Note 111 — Chapter XVII · ANCIENT AND MODERN TRAGEDY.

In the Greek drama the notion of fate was primarily theological: the hero was conducted to his end by gods. In Shakespeare Fate is psychological; Hamlet's own character is his destiny. In Goethe, Victor Hugo, and George Eliot the conception of Fate has passed into the region of positivism: the laws of blood, society, and race rule individuals in the Elective Affinities, Les Misérables, the Spanish Gypsy. The modern analogue for Greek hereditary destiny, traceable to some original transgression and tainting all the action of a doomed family, is to be found in madness, which has as yet been tragically treated by no dramatist of the first rank.