To us, however, these adventures no longer correspond with a living and
actual reality. Should a youth of our own time love, and meet obstacles
not unlike those which, in another order of ideas and events, beset
Romeo's passion, we need no telling that his adventure will be
embellished by none of the features that gave poetry and grandeur to the
episode of Verona. Gone beyond recall is the entrancing atmosphere of a
lordly, passionate life; gone the brawls in picturesque streets, the
interludes of bloodshed and splendour, the mysterious poisons, the
majestic, complaisant tombs! And where shall we look for that exquisite
summer's night, which owes its vastness, its savour, the very appeal
that it makes to us, to the shadow of an heroic, inevitable death that
already lay heavy upon it? Divest the story of Romeo and Juliet of
these beautiful trappings, and we have only the very simple and ordinary
desire of a noble-hearted, unfortunate youth for a maiden whose obdurate
parents deny him her hand. All the poetry, the splendour, the passionate
life of this desire, result from the glamour, the nobility, tragedy,
that are proper to the environment wherein it has come to flower; nor is
there a kiss, a murmur of love, a cry of anger, grief or despair, but
borrows its majesty, grace, its heroism, tenderness--in a word, every
image that has helped it to visible form--from the beings and objects
around it; for it is not in the kiss itself that the sweetness and
beauty are found, but in the circumstance, hour and place wherein it was
given. Again, the same objections would hold if we chose to imagine a
man of our time who should be jealous as Othello was jealous, possessed
of Macbeth's ambition, unhappy as Lear; or, like Hamlet, restless and
wavering, bowed down beneath the weight of a frightful and unrealisable
duty.