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 is 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.