complain that they are painfully obvious. But if they are true as well
as obvious, something follows from them in regard to our present
question.

From the first it follows that the ultimate power in the tragic world is
not adequately described as a law or order which we can see to be just
and benevolent,--as, in that sense, a 'moral order': for in that case
the spectacle of suffering and waste could not seem to us so fearful and
mysterious as it does. And from the second it follows that this ultimate
power is not adequately described as a fate, whether malicious and
cruel, or blind and indifferent to human happiness and goodness: for in
that case the spectacle would leave us desperate or rebellious. Yet one
or other of these two ideas will be found to govern most accounts of
Shakespeare's tragic view or world. These accounts isolate and
exaggerate single aspects, either the aspect of action or that of
suffering; either the close and unbroken connection of character, will,
deed and catastrophe, which, taken alone, shows the individual simply as
sinning against, or failing to conform to, the moral order and drawing
his just doom on his own head; or else that pressure of outward forces,
that sway of accident, and those blind and agonised struggles, which,
taken alone, show him as the mere victim of some power which cares
neither for his sins nor for his pain. Such views contradict one
another, and no third view can unite them; but the several aspects from
whose isolation and exaggeration they spring are both present in the
fact, and a view which would be true to the fact and to the whole of our
imaginative experience must in some way combine these aspects.

Let us begin, then, with the idea of fatality and glance at some of the
impressions which give rise to it, without asking at present whether
this idea is their natural or fitting expression. There can be no doubt