the avenger are alike overwhelmed. Titus' vengeance was, it is true, a kind of wild justice; but we do not feel that the author exults in it, or even approves of it; and I think the moral resultant of the play is forcibly to recall the text: "Vengeance is Mine, saith the Lord." We see this clearly

in the final speeches of Marcus and Lucius, who seem thoroughly conscious that by such deeds and by this creed of vengeance, not only are individuals outraged and families destroyed, but the whole fabric of society and the state endangered. It is the moral of the three parts of Henry VI., if not of nearly all the historical plays. The squeamish and namby-pamby persons who would strike this powerful and, if you will, appalling tragedy from the roll of Shakespeare's works (and at that rate should treat the Medea of Euripides, if not the Agamemnon of Eschyles in a similar manner), seem to have little idea of the high purposes of Tragedy, or of the intensity of moral purpose and clearness of moral and spiritual insight which that of Shakespeare, at any rate, displays.

That modern weakness of moral fibre, that false sentimentalism, which tends to make our sympathies go to the side of the criminal rather than his victim, was not characteristic of the more masculine Elizabethan age. Shakespeare himself, indeed, is never lacking in sympathetic treatment of his very worst characters, but he never flinches from allotting them the punishment they deserve. [I speak, of course, of Tragedy, and not of Comedy, where these severe sentences cannot, in the nature of things, be carried out.] In the present play, for instance, he gives Tamora as much excuse and sympathy as it is

possible justly to accord her. But she is partner, if not chief instigator, of horrible crimes, and crimes against those, Bassianus and Lavinia, who had personally done her no wrong, and for this the dramatist feels bound to mete out appropriate punishment. Her mere killing in the end of the tragedy, when all the leading characters are killed off as a matter of course, would not be sufficient. In times when witches and heretics and more ordinary criminals were tortured and burnt, Tamora's punishment, if gruesome, could not be regarded as excessive. She had been false to her womanhood, if to nothing else, in refusing to Lavinia the mercy of death, and handing her over to her ruffian sons. Rape has, is, and always should be regarded as one of the most heinous of crimes, and, in a sense, far worse than murder; and the woman who encouraged, if she did not contrive, this outrage on one of her own sex, is guilty of a crime all the more heinous that it lacks the natural, if brutal, incentive of the actual ravishers. It is the most revolting crime which Shakespeare attributes to a woman in all his plays, and he accords it the most horrible punishment. Even her maternal instincts and affections do not carry her very far, for the moment a child of her body, gotten of the one man she loved, is a danger to her, she hands it over without compunction to the butcher's knife. Is it then so unjust, is it even so gratuitously horrible, to make this woman, thus false even to her instincts, eat the flesh and blood of her own offspring? For the woman, indeed, who was the moral murderer of her two sons, in encouraging them to commit the vilest of crimes, and who was in intention an infanticide, could there really be any more appropriate horror of punishment?

That Shakespeare did not invent the episode is certain from its occurring in the ballad. And he had also it ready to his hand in the Philomela legend to which he more than once alludes in this play. Shakespeare seems consistently throughout his plays to be always endeavouring to arouse our feeling for the morally horrible by presenting us with the physically horrible. Thus, in Lear, the gouging of Gloucester's eyes, the hanging of Cordelia, and the physical sufferings of Lear are all meant to symbolise and signalise what is morally revolting in the conduct of Lear's two elder daughters. Shakespeare, like his almost sole rival in the sphere of spiritual morals, Robert Browning,1 sets the highest value on the instincts of natural affection, although Shakespeare so carefully teaches us the inadequacy of these instincts when they do not eventuate in really personal love.

Poor Titus himself, like Lear, has more than expiated his faults by his sufferings, and his death comes rather as release than punishment. Aaron, like Iago, as being the most wantonly and maliciously wicked, is reserved for unspeakable torment; but it is remarkable that neither here nor elsewhere does Shakespeare appeal to the guilty fear or prospect of future retribution as a source of punishment to his villains. He strives to make his moral sequences and laws "come full circle" within the compass of his tragedies. Except in the case of Hamlet's father, I believe there is little in Shakespeare to show his belief in a physical Hell or Purgatory. Christian as Shakespeare is in spirit, he will have little to do with what we may call Christian theology or mythology as such, and still less with what we 1 See especially Ivan Ivanovitch.

may call evangelical sentiment.

He is too stern a realist,

and too earnest a student of life and human nature as he saw it, to extricate his characters from the inevitable results of their crimes and passions by any cheap and sudden conversion. In some of his comedies the bad characters must, perforce, in a way, repent and turn from their evil ways; but in his tragedies, as a rule, following his own powerful first sketch of the "Death of the wicked man," Cardinal Beaufort, who "dies and gives no sign," Shakespeare usually lets his bad characters die unrepentant. Indeed, he draws in Hamlet the terrible picture of a man striving to repent and unable to do so. The ordinary preacher strives to bring us to repentance by threatening that we shall have " no room for repentance." The question is not one of room, even in a metaphorical sense; it is the very faculty of repenting that is lacking. Those of us who are not deceived by the deceitfulness of our own hearts must all be aware how difficult it is really to repent of a sin as such. We regret readily the trouble and suffering our sins involve in ourselves and others, but how difficult it is to repent of the sin itself, or even to wish it had never been done! Shakespeare must have held, I think, as Browning does in Easter Day, that some men, if not all, are judged already. I take this to be the significance of Lear's "Ripeness is all," meaning spiritual ripeness for good or evil. When he wrote Titus Andronicus he had only the germs of this religious philosophy, and yet I cannot but think that the germs are certainly there. For the characters divide themselves into two groups-into those who are decisively, if not absolutely, bad, and those who are faulty. The decisively bad, as Aaron, Tamora, Demetrius, Chiron,

and Saturninus, are sent to their account, without repentance and with appropriate punishment. The merely faulty, like Titus, Bassianus, and Lavinia, must be regarded as having fully expiated such faults or errors as they had committed. Titus like Lear, Hamlet, Othello, Coriolanus, Brutus, etc., commit faults, but it would be a very great misuse of language to call any of them bad men. Titus himself obviously does what he thinks right. His piety or his superstition make him really yield up Alarbus as a propitiatory sacrifice to the perturbed spirits of his dead sons. Mutius he slays

in a moment of passionate paternal indignation, caused by Lavinia's insubordination; and if we turn to Midsummer Night's Dream, we find Egeus possessing power of life and death over Hermia under similar circumstances. That Shakespeare thought Titus justified in his rash action, there is no reason to think, and there is no doubt his sympathies go largely with the two pairs of lovers. At the same time, he does seem to attach a certain amount of blame to a daughter's actual defiance of her father's commands, and I think he holds it a fault in Lavinia, as he clearly does in Desdemona, and as contributory to the catastrophe. Reading between the lines of Midsummer Night's Dream, I should say that Shakespeare's own position was, that while a daughter had the right to refuse an unwelcome suitor, she was wrong to marry the favoured one in defiance of her father's wishes and commands; or, if he did not regard it as morally wrong, he regarded it as one of those acts that invariably bring a certain retribution in their train.

1 As I point out in a note, for which I have to thank Mr. Crawford, Mutius, like Alarbus, is an invention of Shakespeare's own, and puts him wrong in the number of Titus' sons.