divided duty" or
a problem half insoluble, a matter of country and connection, of family
or of race; we look upward and downward, and in vain, into the deepest
things of nature, into the highest things of providence; to the roots of
life, and to the stars; from the roots that no God waters to the stars
which give no man light; over a world full of death and life without
resting-place or guidance.

But in one main point it differs radically from the work and the spirit
of AEschylus. Its fatalism is of a darker and harder nature. To
Prometheus the fetters of the lord and enemy of mankind were bitter; upon
Orestes the hand of heaven was laid too heavily to bear; yet in the not
utterly infinite or everlasting distance we see beyond them the promise
of the morning on which mystery and justice shall be made one; when
righteousness and omnipotence at last shall kiss each other. But on the
horizon of Shakespeare's tragic fatalism we see no such twilight of
atonement, such pledge of reconciliation as this. Requital, redemption,
amends, equity, explanation, pity and mercy, are words without a meaning
here.

As flies to wanton boys are we to the gods;
They kill us for their sport.

Here is no need of the Eumenides, children of Night everlasting; for here
is very Night herself.

The words just cited are not casual or episodical; they strike the
keynote of the whole poem, lay the keystone of the whole arch of thought.
There is no contest of conflicting forces, no judgment so much as by
casting of lots: far less is there any light of heavenly harmony or of
heavenly wisdom, of Apollo or Athene from above. We have heard much and
often from theologians of the light of revelation: and some such thing
indeed we find in AEschylus: but the darkness of revelation is here.

For in this the most terrible work of human genius it is with the very
springs and sources of nature that her student has set himself to deal.
The veil of the temple of our humanity is rent in twain. Nature herself,
we might say, is revealed--and revealed as unnatural. In face of such a
world as this a man might be forgiven who should pray that chaos might
come again. Nowhere else in Shakespeare's work or in the universe of
jarring lives are the lines of character and event so broadly drawn or so
sharply cut. Only the supreme self-command of this one poet could so
mould and handle such types as to restrain and prevent their passing from
the abnormal i