But the primary
_object_ of a tragedy is not to inculcate a formal moral. Representing
life, it teaches, like life, by indirection, by those nods and winks that
are thrown away on us blind horses in such profusion. We may learn, to be
sure, plenty of lessons from Shakespeare. We are not likely to have
kingdoms to divide, crowns foretold us by weird sisters, a father's death
to avenge, or to kill our wives from jealousy; but Lear may teach us to
draw the line more clearly between a wise generosity and a loose-handed
weakness of giving; Macbeth, how one sin involves another, and forever
another, by a fatal parthenogenesis, and that the key which unlocks
forbidden doors to our will or passion leaves a stain on the hand, that
may not be so dark as blood, but that will not out; Hamlet, that all the
noblest gifts of person, temperament, and mind slip like sand through the
grasp of an infirm purpose; Othello, that the perpetual silt of some one
weakness, the eddies of a suspicious temper depositing their one
impalpable layer after another, may build up a shoal on which an heroic
life and an otherwise magnanimous nature may bilge and go to pieces. All
this we may learn, and much more, and Shakespeare was no doubt well aware
of all this and more; but I do not believe that he wrote his plays with
any such didactic purpose.
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