Drama: Its Law and Its Technique Part 1 Ch 5

CHAPTER V – THE NATURE AND SOURCES OF COMIC EFFECT

Perhaps nothing in the province of literary forms is so baffling as comedy. Considered objectively, as an art-product, it trenches on the realm of the grotesque, confessedly one of the most difficult problems of aesthetics, while in its subjective aspect it requires an analysis of our intellectual processes which has not yet been satisfactorily given us by psychologists. Moreover, in considering concrete literary examples of comedy we are constantly checked by the conviction that the perception of what is comic is something very unstable, subject to change with process of time, and showing wide divergence among different classes of society living at the same time. This is, of course, partly true also of our perception of the tragic, but by no means to the same extent. For tragedy, as we have seen, deals with phases of human nature which are relatively eternal and unchanging. We cannot, of course, affirm that our perception of the tragic in the Oedipus is exactly the same as was that of Sophocles’ contemporaries; but certainly time has made far less difference here than it has in the understanding and appreciation of Aristophanes, and this quite aside from the inevitable obscurity of the comic poet’s political allusions. Apparently, the feelings to which tragedy appeals attained a high degree of development at an earlier time than did those to which comedy appeals, and they have therefore undergone less change.

Especially in the last few centuries has the comic sense been undergoing a modification intimately connected with the development of that group of feelings which may be roughly classed as the philanthropic. At the end of the sixteenth century, the sweetest-natured gentleman of his age could, without argument, class physical deformity among the legitimate sources of laughter. [1] To-day such a sentiment would at once stamp the holder of it as lacking in fine feeling and sympathetic instincts. It has only recently occurred to Shakespeare students that many of his scenes which to us are tragic or pathetic were perhaps comic or partly comic to his audience, and, right or wrong in the given instances, the suggestion is extremely interesting as a recognition of the instability of the comic sense, and as a step toward the study of its evolution. [2]

[1 Sidney, Defense of Poesy, ed. Cook, p. 51.]

[2 Cf. John Corbin, The Elizabethan Hamlet, and Barrett Wendell, William Shakespeare.]

Such a study is here inadmissible; all we can do is to recognize that the problem exists, and admit that what is to be said in this chapter must necessarily be subject to modification when the subject shall have been worked out further.

It is generally agreed that the sense of the comic arises from a perception of incongruity. The incongruity may be physical or spiritual, or both; it may be perceptual or conceptual, or both; it may exist in space or in time, or in both; and, according as it is one or another of these, there results one or another variety of comic effect. It may be helpful to make a rough scheme of these classes of comic effects, always remembering that any such scheme can only approximate completeness and only suggest truth.

A. The incongruity is purely conceptual, as in the various forms of wit. Here we may class puns, double meanings, irony, hyperbole, etc. An example is the well-known question, addressed to a servant carrying a roasted hare, “Is that your own hare or a wig?”

B. The incongruity is perceptual as well as conceptual.

I. It is based on a perception of successive events. The source of the comic effect may be stated in general terms as the contrast between expectation and fulfilment. A simple example of this is the case of a man who goes to sit down in a chair, the chair is drawn away, he sits on the floor. Such an occurrence is almost certain to raise a laugh, and the comic in our modern variety show is largely of this character.

In comedy of a higher type, the cases are less simple, but the principle is the same. The occurrences are partly or wholly in the realm of the intellectual or social, rather than the physical life. Examples of this are the relations between Rosalind and Orlando in As You Like It, and the development of the main plots of any of Plautus’ or Terence’s comedies. [1] These last, however, contain much of the simpler comic, of the variety-show type; so also does Shakespeare’s Comedy of Errors. The case in As You Like It, on the other hand, affiliates with the next group. Indeed, nearly all comedy of intrigue, though its main plot may be reduced to this type, involves some character-treatment, and must therefore be referred in part to the following group.

[1 Cf. infra, pp. 139 ff.]

II. The incongruity is based on a perception of appearances, simultaneous rather than successive. An example is the effect produced by the juxtaposition of a very tall and a very short man, or a very fat and a very thin man. The case is a good one to take, because it is so easily analyzable. The two members of the comparison are here supplied to perception, while a third element – the conception of the normal man – exists in the mind of the percipient as the standard from which both deviate. That this conceptual norm must exist, and must be a norm common to both members of the comparison presented, is shown by the fact that the contrast between a tall man and a child is usually not funny to us, because we apply different standards to the two; whereas, if the child attempts to take on a man’s ways, he brings upon himself the application of the man’s standard, and gets laughed at. Similarly, we laugh when a man adopts a child’s manner. Again, the sight of a big tree and a small one side by side is not usually funny, because we have no definitely established standard of size for trees in general. The examples might be multiplied indefinitely, showing the necessity for a common standard, and a definite one.

Starting from these simple cases, we find comic effects ranging all the way up to those of very great complexity. The cases of actual physical deformity, of drunkenness, of the milder forms of insanity, all of which have ceased to be funny to many people, still are highly comic to many, and must be classed here; also instances like the use made of Falstaff’s huge size, in King Henry IV, or of Ursula’s in Bartholomew Fair. Our modern comic stage has much of this sort of thing. More complex, but essentially akin, are the cases where the emphasis is laid upon eccentricities of character. The standard applied may be a moral one, as often in Jonson, or an intellectual one, as perhaps in the case of Osric or Polonius in Hamlet, or a social one, as in many of Molière’s plays. Here we must class all the so-called “Comedy of Humors.” Here belong all the effects to which Meredith has exclusively applied the term “Comedy,” his standard of reference being the standard of common sense of the well-trained social man considered primarily as in society. [1]

[1 Cf. George Meredith, An Essay on Comedy.]

C. There appears to be yet another source of comic effect, which is, however, fortunately growing less and less important. That, namely, which arises from the mere sight of pain, especially pain involving violent movement. To take, as usual, a simple instance, the sight of a man getting a beating is apt to appear funny to some people, even to-day, and any one who reads Aristophanes and Plautus and Terence, or even the Elizabethan and pre-Elizabethan drama, is almost forced to conclude that beatings were esteemed funny per se. Of course the comic effect in these cases may often be interpreted as lying not in the beating qua beating, but in the beating qua surprise, as, for instance, in the Comedy of Errors, IV, 4, where Dromio enters, with the rope’s end his master had sent him for, and, instead of thanks, gets a taste of it himself. But, placing the most charitable construction on such instances, we are still forced to suspect that, in the comic incident as in case of roast pig, the beating may have helped to “impart a gusto.” And this suspicion is strengthened if we note that in all comic surprise the surprise is almost always somewhat disagreeable for the person at whom we laugh, which only means that such comic denouements are, so to speak, beatings in disguise. Perhaps, then, Hobbes was right, at least in his estimate of the natural man, when he calls the comic sense “a sudden glory arising from some sudden conception of some eminency in ourselves by comparison with the inferiority of others, or with our own formerly.”

Leaving out of account this last group, which is partly provided for in group B, we have two main classes of comic effects, of which the second falls into two parts, according as the contrasts occur; simultaneously or successively, and so have to do respectively with plot and with character. But of course, though these groups are separable in thought, they are not so in experience, and the scheme just given makes, we must repeat, no claim to subtlety of discrimination. For in dealing with anything so shifting and elusive as the comic sense, any schematic statement imposing, as it does, hard and fast limits where no such really exist, must of necessity be inadequate and partly false. But it is nevertheless useful if it be taken as merely indicating the main lines of comic effect. It will be found that most literary comedy can be easily put in one or another or in several of the above categories.

The first division, A, may be disregarded in this discussion, since it is only incidental in the drama. Group B, I and II are essential, as they concern the treatment of life in its two aspects: character (physical or spiritual) and plot. For it is with these that the drama essentially deals.

It is evident that all the cases suggested in the scheme just given have certain things in common; they imply a certain attitude on the part of the percipient quite different from the serious or tragic attitude. Every case makes an appeal to the intellect primarily, and to the emotions only secondarily, if at all. The very word “incongruity” implies a process of comparison, which implies the reference to some standard or norm. A fat man is funny, not in virtue of his fatness per se, but because most men are not fat. One may ask, “But why is that funny?” which is merely to ask why any incongruity is comic. There is as yet no answer, any more than there is to the question why laughter rather than any other bodily contortion should be the physical expression of amusement. We must take these as ultimate facts, and leave their further explanation to the physiological psychologists.

To return, the whole matter is seen to be dependent on perception of relations and the assumption of a standard, of reference.

