evitably any individual human
being who comes into conflict with them. The first of these types was
discovered by Aeschylus and perfected by Sophocles; the second was
discovered by Christopher Marlowe and perfected by Shakespeare; and the
third was discovered by Victor Hugo and perfected by Ibsen.

The first type, which is represented by Greek tragedy, displays the
individual in conflict with Fate, an inscrutable power dominating alike the
actions of men and of gods. It is the God of the gods,--the destiny of
which they are the instruments and ministers. Through irreverence, through
vainglory, through disobedience, through weakness, the tragic hero becomes
entangled in the meshes that Fate sets for the unwary; he struggles and
struggles to get free, but his efforts are necessarily of no avail. He has
transgressed the law of laws, and he is therefore doomed to inevitable
agony. Because of this superhuman aspect of the tragic struggle, the Greek
drama was religious in tone, and stimulated in the spectator the reverent
and lofty mood of awe.

The second type of tragedy, which is represented by the great Elizabethan
drama, displays the individual foredoomed to failure, no longer because of
the preponderant power of destiny, but because of certain defects inherent
in his own nature. The Fate of the Greeks has become humanised and made
subjective. Christopher Marlowe was the first of the world's dramatists
thus to set the God of all the gods within the soul itself of the man who
suffers and contends and dies. But he imagined only one phase of the new
and epoch-making tragic theme that he discovered. The one thing that he
accomplished was to depict the ruin of an heroic nature through an
insatiable ambition for supremacy, doomed by its own vastitude to defeat
itself,--supremacy of conquest and dominion with Tamburlaine, supremacy of
knowledge with Dr. Faustus, supremacy of wealth with Barabas, the Jew of
Malta. Shakespeare, with his wider mind, presented many other phases of
this new type of tragic theme. Macbeth is destroyed by vaulting ambition
that o'erleaps itself; Hamlet is ruined by irresoluteness and contemplative
procrastination. If Othello were not overtrustful, if Lear were not
decadent in senility, they would not be doomed to die in the conflict that
confronts them. They fall self-ruined, self-destroyed. This second type of
tragedy is less lofty and religious than the first; but it is more human,
and therefore, to t