Thus we are left at last with an idea showing two sides or aspects which we can neither separate nor reconcile.  The whole or order against which the individual part shows itself powerless seems to be animated by a passion for perfection:  we cannot otherwise explain its behaviour towards evil.  Yet it appears to engender this evil within itself, and in its effort to overcome and expel it it is agonised with pain, and driven to mutilate its own substance and to lose not only evil but priceless good.  That this idea, though very different from the idea of a blank fate, is no solution of the riddle of life is obvious; but why should we expect it to be such a solution?  Shakespeare was not attempting to justify the ways of God to men, or to show the universe as a Divine Comedy.  He was writing tragedy, and tragedy would not be tragedy if it were not a painful mystery.  Nor can he be said even to point distinctly, like some writers of tragedy, in any direction where a solution might lie.  We find a few references to gods or God, to the influence of the stars, to another life:  some of them certainly, all of them perhaps, merely dramatic—­appropriate to the person from whose lips they fall.  A ghost comes from Purgatory to impart a secret out of the reach of its hearer—­who presently meditates on the question whether the sleep of death is dreamless.  Accidents once or twice remind us strangely of the words, ‘There’s a divinity that shapes our ends.’  More important are other impressions.  Sometimes from the very furnace of affliction a conviction seems borne to us that somehow, if we could see it, this agony counts as nothing against the heroism and love which appear in it and thrill our hearts.  Sometimes we are driven to cry out that these mighty or heavenly spirits who perish are too great for the little space in which they move, and that they vanish not into nothingness but into freedom.  Sometimes from these sources and from others comes a presentiment, formless but haunting and even profound, that all the fury of conflict, with its waste and woe, is less than half the truth, even an illusion, ‘such stuff as dreams are made on.’  But these faint and scattered intimations that the tragic world, being but a fragment of a whole beyond our vision, must needs be a contradiction and no ultimate truth, avail nothing to interpret the mystery.  We remain confronted with the inexplicable fact, or the no less inexplicable appearance, of a world travailing for perfection, but bringing to birth, together with glorious good, an evil which it is able to overcome only by self-torture and self-waste.  And this fact or appearance is tragedy.[15]

FOOTNOTES: 

[Footnote 1:  Julius Caesar is not an exception to this rule.  Caesar, whose murder comes in the Third Act, is in a sense the dominating figure in the story, but Brutus is the ‘hero.’]