But further, the incongruity will be perceived as comic only if the attention be held closely to the particular contrast to be made. If it is allowed to wander, to take into consideration other aspects of the subject presented, the sense of the comic may give place to some other feeling. The appeal has thus far been to the intellect merely, and to the intellect working along a narrow and definitely prescribed line. But if the emotions are called in, or if the mind breaks over the prescribed limits of the treatment, the comic incongruity may be forgotten in more serious thoughts. If, for instance, after smiling at the sight of our very tall man walking beside our very short one, we approach them, and suddenly perceive that the short man is a cripple and deformed, the smile vanishes. Why? Because a whole set of feelings are called into activity of such a nature and strength as quite to overwhelm the intellectual perception of contrast. We perceive the contrast, indeed, all the more vividly, but our thought dwells not on the contrast per se, intellectually considered, but on what it involves to the cripple himself. Our emotions are aroused, our sympathy is evoked.

Thus it may be said that the perception of the comic has in it something arbitrary and limited. It requires a point of view which shall cut off from the mental vision the real issues of life and its vital substance, – the emotions and susceptibilities that make it subject to pleasure or pain. If the view be changed, so as to include these, the comic usually vanishes. [1] The distinction is one of treatment, of attitude, not of original material, and this is why the same material may be either comic or tragic according to its treatment – why even the same treatment may appear to us comic or tragic according as we fix our attention upon one or another aspect of it; for this reason two people may watch the same occurrence, and one may smile and the other be saddened by it.

[1 But cf. infra, p. 65-66.]

Take as further illustration an instance from life and one from literature:

A boy stands convulsed with laughter as he watches the wild contortions of two cats whose tails have been wired together; another boy, too small to interfere, may be suffering actual pain at the same sight. What is the difference? In a sense, both boys are right, for, though they are looking at the same occurrence, what they see is not the same: the thing the big boy sees is funny; the thing the little boy sees is painful. The little boy feels the pain of the tightly wound wire as it cuts into the animals’ flesh, he feels the frenzy of the helpless creatures, he resents the brute strength that can willingly cause such tortures. The big boy, on the other hand, simply does not see or feel anything of all this: he sees merely the contortions of the animals, their total failure to comprehend the real cause of their difficulty, and the inadequacy of the means they take to meet it. At the present time society, on the whole, stands with the small boy and condemns the big one; three centuries ago it would have done precisely the reverse; and each position is intellectually explicable though to us only one seems morally justifiable.

Take now an instance from literature:

In Lear the subject-matter is the treatment of an old, helpless father by his daughters, and it is so handled as to be one of the most terrible tragedies ever written. But is this the only possible treatment? Turn to Aristophanes, and find in The Clouds precisely the same theme made the basis of a comedy – of comedy, indeed, to appreciate which we must divest ourselves of some modern preconceptions, but genuine comedy nevertheless, and not cruel, simply because it is out of the realm of the emotions entirely.

There is, then, this fundamental difference between tragedy and comedy: a difference in point of view – a difference not in the thing as perceived by the eye, but in the thing as conceived by the mind. We may say that tragedy interprets life by emphasizing its vital realities; comedy reconstructs it by emphasizing certain aspects of it, selected so as to make good contrasts, striking incongruities. Each is eminently selective, but the principle of selection is different. And the comic standpoint may be assumed toward almost any subject: it may be momentary, and we have its light playing over the situation for an instant and then going out, as when Hamlet rouses himself from his bitter melancholy to make sport of Polonius or Osric; or it may be pervasive, affecting the entire conception of life as represented by the artist, as in Shakespeare’s early comedies (Love’s Labour’s Lost, Comedy of Errors) and Jonson’s typical ones; or it may single out certain characters for comic treatment in the midst of an otherwise serious presentation of a subject, as in Shakespeare’s later comedies. And according as it is more or less pervasive do we get all the gradations between unmixed comedy or pure farce at the one extreme and the tragedy with comic lights at the other.

To return now to our classification of comic effects. It has thus far been based on differences in subject-matter, and we have distinguished the comedy whose main point lies in the incongruities of men’s character, from the comedy which emphasizes mainly the incongruities in the things that happen to men. And if The Comedy of Errors is a purer example of the second class than King Henry IV is of the first, this is because, dramatically, character can scarcely be presented save through action, and Aristotle’s assertion – difficult to explain as it stands – is unquestionably true if we change its application and read: “Without action there cannot be a comedy; there may be without character.” [1]

[1 Cf. Poetics, VI, “Without action there cannot be a tragedy; there may be without character.”]

But in the group of character comedies there is another basis of distinction. For incongruity of character implies – it springs from – imperfection of character. If a man’s character were in perfect poise, if it were absolutely symmetrical, it would not be comic. Comedy, then, is really based on imperfections in character, but considered from the comic, not the tragic standpoint.

Now it is evident that one may view these imperfections in one of several ways: one may simply enjoy them as such, without forming a judgment of the moral or intellectual level of the person in whom they are manifested. Or one may, without losing sight of the comic, regard the person with sympathy, or even love. Or one may, consciously or unconsciously, make a judgment, and there is added to our perception of the comic, and modifying this perception, a feeling of superiority, moral or intellectual or both, while we may express this judgment in terms varying from the gentlest irony to the severest condemnation, according to our mood and the nature of the subject. This was the sort of comedy of which Sidney was speaking when he said, “The comedy is an imitation of the common errors of our life, which he representeth in the most ridiculous and scornful sort that may be, so as it is impossible that any beholder can be content to be such a one.” [1] The significant thing here is the use of the two words “scornful” and “ridiculous.” “Ridiculous” carries with it a notion of superiority on the part of the percipient which is not so palpably implied in other words for the comic; “scornful” still further emphasizes this, leaving out the notion of the comic altogether; and the concluding phrase of the passage makes the writer’s standpoint yet clearer.

[1 The Defense of Poesy, p. 28.]

Such a passage, especially coming from Sidney, is highly significant. What he would have said if he had lived to see the Shakespearean comedy we can only surmise. Perhaps he might then have seen the possibility of anothher kind of comic perception, wherein we laugh at the folly and love the fool. But, as it stands, the passage fairly represents the type of comedy we have termed judicial.

Jonson’s is a stronger statement of the same view:

 “But, with an armed, and resolved hand,
  I’ll strip the ragged follies of the time
  Naked as at their birth...
  ... and with a whip of steel,
  Print wounding lashes in their iron ribs.
  .   .   .   .   .   .   .   .   .   .
 “... Well, I will scourge those apes,
  And to these courteous eyes oppose a mirror,
  As large as is the stage whereon we act;
  Where they shall see the time’s deformity
  Anatomized in every nerve and sinew.
                     ... my strict hand
  Was made to seize on vice...” [1]

[1 Every Man out of His Humour; Induction.]

And Meredith’s description of Molière’s comedy gives us only another aspect of this kind of comedy:

“Never did man wield so shrieking a scourge upon vice, but his consummate self-mastery is not shaken while administering it. Tartuffe and Harpagon, in fact, are each made to whip himself and his class, the false pietists, and the insanely covetous. Molière has only set them in motion. He strips Folly to the skin, displays the imposture of the creature, and is content to offer her better clothing... The source of his wit is clear reason: it is a fountain of that soil; and it springs to vindicate reason, common sense, rightness and justice.” [1]

[1 Meredith: An Essay on Comedy, pp. 27, 28.]

These two attitudes, the non-judicial and the judicial, though of course neither one is ever adopted with perfect consistency by any given writer, make a convenient basis for distinguishing the two main tendencies of comedy. If we seek for literary types, we shall find the one predominating in Shakespeare, Dickens, George Eliot; the other predominating in Jonson, Molière, Thackeray, Meredith; while Addison and Goldsmith are on the border line between.

We have called the second sort satiric comedy, because its tendency is toward satire. This will be apparent if we make a mental survey of the two fields of comedy and satire, and see how difficult it is at some points to distinguish them. Making Shakespeare one end of the scale, and Juvenal the other, we find next Shakespeare, but with satiric qualities, Addison and Thackeray; close to Juvenal, but with comic qualities, Swift, with Pope and Dryden as subordinate types; between these would come Jonson and Molière, while Aristophanes verges rather on satire, and Rabelais rather on comedy, though a rigid classification of either of these last is beyond possibility.

