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we are examining life itself; or rather, in examining the interest which we take in a work of art, in examining the reasons why we think it beautiful, or great, or interesting, we are examining our own feelings as to the realities represented by it.

And now remembering this, let us turn to certain of the world's greatest works of art—I mean its dramas: for just as poetry is the most articulate of all the arts, so is the drama the most comprehensive form of poetry. In the drama we have the very thing we are now in want of. We have life as a whole—that complex aggregate of details, which forms, as it were, the mental landscape of existence, presented to us in a 'questionable shape,' at once concentrated and intensified. And it is no exaggeration to say that the reasons why men think life worth living, can be all found in the reasons why they think a great drama great.

Let us turn, then, to some of the greatest works of Sophocles, of Shakespeare, and of Goethe, and consider briefly how these present life to us. Let us take Macbeth, Hamlet, Measure for Measure, and Faust. We have here five presentations of life, under what confessedly are its most striking aspects, and with such interests as men have been able to find in it, raised to their greatest intensity. Such, at least, is the way in which these works are regarded, and it is only in virtue of this estimate that they are called great. Now, in producing this estimate, what is the chief faculty in us that they appeal to? It will need but little thought to show us that they appeal primarily to the supernatural moral judgment; that this judgment is perpetually being expressed explicitly in the works themselves; and, which is far more important, that it is always pre-supposed in us. In other words, these supreme presentations of life are presentations of men struggling, or failing to struggle, not after natural happiness, but after supernatural right; and it is always pre-supposed on our part that we admit this struggle to be the one important thing. And this importance, we shall see further, is based, not on the external and the social consequences of conduct, but essentially and primarily on its internal and its personal consequences.

In Macbeth, for instance, the main incident, the tragic-colouring matter of the drama, is the murder of Duncan. But in what aspect of this does the real tragedy lie? Not in the fact that Duncan is murdered, but in the fact that Macbeth is the murderer. What appals us, what purges our passions with pity and with terror as we contemplate it, is not the external, the social effect of the act, but the personal, the internal effect of it. As for Duncan, he is in his grave; after life's fitful fever he sleeps well. What our minds are made to dwell upon is not that Duncan shall sleep for ever, but that Macbeth shall sleep no more; it is not the extinction of a dynasty, but the ruin of a character.

We see in Hamlet precisely the same thing. The action there that our interest centres in, is the hero's struggle to conform to an internal personal standard of right, utterly irrespective of use to others, or of natural happiness to himself. In the course of this struggle, indeed, he does nothing but ruin the happiness around him; and this ruin adds greatly to the pathos of the spectacle. But we are not indignant with Hamlet, as being the cause of it. We should have been indignant rather with him if the case had been reversed, and if, instead of sacrificing social happiness for the sake of personal right, he had sacrificed personal right for the sake of social happiness.

In Antigone the case is just the same, only there its nature is yet more distinctly exhibited. We have for the central interest the same personal struggle after right, not after use or happiness; and one of the finest passages in that whole marvellous drama is a distinct statement by the heroine that this is so. The one rule she says, that she is resolved to live by, and not live by only, but if needs be to die for, is no human rule, is no standard of man's devising, nor can it be modified to suit our changing needs; but it is

The unwritten and the enduring laws of God,
Which are not of to-day nor yesterday,
But live from everlasting, and none breathes
Who knows them, whence begotten.

In Measure for Measure and Faust we can see the matter reduced to a narrower issue still. In both these plays we can see at once that one moral judgment at least, not to name others, is before all things pre-supposed in us. This is a hard and fixed judgment with regard to female chastity, and the supernatural value of it. It is only because we assent to this judgment that Isabella is heroic to us; and primarily for the same reason that Margaret is unfortunate. Let us suspend this judgment for a moment, and what will become of these two dramas? The terror and the pity of them will vanish instantly like a dream. The fittest name for both of them will be 'Much Ado about Nothing.'

It will thus be seen, and the more we consider the matter the more plain will it become to us—that in all such art as that which we have been now considering, the premiss on which all its power and greatness rests is this: The grand relation of man is not first to his brother men, but to something else, that is beyond humanity—that is at once without and also beyond himself; to this first, and to his brother men through this. We are not our own; we are bought with a price. Our bodies are God's temples, and the joy and the terror of life depends on our keeping these temples pure, or defiling them. Such are the solemn and profound beliefs, whether conscious or unconscious, on which all the higher art of the world has based itself. All the profundity and solemnity of it is borrowed from these, and exists for us in exact proportion to the intensity with which we hold them.

