self ironically aloof,-the fulness of satisfied need when Posthumus embraces Imogen, Hang there like fruit, my soul, Till the tree die! and the rapture (almost transcending the bounds of consciousness) of Pericles upon the recovery of his long-lost O Helicanus, strike me, honour'd sir; And drown me with their sweetness. On the other hand this same vigour enables men to perceive and enjoy the comedy of life; for vigour enjoys folly; when it laughs, like Shakspere's Valentine, “it laughs like a cock." One who is thoroughly in earnest is not afraid to laugh; he knows that he may safely have his laugh out, and that it will not disturb the solid relations of things. It is only when we are half in earnest that we cherish our seriousness, and tremble lest the dignity of our griefs or joys should be impaired. And accordingly when great tragedies can be written joyous comedies can be written also. But when life grows base or trivial, when great tragedy ceases (as in the period of the Restoration), when false heroics, and showy sentimentality take the place of tragic passion, then the laughter of men becomes brutal and joyless, the crackling of thorns under a pot. This vigorous vitality which underlies the Elizabethan drama is essentially mundane. To it all that is upon this earth is real; and it does not concern itself greatly about the reality of other things. Of heaven or hell it has no power to sing. It finds such and such facts here and now, and does not invent or discover supernatural causes to explain the facts. It pursues man to the moment of death, but it pursues him no farther. If it confesses "the burden of the mystery" of human life it does not attempt to lighten that burden by any "Thus saith the Lord," which cannot be verified or attested by actual experience. If it contains a divine element, the divine is to be looked for in the human, not apart from the human. It knows eternity only through time which is a part of eternity.* Without an ethical tendency, then, the Elizabethan | drama yet produces an ethical effect. A faithful presentation of the facts of the world does not leave us indifferent to good and evil, but rather rouses within us, .... The following passage adds to what has been written above, and illustrates it. "The feeling which we commonly call pathos seems, when one analyses it, to arise out of a perception of grand incongruities -filling a place in one class of our ideas corresponding to that in another in which the sense of the ludicrous is placed by Locke. And this pathos was attained by mediæval asceticism through its habit of dwarfing into insignificance the earthly life and its belongings, and setting the meanness and wretchedness which it attributed to it, in contrast to the far-off vision of glory and greatness. . . . . Another sort of pathos-the Pagan- . . . . results from a full realising of the joy and the beauty of the earth, and the nobleness of men's lives on it, and from seeing a grand inexplicableness in the incongruity between the brightness of these and the darkness which lies at either end of them— the infinite contradiction between actual greatness and the apparent nothingness of its whence and whither-the mystery of strong and beautiful impulses finding no adequate outcome now, nor promise of ever finding it hereafter-human passion kindling into light and glow, only to burn itself out into ashes-the struggle kept up by the will of successive generations against Fate, ever beginning and ever ending in defeat, to recommence as vainly as before the never-answered, Why? uttered unceasingly in myriad tones from out all human life. The poetry of the Greeks gained from the contemplation of these things a pathos which, however gladly a Christian poet may forego such gain more than all maxims and all preaching can, an inextinguishable loyalty to good. It is any falsifying of those facts, whether the falsification be that of the sensualist or of the purist, whether it be a lie told to seduce us to vice, or to bribe us to virtue,—it is this which may possibly lead us aside from directness, simplicity, and uprightness of action. Is the Elizabethan drama religious? No, if religion be something which stands over and above human life, luring it away from earth no, if the highest acts of religion be an access to the Divine presence through special ecclesiastical rites, and places, and persons. Yes, if the facts of the world be themselves sacred,-parts of a divine order of things, and interpenetrated by that Supreme for his art, was in its sadness inexpressibly beautiful. The Iliad had a deep under-current of it even in the midst of all its healthy childlike objectivity, and it was ever present amongst the great tragedians' introspective analysings of humanity. High art of later times has, for the most part, retained this Pagan beauty. Though there is no reason to think that there was any Paganism in Shakspere's creed, yet we cannot help feeling that, whether the cause is to be sought in his individual genius, or in Renaissance influences, the spirit of his art is in many respects Pagan. In his great tragedies he traces the workings of noble or lovely human characters on to the point-and no further-where they disappear into the darkness of death, and ends with a look back, never on towards anything beyond. His sternly truthful realism will not, of course, allow him to attempt a shallow poetical justice, and mete out to each of his men and women the portion of earthly good which might seem their due; and his artistic instincts-positive rather than speculative prefer the majesty and infinite sadness of unexplainedness to any attempt to look on towards a future solution of hard riddles in human fates."-E. D. West (in the first of two articles on "Browning as a Preacher :" The Dark Blue Magazine, October and November, 1871). This passage may be borne in mind to illustrate the view taken of the great tragedies of Shakspere in a subsequent chapter of this volume. See also on the agnosticism of Shakspere-Mr Ruskin's lecture, "The Mystery of Life and its Arts" in Afternoon Lectures (Dublin: M'Gee, 1869), pp. 110-111. Reality, apprehended yet unknowable, of which the worlds of matter and of mind are a manifestation. To many, at the present time, the sanity and the strength of Shakspere would assuredly be an influence that might well be called religious. The Elizabethan drama is thoroughly free from lassitude, and from that lethargy of heart, which most of us have felt at one time or another. Those whose lot falls in a period of doubt and spiritual alteration, between the ebb and the flow, in the welter and wash of the waves, are,-because they lack the joyous energy of a faith-peculiarly subject to this mood of barren lethargy. And it is not alone in the mystic, spiritual life of the soul that we may suffer from coldness or aridity. There are seasons when a sterile world-weariness is induced by the superficial barrenness of life. The persons we know seem to shrivel up and become wizened and grotesque. The places we have loved transform themselves into ugly little prisons. The ideals for which we lived lived appear absurd patterns, insignificant arabesques, devoid of idea and of beauty. Our own heart is a most impertinent and unprofitable handful of dust. It is well if some supreme joy or sorrow which has overtaken us save us from possible recurrence of this mood of weary cynicism. But humbler means at times have served. The tear shed over a tale of Marmontel by one who recorded his malady and his recovery, has occasioned certain smiles on critical lips.* A true physician of the soul discerns that such a tear is not despicable, but significant as the beads of perspiration which tell that the crisis of a fever * J. S. Mill's Autobiography, pp. 140-41. is favourably passed. To this mood of barren worldweariness the Elizabethan drama comes with no direct teaching, but with the vision of life. Even though death end all, these things at least are-beauty and force, purity, sin, and love, and anguish and joy. These things are, and therefore life cannot be a little idle. whirl of dust. We are shown the strong man taken in the toils, the sinner sinking farther and farther away from light and reality and the substantial life of things into the dubious and the dusk, the pure heart all vital, and confident, and joyous; we are shown the glad, vicarious sacrifice of soul for soul, the malign activity of evil, the vindication of right by the true justiciary; we are shown the good common things of the world, and the good things that are rare; the love of parents and children, the comradeship of young men, the exquisite vivacity, courage, and high-spirited intellect of noble girlhood, the devotion of man and woman to man and woman. The vision of life rises before us; and we know that the vision represents a reality. These things, then, being actual, how poor and shallow a trick of the heart is cynicism! A 2 Two views of the character of Shakspere have been offered for our acceptance; we are expected to make a choice between the two. According to one of these views Shakspere stands before us a cheerful, selfpossessed, and prudent man, who conducted his life with sound worldly judgment; and he wrote plays, about which he did not greatly care; acquired property, about which he cared much; retired to Stratford, and attaining the end of his ambition, became a wealthy and respect |