And when he calls to mind his prowess in happier days, cries: "O vain boast! Who can control his fate?" The magnanimous Antony rises superior to the enmity of Fate when his soldiers are lamenting round him, he says to them : "Nay, good my fellows, do not please sharp Fate The thought of inevitable Destiny, iron Fate, is a great tranquilliser, and rolls over tragic catastrophes like the calm grandeur of stars after a storm. When our minds are fatigued by the spectacle of horrors, or poignant griefs, or violent struggles of fatal issue, this thought unfolds itself to soothe the tumult. We subdue the keen agitation of particular calamities by fixing our eyes on the calm majesty of the irresistible forces of the universe: we take some part of the disturbing culpability of individual agents off their shoulders, and lay it on the Stars, dread agents equally above our love and our hatred. Before the awful magnificence of their doings, our fierce detestation of individual malice is subdued, and the sorrows of the individual lose their sharpness merged in the sorrows of mankind. The power that overhangs Shakespeare's tragedies appears also in the aspect of an inexorable and relentless Justice, blindly dealing out the punishment of death to all who are wilfully or accidentally brought within the sweep of her sword. Not the slightest culpability is left unavenged. None remain alive at the end who have been so intimately mixed up with the chief victims that their survival would chafe our sense of justice and vex our meditations on the impartial rigour of the Destinies. Not one false step within the tragic circle can be withdrawn. Conscious or unconscious, intentional or unintentional, all com plicity is fearfully punished. We ask what poor Cordelia had done that she should perish untimely; and Justice points to her wayward refusal to humour the exacting irritability of her doting old father. Ophelia? She was thrust for a moment by the wretched rash intruding Polonius between Hamlet and his revenge: for one moment she was the innocent tool of the guilty, and though her sad fate was avenged on Hamlet, she could not escape. Consider how you should have felt had Cordelia survived Lear or Ophelia survived her father, her brother, and her lover, and you will recognise the dramatic justice of involving them in the general ruin of their friends and enemies. The fate of Desdemona is too harrowing if we miss the completeness of the dramatist's design in the outlines of her character. In the first frenzy of our grief and anger, our thoughts run fiercely towards revenge. We do not regret the death of Emilia, remembering that she had been guilty of stealing the fatal handkerchief. We behold with savage satisfaction the remorse of Othello, and his desperate retribution on himself. We exercise our ingenuity in devising tortures for Iago, the fiendish contriver of all the mischief. Then when justice has been surfeited, and the awful question-Who can control his fate? rolls its starry grandeurs over the fatigued spirit, we revert to the life of the victim, and in that mood we recognise a sinister influence even in the stars of poor Desdemona. She was not a pale creature of colourless blood, framed for a long unruffled life. Her nature was capable of the intemperate passion that leads too surely to tragic consequences. That passionate love of hers for the warlike Moor, which seemed so monstrous and unnatural to her father, and which was construed so craftily by Iago, was too immoderate to be innocuous: "such violent delights have violent ends." The powers that gave her the heart to slight men of her own complexion and degree and fix her affections on a Moor, had destined her to unhappiness. Remove this vicious mole of nature from Desdemona, leave her a cold pattern of propriety reserved to her lover and obedient to her parents, and you find it much more difficult to quell your uneasiness at the crushing of such a flower under the wheel of Destiny. The vicious mole is small in proportion to the retribution: but the fact that she was in a measure, however faint, accessory to her own ruin, blends with other mitigations of the final horror. 422 CHAPTER VIII. SHAKESPEARE'S CONTEMPORARIES AND SUCCESSORS. THE more we read of Elizabethan literature, the more we become convinced of the vast superiority of Shakespeare. If one begins the study of the Elizabethan dramatists with a stern resolution to throw aside all prepossessions, and judge every man as if one had heard nothing whatever about him before, the first conclusion reached from dipping here and dipping there into choice passages may well be, that they all wrote with very much the same kind of power. But when we have lived in their company for some time, and studied their works in various lights, we become aware of immeasurable differences. Gradually we come to see that each man applies a different kind of power to the expression of every thought, the conception of every character, the construction of every scene; and the sum of these individualities is enormous. But though no other Elizabethan dramatist could make the shadow of a claim to be the equal of Shakespeare, there were other men among them justly entitled to be called great. Why, it is often asked, was there such a cluster of great dramatists in that age? Why, we may reply, should there not have been? The drama at that time offered a new and exciting field to the English imagination; and the English imagination, finding the field congenial, rushed into it, and worked at the exalted pitch of energy which new things inspire. Marlowe was really the Columbus of a new literary world. He emancipated the English mind from classical notions of stiff decorum-the necessary accompaniments of the large theatre and the cothurnus and the mask-and by so doing, opened up infinite possibilities to the dramatist. Now, indeed, the drama could be a representation of passionate life. Men struggling passionately after antagonistic aims could now be brought face to face; and the ups and downs, the hopes and fears, the shrinkings and the darings of the struggle and the characters of the combatants, could be placed in swift and dazzling and heart-shaking succession visibly before the eyes of the spectators. The stage even dared to show how men and women bore themselves in the presence of incensed Death-how their spirits quailed or remained constant in fierce defiance with the knife at their throat. Never was there an emancipation so calculated to excite the human intellect to the very utmost of its powers. No wonder that the age should have produced the largest cluster of great names in our literature. Further, I believe it may be said that it is indispensable to the production of a very great man that a number of great men should work side by side. They not only stimulate one another to extreme effort, but they also, consciously and unconsciously, get from one another invaluable helps and suggestions. In literature, in art, in commerce, all through life, I believe this rule holds. In all things it is an infallible source of degeneration to keep company with inferior minds. You cannot even have a good whistplayer, or billiard-player, or croquet-player, without others. to spur him on; remove the stimulus of competition, and he inevitably demoralises. Distinguished criminals do not occur singly. What great orator ever rose up from a low general level? When one man makes a tremendous fortune, you are certain to find others following hard in his wake. Greatness in the humblest walks as well as in the highest is so difficult an achievement, and demands such a persistence in heroic effort, that men cannot persevere unto the end, but fall away from the straight course unless they are kept |