[131]
It might be defended as a bit of ghastly humor characteristic of the
speaker. But at any rate it is not without precedent in the two greater
Greek tragedians. In a chorus of the _Seven against Thebes_ we have:--
[Greek: en de gaia.
Zoa phonoruto
Memiktai, _karta d' eis' omaimoi_.]
And does not Sophocles make Ajax in his despair quibble upon his own name
quite in the Shakespearian fashion, under similar circumstances? Nor does
the coarseness with which our great poet is reproached lack an Aeschylean
parallel. Even the Nurse in _Romeo and Juliet_ would have found a true
gossip in her of the _Agamemnon_, who is so indiscreet in her confidences
concerning the nursery life of Orestes. Whether Raleigh is right or not
in warning historians against following truth too close upon the heels,
the caution is a good one for poets as respects truth to Nature. But it
is a mischievous fallacy in historian or critic to treat as a blemish of
the man what is but the common tincture of his age. It is to confound a
spatter of mud with a moral stain.
But I have been led away from my immediate purpose. I did not intend to
compare Shakespeare with the ancients, much less to justify his defects
by theirs. Shakespeare himself has left us a pregnant satire on
dogmatical and categorical aesthetics (which commonly in discussion soon
lose their ceremonious tails and are reduced to the internecine dog and
cat of their bald first syllables) in the cloud-scene between Hamlet and
Polonius, suggesting exquisitely how futile is any attempt at a cast-iron
definition of those perpetually metamorphic impressions of the beautiful
whose source is as much in the man who looks as in the thing he sees.
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