impressions which give rise to it, without asking at present whether
this idea is their natural or fitting expression. There can be no doubt
that they do arise and that they ought to arise. If we do not feel at
times that the hero is, in some sense, a doomed man; that he and others
drift struggling to destruction like helpless creatures borne on an
irresistible flood towards a cataract; that, faulty as they may be,
their fault is far from being the sole or sufficient cause of all they
suffer; and that the power from which they cannot escape is relentless
and immovable, we have failed to receive an essential part of the full
tragic effect.
The sources of these impressions are various, and I will refer only to a
few. One of them is put into words by Shakespeare himself when he makes
the player-king in _Hamlet_ say:
Our thoughts are ours, their ends none of our own;
'their ends' are the issues or outcomes of our thoughts, and these, says
the speaker, are not our own. The tragic world is a world of action, and
action is the translation of thought into reality. We see men and women
confidently attempting it. They strike into the existing order of things
in pursuance of their ideas. But what they achieve is not what they
intended; it is terribly unlike it. They understand nothing, we say to
ourselves, of the world on which they operate. They fight blindly in the
dark, and the power that works through them makes them the instrument of
a design which is not theirs. They act freely, and yet their action
binds them hand and foot. And it makes no difference whether they meant
well or ill. No one could mean better than Brutus, but he contrives
misery for his country and death for himself. No one could mean worse
than Iago, and he too is caught in the web he spins for others. Hamlet,
recoiling from the rough duty of revenge, is pushed into
blood-guiltiness he never dreamed of, and forced at last on the revenge
he could not will. His adversary's murders, and no less his adversary's
remorse, bring about the opposite of what they sought. Lear follows an
old man's whim, half generous, half selfish; and in a moment it looses
all the powers of darkness upon him. Othello agonises over an empty
fiction, and, meaning to execute solemn justice, butchers innocence and
strangles love. They understand themselves no better than the world
about them. Coriolanus thinks that his heart is iron, and it melts like
snow before a fire. Lady Macbeth, who thought she could dash out her own
child's brains, finds herself hounded to death by the smell of a
stranger's blood. Her husband thinks that to gain a crown he would jump
the life to come, and finds that the crown has brought him all the
horrors of that life. Everywhere, in this tragic world, man's thought,
translated into act, is transformed into the opposite of itself. His
act, the movement of a few ounces of matter in a moment of time, becomes
a monstrous flood which spreads over a kingdom. And whatsoever he dreams
of doing, he achieves that which he least dreamed of, his own
destruction.
All this makes us feel the blindness and helplessness of man. Yet by
itself it would hardly suggest the idea of fate, because it shows man as
in some degree, however slight, the cause of his own undoing. But other
impressions come to aid it. It is aided by everything which makes us
feel that a man is, as we say, terribly unlucky; and of this there is,
even in Shakespeare, not a little. Here come in some of the accidents
already considered, Juliet's waking from her trance a minute too late,
Desdemona's loss of her handkerchief at the only moment when the loss
would have mattered, that insignificant delay which cost Cordelia's
life. Again, men act, no doubt, in accordance with their characters; but
what is it that brings them just the one problem which is fatal to them
and would be easy to another, and sometimes brings it to them just when
they are least fitted to face it? How is it that Othello comes to be the
companion of the one man in the world who is at once able enough, brave
enough, and vile enough to ensnare him? By what strange fatality does it
happen that Lear has such daughters and Cordelia such sisters? Even
character itself contributes to these feelings of fatality. How could
men escape, we cry, such vehement propensities as drive Romeo, Antony,
Coriolanus, to their doom? And why is it that a man's virtues help to
destroy him, and that his weakness or defect is so intertwined with
everything that is admirable in him that we can hardly separate them
even in imagination?
If we find in Shakespeare's tragedies the source of impressions like
these, it is important, on the other hand, to notice what we do _not_
find there. We find practically no trace of fatalism in its more
primitive, crude and obvious forms. Nothing, again, makes us think of
the actions and sufferings of the persons as somehow arbitrarily fixed
beforehand without regard to their feelings, thoughts and resolutions.
