oes out
to those who, like OEdipus, are overmatched by a fate which pursues
with relentless step, or, like Hamlet, are overweighted with tasks too
heavy or too terrible for them. Agamemnon, OEdipus, Orestes, Hamlet,
Lear, Pere Goriot, are supreme figures in that world of the
imagination in which the poets have endeavoured both to reflect and to
interpret the world as men see it and act in it.

The essence of tragedy is the collision between the individual will,
impulse, or action, and society in some form of its organisation, or
those unwritten laws of life which we call the laws of God. The tragic
character is always a lawbreaker, but not always a criminal; he is,
indeed, often the servant of a new idea which sets him, as in the case
of Giordano Bruno, in opposition to an established order of knowledge;
he is sometimes, as in the case of Socrates, a teacher of truths which
make him a menace to lower conceptions of citizenship and narrower
ideas of personal life; or he is, as in the case of Othello and Paolo,
the victim of passions which overpower the will and throw the whole
life out of relation to its moral and social environment. The interest
with which the tragic character is always invested is due not only to
the exceptional experience in which the tragic situation always
culminates, but also to the self-surrender which precedes the penalty
and the expiation.

There is a fallacy at the bottom of the admiration we feel when a rich
nature throws restraint of any kind to the winds and gives itself up
wholly to some impulse or passion,--the fallacy of supposing that by a
violent break with existing conditions freedom can be secured; for the
world loves freedom, even when it is too slothful or too cowardly to
pay the price which it exacts. That admiration arises, however, from a
sound instinct,--the instinct which makes us love both power and
self-sacrifice, even when the first is ill-directed and the second
wasted. The vast majority of men are content to do their work quietly
and in obscurity, with no disclosure of originality, freshness, or
force; they obey law, conform to custom, respect the conventionalities
of their age; they appear to be lacking in representative quality;
they are, apparently, the faithful and uninteresting drudges of
society. There are, it is true, a host of commonplace persons, in
every generation, who perform uninteresting tasks in a mechanical
spirit; but it must not be inferred that a man i