character. We do not think of Hamlet merely as failing to meet its
demand, of Antony as merely sinning against it, or even of Macbeth as
simply attacking it. What we feel corresponds quite as much to the idea
that they are _its_ parts, expressions, products; that in their defect
or evil _it_ is untrue to its soul of goodness, and falls into conflict
and collision with itself; that, in making them suffer and waste
themselves, _it_ suffers and wastes itself; and that when, to save its
life and regain peace from this intestinal struggle, it casts them out,
it has lost a part of its own substance,--a part more dangerous and
unquiet, but far more valuable and nearer to its heart, than that which
remains,--a Fortinbras, a Malcolm, an Octavius. There is no tragedy in
its expulsion of evil: the tragedy is that this involves the waste of
good.

Thus we are left at last with an idea showing two sides or aspects which
we can neither separate nor reconcile. The whole or order against which
the individual part shows itself powerless seems to be animated by a
passion for perfection: we cannot otherwise explain its behaviour
towards evil. Yet it appears to engender this evil within itself, and in
its effort to overcome and expel it it is agonised with pain, and driven
to mutilate its own substance and to lose not only evil but priceless
good. That this idea, though very different from the idea of a blank
fate, is no solution of the riddle of life is obvious; but why should we
expect it to be such a solution? Shakespeare was not attempting to
justify the ways of God to men, or to show the universe as a Divine
Comedy. He was writing tragedy, and tragedy would not be tragedy if it
were not a painful mystery. Nor can he be said even to point distinctly,
like some writers of tragedy, in any direction where a solution might
lie. We find a few references to gods or God, to the influence of the
stars, to another life: some of them certainly, all of them perhaps,
merely dramatic--appropriate to the person from whose lips they fall. A
ghost comes from Purgatory to impart a secret out of the reach of its
hearer--who presently meditates on the question whether the sleep of
death is dreamless. Accidents once or twice remind us strangely of the
words, 'There's a divinity that shapes our ends.' More important are
other impressions. Sometimes from the very furnace of affliction a
conviction seems borne to us that somehow, if we could see it, this
ago