Nor, I believe, are the facts ever so presented that it seems to us as
if the supreme power, whatever it may be, had a special spite against a
family or an individual. Neither, lastly, do we receive the impression
(which, it must be observed, is not purely fatalistic) that a family,
owing to some hideous crime or impiety in early days, is doomed in later
days to continue a career of portentous calamities and sins.
Shakespeare, indeed, does not appear to have taken much interest in
heredity, or to have attached much importance to it. (See, however,
'heredity' in the Index.)
What, then, is this 'fate' which the impressions already considered lead
us to describe as the ultimate power in the tragic world? It appears to
be a mythological expression for the whole system or order, of which the
individual characters form an inconsiderable and feeble part; which
seems to determine, far more than they, their native dispositions and
their circumstances, and, through these, their action; which is so vast
and complex that they can scarcely at all understand it or control its
workings; and which has a nature so definite and fixed that whatever
changes take place in it produce other changes inevitably and without
regard to men's desires and regrets. And whether this system or order is
best called by the name of fate or no,[12] it can hardly be denied that
it does appear as the ultimate power in the tragic world, and that it
has such characteristics as these. But the name 'fate' may be intended
to imply something more--to imply that this order is a blank necessity,
totally regardless alike of human weal and of the difference between
good and evil or right and wrong. And such an implication many readers
would at once reject. They would maintain, on the contrary, that this
order shows characteristics of quite another kind from those which made
us give it the name of fate, characteristics which certainly should not
induce us to forget those others, but which would lead us to describe it
as a moral order and its necessity as a moral necessity.
5
Let us turn, then, to this idea. It brings into the light those aspects
of the tragic fact which the idea of fate throws into the shade. And the
argument which leads to it in its simplest form may be stated briefly
thus: 'Whatever may be said of accidents, circumstances and the like,
human action is, after all, presented to us as the central fact in
tragedy, and also as the main cause of the catastrophe. That necessity
which so much impresses us is, after all, chiefly the necessary
connection of actions and consequences. For these actions we, without
even raising a question on the subject, hold the agents responsible; and
the tragedy would disappear for us if we did not. The critical action
is, in greater or less degree, wrong or bad. The catastrophe is, in the
main, the return of this action on the head of the agent. It is an
example of justice; and that order which, present alike within the
agents and outside them, infallibly brings it about, is therefore just.
The rigour of its justice is terrible, no doubt, for a tragedy is a
terrible story; but, in spite of fear and pity, we acquiesce, because
our sense of justice is satisfied.'
Now, if this view is to hold good, the 'justice' of which it speaks must
be at once distinguished from what is called 'poetic justice.' 'Poetic
justice' means that prosperity and adversity are distributed in
proportion to the merits of the agents. Such 'poetic justice' is in
flagrant contradiction with the facts of life, and it is absent from
Shakespeare's tragic picture of life; indeed, this very absence is a
ground of constant complaint on the part of Dr. Johnson. [Greek:
Drasanti pathein], 'the doer must suffer'--this we find in Shakespeare.
We also find that villainy never remains victorious and prosperous at
the last. But an assignment of amounts of happiness and misery, an
assignment even of life and death, in proportion to merit, we do not
find. No one who thinks of Desdemona and Cordelia; or who remembers that
one end awaits Richard III. and Brutus, Macbeth and Hamlet; or who asks
himself which suffered most, Othello or Iago; will ever accuse
Shakespeare of representing the ultimate power as 'poetically' just.
And we must go further. I venture to say that it is a mistake to use at
all these terms of justice and merit or desert. And this for two
reasons. In the first place, essential as it is to recognise the
connection between act and consequence, and natural as it may seem in
some cases (_e.g._ Macbeth's) to say that the doer only gets what he
deserves, yet in very many cases to say this would be quite unnatural.
We might not object to the statement that Lear deserved to suffer for
his folly, selfishness and tyranny; but to assert that he deserved to
suffer what he did suffer is to do violence not merely to language but
to any healthy moral sense. It is, moreover, to obscure the tragic fact
that the consequences of action cannot be limited to that which would
appear to us to follow 'justly' from them. And, this being so, when we
call the order of the tragic world just, we are either using the word in
some vague and unexplained sense, or we are going beyond what is shown
us of this order, and are appealing to faith.
