The greatness of tragedy depends upon its allegiance to this meaning of literature. The dramatic form gives opportunity for a close approach to the semblance of actuality. The very subjects of tragedy, suffering and disaster, discourage the seeking of mere amusement or a contentment with mere beauty of expression. They require, if not high seriousness or a teleology, at least a concern with the most interesting, inescapable, and dreadful of human facts. This baleful portion of human existence is the field of tragedy's research, where it may find grandeur and violence, malevolence and magnanimity, optimism or pessimism, harmony or anarchy, but where it can only with difficulty escape a serious attempt at the study of character and deed. No other literary form has so nobly responded to this great mission as that adopted by Sophocles, Shakespeare, Calderon, Corneille, and Ibsen. It has constrained drama and literature to their duty of research, interpretation, discovery in the almost impenetrable maze of human fact, by the very nature of its chosen field, by the preëminence of its great examples, and even by the continued endeavor of its humblest servants. As one reads through these forgotten tragedies, as when one scans closely any large field of human effort, the main impression is one of futility. Beauty is not attained, life is not revealed, everything is imitative, feeble, and absurd. Yet, even among those hundreds of eighteenth century tragedies, with their rhyming tags that neatly sum up their authors' generalizations on life, one may find reason for sympathy and interest. They record what had meaning for their day, the heroisms, sentiments, and morals that somehow stirred men's hearts and elevated their resolves. They represent some degree of temporary success in giving relations and significance to their world. The lastingly significant representation of life is found not in the many but in the few, but the mediocrities and the failures continue the effort and maintain the form that make possible the few masterpieces. The very greatest set no impassable bound, for the ever-widening expanse of tragic fact continually invites new explorers. Progress can come not by resting admiringly on the greatness of the past, but only through a free opportunity for new pioneers and discoverers. Were the achievement of English tragedy far less than it has been, the very expenditure of effort should give it some interest for study. Its history, however, includes in Shakespeare's tragedies a few of the unapproached achievements of the human mind, many other plays that for a while greatly interested and persuaded men, not a few that still have searching meaning for us, and hundreds more that have maintained an unselfish, a social, a moral inquiry into life, and that, while perishing themselves, have aided others to live. In such a history, even he who runs may read a record of human endeavor not alien to his interest.