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.