learn from him. But that is all. He 
 pretends to nothing more. He is merely a natural 
 poet. He has no divine message. He is not a 
 teacher of spirituality. He is not a leader on the 
 higher paths of supernatural morality. He never 
 took to the wings of Dante. He was too reverent 
 to essay the "altius canamus," and he would be the 
 first to laugh at the canonization with which some 
 critics would honor him — men who follow his teach- 
 ing as their all in all in life. 
 
 No! If a Christian wishes to learn something 
 about his last end and the manner of compassing it, 
 
l6 AN ESTIMATE OF SHAKESPEARE 
 
 he ought to read another Book, the Volume of God's 
 Word, and Hsten to another voice, the voice of His 
 Church. 
 
 Hence the absurdity of a man Hke Tennyson 
 dying with a volume of Shakespeare on his breast. 
 At the time the story of his death went round, many 
 thought that the picture of the modern bard lying in 
 the pale moonlight with the book in his hand was 
 pathetically beautiful. To true Christians it must 
 have seemed absurd; or, rather, it would have 
 seemed so had it not been so tragic. The idea of a 
 Christian dying thus, as though the earthly book 
 were an open sesame to the gates of heaven ! One 
 would think that, as a good Protestant, he would 
 have preferred the Bible, 
 
II. POET OF THE PRETERNATURAL 
 
 Although Shakespeare seldom crossed the border- 
 land of the supernatural, he explored the mysteries 
 of the preternatural world. His soul was keenly 
 awake to spirits of the air and sea and earth. He 
 believed that there are more things in heaven and 
 earth than a materialistic philosophy dreams of. 
 Ghosts, witches, fairies, Pucks, Titanias, Ariels and 
 Calibans encircled him : and the beauty, mystery and 
 terror of this spirit-world are substantial elements 
 of his plays. 
 
 The classic poets of old had created a series of 
 spirits before him : but their masterpieces were in- 
 ferior to his. For while they and their readers en- 
 tertained scant belief in the gods and goddesses, 
 most of Shakespeare's contemporaries, and perhaps 
 the poet himself, accepted the existence of ghosts, 
 witches and fairies as a reality. Moreover, even if 
 the ancients had considered Olympus a fact, we 
 now know that it was pure fiction. Therefore, it 
 lacks for us the charm of poetic probability. But 
 who would have the hardihood to reject belief in 
 ghosts and witches, and who has not felt at times 
 a partiality for faith in fairies ? But, aside from the 
 question of probability, Shakespeare's preternatural 
 creation surpasses that of the ancient poets as a 
 work of imagination. The aesthetic appeal of Jupi- 
 ter, Juno, Venus and the rest of the celestials is 
 gravely marred by their carnal vulgarities. At their 
 best they were only a few grades above earthly men 
 and women, and at their worst they were several 
 grades beneath them in lasciviousness, petty jealousy 
 17 
 
1 8 AN ESTIMATE OF SHAKESPEARE 
 
 and childish quarrelsomeness. Olympus, with their 
 changing moods, resembled a hill of debauch, a nest 
 of outlaws and a cradle of testy, grown-up children. 
 
 But who can refrain from feeling unqualified ad- 
 miration for the unearthly agencies which Shake- 
 speare revealed through the half-drawn veil of necro- 
 mancy? Who has not been awed by the majesty of 
 buried Denmark, clad in complete steel, revisiting 
 the glimpses of the moon, in the dead vast and mid- 
 dle of the night, pacing the platform of Elsinore 
 with martial stalk, in a land of dim lights and mel- 
 ancholy silences ; grizzled, speechless to Horatio and 
 the guards, but to Hamlet eloquent in deep mono- 
 tone in his tale of earthly crimes and unearthly pris- 
 on-house? The crowing of the cock, the matin- 
 dimming of glow-worms, the russet morn among the 
 dews on the eastern hill, the bitter cold, the heart- 
 sickness and fear of the guards, the references to the 
 ghastly omens in the streets of Rome and the with- 
 drawal of Hamlet with the ghost to the precipice — 
 who can be callous to these circumstantial touches 
 of fearfulness? It has been said that the play of 
 "Hamlet" would be no play without the melancholy 
 Dane; it may be affirmed with equal truth that it 
 would be but half a play without the Ghost. 
 
 The preternatural influences of the play of "Ham- 
 let" are awe-inspiring; those of "Macbeth" are ter- 
 rible. The three witches in the dark recesses of a 
 cave, leaning over the cauldron steaming with gross 
 ingredients, crooning their lyrics of disgust, their 
 dark and midnight repulsiveness emphasized by the 
 flickering of infernal flames : and the ghost of Ban- 
 quo, blood-boltered, with twenty trenched gashes in 
 
POET OF THE PRETERNATURAL IQ 
 
 his head, marrowless and without speculation in 
 his eyes, taking his place at the table's head, while 
 Macbeth stands cowering, his hair on end and his 
 eyeballs starting from their sockets — who that has 
 beheld these horrors can doubt the Plutonian po- 
 tency of the poet's conjuring wand? 
 
 The "Midsummer Night's Dream" is a vision of 
 delight. The mischievous Puck circling the earth in 
 a trice. Cupid letting fly his arrow at the moon 
 which still pursued her course in meditation fancy 
 free, Titania fighting for the Indian boy, fairies no 
 bigger than an agate-stone on the forefinger of an 
 alderman, gnomes dancing in tiny circles under the 
 moon, sleeping beneath clover leaves, swinging their 
 hammocks from little vines, sailing down streams in 
 rose-leaves for shallops, fencing with grass-blades 
 for rapiers, mounted on beetles for steeds, sailing on 
 the backs of butterflies for aeroplanes, stealing 
 honey-bags from bees, cropping their waxed legs for 
 torches and lighting them at the glow-worms' lamps 
 — all these unearthly forms of beauty in miniature, 
 made more unearthly and tiny by being placed side 
 by side with the huge bully Bottom, are an exhil- 
 arating stimulus to our sense of the preternatural. 
 
 Ariel, in "The Tempest," is a distinct and original 
 creation of Shakespeare, quite different from the 
 ordinary fairies of folk-lore. He has been described 
 by DeQuincey as a sprite, compacted of sunset-hues 
 and fragrances. He drifts round the mystic isle of 
 Prospero like an iridescent gossamer. He comes and 
 goes like a fugitive strain of music on a rising and 
 falling wind. Not less original in conception is Cali- 
 ban, with his paradoxical combination of brutal 
 
20 AN ESTIMATE OF SHAKESPEARE 
 
 grossness, servility, intelligence and power of poetic 
 expression. 
 
 Finally, nothing in the great Roman play illus- 
 trates more powerfully the calm of Brutus and the 
 all-pervading influence of Caesar, relentlessly pursu- 
 ing him unto death, than the fateful words of Cae- 
 sar's ghost: "I shall meet thee at Philippi;" and 
 Brutus' laconic answer : ''Well, then, thou wilt meet 
 me at Philippi." The words are few, but thrilling ; 
 and their potency is increased by the world-weari- 
 ness of Brutus, the dreamy touches of Luciana's 
 harp-strings, the great Commoner's tenderness for 
 the sleepy lad and his quest of comfort in his book 
 of philosophy. 
 
 Truly, Shakespeare, the necromancer, has woven 
 a tapestry of preternatural figures in the looms of 
 an invisible world, without which the undraped 
 walls of his palace of art would be only half as 
 beautiful as they are. 
 
III. CREATOR OF WOMAN'S WORLD 
 
 Shakespeare's galaxy of women characters sur- 
 prises us with the number and variety of its types. 
 Hermione and Perdita, Queen Catharine, Imogen 
 and Miranda, JuHet, the two Portias, Viola, Rosa- 
 lind and the heroines of the great tragedies, Ophelia, 
 Desdemona and Cordelia — how many there are! 
 how different and winning ! 
 
 Now, the peculiarity of the Shakespearean wo- 
 man is that she does not do nor say much. Never- 
 theless her presence is potently felt. Like an atmos- 
 phere which cannot be seen but without which we 
 cannot live, her influence pervades the plays. She 
 is not aggressive, not prominent according to the 
 measurement of lines ; yet without her the great 
 dramatist's work would be a mutilated remnant. 
 Cordelia, for instance, has but about fifty lines in 
 the play of "Lear" : yet she is as engrossing a figure 
 as the mad King himself. This passive power and 
 speechless eloquence render an analysis of their 
 characters well-nigh impossible. The most subtle 
 influences in real life are always unseen, impalpable, 
 silent and retiring, and therefore difficult of appre- 
 hension and incapable of being formally described. 
 The charm of womanhood is particularly elusive. A 
 man's good qualities are towering and plain ; a wo- 
 man's defy exact defining. Shakespeare did not at- 
 tempt the impossible. He made no exhaustive analy- 
 sis of the female soul ; he drew up no list of its traits. 
 He simply held up to nature the mirror of instinct- 
 ive intuition, caught the images which he himself 
 could not wholly understand and showed them to us. 
 
 21 
 
22 AN ESTIMATE OF SHAKESPEARE 
 
 But, while we may not entertain the hope of ac- 
 quiring an increased knowledge of Shakespearean 
 women by direct analysis, we may however make 
 an approach to the secret of their charm by attempt- 
 ing an answer to a three- fold question which more 
 than once has been asked about them : Why are 
 Shakespeare's women superior to his men; why, in 
 particular, are the women of his classical plays su- 
 perior to the men of those plays ; and how account 
 for the superiority of his women to the women of 
 the Greek tragedians ? 
 
 The superiority implied in the first question may, 
 I imagine, be presumed. It has so often been as- 
 serted without being questioned that it may be taken 
 as a fact. Personally, I have no difficulty in admit- 
 ting it. But the explanation of the fact is not as 
 evident as the fact itself. Indeed, a satisfactory ex- 
 planation would be tantamount to a thorough under- 
 standing of Shakespeare's female creations, which 
 it was said above is impossible. However, a tenta- 
 tive reasoning may be essayed. I would suggest 
 three or four probable explanations without taking 
 the responsibility of making a choice among them. 
 
 Can it be that the poet's women are more amiable 
 than his men because women in real life are more 
 amiable than men? An affirmative answer to the 
 question would please a certain very important por- 
 tion of the human race; but whether it would ex- 
 press the unmixed truth may perhaps be open to 
 question. 
 
 Can it be that the poet, as a man, took for granted 
 many gracious traits in the sex which a woman 
 would question? "Distance lends enchantment to 
 
CREATOR OF WOMAN S WORLD 23 
 
 the view"; and the psychological distance between 
 sex and sex clothes each for the other in charming 
 hues. If Shakespeare had been a woman, would 
 womanhood have lost some of its enchantment for 
 him, and would he not have gazed on man with a 
 more wondering eye and depicted him in more 
 glowing colors? 
 
 Perhaps the poet in drawing feminine portraits so 
 splendidly was impelled by a spirit of gallantry. In 
 a great tragedy the catastrophe must be partially the 
 outcome of an interior losing conflict between the 
 hero or heroine's better and worse self. Shakespeare 
 could have made the moral delinquency of heroines 
 accountable for the final ruin. Did he refrain from 
 laying the burden of grave faults of character and 
 conduct upon them because he was a chivalric gentle- 
 man? He marred the moral perfection of his men 
 with yawning flaws ; he allowed his women to retain 
 their integrity of soul. Are we to account for this 
 unequal distribution of blameworthiness by his cour- 
 teous regard for the other sex ? 
 
 Or may it be said that women fare so well at his 
 hands because they are beautiful and emotional in 
 character? A man at his best is strong; a woman 
 at her best is beautiful. A man may have a beauti- 
 ful character and a woman a strong one ; but I would 
 hazard the view that strength of character is more 
 characteristic of men, and beauty of character is 
 more proper to women. Now, poetry deals with the 
 beautiful; not precisely with the true, like philoso- 
 phy, nor with the strong; and a poet is in his ele- 
 ment while contemplating beauty in any form and 
 while elaborating his copies of it; but he is not at 
 
24 AN ESTIMATE OF SHAKESPEARE 
 
 his best in dealing with the strong. Hence Shake- 
 speare's poetic genius found more apt material for 
 its exercise in women than in men. 
 
 Again, man is thoughtful; woman emotional. I 
 am far from saying that men are without emotion 
 and women without thought. But in examining the 
 twofold division of human gifts, thought, I believe, 
 is found to be more kin to the souls of men and 
 emotion to the souls of women. Neither is the con- 
 trast intended to be in any way derogatory to either 
 sex. Now, as philosophy is the embodiment of 
 thought, poetry is the embodiment of emotions. It 
 is the art of imagination and feeling expressed 
 in language: it postulates abundant sentiment 
 in its subject-matter; and therefore the great dra- 
 matic poet found woman more native to his cre- 
 ative hand and took more delight in following and 
 portraying the movements of her soul than man's. 
 
 Finally, can the special requirements of tragic 
 poetry and woman's special capacity for suffering 
 be invoked as the explanation of the high character 
 of Shakespeare's tragic heroines ? Pathos is the soul 
 of tragedy: for tragedy aims at representing the 
 beauty of suffering. Epic poetry appeals to our ad- 
 miration by setting human beings before us doing 
 great things ; but tragic poetry appeals to our sym- 
 pathy by setting them before us, enduring great mis- 
 fortunes. Now, men are seen to their best advan- 
 tage in the thick of action and, therefore epic bards 
 invariably select men to carry on the plot of their 
 poems. But women actuate their highest possibili- 
 ties of character under the pressure of irremediable 
 adversity. Hence tragic poets choose women to glo- 
 
CREATOR OF WOMAN S WORLD 25 
 
 rify their catastrophes ; and Shakespeare, as a mat- 
 ter of human necessity had to make the passion and 
 death of his heroines more poignantly captivating 
 than the undoing of his heroes. 
 
 In answering the second question, I shall refer to 
 an historic fact. The heroines of Shakespeare's 
 plays of antiquity are more admirable than the 
 heroes of those plays because they are his own 
 poetic creation; and they had to be such because 
 the status of women in olden times was not favor- 
 able to the development of heroines in fact. What- 
 ever social advantages woman now possesses she 
 owes to Christianity. Before the Christian era she 
 was regarded as chattels. Indeed, a more degrading 
 character was her lot. We gaze across the superb 
 stage of ancient history; we are astonished at its 
 panoramic splendor; but we observe that the chief 
 actors were men. Great women were conspicuous 
 for their absence. But when God made a woman 
 His mother He raised all other women with her. 
 He made them queens of the fireside, angels of the 
 home. He made maidenhood a glory and placed a 
 nimbus around the brow of wife and mother. The 
 knight-errant's dream of ideal womanhood was of 
 Christian origin ; and the social courtesies prevalent 
 among modern men in regard to women can be 
 traced back to the great courtesy which God conde- 
 scended to show to Mary in asking her to be His 
 mother. 
 
