"Here lay Duncan, His silver skin laced with his golden blood, And his gash'd stabs look'd like a breach in nature For ruin's wasteful entrance: there, the murderers, Steep'd in the colours of their trade, their daggers Unmannerly breech'd with gore."
Such a style, however, does not readily give up opportunities for aphorism or beauty for the sake of absolute truth to situation or character. Still less does it mimic actual speech. It does give a potency to the stories, otherwise hardly conceivable; and it adds to truth of character the allurement of music and picture, and the idealization of a magnified suggestiveness. A father has reason to curse his daughter--gesture and incoherent words might correctly represent life; a plain sentence of Ibsen's might convey the tragedy of the situation--but it is the extravagant and terrible imprecation of Lear that has for centuries made men's imaginations shudder. Style such as this the drama will never recover. We shall sooner find another Shakespeare to blend its diverse elements than a host of dramatists, like the Elizabethans, fascinated by a newly discovered world of poetry and daringly adventurous in search of melody of verse, wealth of aphorism, luxury of fantasy, and truth to character.
The effect of Shakespeare's tragedies on spectator or reader is so complex as to defy analysis. Incidental wisdom, effective scene, immortal story all contribute; but the main sources of their abiding impressiveness have surely been the characterization and the poetic style. If we must continue to seek for a katharsis, do not they supply it? The great tragedies are full of disaster, wrong, and suffering. The world they reveal is not the abode of happiness, but of darkness and remorse. Though the bad are punished, the good are not rewarded. Sweetness and innocence suffer and perish along with foulness and malevolence. The noblest spirits are broken; the wages of mortal effort are failure. There are many "breaches in nature for ruin's wasteful entrance." Nor does the life hereafter offer a promise of compensation. Death ends all,--that is the great catastrophe toward which human endeavor precipitates itself. This is not Shakespeare's view of life, but it is his view of the tragedy of life, and its effect upon us is gloomy, overpowering, heartrending. But everywhere this tragedy of life is revealed in verse infinitely appealing to intellectual analysis and to imaginative exhilaration. Everywhere there are men and women, not dead but living, representative of much that is most intensely and universally interesting in life, and the permanent guests of our reflection. The old ethical adage that it does not so much matter what men do as what they are has a particular truth when applied to the people of Shakespeare. That they do this or that, love, murder, die, is in the story; what they are remains the possession of humanity. Our horror at the successful villany of Iago finds a certain relief in the intellectual pleasure and admiration at the creator's achievement; it accomplishes a certain purification in its application to the Iago in ourselves. Still more do the persons who most excite our sympathy survive the intolerable emotions that first greet their misfortunes. When we read "Othello" we feel an overwhelming pity, a fierce resentment, but we would not erase from our possession the memory of Desdemona and her Moor. The misery and wrong and death go to make up in our reflection the beings whom we love and cherish. It is Lear's fivefold "never" that completes for us the loveliness of Cordelia.
