he field without the town,
Angelo's garden-house, the consecrated fountain. Indirectly it has
suggested two of the most perfect compositions among the poetry of our
own generation. Again it is a picture within a picture, but with
fainter lines and a greyer atmosphere: we have here the same passions,
the same wrongs, the same continuance of affection, the same crying out
upon death, as in the nearer and larger piece, though softened, and
reduced to the mood of a more dreamy scene.

[177] Of Angelo we may feel at first sight inclined to say only guarda
e passa! or to ask whether he is indeed psychologically possible. In
the old story, he figures as an embodiment of pure and unmodified evil,
like "Hyliogabalus of Rome or Denis of Sicyll." But the embodiment of
pure evil is no proper subject of art, and Shakespeare, in the spirit
of a philosophy which dwells much on the complications of outward
circumstance with men's inclinations, turns into a subtle study in
casuistry this incident of the austere judge fallen suddenly into
utmost corruption by a momentary contact with supreme purity. But the
main interest in Measure for Measure is not, as in Promos and
Cassandra, in the relation of Isabella and Angelo, but rather in the
relation of Claudio and Isabella.

Greek tragedy in some of its noblest products has taken for its theme
the love of a sister, a sentiment unimpassioned indeed, purifying by
the very spectacle of its passionlessness, but capable of a fierce and
almost animal strength if informed for a moment by pity and regret. At
first Isabella comes upon the scene as a tranquillising influence in
it. But Shakespeare, in the development of the action, brings quite
different and unexpected qualities out of her. It is his
characteristic poetry to expose this cold, chastened personality,
respected even by the worldly Lucio as "something ensky'd and sainted,
and almost an immortal spirit," to two [178] sharp, shameful trials,
and wring out of her a fiery, revealing eloquence. Thrown into the
terrible dilemma of the piece, called upon to sacrifice that cloistral
whiteness to sisterly affection, become in a moment the ground of
strong, contending passions, she develops a new character and shows
herself suddenly of kindred with those strangely conceived women, like
Webster's Vittoria, who unite to a seductive sweetness something of a
dangerous and tigerlike changefulness of feeling. The swift,
vindictive anger leaps,