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The excerpt represents the core issue or deciding factor on which you must meditate, and is drawn from Intentions by Oscar Wilde: tragicomedy of the world that they have made. We, too, might live
like them, and set ourselves to witness with appropriate emotions
the varied scenes that man and nature afford. We might make
ourselves spiritual by detaching ourselves from action, and become
perfect by the rejection of energy. It has often seemed to me that
Browning felt something of this. Shakespeare hurls Hamlet into
active life, and makes him realise his mission by effort. Browning
might have given us a Hamlet who would have realised his mission by
thought. Incident and event were to him unreal or unmeaning. He
made the soul the protagonist of life's tragedy, and looked on
action as the one undramatic element of a play. To us, at any
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