Milton have bequeathed to her, against the fierce might of envious hatred. The foe is embattled, and our happier brethren are pouring out their lifeblood to break his cruel onslaught. England, your England, has called, and from all the ends of the world her children come, eager to die that Shakespeare's land may live. O princely soul, we know not what shall be the issue: but you have given us the victory, let fall what will. Though the island home we love were sunk in the oblivious sea, yet should it live in men's memories and be blessed for ever for your sake. Your glory has bedimmed the noontide sun, and the shadows of your fancy are more real than aught the sun looks down on. Hail, magician, who may yet allay this last dread tempest! You at least have conquered the foe with whom we wrestle: and though he could destroy us it were nothing, for you shall live serene above the whirlwind of destruction. Look not down with sorrow from the realm where your imperial spirit sits ensphered. The tempest and the agony shall be spent, and earth shall breathe again in peace and bind up her wounds in hope and faith. Then shall fraternity, re-born, make us forget the heaviness that's past; and over the grave of buried hatred shall rise anew the temple of the God in man. England, that lives by you, through you shall live for ever; and never shall wane our love for you, or our pride and joy in you. Hail and farewell!

Shake

spearean

In the preceding chapter, the general character- Tone of the istics of the three plays of Shakespeare's final period have been outlined. While The Tempest shares tragi-comethese, it yet represents in a sense another new de- dies. parture. "Tragi-comedy," the type of play in

In what sense the

plays are autobiographical.

which there is tragic action but no death,2 and in
which the ending must be happy, had become fash-
ionable in the opening decade of the seventeenth
century, and the success of such works by other
writers may account in part for Shakespeare's turn-
ing his genius in this direction after his years of
tragedy were over, instead of returning to comedy
pure and simple. However deeply his inner life
may have been perturbed, he always remained a true
man of business, and never failed in transmuting
the moods of his soul into plays that seemed sure
of popularity. But this could not prevent his work
from reflecting the feeling that dominated him at
the time of doing it. The sunset calm, the peace
after storm, which we see in Cymbeline, The Win-
ter's Tale and The Tempest, is no subjective fancy
of the reader's, and it is not accounted for by the
nature of the medium in which the poet was work-
ing. We have here the record of a spirit which has
drunk life to the lees, without dulling the zest of its
palate for the various vintages. Such joy and sor-
row as Shakespeare's comedies and tragedies com-
municate cannot have sprung from anything short
of the reality of life in him. Plays may be written
Passion may be simu-

to order, but not such plays.
lated; but the woes of Lear, the agony of Othello,
the proud melancholy of Hamlet, could not have
been created save by one who had lived through
their spiritual trials.

This is not to say, however, that some special personal experience underlies each of the great characters Shakespeare depicts, and every one of the

2 A rule which, more suo, Shakespeare could not refrain from violating! He kills Cloten in Cymbeline and Antigonus in The Winter's Tale.

great problems about which his tragedies revolve. I do not believe that even a biography which faithfully reported the incidents of every day of his life would give us the genesis of the changes of spiritual tone to which his works bear witness. Only a diary of personal confessions could do this. When a man has the seeing eye, the moral problems of the world haunt his reason and rack his soul, whether he be called upon to bear a load of purely personal grief or not. The religious experience - the discovery within oneself of a thirst for perfection which condemns the outward order of things, and which the world of the senses and the transient can never wholly satisfy-comes to every man who is endowed by nature with the appropriate organ, as it were. Now, this was what Shakespeare underwent. For many years he was tortured by the contrast between what the world gives and what the soul demands: between "what is" and "what ought to be." It is banal to think that such a soul needed to wait for a disappointment in love, or for betrayal by a trusted friend, before he could describe, in imaginary characters, the effects of such experiences. His distinctive power is that of suffering vicariously. It is no petty personal sorrow or joy that he gives voice to, but the joy of all mankind, the burden of the whole world.

There is no truly tragic experience save where a man by sympathy can universalize what he has seen or felt. The child-mind pities the martyr solely for the nails in his hands and feet, and the thorngashes on his brow; but riper experience shows us that these things are as nothing. Christ was no sufferer, so far as actual physical pain, or the immediate spiritual assaults of false friendship or evil

The joy and sorrow of genius.

hap, were concerned. Thousands of men have endured bodily agonies, to which his few hours of crucifixion were child's play; thousands, too, have suffered from the cruelty of the world, the anguish of bereavement or betrayal, in ways to which his short life offers no parallel. Yet men are right in applying to him the prophetic designation of the Man of Sorrows. He may truly be said to have borne the sins and sufferings of the whole world, .because he had the unique gift of penetration and feeling that forced him to know and bear them. Because in his own breast he experienced whatever happened or was done to the least of his brethren, he was doomed to suffering and destined to joy beyond what other men could even imagine. Thus was it also, though in different manner, with Shakespeare.

The Tempest, then, like the two plays that immediately preceded it, is to be explained as embodying the mood of a spiritual Ulysses, who has reached his Ithaca after voyaging through strange seas of thought alone. Its peace is that deep peace which comes as a positive experience only to those who have known the contrast of war. "To have suffered much," it has been said, "is like knowing many languages: thou hast learned to understand all and to make thyself intelligible to all." This is a great saying, but it omits half the truth. To understand all, we must also have drunk deeply of the joy of life: and the divinest gift of a saviour of mankind is that he leaves his joy to be fulfilled in us. Shakespeare in these last plays says to us, in his own fashion, "Be of good cheer: I have overcome the world." That is why we turn to them with such deep relief after dwelling long in the land of the

tragedies a land that seems forsaken of God. It is here that the wheel comes full circle. Comedy and tragedy are broken arcs; here we find the perfect round. It matters not how romantic or fantastic the tale he tells may be; the poet's "criticism of life" is conveyed in its serene maturity only here. The actual incidents of the final trilogy may be remote from prosaic experience, but the music of humanity is brought to full symphonic perfection. Shakespeare gives us at the last

Contrast beTempest and the Midsum mer Night's

tween The

Dream.

The resemblance between The Tempest and the Midsummer Night's Dream, Shakespeare's only other fairy-tale, great as it appears on the surface, is in reality less striking than the difference. The two plays are separated by an interval of well-nigh twenty years. The earlier one is brimming over with youthful fun. Life in it is one gorgeous lark, and the delirious beauty of the language is an allsatisfying end in itself: it is the poetry of description and immediate sensation, not that of penetrating reflection and deep-delved thought. The spirit of Puck dominates the whole play; and that spirit is summed up in the phrase, "Lord, what fools these M. N. D. mortals be!" The poet has not yet been into the III i 115. depths. He can laugh at everybody, because he has not detected the tragic shadow that stalks behind. everybody. The Midsummer Night's Dream is one of the "dreams out of the ivory gate, and visions before midnight." But in the intervening years, 3 W. V. Moody, The Fire-Bringer, Act I.