On the other hand, the pure comedy shades off into other forms. It is, we have said, non-judicial, but one of the reasons why it is non-judicial is because it is sympathetic. Now we have seen that keen sympathy is usually incompatible with comic perception. That it was inevitably and invariably incompatible we expressly did not affirm. For here, as in the case of satiric comedy, there is no hard and fast line drawn, but the two things may shade off the one into the other. We may have the purely comic, where the sympathies, in this sense, are not invoked, as in the Launce episodes of The Two Gentlemen of Verona; or as in Sir John Falstaff, – the pure comic preponderating, but enough sympathy so that transition to the pathetic is possible, as hinted in the scene of Falstaff’s rebuff at the hands of the young king, and the account of his death. [1] Accentuate the sympathy farther, retaining the comic, and you get Cervantes’ comedy; accentuate it still farther and you get the Fool in Lear.

[1 King Henry IV, Part II, Act V, Scene 5, King Henry V, Act II, Scenes 2 and 3. Probably the first of these Scenes was intended by Shakespeare to be comic.]

Thus we find that the comic sense tends to vary in one of these two directions, – toward the pathetic or even the tragic on the one hand, and toward the satiric on the other. And it is evident that in the case of comedians like Jonson and Molière, who stand part way on the road toward satire, any discussion which does not take into account the satiric as well as the comic aspect must necessarily be inadequate.

One more quality of comedy must be mentioned here, though its purport will be more fully shown in the chapter on comic plot-structure. It is this: comedy, from the arbitrariness, the narrow limitation of its view, leaves out much of life; moreover, the things it leaves out are those things that we are accustomed to call the serious realities of life, – the realities of pain and death, and the inexorable sway of law. Hence, comedy is not bound, as is tragedy, to base itself on law; it may make a much freer use of what we call chance; the events and people with which it deals may, if we may use a figure, all be largely external. As an actual fact, comedy does do this, and compared with tragedy, the emphasis on causality, on law, is slight.

Summing up: we have seen that comic effects have a common basis in incongruity, contrast; that the incongruity may lie principally in the realm of events, and we have comic intrigue, or in the realm of appearances, and we have comic character; while usually both these are found in conjunction, but with preponderating emphasis on one or the other, which gives us farce or intrigue comedy on the one hand and character comedy on the other. We have seen, too, that comedy differs from tragedy not so much in subject-matter as in point of view and treatment. Finally, we have noted that comedy itself varies according to the attitude of the author or the percipient, tending, where it becomes judicial, toward satire; where it becomes sympathetic, toward pathos and tragedy.

Drama: Its Law and Its Technique Part 1 Ch 4

CHAPTER IV – THE NATURE AND SOURCES OF TRAGIC EFFECT

The word “tragic,” as commonly used, denotes anything sad, especially something having the qualities of suddenness and finality. It is scarcely distinguished from the pathetic, and, though when the two words are brought together a difference is felt, it is a difference rather of intensity than of quality. But for our purposes the word must be interpreted more narrowly, to mean the kind of effect produced by the sight of a losing struggle carried on between a strong but imperfect individuality and the overpowering forces of life. This will do as a rough beginning, as a trial definition, to be corroborated or modified as it is applied to those tragedies which are by universal consent held to be among the greatest. Choosing almost at random, let us take for this purpose the tragedy Macbeth, the tragedy Othello, and the tragedies whose centre of interest is the figure of Orestes.

In Macbeth we have a double protagonist, for a treatment of Lady Macbeth as subordinate involves one in great difficulties. We have here a man in whom are mingled great strength and great weakness: he is a brave and able soldier, but is incapable of prolonged and consistent effort; his thinking is superficial and his morality is therefore not vital and durable; a man of generous and kindly impulses, but open to influence either for good or evil if another stronger and steadier force be brought to bear upon him. Such a force is found in Lady Macbeth. Her mind is cool and steady, and her effectiveness in carrying out any policy she may take up, whether that policy be good or bad, is therefore greater than his could ever be. The occurrence of favorable opportunity, and her ambition for her husband determine her toward evil. Macbeth, morally unsound but wavering in his policy, is upheld by his wife, and together they enter upon the series of acts which end in the ruin of both. The tragic effects are found in their struggles to do that which is impossible to escape the consequences of their own acts.

Othello presents, stated briefly, a struggle between two natures: the one impulsive, passionate, generous, endowed with tremendous power to love and hate, but not well poised, without controlling judgment; the other cold, intellectually agile, self-sufficient and self-controlled, able to use himself and others as tools with a skill founded in an accurate though limited understanding of human motives. In this struggle, Othello’s weakness brings about his fall, but Iago’s success is not complete because his understanding is thus limited – because the world is not, after all, wholly moved by the motives which he understands and counts upon. Each falls a victim to the laws of society which are based in human nature.

In Orestes we have the spectacle of a man who, through no fault of his own, is placed in a position where he must choose between two evils, and, whichever he chooses, he will be contravening some of the most sacred laws of religion and of nature. He chooses, and bears the retribution which his act, though necessary, necessarily involved.

In these instances we find certain constant elements which had been already implied in our trial definition. There is always a struggle, there is the fighter, and there is the opposing force. Let us examine these elements.

And first, the fighter. Our definition said, a strong but imperfect individuality. It has already (chap. III) been suggested that the dramatic person must be vital and positive. Not that he must necessarily act positively; the colorlessness of much of Hamlet’s outer activity is quite different from that of his two friends, Rosenkranz and Guildenstern. It is not the result of forcelessness, but the resultant of conflicting forces within him. The hero must be imperfect, because, for one reason, a perfectly poised character is usually too nearly invulnerable for the opposing force to get a firm hold. Aristotle clearly saw this when he said that the hero must not be a perfectly good man, but, as we shall see, this provision has to be accepted with some reservations. [1] The deepest reason for it is found in the nature of the opposing force.

[1 Cf. infra, pp. 117 ff.]

For the best form of tragedy is found, according to Hegel, when the opposing force is closely united with the soul of the fighter himself – when it has effected a lodgment in the enemy’s trenches and fights from within as well as from without. Such is the case in Macbeth, such is Orestes’ case, such is the case in Othello, such is preeminently the case in Hamlet and in Wallenstein. The hero is, as it were, his own worst enemy. So that one is almost inclined to state categorically that the hero must be thus imperfect, because the tragic struggle must be within him in order to be truly tragic.

But tempting as it is to generalize from these supreme examples, we must be careful not to construct such a theory of the tragic as will exclude such plays as Antigone, and Romeo and Juliet. Here we have another class of effects which we cannot ignore, and in which the tragic element is certainly of a different kind from that found in the other group. We have, in each of these cases, a tragic hero or heroes whose struggle is with outer circumstances, and whose fall is necessitated, not by inner weakness, but by the brute strength of external fact. Thus, Antigone is, so far as her tragic end is concerned, a perfect character. But a combination of circumstances suddenly arises, because of which she is forced to choose between conformity to a social or political law and obedience to a spiritual or religious law. Her brother’s corpse lies unburied outside her native city. Her king and uncle – having over her since her father’s death also a father’s authority – imperatively commands that the body shall not be buried. This command Antigone feels bound, by all the sacredness of family ties and religious custom, to contravene. She chooses to break the law of the state, and by the state she dies. The story of Orestes might, of course, be similarly interpreted, and thus brought within this group of tragedies.

It may indeed be said that such a death in such a cause is not defeat but triumph, and so it is, from one standpoint. But such a standpoint is not one from which we can judge drama with any practical helpfulness. It would involve us in endless subtleties, probably ending in the assertion that the only thing truly tragic is the moral ruin of a soul, – which would cut out nearly everything in drama except Macbeth and Browning’s A Soul‘s Tragedy, or at least would swing around the whole emphasis in the tragedies we know, transferring the interest from the so-called “heroes” to the so-called “villains,” who, having power only to “kill the body” of their victims, kill, in so doing, their own souls.

Evidently this will not do, and we must return to a simpler and perhaps a somewhat more external way of judging. Antigone may be spiritually a conqueror, – her death is surely amply avenged, – but considered simply as a woman, as a human being with but one earthly life to live, she is conquered. This, indeed, she herself recognizes when she answers the chorus, who have been trying to show her the heroic aspect of her fate:

“Chorus. But ‘tis great renown for a woman who hath perished that she should have shared the doom of the godlike, in her life, and afterward in death.

Antigone. Ah, I am mocked! In the name of our fathers’ gods, can ye not wait till I am gone, must ye taunt me to my face, O my city, and ye, her wealthy sons? Ah, fount of Dirce, and thou holy ground of Thebe whose chariots are many; ye, at least, will bear me witness, in what sort, unwept of friends, and by what laws I pass to the rock-closed prison of my strange tomb, ah me unhappy! who have no home on the earth or in the shades, no home with the living or with the dead... From what manner of parents did I take my miserable being! And to them I go thus, accursed, unwed, to share their home. Alas, my brother, ill-starred in thy marriage, in thy death thou hast undone my life!” [1]

[1 Antigone, trans. Jebb, pp. 155 ff.]

