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Kansas University Weekly.
decia, Shakspere would not "show the good woman overwhelmed in her goodness; that is not Shakespeare's view of the moral order of things." Moral order, indeed! Shakspere taught life, not morals; and for this the greater Shakspere he.
A reproach ample to overturn the whole system is the Edgar paradox in Snider's elaborated Lear. Edgar should suffer death by the essential arguments used to justify the murder of Cordelia and Desdemona. Retribution, according to Snider, demands this; else to man is not served up man's deed. Edgar's case, robbed of surplus, circumlocutory arguments multiplied by Mr. Snider for other characters with an endless, euphuistic cheerfulness, may be stated briefly in this wise:
He is wanting, as is Cordelia, in a certain type of filial trust and affection. He participates in a deception practiced upon his own father. How terribly was Desdemona requited, who deceived her father! Later in the play we find Edgar lying to blind Gloster with persistent purpose, lying by telling the truth in a mystical form, as Snider puts it, lying that good may come of it. But he has no such soothing, explanatory palliative for noble Desdemona's dying life, the lie whose breath wafted her into paradise. "She's like a liar gone to burning hell." Such is her reward for her sacrifice of truth to affection." Last and the ultimate of the whole Sniderian argument, Edgar kills his own brother. True this is done in a duel of sufficient provocation, and for the avenge of the father's wrong; but what thereby becomes of Snider's system? For this consummation of the "light-giving career of Edgar," who has taken "on the appearance of untruth, that he may be true," and has been the instrument, self-appointed, of his brother's destruction, Snider has only the mild rebuke "harsh;" and yet Edgar has flagrantly violated the institutional principle of the family, one of the rocks upon which Snider's gospel is founded.
But Edgar lives. He becomes one of the twain who "Rule in this realm, and the good state sustain." All is well with Edgar, hence
it is unnecessary to fix up a retribution for him. Had he died, Mr. Snider could easily have accommodated him. His system is sound flexible, elastic, adaptable to all conditions. There can be no errors of judgement, no mistakes of calculation. Everything is tabulated with the precision of an adding machine. Two and two always make five. Shakspere is divine; Snider is his prophet.
In Shakspere Snider sees only the stern moralist, who makes all his creations an argument for the good, who merely describes clashes between ethical worlds. He fails entirely to comprehend the sensitive, sensuous Shakspere, the author of Adonis, Lucrece and the Sonnets. Any theory that can be applied in the living world can be applied and made to fit in the Shaksperian world, a world most complex of simples because a reflexion of the actual. Shakspere plumbs deeper than ethical study; he goes down, down to fathom human character. He is not oblique nor onesided, but direct, broad, earnest. "If life proposes inexplicable riddles, Shakspere's art must propose them also." It is not ours to find the reason why in the entanglements of extraneous criticism. The rules of art will always apply. Shakspere makes comedy comic and tragedy tragic. And this it needs but the artistic temperament to perceive. To Cordelia is not meted out death as a punishment for invading her native land. Such a guess is prematurely puerile. Edgar, Kent and weak Albany are not preserved, the two former as a reward for passively co-operating in their country's invasion, the latter for actively opposing. If Shakspere rewards at all he never rewards passivity; and we may be sure that Albany, weakly accessory to Goneril's base schemes, the profiter of Cordelia's disinheritance, the man who stands idly by, chattering and chiding merely, while the daughter's persidy drives the old man mad, will not be forgiven all for his one brave stand at the close. No; Shakspere is not giving inspired revelations of retribution. He is offering the sublimest, most awful problems of life for human sympathy. He is writing for the stage, touching the sen-