ks of art--I mean its dramas: for just as poetry is the most
articulate of all the arts, so is the drama the most comprehensive form
of poetry. In the drama we have the very thing we are now in want of. We
have life as a whole--that complex aggregate of details, which forms, as
it were, the mental landscape of existence, presented to us in a
'_questionable shape_,' at once concentrated and intensified. And it is
no exaggeration to say that the reasons why men think life worth
living, can be all found in the reasons why they think a great drama
great.

Let us turn, then, to some of the greatest works of Sophocles, of
Shakespeare, and of Goethe, and consider briefly how these present life
to us. Let us take _Macbeth_, _Hamlet_, _Measure for Measure_, and
_Faust_. We have here five presentations of life, under what confessedly
are its most striking aspects, and with such interests as men have been
able to find in it, raised to their greatest intensity. Such, at least,
is the way in which these works are regarded, and it is only in virtue
of this estimate that they are called great. Now, in producing this
estimate, what is the chief faculty in us that they appeal to? It will
need but little thought to show us that they appeal primarily to the
supernatural moral judgment; that this judgment is perpetually being
expressed explicitly in the works themselves; and, which is far more
important, that it is always pre-supposed in us. In other words, these
supreme presentations of life are presentations of men struggling, or
failing to struggle, not after natural happiness, but after supernatural
right; and it is always pre-supposed on our part that we admit this
struggle to be the one important thing. And this importance, we shall
see further, is based, not on the external and the social consequences
of conduct, but essentially and primarily on its internal and its
personal consequences.

In _Macbeth_, for instance, the main incident, the tragic-colouring
matter of the drama, is the murder of Duncan. But in what aspect of this
does the real tragedy lie? Not in the fact that Duncan is murdered, but
in the fact that Macbeth is the murderer. What appals us, what purges
our passions with pity and with terror as we contemplate it, is not the
external, the social effect of the act, but the personal, the internal
effect of it. As for Duncan, he is in his grave; after life's fitful
fever he sleeps well. What our minds are made to dwell up