 A civilization prolific of great men but barren of 
 great women was not propitious to the genius of the 
 Poet in quest -of womanly ideals. What thecivilization 
 failed to afford his own imagination supplied ; and 
 
26 AN ESTIMATE OF SHAKESPEARE 
 
 thus the historic dearth became a poetic advantage. 
 For while heytook the heroes of Rome with their 
 faults and all as he found them and introduced them 
 unchanged ihto his plays, he had to fall back upon 
 his superb creative power in fashioning classical 
 heroines. These, therefore, historically dwarfed in 
 comparison with their fellow-men, dramatically out- 
 shine them. The lasciviousness of the Roman wo- 
 men could not be dramatized without engendering 
 disgust : so Shakespeare embodied an imaginary ma- 
 tronly morality in Portia, j Cleopatra, as an historic 
 fact, could appeal only to the sodden soul of a roue ; 
 Shakespeare partially transformed the jaded origi- 
 nal with the talismanic touch or his art. 
 
 In answering the third question I shall invoke the 
 authority of DeQuincey. His name ought to be in 
 honor in the present consideration, as he was emi- 
 nently capacitated to pass judgment on the compara- 
 tive merits of Greek and English dramatic poetry. 
 He read Greek fluently at the age of twelve and, like 
 Ben Jonson, loved Shakespeare intensely. His pref- 
 erence for the Shakespearean heroine is unqualified 
 and his illustrations of her superiority as an artistic 
 creation to the handiwork of Sophocles, Euripides 
 and ^schylus are most emphatic. Their women, he 
 says, are a group of marble statuary ; his women are 
 glowing with the warmth of real life. 
 
 According to DeQuincey, the explanation of this 
 contrast may be found in the pronounced differences 
 between Greek and modern life. The women of 
 Greece led their lives in seclusion like women of the 
 Oriental seraglios. Their isolation left a grave va- 
 cancy in the social and civil life of the community. 
 
CREATOR OF WOMAN'S WORLD 27 
 
 and also prevented them from developing the best 
 elements of female character. The Greek dramatist 
 accordingly looked around him in vain in the open 
 ways of the world for feminine forms of beauty; 
 and in the walled spaces of retirement found only a 
 colorless monotone of half-developed womanhood. 
 And even when some civil catastrophe broke open 
 the doors of feminine privacy and cast forth the in- 
 mates into the reaches of the general gaze the dra- 
 matist still labored under the disadvantage of having 
 to make an unsatisfactory choice. For the women 
 who would have strength enough to survive such a 
 civil storm long enough to be caught and imaged in 
 the mirror of a play would be of the masculine type. 
 Their qualities of soul would be a mere repetition 
 of the qualities of men. Now, the chief charm of the 
 sexes lies in their differences; and women are en- 
 gaging not in that they are like men, but in that they 
 are unlike them. Antigone is grand, but she is a 
 man; Ismene is not grand, but she is at any rate a 
 woman, and if her environment had been less diffi- 
 cult she might have developed and displayed an ami- 
 able womanly character. 
 
 But in the Dispensation of Christianity women 
 live out in the world side by side with men as well 
 in times of calm as of storm; they are free to de- 
 velop without strain Into their highest types along 
 the lines of their own sex : many of them have 
 availed themselves of their opportunities; Shake- 
 speare saw the vision of their distinctive feminine 
 beauty; he glorified it still more by his magic and 
 left us an album in which he who runs may read 
 the Poet's notion of what women ought to be. 
 
IV. MYRIAD-MINDED 
 
 When critics characterize Shakespeare as the 
 myriad-minded they mean to say, I suppose, 
 that he possessed the diversified powers of 
 many minds; that he took a marvellous number 
 of divergent views of life and expressed them 
 with profuse variations of style and imagery. 
 And, indeed, can even the casual reader fail to 
 observe his Protean impartiality to a thousand pos- 
 sibilities of mental attitude? He was no specialist 
 in the selection of themes. All forms of humanity 
 and nature made their appeal to his accommodating 
 mind with apparently equal degrees of attractive- 
 ness. When for instance I read Hamlet I imag- 
 ine that Shakespeare must have spent his life 
 exclusively brooding in melancholy silence over the 
 mysteries of the world and man and life and death. 
 I turn to Romeo and Juliet and I see his cheeks 
 crimsoned with the flush of young love; in his 
 eyes the light of ecstatic joy, in his bearing the 
 irresponsibility of a thoughtless career. In Lear he 
 appears to have made a lifelong study of madness; 
 in Macbeth he is a specialist in observing phases 
 of conscience. Julius Csesar is an embodiment of 
 his whole-hearted admiration for the imperial gran- 
 deur of Rome. In the English historical plays he 
 cares only for the glory of Britain. With Falstaif 
 broad fun in a tavern is the only thing worth while 
 in life. With Viola, Rosalind, Bassanio's Portia, 
 Perdita, the fresh poetic beauty of life engrosses 
 him. He addresses us through Antony, and we 
 feel that Demosthenes never spoke better. He 
 
 2% 
 
MYRIAD-MINDED 29 
 
 reveals the loveliness of hill and valley, stream, sky 
 and sea, and we imagine him wedded to nature 
 alone and never wearied with gazing at her face. 
 Most men can do only one or two things well; he 
 is an adept at many. Perhaps Carlyle has described 
 as forcibly, Tennyson undoubtedly has written as 
 smoothly ; Byron is his match in rhetorical forcef ul- 
 ness; Shelley was as ethereal in his lyrics; Keats as 
 gorgeous in phrasing, Scott as romantic, Coleridge 
 as weird, Milton as sublime. But they were spe- 
 cialists in their particular respective spheres of 
 poetic expression. He was a specialist in none of 
 them, or rather, a specialist in all of them. 
 
 A notable effect of the universality of Shake- 
 speare's genius is its freedom from oddities. Spe- 
 cialization, tends to develop idiosyncracies, and the 
 peculiarities of so many English writers is an apt 
 illustration of this general principle. Their charms 
 are marred by strange biases because they consid- 
 ered themselves privileged on account of their 
 exalted gifts to be outlandish with impunity. Dr. 
 Johnson, Carlyle, Byron, Shelley, Coleridge, De 
 Quincey, Poe, Wordsworth, Goldsmith, Gray, 
 ColHns and Milton as a prose-writer were not 
 normal men, whereas the sublime gift of Shake- 
 speare was his common sense and balance of mind 
 which enabled him to direct his course along the 
 beaten highway of thought and feeling with very 
 few erratic excursions. Hence, whereas a read- 
 ing of them is often accompanied by a sense of 
 remoteness from the plain realities of life, the pre- 
 dominant thought pulsing through the study of 
 Shakespeare is: How true all this is; how like the 
 
30 AN ESTIMATE OF SHAKESPEARE 
 
 world of fact! The transition of our minds from 
 the sphere of actuality to the sphere of his poetry 
 is easy and natural. No preparatory rearrange- 
 ment of mental attitude to fit in with an unwonted 
 group of ideas and impressions is demanded. We 
 feel as little strain in understanding him as in 
 enjoying a summer day, a sunset or home. And 
 when we part with him to return to our accustomed 
 environment of objective things, a sense of parting 
 is hardly felt, so kin is his creation to God's. He 
 never presumed to attempt an improvement on 
 nature by substituting for its truths spurious vari- 
 ants, quaint interpretations, original colorations, 
 subjective rearrangements of them. He trusted for 
 effect not in imaginative legerdemain, however 
 startling in its charming tricks ; but in the elo- 
 quence of sincere interpretation. He was con- 
 cerned not with what he might possibly add to the 
 splendor of the world from the sources of his splen- 
 did mind, but with the task of making his mind a 
 transparent window that men might see through it 
 the uncommon beauty of common things. They 
 had been blinded to the loveliness of nature and 
 man by the film of familiarity ; he would teach them 
 that the ordinary is marvellous. Why should they 
 go afar in quest of beauty, when eye-opening won- 
 ders like fellow men and women were around 
 them; when the sky above them and the earth at 
 their feet defied description? Originality has com- 
 monly been accounted a mark of literary genius. 
 Shakespeare was original, but his originality con- 
 sisted in undoing one of the works of original sin. 
 Through Adam's fall man's vision of truth was 
 
MYRIAD- MINDED 3I 
 
 dimmed. God, humanity and nature became three 
 closed books. Shakespeare reopened at least two 
 of them". His gospel was the preaching of two 
 truths as old as the Garden of Eden. And he is 
 greater than the common run of mortals, not in that 
 he contemplated the recondite and unusual, but in 
 that he saw the ordinary in a thousand forms more 
 clearly and profoundly than they and had the power 
 of manifesting his vision with miraculous ease, ver- 
 satility, fidelity, comprehensiveness, intensity and 
 gorgeous profusion of speech. 
 
V. POET OF MIRACULOUS POWER OF 
 EXPRESSION 
 
 Profusion is perhaps the most prominent feature 
 of Shakespeare's style. Like a perennial fountain he 
 poured forth from the springs of his soul a full flood 
 of language saturated with thought ; and he exulted 
 in his abundance. His mind bristled with ideas, his 
 heart glowed with emotions, his imagination was 
 splendid with imagery ; and for every thought, emo- 
 tion and image he had his expression. Ani even 
 when only one thought was engaging him his words 
 were multiple. For he analyzed that thought into 
 its elements, contemplated it from various points of 
 view, compared it with other ideas, saw the points 
 of similarity and difference ; and then vocalized the 
 whole cluster of observations. The play of ''Ham- 
 let" in particular is an embodiment of power of 
 speech. Soldiers, statesmen, kings and many of the 
 other sorts of men that carry most of his plots are 
 naturally sparing in words. Shakespeare had to ac- 
 commodate himself to the requirements of their reti- 
 cent characters. But Hamlet the philosopher and 
 poet to whom speech was as necessary as breathing 
 gave him his opportunity and he seized it with an 
 onrush of eloquence. 
 
 One would not expect a fine discrimination in the 
 choice of words in a vocabulary of spontaneous 
 abundance. And yet the nicest adaptation of ex- 
 pression to idea goes along with Shakespeare's pro- 
 fusion. When he broods his language hangs heavily 
 around his thoughts. When his mind breaks out in 
 sudden intuitions of the truth his words leap with 
 
 32 
 
POET OF EXPRESSION 33 
 
 it. When he grows passionate his language glows 
 and rushes with his feelings. Indeed, it is impos- 
 sible for an elocutionist to render such rapid pas- 
 sages otherwise than rapidly. The balanced sen- 
 tences of Brutus' speech are a replica of the Ro- 
 man's balancing, philosophic mind. The words of 
 Lorenzo to Jessica, in the last act of "The Merchant 
 of Venice," are as velvety as the Italian night they 
 describe. The majestic march of the blank verse 
 in Othello's speech before the senate becomes the 
 heroic proportions of the speaker's soul. The rug- 
 ged compactness of innumerable passages in ** Mac- 
 beth" fit in with the compressed and tense forceful- 
 ness of the whole action. The ghost in ''Hamlet" is 
 not more solemn than the heroics in which he speaks. 
 The language of Caesar is always that of a world- 
 conqueror ; and the address of Henry V to his troops 
 before the battle of Agincourt vibrates with the re- 
 pressed energy of his prepared soul. 
 
 Did Gray in his years of elaboration over the 
 phrasing of the "Country Churchyard" ever fit the 
 phrase to the idea more happily than Shakespeare 
 when he threw off carelessly expressions like these : 
 "The majesty of buried Denmark," 'Tn the high and 
 palmy days of Rome, a little ere the mightiest Julius 
 fell," "The sheeted dead did squeak and gibber 
 through the streets of Rome," "In the dead vast and 
 middle of the night," "His sovereign reason like 
 sweet bells jangled out of tune," "Gilding pale 
 streams with heavenly alchemy," "O thou weed, who 
 art so lovely fair and smell'st so sweet that the sense 
 aches at thee," "Nothing became him in his life like 
 the leaving it," "My way of life is fallen into the 
 
34 AN ESTIMATE OF SHAKESPEARE 
 
 sere, the yellow leaf," "Painting the lily and gilding 
 refined gold ?" Appropriate phrasings come upon us 
 so thick and fast that the glory of his utterances are 
 dimmed by their own light. We need to read a 
 book of quotations to appreciate by contrast the su- 
 perior fitness of his expressions to the best efiforts of 
 other poets. 
 
 I implied in the last paragraph that Shakespeare 
 composed in an ofif-hand manner : and so, I am per- 
 suaded, he did. There is every evidence of sponta- 
 neity in his plays. I cannot imagine him as a patient 
 elaborator of style. No doubt he thought deeply be- 
 fore putting pen to paper, but when once settled on 
 his characters, theme and plan, he must have written 
 with lightning speed. Innumerable peculiar colloca- 
 tions of words could not possibly have been the out- 
 come of deliberate selection. Such verbal juxtapo- 
 sitions never existed before his time. They were 
 stricken off according to the exigencies of a mind 
 impatient of delay in choosing the traditional phrase 
 or in coining a new one in accordance with ac- 
 cepted artificial laws. No other joiner of words 
 could have made such incongruous pieces fit together 
 into a consistent mosaic. "Coigne of vantage," 
 *'High-battled Caesar," ''The itch of Antony's affec- 
 tion nicked his captainship," *'A thousand soldiers 
 have on their riveted trim," ''Wouldst thou be 
 windowed in great Rome?" Such expressions, so 
 unusual and yet so telling, were the first that came 
 to his hurrying mind and he waited for no other. 
 From the first act the finale beckoned to him, and he 
 hurried to it without taking time to measure his steps 
 too nicely. If a man of lesser powers snatched at 
 
I'OKT or I'.XI'RKSSFON 35 
 
 words haphazard in an onward rush of thoughts 
 a hodge-pod^'c would result. Most of us must raise 
 ourselves lahoriously to a level of high expres- 
 sion and then he very careful not to fall. P.ut h(^ 
 dwelled normally on elevated planes of language 
 and needed not to dread much the danger of sinking 
 through carelessness. That he did sinl< soniclinics, 
 however, is evident from the occasional ohscurily 
 and clumsiness of his style. 
 
 1 lad he ])QQn more circumspect in choosing words 
 undouhtedly he would have avoided these (laws ; hut 
 he would also have sacrificed a great portion of his 
 freshness and vitality. A cool judgment is liahle to 
 be wedded to a cold style: and the pauses of judicial 
 selection too often involve a stoppage of the stream 
 of words. Few men can he meticulous in the choice 
 of expressions without loss of glow and fluency. 
 Even Newman (be it said, salvo meliori judicio) 
 suffers as a writer from the sense he creates in his 
 readers' minds of a laborious effort to write nothing 
 beside the mark nor to ])ennit the slightest flaw to 
 mar the perfect contour of his style, ile is never 
 sublimely carried away ; his thoughts are superb, but 
 always under rein. One almost wishes that he were 
 not habitually so masterful. One would be relieved 
 to see him lounge at times: a strain would be lifted 
 and a sense of freedom break across his i)age. I'ut 
 because Shakespeare was swift and informal in ex- 
 ])ressing his thoughts his language tingles with life: 
 a rare tang and verve thrill through his lines and a 
 delightful abandon characterizes his luxuriant mul- 
 tiplication of images. 
 