To change the instance: – the end of the prison-scene in Faust means that the girl has won for herself the great spiritual victory:

 “Marguerite. Gericht Gottes! Dir hab’ ich mich
       übergeben!
  Dein bin ich, Vater! Rette mich!
  Ihr Engel! Ihr heiligen Schaaren,
  Lagert euch umher, mich zu bewahren!
  Heinrich! Mir graut’s vor dir.

  Mephistopheles. Sie ist gerichtet!

  Stimme. [von oben] Ist gerettet!”

But her drama is none the less a tragedy, and while the “voice from above” proclaims her “saved,” Mephistopheles is, humanly speaking, entirely right in deeming her “lost.” The two judgments here thus opposed may be taken as representative of the two standards – the standard which judges a human life by itself, and sees in death an ultimate fact; and the standard which looks beyond and above to a different set of spiritual values, in which death is a comparatively unimportant element, or important only as it acts upon the hero’s nature as a motive. The second standard may or may not be the true one; the first seems the only practicable one to apply to art. For, as we have already said, the artist works with phenomena only; life has for him only what it seems to have for those who live it, and death for him is ultimate because it ends our known activity. [1]

[1 Cf. supra, pp. 32-34, and infra, pp. 88-90.]

Remembering, then, that there is another way of judging, we may once more return to our definition of tragedy: as a losing struggle wherein the opposing and victorious forces may lie either chiefly within the hero’s own nature, in which case we have a conflict which is chiefly spiritual – Hamlet, Orestes; or they may lie chiefly outside, in which case we have a struggle more or less external, the hero remaining unmoved – Antigone, Romeo, and Juliet; or it may be both internal and external – Othello, possibly Wallenstein. Of course in one sense it must always be both, for the spiritual forces of the inner struggle will always have some outward and material embodiment, the outer conflict will always have an answering inner phase. [1] Here, as always, it is a question of proportion, of relative emphasis, and there is no possibility of strict demarcations of classes.

[1 Cf. infra, pp. 129 ff.]

One other element there is which these all have in common, besides the necessity of there being a struggle and a losing one: the element, namely, of causality. Aristotle saw this clelirly and laid great emphasis upon it:

“Tragedy is an imitation ... of events terrible and pitiful. Such an effect is best produced when the events come on us by surprise; and the effect is heightened when, at the same time, they follow from one another. The tragic wonder will then be greater than if they happened of themselves or by accident; for even accidents are most striking when they have an air of design.” [ Poetics, IX.]

“These last [reversal of fortune and recognition] should arise from the internal structure of the plot, so that what follows should be the necessary or probable result of the preceding action. It makes all the difference whether one event is the consequence of another, or merely subsequent to it.” [ Ib., X.]

“It is therefore evident that the unravelling of the plot, no less than the complication, must arise out of the plot itself, it must not be brought about by the Deus ex Machina. Within the action there must be nothing irrational.” [ Ib., XV.]

That is to say, the opposing force must derive its power, not only really but evidently, from what has gone before. Aristotle even goes so far as to say that if the event be not really probable, it should at least, by a kind of sleight of hand, be made to seem so. [1] But, if such jugglery is necessary, it means weakness. The drama should be the place where we may see, more easily recognizable than in actual life, the universal operation and validity of irresistible law. Othello is not a great tragedy because a husband mistakenly kills his wife, but because he is seen to be, in so doing, the victim and the agent of absolute and remorseless law. Wallenstein is not a great tragedy because the general is assassinated, or even because he is a traitor, but because these things are seen to be the inevitable conclusion of the given series of events. The thing which we must be made to feel is, in Amiel’s phrase, “The fatality of the consequences which follow upon every human act, – the leading idea of dramatic art and the most tragic element of life.” [2]

[1 Poetics, XXIV.]

[2 Journal, 6th April, 1851.]

To take an opposite instance, the following is a true story of our Civil War: A young Confederate soldier had, after months of service, obtained leave to go home for a few weeks. His companions crowded around him, giving him messages to friends, and letters to be sent when he reached a safe district. As he was ready to start he turned back, with the words, “Guess I’ll have one more look at the Yanks,” and went out again to the intrenchments. He leaned forward on the ridge, raised his head above it, and a bullet from the Union ranks struck him. He fell forward, dead.

Such an event appeals to us with more than common force, by virtue of its grim irony. It is one of those accidents which Aristotle would have said have an air of design, but it is not available for tragedy – at least, not for the chief event of tragedy – because it is, after all, accident. It may, indeed, be said that nothing is accidental, everything is the result of unvarying law, and this is certainly true. But not all events bear upon them the recognizable stamp of this causality, and there are therefore in our experience a vast number of occurrences which go by the name of accidents. The dramatist may be able by his insight and power of presentation to take some of these occurrences out of this category. If he can, they are his to use. If he cannot, they are not fit material for tragedy; their appearance in drama is a sign of decay, it is one of the distinguishing characteristics of the “melodramatic.” If examples of this kind of abuse are wanted, they may be found in almost any of the plays of Beaumont and Fletcher.

Such an incident as that just given, if not strictly speaking tragic, is certainly pathetic, and we are now ready to return to the distinction, suggested at the beginning of the chapter, between these two classes of effects. That is pathetic which involves suffering, unmerited, or out of proportion to guilt, or at least considered without reference to the guilt of the sufferer. It implies a certain passivity on his part, or a resistance so manifestly inadequate as to amount to the same thing. Thus, the sufferings of animals under abuse are pathetic, the sufferings of sick people are so, so is much spiritual suffering which is recognized as inevitable and endured as such. Thus, Ophelia and Desdemona may be called pathetic, while Hamlet and Othello are tragic, and we might multiply examples indefinitely. This is perhaps the reason why children have never been used as tragic heroes. To themselves, their world is great and their emotions intense, and, suffering being a wholly subjective matter, their actual sufferings are doubtless often as great as those of adults. But the dramatist is concerned with act as well as feeling, with struggle as well as pain, and the child has not the command of himself and of the world to meet these requirements. Occasionally the treatment of children in literature, by some singular combination of good fortune and skill and sympathy, does approximate the tragic; it does this in Kipling’s remarkable story, The Drums of the Fore and Aft. But the means by which the author has attained this result, so far as they are discoverable, only go to prove the truth of the general rule. An interesting instance of its validity may be found in the three Theban plays of Sophocles. In the Oedipus Rex Antigone and Ismene are simply pathetic figures, used to enhance the effect of their father’s fall. In the Oedipus Coloneus Antigone is rising out of this passivity, but she is still in the main pathetic in this sense. In the Antigone she has become truly tragic, though retaining a certain pathetic tone, by virtue of the quietness of her resistance. [1]

[1 It is not meant to imply that the three plays were written in sequence or regarded as a trilogy. They were written at long intervals, and probably not in the order of the story, and were not performed together. Cf. Jebb’s introduction to his translation of Antigone, §§ 22, 23.]

It is, then, not enough that an incident be pathetic that the recital of it saddens us. It must not be merely

             “a tale of things
  Done long ago, and ill done,”

but must involve action and reaction, blow and counterblow, the conflict of forces.

It has become a commonplace of dramatic criticism to say that the Greek tragic differs from ours in that their tragic force was a resistless fate, while with us it springs from recognized antecedents, usually to be found in the voluntary acts of the hero himself. Thus Freytag says:

“The dramatic ideas and the dramatic actions of the Greeks dispensed with a rational world-order, dispensed, that is, with an interlinking of events that is completely accounted for by the conditions and the onesidedness of the characters represented. We are become freer men, we recognize on the stage no other fate than such as arises out of the essential nature of the hero himself.” [2]

[2 Die Technik des Dramas, p. 81. And cf. pp. 119-20.]

Such phrases are, however, apt to be misleading. Whatever be the difference in the form of statement, the underlying tragic motive in Oedipus, and in Lear or Hamlet or Othello, is really the same, namely, “the fatality of the consequences which follow upon every human act.”

It has been assumed that much of Ibsen’s work is in this respect Greek rather than modern. But even in Ghosts, where the idea of an overpowering fate is most prominent, this idea affords the tragic material only, and neither in Ibsen nor in Sophocles is the victim of this “fate” regarded, per se, as the tragic hero. In Ghosts the victim, Oswald, is not the hero at all – he is a passive sufferer under what the dramatist, mistakenly or not, represents as unalterable law. The real protagonist is Oswald’s mother, and the tragic effect is found in the spectacle of her heroic struggle against a power that she finally discovers to be unconquerable.

