like Hamlet, are overweighted with
tasks too heavy or too terrible for
them. Agamemnon, Oedipus, Ores-
tes, Hamlet, Lear, Pere Goriot, are
supreme figures in that world of the
imagination in which the poets have
endeavoured both to reflect and to
interpret the world as men see it and
act in it.

The essence of tragedy is the col-
lision between the individual will,
impulse, or action, and society in
some form of its organisation, or
those unwritten laws of life which
we call the laws of God. The tragic
character is always a lawbreaker, but
not always a criminal; he is, indeed,
often the servant of a new idea which
sets him, as in the case of Giordano
Bruno, in opposition to an established
order of knowledge; he is sometimes,
as in the case of Socrates, a teacher of

[[218]]

p217 _ -chap- _ toc-1 _ p218w _ toc-2 _ +chap+ _ p219

v?