s either craven or
cowardly because he does not break from the circle in which he finds
himself and make a bold and picturesque rush for freedom; it may be
that freedom is to be won for him in the silent and faithful doing of
the work which lies next him; it is certain that the highest power and
the noblest freedom are secured, not by the submission which fears to
fight, but by that which accepts the discipline for the sake of the
mastery which is conditioned upon it.

There are, however, conditions which no man can control, and which are
in their nature essentially tragic; and men and women who are involved
in these conditions cannot elude a fate for which they are not
responsible and from which they cannot escape. This was true of many
of the greatest characters in classical tragedy, and it is true also
of many of the characters in modern tragedy. The world looks with
bated breath on a struggle of the noblest heroism, in which men and
women, matched against overwhelming social forces, bear their part
with sublime and unfaltering courage, and by the completeness of their
self-surrender assert their sovereignty even in the hour when disaster
seems to crush and destroy them. To these striking figures, isolated
by the greatness of their fate, the heart of the world has always gone
out as to the noblest of its children. Solitary in the possession of
some new conception of duty or of truth, separated from the mass of
their fellows by that lack of sympathy which springs from imperfect
comprehension of higher aims or deeper insight, these sublime
strugglers against ignorance, prejudice, caste, and power, become the
heroes and martyrs of the race; they announce the advent of new
conceptions of social order and individual rights; they incarnate the
imperishable soul of humanity in its long and terrible endeavour to
bring the institutions and the ideas of men into harmony with a higher
order of life.

The tragic element has, therefore, many aspects,--sometimes lawless
and destructive, sometimes self-sacrificing and instructive; but its
illustration in literature in any form is not only profoundly
interesting, but profoundly instructive as well. In no other literary
form is the stuff of which life is made wrought into such commanding
figures; in no other form are the deeper possibilities of life brought
into such clear view; in no other form are the fundamental laws of
life disclosed in a light at once so searching and so beaut