If we accept, as I have been told that Goethe accepted (a point which I regret my inability to verify), the former of these alternatives--or if at least we assume it for argument's sake in passing--we may easily strengthen our position by adducing as further evidence in its favour the author's thoroughly Shakespearean fidelity to the details of the prose narrative on which his tragedy is founded. But, it may be objected, we find the same fidelity to a similar text in the case of _A Warning for Fair Women_. And here again starts up the primal and radical difference between the two works: it starts up and will not be overlooked. Equal fidelity to the narrative text we do undoubtedly find in either case; the same fidelity we assuredly do not find. The one is a typical example of prosaic realism, the other of poetic reality. Light from darkness or truth from falsehood is not more infallibly discernible. The fidelity in the one case is exactly, as I have already indicated, the fidelity of a reporter to his notes. The fidelity in the other case is exactly the fidelity of Shakespeare in his Roman plays to the text of Plutarch. It is a fidelity which admits--I had almost written, which requires--the fullest play of the highest imagination. No more than the most realistic of reporters will it omit or falsify any necessary or even admissible detail; but the indefinable quality which it adds to the lowest as to the highest of these is (as Lamb says of passion) "the all in all in poetry." Turning again for illustration to one of the highest names in imaginative literature--a name sometimes most improperly and absurdly inscribed on the register of the realistic school, {137} we may say that the difference on this point is not the difference between Balzac and Dumas, but the distinction between Balzac and M. Zola. Let us take by way of example the character next in importance to that of the heroine--the character of her paramour. A viler figure was never sketched by Balzac; a viler figure was seldom drawn by Thackeray. But as with Balzac, so with the author of this play, the masterful will combining with the masterly art of the creator who fashions out of the worst kind of human clay the breathing likeness of a creature so hatefully pitiful and so pitifully hateful overcomes, absorbs, annihilates all sense of such abhorrence and repulsion as would prove the work which excited them no high or even true work of art. Even the wonderful touch of dastardly brutality and pitiful self-pity with which Mosbie at once receives and repels the condolence of his mistress on his wound-- _Alice_.--Sweet Mosbie, hide thine arm, it kills my heart. _Mosbie_.--_Ay, Mistress Arden, this is your favour_.--