d to me by revolting malice,
still that my life had been full of perverse pleasures, and that unless
he accepted that as a fact about me and realised it to the full I could
not possibly be friends with him any more, or ever be in his company. It
was a terrible shock to him, but we are friends, and I have not got his
friendship on false pretences.

Emotional forces, as I say somewhere in _Intentions_, are as limited in
extent and duration as the forces of physical energy. The little cup
that is made to hold so much can hold so much and no more, though all the
purple vats of Burgundy be filled with wine to the brim, and the treaders
stand knee-deep in the gathered grapes of the stony vineyards of Spain.
There is no error more common than that of thinking that those who are
the causes or occasions of great tragedies share in the feelings suitable
to the tragic mood: no error more fatal than expecting it of them. The
martyr in his 'shirt of flame' may be looking on the face of God, but to
him who is piling the faggots or loosening the logs for the blast the
whole scene is no more than the slaying of an ox is to the butcher, or
the felling of a tree to the charcoal burner in the forest, or the fall
of a flower to one who is mowing down the grass with a scythe. Great
passions are for the great of soul, and great events can be seen only by
those who are on a level with them.

* * * * *

I know of nothing in all drama more incomparable from the point of view
of art, nothing more suggestive in its subtlety of observation, than
Shakespeare's drawing of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. They are Hamlet's
college friends. They have been his companions. They bring with them
memories of pleasant days together. At the moment when they come across
him in the play he is staggering under the weight of a burden intolerable
to one of his temperament. The dead have come armed out of the grave to
impose on him a mission at once too great and too mean for him. He is a
dreamer, and he is called upon to act. He has the nature of the poet,
and he is asked to grapple with the common complexity of cause and
effect, with life in its practical realisation, of which he knows
nothing, not with life in its ideal essence, of which he knows so much.
He has no conception of what to do, and his folly is to feign folly.
Brutus used madness as a cloak to conceal the sword of his purpose, the
dagger of his will, but the Hamlet madness is a mere mask