decisions, and compel a belief that momentous events are about to
happen or have happened. In harmony with this effect is the absence of
all comic relief--although Shakespeare was to prove later that this has
a useful place in tragedy. A smile, a jest would be sacrilege in the
prevailing gloom. Two effects alone are aimed at; an impression of
loftiness in the theme, and a profound melancholy. Not warm gushing
tears. Those are the outcome of a personal sorrow, small and ignoble
beside an abstract grief at 'the falls of princes', 'the tumbling down
of crowns', 'the ruin of proud realms'. What does the reader or
spectator know of Ferrex that he should mingle his cries with Videna's
lamentations? The account of Porrex appealing, with childlike faith in
his mother, to the very woman who has murdered him, may, for the moment,
bring tears to the eyes. But it is an accidental touch. The tragedy lies
not there but in the great fact that with him dies the last heir to the
throne, the last hope of avoiding the miseries of a disputed succession;
and that in her revengeful fury the queen, as a woman, has committed the
blackest of all crimes, a mother's slaughter of her child. We are not
asked to weep but to gasp at the horror of it. It is in order to protect
the loftier, broader aspects of the catastrophe from the influence of
the particular that action is excluded. This cautions us against
confusing tragedy and pathos. To perceive the difference is to recognize
that English Tragedy really begins with _Gorboduc_. Until its advent the
stress laid on the pathetic partially obscured the tragic. This may be
seen at once in the Miracles, though a little thought will reveal the
intensely tragic nature of the complete Miracle Play. In _Cambyses_ we
find the same obscuration: there is tragedy in the sudden ending of
those young lives, but the pathos of the mother's anguish and the sweet
girl's pleadings prevent us from thinking of it. _Appius and Virginia_
maintains a much truer tragic detachment, the effect being heightened by
its opening picture of virtuous happiness destined to abrupt and