There is, as has been suggested, a type of tragedy which does not entirely conform to the principles we have been deducing. We have examples of it in Shakespeare’s Richard III, in Jonson’s Catiline and Sejanus, in Massinger’s The Roman Actor. In these cases the hero is an absolutely vicious character who holds his place as hero at all only by reason of high intellectual powers. The tragedy presents to us the spectacle of his downfall, it presents the vengeance taken by society upon one who has done violence to all its laws. It does not portray an inner struggle, it does not present a spiritual problem; it shows the means by which a moral monster is prevented from permanent enjoyment of the fruits of his vices and his crimes.

Such a theme can, it is evident, never be treated so as to attain the highest tragic effect. It may contain much pathos in the subordinate characters – it usually does contain this. When it is great at all its greatness is intellectual solely. It might be better to call this group satiric tragedies, with emphasis on the “satiric,” for it possesses the grim irony of satire and its judicial attitude, and thus affiliates with one group of satiric comedy. The differences between Richard III and Sejanus on the one hand, which are called tragedy, and Volpone on the other, which is called comedy, are superficial; their kinship is essential.

Thus far we have been considering the elements of the tragic in themselves, and, so far as is possible, apart from their effect on the spectator. Aristotle chose the other point of view and defined the tragic solely in terms of its effect. [1] The two elements of this effect he made pity and fear, with a third element which may be here disregarded because, despite the efforts of philosophers and commentators, it is still not quite clear what he meant, nor are we sure that his statement, if we do understand it, is true for us moderns. But pity and fear will be found to be readily convertible into the terms we have used. “Pity” corresponds to the suffering and the struggle, “fear” corresponds to the causality. For Aristotle elsewhere distinguishes pity from fear by saying that pity is caused by the perception of suffering which we do not think of as affecting ourselves; fear is caused by the perception of suffering which we realize may be ours. Now this last element is exactly what is involved in causality, it is the element of universal law, whose universality involves us in its sweep, and the perception of which produces, according to our mood, either an enlargement of spirit or a sense of oppression which is probably another name for Aristotle’s fear.

[1 Poetics, VI.]

Thus we may sum up the elements of tragic effect in three words: suffering, struggle, causality. Suffering alone is pathetic merely; struggle alone may be heroic merely (note the Heracles of Euripides’ Alkestis); causality alone gives us the rational merely: the union of the three produces the tragic.

Drama: Its Law and Its Technique Part 1 Ch 3

CHAPTER III – SERIOUSNESS – ΣΠΟΥΔΗ

“Tragedy,” said Aristotle, “is an imitation of an action that is serious.” The word he uses here, σπουδαίας, is explained by Butcher as uniting the two notions of grave and great; it has been paraphrased by Arnold in the expression “high and excellent seriousness,” and these phrases come as near as any to indicating a certain quality of greatness which we all recognize as indispensable to the serious drama.

To begin with, one must carefully guard oneself against the mistake of confusing greatness of subject with greatness of treatment. Only the second can produce greatness in the art-product, yet these two things have been, and still are, constantly confounded. Donne’s poems, we are told, are sublime because their theme is so. Milton’s Paradise Lost is greater than Virgil’s Aeneid by the whole difference in grandeur between the conceptions of the two poems, one dealing with the founding of Rome, the other with the fall of man from his first state. It is easy to see the absurdity of such judgments, taking them individually, and nearly as easy to fall into similar absurdities on one’s own account. The reason may be that there is in such notions a root of truth. For, if the subject does not make the poem, at least subject and poem have a common source, the one being chosen, the other created, by the poet; and it is quite probable that if a “sublime” subject genuinely appeals to a poet, he has in him elements of sublimity, although these may not be accompanied by the power to create a sublime poem.

And we must make another distinction, between the subject-matter as it exists apart from the artist in the actual world of experience, and the subject as recognized by the artist, recreated in his mind as his theme. Sometimes one of these is truly great when the other is not. Thus, a jealous man does not usually impress us as having any elements of greatness, yet Othello is great, because greatly conceived; querulous and impotent old age seems unpropitious for drama, as do the half-crazed murmurs of an old clown, yet Lear and his fool are among the greatest dramatic creations. Such greatness is due, not to the original subject-matter, but to the poet who, whatever his theme, views it so truly and deeply that he reaches its inner significance as human life – and it is in the depths of human life that greatness will be found, if found anywhere.

The necessity that tragedy and the serious drama shall possess an element of greatness or largeness – call it nobility, elevation, what you will – has always been recognized. The divergence has come when men have begun to say what they mean by this quality, and – which is much the same thing – how it is to be attained. Even Aristotle, when he begins to analyze methods, sounds, at first hearing, a little superficial. The hero must be, he says, “one who is highly renowned and prosperous, – a personage like Oedipus, Thyestes, and other illustrious men of such families.” [1] Now we are used to seeing tragic effects produced in the treatment of characters who are neither renowned nor of noble family. Yet, for his own time, Aristotle was right. For dramatic action means struggle, and struggle of the most intense kind; the dramatic agent must therefore possess, not only latent passion and potential energy, but opportunity which shall make this energy kinetic. Such opportunity came in the past chiefly to such men as by birth or fortune were placed in positions of power, who were forced to take part in affairs having large issues and demanding positive and individual activity. They had, as others did not have, opportunity for self-expression in action; they had greatness thrust upon them, while the average man of their times was lost in the corporate body. For, even in Greece, society had not yet wholly freed itself from the tradition of tribal solidarity and tribal responsibility, and the individual appears in half-relief, epic rather than dramatic, controlled by events rather than originating action. This the Greek dramatists felt, and it was one of the reasons why they sought their heroes in the rolls of kings and their actions in the annals of nations. They were right, and Aristotle merely stated, in his somewhat bare way, a generalization from their practice. What is wrong is the assumption made by later theorists and dramatic artists that, because the Greeks had found their tragic heroes among kings, therefore royalty was sufficient to constitute a tragic hero, and a great national issue was, as such, fit subject for a tragic action. Thus Racine, in Athalie, has chosen a crisis in Hebrew history. He has not, however, presented to us actions in themselves of great tragic import – or rather, he has not interpreted to us the tragic import of the actions which he presents. A vicious queen, who has won her throne by murder, retains it by force. By a successful coup d’état of the minority, she is deposed and put to death. This theme has historical importance; it lacks dramatic importance because the sources of the action are not rooted in the spiritual nature of the heroine or of any other of the actors. Yet two points in the action might have furnished a theme that would have been truly dramatic. One is the conflict between the queen’s ambitious lust of power and her impulse of love for the boy who proves her rival. Another is the conflict of impulses in the old general, Abner, whose instinctive patriotism bids him free his country from an oppressive and unrighteous rule, but whose military training enjoins him to render unquestioning obedience to his sovereign. Each of these themes is suggested in Racine’s drama, and as each suggestion occurs the reader awaits its further development, but awaits it in vain. The author evidently had in mind the historical importance of his action rather than its spiritual import.

[1 Poetics, XIII.]

Compare the way in which Shakespeare has treated a similar subject. Julius Caesar, like Athalie, is concerned with a crisis in a nation’s history, where a tyrant is overcome by a small but steadfast minority. But the tragic interest does not depend upon our knowledge that the fate of Rome hung upon the result of Brutus’ conspiracy. This fact, kept in the background, or used as a motive force in the half-prophetic consciousness of Brutus himself, does indeed enhance the appeal to our interest, but the nearer and stronger appeal is made through the individuality of the men Caesar, Antony, Brutus, Cassius, while the tragic theme is found in the spiritual experiences of Brutus, torn by a double and conflicting allegiance. Thus, in Brutus, Shakespeare has done exactly the thing that Racine missed doing, and Julius Caesar has in this respect a greatness that Athalie wholly lacks.

That the spiritual issue might have been made yet clearer may be acknowledged; it will certainly be recognized if we extend our field of comparison, and consider Browning’s use of a similar theme in Strafford. As in Athalie, as in Julius Caesar, there is in Strafford the tyrant, the oppressed people crying for relief, the reluctant, sad-hearted leaders shrinking from the issue, yet forced to meet it. But here, as in Julius Caesar, the greatness of the interests involved does not constitute the tragedy, though it furnishes the occasion for it and makes for it a background of sombre grandeur. The tragic interest gathers about the three figures Pym, Charles, Strafford; it centres in the spiritual experiences of the great statesman who is forced by fate to do violence to one-half of himself in being true to the mandates of the other half. All the powers of the dramatist are exerted toward this one end – toward laying bare the inner life of the man, the mortal pain of a great soul forced to be untrue to itself. To say that Strafford is a greater drama than Julius Caesar would be at least venturesome; it would probably be a mistake, for there are many considerations to be taken into account in the final judgment of a drama. The three plays are here presented as a group to illustrate the way in which political eminence in the actor and national issues involved in the action may be used or abused by the dramatist. [1]

[1 The three, or more particularly the last two, would well repay study from other points of view. The characters and motiving of Caesar as compared with Charles, and of Brutus as compared with Strafford and Pym, the use made of historical background, the treatment of the subordinate characters, all these are subjects that could be so treated as to illuminate the questions of dramatic effect in general.]

