Much of what I have said touching Shakespeare’s comic scenes holds true, conversely, of his tragic scenes.  For it is a great mistake to suppose that his humour has its sole exercise in comic representations.  It carries the power of tears as well as of smiles:  in his deepest strains of tragedy there is often a subtile infusion of it, and this too in such a way as to heighten the tragic effect; we may feel it playing delicately beneath his most pathetic scenes, and deepening their pathos.  For in his hands tragedy and comedy are not made up of different elements, but of the same elements standing in different places and relations:  what is background in the one becomes foreground in the other; what is an undercurrent in the one becomes an uppercurrent in the other; the effect of the whole depending almost, perhaps altogether, as much on what is not directly seen as on what is.  So that with him the pitiful and the ludicrous, the sublime and the droll, are like the greatness and littleness of human life:  for these qualities not only coexist in our being, but, which is more, they coexist under a mysterious law of interdependence and reciprocity; insomuch that our life may in some sense be said to be great because little, and little because great.

And as Shakespeare’s transports of humour draw down more or less into the depths of serious thought, and make our laughter the more refreshing and exhilarating because of what is moving silently beneath; so his tragic ecstasies take a richness of colour and flavour from the humour held in secret reserve, and forced up to the surface now and then by the super incumbent weight of tragic matter.  This it is, in part, that truly makes them “awful mirth.”  For who does not know that the most winning smiles are those which play round a moistening eye, and tell of serious thoughts beneath; and that the saddest face is that which wears in its expression an air of remembered joy, and speaks darkly of sunshine in the inner courts of the soul?  For we are so made, that no one part of our being moves to perfection unless all the other parts move with it:  when we are at work, whatever there is of the playful within us ought to play; when we are at play, our working mind ought to be actively present in the exercise.  It is this harmonious moving together of all the parts of our being that makes the true music of life.  And to minister in restoring this “concord of a well-tuned mind,” which has been broken by “discords most unjust,” is the right office of Culture, and the right scope of Art as the highest organ of Culture.  And in reference to this harmonious interplay of all the human faculties and sensibilities, I may not unfitly apply to Shakespeare’s workmanship these choice lines from Wordsworth: 

    “Brisk Youth appeared, the Morn of youth,
      With freaks of graceful folly,—­
    Life’s temperate Noon, her sober Eve,
      Her Night not melancholy;
    Past, present, future, all appeared,
      In harmony united,
    Like guests that meet, and some from far,
      By cordial love invited.”