moved by the sufferings of noble human beings, has the power of regarding them in the light of their causes and results. And thus the inculcation of deep moral ideas, without injury to the "objectivity" of the work, is, to say the least, compatible with the essential function of tragedy.

All great tragedy is at once individual and universal-individual, because the action is the combined result of characters and situations which are believed as real; universal, because the same action is felt to be typical of human life in one of its primary aspects, as seen by the light of some passionate experience or of some signal example.

And if the age be one in which experience has not only been enlarged but deepened by the growth of moral ideas in thoughtful minds amounting to a new revelation, then the tragic poet, whose vision of truth and right is at least adequate to the advancement of his contemporaries, will make his poetry the vehicle of ethical truth, not because from a poet he becomes a preacher, but because he gives expression to his conception of life as a whole, and his creations bear the marks of that conception the more unreservedly in proportion as there are minds. amongst his audience who are prepared to sympathise with him.

The truth which Aristotle sought to convey

is now sufficiently apparent. The value of his definition is seen to depend partly on the degree of emphasis given to the several terms of it, and partly to the amount which can be read into each of them. If the words expressing seriousness, completeness, greatness, are rightly accentuated and understood; if pity can be extended so as to include admiration and sympathy, and fear may be interpreted to mean, at once, terror, horror, wonder, and awe, and if in the purification of the emotions be included the refinement of feeling through reflection, there is little fault to find with his account. The chief defect in it is the confusion which he shares with all ancient writers between an imitation and an ideal creation, in which emotion, both as excited and as represented, is transfused with active and contemplative thought. Aristotle also fails to trace the evolution of the art from its rudimentary form and to recognise the religious basis, after the loss of which the art itself could not long subsist. (See below, Chapter III.)

CHAPTER II

TRAGEDY, ANCIENT AND MODERN1

WITHIN half a century after Shakespeare's death his reputation had suffered from the reaction to which the fame of most great poets has been liable. French models and French criticism were exercising a powerful influence on English literary taste, and a wave of classicism, like that which came from Italy in the sixteenth century, but without the counter-balancing popular impulse, was the result.

John Dryden-who, to do him justice, appreciated Shakespeare more fully than any of his contemporaries-was led by the fashion of the hour into some strange vagaries, such as the travesty of the Tempest, for which Davenant was partly responsible, and the freak of "tagging" Milton's verses with rhyme.

The mention of Antony in the preceding

1 Books to consult : Dryden's Grounds of Criticism in Tragedy; Ency. Brit., art. "Drama"; Paul Stapfer's Shakespeare et les Trágiques Grecs (French); Wilson's Hindu Theatre, p. xi. ; Pollard's Miracle Plays, Introd.

chapter may recall this poet's famous attempt to ht? recast a Shakespearian drama in a classical mould.

In the preface to All for Love, which is confessedly founded on Antony and Cleopatra, the author says: "I have endeavoured in this play to follow the practice of the ancients, who, as Mr. Rymer has judiciously observed, are and ought to be our Horace likewise gives it for a rule in

masters.

his art of poetry

"Vos exemplaria Græca

Nocturna versate manu, versate diurnâ.

Yet, though their models are regular, they are too little for English tragedy, which requires to be built in a larger compass.1

. . . The fabric of the play is regular enough as to the inferior parts of it, and the unities of time, place, and action more exactly observed than perhaps the English theatre requires. Particularly, the action is so much one, that it is only of the kind without episode or underplot; every scene in the tragedy conducing to the main design, and every act concluding with a turn of it."

As is usual with him, Dryden is no more than just to his own work. All for Love is a very

1 Cp. the same author's dedication to his Third Miscellany, where the contrast is drawn between French and English dramatic art: "They" (the French) "content themselves with a thin design without episodes and managed by few persons; our audience will not be pleased but with variety of accidents, an underplot, and many actors."

noble composition, and claims admiration even from those who are familiar with the Shakespearian play. What most concerns us here is to observe that the scene is laid wholly in Alexandria, and the time confined to what is subsequent to the battle of Actium. Whereas Shakespeare, following Plutarch, carries us from Alexandria to Rome and back again, to Messina, to Misenum, to Syria, to Athens, to Actium (both by sea and land), to the coast of Peloponnesus,' and to Alexandria once more. Then Enobarbus, with his comic vein, Pompey, Menas, and many other minor characters, are discarded by Dryden. The result is greater simplicity, and apparently, at first sight, greater concentration. But there is one thing more essential even than unity of action as here understood, and that is climax. cannot be attained by skill in arrangement; and it is precisely this which Shakespeare, Aeschylus, and Sophocles never fail to attain. That is the mark of their profound and radical affinity. The fire of tragic passion, once kindled, blazes more and more fiercely and with a clearer flame until the height is reached; then comes the change, with clouds of smoke that gather round combustion, until the darkness of extinction follows. It makes no difference whether the bush out of the midst of which the flame appears be formed of

This

1 Act iii. Scenes 11 and 13, wrongly headed in the editions.