some cases (_e.g._ Macbeth's) to say that the doer only gets what he
deserves, yet in very many cases to say this would be quite unnatural.
We might not object to the statement that Lear deserved to suffer for
his folly, selfishness and tyranny; but to assert that he deserved to
suffer what he did suffer is to do violence not merely to language but
to any healthy moral sense. It is, moreover, to obscure the tragic fact
that the consequences of action cannot be limited to that which would
appear to us to follow 'justly' from them. And, this being so, when we
call the order of the tragic world just, we are either using the word in
some vague and unexplained sense, or we are going beyond what is shown
us of this order, and are appealing to faith.

But, in the second place, the ideas of justice and desert are, it seems
to me, in _all_ cases--even those of Richard III. and of Macbeth and
Lady Macbeth--untrue to our imaginative experience. When we are immersed
in a tragedy, we feel towards dispositions, actions, and persons such
emotions as attraction and repulsion, pity, wonder, fear, horror,
perhaps hatred; but we do not _judge_. This is a point of view which
emerges only when, in reading a play, we slip, by our own fault or the
dramatist's, from the tragic position, or when, in thinking about the
play afterwards, we fall back on our everyday legal and moral notions.
But tragedy does not belong, any more than religion belongs, to the
sphere of these notions; neither does the imaginative attitude in
presence of it. While we are in its world we watch what is, seeing that
so it happened and must have happened, feeling that it is piteous,
dreadful, awful, mysterious, but neither passing sentence on the agents,
nor asking whether the behaviour of the ultimate power towards them is
just. And, therefore, the use of such language in attempts to render our
imaginative experience in terms of the understanding is, to say the
least, full of danger.[13]