man reason alone. Hooker, while assigning the ultimate, judicial position to reason, will not deny its place to either Scripture, or to the Church, or to tradition. He is an embodiment of the ecclesiastical wisdom of England. While providing the Church, as the Dean of St. Paul's has said, with a broad, intelligible theory, Hooker saves this theory from rigidity and merely ideal constructiveness by root. ing it in his rich feeling for the concrete fact. Charac teristically English the work of Hooker will always re main by its lying close to reality, by its practical tendency, by its moderation, by its large good-sense. More massive Hooker's spirituality becomes, because it includes a noble realization of positive fact. Now, the same soil that produced Bacon and Hooker produced Shakspere; the same environment fostered the growth of all three. Can we discover anything possessed in common by the scientific movement, the ecclesiastical movement, and the drama of the period? That which appears to be common to all is a rich feeling for positive, concrete fact. The facts with which the drama concerns itself are those of human character in its living play. And assuredly, whatever be its imperfection, its crudeness, its extravagance, no other body of literature has amassed in equal fulness and equal variety a store of concrete facts concerning human character and human life; assuredly not the drama of Æschylus and Sophocles, not the drama of Calderon and Lope de Vega, not the drama of Corneille and Racine. These give us views of human life, and select portions of it for artistic handling. The Elizabethan drama gives us the stuff of life itself—the coarse with the fine, the mean with the heroic, the hu morous and grotesque with the tragic and the terrible. The personages of the drama-if we except those of Marlowe, "are not symbols of any absolute or ideal type. The human being is not defined by its most promi nent faculty, nor life by its most potent manifestation. The beings themselves, life itself, are brought before us on the scene, and that with a reality, truth, and perfection the highest ever attained by man." Poetry, in this Elizabethan period, is put upon a purely human basis. No fate broods over the actions of men and the history of families; the only fatality is the fatality of character. † Luck, an outstanding element helping to determine the lives of mortals, and not reducible to known law, luck good and bad, Shakspere readily admits; but luck is strictly a thing in the course of nature. The divinity which shapes our ends works efficiently, but secretly. Men's lives in the drama of Shakspere are not disorganized and denaturalized by irruptions of the miraculous. The one standing miracle is the world itself. That power and virtue which can achieve wonders, which can do higher things than all feats of grotesque magic recorded in the Legend, is simply a noble or beautiful soul of man or woman. If we recognize in a moral order of the world a divine presence, then the divine presence is never absent from the Shaksperian world. For such sacred thaumaturgy as that of Calderon's "Autos" we shall in vain seek in the drama of England.+ * Joseph Mazzini, "Critical and Literary Writings," vol. ii., pp. 133, 134. On what follows Mazzini writes: "In Shakspere, and this is a real progress (as compared with Æschylus), liberty does exist. The act of a single day, or it may be of an hour, has thrown an entire life under the dominion of necessity; but in that day or hour the man was free, and arbiter of his own future" (p. 135). "Shakespeare stellte zuerst seine Stücke auf ganz rein menschlichen Boden. . . . Wie eines Menschen Gemüth ist, so ist auch sein Schicksal. Alles, was äusserlich geschieht, ist bei Shakespeare durch ein Inneres bedingt."-E. VEHSE, Shakespeare als Protestant, etc., vol. i., pp. 57, 58. It is remarkable that the peculiar merit of Calderon recognized by Shelley in his "Defence of Poetry"—a merit which Shelley cannot attribute to the Elizabethan dramatists-should be his endeavor to connect art with religion. A vigorous, mundane vitality - this constitutes the basis of the Elizabethan drama. Vigor reveals, on the one hand, the tragedy of life. Love and hatred, joy and sorrow, life and death being very real to a vigorous nature, tragedy becomes possible. To one who exists languidly from day to day, neither can the cross and passion of any human heart be intelligible, nor the solemn intensities of joy, the glorious resurrection and ascension of a life and soul. The heart must be all alive and sensitive before the imagination can conceive, with swift assurance, and no hesitation or error, extremes of rapture and of pain. The stupendous mass of Lear's agony, and the spasms of anguish which make Othello writhe in body as in mind, fell within the compass of the same imagination that included at the other extremity the trembling expectation of Troilus before the entrance of Cressida *into which the dramatist enters so profoundly, while at the same time he holds himself ironically aloof - the fulness of satisfied need