he could not will. His adversary's murders, and no less his adversary's
remorse, bring about the opposite of what they sought. Lear follows an
old man's whim, half generous, half selfish; and in a moment it looses
all the powers of darkness upon him. Othello agonises over an empty
fiction, and, meaning to execute solemn justice, butchers innocence and
strangles love. They understand themselves no better than the world
about them. Coriolanus thinks that his heart is iron, and it melts like
snow before a fire. Lady Macbeth, who thought she could dash out her own
child's brains, finds herself hounded to death by the smell of a
stranger's blood. Her husband thinks that to gain a crown he would jump
the life to come, and finds that the crown has brought him all the
horrors of that life. Everywhere, in this tragic world, man's thought,
translated into act, is transformed into the opposite of itself. His
act, the movement of a few ounces of matter in a moment of time, becomes
a monstrous flood which spreads over a kingdom. And whatsoever he dreams
of doing, he achieves that which he least dreamed of, his own
destruction.

All this makes us feel the blindness and helplessness of man. Yet by
itself it would hardly suggest the idea of fate, because it shows man as
in some degree, however slight, the cause of his own undoing. But other
impressions come to aid it. It is aided by everything which makes us
feel that a man is, as we say, terribly unlucky; and of this there is,
even in Shakespeare, not a little. Here come in some of the accidents
already considered, Juliet's waking from her trance a minute too late,
Desdemona's loss of her handkerchief at the only moment when the loss
would have mattered, that insignificant delay which cost Cordelia's
life. Again, men act, no doubt, in accordance with their characters; but
what is it that brings them just the one problem which is fatal to them
and would be easy to another, and sometimes brings it to them just when