"I do not know Why yet I live to say 'This thing's to do'; Sith I have cause, and will, and strength, and means To do't. Examples, gross as earth exhort me: Witness this army, of such mass and charge, Led by a delicate and tender prince; Whose spirit with divine ambition puff'd, Makes mouths at the invisible event, Exposing what is miserable and unsure To all that fortune death and danger dare Even for an egg-shell.... O, from this time forth, My thought be bloody or be nothing worth!" Finally, he accomplishes the great vengeance, but alas, in how small a way, as though jestingly, as though it were by chance, and he himself dies as though by chance. He had abandoned his life to chance, so his death must be due to chance. We too have termed the condition of spirit that ruins Hamlet, an illness; but the word is better applied to a doctor or a moralist, whereas the tragedy is the work of a poet, who does not describe an illness, but sings a song of desperate and desolate anguish, and so lofty a song is it, to so great a height does it attain, that it would seem as though a newer and more lofty conception of reality and of human action must be born of it. What was perdition for Hamlet, is a crisis of the human soul, which assumed so great an extension and complexity after the time of Shakespeare as to give its name to a whole historical period. Yet it has more than historical value, because, light or serious, little or great, it returns to live again perpetually. 6 JUSTICE AND INDULGENCE It would be vain to seek among the songs of Shakespeare for the song of reconciliation, of quarrels, composed of inner peace, of tranquillity achieved, but the song of justice echoes everywhere in his works. He knows neither perfect saints, nor perfect sinners, for he feels the struggle at the heart of reality as necessity, not as accident, artifice, or caprice. Even the good, the brave and the pure have evil, impurity and weakness in them: "fragility" is the word he utters most often, not only with regard to women; and on the other hand, even the wicked, the guilty, the criminal, have glimpses of goodness, aspirations after redemption, and when everything else is wanting, they have energy of will and thus possess a sort of spiritual greatness. One hears that song as a refrain in several of the tragedies, uttered by foes over the foes whom they have conquered. Anthony pronounces this elegy over the fallen Brutus: "This was the noblest Roman of them all: All the conspirators, save only he, Did that they did in envy of great Caesar; He only in a general honest thought And common good to all, made one of them. His life was gentle and the elements So mix'd in him that nature might stand up And say to all the world 'This was a man.'" Octavian, when he hears of the death of Anthony, exclaims: