The very means that Shakespeare makes use of to
lay upon him the obligation of acting--the ghost--really seems to make it
all the harder for him to act; for the spectre but gives an additional
excitement to his imagination and a fresh topic for his scepticism.
I shall not attempt to evolve any high moral significance from the play,
even if I thought it possible; for that would be aside from the present
purpose. The scope of the higher drama is to represent life, not everyday
life, it is true, but life lifted above the plane of bread-and-butter
associations, by nobler reaches of language, by the influence at once
inspiring and modulating of verse, by an intenser play of passion
condensing that misty mixture of feeling and reflection which makes the
ordinary atmosphere of existence into flashes of thought and phrase whose
brief, but terrible, illumination prints the outworn landscape of
every-day upon our brains, with its little motives and mean results, in
lines of tell-tale fire. The moral office of tragedy is to show us our
own weaknesses idealized in grander figures and more awful results,--to
teach us that what we pardon in our selves as venial faults, if they seem
to have but slight influence on our immediate fortunes, have arms as long
as those of kings, and reach forward to the catastrophe of our lives,
that they are dry-rotting the very fibre of will and conscience, so that,
if we should be brought to the test of a great temptation or a stringent
emergency, we must be involved in a ruin as sudden and complete as that
we shudder at in the unreal scene of the theatre.
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