 The abandon of Shakespeare's style is exemplified 
 
36 AN ESTIMATE OF SHAKESPEARE 
 
 in his use of invective, humorous and serious. Noth- 
 ing surpasses the jolly violence v^ith which Falstaff 
 and Prince Hal throw themselves into their bouts of 
 name-calling. They coin and exchange epithets with 
 great gusto. They pour forth vituperation till they 
 are out of breath, and after a breathing-space go to 
 it again with renewed ardor. They seem to have 
 memorized dictionaries of abuse in preparation for 
 encounters ; and, indeed, they could make additions 
 to any dictionary. In "The Taming of the Shrew," 
 Petruchio relieves his feelings off and on with an 
 outburst of complimentary phrases. One wonders, 
 in reading these and like passages where under the 
 sun the poet could have found so many outlandish 
 forms of abusive speech.' 
 
 But his serious invective is more startling. The 
 two soliloquies of Hamlet: '*Oh, what a peasant 
 slave am I !" and '*How all occasions do inform 
 against me !" are exaggerated forms of self-condem- 
 nation in which the prince takes a morbid pleasure 
 in pouring out the vials of a wrathful vocabulary 
 upon his own head. ''The devil damn thee black, thou 
 cream- faced loon! Where gotst thou that goose- 
 look ? Go prick thy face and over-red thy fear, thou 
 lily-livered boy. Those linen cheeks of thine are 
 counsellors to fear. What soldiers, whey-face?" In 
 this passage Macbeth mounts to the height of indig- 
 nation against the fearfulness of his servant through 
 six metaphors of fear. Marullus says to the mob : 
 "You blocks, you stones, you worse than senseless 
 things ! Oh, you hard hearts, you cruel men of 
 Rome." But Lear and Timon say things that make 
 Marullus seem like a novice in the art of rebuke. 
 
POET OF EXPRESSION 37 
 
 The pleasure which Shakespeare took in multi- 
 plying scathing epithets, he took indeed also, in 
 his general use of words. Thought is something 
 greater than a vocabulary. But a vocabulary is not 
 contemptible. ''Words, words, words" when they 
 usurp the place of thought are a bane, but not 
 otherwise. At least in literature they are more 
 than artificial forms. Scientific words are cold and 
 lifeless, merely indispensable evils, without which 
 a communication of thought is impossible. The 
 scientist would do without them if he could. But 
 the literary man delights in words, phrases and sen- 
 tences. Anyone with a little experience in writing 
 is aware of the keen pleasure of turning expres- 
 sions. Half the delight of reading Keats is due to 
 his exquisite phraseology. The word-artist finds 
 his joy not precisely in his thought nor in his 
 expression, but in the luxuriant unfolding of his 
 thought into expressions which are its perfect com- 
 plement. As Newman says, words are not mere 
 outward signs. They are a part of the thought, as 
 the voice is of the singer's soul. They flash on the 
 page or else only embody a few dead letters of the 
 alphabet, according as the author's mind was aglow 
 or cold when he wrote. 
 
 Now Shakespeare's words are still swathed for 
 us in the atmosphere of his soul and his verse is 
 still gold-flecked with his radiant intellect. Have 
 we not more than once been stopped at a line of his 
 by the magic of its suggestiveness? Have we not 
 found ourselves exploring the author's mind, won- 
 dering what imspoken things he meant by the 
 spoken words? Have we not found a wealth of 
 
38 AN ESTIMATE OF SHAKESPEARE 
 
 meaning between the lines? And is not this intui- 
 tion for things invisible a proof of the conjuring 
 power which a vocabulary has, not in itself, but 
 only from the writer's mind with which it is in 
 intimate touch? And if this be true, shall we think 
 it beneath the great poet's dignity to have revelled 
 in words? Rhetoricians have counted the number 
 of words employed by various authors and they 
 have accorded Shakespeare the first place in fecun- 
 dity over men like Macaulay, De Quincey and 
 Carlyle — a pre-eminence startling in a writer who 
 was under the handicap of some 250 years' priority 
 in the growth of the English language. He knew 
 the power of words. He loved them as the very 
 body of his spiritual conceptions. Next to the ideas 
 and emotions which surged through his soul, he 
 loved the majesty, the sweetness, the luxuriant pro- 
 fusion, the full-toned sonorousness, the quick adapt- 
 ability, the nice distinctions and the suggestiveness 
 of a perfect vocabulary. 
 
 The suggestiveness of Shakespeare is one of the 
 greatest wonders of the man. I do not know 
 whether suggestiveness is the right word for my 
 meaning. Let me illustrate. The delicious sense 
 of beauty and happiness emitted by the garden 
 scene of the last act of "The Merchant of Venice" ; 
 the feeling of powerlessness to face and answer the 
 multitudinous questionings rushing in upon the mind 
 for solution from everywhere, which rises from the 
 pages of "Hamlet" ; the realization of the unimpas- 
 sioned happiness of being in touch with nature, 
 which charms the reader of "As You Like It"; the 
 mystic pleasure of supposing a world of quaint and 
 
POET OF EXPRESSION 39 
 
 harmless spirits invisible at our feet and around 
 our head which comes upon us out of 'The Mid- 
 summer Night's Dream," and the fateful sense of 
 the tremendous presence of Caesar in the play of 
 that name, dominating careers even after his death, 
 for ruin or success — these impressions are not 
 definitely conveyed by language; they are breathed 
 into us mysteriously by impalpable processes of the 
 poet's mind; they may be called the work of sug- 
 gestion and they prove Shakespeare to be great. 
 
 The wit of Shakespeare embodied in his puns has 
 been a perennial subject of comment. I hold no 
 brief for puns. Nevertheless, I submit that there 
 are puns and puns. A play on words in which the. 
 relationship between idea and idea is hidden from 
 all but subtle minds, which conveys a merited dash 
 of bitter- irony or mystifies the inquisitive, is a 
 keen-cutting rapier-thrust in intellectual repartee. 
 Many of the poet's puns are distressing to the 
 reader. But explanations can be given. Here and 
 there undoubtedly he is only illustrating the fatuous 
 sense of fun in obtuse characters. The flat jokes 
 of the grave diggers are perhaps excusable on this 
 score; and Hamlet's own answers to them may be 
 supposed to be only a condescension to their intel- 
 lectual capacity. He had an audience too in 
 Elizabethan days that required crude entertain- 
 ment; he must have despised many of the things 
 he wrote to tickle them. Moreover, it seems that 
 even the cultured of that period had developed a 
 vitiated taste for pert inanities of speech. Shake- 
 speare probably caught the disease. Finally, word- 
 trifling may have been an inborn fault with him. 
 
40 AN ESTIMATE OF SHAKESPEARE 
 
 Nature often mars her best works. Bernard Shaw, 
 referring to some of the exchanges of Benedik and 
 Beatrice, remarks that the EngHsh mind has never 
 been noted for subtlety. 
 
 But when the worst has been said about Shake- 
 speare's punning, the truth remains that many of 
 his doubhngs of ideas are masterful. No apology 
 is in place for passages like these: 
 
 PoLONius — "My lord, would you go out of the air?" 
 
 {Take the air.) 
 Hamlet — "Into my grave?" 
 PoLONius — "My Lord, I most humbly take my leave of 
 
 you." 
 Hamlet — "You cannot take from me anything with which 
 
 I will more gladly part withal." 
 PoLONius — "What do you read, my lord?" 
 Hamlet — "Words, words, words." 
 Hamlet {to Guildenstern) — "Though you can fret me, 
 
 you cannot play upon me." 
 Gertrude — "Hamlet, thou hast thy father much offended." 
 Hamlet — "Mother, you have my father much offended." 
 Hamlet — "Is this the fine of his fines to have his fine pate 
 
 filled with fine dust?" 
 Hamlet {to the King) — "Drink off this potion. Is thy 
 
 union here? Follow my mother." 
 
 Punning and indeed all of the lighter forms of 
 literary expression receive an added value from 
 their association with grave ideas. A specialist in 
 fun is not to be wondered at for his felicities; for 
 an exclusive devotion to any art is expected to pro- 
 duce results above the ordinary. But quick transi- 
 tions from grave to gay and from gay to grave are 
 rare; for they imply a many-sided versatility. 
 Shakespeare changes front with astounding sud- 
 denness. Indeed, the intermingling of parti-colored 
 
POET OF EXPRESSION 4I 
 
 scenes in his plays would be disastrous were his 
 dexterity not guided by a sublime instinct for 
 effect. Perhaps he sometimes fails in mingling 
 shine and shadow. But all agree that the stroke 
 of genius is apparent in many of his contrasting 
 lines and scenes, and I am convinced that appar- 
 ently crude and incongruous combinations to which 
 exception is often taken justify themselves on closer 
 reading as indispensable means to the effect in- 
 tended. The drunken porter scene in ''Macbeth," 
 the clown scene immediately preceding the death 
 of Cleopatra, the mob-vulgarities which prelude the 
 sublime speech of Marullus and the emphatic 
 earthiness of Bottom and his histrionic craftsmen, 
 tangled in a gossamer-route of fairies, are really 
 subtle though apparently crude juxtapositions. 
 For the horror of Duncan's murder, the sublimity 
 of Cleopatra's death, the high eloquence of the 
 Roman and the gauzy evanescence of fairyland are 
 made more impressive by these opposites. Other 
 contrasts are better understood. Mamillius' story- 
 telling before the apprehension of Hermione, the 
 volubility of the fool at Lear's side in the storm, 
 the wild and whirling frivolity of Hamlet after the 
 vision of the ghost, Prince Hal's rakishness fol- 
 lowed by his kingliness — every reader sees here the 
 master's changeful hand combining opposites with 
 miraculous dexterity. 
 
 But the producing of effect is not the only ex- 
 planation of Shakespeare's contrasting scenes. He 
 embodied contraries side by side in his plays, 
 because he saw that life taken as a whole is a con- 
 fused mass of opposites. He intended his plays to 
 
42 AN ESTIMATE OF SHAKESPEARE 
 
 be a living image of life, and therefore he did not 
 stop at making combinations at which an over- 
 nice sestheticism w^ould be shocked. He was 
 not squeamishly artistic, but hearty and strong 
 as well as exquisitely delicate. He did not special- 
 ize in exotic refinement of portrayal. He would 
 rather represent two uncongenial truths than omit 
 either of them through a love of artistic consistency. 
 He waded into life, ready to portray anything that 
 he might meet. Pellucid lake and tempestuous 
 ocean ; dreaming valley and rugged cliff ; forest and 
 open plain; love, hatred, hope, fear, ecstasy and 
 despair, jealousy, ambition, madness; keen intel- 
 lectuality and sodden stupidity; courage and cow- 
 ardice ; frivolity and gravity ; courtliness and boor- 
 ishness ; self-sacrifice and selfishness ; the grandeur 
 of antiquity and the dash of modern chivalry — all 
 these bulked before him. Another man would 
 shrink from approach, or select a portion for 
 portrayal, or, attempting all, would be lost in the 
 confusion of things. But he rushed into the midst 
 of the chaotic mass, seized right and left, separ- 
 ated, ordered and represented the whole concrete 
 route of truths concretely, and yet so distinctly, 
 part by part, that we can study each part at our 
 leisure, with the pleasant sense of taking one thing 
 at a time. Nature is an organ, and he a skilled 
 player. All sounds are in its depths. They can 
 come out in massed dissonance or multitudinous 
 harmony. He knew the keyboard and all the stops 
 and he made his instrument express its one great 
 soul through many throats. 
 
PART II 
 SHAKESPEARE AND TRAGEDY 
 
 I. REPRESENTATION OF PROVIDENCE 
 
 Up to the present we have been considering 
 characteristics of Shakespeare in general. We may 
 now approach the more specific topic of his tragedy. 
 The most important and engrossing element of 
 Shakespearean tragedy is the representation of 
 Providence which the poet offers us. The generality 
 of men, captivated as they are by the whirl and gla- 
 mor of earthly pursuits, do not appear to interest 
 themselves in the influences exerted by a heavenly 
 power on their career. But their seeming indiffer- 
 ence is not an index of their thoughts. In moments 
 of solitude and in times of misfortune questions 
 concerning the fact and character of Providence are 
 vitally insistent. And though in reading Shake- 
 speare they explicitly think of this that and the 
 other thing, yet when the full force of his catas- 
 trophes overwhelms them, implicitly, almost uncon- 
 sciously their inquiring thoughts turn to the char- 
 acter of the Power that rules the world. Wherefore 
 the question of Shakespeare's representation of 
 Providence in tragedy is paramount. 
 
 We shall see later that Providence was repre- 
 sented by the Greek tragedians as contradicting the 
 freedom of man. Is man free in Shakespeare's tra- 
 gedy, and is the influence exerted by the superior 
 power upon his career beneficent or malignant? 
 
 43 
 
44 AN ESTIMATE OF SHAKESPEARE 
 
 To answer the question more satisfactorily I shall 
 first state two extreme views, between which the 
 truth is found. Some hold that the poet represents 
 Providence as perfectly beneficent and that there- 
 fore the reader or spectator experiences a feeling 
 of complete satisfaction at the end of the play. 
 s Others maintain that he represents Providence as 
 malignant, and that for this reason a reader or 
 spectator's sentiments are those of hopeless pessi- 
 mism, deep chagrin and rebellious hatred of the 
 power that so unevenly distributes success and mis- 
 fortune among the wicked and deserving. The 
 truth is that Shakespearean Providence is not malig- 
 nant nor perfectly beneficent. It is imperfectly 
 beneficent, and therefore the deep sense of sorrow 
 which emanates from the final scenes of defeat and 
 death, though far from satisfying to a mind that 
 rejoices in the triumph of good, has not a tincture 
 of debilitating gloom, moroseness or revolt against 
 heaven. 
 
 For the sake of clearness, I shall allow myself the 
 luxury of setting up the-proof somewhat formally. 
 
 First, then, the Providence of a Shakespearean 
 tragedy is not perfectly beneficent. The ways of 
 God in dealing with men cannot be justified without 
 reference to the next life. 'The whips and scorns 
 of time, the oppressor's wrong, the proud man's con- 
 tumely, the law's delay, the insolence of office and 
 the spurns that patient merit of the unworthy takes," 
 these and their likes would ofifer material for a less 
 favorable commentary on God's care of the good 
 but that the thought of a rectifying rearrangement 
 of apportionments after death helped the judgment 
 
REPRESENTATION OF PROVIDENCE 45 
 
 to pronounce in favor of Divine justice and 
 benevolence. 
 
 Nor can the objection be urged that virtue is its 
 own reward and vice its own punishment even in 
 this life. For the gratifying consciousness of virtue 
 is not a sufficient return for well-doing and the 
 stings of conscience are not an adequate punishment 
 for wickedness. Surely hero and heroine would not 
 feel themselves adequately remunerated for their 
 noble endurance of adversity by a high sense of rec- 
 titude unless this were complemented by the hope of 
 something after death. 
 
