difference between physical injury and mental distress. "Lean but upon a rush," says Phoebe, Which I have darted at thee, hurt thee It is the blank verse that gives the nurse and Phoebe this enlargement of their powers. In fact, both Greek tragedy and Shakespearian tragedy are in their poetic march a sort of great Gargantuan discourse issuing from the mouth of the poet, the stage being his jaws. There is yet another resemblance between Shakespeare and the Greeks. Both the Greek tragedies and Shakespeare's best plays have been written with supreme facility. They have fallen from the pen. They exist in a region of artistic fulfilment. I suspect that it is this latter element of perfection that links Shakespeare and the Greeks in our thought, rather than all the rest of their scanty resemblances. So far as perfection of form goes, the Greek plays are infinitely superior to Shakespeare's. So far as native talent goes, there is no Greek dramatist who stands anywhere near Shakespeare, though Aristophanes suggests him. In each case perfection reaches a climax. With the Greeks it is the perfection of massive racial power; with Shakespeare, the perfection of modern romantic sentiment. THE II SHAKESPEARE'S VEHICLE HE invention of the alphabet very soon turned all forms of articulate expression into mere reading and writing. The first edition of Homer's poems, no doubt, threw the reciters out of work, and handed over the poems bound hand and foot to the literary fraternity,-to those men with inkbottles and sheets of parchment who have owned and controlled the poems ever since. (Happy is the ordinary man if the scholars will give him but a peep at them!) To-day we have almost forgotten that Homer was originally intended for recitation, not for reading. The form in which we know the Iliad is due, thinks Professor Gilbert Murray, to the demands of a reading public. In like manner, Shakespeare's plays have, during the last two hundred years, been kept upon the stage largely through the influence of the reading public. The world will un doubtedly continue to read the plays long after they have ceased to walk the boards. There is a great and terrible truth at the bottom of this outcome. Things are better understood, more rapidly and more vividly taken in, when they are read than when they are recited or acted; and though the rise of a great actor may now and then qualify this rule for a day, though Garrick or Edmund Kean or Salvini may show the true Shakespeare in a flash, the memory of which lasts for the hearer's lifetime, yet the mass of men must depend on the printed page for all their knowledge of Homer or of Shakespeare. We know Hamlet so well that it is only by an effort that we remember that Hamlet was once a play, a thing unfamiliar, a novelty in a theatre, where people sat and wondered and watched the actors. Shakespeare on the stage has been murdered by Shakespeare in the closet. The theatre of one's own mind is more interesting than any actual theatre, and our inward actors outdo all but the greatest tragedians and comedians of the world. On the real stage things move too slowly. I am bored with every speech: the lines are too familiar. The theatre compels me to take in the text by linear measurement, and |