That rounds the mortal temples of a king,

grinning at his pomp, watching till his vanity and his fancied security have wholly encased him round, and then coming and boring with a little pin through his castle wall.  And these feelings, though their predominance is subdued in the mightiest tragedies, remain powerful there.  In the figure of the maddened Lear we see

     A sight most pitiful in the meanest wretch,
     Past speaking of in a king;

and if we would realise the truth in this matter we cannot do better than compare with the effect of King Lear the effect of Tourgenief’s parallel and remarkable tale of peasant life, A King Lear of the Steppes.

2

A Shakespearean tragedy as so far considered may be called a story of exceptional calamity leading to the death of a man in high estate.  But it is clearly much more than this, and we have now to regard it from another side.  No amount of calamity which merely befell a man, descending from the clouds like lightning, or stealing from the darkness like pestilence, could alone provide the substance of its story.  Job was the greatest of all the children of the east, and his afflictions were well-nigh more than he could bear; but even if we imagined them wearing him to death, that would not make his story tragic.  Nor yet would it become so, in the Shakespearean sense, if the fire, and the great wind from the wilderness, and the torments of his flesh were conceived as sent by a supernatural power, whether just or malignant.  The calamities of tragedy do not simply happen, nor are they sent; they proceed mainly from actions, and those the actions of men.

We see a number of human beings placed in certain circumstances; and we see, arising from the co-operation of their characters in these circumstances, certain actions.  These actions beget others, and these others beget others again, until this series of inter-connected deeds leads by an apparently inevitable sequence to a catastrophe.  The effect of such a series on imagination is to make us regard the sufferings which accompany it, and the catastrophe in which it ends, not only or chiefly as something which happens to the persons concerned, but equally as something which is caused by them.  This at least may be said of the principal persons, and, among them, of the hero, who always contributes in some measure to the disaster in which he perishes.

This second aspect of tragedy evidently differs greatly from the first.  Men, from this point of view, appear to us primarily as agents, ‘themselves the authors of their proper woe’; and our fear and pity, though they will not cease or diminish, will be modified accordingly.  We are now to consider this second aspect, remembering that it too is only one aspect, and additional to the first, not a substitute for it.