 But Shake'speare does not advert, as a rule, to the 
 next life in his tragic catastrophes. This was made 
 clear above in the chapter on his naturalness. We 
 saw there that the predominant impression left on 
 our souls in the last act of a Shakespearean tragedy 
 is that of finality. We repeat : the vision of an after- 
 life in which the wrongs wrought on earth will be 
 rectified is not opened to our gaze. In "Othello," 
 "Lear," "Romeo and Juliet," for instance, not even 
 a suggestion of the eternal reunion of broken hearts 
 is made to alleviate the pressure of the sympathetic 
 feelings which we entertain for these victims of mis- 
 fortune. 
 
 If the objection be urged : therefore Shakespeare 
 is an infidel, we repeat the distinction given above — 
 i.e., that non-advertence to a heavenly truth is not 
 the same thing as the denial of it. The distinction 
 may perhaps seem too nice ; in fact, only imaginary. 
 But it is founded on a possibility and a fact. The 
 possibility of not adverting to a truth without deny- 
 ing or doubting it may be illustrated in a homely way 
 
46 AN ESTIMATE OF SHAKESPEARE 
 
 from the art of sculpture. A sculptor does not rep- 
 resent the interior organs of a man — his heart, lungs 
 and brain; for he is concerned only with his figure 
 and face. Who would say that he denies what he 
 does not represent ? In like manner a poet can rep- 
 resent certain phases of life to the exclusion of other 
 phases by a process of non-advertence without being 
 involved in the necessity of doubting or denying. 
 Now, that Shakespeare actuated that possibility in 
 regard to the truth of heaven is evident in the light 
 of a reader's emotions at the catastrophe. No reader 
 is fully satisfied on closing the book. He would be if 
 the light of another world were let in by the poet to 
 dissipate the shadows of the doleful finale. But no 
 reader is pessimistic and rebellious. He would be 
 if that light were extinguished by the spirit of denial 
 or doubt in the tragedy. 
 
 But, the possibility and fact of non-advertence 
 being admitted, the question may be asked : How can 
 a spectator or reader take artistic pleasure in a play 
 in which justice is not fully meted out by Provi- 
 dence to the deserving ? In answering, I admit that 
 the human heart naturally wishes to see justice fully 
 done; that justice is not represented as being fully 
 done in Shakespeare's tragedy ; and, thirdly, if, dur- 
 ing the course of the tragedy, the reader or spectator 
 adverted to the fact of injustice, his displeasure at 
 the sight would destroy any artistic gratification 
 which might otherwise be aroused. But I maintain 
 that, if the dramatist be a real artist and his play 
 be followed with wrapt attention, the soul of the 
 reader will be too full of sympathetic interest in the 
 beauty of suffering to advert to its injustice. Only 
 
REPRESENTATION OF PROVIDENCE 47 
 
 at the completion of the play, when the tense emo- 
 tions of the heart will have relaxed, will the mind 
 begin to act, perceiving and revolting at the sight of 
 crushed nobility of character unavenged on earth. 
 But then forces other than tragedy — i.e., Reason 
 and Faith — can come in to give assurance of an 
 after-life in which the tilted scale-beam of justice 
 will be reset. 
 
 Providence, then, as represented in Shakespearean 
 tragedy is not perfectly beneficent. 
 
 But neither is it malignant. For, aside from the 
 fact that Shakespeare does not exclude the possibil- 
 ity of a heavenly readjustment of earthly wrongs by 
 positively denying the next life, there are always 
 five or six factors in his catastrophes which save the 
 partially beneficent character of Providence. Since 
 the villain is always punished, therefore Providence 
 in directing destinies is certainly not partial to vil- 
 lainy. Since some virtuous persons always survive 
 the catastrophe to advance the cause of good, there- 
 fore Providence is propitious to the worthy. Since 
 the destruction of the amiable figures of the tragedy 
 in most cases may be largely attributed to faults of 
 their own : and in all cases is principally the work of 
 human agencies of evil, therefore Providence cannot 
 justly be held accountable for the defeat. More- 
 over, the sublime heights to which some of his hero- 
 ines rise, the beauty of their pathetic submission, 
 their love in death, their fortitude force upon us 
 the reflection that the supernal Power from which 
 such beings proceed must itself be amiable. For, if 
 we love God for having given us the loveliness of 
 field and mountain, ocean and sky, surely we have 
 
48 AN ESTIMATE OF SHAKESPEARE 
 
 a right to conclude with greater cogency to the good- 
 ness He manifested in blessing the world with such 
 types of womanhood. Therefore, Providence is not 
 presented to us in Shakespearean tragedy as a ma- 
 lignant force. It is neither perfectly beneficent nor 
 malignant. It is imperfectly beneficent, and there- 
 fore our feelings on finishing a tragedy are painful 
 rather than exultant; but, though painful, yet not 
 pessimistic nor rebellious. 
 
II. MALE CHARACTERS 
 
 An estimate has already been given of Shake- 
 speare's female characters in tragedy and comedy. 
 The following considerations bear exclusively upon 
 his tragic characters, especially his men. When I 
 stop to question myself about his great portrayals 
 of heroes — Othello, Macbeth, Hamlet, Brutus, 
 Lear, Coriolanus, Antony and the rest — the first 
 thought that comes to me is : how essential they are 
 to the plays. Many a good novelist rests his claim 
 to recognition on other things than character: e. g., 
 on incidents, plot, description and style. A lyric 
 poet need have nothing to do with the portrayal of 
 character ; for a lyric is an efifusion of emotion and 
 thought. And although an epic poet must create 
 characters to carry on the action of his epic, his 
 main work consists in drawing up and setting forth 
 a grand scale of events. It is evident that the Iliad 
 and ^neid depend incomparably less on character 
 for their effectiveness than a tragedy of Shake- 
 speare and incomparably more on big happenings. 
 Character-drawing is not wanting in the great 
 epics, but character-drawing was not the primary 
 purpose in the epic poet's mind; it is not exhaustive 
 and does not afford an abundant supply of material 
 for analytic study. In some instances it would 
 appear that the epic poet was only intent on the 
 glorification of some abstract quality, which he 
 encompassed in a form of flesh and blood to make 
 a concrete appeal. Thus Achilles is the brave, 
 Ulysses the wise, Menalaus the eloquent. In other 
 cases, an epic character's only recommendation is 
 
 49 
 
50 AN ESTIMATE OF SHAKESPEARE 
 
 his physical strength. The hero of the ^neid is 
 merely "pius ^neas," and the colorlessness of Vir- 
 gil's ''fortemque Gyan, fortemque Cloanthum/' has 
 made the names of those two adventurers bywords. 
 Satan in "Paradise Lost" is of course a great char- 
 acter but the other demons and the good angels 
 are little more than names. But the heroes of 
 Shakespearean tragedy are many and varied and 
 rich in material for deep psychological study. 
 
 A peculiarity of the Shakespearean heroes is that 
 they are not heroes. They are as a rule beings of 
 tremendous power, amiable and admirable in many 
 phases of their souls, but cursed with a grave defect 
 of character which helps to work their ruin. They 
 are called heroes on account of their massive ele- 
 ments of good. But they are not heroes in the 
 strict sense of the word because they invariably 
 fail at the end of the play, partially through their 
 own fault. The forces of evil round about them 
 dispose them for a moral fall and they themselves 
 do not possess the truly heroic self-control to rise 
 superior to adverse conditions and conquer. Mac- 
 beth, Othello and Lear are examples of the Shake- 
 spearean heroes who are not heroes — of men, 
 adorned with very lovable traits but deficient in the 
 will-power to govern themselves. 
 
 The question naturally arises here: Why does 
 Shakespeare invariably create heroes who are not 
 heroes? Surely the answer cannot be that life 
 affords no examples of heroes of the genuine sort. 
 Perhaps his motive is to win our sympathy more 
 surely. For, rightly or wrongly, men quite gener- 
 ally are inclined to feel a particular compassion for 
 
MALE CHARACTERS 5 1 
 
 those whose ruin is partially due to their own faults. 
 This strange tendency of human sympathy may 
 probably be accounted for by the sense of fellow- 
 ship which we feel for great men who are not with- 
 out faults. We realize that, for all their heroic 
 qualities, they are of the same flesh and blood as 
 ourselves. 
 
 There is some plausibility in the view that the 
 portrayal of a faultless hero, doomed to ruin, would 
 create a sense of horror rather than sympathy 
 whereas sympathy should be the paramount emo- 
 tion at the catastrophe. 
 
 But a more likely explanation is found in the 
 requirements of a first-class tragedy. In a second- 
 class tragedy the conflict is waged between hero 
 and villain. It is external. In a first-class tragedy 
 the external conflict is secondary to the more ter- 
 rific, engrossing and losing battle waged in the 
 hero's own breast between his better and worse 
 self. Therefore, to produce a tragedy of the latter 
 sort, the dramatist must select a leading character 
 whose imperfect will or intellect will yield the vic- 
 tory in the long run to the dominant passion that 
 assails him. Hamlet yields to a habit of delay, 
 Othello to jealousy, Macbeth to ambition, Lear to an 
 overweening imperiousness. Hamlet against his 
 enemies, Othello against lago, are interesting com- 
 batants, but Hamlet's habit of delay pitted against 
 his will to do, Othello's jealousy set over against 
 his love are far more interesting, and the final inter- 
 nal defeat of the good elements at the hand of the 
 bad touches the heart more keenly than the outward 
 downfall brought about by the villainy. 
 
52 AN ESTIMATE OF SHAKESPEARE 
 
 It is clear that the artistic handUng of an imper- 
 fect hero is very difficult. For, unless his lovable- 
 ness is kept prominent the reader will despise him 
 for his weakness. The reader ought not to despise 
 him although he may clearly perceive his faults, 
 for surely contempt is not an artistic feeling, and a 
 dramatist would make a grave artistic blunder were 
 he to arouse it and draw it upon his hero. Indeed, 
 weakness and failure are set forth by true dramatic 
 art to emphasize by force of contrast the level of 
 nobility from which a hero pathetically falls. Some 
 readers feel contempt for Othello and Hamlet. The 
 readers are to blame and not Shakespeare. For in 
 passing on to the animal jealousy of the Moor and 
 the prone passivity of the melancholy Dane, they 
 fail to carry with them, as a counteractant to dis- 
 gust, the memory of their nobility. They draw a 
 false meaning out of a text for not reading it in 
 its context. 
 
 But the most probable explanation of the imper- 
 fect hero in Shakespeare is his parallel in fact. Real 
 heroes are found, but life is more prolific of good 
 and able men, marred by fatal flaws. 
 
 Two of the central truths of human life are physi- 
 cal liberty in regard to good and evil; and a pro- 
 nounced propensity to evil. Our own conscience is 
 a sufficient guarantee for the fact of personal physi- 
 cal liberty; and the universal esteem of men for 
 mastery in one form or another as being one of the 
 most excellent things in the world is a sufficient 
 guarantee for the surpassing excellence of master- 
 ing one's own future by exercising free will. 
 Hence tragedy as a replica of life must set forth 
 
MALE CHARACTERS 53 
 
 the free will of man. The old Greek tragedians 
 have commonly been accused of neglecting it. 
 Their heroes are physically forced to fall by en- 
 vironment or heredity or some ancestral curse. The 
 neglect is not a particular fault of the Greek trage- 
 dians. It is the fault of Greek theology which 
 included the doctrine of fate. But if there is any 
 one feature more prominent than another in the 
 tragedies of Shakespeare it is the physical freedom 
 of his characters. He was a Christian and wrote 
 according to the Christian ideal of personal respon- 
 sibility. No one thinks of Hamlet, Othello, Mac- 
 beth but as of physically free men. 
 
 Nevertheless they are represented as being under 
 the pressure of a strong bias toward evil, because 
 no other representation would square with a most 
 prominent fact of real life. For what is more com- 
 mon in real life than an environment of difficulties 
 so many and pressing that, though they can be over- 
 come, they will not be overcome except by a strong 
 will specially assisted from on high ? 
 
 Now, a recurrent feature of Shakespeare's trage- 
 dies is the hero, admirable in many ways, but de- 
 fective in some pronounced feature of his character, 
 placed in a particular set of circumstances which will 
 (though they need not) prove fatal to him. He can 
 master them, but he will not, the difficulties are so 
 great. And, indeed, a keen reader of the drama, 
 after a survey of the hero and his environment, can 
 prognosticate his course of action pretty accurately. 
 At any rate after reading the play, on looking back 
 over its course of action, he cannot but see how nat- 
 urally the catastrophe grew out of its antecedents. 
 
54 AN ESTIMATE OF SHAKESPEARE 
 
 Othello can reject the representations of lago and 
 of his own imagination against Desdemona ; but the 
 snares have been so dexterously laid that, for a fact, 
 he will not evade them. Hamlet can rouse his pros- 
 trate will to action; but we know that, under the 
 stress of outward circumstances and inward melan- 
 choly, he zvill not. Macbeth can follow conscience ; 
 but he will follow ambition. 
 
III. TRAGIC CAUSALITY IN SHAKE- 
 SPEARE 
 
 The importance of character in Shakespearean 
 tragedy will be made still more apparent by consid- 
 ering tragic causality, so strikingly exemplified in all 
 the poet's great tragedies. 
 
 Causality is the link between cause and effect, and 
 tragic causality means the intimate connection be- 
 tween the characters and the whole action of the 
 play. The characters are the cause, and the plot 
 grows out of them. Hence the whole color, atmos- 
 phere, tone of the play are as the characters are. An 
 illustration of the importance of tragic causality may 
 be drawn by again contrasting tragedy with lyric 
 and epic poetry. In a lyric, as I hinted above, the 
 poet gives vent to the joys, grief, hopes, fears, aspi- 
 rations and loves of his heart. A lyric is not the ex- 
 hibition of human wills, aiming more or less delib- 
 erately at a definite end. The purpose of a lyric is 
 nothing more than the expression of the poet's own 
 emotions. An epic poem, 'tis true, sets before us 
 men acting with a purpose. But the sequence be- 
 tween aims and results is not so vital to an epic 
 poem as to a tragedy. Chance plays a most impor- 
 tant part in an epic. Big things in the poem happen 
 independently of the wills of the characters. The 
 human agents are not the sole nor principal makers 
 of the action ; they are often passively driven on by 
 a divinity which shapes their ends. Their own initi- 
 ative is secondary to the ruling powers of the em- 
 pyrean. Chance, luck, destiny has some place in 
 tragedy also; but it is subsidiary. Human choice 
 55 
 
56 AN ESTIMATE OF SHAKESPEARE 
 
 must be paramount. In the ''Odyssey/' for instance, 
 most of the events simply happen. They are created 
 for the hero by chance ; he himself does not create 
 them. In fact, it would not be extravagant to sup- 
 pose an epic poet first drawing up in his mind an 
 elaborate scheme of events, worked out in detail be- 
 fore he even thinks of his characters : and then, only 
 on second thought, creating his characters and set- 
 ting them to experience the events. Whereas a tra- 
 gic poet first imagines his characters, contemplates 
 them, sees them acting according to the natural lean- 
 ing of their souls, and then writes his play. Thus 
 in an epic characters may be created to fit in with 
 the action which is predetermined in the poet's mind. 
 In a tragedy the action must square with the char- 
 acters. The growth of an epic theme may be com- 
 pared to the inanimate growth of a crystal. It is ex- 
 ternal, depending upon the poet's arbitrary accu- 
 mulation of interesting happenings. The growth of 
 a tragedy is like the vital growth of a seed. It is 
 from within, rooted in and springing from the heart 
 and mind of the tragic characters. Epic incidents, 
 coloring, drift and outcome may be just as the poet 
 wishes them to be. But tragic incidents, coloring, 
 drift and outcome must be just as the characters 
 require. 
 
