hould expect little, for what we expect will not
come to pass. Revolutions, reformations--those vast movements into which
heroes and saints have flung themselves, in the belief that they were
the dawn of the millennium--have not borne the fruit which they looked
for. Millenniums are still far away. These great convulsions leave the
world changed--perhaps improved,--but not improved as the actors in them
hoped it would be. Luther would have gone to work with less heart, could
he have foreseen the Thirty Years' War, and in the distance the theology
of Tubingen. Washington might have hesitated to draw the sword against
England, could he have seen the country which he made as we see it
now.[B]

The most reasonable anticipations fail us--antecedents the most apposite
mislead us; because the conditions of human problems never repeat
themselves. Some new feature alters everything--some element which we
detect only in its after-operation.

But this, it may be said, is but a meagre outcome. Can the long records
of humanity, with all its joys and sorrows, its sufferings and its
conquests, teach us no more than this? Let us approach the subject from
another side.

If you were asked to point out the special features in which
Shakespeare's plays are so transcendently excellent, you would mention,
perhaps, among others, this, that his stories are not put together, and
his characters are not conceived, to illustrate any particular law or
principle. They teach many lessons, but not any one prominent above
another; and when we have drawn from them all the direct instruction
which they contain, there remains still something unresolved--something
which the artist gives, and which the philosopher cannot give.

It is in this characteristic that we are accustomed to say Shakespeare's
supreme _truth_ lies. He represents real life. His dramas teach as life
teaches--neither less nor more. He builds his fabrics as nature does, on
right and wrong; but he does not struggle to make nature more systematic
than she is. In the subtle interflow of good and evil--in the unmerited
sufferings of innocence--in the disproportion of penalties to desert--in
the seeming blindness with which justice, in attempting to assert
itself, overwhelms innocent and guilty in a common ruin--Shakespeare is
true to real experience. The mystery of life he leaves as he finds it;
and, in his most tremendous positions, he is addressing rather the
intellectual emotions than