ous 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
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