when Posthumus embraces Imogen Hang there like fruit, my soul, and the rapture (almost transcending the bounds of con *Troilus." I am giddy; expectation whirls me round. The imaginary relish is so sweet That it enchants my sense; what will it be, Too subtle-potent, tuned too sharp in sweetness, I fear it much: and I do fear, besides, That I shall lose distinction in my joys; As doth a battle, when they charge on heaps sciousness) of Pericles upon the recovery of his long-lost Marina : "O Helicanus, strike me, honor'd sir; Give me a gash, put me to present pain; And drown me with their sweetness." On the other hand, this same vigor enables men to perceive and enjoy the comedy of life; for vigor enjoys folly when it laughs, like Shakspere's Valentine, "it laughs like a cock." One who is thoroughly in earnest is not afraid to laugh; he knows that he may safely have his laugh out, and that it will not disturb the solid relations of things. It is only when we are half in earnest that we cherish our seriousness, and tremble lest the dignity of our griefs or joys should be impaired. And, accordingly, when great tragedies can be written, joyous comedies can be written also. But when life grows base or trivial, when great tragedy ceases (as in the period of the Restoration), when false heroics and showy sentimentality take the place of tragic passion, then the laughter of men becomes brutal and joyless-the crackling of thorns under a pot. This vigorous vitality which underlies the Elizabethan drama is essentially mundane. To it all that is upon this earth is real; and it does not concern itself greatly about the reality of other things. Of heaven or hell it has no power to sing. It finds such and such facts here and now, and does not invent or discover supernatural causes to explain the facts. It pursues man to the moment of death, but it pursues him no further. If it confesses "the burden of the mystery" of human life, it does not attempt to lighten that burden by any "Thus saith the Lord" which cannot be verified or attested by actual experience. If it contains a divine element, the divine is to be looked for in the human, not apart from the human. It knows eternity only through time, which is a part of eternity.* * The following passage adds to what has been written above, and illustrates it: "The feeling which we commonly call pathos seems, when one analyzes it, to arise out of a perception of grand incongruities-filling a place in one class of our ideas corresponding to that in another in which the sense of the ludicrous is placed by Locke. And this pathos was attained by mediæval asceticism through its habit of dwarfing into insignificance the earthly life and its belongings, and setting the meanness and wretchedness which it attributed to it in contrast to the far-off vision of glory and greatness.. Another sort of pathos-the pagan-... results from a full realizing of the joy and the beauty of the earth, and the nobleness of men's lives on it, and from seeing a grand inexplicableness in the incongruity between the brightness of these and the darkness which lies at either end of them; the infinite contradiction between actual greatness and the apparent nothingness of its whence and whither; the mystery of strong and beautiful impulses finding no adequate outcome now, nor promise of ever finding it hereafter; human passion kindling into light and glow, only to burn itself out into ashes; the struggle kept up by the will of successive generations against Fate, ever beginning and ever ending in defeat, to recommence as vainly as before; the never-answered Why? uttered unceasingly in myriad tones from out all human life. The poetry of the Greeks gained from the contemplation of these things a pathos which, however gladly a Christian poet may forego such gain for his art, was in its sadness inexpressibly beautiful. The 'Iliad' had a deep undercurrent of it even in the midst of all its healthy childlike objectivity, and it was ever present amongst the great tragedian's introspective analyzings of humanity. High art of later times has, for the most part, retained this pagan beauty. Though there is no reason to think that there was any paganism in Shakspere's creed, yet we cannot help feeling that, whether the cause is to be sought in his individual genius or in Renaissance influences, the spirit of his art is in many respects pagan. In his great tragedies he traces the workings of noble or lovely human characters on to the point-and no further-where they disappear into the darkness of death, and ends with a look back, never on towards anything beyond. His sternly truthful realism will not, of course, allow him to attempt a shallow poetical justice, and mete out to each of his men and women the portion of earthly good which might seem their due; and his artistic instincts-positive rather than speculative -prefer the majesty and infinite sadness of unexplainedness to any attempt to look on towards a future solution of hard riddles in human fates."-E. D. WEST (in the first of two articles on "Browning as a Preacher," The |