 Hence the engrossing interest which tragedy has 
 always afforded to men as rational beings. As ra- 
 tional beings we like to trace the links between cause 
 and effect. Tragedy affords us the opportunity. 
 Other forms of poetry make their appeal to the im- 
 agination and heart. Tragedy does this too ; but it 
 is also, perhaps preeminently, an appeal to reason. 
 
TRAGIC CAUSALITY IN SHAKESPEARE 57 
 
 Now, tragic causality runs through every tragedy 
 of Shakespeare. Were not lago, Othello and Desde- 
 mona the peculiar characters they are, the play of 
 "Othello" would not be what it is. For instance, 
 were Cordelia in Desdemona's place she would have 
 insisted with Othello, in her high way, on an ex- 
 planation of his conduct, and therefore lago's plot 
 would have collapsed. But because Desdemona's 
 character was one of silent long- suffering the plot 
 progressed. Again, if Hamlet had been in Othello's 
 place there would not have been a tragedy. For 
 Hamlet's keen intellectuality would have made him 
 a match for the astute lago. Hamlet was accus- 
 tomed to a most elaborate self-examination of mo- 
 tives, leanings, schemings of the human heart. He 
 knew by personal internal experience all the fits and 
 starts, the cool calculations, the adaptations of 
 means to ends, the wary preparations, the tortuous 
 advances, the feignings, the quick changes of front 
 and all the other manifold and intricate workings of 
 an abnormally active mind. He would have applied 
 his self-knowledge and converted it into a knowl- 
 edge of lago. His own capability for intellectual 
 elaboration in a good cause would have served him 
 well in guessing at lago's intellectual elaboration in 
 a bad cause. But Othello was too grandly simple to 
 suspect. On the other hand, however, precisely be- 
 cause Othello was sudden and quick in action there 
 would have been no tragedy of Hamlet had he been 
 in place of the melancholy Dane. For he would 
 have gone straight from the platform and his audi- 
 ence with the ghost and slain his uncle without 
 thought. 
 
IV. SHAKESPEARE AND THE IMPROB- 
 ABLE 
 
 The charge of improbabihty has frequently been 
 urged against characters of Shakespeare. The 
 charge includes male and female, characters of 
 comedy and tragedy, but more emphasis is placed 
 on it in regard to tragic heroes. It is said, for 
 instance, that Hamlet's delays, Othello's hardening 
 towards Desdemona, Lear's division of his king- 
 dom, Macbeth's terrors of conscience are improb- 
 able. In like manner, flaws are picked in his plots. 
 The casket scene and the pound of flesh are ac- 
 counted unreal. 
 
 In answering the objection, I would state, first, 
 that some of the factors of the poet's tragedies are 
 improbable in themselves and in the manner of 
 presenting them; second, other elements are im- 
 probable in themselves, but not in their manner of 
 presentation, and third, other elements to which 
 exception is taken are not improbable in any way. 
 Their seeming to be so is due to one or other defect 
 in the perception of the reader. 
 
 The division of the kingdom in Lear, I am 
 aware, has been defended and explained by some 
 critics. Nevertheless, it appears to exemplify the 
 improbability noted in the first place above. 
 Shakespeare perhaps did not care whether that in- 
 cident was probable or not. He wished to pour out 
 the riches of his genius in elaborating the later 
 great scenes, which would have been impossible 
 without that first improbability. He admitted the 
 
 58 
 
SHAKESPEARE AND THE IMPROBABLE 59 
 
 improbability for the sake of the pathetic things 
 that flowed from it, and did not bother about the 
 artistic valuelessness of the means, so long as they 
 served his end. 
 
 But not all the improbabilities in the plays of 
 Shakespeare are open to criticism. Those that are 
 made to appear probable by the art of the dramatist 
 are to be commended. For an important criterion 
 of good dramatic art is not necessarily the objective 
 plausibility of characters and incidents, but rather 
 their seeming plausibility. If a dramatist can make 
 the unlikely appear likely, he has fulfilled the re- 
 quirements. Now nothing is more characteristic 
 of Shakespeare than the clothing of the unusual in 
 ordinary semblances, and nothing is less deserving 
 of unfavorable comment. He gives to the airy 
 nothingness of the improbable the local habitation 
 aijd the name of the probable. Take many of the 
 factors of a plot of hi^ from the context and they 
 seem crudely extravagant; study them in their set- 
 ting and you forget to criticise. The atmosphere he 
 throws around them, the background against which 
 he places them, the gradual approaches which he 
 makes to them from a starting point of ordinary 
 events have the efifect of illusionment. You are 
 allured from a rationalizing attitude, you forget to 
 advert to the tenuousness of the web of incidents 
 being woven around you, you accept everything 
 with implicit faith and only after the spell has been 
 broken at the end of the play do you think of say- 
 ing: How very improbable! Men that criticise the 
 casket scene and the pound of flesh in "The Mer- 
 chant of Venice," the statue scene in "The Winter's 
 
6o AN ESTIMATE OF SHAKESPEARE 
 
 Tale/' the leap from the cliff in ''Lear," and certain 
 manifestations of character too numerous to men- 
 tion, occurring here and there throughout the 
 plays, level their attacks only after they have closed 
 the book and gotten beyond the reach of the poet's 
 magic wand. This is unfair. Poetry must be stud- 
 ied poetically. It is a thing of concrete beauty 
 which capnot be appreciated without imagination 
 and heart. Subject it to the touch of cold analysis 
 and you divest it of its charm, as you destroy the 
 beauty of a flower by the very act of taking it 
 apart. The less imagination and feeling in a stu- 
 dent of philosophy, the better for him in his own 
 sphere of study ; the worse for him if he transfer his 
 energies to the study of poetry. For though in the 
 study of poetry the mind is used, yet it is not domi- 
 nant. The feelings and imagination are the princi- 
 pals ; the mind only runs along supplying them with 
 materials. The mind is made for truth, the imagi- 
 nation and heart are made for beauty. Therefore, 
 the mind is at greater advantage in the field of phi- 
 losophy, which embodies truth. The imagination 
 and heart are at home in the field of poetry, which 
 embodies the beautiful. Now, after a play, a man's 
 feelings and fancy subside; his mind resumes its 
 plain and unimpassioned activity. In the course 
 of a play, these respective faculties act inversely. 
 Hence the propriety of judging of Shakespeare's 
 improbabilities by the effect they produce on an 
 engrossed reader or spectator and not by the im- 
 pression made by them upon a cold, calculating 
 critic. 
 
 Finally, other factors of Shakespearean tragedy 
 
SHAKESPEARE AND THE IMPROBABLE 6l 
 
 to which exception has been taken on the score of 
 improbability are not improbable either in them- 
 selves or in Shakespeare's manner of presenting 
 them. The difficulty lies with the reader. When 
 we hear a reader say that Othello is impossible (I 
 take only one of twenty like animadversions against 
 the probability, of Shakespeare's characters), we 
 may put him down as being under one or another 
 of several disadvantages. He has not had personal 
 experience of the tremendous possibilities of human 
 passion set aflame; or he is mistaking unreason- 
 ableness of conduct for unnaturalness of conduct; 
 or he is not aware that Shakespeare's purpose is to 
 represent abnormal men in an extraordinarily try- 
 ing environment; or he has forgotten that exag- 
 gerated dramatic portrayal is not a fault, provided 
 it does not pass the* boundary of human nature to 
 the plane of devils or angels ; or he has followed the 
 play only half-heartedly. In fact, he may be labor- 
 ing under several of these disadvantages. How, 
 therefore, can his indictment have any weight? 
 
 Perhaps the most common cause of misappre- 
 hending the value of Shakespeare's characters is the 
 last-named condition of mind. 
 
 The thorough appreciation of tragedy presup- 
 poses a thorough reading of it. Literature in gen- 
 eral and tragedy in particular are too generally 
 looked upon as mere luxuries. They are supposed 
 to tide the mind over a weary hour or minister to 
 a cultivated taste. They are luxuries in a sense, 
 but in no sense are they superficial. They require 
 as much application in a student as the most ab- 
 struse philosophy. The application, however, is of 
 
62 AN ESTIMATE OF SHAKESPEARE 
 
 a different sort. For, while the philosopher must 
 apply his mind, the reader of tragedy must apply 
 his imagination and heart. There is not much 
 need of imagination or heart in unravelling philo- 
 sophic problems. There is not much need of intel- 
 lect in simply understanding a play. But the 
 understanding of a play is not the appreciation of 
 it. For this, the imagination and heart must glow ; 
 and they will not glow without tense and continued 
 application. A reader must steep himself in the 
 lines before him and- read much between the lines, 
 imagining twenty things that are suggested but not 
 expressed. He must picture, scenes and nojt merely 
 read stage directions between brackets, and he 
 must fill in the pictures and- not be satisfied with 
 an outline. He must trace words on the lips to 
 their source in the heart, and behind action look 
 for motives. In the catastrophe he himself n>ust be 
 the sufferer. If he remain a spectator, his grief 
 will be superficial ; only a pleasant bit of the luxury 
 of emotion. But with the anguish of hero and hero- 
 ine become his own by his dramatic identification 
 of himself with them, he will refrain from criticising 
 apparent improbabilities of character and will ex- 
 perience a real rending of the heart. 
 
 I may suggest finally that possibly a lack of 
 natural sensibility explains the callousness of some 
 readers to the appeal of Shakespeare's heroes. 
 There are men that simply have not a heart for 
 natural scenery. They have an eye for it. They 
 can see its colors and shapes. But they cannot feel 
 the throbbing of its heart against their own. Hence 
 their persuasion that true lovers of nature are ex- 
 
SHAKESPEARE AND THE IMPROBABLE 63 
 
 iravagant in their admiring expressions. Again, 
 there are men that have no special aptitude for 
 philosophy. To them philosophy is a Babel of 
 words, a museum of fossilized mental formalities. 
 Hence they think that an enthusiastic student of 
 philosophy is a conceited pretender. And in like 
 manner there are men that cannot keenly feel 
 tragedy; to their mind, an intensely sympathetic 
 reader of it is an anomaly. Though men, they 
 are hardly human in their sympathies; they are 
 cold and unimpassioned. No amount of experi- 
 ence in life is capable of bringing their passions 
 into play, because they lack them, and therefore the 
 exhibition of passion at white heat in Shakespeare's 
 tragedies, driving men on to unwonted manifesta- 
 tions of character, seems to them a pure extrava- 
 gance of portrayal. 
 
V. DRAMATIC ACTION 
 
 Much need not be said about action in tragedy: 
 for the necessity of action is evident. Shakespeare's 
 superiority to at least one class of modern play- 
 writers lies in his combination of character-study 
 with dramatic action. An analysis of human mo- 
 tives, peculiarities, weakness and strength in a con- 
 crete character may be a fine psychological study; 
 but it need not therefore be a good play. A tragedy 
 is more than a leisurely contemplation of isolated 
 men and women, living apart from the activities of 
 life in the privacy of their own souls. What we 
 see of the souls of dramatic characters must be seen 
 as it were in passing, by intermittent glances at 
 them in the midst of the onward sweep of their out- 
 ward energies. The action and plot are only the 
 body of the play. The character-drawing is the soul. 
 This must be granted. But, though the body is less 
 than the soul, it is essential. 
 
 A lyric is only an expression of passion in words, 
 without action ; an epic is a series of grand events, 
 touched with passion of course, but chiefly effective 
 through their external interest. A tragedy combines 
 in itself the inwardness of the lyric with the out- 
 wardness of the epic. It may be described as the 
 passions of the heart working themselves out into 
 action ; or in other words action permeated by pas- 
 sion. Some of Shakespeare's historical plays do not 
 deserve the name of tragedy because they are hardly 
 more than a stringing together of historical events. 
 But in his great tragedies beneath the surface of 
 
 64 
 
DRAMATIC ACTION 65 
 
 events lies precious and abundant matter for con- 
 crete psychological study. 
 
 CONFLICT 
 
 The action of tragedy is carried on between con- 
 flicting powers. A reference has already been made 
 to the two sorts of conflict proper to tragedy. The 
 protagonists in the external conflict are the hero and 
 villain: the internal protagonists are the mutually 
 inimical forces of good and evil in the hero's own 
 soul. In this connection it may be remarked that the 
 Greek tragedy of Antigone is not ideal. For the 
 tragic conflict is external — between Antigone and 
 her enemy. It is true a warfare of intense interest 
 is also waged in her own bosom between her love of 
 life and her purpose to endure death for love's sake. 
 But observe, this conflict is not properly tragic ; for 
 it results in a victory and a triumph for the nobler 
 part of her. We grieve at her death, but we exult 
 that she has kept her firm soul intact. 
 
 Conflict exercises two influences on tragedy. It 
 makes tragedy more interesting and more pathetic. 
 More interesting : for an encounter naturally appeals 
 to men. For instance, however much we deprecate 
 the present war for the sorrows it has bred, we are 
 tensely interested in the outcome of formidable 
 forces crossing swords. More pathetic : for surely 
 the sight of a hero, prostrate after a brilliant effort 
 to succeed, appeals to our compassion more potently 
 than if the hero were merely a passive sufferer. 
 Othello's repeated efforts to throw off jealousy lend 
 a peculiar painfulness to his final yielding: and 
 Hamlet's procrastinations would be utterly con- 
 
66 AN ESTIMATE OF SHAKESPEARE 
 
 temptible were they not preceded by brave but in- 
 sufficient efforts to be strong. Macbeth too is saved 
 from being a mere villain and awakens a feeling 
 of pity in his prostrate moral ruin by the frantic 
 efforts which his conscience had made to stop him in 
 his ambitious march to the throne. 
 
 CLIMAX 
 The climax of a tragedy is the highest point of 
 the hero's successful activity. The energy of the 
 villain mounts higher after the climax, but the hero's 
 star begins to decline. The hero may energize more 
 after the climax than before, but his efforts are 
 being made then in a losing cause. But, though the 
 hero falls off in successful action after the climax 
 interest in him does not (or, at any rate, ought not 
 to) decrease. A play would be a poor affair in- 
 deed if its post-climactic portions were less inter- 
 esting than its prior parts. A declension in action 
 need not involve a similar declension in interest : 
 although interest is very likely to wane with the 
 waning of action. For we are not prone to be in- 
 terested in a character that is not conspicuous for 
 action. The sufferings of a hero elicit sympathy, 
 but sympathy is not interest. Hence one of the 
 main efforts of a dramatist must be to sustain, if 
 not to increase, interest in the hero after the climax ; 
 and it may be questioned if even Shakespeare has 
 completely succeeded in all his best tragedies in this 
 difficult undertaking. More than one person of 
 judgment has preferred the ante-climactic parts of 
 both "Hamlet" and "Macbeth" to the portions which 
 follow the climax. 
 
