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?