, there comes some moment,
perhaps in the very heyday of success and joy and love, when a sudden
ruin falls upon the world. The death of one loved more than self, {681}
disease and pain, the betrayal of some trust, the failure of the so
cherished cause--all these and many more are the gates by which tragedy
is born. And the beauty of tragedy is above all other beauty because
only in some supreme struggle can the grandeur of the human spirit assert
its full majesty. In Shakespeare and Michelangelo it is not the torture
that pleases us, but the triumph over circumstance.

[Sidenote: Michelangelo, 1475-1564]

No one has so deeply felt or so truly expressed this as the Florentine
sculptor who, amidst a world of love and laughter, lived in wilful
sadness, learning how man from his death-grapple in the darkness can
emerge victor and how the soul, by her passion of pain, is perfected. He
was interested in but one thing, man, because only man is tragic. He
would paint no portraits--or but one or two--because no living person
came up to his ideal. All his figures are strong because strength only
is able to suffer as to do. Nine-tenths of them are men rather than
women, because the beauty of the male is strength, whereas the strength
of the woman is beauty. Only in a few of his early figures does he
attain calm,--in a Madonna, in David or in the Men Bathing, all of them,
including the Madonna with its figures of men in the background, intended
to exhibit the perfection of athletic power.

But save in these early works almost all that Michelangelo set his hand
to is fairly convulsed with passion. Leda embraces the swan at the
supreme moment of conception; Eve, drawn from the side of Adam, is
weeping bitterly; Adam is rousing himself to the hard struggle that is
life; the slaves are writhing under their bonds as though they were of
hot iron; Moses is starting from his seat for some tremendous conflict.
Every figure lavished on the decoration of the Sistine Chapel reaches,
when it does not surpass, the limit of human physical development. Sibyl
and Prophet, {682} Adam and Eve, man and God are all hurled together with
a riot of strength and "terribilita."

The almost supernatural terror of Michelangelo's genius found fullest
scope in illustrating the idea of predestination that obsessed the
Reformers and haunted many a Catholic of that time also. In the Last
Judgment [Sidenote: The Last Judgment] the artist laid the who