CHAPTER XV

THE ETHICAL SIGNIFICANCE OF THE TRAGEDIES

MR. DENTON SNIDER, who has interpreted Shakespeare with breadth of view and keenness of insight, and has brought out with convincing clearness the poet's conception of life and art from the institutional point of view, describes the Shakespearean drama as "the grand Mystery Play of humanity." The essence of the mystery play was the disclosure of a divine power at work in the world dealing directly with human affairs; the interior union of the seen with the unseen, of the temporal with the eternal, of the human with the divine, was set out in childlike simplicity in these dramas of medieval faith and genius. In Shakespeare this disclosure of an invisible background against which human life is set and from the order of which it cannot escape without setting tragic forces in motion, took on a new and deeper form in the Tragedies which came from his hand in uninterrupted succession after 1601. In these dramas all the elements of power and art which were present in germ in the Mystery, the Morality, and the Interlude were unfolded and harmonized in the spirit of freedom and with the feeling for beauty which were the gifts of the Renaissance to the greatest of its children.

Shakespeare was preeminently a poet, and it is highly improbable, therefore, that he thought out in advance the philosophical bearings of his art and worked out for himself a systematized conception of life. Even Goethe, whose insight into the principles of art productivity was as clear and final as his creative genius was direct and spontaneous, was primarily a poet and secondarily a critic or philosopher. There is every reason to believe that Shakespeare's view of life came to him through the gradual disclosure of an experience which was rationalized and interpreted by habitual meditation. A nature of such sensitiveness and receptivity as his would feel the beauty of the world and the variety, the interest, and the humour of life as he felt these things in the years when he was serving his apprenticeship and, a little later, writing the Comedies. Such a nature, constantly fed by that vital sympathy with men which is part of the gift of genius, steadily deepened and clarified by experience and illumined by the insight of genius, would inevitably pass through the show of things to the moral order behind them, and discern more and more clearly the significance of character in the fortunes and fates of men, as Shakespeare did in the period of the historical and purely poetic dramas.

If at this stage a deep and searching crisis were to occur in his spiritual life, misfortune overtake the men whom he loved and who personified for him the spirit and genius of his time, and that time, so splendid in its earlier promise and performance, become overclouded like a day fast hastening to night, his vision

would insensibly widen and deepen, as did Shakespeare's when he entered upon the period of the Tragedies. Through all the earlier years in London he was steadily approaching the mystery of life; in the years of the Tragedies he entered into that mystery and was enfolded by it. He wrote the Tragedies as he had written the Comedies, because the creative impulse was on him and play-writing was his vocation; but the order of the world which comes to light in them, giving significance to human striving and suffering, was not less clearly seen nor less authoritatively revealed because Shakespeare did not definitely set it before him as the object of his artistic endeavour. The poet is a more impressive witness to the ethical order of life than the moralist, because his discovery of that order is, in a sense, incidental and unintentional; he sees it, not because he set out to discover it, but because it is there and he cannot avoid seeing it.

That Shakespeare deliberately, and in a spirit of philosophic detachment from life, studied, after the manner of a psychologist, the phenomena of experience, and formulated a system of interpreting those phenomena, is incredible in the exact degree in which one comprehends his nature; that he was blind to this great order, that he did not discern what he saw nor understand what he said, that his mind was simply a mirror in which was caught up the reflection of a world which he never realized in consciousness, is still more incredible. When he laid aside the dramatic mask, as he did at times in the Sonnets and more than once in the plays, and notably in "Troilus and Cressida,”

he made it plain that he understood the significance of his own thought, and that his attitude toward the great matters with which he deals was intelligent and deliberate, if not at all moments self-conscious.

It was his rare good fortune as an artist to pluck the fruits of the most searching scrutiny of the facts of life without losing that free and captivating spontaneity which is the joy of art; to command the knowledge of the psychologist without losing the magic of the poet; to be at the same time one of the most penetrating of thinkers and the most beguiling of poets, with a clear vision of the deepest realities of existence and a voice full of the careless, rapturous melody of birds under the free sky.

In the period of the Tragedies Shakespeare set forth with perfect clearness his view of a man's place and meaning in the world. His whole conception of the authority and significance of human nature rests on personality—the master word of the thought of the Western world and the source of its formative ideas of freedom, responsibility, beauty, democracy, the reality of experience, the dignity of individual effort, and personal immortality. In the Tragedies Shakespeare worked out in dramatic form this central conception about which Western thought, since Plato, has organized itself. He exhibits the individual man as shaping his destiny largely by his own will; as fashioning himself chiefly through action, by means of which ideas and emotions are transmuted into character and re-form the man. The problem of life, as it is presented in the Shakespearean dramas, is to bring the

individual will into harmory with the institutional life of society, organized in the family, the Church, and the State; and to bring these institutions into harmony with the immutable principles of righteousness. This result is brought about in the Tragedies by the collision of the individual with the established order, either to his own hurt or to the betterment of the order itself; and the moment of collision is the moment of tragedy. It is at this moment, when the inner subjective force of the man sweeps into light through action, becomes objective and begins to affect others, to set in motion reactions upon himself and to change the order of things about him, that Shakespeare fastens attention upon the tragic character; and, through the collision between his will and the order of society or of life, reveals as by a lightning flash the soul of the man and the visible or invisible order in which his life is set.

As clearly as does Dante, though in a very different fashion, he shows the inevitable reaction of the deed upon the doer, and so strikes into sudden light the massive and all-embracing moral order of life. He swept away the last lingering shadows of the pagan conception of fate by showing that character is destiny, and that "character is the only definition we have of freedom and power."

In the word character- the organization of impulse, emotion, will, and deed into a permanent, selfconscious personality, which becomes a shaping force in the world is to be found the key to Shakespeare's conception of life and of the function of dramatic art. If he made plays which were suited to the taste of his