Shakespeare has been sometimes taxed with the barbarism of profuseness
and exaggeration. But this is to measure him by a Sophoclean scale. The
simplicity of the antique tragedy is by no means that of expression, but
is of form merely. In the utterance of great passions, something must be
indulged to the extravagance of Nature; the subdued tones to which pathos
and sentiment are limited cannot express a tempest of the soul The range
between the piteous "no more but so," in which Ophelia compresses the
heart-break whose compression was to make her mad, and that sublime
appeal of Lear to the elements of Nature, only to be matched, if matched
at all, in the "Prometheus," is a wide one, and Shakespeare is as truly
simple in the one as in the other. The simplicity of poetry is not that
of prose, nor its clearness that of ready apprehension merely. To a
subtile sense, a sense heightened by sympathy, those sudden fervors of
phrase, gone ere one can say it lightens, that show us Macbeth groping
among the complexities of thought in his conscience-clouded mind, and
reveal the intricacy rather than enlighten it, while they leave the eye
darkened to the literal meaning of the words, yet make their logical
sequence, the grandeur of the conception, and its truth to Nature clearer
than sober daylight could.
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