ny counts as nothing against the heroism and love which appear in it
and thrill our hearts. Sometimes we are driven to cry out that these
mighty or heavenly spirits who perish are too great for the little space
in which they move, and that they vanish not into nothingness but into
freedom. Sometimes from these sources and from others comes a
presentiment, formless but haunting and even profound, that all the fury
of conflict, with its waste and woe, is less than half the truth, even
an illusion, 'such stuff as dreams are made on.' But these faint and
scattered intimations that the tragic world, being but a fragment of a
whole beyond our vision, must needs be a contradiction and no ultimate
truth, avail nothing to interpret the mystery. We remain confronted with
the inexplicable fact, or the no less inexplicable appearance, of a
world travailing for perfection, but bringing to birth, together with
glorious good, an evil which it is able to overcome only by self-torture
and self-waste. And this fact or appearance is tragedy.[15]

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 1: _Julius Caesar_ is not an exception to this rule. Caesar,
whose murder comes in the Third Act, is in a sense the dominating figure
in the story, but Brutus is the 'hero.']

[Footnote 2: _Timon of Athens_, we have seen, was probably not designed
by Shakespeare, but even _Timon_ is no exception to the rule. The
sub-plot is concerned with Alcibiades and his army, and Timon himself is
treated by the Senate as a man of great importance. _Arden of Feversham_
and _A Yorkshire Tragedy_ would certainly be exceptions to the rule; but
I assume that neither of them is Shakespeare's; and if either is, it
belongs to a different species from his admitted tragedies. See, on this
species, Symonds, _Shakspere's Predecessors_, ch. xi.]

[Footnote 3: Even a deed would, I think, be counted an 'accident,' if it
were the deed of a very minor person whose character had not been
indicated; because such a deed would not issue from the little world to
which the dramatist had confined our attention.]

[Footnote 4: Comedy stands in a different position. The tricks played by
chance often form a principal part of the comic action.]

[Footnote 5: It may be observed that the influence of the three elements
just considered is to strengthen the tendency, produced by the
sufferings considered first, to regard the tragic persons as passive
rather than as agents.]

[Footnote 6: An account of Hegel's vi