But, in the second place, the ideas of justice and desert are, it seems
to me, in _all_ cases--even those of Richard III. and of Macbeth and
Lady Macbeth--untrue to our imaginative experience. When we are immersed
in a tragedy, we feel towards dispositions, actions, and persons such
emotions as attraction and repulsion, pity, wonder, fear, horror,
perhaps hatred; but we do not _judge_. This is a point of view which
emerges only when, in reading a play, we slip, by our own fault or the
dramatist's, from the tragic position, or when, in thinking about the
play afterwards, we fall back on our everyday legal and moral notions.
But tragedy does not belong, any more than religion belongs, to the
sphere of these notions; neither does the imaginative attitude in
presence of it. While we are in its world we watch what is, seeing that
so it happened and must have happened, feeling that it is piteous,
dreadful, awful, mysterious, but neither passing sentence on the agents,
nor asking whether the behaviour of the ultimate power towards them is
just. And, therefore, the use of such language in attempts to render our
imaginative experience in terms of the understanding is, to say the
least, full of danger.[13]
Let us attempt then to re-state the idea that the ultimate power in the
tragic world is a moral order. Let us put aside the ideas of justice and
merit, and speak simply of good and evil. Let us understand by these
words, primarily, moral good and evil, but also everything else in human
beings which we take to be excellent or the reverse. Let us understand
the statement that the ultimate power or order is 'moral' to mean that
it does not show itself indifferent to good and evil, or equally
favourable or unfavourable to both, but shows itself akin to good and
alien from evil. And, understanding the statement thus, let us ask what
grounds it has in the tragic fact as presented by Shakespeare.
Here, as in dealing with the grounds on which the idea of fate rests, I
choose only two or three out of many. And the most important is this. In
Shakespearean tragedy the main source of the convulsion which produces
suffering and death is never good: good contributes to this convulsion
only from its tragic implication with its opposite in one and the same
character. The main source, on the contrary, is in every case evil; and,
what is more (though this seems to have been little noticed), it is in
almost every case evil in the fullest sense, not mere imperfection but
plain moral evil. The love of Romeo and Juliet conducts them to death
only because of the senseless hatred of their houses. Guilty ambition,
seconded by diabolic malice and issuing in murder, opens the action in
_Macbeth_. Iago is the main source of the convulsion in _Othello_;
Goneril, Regan and Edmund in _King Lear_. Even when this plain moral
evil is not the obviously prime source within the play, it lies behind
it: the situation with which Hamlet has to deal has been formed by
adultery and murder. _Julius Caesar_ is the only tragedy in which one is
even tempted to find an exception to this rule. And the inference is
obvious. If it is chiefly evil that violently disturbs the order of the
world, this order cannot be friendly to evil or indifferent between evil
and good, any more than a body which is convulsed by poison is friendly
to it or indifferent to the distinction between poison and food.
Again, if we confine our attention to the hero, and to those cases where
the gross and palpable evil is not in him but elsewhere, we find that
the comparatively innocent hero still shows some marked imperfection or
defect,--irresolution, precipitancy, pride, credulousness, excessive
simplicity, excessive susceptibility to sexual emotions, and the like.
These defects or imperfections are certainly, in the wide sense of the
word, evil, and they contribute decisively to the conflict and
catastrophe. And the inference is again obvious. The ultimate power
which shows itself disturbed by this evil and reacts against it, must
have a nature alien to it. Indeed its reaction is so vehement and
'relentless' that it would seem to be bent on nothing short of good in
perfection, and to be ruthless in its demand for it.
To this must be added another fact, or another aspect of the same fact.