It is apparent that a proper use of these elements, as subsidiary aids to dramatic effect, is entirely legitimate. It is equally apparent that they must be recognized as subsidiary only, that they must not be given first place as factors of this “greatness” which we have been discussing. The essential requirement is that the dramatic hero be free to express himself in action, that he be given scope first to develop and then to express his individuality; and material power, social and political eminence are valuable only because they furnish these things, and only when they do so. What is required lor great drama is not great political or religious or social issues as such, but the enlargement of soul and stress of passion that sometimes accompanies great issues. What is needed for the tragic hero is not the crowned head, but the royal nature. “Royal” by a figure only, for such a nature is not now necessarily found among monarchs; and kings, once singularly fit subjects for dramatic treatment, are becoming singularly unfit, The monarch, bound and shackled by constitutal provisions, loses his personality, though in his private capacity he may still keep his freedom. The very eminence that once gave scope to his individuality now tends to repress it, and, private individuality and official greatness being thus dissevered, the special dramatic meaning of this greatness is gone; there is no longer the identity expressed in the significant title, “Oedipus, King.”

On the other hand, this freedom and scope for individuality, no longer the concomitant of royalty as such, is in modern times often found in the status of the so-called “private” man. The “royal” nature that is developed by power and opportunity, and which in turn uses power and opportunity for its self-expression, may be found in a man whose eminence is social or political; it is even conceivable that a great tragic hero may be found in one who has no apparent “eminence” of any kind. Such a one, it may be said, is Beatrice Cenci, but the case is not clear enough to prove the point. Certainly our modern stage-drama, with its love of “middle-class” subjects, has not yet produced anything really great. On the other hand, it is significant that the greatest classic dramas – those of Shakespeare and of Sophocles, those of Schiller, Euripides, Corneille – all conform to this seemingly superficial rule of Aristotle, as do the greatest English dramas of this century, those of Shelley, of Tennyson, of Browning, and of Swinburne. The German “familiendrama” and the French society drama lack this element of greatness, or where they possess it they too will be found to be in conformity.

There is another consideration which might have motived Aristotle’s remark, though it probably did not do so. Dramatic action is not merely action as seen in the outer event, but action viewed in relation to its source in passionate emotion and in relation to its reactionary emotional effect. It is therefore necessary that we understand the spiritual states of the agent, and this is in the main brought about only through his own words. For the medium of the drama is self-expression by the actors, not description by the writer, and self-expression principally in words. But such power of self-expression implies in the agent a large degree of culture of a certain kind, as well as a certain bent of character; in general, men must reach rather a high level, intellectually, before they become sufficiently conscious of their own spiritual states to express them.

In the modern drama, owing to the increased complexity and subtlety of the dramatic motiving, it is increasingly important that we understand the thought as well as the acts of the persons involved. Consider what the play of Hamlet would be if its hero were not endowed with the most marvellous power of self-expression, counterbalancing his power of self-repression. Our appreciation of the play depends upon our understanding of the relation between his apparently meaningless acts and his spiritual states, which are deeply significant; and it is because, whether intentionally or not on the author’s part, Hamlet does not, after all, adequately express these spiritual states [1] that the drama still remains not perfectly clear in its motiving.

[1 Possibly the reason why he does not is because these spiritual states were not clearly conceived by the author himself. He seems to have been working away from an earlier, traditional Hamlet, toward a new conception of the character, but never to have quite freed himself from the earlier tradition. Cf. Corbin: The Elizabethan Hamlet.]

A very recent attempt to introduce’ the uneducated classes into the drama as its central figures seems only to bear out the principle just developed. Hauptmann, in Die Weber, presents a society of working people degraded by crushing labor and hopeless poverty almost to the level of brutes. The result is not satisfying. There are scenes of keen pathos, there are scenes with tragic lights, but the participants have not sufficient power of self-expression: they need a spokesman. We know they are hungry, sick, dying, and we pity them; but they are incoherent, and their incoherence is none the less baffling because we know that in reproducing it the author is giving us a faithful portrait of actual conditions. The same material might have been used with great effect in another literary form – in the story, for instance, or the novel, for this form would have given the author a chance to interpret his characters to the reader, to speak for them where they cannot speak for themselves. But they are not suitable for dramatic treatment – at least it yet remains to prove them so.

Summing up, then: Aristotle’s generalization from Greek usage is seen to have been borne out by later dramatic writers, but the reasons for its validity must be recognized, or there is danger of a superficial and conventional interpretation. The use of great national issues is right so long as the dramatist does not rely for his great effects upon our knowledge of the great issues involved. It is well that the hero be outwardly great as well as inwardly, – the two things will usually go together, – but the dramatist must not be content to substitute the outward for the inward greatness.

But if this quality of “greatness” does not essentially consist in these things, in what does it essentially consist?

Shelley, in another connection, says:

“The highest moral purpose aimed at in the highest species of the drama is the teaching the human heart, through its sympathies and antipathies, the knowledge of itself.” [1] And an answer to the question just propounded would be, that a drama, which deals truly and – which is the same thing – vitally with the human heart in its struggles with itself and with the outer world, will possess greatness and seriousness. Such an answer may seem utterly hackneyed, but it is, in the end, the only one that can be given. For the artist has to do with phenomena, and in the world of phenomena the human spirit – whatever we may think of it absolutely – is relatively the greatest thing we know. There are ideas metaphysical which bring with them a kind of enlargement of mind technically known in Aesthetic as the feeling of sublimity: such are the conceptions of God as found in the Hebrew religion and in some of the religions of the far East, the conception of the soul, or of a future life. Such ideas as these are found in the writings of Dante and of Milton, and it is occasionally suggested that their writings are for this reason greater than, for example, Shakespeare’s. In reply, we may say that it is at least doubtful whether it is the metaphysics of Milton that give him his greatness, while we may be sure it is not this which gives Dante his. But, even if it were so, Shakespeare’s defence is clear. With metaphysical notions as such the dramatist has nothing to do. His concern is, first and last, with the human spirit, and these ideas concern him, not directly, but only in so far as they appeal to and influence the men and women whom he is portraying. It is not his province to

[1 Preface to the Cenci.]

 “Assert eternal providence
  And justify the ways of God to men,”

but rather to show the ways of men toward God, or whatever stands to them for God, and toward each other. Dante may say:

 “Varamente quant’io del regno santo
  Nella mia mente potei far tesoro,
  Sara ora materia del mio canto.” [1]

[1 Paradiso, XXXIII.]

The dramatist approaches such subjects only indirectly, through his created persons. It is thus that Hamlet gazes out into

 “That undiscovered country from whose bourn
  No traveller returns.”

It is thus that Antigone faces death, firm, but hopeless, in those last words of hers:

“Ah, fount of Dirce, and thou, holy sons of Thebe whose chariots are many; ye, at least, will bear me witness, in what sort, unwept of friends, and by what laws I pass to the rock-closed prison of my strange tomb, ah me unhappy! who have no home on the earth or in the shades, no home with the living or with the dead... Unwept, unfriended, without marriage-song, I am led forth in my sorrow on this journey that can be delayed no more. No longer, hapless one, may I behold yon day-star’s sacred eye; but for my fate no tear is shed, no friend makes moan.” [1]

[1 Antigone, trans. Jebb, pp. 161 ff.]

It is thus that Beatrice looks over the brink, shuddering:

 “My God! can it be possible I have
  To die so suddenly? So young to go
  Under the obscure, cold, rotting, wormy ground!
  To see no more sweet sunshine; hear no more
  Blithe voice of living being; ...
    .   .   .   .   .   .   .   .   .
 “What! O, where am I? Let me not go mad!
  Sweet heaven forgive weak thoughts! If there should be
  No God, no Heaven, no Earth in the void world;
  The wide, gray, lampless, deep, unpeopled world!
  If all things then should be my father’s spirit, ...
    .   .   .   .   .   .   .   .   .
                  ... “Who ever yet returned
  To teach the laws of death’s untrodden realm?
  Unjust, perhaps, as those which drive us now,
  O, whither, whither?” [1]

[1 Shelley: The Cenci, V, 4.]

