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.