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