DRAMATIC ACTION 67 
 
 An engaging bit of study consists in observing the 
 dramatic resourcefulness brought into play in the 
 latter acts of tragedies to prevent loss of interest. 
 In the play of **Hamlet," Laertes' encounter with 
 the King and the ravings of Ophelia supply for the 
 protracted absence of Hamlet from the scene of 
 action : and Hamlet's encounter with the grave-dig- 
 gers, which is only a digression, helps to tide us over 
 to the catastrophe. In ''J^^i^s Csesar," the quarrel 
 scene between Brutus and Cassius is introduced not 
 less for the extrinsic purpose of stimulating interest 
 after the star of Brutus has begun to wane than for 
 any other end more essential to the play. 
 
 The increased importance of the villain in the lat- 
 ter acts of the play adds to the difficulty of making 
 those acts an artistic success. For his importance 
 can easily be overemphasized or insufficiently in- 
 creased. If the first possibility be actualized, he will 
 overshadow the hero ; if the second, he will not be 
 a protagonist of big enough proportions to measure 
 up to the hero in an equal fight. In either case the 
 play will suffer. 
 
 In the play of "Hamlet," Laertes who during the 
 first acts appears to be scarcely more than a friv- 
 olous youth, later on through his grief for Ophelia's 
 madness and death, his bearding of the King and 
 his oath of vengeance, looms as a large figure 
 worthy of crossing swords with the Dane. Mark 
 Antony by his speech to the Romans sud- 
 denly shoots up to the size of Brutus ; and Macduff 
 is made greater than himself by the news of his 
 slaughtered wife and children. And yet the heroes 
 are not overshadowed by these new-grown giants. 
 
68 AN ESTIMATE OF SHAKESPEARE 
 
 As the climax is the culmination of the action, 
 which begins in the first act, it is natural to turn now 
 to the first act and to make a few observations on 
 the opening of the play. The first act of the play is 
 hard to handle. Characters must be introduced to 
 the audience, the idea of the play must be at least 
 partially revealed ; its tone, atmosphere, coloring, 
 must be shown. How can this be done briefly, ar- 
 tistically, effectively? The use of a prologue is 
 clumsy. Soliloquies, which are nothing more than 
 confidential explanations to the audience, are crude. 
 Prolonged explanatory conversations between char- 
 acters for the enlightenment of the auditors are tir- 
 ing. But a few exchanges of ideas, appearing to be 
 more or less accidental and informal, are all that is 
 permitted in the initial scenes. The weaving of such 
 brief but pregnant introductions is a trial of con- 
 summate skill. 
 
 Shakespeare is a master in the construction of 
 opening scenes. The ghost-scene in *'Hamlet," the 
 scene of the witches in ''Macbeth," the mob scene in 
 "Julius Caesar" and the street scene in ''Romeo and 
 Juliet" hurry us away immediately as if by magic, 
 from real life into a tragic world. They give the 
 prevailing tone of those tragedies and raise the cur- 
 tain sufficiently to acquaint us with the character of 
 the story. 
 
 The ordinary place for the climax is the end of 
 the third act. We have, however, two remarkable 
 exceptions to the rule in "Macbeth" and "Othello." 
 For the successful action of Macbeth and Lady 
 Macbeth mounts to its highest at the beginning of 
 the second act: and in "Othello" the hero is still a 
 
DRAMATIC ACTION 69 
 
 successful man (in his own opinion) in unmasking 
 the wickedness of Desdemona well-nigh to the end 
 of the play. 
 
 A play with an early climax has the advantage of 
 hurrying on the audience without delay to the top 
 of the action. It involves, however, the drawback 
 of being obliged to sustain interest for an abnor- 
 mally long period between climax and catastrophe. 
 Inversely, a play with a late climax is likely to drag 
 through the first acts. But there is no danger of a 
 slowing down in interest during the short time be- 
 tween climax and catastrophe. 
 
 The difficulty of successfully managing irregu- 
 larly placed climaxes seems to have outweighed 
 their advantages in the judgment of Shakespeare. 
 For the end of the third act is the favorite place 
 with him. Another motive, however, may have 
 made him averse to late climaxes — i.e., the need of 
 room to teach the lesson of punishment in wait for 
 the hero's faults and the villain's crimes. As we 
 shall see later, tragedy instills the terrific truth that 
 '*the v/ages of sin is death." Before the climax the 
 lesson cannot be taught ; for the hero is in the ascen- 
 dant and the villain has not reached the collapse of 
 his maneuvering. Hence the necessity of consider- 
 able space after the climax to elaborate the idea of 
 the sanction of the natural law. 
 
 The importance of climax in tragedy can be illus- 
 trated by referring to another difference between 
 tragedy and lyric and epic poetry. A lyric is a full 
 and glorious outburst of emotion and imagery; it 
 may be a tumultuous improvisation, a poetic f erver- 
 ino, beginning ex abrupt© and ending in the same 
 
70 AN ESTIMATE OF SHAKESPEARE 
 
 style, without graduation of intensity. An epic 
 poem may run along on the same level of interest 
 and action from beginning to end without mounting 
 to peaks or descending to caverns of emotion. In- 
 deed, an epic may be more interesting and replete 
 with action at the start than in the middle or at the 
 end without gravely falling short of the epic ideal. 
 In the judgment of most readers, for instance, the 
 fall of the rebel Angels in the first portion of "Para- 
 dise Lost" is unequaled by anything that follows; 
 and many, without intending to criticise the "Divina 
 Commedia," have expressed more favorable views 
 of Dante's "Inferno" than of his "Purgatorio" and 
 "Paradiso." But the action of a tragedy begins low, 
 mounts to its highest point at the climax and then 
 sinks through failure, sorrow and death to the 
 catastrophe. It may be compared to the waters of a 
 lake, mounting from the trough of a wave to the 
 crest and then sinking from the crest to the trough. 
 
 CATASTROPHE 
 
 In the catastrophe lie the heart and soul of trag- 
 edy. Every portion of the play is supposed to 
 point to it. The antecedent success, happiness and 
 greatness of hero and heroine are intended only to 
 make the catastrophe more impressive by contrast. 
 In the catastrophe the greatest power of the dra- 
 matist is called into requisition. If he fail here, he 
 fails seriously, while on the other hand a masterly 
 catastrophe redeems faults of composition that may 
 precede it. 
 
 In the catastrophe two big elements are empha- 
 sized: the pathetic and the terrible. The pathetic 
 
DRAMATIC ACTION yi 
 
 arouses sympathy and the terrible causes fear. In 
 all tragedies both factors are found, but in some 
 the one predominates and in others the other. Mac- 
 beth, for instance, is an exemplification of the ter- 
 rible with little of the pathetic. The most pathetic 
 of Shakespeare's tragedies is Othello. The terrible 
 is embodied in the downfall of hero or heroine and 
 in the punishment of the villain; the pathetic con- 
 sists in the vision of noble characters destroyed. 
 Nobody who follows a terrible tragedy heartily can 
 but fear for himself lest in his human weakness he 
 may possibly fall into wickedness and experience its 
 punishment. Nobody who enters heart and soul 
 into a pathetic tragedy can remain callous to the 
 appealing beauty of suffering in amiable men and 
 women. The sleep-walking of Lady Macbeth, I 
 would venture to say, has made many a person 
 think twice before entering the path of wickedness, 
 which leads to the fearful goal of remorse. And 
 the sight of innocence and sweetness crushed in 
 Desdemona has stirred the souls of thousands to 
 their depths with self-forgetting compassion. 
 
VI. IRONY, ATMOSPHERE, OMENS 
 
 Three very subtle forces in the tragedies of 
 Shakespeare are Irony, Atmosphere and Omens. 
 They are subtle, because their influence though 
 emphatically felt is hard to describe. 
 
 Ordinary irony is the conveying of one idea 
 under the expression of another, the speaker and 
 perhaps the hearer both perceiving the disguise. 
 Extraordinary irony is a disguise not perceived by 
 either speaker or hearer, but (in the case of a play) 
 perceived by the dramatist and his reader. It is 
 easier to feel than to describe its peculiar tragic 
 effectiveness. Extraordinary irony is used here and 
 there by Shakespeare in many of his tragedies, but 
 as Bradley observes, ''Macbeth" is noted for its fre- 
 quent occurrence. When, for instance, Banquo utters 
 the lines, "This castle hath a pleasant seat," etc., de- 
 scriptive of the peaceful beauty of Macbeth's hold, 
 Banquo was not ironical, but Shakespeare was. 
 And in the light of the subsequent villainies which 
 made that fair place a hell, the sinister veiled sug- 
 gestiveness of the lines appears. When, after being 
 assured of the execution done on Cawdor for his 
 treason, the King expresses perfect confidence in 
 Macbeth, who at that very moment was meditating 
 the perfidious murder of his sovereign, the cruel 
 irony of the situation strikes us like a blow. When 
 Lady Macbeth lightly exclaims, "A little water 
 clears us of this deed, how easy then," we think 
 of those later words of hers: "Can all the perfumes 
 of Arabia sweeten this little hand?" The lady in 
 making light of the guilt and punishment of mur- 
 72 
 
IRONY, ATMOSPHERE, OMENS 73 
 
 der maybe was sincere, but Shakespeare in putting 
 those flippant words into her mouth was terribly 
 ironical. The drunken servitor on that awful night 
 dreams that he was keeping the gate of hell, and 
 we think with Shakespeare, though the servitor 
 did not when he spoke, how true a dream! Mac- 
 beth, with hypocritical graciousness, says to Banquo 
 at parting: "Fail not our feast to-night." Banquo, 
 already doomed by Macbeth to murder on the 
 road, answers: "I shall be there," and he kept his 
 word, for his ghost came to put the King from his 
 seat. Neither Macbeth nor Banquo saw the irony 
 of the promise, but the reader does, and Shake- 
 speare intended that he should. 
 
 Possibly some passages may be ironical only in 
 the reader's imagination. Or, supposing Shake- 
 speare intended them to be ironical, we need not 
 suppose that his intention was deliberate and ex- 
 plicit. Perhaps he himself was hardly aware of the 
 double meaning he conveyed. The sarcastic sug- 
 gestiveness may have been a bit of unconscious 
 cerebration on his part. But, for all that, it is none 
 the less powerful, as many another blind, instinctive 
 utterance is not less powerful than the most delib- 
 erate attempt at expression. 
 
 ATMOSPHERE 
 Atmosphere in tragedy is as intangible as the 
 atmosphere of the physical world. I believe I re- 
 ferred to its elusiveness when I spoke of the sug- 
 gestiveness of Shakespeare. It surrounds and per- 
 meates the plays and gives them an individual tone 
 and color, although it is made up of infinitesmal 
 
74 AN ESTIMATE OF SHAKESPEARE 
 
 circumstantial elements. You feel its influence 
 unconsciously (if I may be allowed the expression), 
 but if asked to describe it you would find yourself 
 embarrassed by a dearth of descriptive words. Its 
 effect upon your soul appears to better advantage 
 when it is being enjoyed than when it is subjected 
 to analysis. But in a negative way we may at least 
 oflfer the patent fact that atmosphere is not plot, 
 characters nor scenery. It surrounds them; it 
 emanates from them, but it is not the same thing. 
 I should imagine that a dramatist spends more time 
 in creating atmosphere than in elaborating the 
 more definite factors of his play, and that his style 
 of work in that occult performance is quite dis- 
 tinctive. He ponders, he contemplates, he dreams 
 about the outstanding definite factors of his story, 
 he circles around thern, he waits in patience for the 
 new thing to come, and in the end, almost without 
 his knowing, the atmosphere is there, breathed out 
 of plot, character, action, scenery, like a circum- 
 ambient fragrance from a bed of flowers. 
 
 Now Shakespeare's greater plays are famous for 
 atmosphere. It is a thing which may escape the 
 undiscerning, but even a casual reader, not barren 
 of poetic appreciation, perceives it when he closes 
 the book. "As You Like It" would be a flimsy 
 piece of composition without it. It is unmistakable 
 in "The Tempest," 'The Midsummer Night's 
 Dream," "Romeo and Juliet." But the great trage- 
 dies are the best exemplifications of atmosphere ; for 
 they are encompassed by it, and to understand their 
 greatness you must view them through that 
 medium. 
 
IRONY, ATMOSPHERE, OMENS 75 
 
 The play of "Macbeth," in particular, is not less 
 notable for atmosphere than for irony. Bradley 
 puts the idea graphically in saying that we behold 
 the whole action of the play through a sanguinary 
 mist. To attempt to analyze the mist would, as I 
 hinted above, be preposterous. Nevertheless the 
 material elements out of which the poet formed the 
 mysterious thing are patent, and as a bare enumera- 
 tion of them may serve as a distant approach to the 
 comprehension of it, it may not be inadvisable to 
 indicate here, by way of exemplifying Shakespeare's 
 general method, some of the circumstantial horrors 
 employed, although by rights they belong rather 
 to a special study of the play of "Macbeth." Dark- 
 ness prevails through the play. It was a foul day 
 on the heath when the witches appeared. Their 
 dwelling was a murky cavern. The murder of 
 Duncan was done at night. References to dark- 
 ness in Macbeth and Lady Macbeth's speeches 
 are numerous. The darkness appalled Banquo 
 when he crossed the courtyard: "There is hus- 
 bandry in heaven! Their" candles are all out." 
 When he came along the road to meet his murder- 
 ers, the terrors of the night overwhelmed him. And 
 Lady Macbeth's sleep-walking received a new ac- 
 cess of horror from the circumstance of the red 
 flicker of her candle-light, making the black night 
 visible. 
 
 Against the darkness of the play are splashes of 
 red: red torches and red blood. The frequent ref- 
 erence to torches and the prevalence of the idea of 
 blood are not accidental. They are so recurrent that 
 they were evidently intended to give a definite tone. 
 
76 AN ESTIMATE OF SHAKESPEARE 
 
 A keen intuition is not required to discover this. 
 Then the multiplication of blood-curdling figures of 
 speech, such as a mother dashing her babe upon the 
 stone, and the whole frame of the world disjointed, 
 and pity like a new-born babe striding the blast! 
 Moreover, miraculous happenings are perceived in 
 the air and sea and on the earth. Duncan's horses 
 try to devour each other ; hurricanes topple steeples ; 
 night birds fill the darkness with plaints; the pres- 
 ence of the witches poisons the atmosphere. Worst 
 of all, the evidence of preternatural agencies at 
 work in the souls of Macbeth and his lady is most 
 uncanny. The thought of murder is like a living 
 demon in his breast. He sees the pendant dagger 
 in the air; he hears the voice cry: "Sleep no more." 
 The blood on his hands plucks out his eyes. The 
 knocking at the door makes him quake. He sees 
 the ghost of Banquo, and in the end Lady Macbeth 
 is nightly impelled, against her own strong will, to 
 rise from her bed and live through the agony of 
 the murder scene again and again. Both of them 
 sup on horrors. Within and without they are en- 
 compassed by dread presences. These things we 
 cannot forget. The more material elements of the 
 play may pass from our memory with time, but the 
 spiritual atmosphere of Macbeth — the atmosphere 
 of darkness, red horror and preternatural presences 
 — remains forever with a reader who has read the 
 play with imagination aroused. 
 
