To these striking figures, isolated
by the greatness of their fate, the heart of the world has always gone
out as to the noblest of its children. Solitary in the possession of
some new conception of duty or of truth, separated from the mass of
their fellows by that lack of sympathy which springs from imperfect
comprehension of higher aims or deeper insight, these sublime
strugglers against ignorance, prejudice, caste, and power, become the
heroes and martyrs of the race; they announce the advent of new
conceptions of social order and individual rights; they incarnate the
imperishable soul of humanity in its long and terrible endeavour to
bring the institutions and the ideas of men into harmony with a higher
order of life.
The tragic element has, therefore, many aspects,--sometimes lawless
and destructive, sometimes self-sacrificing and instructive; but its
illustration in literature in any form is not only profoundly
interesting, but profoundly instructive as well. In no other literary
form is the stuff of which life is made wrought into such commanding
figures; in no other form are the deeper possibilities of life brought
into such clear view; in no other form are the fundamental laws of
life disclosed in a light at once so searching and so beautiful in its
revealing power.
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