nitial impetus, and proceeding from the
serene semi-Stoicism of the essayist to a deeper and sterner conception
of things. It lay, indeed, in the nature of Shakspere's psychosis, so
abnormally alive to all impressions, that when he fully faced the darker
sides of universal drama, with his reflective powers at work, he must
utter a pessimism commensurate with the theme. This is part, if not the
whole, of the answer to the question "Why did Shakspere write
tragedies?"[169] The whole answer can hardly be either Mr. Spedding's,
that the poet wrote his darkest tragedies in a state of philosophic
serenity,[170] or Dr. Furnivall's, that he "described hell because he
had felt hell."[171] But when we find Shakspere writing a series of
tragedies, including an extremely sombre comedy (MEASURE FOR MEASURE),
after having produced mainly comedies and history-plays, we must
conclude that the change was made of his own choice, and that whereas
formerly his theatre took its comedies mostly from him, and its
tragedies mostly from others, it now took its comedies mostly from
others and its tragedies from him. Further, we must assume that the
gloomy cast of thought so pervadingly given to the new tragedies is
partly a reflex of his own experience, but also in large part an
expression of the philosophy to which he had been led by his reading, as
well as by his life. For we must finally avow that the pervading thought
in the tragedies outgoes the simple artistic needs of the case. In
OTHELLO we have indeed a very strictly dramatic array of the forces of
wrong--weakness, blind passion, and pitiless egoism; but there is
already a full suggestion of the overwhelming energy of the element of
evil; and in LEAR the conception is worked out with a desperate
insistence which carries us far indeed from the sunny cynicism and
prudent scepticism of Montaigne. Nowhere in the essays do we find such a
note of gloom as is struck in the lines:

"As flies to wanton boys are we to the Gods:
They kill us for their sport."

And since there is no pretence of balancing that mordant saying with any
decorous platitude of Christian Deism, we are led finally to the
admission that Shakspere sounded a further depth of philosophy than
Montaigne's unembittered "cosmopolitan view of things." Instead of
reacting against Montaigne's "scepticism," as Herr Stedefeld supposes,
he produced yet other tragedies in which the wrongdoers and the wronged
alike exhibit less and n