s
ought to be rewarded, or at least commended, in spite of all the
Injuries of Fortune; and that likewise Vices be always punished or
at least detested with Horrour, though they triumph upon the Stage for
that time."

Doctor Johnson was so completely a man of his own century that he
found fault with Shakespeare because Shakespeare did not preach,
because in the great tragedies virtue is not always rewarded and
vice is not always punished. Doctor Johnson and the Abbe d'Aubignac
wanted the dramatist to be false to life as we all know it. Beyond all
peradventure the wages of sin is death; and yet we have all seen the
evil-doer dying in the midst of his devoted family and surrounded
by all the external evidences of worldly success. To insist that
virtue shall be outwardly triumphant at the end of a play or of a
novel is to require the dramatist or the novelist to falsify. It
is to introduce an element of unreality into fiction. It is to
require the story-teller and the playmaker to prove a thesis that
common sense must reject.

Any attempt to require the artist to prove anything is necessarily
cramping. A true representation of life does not prove one thing only,
it proves many things. Life is large, unlimited, and incessant; and
the lessons of the finest art are those of life itself; they are not
single but multiple. Who can declare what is the single moral
contained in the "OEdipus" of Sophocles, the "Hamlet" of Shakespeare,
the "Tartufe" of Moliere? No two spectators of these masterpieces
would agree on the special morals to be isolated; and yet none of them
would deny that the masterpieces are profoundly moral because of their
essential truth. Morality, a specific moral--this is what the artist
cannot deliberately put into his work without destroying its veracity.
But morality is also what he cannot leave out if he has striven only
to handle his subject sincerely. Hegel is right when he tells us that
art has its moral--but the moral depends on him who draws it. The
didactic drama and the novel-with-a-purpose are necessarily unartistic
and unavoidably unsatisfactory.

This is what the greater artists have always felt; this is what they
have often expressed unhesitatingly. Corneille, for one, though he was
a man of his time, a creature of the seventeenth century, had the
courage to assert that "the utility of a play is seen in the simple
depicting of vices and virtues, which never fails to be effective if
it is well