he intrinsic beauty of the vehicle
in which it is set forth. The high and breathless beauty
of rhythm, the verve, the mystery, and music with which evils
are set forth, may make them not only tolerable but tender
and appealing. What would be as immediate experience
altogether heartrending, for example the torturing remorse of
a Macbeth, is made splendid and moving in the incisive
majesty and penetration of his monologues. At the end of
Hamlet, the utter wreck, unreason, and confusion is made
bearable and beautiful by the tender finality of Hamlet's
dying words to Horatio:

"Absent thee from felicity awhile
And in this harsh world draw thy breath in pain,
To tell my story."

Greek tragedy had the additional accouterments of a
chorus, of music, of production in a vast amphitheater to give
an atmosphere of outward grandeur to the glory of its intent.
Tragedy often relieves the net horror which is its burden by
the pomp and circumstance of the associations it suggests:

We have palaces for our scene, rank, beauty, and virtues in our
heroes, nobility in their passions and in their fate, and altogether a
sort of glorification of life without which tragedy would lose both in
depth of pathos--since things so precious are destroyed--and in
subtlety of charm, since things so precious are manifested.[1]

[Footnote 1: Santayana: _Sense of Beauty_, p. 228.]

Tragedy still more subtly attains the beauty of expressiveness
by making the very evils and confusions and terrors it
presents somehow the exemplifications of a serene eternal
order. The function of the chorus in Greek tragedy was indeed
chiefly to indicate in solemn strophe and antistrophe the
ordered and harmonious verities of which these particular
follies and frustrations were so tender and terrible an
illustration. They catch up the present and particular evil into
the calm and splendid interplay of cosmic forces. Thus at the
end of Euripides's play _Medea_, when the heroine has slain
the children she has borne to Jason and in her fury refuses to
let him gather up their dead bodies, when Jason in utter
inconsolable despair, casts himself upon the earth, out of all
this wrack and torture the chorus raises the audience into a
contemplation of the ordered eternity by which these things
come to be. It sings:

"Great treasure halls hath Zeus in Heaven,
From whence to man strange dooms be given,
Past hope or fear;
And the end men looked for com