This is the sublimity of the dramatist. [1] But such passages as these show also, better than any exposition can do, the source of the dramatic σπουδη in the poet’s interpretative portrayal of human souls. We might say that any human soul, so long as it be strong and positive, – that is, truly alive, – might, if deeply viewed, be a “great” subject. He might not possess the kind of qualities that become dramatic; his story might not have the kind of unity necessary in a play; but simply in this one quality of greatness and seriousness he would be fit. The quality is not, of course, confined to drama; hardly, even, to so-called “serious” writing. It is possessed by Dante and Shakespeare and Sophocles, it is true, but it also underlies Rabelais and pervades Cervantes. It marks every line of Browning’s writing, while to take examples somewhat at random – Tennyson seldom shows it, Byron almost never. But while other forms of writing may possess this quality, the serious drama must possess it. There are other sources of greatness and seriousness: a poem may have it by virtue of its sweep and velocity of thought, as in Byron’s Cain; or of its nobility of thought and its majestic sound and rhythm, as in Milton; or by a certain large simplicity, as in Keats’ Hyperion. The serious drama may have all these; it must have the greatness that springs from a wise and vital treatment of human nature.

[1 Cf. infra, pp. 40-42.]

Drama: Its Law and Its Technique Part 1 Ch 2

CHAPTER II – DRAMATIC UNITY

Few sayings have been the occasion of such bitter and long-continued controversy as Aristotle’s remarks on the unity of the drama. For this reason, and because they furnish a convenient point of departure, it may be well to quote his own words:

“Tragedy is an imitation of an action, that is complete, and whole, and of a certain magnitude... A whole is that which has beginning, middle, and end. A beginning is that which does not itself follow anything by causal necessity, but after which something naturally is or comes to be. An end, on the contrary, is that which itself naturally follows some other thing, either by necessity, or in the regular course of events, but has nothing following it. A middle is that which follows something as some other thing follows it. A well-constructed plot, therefore, must neither begin nor end at haphazard, but conform to the type here described.” [Aristotle, Poetics, VII.]

“Unity of plot does not, as some persons think, consist in the unity of the hero. For infinitely various are the incidents in one man’s life, which cannot be reduced to unity; and so, too, there are many actions of one man out of which we cannot make one action... As therefore, in the other imitative arts, the imitation is one, when the object imitated is one, so the plot, being an imitation of an action, must imitate one action and that a whole, the structural union of the parts being such that, if any one of them is displaced or removed, the whole will be disjointed and disturbed.” [Aristotle, Poetics, VIII.]

“Epic poetry agrees with Tragedy in so far as it is an imitation in verse of characters of a higher type... They differ, again, in length: for Tragedy endeavors, as far as possible, to confine itself to a single revolution of the sun, or but slightly to exceed this limit; whereas the Epic action has n limits of time.” [Aristotle, Poetics, V.]

The first two passages quoted, emphasizing the need for what is technically known as “unity of action,” will be seen to have permanent and essential validity. The last passage is evidently a passing generalization made from the usage of Aristotle’s contemporaries. It was, however, taken up by the French of the early sixteenth century and, under the title “unity of time,” exalted to the position of a chief canon in dramatic art. A third requirement, that of “unity of place,” though not even suggested by Aristotle, was taken for granted, partly as a corollary of the unity of time, partly in imitation of Greek and Senecan usage. These three canons, supported by the authority of the French Academy, and, after some resistance, accepted and defended by Corneille, determined the form of French drama until the beginning of this century, when Victor Hugo, in Hernani, broke bounds, and the “Romantic” reaction became powerful. In Germany the drama for a time slavishly followed French models, but the break with the unities came somewhat earlier than in France, and may be taken as dating from Lessing’s notes on dramatic writing, published between 1767 and 1769. In England the period of great drama fell so much earlier than in France or in Germany, that it escaped almost altogether the tyranny of “classic” tradition. To Shakespeare, Aristotle can have been little more than a name, and though Seneca’s tragedies were translated in his lifetime, their influence was only one of the factors which determined the form of the national drama. [1]

[1 For the blending of the Senecan and the national tradition, cf. R. Fischer, Zur Kunstentwicklung der Englischen Tragödie.]

Yet, relatively small as was their influence in our own literature, the “unities” have been too important elsewhere to be passed over in a discussion of the drama. Moreover, the very absurdities into which they led their adherents are instructive as to the true basis of dramatic theory. Nothing, for example, could be more suggestive than the treatise in which Corneille [1] defends The Three Unities, of Action, of Time, and of Place. A few extracts will indicate his position.

[1 P. Corneille, Discours III, Des Trois Unités.]

“The rule regarding the unity of time is based upon this remark of Aristotle, ‘that the tragedy ought to confine the duration of its action within one revolution of the sun, or to try to exceed this but slightly.’ [1] These words have given occasion to this famous controversy, whether they ought to be understood to mean a natural day of twenty-four or an artificial day of twelve... For my part, I find that there are subjects which it is so inconvenient to reduce within so brief a time, that not only would I grant them the entire twenty-four hours, but I would even avail myself of license allowed by the philosopher to exceed this number a little, and would without scruple extend it to thirty.”

[1 Note Corneille’s mistranslation of Aristotle, which really begs the whole question. Compare Butcher’s translation, quoted above.]

In support of the rule he argues thus:

“The dramatic poem is an imitation, or, better, a portrait of the actions of men; and there is no doubt that portraits are the more excellent in proportion as they the more closely resemble their original. The representation [of a drama on stage] lasts two hours, and the verisimilitude would be perfect if the action which it presented did not demand more for its actual occurrence. Let us not, then, fix upon either twelve hours or twenty-four, but let us compress the action of the poem into as brief a space as we possibly can, in order that its representation have the greater verisimilitude and be the more perfect.”

As to unity of place, he admits that the rule is not found either in Horace or in Aristotle, but he nevertheless holds it binding, and characterizes as “un peu licencieuse” the interpretation of it which would allow a single drama to represent such places as a man could go to and return from in a day. He goes on:

“I could wish, in order not to offend the spectator in any way, that what we represent before him in two hours could actually take place in two hours, and that what we make him see, on a stage that is immovable, could confine itself to one room, or one hall, according to choice; but often this is so inconvenient, not to say impossible, that it is necessary, for place as for time, to admit some enlargement of the limits.”

He concludes that in cases of absolute necessity it is sufficient that the action be confined within the walls of a single city. At the close of his treatise, however, the common sense of the practical playwright overcomes for a moment the conventionality never quite genuine of the Academician, and asserts itself in the impatient remark:

“It is easy for the theorists to be rigid; but if they were to give to the public six or a dozen poems of this sort, they would perhaps widen their rules even more than I have done, when they had seen by experience what restraint their precision causes, and how many beautiful things it banishes from our stage.”

Evidently the trouble here arises from a misuse of the word “imitation,” and a misconception of what “truth to nature” really is. Art does not copy nature, it follows and interprets it, and Corneille’s first proposition, about which he says “there is no doubt” – namely, that the more closely the stage presentation copies the actual events the more perfect is the drama – this proposition is false and subversive of good art; if he had followed it consistently, he would not have been the great artist he was.

On the other hand, the practice of “following these rules at a distance” has something to be said for it. Shakespeare’s dramas would have been better if they had not taken quite so much license. The structure of Lear is marred by the too frequent changes of scene, not because these destroy the illusion, but because every such change demands a fresh adjustment of the reader’s mind to the new conditions, and such use of his energies is waste of his energies unless there is some compensating gain. In Antony and Cleopatra we have an illustration of the way in which bad artistic form may almost nullify the effectiveness of the artist’s real perceptions; for the noble scenes scattered through the play do not wholly atone for the sprawling, helter-skelter character of the treatment.

In modern plays the elaborateness of the scenery has taken the place of the “classic” tradition as a check on frequent changes of scene, and, except in plays that are chiefly spectacular, the tendency is to cut down scene-shifting, especially within the act. The greater emphasis, too, on the inner rather than the outer aspects of the dramatic situation [1] may have had something to do with the simplification of setting and compactness of treatment that marks the work of at least some groups of modern dramatists. It may be noted in the plays of the young German writers, Sudermann, Hauptmann, Fulda; it is yet more striking in the dramas of Ibsen, some of which preserve the same scene throughout, while two, Ghosts and John Gabriel Borkman, observe the unity of time in almost Corneille’s strictest interpretation. The same is true of Sudermann Die Heimath, [2] and it is interesting to note that these two plays, which have roused more than common interest on the stage as well as among the reading public, show such conformity to the standards of a past age. But it is also significant that all three of these plays resemble the Greek drama in presenting to us the culminating point of an action that has been going on for years; the plays themselves include little more than would be found in the last act of a Shakespearean drama, and their likeness to the classic form may be taken as a natural result of this essential similarity of theme.