 OMENS 
 
 How weird are the omens scattered through the 
 tragedies! They are not many nor important, ac- 
 
IRONY, ATMOSPHERE, OMENS 'Jj 
 
 cording to the measure of lines ; but they hah the 
 reader with sudden impressiveness and leave in his 
 soul a combined feeling of sympathy and mystery. 
 In some cases they are a bolt from the blue. At the 
 height of a hero's career, in the flush of his hope- 
 fulness, the veil of the future is momentarily drawn 
 for him, and his joy is shivered with ill-boding. In 
 other cases, when his fortunes are already drooping, 
 and he knows it, a portend makes his assurance of 
 failure doubly sure to him; puts another lock upon 
 his fastening-down and disabuses the reader of the 
 last rays of hope he may have been cherishing for a 
 favorable outcome of the tragedy. Romeo, in the 
 thrill and glow of his first meeting with Juliet, stops 
 suddenly and exclaims : 
 
 "I fear too early, for my mind misgives 
 Some consequence, yet hanging in the stars 
 Shall bitterly begin his fearful date 
 With this night's revels;" 
 
 then gallantly concludes : 
 
 "But he that, hath the steerage of my course 
 Direct my sail ! On, lusty gentlemen !" 
 
 Hamlet, busy with preparation for his friendly ra- 
 pier-tilt with Laertes, suddenly sees the shadow of 
 doom : *'But thou wouldst not think how ill all's here 
 about my heart !" But he laughs it ofif. 
 
 And Desdemona sees death before its approach: 
 "My eyes do itch. Doth that bode weeping? How 
 foolish are our thoughts? If I should die before 
 thee, prythee, shroud me in one of those same 
 sheets." 
 
VIL UNITIES, BORROWED PLOTS, 
 SUICIDE 
 
 The advantages and disadvantages of observing 
 or not observing the three unities of time, place and 
 action have been so often discussed that it seems ad- 
 visable to say only a word about them here. Shake- 
 speare generally observes the unity of action. His 
 observance however differs from that of the Greeks ; 
 for, while austere simplicity characterizes the 
 working out of their plots, luxuriant variety at- 
 tends Shakespeare's prosecution of a central idea. 
 The old contrast between Greek and Gothic archi- 
 tecture illustrates the difference between the Greeks 
 and Shakespeare. The bearing of certain elements 
 of his tragedies upon the main issue seems irrele- 
 \rant ; but a closer study of them reveals their perti- 
 nency. The secondary plot in "Lear" e.g., has more 
 than once been subjected to scathing criticism, as 
 being only a repetition in miniature of the primary 
 theme. It detracts therefore, some critics say, from 
 the impressiveness of the story of Lear, Cordelia 
 and Kent; as the rendition of a superb piece of 
 music on a hand-organ detracts from the impres- 
 siveness of its rendition on a grand organ. But this 
 criticism seems to be launched unwisely. For the 
 very sameness of the secondary plot, worked out, 
 however on a minor scale emphasizes by contrast 
 the tremendous proportions of the primary, as a 
 little hill makes a high hill at its side look higher by 
 contrast. The lesser misfortunes of Gloster empha- 
 size the greater misfortunes of Lear; the lesser 
 
 78 
 
UNITIES, BORROWED PLOTS, SUICIDE 79 
 
 wickedness of Edmund emphasizes the greater wick- 
 edness of Regan and Goneril; the lesser beauty of 
 Kent's character emphasizes the greater beauty of 
 CordeHa's. 
 
 Perhaps some other departures from strict unity 
 of effect are not only seeming, but real. If so, they 
 either can be defended on the plea that life in 
 the concrete, which Shakespeare studiously strove 
 to represent, is not after all a whole of perfect 
 symmetry and mathematic consistency, but a con- 
 glomerate mass of thoughts, ambitions and activi- 
 ties, full of divergent tendencies and tumultuous dis- 
 crepancies ; or they can at least be palliated by the 
 exuberant fecundity of his imagination, which he 
 sometimes indulged out of sheer love of exercise 
 without adverting to the oblique bearing of its 
 activities. 
 
 Whatever be the drawbacks of Shakespeare's 
 neglect of the unities of time and place, at any rate 
 variety and abundance of incident and character are 
 well served by that neglect. But another effect is 
 produced by the liberty which he takes with time; 
 i.e., the mellowed beauty with which intervening 
 years like an intervening atmosphere clothes the 
 past. Many a present great deed loses in its appeal 
 by its very nearness. The battles of antiquity are 
 glorified by the glamor of centuries ; the present 
 European struggle is doing well to share in our in- 
 terest with the score or picture show. Future gen- 
 erations will get the right perspective, and perhaps 
 another Homer will sing another and greater 
 "Iliad." Shakespeare understood that distance in 
 time as well as space lends enchantment to the view 
 
8o AN ESTIMATE OF SHAKESPEARE 
 
 and availed himself of the transformation. The 
 ''Winter's Tale" illustrates. To me, personally, the 
 sufferings of Hermione have always seemed more 
 pathetic through the mist of seventeen years than 
 when they transpired. The jealous excesses of the 
 King, his unbounded cruelty and the complete en- 
 durance of the queen overwhelm my power of sym- 
 pathy when they occur. But when I look back from 
 the art-chamber of Paulina and think with Perdita 
 of her mother's past martyrdom, I feel its meaning 
 better. Moreover, the years of patient waiting in 
 retirement and the permanence of Hermione's spirit 
 of forgiveness could not have been represented with- 
 out neglecting the unity of time. 
 
 BORROWED PLOTS 
 Shakespeare, we know, borrowed his plots. Why ? 
 It would be interesting for us to have a plot of his 
 own making. Perhaps it would not bear comparison 
 with many plots of the moderns. Perhaps it would 
 surpass them. Evidently, whatever his powers were 
 along that line, his taste did not incline him to try his 
 hand at the art. Other and greater things engrossed 
 him. He was satisfied to take middling stories and 
 immortalize them by the surpassing spirit of his 
 genius. And therefore they are read and re-read. 
 The plot of a great story is engrossing but ephem- 
 eral. The underlying spirit invites repeated con- 
 templation. We enjoy the "Hound of the Basker- 
 villes," but read it only once; but generations have 
 worn the pages of "Hamlet" and found them peren- 
 nial in beauty and truth. 
 
UNITIES, BORROWED PLOTS, SUICIDE 8l 
 
 SUICIDE 
 
 Every reader of the great dramatist must have 
 observed the air of nobility about his suicides. Bru- 
 tus, Othello, Romeo and Juliet, Cleopatra are glori- 
 fied by their ending. Their utterances at the last 
 moment are high preludes to an incomparable deed, 
 and the reader's sympathies are caught. Othello 
 was never more superb than when he said : "and tell 
 them that in Aleppo once, where a malignant and a 
 turbaned Turk struck a Venetian and traduced the 
 state, I took by the throat the circumcised dog and 
 smote him thus." 
 
 Now, suicide is an ignoble thing. How then ex- 
 plain the transformation which Shakespeare makes 
 in its character? Briefly, very often a mean deed is 
 done through a noble motive. The motive does not 
 justify the deed ; nevertheless it may be so engaging 
 that its beauty quite veils the ugliness of the deed. 
 Romeo and Juliet commit suicide through boundless 
 love; they would rather be dead together than live 
 apart ; and we, caught by the vision of their love, be- 
 come oblivious for the time being of the immorality 
 of their deed. Brutus loves the commonwealth so 
 passionately that he would rather die than see it 
 enthralled in the golden manacles of an emperor. 
 Othello's heart was so engrossed with the lovableness 
 of Desdemona that, with her gone, all the world was 
 dirt. ''Where should Othello go?" How poignant 
 these words are ! We forget the ignobleness of their 
 deed in our admiration of their love. 
 
 The morality of Shakespeare in his treatment of 
 suicide, it appears to me, is open to question. It 
 would seem that in this matter he is blameworthy. 
 
82 AN ESTIMATE OF SHAKESPEARE 
 
 The tragic effectiveness of high-minded suicides was 
 very alluring to him, but the evil of the thing ought 
 not to have been glorified. No doubt the glamor 
 thrown around self-destruction by his talismanic 
 power has been in part accountable for the too gen- 
 eral recognition of suicide among men as a prefer- 
 able alternative to continuance in a crushed career. 
 Better things are often less brilliant things. The 
 tragedies of Shakespeare would have been better 
 embodiments of morality without suicide, though 
 they would have lost in dramatic power. 
 
VIII. INARTICULATE ELOQUENCE 
 
 We spoke above of Shakespeare's miraculous 
 power of expression. We were referring to his 
 abiHty to express himself in words. Truly, his 
 command of speech is marvellous! But he has a 
 greater power — that of showing the deepest pas- 
 sions of the heart without using articulate expres- 
 sions. The mind of man manifests its judgments 
 by propositions, i.e., it encloses its thoughts in 
 regular sentences of subject and predicate. But 
 the heart is a different faculty, and when its pas- 
 sions are roused, it pours itself out in flaming jets 
 of fragmentary language; for, as the passions are 
 blind, spontaneous and tumultuous, naturally the 
 words which convey them lack poise and calm 
 regularity of construction. I am referring to the 
 interjections and broken phrases which are thick in 
 the catastrophes. The beautiful, well-proportioned 
 passages of Shakespeare are windows through 
 which we may glance at the souls of his characters, 
 but in the catastrophe we gaze almost without any 
 medium into the depths of torn hearts. Students 
 of literature can imitate the verbal eloquence of 
 Shakespeare; they can learn words and appreciate 
 the value of imagery, but they must throw up their 
 hands in despair in presence of his chaotic elo- 
 quence. Here they see that however wonderful 
 the power of his speech, it is not worth considering 
 in comparison with what may be called the power 
 of his silence. It would be weakness for Shake- 
 speare to elaborate language, however telling, in 
 presence of an elemental passion at white heat. 
 
 83 
 
84 AN ESTIMATE OF SHAKESPEARE 
 
 And he has not that weakness. Artists of inferior 
 calibre show their inferiority precisely in playing 
 the rhetoricians in trying to express a thing which 
 is above rhetoric. They would elaborate the ex- 
 pression of a passion as they would elaborate the 
 expression of a thought. They forget that the 
 essential difference between thinking and feeling 
 requires an essentially different method of expres- 
 sion. I had often heard that Shakespeare was 
 great. I accepted the estimate on faith and half- 
 believed in his greatness: but when I came under 
 the sway of his impassioned incoherence, then and 
 then only did I know what the greatness of Shake- 
 speare meant. I saw that others might be as rich in 
 bnguage, as gorgeous in imagery, as lyrical, as 
 happy in dialogue; might be his peer in twenty 
 other ways; but he stood alone, beyond compari- 
 son, in disclosing the mute depths of human pain. 
 Nothing in the play of ''Othello," thick as it is 
 with rushing passages, can bear comparison with 
 "Desdemona, O Desdemona, O-O-O!" the line 
 which reveals ineffable depths of Othello's misery. 
 When Lady Macbeth closes the sleep-walking 
 scene with *'0-0-0!" she has reached the climax 
 of tragic expression. We catch a glimpse through 
 that thrice-repeated interjection of a conscience 
 seared unto anguish with remorse. In the ante- 
 cedent lines she is in a sense mistress of her emo- 
 tions. "Can all the perfumes of Arabia sweeten 
 this little hand?" and ''Who would have thought 
 the old man had so much blood in him?" These 
 lines, awful though they be, are uttered by a human 
 being who still walks and thinks, but in the end 
 
INARTICULATE ELOQUENCE 85 
 
 a soul torn to shreds with agony is seen through 
 shreds of speech. 
 
 I may be permitted to make one more reference, 
 to a Une in ''Lear," which has been accounted by 
 at least one competent critic the best line in Shake- 
 speare. It is composed of only one word, and that 
 a short Saxon word, repeated five times: "Never, 
 never, never, never, never!" Lear had solaced 
 himself with the thought of having Cordelia with 
 him to the end. Cordelia is hanged. In the midst 
 of his sweet dream, her body is carried to him. His 
 emotions at the sight are heartrending, mounting 
 to the climax of piteousness in the realization that 
 she would never more speak to him. 
 
 Cordelia — "Shall we not see these daughters and these 
 sisters?" 
 
 Lear — "No, no, no, no ! Come, let's away to prison. 
 We two alone will sing like birds in a cage : 
 When thou dost ask me blessing, I'll kneel down 
 And ask of thee forgiveness; so we'll live, 
 And pray and sing and tell old tales and laugh 
 At gilded butterflies, and hear poor rogues 
 
 Talk of court-news ; we'll talk with them too 
 
 and we'll wear out 
 In a walled prison packs and sets of great ones 
 That ebb and flow by the moon" — 
 
 [Last scene. Enter Lear with Cordelia dead in his arms.^ 
 
 Lear — "Howl, howl, howl, howl! Oh, you are men of 
 stones ! 
 Had I your tongues and eyes, I'd use them so 
 That heaven's vaults should crack — she's gone 
 forever." 
 
 ****** 
 "And my poor fool is hanged ! No, no, no life ! 
 Thou'lt come no more? 
 Never, never, never, never, never!" 
 
86 AN ESTIMATE OF SHAKESPEARE 
 
 It is no wonder that the critic Tate cut away the 
 last scene in **Lear." He saw that in all probabil- 
 ity no actor of his time could mount to its level of 
 passionate expression ; and the English Kean's 
 claim to the honor of posterity rests in great part 
 on his loathing of Tate's outrageous mutilation, on 
 his restoration of the original and his masterful 
 interpretation of the final passages of the play. 
 
 Middling elocutionists can render the ringing 
 lines of Shakespeare well, but only an artist of 
 highest powers can interpret the unspeakable parts. 
 Mrs. Siddons could do that. Her best interpreta- 
 tion was that of Lady Macbeth, and her powers 
 reached their acme in the sleep-walking scene. It 
 is not surprising then that Reynolds had her sit for 
 him when he painted his 'Tragedy." We should 
 like to believe that Samuel Johnson began to un- 
 derstand Shakespeare through her. This is not 
 unlikely in view of the admiration which the old 
 man felt for her and for the great painter's 
 "Tragedy." 
 
