and murder. Julius Caesar is the only tragedy in which one is even tempted to find an exception to this rule.  And the inference is obvious.  If it is chiefly evil that violently disturbs the order of the world, this order cannot be friendly to evil or indifferent between evil and good, any more than a body which is convulsed by poison is friendly to it or indifferent to the distinction between poison and food.

Again, if we confine our attention to the hero, and to those cases where the gross and palpable evil is not in him but elsewhere, we find that the comparatively innocent hero still shows some marked imperfection or defect,—­irresolution, precipitancy, pride, credulousness, excessive simplicity, excessive susceptibility to sexual emotions, and the like.  These defects or imperfections are certainly, in the wide sense of the word, evil, and they contribute decisively to the conflict and catastrophe.  And the inference is again obvious.  The ultimate power which shows itself disturbed by this evil and reacts against it, must have a nature alien to it.  Indeed its reaction is so vehement and ‘relentless’ that it would seem to be bent on nothing short of good in perfection, and to be ruthless in its demand for it.

To this must be added another fact, or another aspect of the same fact.  Evil exhibits itself everywhere as something negative, barren, weakening, destructive, a principle of death.  It isolates, disunites, and tends to annihilate not only its opposite but itself.  That which keeps the evil man[14] prosperous, makes him succeed, even permits him to exist, is the good in him (I do not mean only the obviously ‘moral’ good).  When the evil in him masters the good and has its way, it destroys other people through him, but it also destroys him.  At the close of the struggle he has vanished, and has left behind him nothing that can stand.  What remains is a family, a city, a country, exhausted, pale and feeble, but alive through the principle of good which animates it; and, within it, individuals who, if they have not the brilliance or greatness of the tragic character, still have won our respect and confidence.  And the inference would seem clear.  If existence in an order depends on good, and if the presence of evil is hostile to such existence, the inner being or soul of this order must be akin to good.

These are aspects of the tragic world at least as clearly marked as those which, taken alone, suggest the idea of fate.  And the idea which they in their turn, when taken alone, may suggest, is that of an order which does not indeed award ‘poetic justice,’ but which reacts through the necessity of its own ‘moral’ nature both against attacks made upon it and against failure to conform to it.  Tragedy, on this view, is the exhibition of that convulsive reaction; and the fact that the spectacle does not leave us rebellious or desperate is due to a more or less distinct perception that the tragic suffering and death arise from collision,