These institutions impose order upon society; to that order each individual must adjust himself, and in it he must find his place; if he sets his will against the general will as organized in these institutions he precipitates a conflict and becomes a tragic figure. These conflicts are not casual and accidental; they represent the working out of the moral and institutional order, and they must, therefore, find their ultimate issue in a deeper harmony.

This is the Shakespearean interpretation of the tragic collisions of society. It is the clearness with which Shakespeare sees and represents this principle of mediation, this process of reconciliation, which gives the Tragedies their authority as works of art and sets the dramatist among the masters of the knowledge of life.

CHAPTER XVI

THE ROMANCES

It was characteristic of Shakespeare that during the years in which the Tragedies were written, and while he was meditating upon the baffling problem of evil in the world, he was conducting his affairs with prudence and sagacity. The sanity of his nature, which held him to the great highways of human interest and rational human living, kept his genius in touch with reality at all points and contributed not a little to the richness and range of his creative activity. The assumption that the man of imagination cannot be a man of practical wisdom, and that there is an inherent antagonism between genius and sound judgment, has been disproved many times in the history of all the arts, and persists in the face of convincing historic refutation. There have been many men of rare and beautiful gifts who have lacked the capacity to deal strongly or intelligently with the practical side of life, and who have, therefore, been unable to make that adjustment to conditions and realities which is part of the problem of life and a chief part of its education. For this reason many men of noble imagination have missed the full unfolding of their genius and the complete harvesting of its fruits. Shakespeare

was not one of those pathetic figures who, through some defect in spiritual organization, make splendid tragic failures figures with whom his imagination was always busy, and who appear in nearly all the plays. He was the sounder and therefore the greater poet because in his life, as in his art, he held the balance between reality and ideality; mounting into high heaven with effortless wing, like the lark in the meadows about Stratford, but returning with unerring instinct to the familiar and solid earth.

During the decade between 1600 and 1610, Shakespeare was adding to his properties at Stratford, he was making various investments, he was seeking to recover by suits at law moneys loaned to others, and he was steadily increasing his income from various sources. His purchase of New Place has been noted; upon the death of his father the houses in Henley Street came into his possession, and in one of them his mother probably lived until her death in 1608. He enlarged by purchase the grounds of New Place; he acquired a property of nearly a hundred and fifty acres in the neighbourhood of Stratford; he purchased an interest in the tithes of Stratford, Welcombe, and Bishopton; and, both at Stratford and in London, he brought suits for the recovery of small debts. Like his father, he appears to have had no aversion to litigation; but, on the other hand, there is nothing in the various records of the legal proceed ings which he inaugurated, to show that he was oppressive or unjust to those with whom he had business dealings. In practical affairs he was sagacious, or

derly, and businesslike. That a poet collected a debt which was due him hardly furnishes rational ground for the theory that he must therefore have been a hard and grasping person.

To the Tragedies succeeded a group of three plays commonly classed as Romances, which completed Shakespeare's work as a dramatist and which hold a place by themselves. It is true that "Henry VIII." came at the very end, but this spectacular play is Shakespeare's only in part, and is hardly to be counted among his representative and original works.

A new note was struck in the Romances, and that note is distinctly sounded in "Pericles," a play which is of Shakespearean authorship only in its idyllic passages. It seems to predict "The Tempest," "Cymbeline," "The Winter's Tale," as "The Two Gentlemen of Verona" predicts "Twelfth Night." Marina is of the same exquisite order of womanhood as Miranda and Perdita. The poet's work on this drama was done when the period of tragedy was drawing to a close but was not yet at an end. The play probably appeared about 1607, and was probably written in collaboration with some playwright of inferior taste and ability. The plot was derived from various sources; the story being one of great antiquity and having been very widely popular for several centuries before Shakespeare's time. It had been read on the Continent in the "Gesta Romanorum," and in England in Gower's "Confessio Amantis"; and it was retold in a prose romance by Lawrence Twine, which appeared in England in 1576. There is now substan

tial agreement that the repellent parts of "Pericles " were written by another hand than Shakespeare's, and that to his genius is due the exquisite episode and romance of Marina, conceived and worked out with a delicacy of feeling, a refinement of sentiment, and a pervading atmosphere of poetry which are unmistakably Shakespearean.

"Cymbeline" was included among the Tragedies by the editors of the First Folio; but its pervading spirit and its peaceful and happy ending place it among the Romances. Shakespeare had passed through the period of tragedy into a deep and abiding peace, but the gayety of the earlier mood of the Comedies was no longer possible. However serene and calm the spirit of the poet, he could never again look at life without seeing the element of tragedy at work in it. That element became subordinate and served chiefly to bring out certain gracious and beautiful qualities of nature, certain pure and almost spiritual personalities, but it was henceforth part of the mysterious experience of life to one who had sounded the depths of Hamlet's solitary melancholy and been abroad when all the fury of the elemental passions burst upon the head of Lear. In "Cymbeline," "The Winter's Tale," and "The Tempest," the tragic motive is introduced, and the tragic conflict would have worked out its inevitable wreckage if these later dramas had not been plays of reconciliation; plays, that is, in which the movement of the tragic forces is arrested by repentance, by the return, through penitence, to the true order of life. In these concluding dramas the