that they do arise and that they ought to arise. If we do not feel at
times that the hero is, in some sense, a doomed man; that he and others
drift struggling to destruction like helpless creatures borne on an
irresistible flood towards a cataract; that, faulty as they may be,
their fault is far from being the sole or sufficient cause of all they
suffer; and that the power from which they cannot escape is relentless
and immovable, we have failed to receive an essential part of the full
tragic effect.

The sources of these impressions are various, and I will refer only to a
few. One of them is put into words by Shakespeare himself when he makes
the player-king in _Hamlet_ say:

Our thoughts are ours, their ends none of our own;

'their ends' are the issues or outcomes of our thoughts, and these, says
the speaker, are not our own. The tragic world is a world of action, and
action is the translation of thought into reality. We see men and women
confidently attempting it. They strike into the existing order of things
in pursuance of their ideas. But what they achieve is not what they
intended; it is terribly unlike it. They understand nothing, we say to
ourselves, of the world on which they operate. They fight blindly in the
dark, and the power that works through them makes them the instrument of
a design which is not theirs. They act freely, and yet their action
binds them hand and foot. And it makes no difference whether they meant
well or ill. No one could mean better than Brutus, but he contrives
misery for his country and death for himself. No one could mean worse
than Iago, and he too is caught in the web he spins for others. Hamlet,
recoiling from the rough duty of revenge, is pushed into
blood-guiltiness he never dreamed of, and forced at last on the revenge