 Shakespeare suffers in the classroom in this re- 
 spect that, as a rule, the best thing in him — his 
 tremendous passionateness, revealed through frag- 
 mentary utterances — is not and cannot be ade- 
 quately explained ; and insistence on lesser dramatic 
 factors leaves the impression that they are the sum 
 total of his work. An explanation ought to be 
 similar to the thing explained. Now the thing ex- 
 plained in the best parts of Shakespearean tragedy 
 is intense passion ; but the explanation of a teacher 
 can hardly be tensely passionate. For teaching as 
 an art is more intellectual than emotional. It re- 
 
INARTICULATE ELOQUENCE 87 
 
 quires analysis, criticism, explanation in the teacher 
 and tangible results in the pupils, all of which 
 leaves little place for the rousing of his passions. 
 And even should the teacher personally experience 
 the passionate exaltations of Shakespearean trag- 
 edy, his explanatory language, necessarily didactic, 
 will not be a suitable means of conveyance to the 
 minds of his scholars. Were he an actor, he could 
 interpret instead of merely explaining. But even 
 though his elocutionary powers be not of the high- 
 est, he would do well to intersperse explanations 
 with well prepared readings. 
 
 However, a first-class actor can best teach Shake- 
 speare. He may have no abstract ideas about the 
 tragedies, he may be deficient in criticism, but he 
 steeps his soul concretely in their spirit, and instead 
 of expressing his own thoughts and impressions, 
 he gives out the very plays themselves. How much 
 we owe to the actors and actresses who have ren- 
 dered Shakespeare well in past years ! Booth, Mary 
 Anderson, Modjeska, Sothern and Marlowe, in our 
 own memory, have interpreted many a scene which 
 we could not have interpreted ourselves. And how 
 lamentable the present decadence of the art of 
 tragedy! Moving pictures can never supply its 
 place. For, aside from the fact that they tend 
 towards the spectacular and worse, they lack the 
 human voice. They lack also that spiritual radi- 
 ation which proceeds from living spiritual beings 
 and which cannot be transferred along with fea- 
 tures, form and motion, to a screen. May the ter- 
 centenary of Shakespeare's death see a rebirth of 
 tragedy on the stage! 
 
IX. THE ART, MORALITY AND EMO- 
 TIONAL EFFECT OF TRAGEDY 
 
 The objection has more than once been seriously 
 urged that tragedy is not art because it is a presen- 
 tation of the painful, calculated to arouse sorrow, 
 whereas art essentially deals with the beautiful and 
 tends to awaken a sense of the pleasurable. It is 
 clear that the idea of art is realized in statuary, 
 painting, architecture and most of the forms of lit- 
 erature: but the embodiment of the idea of art in 
 the tragedy is doubtful. The reasonableness of vis- 
 iting an art-gallery to be pleased is apparent. The 
 reasonableness of being present at a tragedy to be 
 moved to tears needs explaining. 
 
 The substance of the answer to the objection may 
 be conveyed by the simple statement that tragedy 
 also presents the beautiful and awakens the pleas- 
 urable, but in a manner peculiar to itself. Tragedy 
 sets suffering and death before us, 'tis true; but it 
 reveals them in the persons of an amiable hero and 
 heroine. The element of beauty required for art is 
 embodied in him or her and that beauty is empha- 
 sized by misfortune. The shadow of death brings 
 out by contrast the brightness of the life that is 
 being destroyed. There is no school for the devel- 
 opment of genuine character like the school of suf- 
 fering: for while suffering hardens mean souls as 
 the sun hardens clay, it softens and refines great 
 souls as the sun softens wax. Hamlet, Lear, Othello 
 are better not indeed for their misdeeds, but for 
 the pain which they endure for them. In no portion 
 of their careers do these heroes make a more potent 
 
 88 
 
THE ART OF TRAGEDY 89 
 
 appeal to our love than in their finales. Out of the 
 depths they radiate amiableness magnetically. The 
 messenger's praise of Cawdor fits each of them: 
 "Nothing in this life became him like the leaving it." 
 At their worst, they are at their best. Their calami- 
 ties illustrate and increase their high nobility. And 
 what we say of heroes is even more emphatically 
 true of heroines. 
 
 Now, though the contemplation of their pain is 
 painful to us, the sight of their heroic endurance 
 evokes from our hearts sentiments of love and ad- 
 miration. Love and admiration are pleasurable. 
 But they are not always pleasurable in the sense of 
 being comfortable. Love and admiration are com- 
 fortable when those whom we love and admire are 
 not only beautiful, but fortunate and happy. But 
 love and admiration are uncomfortable to us when 
 those whom we love are unfortunate and unhappy. 
 Now, the possibility of simultaneously experiencing 
 pain and pleasure has upon it a touch of the para- 
 dox. It seems a contradiction in terms, but it is 
 not. Indeed, the phrase, *'the pain of love," is cur- 
 rent, perfectly intelligible to any one who has ex- 
 perienced at one and the same moment the pleas- 
 urable yet poignant thrill of love. 
 
 Tragedy then is a form of art because it pre- 
 sents beauty of character and evokes a sense of 
 painful pleasure, pleasurable pain. 
 
 But also the sorrow itself in tragedy is beautiful. 
 For though sorrow taken by itself is repulsive, yet 
 it has been so thoroughly identified in the history of 
 humanity with the most lovable types of humanity 
 that we have come to regard it also as lovable. The 
 
90 AN ESTIMATE OF SHAKESPEARE 
 
 most representative of the children of men have 
 been children of sorrow. As with a sombre cloak 
 they have been enveloped in it. Therefore it has a 
 borrowed splendor caught from the splendid men 
 and women whom it has touched; just as faded and 
 threadbare garments are more precious than cloth 
 of gold to those who keep them as heirlooms in 
 memory of the dear one who once wore them. 
 
 Tragedy then is not only art, but it is one of the 
 highest arts. For its appeal is not to the senses 
 through sensuous beauty, but to the love of the soul 
 through spiritual beauty in a repellant environment. 
 Newman says that ''a face worn by tears and fast- 
 ing loses its beauty." He could have added that it 
 acquires a new beauty — the higher beauty of pathos. 
 The face of tragedy draws us not with its high col- 
 ors and contour, but with the expressive pallor and 
 shadows of heroic endurance. Hence the little 
 space devoted by Shakespeare to the description of 
 a hero and heroine's personal appearance, and hence 
 his supreme effort to portray their passion and 
 death. 
 
 MORALITY 
 
 We can best approach the question of the morality 
 of tragedy by considering two meanings of the 
 phrase so often heard and seen in print: ''Art for 
 art's sake." ''Art for art's sake" can mean the 
 worthiness of art of being pursued without any re- 
 gard for morality. The dictum taken in this sense 
 is false ; for morality is higher than art and due re- 
 gard must be had by the artist for morality in the 
 pursuit of his art. If we were not moral beings art 
 
THE MORALITY OF TRAGEDY QI 
 
 might engross our whole attention. But we must be 
 moral; and hence our artistic ambitions must be 
 made to fit in with moral obligations. But the ex- 
 pression, ''Art for art's sake," has a second meaning 
 which is admissable : i.e., we need not as artists play 
 the part of moralists. We need not attach a lesson 
 to every statue that we chisel. Our every painting 
 need not be an illustration of the Ten Command- 
 ments. Our poems need not embody the ideas of 
 Faith. A sculptor may purpose merely to reveal a 
 superb physique. A painter may aim at nothing 
 more than setting forth the glory of a sunset. A 
 poet may intend nothing more than to describe a 
 particular phase of mind and heart. In other words, 
 each art has an end special and internal to itself 
 which may be pursued without explicitly aiming at 
 any other end. 
 
 But even in this second admissable sense ''art for 
 art's sake" has no place in the art of tragedy. For 
 it is of the essence of tragedy to be moral as well as 
 artistic. For all writers of tragedy have had in 
 mind the purpose of teaching the amiableness of vir- 
 tue and the horror of crime. They illustrate in their 
 villains and also to some extent in their heroes the 
 punishment of wrong-doing ; and in their heroes and 
 heroines they manifest human greatness, sweetness, 
 patience in such alluring colors that a normal reader 
 or spectator of tragedy can hardly resist the call to 
 a nobler life. The king and queen in "Hamlet," 
 lago, Edmund, Regan and Goneril are intended by 
 the dramatist to make his readers hate and be afraid 
 of vice: and Hamlet's love of rectitude, Othello's 
 massive grandeurs, Brutus' unselfish devotion to the 
 
92 AN ESTIMATE OF SHAKESPEARE 
 
 commonwealth, Lear's final love of Cordelia — these 
 various qualities, admirable, though marred by de- 
 fects, and more particularly the charming traits of 
 the Shakespearean heroines are revealed with the 
 purpose of rousing men and women from stale and 
 flat mediocrity of life. 
 
 I do not say that the poet's aim was formally be- 
 fore his mind when he wrote, as a preacher's aim 
 may be supposed to be formally before his mind 
 when he speaks. It may have been there only sub- 
 consciously, but it influenced him potently. 
 
 To the question about tragic morality in another 
 sense, a less favorable answer must be given. For 
 tragedy by accident, not through any element in- 
 trinsic to it, but rather through a misapprehension 
 of the reader, can be the occasion of a mawkish 
 preference of failure to success. There is something 
 very enticing in the hero of a lost cause. In all 
 tragedies the great and noble go down to ruin, the 
 mediocre survive. A reader of Shakespeare's plays 
 of English history sees great men succeeding and 
 middling ones occupying their proper place. Suc- 
 cess in itself is better than failure ; and in "Henry 
 V," for instance, success is shown in splendid col- 
 ors. But an exclusive reader of Shakespeare's trag- 
 edies is so used to finding noble characters in defeat 
 and mediocre ones on top, that he may gradually fall 
 into the sentimental belief that defeat is amiable and 
 that success is mediocre and vulgar. We rightly 
 prefer the failing Hamlet to Fortinbras with his foot 
 on the throne ; but, wrongly, we are inclined also to 
 be partial to Hamlet's very failure and to under- 
 value the very achievements of Fortinbras. 
 
THE MORALITY OF TRAGEDY 93 
 
 The morality of Shakespeare in another sense of 
 the word may be spoken of here. 
 
 Shakespeare offends against moraHty by his vul- 
 garities and obscenities. The wonder however is 
 that he was not worse. The age was not delicate. 
 A glance at the other Elizabethan dramatists shows 
 in what excesses their pens indulged. He was more 
 careful than they. Moreover, his offensiveness is 
 not half so dangerous as the silken insidiousness of 
 many a lascivious modern. Besides, he never de- 
 liberately attacked fundamental laws of morality, as 
 many moderns do. He was lacking in delicacy, but 
 he was not irreverent. Again, vice is exhibited in 
 his tragedies not for itself, but to illustrate con- 
 trastingly the beauty of virtue: or for some other 
 noble tragic effect. I do not say that the end justi- 
 fies the means ; but it is well to remember that the 
 vicious things are only means to a noble end. Other 
 representations in the plays are not bad, but only 
 unbecoming for youthful eyes. 
 
 When all has been said however, it must be 
 granted that the reading of Shakespeare is fraught 
 with danger. Indiscriminate reading will harm at 
 least the young. How some teachers can allow and 
 oblige boys and girls together in the class-room to 
 read aloud certain passages is difficult to understand. 
 Modesty is sorely tried, indelicacies are emphasized 
 and trains of unhealthy reflections are started by 
 such an obliviousness of youthful susceptibilities. 
 The mature teacher may perhaps be immune ; but his 
 feelings are no criterion for judging the emotional 
 attitude of his charges. Original sin and its pas- 
 sionate effects are facts accepted by all Christians. 
 
94 AN ESTIMATE OF SHAKESPEARE 
 
 Platonic indifference of feeling is only a pleasant 
 dream. The study of poetry may easily deteriorate 
 into the study and practice of sensuality. For as 
 there is only a step from the sublime to the ridicu- 
 lous, so there is only a step from aestheticism to 
 hedonism. 
 
 But with proper precautions the risk of reading 
 Shakespeare in schools and colleges may be taken. 
 He is the glory of our literature, and a circle of 
 studies without him is like a ring without its jewel. 
 He is the interpreter of life, and those who are 
 going into it would do well to sit for a time at his 
 knees. 
 
 EMOTIONAL EFFECT 
 
 Another interesting question which has been 
 asked about the influence of tragedy is whether 
 the sense of sorrow aroused in a spectator or read- 
 er's heart by the catastrophe is real or only ar- 
 tistic. The view has been expressed that as the mis- 
 fortunes of tragic characters are not real but 
 feigned, therefore our sympathy for them cannot 
 be real but must be only feigned. Now it is clear 
 to me that the sentiments in question are as real as 
 the sorrows of actual life, and the argument to the 
 contrary is fallacious. 'Tis true a tragedy is a 
 presentation of imaginary griefs, but the highest 
 art of the dramatist consists precisely in concealing 
 the imaginary character of those griefs. The mo- 
 ment he permits his audience to advert to the fact 
 of feigning, the charm is broken, the magical wand 
 of tragedy is snapped. He might as well ring down 
 the curtain on his play. There is no more poetry 
 
EMOTIONAL EFFECT OF TRAGEDY 95 
 
 in the air. The audience is rationalized again; the 
 bands of enchantment have been loosened from 
 their mind, and they are free to sit and gaze and 
 speculate and criticize unmoved. But if a trage- 
 dian has the power of magnetizing the mind and 
 holding it entranced to the end, every scene and 
 action of the play makes an appeal as potent as if it 
 were real. In such a case we do not positively say 
 to ourselves that we are witnessing facts, for this 
 would be untrue, and no genuine art can be built 
 on an untruth. But neither do we say to ourselves 
 that the action of the play is fictitious; we simply 
 do not advert to its fictional character. To us it 
 has all the seeming of actuality, and this is sufficient 
 to arouse in our hearts an emotion that is actual. 
 
 The emotion, it is true, is not as permanent as it 
 is when in real life our hearts are pierced with some 
 shaft of distress. For, after the mystic spell of a 
 play is broken we are free to lay the comforting 
 unction to our soul that all is well with us, whereas 
 the first shock of a real misfortune is intensified by 
 the reflex and positive conviction of its reality. 
 Nor is the emotion as keen as in real life. For in a 
 theatre the sufferer is not as near to us as, for 
 instance, a dying relative or friend. There is no 
 question of personal loss to us. A sort of domestic 
 selfisnness of love is not appealed to. But for all 
 that, the emotion can be and is real. Nor can the 
 point be urged that the masterfulness of dramatic 
 presentation and the poetic beautifying of a painful 
 theme please instead of paining. For, aside from 
 the fact that we become clearly conscious of dra- 
 matic masterfulness and beauty only afterwards on 
 
96 AN ESTIMATE OF SHAKESPEARE 
 
 reflection, when the glow of poetry in our minds 
 has yielded to the discriminating light of criticism, 
 our partial consciousness during the progress of 
 the play of its artistic handling lessens but by no 
 means completely dissipates the real sense of sym- 
 pathy which affects us. 
 
 And finally even though a rift in the play per- 
 mitted us to see that the dramatist behind it is only 
 feigning, sufficient motive would still remain for 
 genuine compassion. For tragedy is a replica of 
 real life. Its characters are shadows of reality; its 
 catastrophes have been endured and are being en- 
 dured too truly under the sun to-day; its loves and 
 hatreds and deep despairs, its crushed hopes and 
 bright prospects extinguished are daily experiences 
 among men and women in the valley of tears. And 
 as these are our brothers and sisters in a common 
 humanity, we may well sympathize with them really 
 in their unreal representatives upon the stage. 
 
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