oral' nature both against attacks made upon
it and against failure to conform to it. Tragedy, on this view, is the
exhibition of that convulsive reaction; and the fact that the spectacle
does not leave us rebellious or desperate is due to a more or less
distinct perception that the tragic suffering and death arise from
collision, not with a fate or blank power, but with a moral power, a
power akin to all that we admire and revere in the characters
themselves. This perception produces something like a feeling of
acquiescence in the catastrophe, though it neither leads us to pass
judgment on the characters nor diminishes the pity, the fear, and the
sense of waste, which their struggle, suffering and fall evoke. And,
finally, this view seems quite able to do justice to those aspects of
the tragic fact which give rise to the idea of fate. They would appear
as various expressions of the fact that the moral order acts not
capriciously or like a human being, but from the necessity of its
nature, or, if we prefer the phrase, by general laws,--a necessity or
law which of course knows no exception and is as 'ruthless' as fate.

It is impossible to deny to this view a large measure of truth. And yet
without some amendment it can hardly satisfy. For it does not include
the whole of the facts, and therefore does not wholly correspond with
the impressions they produce. Let it be granted that the system or order
which shows itself omnipotent against individuals is, in the sense
explained, moral. Still--at any rate for the eye of sight--the evil
against which it asserts itself, and the persons whom this evil
inhabits, are not really something outside the order, so that they can
attack it or fail to conform to it; they are within it and a part of it.
It itself produces them,--produces Iago as well as Desdemona, Iago's
cruelty as well as Iago's courage. It is not poisoned, it poisons
itself. Doubtless it shows by its violent reaction that the poison _is_
poison, and that its health lies in good. But one significant fact
cannot remove another, and the spectacle we witness scarcely warrants
the assertion that the order is responsible for the good in Desdemona,
but Iago for the evil in Iago. If we make this assertion we make it on
grounds other than the facts as presented in Shakespeare's tragedies.

Nor does the idea of a moral order asserting itself against attack or
want of conformity answer in full to our feelings regarding the tragic