innocent victims, who, apparently at least, have no share in the represented guilt? Our answer must primarily be directed to the second objection. The Tragic poet is not required to imitate history in all its length and breadth, but to condense its general features within a particular and limited space. Accordingly, he must be at liberty to set up as many subordinate figures as may appear necessary, and to employ them as such agreeably to the purpose he had in view in creating them. If, therefore, he introduces any personages merely as the passive objects of the actions and influences of others, and not as independent agents, it will be sufficient if he exhibit their fortunes and sufferings objectively only, while, from their subjective basis in their individual characters and pursuits, from which alone the true reason of their destiny is to be discovered, he does not attempt to account for it, except by a few slight hints and allusions. Of the latter, however, sufficient is furnished us by Shakspeare in the present piece. Thus the gracious Duncan does not seem to have fallen altogether blameless. This we are led to infer from the numerous revolts against his authority, which Macbeth successively suppressed. Whether they were the result of an arbitrary rule or injustice, or (as the Chronicles assert, from which Shakspeare drew his materials) of an unkingly weakness and cowardice, at any rate he is open to the reproach of unfitness for the duties of his office and state. His sons, again, expose themselves to the suspicion of having slain their own father, by their precipitate, and though prudent, yet most unmanly and cowardly flight. Banquo, too, evidently broods with arrogant complacency on the promised honours of his posterity, and so brings down destruction on his own head. Lastly, the wife and children of Macduff suffer for the selfishness of their natural protector, who, forgetful of his duty as a husband and father, has left them, to secure his own personal safety. Accordingly, he is punished by the loss of all his little ones, while the fate which falls upon Lady Macduff is not altogether unmerited by the unamiable asperity with which she rails at her husband for his desertion of her. All, in short, both nobles and commons, are guilty. With a mean and selfish cowardice, and a sinful compliance, they overlook the lawful successor to the throne, and submit to the usurped authority of Macbeth. He who weakly complies with evil involves himself in its guilt and fearful consequences. such matter there reigns an intrinsic necessity, and the more imperceptible its threads are, the more inextricably do they seize upon and wind themselves around us. The fundamental idea of the piece is not merely illustrated in the characters and fortunes of Macbeth and his wife, but all the subordinate personages and incidents reflect it in a great variety of light and shade. Throughout we meet with the same sinful wilfulness and conduct under various modifications, and equally visited with sure but varying degrees of retribution. An answer to the second of the previous objections satisfies at the same time the first also in some measure. The tragical is not confined exclusively to the fate and fortune of Macbeth, which form at most but one portion of it. The death of Macbeth awakens no other sensation than a painful conviction of the frailty of all human grandeur; certainly it suggests, in the immediate instance, no soothing or elevating thought, and does but breathe of eternal ruin and death. Mediately, however, it does give rise to higher and calmer feelings; this purifying and instructive result, however, is the other element of the tragical in this drama, which at the same time is closely and influentially connected with the first. Something, no doubt, is lost of force and effect by this division of the tragic interest; nevertheless, together, the two parts make it complete. By the sufferings which the crime of Macbeth brings upon all the other characters, their own faults and weaknesses are atoned for, their virtue and resolution confirmed, and their minds purified, until at last they risc great and powerful, and throw off the unworthy yoke which they had been in such a criminal haste to accept. In the suicidal consequences of evil, as here exhibited, we may read the comfortable and instructive lesson, that ultimately victory is ever with the good. In conclusion, we must make a remark or two on the character of Malcolm. Consistently with the fundamental idea of the piece, whose design was to exhibit the vanity and inevitable ruin of human energy, of will and action, considered as the leading spring of historical development, whenever it resigns itself entirely to earthly objects, the action advances with extraordinary rapidity and a tearing haste. All is action; act presses upon act, and event upon event. The dark and supernatural powers, whose evil influence prevails throughout, would seem to have annulled the usual course of time. But it is only the irresistible sequence with which crime follows crime, that can proceed with such rapidity. Good requires time and patience; the virtuous deed demands for its fulfilment much of forethought, mature preparation, and calm collectedness of mind. As if designing to call attention to this important truth, our poet has placed Malcolm's lingering and thoughtful deliberation in direct contrast to the stormy and impetuous activity of Macbeth. It is almost superfluous to remark the truthfulness with which Shakspeare has here sketched the two principal forms under which the human will historically developes itself. Beautifully, indeed, has