Men must endure Their going hence e’en as their coming hither: Ripeness is all.
And for ripeness or unripeness, man’s will is responsible. He would probably have agreed with the saying of Heraclitus, ηθος ανθρωπω δαιμων. Throughout his Dramas all is explicable, with the single exception of Macbeth, without reference to supernaturalism. Perfectly intelligible effects follow perfectly intelligible causes; the moral law solves all. But especially conspicuous is the absence of the theological element where we should especially have looked for it. “Men and women,” says Brewer, “are made to drain the cup of misery to the dregs; but, as from the depths into which they have fallen, by their own weakness, or by the weakness of others, the poet never raises them, in violation of the inexorable laws of nature, so neither does he put a new song in their mouths, or any expression of confidence in God’s righteous dealing. With as hard and precise a hand as Bacon does he sunder the celestial from the terrestrial kingdom, the things of earth from the things of heaven.”[56]
His theology, indeed, in its application to life, seems to resolve itself into the recognition of universal law, divinely appointed, immutable, inexorable, ubiquitous, controlling the physical world, controlling the moral world, vindicating itself in the smallest facts of life, and in the most stupendous convulsions of nature and society. In morals it is maintained by the observance of the mean on the one hand, and the due fulfilment of duty and obligation on the other. In politics it is maintained by the subordination of the individual to the state, and of the state to the higher law. Hooker says of Law, that as her voice is the harmony of the world, so her seat is the bosom of God. The Law Shakespeare recognises; of the Law-giver he is silent. As he is dumb before the mystery of death, so is he equally reticent in the face of that other mystery. He has nothing of the anthropomorphism of the Old Testament, of the Homeric poems, and of Milton. Nor has he ever expressed himself as Goethe has done in the famous passage in _Faust_, beginning: “Wer darf ihn nennen.” In two important respects he seems to differ from the Christian conception. He represents no miraculous interpositions of Providence, no suspension of natural laws in favour of the righteous, and to the detriment of the wicked. He is too reverend to say with Goethe, that man, so far as direction in action goes, is practically his own divinity. But he does say and represent--and that repeatedly--what is expressed in such passages as these:--