230 UNIVERSITY OF COLORADO STUDIES 



the downfall of great causes, such as reduced to prostration the southern 

 states in 1865; the wiping out of cities by fire or earthquake; the 

 devastation of pestilence, such as that of England by the Black Plague 

 in the fourteenth century. These examples will suggest enough to 

 establish the typical quality of the scene, and the great men in private 

 and national Hfe who, like the heroes of the city of Chicago, or the states- 

 men of the French Repubhc, or Heine strugghng with disease, have kept 

 their minds above fate and have met difficulties with courage, will be 

 seen to correspond to the better characters of the scene. The best Welt- 

 anschauung may not represent the Hfe of man as a tempest, but it begins 

 by 50 representing it. That is the keynote. The world is full of peril; 

 wisdom is not in easy-going optimism; pedagogy should train children 

 to expect battle, and to accustom themselves to struggle and to sleep 

 on the field of battle. If the piping times of peace should actually make 

 up the greater part of the play, yet it is because of the courage and the 

 protection of those who would bear themselves best in storm and stress. 

 Peace is a positive not a negative state, " for the rain it raineth every day." 

 2. The Cain Motif. — Those simple critics who find fault with Shake- 

 speare for not inventing his own stories, forgetting the words of Horace, 

 and the practice of Vergil, the multiphcity of Madonnas, and the gifts 

 of Wilkie ColUns and Conan Doyle, cannot indeed find fault with the 

 plot of The Tempest, which seems to be very much the poet's own, but 

 they should revel in the triteness of the situations of that plot which are 

 literally as old as the hills. The dramatist would seem to have made 

 the plot purely that he might be free to give shape and proportion to the 

 very platitudes of story-telhng with greater freedom. Proportion or a 

 set of right values is the very philosophy of art, and the lack of it cbaos 

 and failure. If there is any one supreme lesson of really great and 

 classical work, it is that sanity and proportion are synonymous. False 

 emphasis, eccentric valuations, perverse originahty of type, are no doubt 

 useful, and at times pleasing or interesting, notes in the whole great 

 orchestra of art ; but the classic works eschew all these, and give us that 

 perennial truth and beauty which works not created with one eye on the 

 whole of life can never possess, and for lack of which they narrow, 

 dwindle, and drop out. 



