How many tragic situations did Goethe say were possible?  Something like thirty-two.  Which seems a lot.  Anyhow, granted that men are men still, that not all of them are bits, parts, machine-sections, then we have added another tragic possibility to the list:  the Strike situation.  As yet no one tackles this situation.  It is a sort of Medusa head, which turns—­no, not to stone, but to sloppy treacle.  Mr. Galsworthy had a peep, and sank down towards bathos.

Granted that men are still men, Labour v.  Capitalism is a tragic struggle.  If men are no more than implements, it is non-tragic and merely disastrous.  In tragedy the man is more than his part.  Hamlet is more than Prince of Denmark, Macbeth is more than murderer of Duncan.  The man is caught in the wheels of his part, his fate, he may be torn asunder.  He may be killed, but the resistant, integral soul in him is not destroyed.  He comes through, though he dies.  He goes through with his fate, though death swallows him.  And it is in this facing of fate, this going right through with it, that tragedy lies.  Tragedy is not disaster.  It is a disaster when a cart-wheel goes over a frog, but it is not a tragedy, not the hugest; not the death of ten million men.  It is only a cartwheel going over a frog.  There must be a supreme struggle.

In Shakespeare’s time it was the people versus king storm that was brewing.  Majesty was about to have its head off.  Come what might, Hamlet and Macbeth and Goneril and Regan had to see the business through.

Now a new wind is getting up.  We call it Labour versus Capitalism.  We say it is a mere material struggle, a money-grabbing affair.  But this is only one aspect of it.  In so far as men are merely mechanical, the struggle is one which, though it may bring disaster and death to millions, is no more than accident, an accidental collision of forces.  But in so far as men are men, the situation is tragic.  It is not really the bone we are fighting for.  We are fighting to have somebody’s head off.  The conflict is in pure, passional antagonism, turning upon the poles of belief.  Majesty was only hors d’oevres to this tragic repast.

So, the strike situation has this dual aspect.  First it is a mechanico-material struggle, two mechanical forces pulling asunder from the central object, the bone.  All it can result in is the pulling asunder of the fabric of civilisation, and even of life, without any creative issue.  It is no more than a frog under a cart-wheel.  The mechanical forces, rolling on, roll over the body of life and squash it.