even raising a question on the subject, hold the agents responsible; and
the tragedy would disappear for us if we did not. The critical action
is, in greater or less degree, wrong or bad. The catastrophe is, in the
main, the return of this action on the head of the agent. It is an
example of justice; and that order which, present alike within the
agents and outside them, infallibly brings it about, is therefore just.
The rigour of its justice is terrible, no doubt, for a tragedy is a
terrible story; but, in spite of fear and pity, we acquiesce, because
our sense of justice is satisfied.'

Now, if this view is to hold good, the 'justice' of which it speaks must
be at once distinguished from what is called 'poetic justice.' 'Poetic
justice' means that prosperity and adversity are distributed in
proportion to the merits of the agents. Such 'poetic justice' is in
flagrant contradiction with the facts of life, and it is absent from
Shakespeare's tragic picture of life; indeed, this very absence is a
ground of constant complaint on the part of Dr. Johnson. [Greek:
Drasanti pathein], 'the doer must suffer'--this we find in Shakespeare.
We also find that villainy never remains victorious and prosperous at
the last. But an assignment of amounts of happiness and misery, an
assignment even of life and death, in proportion to merit, we do not
find. No one who thinks of Desdemona and Cordelia; or who remembers that
one end awaits Richard III. and Brutus, Macbeth and Hamlet; or who asks
himself which suffered most, Othello or Iago; will ever accuse
Shakespeare of representing the ultimate power as 'poetically' just.

And we must go further. I venture to say that it is a mistake to use at
all these terms of justice and merit or desert. And this for two
reasons. In the first place, essential as it is to recognise the
connection between act and consequence, and natural as it may seem in