and waged unflinchingly to the issue. In this ultimate sense, most of
human life is tragic; because it involves a continual warfare with
circumstances, which the majority of people carry on with a silent
heroism. Originally, only the glorious and spectacular conflicts of
great personalities were deemed worthy of representation in art; but
with the growth of sympathy the range of tragic portrayal has gradually
been extended over almost the whole of human life. The peasant in his
struggle for subsistence against a niggardly soil, or the patient woman
who loses the bloom of her youth in the unremitting effort to maintain
her children, are tragic figures.

Second, it is part of the essence of tragedy that the conflict should
be recognized as necessary and its issue as inevitable. In one form
or another, whether as Greek or Christian or naturalistic, fatality
has remained an abiding element in the idea of tragedy. The purpose
or passion or sentiment which impels the hero to undertake and maintain
the struggle must be a part of his nature so integral that nothing
else is possible for him. "_Ich kann nicht anders_" is the cry
of every tragic personality. And the opposition which he meets from
other persons, from social forces or natural circumstances, must seem
to be equally fateful--must be represented as issuing from a counter
determination or law no less inescapable than the hero's will. Even
when the catastrophe depends upon some so-called accident, it must be
made to appear necessary that our human purposes should sometimes be
caught and strangled in the web of natural fact which envelops them.

The reasons for our acceptance of tragedy are not difficult to find
and have been noted, with more or less clearness, by all students. We
accept it much as the hero accepts his own struggle--he believes in
the values which he is fighting for and we sympathetically make his