Poetry | Page 8

again in two persons lifted above the common station; and he does this not (as I think) for the practical reason for which Aristotle seems to commend it to tragic writers--that the disasters of great persons are more striking than those of the small fry of mankind--that, as the height is, so will be the fall--or not for that reason alone; but, still in the process of "idealising," because such persons, exalted above the obscuring petty cares of life, may reasonably be expected to see the Universe with a clearer vision than ours, to have more delicate ears for its harmonies. Who but a King should know most concerning moral law? Why is he with our consent lifted up so that he may hear the divine commandments better than we, and dictate them down to us? He is greater, but yet--and this is the point--_a man like ourselves_ ([Greek: omoios]). He cannot for purposes of tragedy be wholly good: for not only is this extremely rare in real life, and almost inconceivable, but the ruin of a wholly good man would merely shock, without teaching us anything. The disaster of a tragic figure must come, and be seen to come, through some fault--or, at least, some mistake--of his own. But again he must not be wholly bad, for the disasters of the wholly bad do not affect us save with disgust. Such men, we know, are not like ourselves. What happens to them may serve for The Police News. Tragedy does not deal with the worthless. How then are Macbeth and Lady Macbeth, beings like ourselves, to fall into crime so heinous? Again Shakespeare strips the Idea bare: their trespass comes through ambition, "last infirmity of noble minds," under the blinding persuasion of witchcraft, which (an actual belief in Shakespeare's time) is a direct negation of the moral law, and puts Satan in place of God.

It is curious that, some thirty-odd years after Shakespeare had handled this tremendous theme, another attempt on it was being meditated, and by the man whom the most of us rank next after Shakespeare in the hierarchy of English poets. Among the treasures in the library at Trinity College, Cambridge, lies a manuscript, the hand-writing undoubtedly Milton's, containing a list compiled by him of promising subjects for the great poem for which, between his leaving the University and the outbreak of the Civil War, all his life was a deliberate preparation. The list is long; the subjects proposed run to no fewer than ninety-nine. Of these, fifty-three are derived from Old Testament history (with a recurring inclination for the theme of Paradise Lost), eight from the New Testament; thirty-three from the history of Britain (with a leaning towards the Arthurian legend); while five of them are legendary tales of Scotland or North Britain, the last being headed "Macbeth. Beginning at the arrival of Malcolm at Macduff. The matter of Duncan may be expressed by the arrival of his ghost." Now that Milton (an adorer of Shakespeare's genius, as everyone knows) should have taken so deep an impression from the play that its theme possessed him and he longed to transfer it to Epic, is credible enough. That he, with his classical bent, should choose to attempt in Drama an improvement upon the most "classical" of all Shakespeare's tragedies seems to me scarcely credible. But if the credibility of this be granted, then I can only conceive Milton's designing to improve the play by making it yet more "classical," i.e. by writing it (after the fashion he followed in Samson Agonistes) closely upon the model of Athenian Tragedy.
For my part I always consider Milton's Macbeth the most fascinating poem--certainly, if play it were, the most fascinating play--ever unwritten. But of this any man may be sure; that (since they were both great poets) one made, as the other would have made, a story of far more value to us than Shakespeare or Milton or any man before or after could have made by a strict biography of Macbeth, the man as he lived. For any such biography would clog the lesson for us with details which were more the less irrelevant because they really happened. Here I must quote Aristotle again, and for the last time in this little book: but no sentences in his treatise hold a deeper import than these:--
"It is not the function of the Poet to relate what has happened, but what may happen of likelihood or must happen of necessity. The Poet and the Historian are not different because one writes in verse and the other in prose. Turn what Herodotus tells into verse, and none the less it will be a sort of history; the metre makes no difference. The real difference lies in the Historian's telling what has happened,