he painted these two forms of historical action : on the one hand, the hasty deed following close upon the heels of resolve, and like a hostile inroad securing its end by desolation and dismay; on the other, a deliberation which anticipates and weighs all possible contingencies (from which the breaking of the boughs from Birnam Wood derives a motive, and ceases to appear purely accidental), which precedes action by a long interval, and works out its end, however tardily, yet certainly. Furthermore, the historical significancy of the tragedy is obvious in all this. Even externally it is projected distinctly enough. The tyranny of Macbeth plunges a whole people in misery, and his crimes have set two great nations in hostile array against each other. There could not be a more pregnant and impressive illustration of the solemn truth, that the evil influence of crime, like a poisonous serpent coiled within the fairest flowers, spreads over the whole circle of human existence, not only working the doom of the criminal himself, but scattering far and wide the seeds of destruction; but that, nevertheless, the deadly might of evil is overcome by the love and justice of God, and good at last is enthroned as the conqueror of the world. Lastly, Macbeth is the tragedy in which, above all others, Shakspeare has distinctly maintained his own genuine Christian sentiments, and a truly Christian view of the system of things. HAMLET. Since the genuine drama must reflect universal history "in concreto," and contain its whole treasury of thoughts, tendencies, and motives, it is evident that there may be manifold ways of viewing it, even though one only can be the true central and culminating point, of which all the rest are but secondary radiations. This remark is singularly confirmed by the tragedy of "Hamlet." If, in all Shakspeare's pieces, it is necessary to dig deep before we can reach to the lowest foundation on which the dramatic edifice is raised, this is the case especially in the present one. Every fresh commentator who studies and writes about " Hamlet," goes deeper and further than his predecessors, and thinks he has reached to the true foundation, which, nevertheless, lies all the while still deeper and far beyond his researches. This perhaps will be the fate also of my own speculations. However, I shall not be deterred by such a prospect, but comfort myself rather with the consoling certainty it affords of the surpassing fulness and the ever freshly-springing fertility of human genius. Goethe, after quoting the complaint of Hamlet—“The times are awry: woe is me that I was born to set them straight again," observes,- "These words, as it seems to me, contain the key to Hamlet's conduct, and it is quite clear to my mind, that Shakspeare designed to paint a great deed enjoined on an inferior mind. In this sense does the whole piece appear to me to have been conceived and executed. We have here an oak planted in a costly vase, fit only to receive lovely flowers within its bosom; the roots spread and burst the vase." A. W. Schlegel, on the other hand, calls it "a tragedy of thought, suggested by continual and unsatisfied meditation on the destiny of man, and the dark perplexity of the events of this world, and designed to awaken the same reflections in the minds of the spectators." He thinks that its purpose was to shew, that a deliberation which would exhaust to the farthest limits of human foresight all the possible contingencies and consequences of a particular act, must unnerve the resolution and cripple the powers of acting: as Hamlet himself expresses it:— "And thus the native hue of resolution Is sicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought; With respect also to the personal character of the Prince the two critics are no less at issue. Goethe calls him tender and noble; born a prince, and desirous of rule only to give free scope to goodness-of an agreeable person, moral by nature, amiable, not originally melancholy and reflective, but made so by circumstances alone in short, a noble, pure, lovely, and highly moral being, but without the firmness of nerve which makes the hero, and sinking beneath a weight which he can neither bear nor throw off, and to whom every duty is holy, but the present obligation too grievous, &c. But Schlegel, on the other hand, while he acknowledges his many excellent qualities, finds fault with his weakness of will, and charges him with a natural inclination for artifice and dissimulation, a want of resolution almost amounting to cowardice, a malicious joy in getting rid of his enemies through necessity and accident, rather than by his own decisive measures against them; and lastly, with scepticism, and with no firm belief either in himself or any thing else. Goethe, again, makes him out to be Werther of the middle ages. In Hamlet, as in Werther, he pretends, a subjective weakness is engaged in an unsuccessful struggle with the objective power of circumstances unfortunately conflicting with the character of the hero. In Werther an exuberance of feeling, in Hamlet an overgreat duty, is laid in a vessel too weak to support it, and consequently breaking beneath it; in both a gloomy melancholy at the corrupt and unhealthy state of the times. Schlegel, on the contrary, sees in Hamlet a perfect hero of the nineteenth century, who hides desired passions and designs under fair and smooth words, and allows theory and speculation to absorb both volition and action; one, in short, in whom history has become the spirit of history. In the conflicting views of these two writers, we have, however, the reflection of the character |