he 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
they are least fitted to face it? How is it that Othello comes to be the
companion of the one man in the world who is at once able enough, brave
enough, and vile enough to ensnare him? By what strange fatality does it
happen that Lear has such daughters and Cordelia such sisters? Even
character itself contributes to these feelings of fatality. How could
men escape, we cry, such vehement propensities as drive Romeo, Antony,
Coriolanus, to their doom? And why is it that a man's virtues help to
destroy him, and that his weakness or defect is so intertwined with
everything that is admirable in him that we can hardly separate them
even in imagination?

If we find in Shakespeare's tragedies the source of impressions like
these, it is important, on the other hand, to notice what we do _not_
find there. We find practically no trace of fatalism in its more
primitive, crude and obvious forms. Nothing, again, makes us think of
the actions and sufferings of the persons as somehow arbitrarily fixed
beforehand without regard to their feelings, thoughts and resolutions.
Nor, I believe, are the facts ever so presented that it seems to us as
if the supreme power, whatever it may be, had a special spite against a
family or an individual. Neither, lastly, do we receive the impression
(which, it must be observed, is not purely fatalistic) that a family,
owing to some hideous crime or impiety in early days, is doomed in later
days to continue a career of portentous calamities and sins.
Shakespeare, indeed, does not appear to have taken much interest in
heredity, or to have attached much importance to it. (See, however,
'heredity' in the Index.)

What, then, is this 'fate' which the impressions already considered lead
us to describe as the ultimate power in the tragic world? It appears to
be a mythological expression for the whole system or order, of which the
individual characters form an inconsiderable and feeble part; which
seems to determine, far more than they, their native dispositions and
their circumstances, and, through these, their action; which is so vast
and complex that they can scarcely at all understand it or control