earthly immersion. For an hour, it may be, or a day, it raises him
into a world of absolute ideality, where he may forget his wants and his
vanity, and lose himself in a struggle in which the combatants are the
forces of the spirit, and of which the end is that annihilation in
collision with destiny which is but the blank side of reconciliation
with it. And though his sojourn in this region be short, yet, when he
falls again, the smell of the divine fire has passed upon him, and he
bears about him, for a time at least, among the rank vapours of the
earth, something of the freshness and fragrance of the higher air.

FOOTNOTES:

[7] The actual time represented in the play has been calculated to be
nine days, with intervals of a week or two between Acts II and III,
scenes ii and iii of Act IV, and scenes i and ii of Act V. See _New
Shakespeare Society Publications_, 1877-79.

[8] The phrase is Aristotle's; cf. the 'Poetics,' Chap. vi, and, for
comment, Butcher's 'Aristotle's Theory of Poetry and Fine Art,' Chapter
vi.

I. TRAGEDY THE ELEVATION OF LIFE

9. In this sense, then, tragedy satisfies its definition as "the flight
or elevation of life." The two indispensable supports which render this
elevation possible, are metrical expression and great situations. "In
the regeneration" the language of the market-place and the morning call
may answer to the realised harmony of life; there may, indeed, be "the
fifth act of a tragedy in every death-bed;" there may be no distinction
of great or little, high or low. But it is an affectation to confound
what shall be with what is. We cannot dissociate ordinary incidents from
the petty wants out of which they ordinarily spring, nor common language
from the common-place thoughts which it usually expresses. The action in
tragedy must be relative to the situation; and if the situation be one
which we are unable to separate from matter-of-fact associations,
neither can the action be so separated except by an effort which of
itself depresses the soaring spirit. Nor, again, if the action be
high-wrought, above the measure of man's ordinary activity, can it find
expression in the unrhythmical language[9] which corresponds to that
ordinary activity. New wine must not be put in old bottles; nor must the
motions of disenthralled passion be confined in vessels worn by the uses
of daily life.

FOOTNOTE:

[9] The language of prose is not necessarily unrhythmical, nor is it
always