the less elementary and yet in a sense lower plane of conduct. That is to say, Shakespeare could worship the nature in Othello as he could worship all vivid life, and he could present the moral limitations of that nature with the deepest sympathy, even without any implication of blame, but he was never in danger of confusing them with moral virtues. So far as there is any deliberate doctrine to be found in Shakespeare’s art, indeed, the jealousy of Othello, even though it had been proved to be as well founded as he himself supposed, is shown to have been as disastrous in its tragic destruction of character as the blood-guilty ambition of Macbeth or the drunken passion of Antony. But Tennyson, although he was vitally interested in life, and honest enough in his acceptance of the processes of life so far as he could interpret them, had also certain abstract moral points of view which he was apt to impose upon those processes in the course of creation. In this there is a difference between the artistic purposes of the two poets, a difference that had really been slowly asserting itself in English poetry from the end of the Shakespearean era until Tennyson’s time. It is a difference that on the whole must definitely mark the later poetry as less unadulterated in its creative aims than the earlier, and it is a difference, further, that has led to grave misconceptions in the modern practice of the art.[19] It may be worth while to analyse this difference a little more closely. It is clearly a mistake to suppose that moral judgment did not come within Shakespeare’s scheme. Every one of his plays from the dark and terrible pity of _Lear_ to the light and gracious revelry of _Twelfth Night_ is charged with moral judgment, but it is a judgment that is strictly complementary to the action of the characters within the play, and as organically a concern of the poet’s creative function in the play as are the characters and action themselves. In other words, the moral judgment becomes inevitably a part of life itself, and is an altogether profounder thing than a merely abstract moral point of view. And this, indeed, is one of the chief glories of Shakespeare’s art, as of the whole poetry of his age, that it is intensely concerned with life, with its moral consequences, but it is hardly at all concerned with moral points of view that are not directly the consequence of life as it grows at the poet’s bidding. That is why we feel that Shakespeare loved Macbeth, whose moral conduct he must have condemned, no less than Rosalind, whose conduct he as certainly sanctioned. Both were a part of the life to which he brought the constant homage of genius, and although that genius could not but award disaster to one and happy honour to the other, there was no prefixed moral rule to be applied with a consequent alienation of affection in the one case and establishment of it in the other before the final reckoning was made.