Evil exhibits itself everywhere as something negative, barren,
weakening, destructive, a principle of death. It isolates, disunites,
and tends to annihilate not only its opposite but itself. That which
keeps the evil man[14] prosperous, makes him succeed, even permits him
to exist, is the good in him (I do not mean only the obviously 'moral'
good). When the evil in him masters the good and has its way, it
destroys other people through him, but it also destroys _him_. At the
close of the struggle he has vanished, and has left behind him nothing
that can stand. What remains is a family, a city, a country, exhausted,
pale and feeble, but alive through the principle of good which animates
it; and, within it, individuals who, if they have not the brilliance or
greatness of the tragic character, still have won our respect and
confidence. And the inference would seem clear. If existence in an order
depends on good, and if the presence of evil is hostile to such
existence, the inner being or soul of this order must be akin to good.
These are aspects of the tragic world at least as clearly marked as
those which, taken alone, suggest the idea of fate. And the idea which
they in their turn, when taken alone, may suggest, is that of an order
which does not indeed award 'poetic justice,' but which reacts through
the necessity of its own 'moral' nature both against attacks made upon
it and against failure to conform to it. Tragedy, on this view, is the
exhibition of that convulsive reaction; and the fact that the spectacle
does not leave us rebellious or desperate is due to a more or less
distinct perception that the tragic suffering and death arise from
collision, not with a fate or blank power, but with a moral power, a
power akin to all that we admire and revere in the characters
themselves. This perception produces something like a feeling of
acquiescence in the catastrophe, though it neither leads us to pass
judgment on the characters nor diminishes the pity, the fear, and the
sense of waste, which their struggle, suffering and fall evoke. And,
finally, this view seems quite able to do justice to those aspects of
the tragic fact which give rise to the idea of fate. They would appear
as various expressions of the fact that the moral order acts not
capriciously or like a human being, but from the necessity of its
nature, or, if we prefer the phrase, by general laws,--a necessity or
law which of course knows no exception and is as 'ruthless' as fate.
It is impossible to deny to this view a large measure of truth. And yet
without some amendment it can hardly satisfy. For it does not include
the whole of the facts, and therefore does not wholly correspond with
the impressions they produce. Let it be granted that the system or order
which shows itself omnipotent against individuals is, in the sense
explained, moral. Still--at any rate for the eye of sight--the evil
against which it asserts itself, and the persons whom this evil
inhabits, are not really something outside the order, so that they can
attack it or fail to conform to it; they are within it and a part of it.
It itself produces them,--produces Iago as well as Desdemona, Iago's
cruelty as well as Iago's courage. It is not poisoned, it poisons
itself. Doubtless it shows by its violent reaction that the poison _is_
poison, and that its health lies in good. But one significant fact
cannot remove another, and the spectacle we witness scarcely warrants
the assertion that the order is responsible for the good in Desdemona,
but Iago for the evil in Iago. If we make this assertion we make it on
grounds other than the facts as presented in Shakespeare's tragedies.
Nor does the idea of a moral order asserting itself against attack or
want of conformity answer in full to our feelings regarding the tragic
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
agony 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 view may be found in _Oxford Lectures
on Poetry_.]
[Footnote 7: The reader, however, will find considerable difficulty in
placing some very important characters in these and other plays. I will
give only two or three illustrations. Edgar is clearly not on the same
side as Edmund, and yet it seems awkward to range him on Gloster's side
when Gloster wishes to put him to death. Ophelia is in love with Hamlet,
but how can she be said to be of Hamlet's party against the King and
Polonius, or of their party against Hamlet? Desdemona worships Othello,
yet it sounds odd to say that Othello is on the same side with a person
whom he insults, strikes and murders.]
[Footnote 8: I have given names to the 'spiritual forces' in _Macbeth_
merely to illustrate the idea, and without any pretension to adequacy.
Perhaps, in view of some interpretations of Shakespeare's plays, it will
be as well to add that I do not dream of suggesting that in any of his
dramas Shakespeare imagined two abstract principles or passions
conflicting, and incorporated them in persons; or that there is any
necessity for a reader to define for himself the particular forces which
conflict in a given case.]
[Footnote 9: Aristotle apparently would exclude them.]
[Footnote 10: Richard II. is perhaps an exception, and I must confess
that to me he is scarcely a tragic character, and that, if he is
nevertheless a tragic figure, he is so only because his fall from
prosperity to adversity is so great.]