Nor is this true of sublime and serious art only. It is true of cynical, profligate, and concupiscent art as well. It is true of Congreve as it is true of Sophocles; it is true of Mademoiselle de Maupin as it is true of Measure for Measure. This art differs from the former in that the end presented in it as the object of struggle is not only not the morally right, but is also to a certain extent essentially the morally wrong. In the case of cynical and profligate art this is obvious. For such art does not so much depend on the substitution of some new object, as in putting insult on the present one. It does not make right and wrong change places; on the contrary it carefully keeps them where they are; but it insults the former by transferring its insignia to the latter. It is not the ignoring of the right, but the denial of it. Cynicism and profligacy are essentially the spirits that deny, but they must retain the existing affirmations for their denial to prey upon. Their function is not to destroy the good, but to keep it in lingering torture. It is a kind of spiritual bear-baiting. They hate the good, and its existence piques them; but they must know that the good exists none the less. 'I'd no sooner,' says one of Congreve's characters, 'play with a man that slighted his ill-fortune, than I'd make love to a woman who undervalued the loss of her reputation.' In this one sentence is contained the whole secret of profligacy; and profligacy is the same as cynicism, only it is cynicism sensualized. Now we have in the above sentence the exact counterpart to the words of Antigone that I have already quoted. For just as her life lay in conformity to 'The unwritten, and the enduring laws of God,' so does the life of the profligate lie in the violation of them. To each the existence of laws is equally essential. For profligacy is not merely the gratification of the appetites, but the gratification of them at the expense of something else. Beasts are not profligate. We cannot have a profligate goat.

In what I have called concupiscent art, the case might seem different, and to a certain extent it is so. The objects of struggle that we are there presented with are meant to be presented as pleasures, not in defiance of right and wrong, but independently of them. The chief of these, indeed, as Théophile Gautier has told us, are the physical endearments of a man and a woman, with no other qualification than that they are both of them young and beautiful. But though this art professes to be thus independent of the moral judgment, and to trust for none of its effects to the discernment between good and evil, this really is very far from being the case. Let us turn once again to the romance we have already quoted from. The hero says, as we have seen already, that he has completely lost the power of discernment in question. Now, even this, as might be shown easily, is not entirely true; for argument's sake, however, we may grant him that it is so. The real point in the matter to notice is that he is at any rate conscious of the loss. He is a man tingling with the excitement of having cast off some burden. The burden may be gone, but it is still present in the sharp effects of its absence. He is a kind of moral poacher, who, though he may not live by law, takes much of his life's tone from the sense that he is eluding it. His pleasures, though pleasurable in themselves, yet have this quality heightened by the sense of contrast. 'I am at any rate not virtuous,' his mistress says to him, 'and that is always something gained.' George Eliot says of Maggie Tulliver, that she liked her aunt Pullet chiefly because she was not her aunt Gleg. Théophile Gautier's hero likes the Venus Anadyomene, partly at least, because she is not the Madonna.

Nay, let us even descend to worse spectacles—to the sight of men struggling for enjoyments that are yet more obviously material, more devoid yet of any trace of mind or morals, and we shall see plainly, if we consult the mirror of art, that the moral element is present even here. We shall trace it even in such abnormal literature of indulgence as the erotic work commonly ascribed to Meursius. We shall trace it in the orgies of Tiberius at Capri; or of Quartilla, as Petronius describes them, at Neapolis. It is like a ray of light coming in at the top of a dark cavern, whose inmates see not it, but by it; and which only brings to them a consciousness of shadow. It is this supernatural element that leavens natural passion, and gives its mad rage to it. It creates for it 'a twilight where virtues are vices.' The pleasures thus sought for are supposed to enthral men not in proportion to their intensity (for this through all their varieties would be probably nearly equal) but in proportion to their lowness—to their sullying power. Degradation is the measure of enjoyment; or rather it is an increasing numeral by which one constant figure of enjoyment is multiplied.

Ah, where shall we go then, for pastime,
If the worst that can
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