x that he should mingle his cries with Videna's
lamentations? The account of Porrex appealing, with childlike faith in
his mother, to the very woman who has murdered him, may, for the moment,
bring tears to the eyes. But it is an accidental touch. The tragedy lies
not there but in the great fact that with him dies the last heir to the
throne, the last hope of avoiding the miseries of a disputed succession;
and that in her revengeful fury the queen, as a woman, has committed the
blackest of all crimes, a mother's slaughter of her child. We are not
asked to weep but to gasp at the horror of it. It is in order to protect
the loftier, broader aspects of the catastrophe from the influence of
the particular that action is excluded. This cautions us against
confusing tragedy and pathos. To perceive the difference is to recognize
that English Tragedy really begins with _Gorboduc_. Until its advent the
stress laid on the pathetic partially obscured the tragic. This may be
seen at once in the Miracles, though a little thought will reveal the
intensely tragic nature of the complete Miracle Play. In _Cambyses_ we
find the same obscuration: there is tragedy in the sudden ending of
those young lives, but the pathos of the mother's anguish and the sweet
girl's pleadings prevent us from thinking of it. _Appius and Virginia_
maintains a much truer tragic detachment, the effect being heightened by
its opening picture of virtuous happiness destined to abrupt and
tyrannous ruin. But it expresses itself so ill, shatters our hearing so
unmercifully with its alliterative mouthing, and hurls us down so
steeply with its low comedy, that we refuse to give its characters the
grandeur or excellence claimed for them by the author. _Gorboduc_ alone
presents tragedy unspoiled by extraneous additions. In its triple
catastrophe of princes, crown and realm we perceive the awful figure of
the Tragic Muse and shrink back in reverent fear of what more may lie
hid from us in the folds of her black robe. Darker, much darker and more
terrible things have come since from that gloomy spirit. What has been
written here should not be misinterpreted as an exaggerated appreciation
of _Gorboduc_. We wish only to insist that this play did give to English
drama for the first time (if we exclude translations) an example,
however weak in execution, of pure tragedy; and was able to do so
largely, if not entirely, by reason of its reversion to classical
principles and devic