In  the  days  of  our  dramatic  supremacy,  the  nature
of  man  became  in  its  entirety  the  subject  of  representa-
tive poetry  ;  and  the  apocalypse  of  man  was  more  com-
plete than  at  any  other  moment  of  the  world's  history,
Shakspere  and  his  greater  contemporaries  reveal  human
passions,  thoughts,  aspirations,  sentiments,  and  motives
of  action  with  evidence  so  absolute,  with  so  obvious
an  absence  of  any  intervenient  medium,  that  the  crea-
tions even  of  Sophocles,  of  Calderon,  of  Corneille,
when  compared  with  these,  seem  to  represent  abstract
conceptions  or  animated  forms  rather  than  the  inner
truths  of  life.
In  order  to  estimate  the  force  of  this  dramatic  in-
sight, we  might  compare  the  stories  on  which  our
dramatists  founded  their  tragedies  with  the  tragedies
themselves — '  Romeo  and  Juliet'  or  '  Othello '  with  the
novels  of  Da  Porto  or  Cinthio,  '  The  Duchess  of  Malfi '
with  Bandello's  prose,  'Arden  of  Feversham'  with
Holinshed's  Chronicle.  It  would  then  be  evident  that,
taking  the  mere  outline  of  a  plot,  they  filled  this  in
with  human  life  of  poignant  intensity,  'piercing'  (to
use  those  words  of  Milton)  '  dead  things  with  in-
breathed sense.'  The  tales  from  which  the  play-
wrights   drew  their   tragedies,   contained   incident   in


INSIGHT  INTO  HUMAN  NATURE.
plenty  but  feeble  silhouettes  of  character,  enough  of
rhetoric  but  no  passion  of  poetry,  enough  moralising
but  little  of  world-wisdom.  The  dramatists  knew  how
to  use  the  framework,  while  they  changed  the  spirit  of
these  pieces  ;  animating  them  with  salient  portraiture
of  men  and  women  studied  from  the  life,  adorning
them  with  unpremeditated  song,  and  making  them  the
lesson-books  of  practical  philosophy.