[1 Cf. for an expansion of this, the comparison between Shakespeare and Browning, pp. 129-133.]

[2 Acted by Duse and by Bernhardt under the title Magda.]

The gain in these cases, however, is not due, as Corneille would have said, to the greater accuracy with which the facts can be copied, but to the greater economy of attention made possible by concentration in the treatment and by elimination of distracting features. Ibsen’s Ghosts, which presents the occurrences of a single day in Mrs. Alving’s drawing-room, is not, because of this, a whit more “true” than Shakespeare’s Macbeth, whose action covers at least months and ranges between England and Scotland. Except when they are of importance for other reasons than those Corneille gives, the unities of time and of place may be set aside as non-essential. The dramatist cannot copy his subject, – he ought not to do so, and the extent to which he copies its outer setting cannot be rigidly prescribed to him. Since he must often make us feel, by means of a few phrases, a soul’s long-drawn agonies, why may he not also make us feel, by means of a two hours’ play, a soul’s life-history? Surely, if he can, he may.

But if these requirements concerning time and place were conventional rules imposed upon drama from without, that concerning action is a vitally grounded law, growing out of the very nature of the art-form; and it is characteristic of the directness and truth of Aristotle’s thought that he is not content with a casual mention of this point, as in the matter of the time-limit, but pauses to emphasize and elaborate his idea, – reverts to it now and again to add some further comment from another point of view.

What he means by unity of action he makes very clear. It is organic unity, he explains, not formal or verbal, that he wants, and this is not necessarily attained by making the actions all centre about one man. He hits the point exactly when he says that it is the action chosen, which must be a whole. It must, that is, be such an action as can be adequately set forth, with its “beginning, middle, and end,” during the two hours allotted to the poet, and by the means at his command. This effectually cuts him off from treating certain themes. National issues, for instance, cannot be handled by him, except as they touch upon individual human lives. They may, indeed, have a certain large unity, they are as truly controlled by laws, and as open to philosophic treatment as is the life of a single man, but the drama cannot handle them. Gibbon’s Decline and Fah of the Roman Empire may, by a figure of speech, be called a magnificent drama. It has, on a gigantic scale, complete and organic unity; it has, in the true sense, a beginning, a middle, and an end. It does for the Roman Empire what Shakespeare does for Macbeth – portrays a process of disintegration and ruin, and traces it to its source in contravention of the laws of human life and intercourse. But Gibbon’s subject-matter is outside the dramatist’s realm. He may touch upon it, as Shakespeare does in Julius Caesar, but the centre of interest will be not the state, but the man, as here it is Brutus. Where this is not the case, as in several of Shakespeare’s historical plays, Henry VIII, or Henry V, or King John, the play is in so far imperfect. That even Shakespeare erred thus often is not surprising. Such plays appealed to the patriotism of his audience and ministered to their inherent Teutonic love of incident and spectacle; they were to those times what the plays based on Napoleon’s life have within recent years been to ours. But such productions are not good dramatic art. The play must have, not merely a running story that can be told, but a centre, and a determined line of development. Shelley expressed this when he wrote, in his preface to The Cenci, “Such a story, if told so as to present to the reader all the feelings of those who once acted it, their hopes and fears, their confidences and misgivings, their various interests, passions, and opinions, acting upon and with each other, yet all conspiring to one tremendous end, would be as light to make apparent some of the most dark and secret caverns of the human heart.” It is this “conspiring to one tremendous end” that is the test of the plot and of the characters.

But it is a test that cannot be applied by rule of thumb. Aristotle, indeed, speaks, in his cool, definite way, of “the structural union of the parts being such that if any one of them is displaced or removed, the whole will be disjointed and disturbed.” [1] Such a test can well be applied to the dramas of Sophocles: try to “cut” the Antigone or the Oedipus, either by reducing the number of characters or by removing incidents; it is like hewing away a limb from a living creature. But, with modern plays, it is another matter. It is true the French of the sixteenth century, following a perverted classic tradition, attempted to attain this same kind of unity: their plays have few under-plots, the number of characters is kept as low as possible. But to the Teutonic mind, these productions lack the power that comes of unified complexity, while they have not, on the other hand, the lyric intensity and vitality of the Greek drama. Schopenhauer puts this feeling perhaps over-vigorously, as is his way, but effectively, when he says that the French tragedies “in general observe this [unity] so strictly that the course of the drama is like a geometrical line without breadth. There it is always a case of ‘Only get on! Pensez à votre affaire!’”

[1 Poetics, VIII.]

In the modern French drama, however, as in all English, we have to face the question of episode and subordinate characters – problems which virtually did not exist for Aristotle, since the severely narrow limits of tragedy did not admit of any episode in our sense of the word, and minor characters scarcely appeared. Shakespeare’s dramas, on the contrary, abound in episodes that have little apparent connection with the main plot, many of which could be cut out without “disjointing” or “disturbing” the structure of the play. In actual stage presentation some of these actually are left out, and, unless we sit book in hand, we are not likely to notice the omissions. This is less true of the tragedies, however, and in the greatest of these we shall usually find that many of these seemingly trifling incidents are set there with a purpose, and make toward the main end. “Almost too copiously and with apparent carelessness, the great artist fastens his golden ornaments in all parts of his piece; but he who goes to unclasp them finds them grown iron-fast into the texture of the whole.” [1]

[1 Freytag, Technik des Dramas, p. 45.]

That a given scene may be omitted without leaving the story of the action incomplete is, of course, no indication that such a scene is superfluous, or runs counter to true unity. Many scenes are needed to give shading to character, to supply contrast, or background. Here, again, nothing can be decided by rule, and even about the greatest of the plays we find that opinion differs. The underplot in Lear is, according to one critic, a blemish, since it is “connected but loosely with the main action,” and “retards the movement and needlessly renders the whole more bitter.” Others [1] regard this same underplot as a source of strength, since it furnishes a reflection of the main action and thus heightens the total effect, as the subordinate theme in a symphony may be a reflection or variant of the principal theme, or as the subordinate lines of a picture may follow the lead of the main color masses. It matters less which judgment we finally adopt than the manner in which we arrive at the judgment. The only tribunal of appeal is taste, but it should be taste that has been trained by long and thoughtful familiarity with the best art.

[1 Vide Ulrici: Shakespeare’s Dramatic Art, I, 437 ff.; Brandes: William Shakespeare, II, 135.]

Drama: Its Law and Its Technique: Part 1 Ch 1

PART I – LAW

CHAPTER I – POETIC TRUTH

All art, said Aristotle, is imitation. That he did not mean by this the mere copying or mirroring of facts is sufficiently clear from his remarks about the ideal and philosophic character of poetry: “Tragedy represents men as better than they are,” [1] “It should preserve the type and yet ennoble it.” [2] In the light of such passages, the word “imitation” takes on another significance from that we might at first be inclined to give it, but it is still misleading, and it seems better to substitute the broader term, “poetic truth.” What does this mean, and what does it imply?

[1 Poetics, II.]

[2 Ib., XV.]

All art, and hence all great drama, is in its nature both universal and personal, both general and selective. The painter cannot, for example, paint every leaf of a tree, and if he did so his painting would certainly be more unsatisfactory to us than if he had worked with less minuteness. His art lies in determining which of the impressions into which the infinitely complex total which we call “tree” may be resolved – which of these is to be preserved as essential, which may be rejected. No two artists would ever make quite the same choice, yet each might be, artistically, true to the subject. Each would, if he were a great artist, give us something better than the landscape itself, he would interpret it to us – make it mean more than it had before. Millet once said, in effect, “A flock of sheep must be regarded by the painter, not as a collection of animals, but as one single huge animal, moving on many feet, and it must be so painted.” And it is because Millet himself painted sheep in this way that his work is really art. To take another illustration, there is a certain living artist who has wonderful power in drawing the urchins of London’s streets, conveying, with a few seemingly careless strokes, the very life and movement of the boys. It is said that he first makes a rather detailed drawing of his subject, then goes over his work, eliminating line after line, until he has reduced it, as it were, to its lowest terms, and there remains no line not absolutely necessary. The finished product, with its appearance of carelessness, is really the result of the most careful selection. It is conceivable that such a process should all have been mental, and nothing have appeared on paper but the final result; conceivable, too, that it might be partly or wholly unconscious on the part of the artist; but the process, or something like it, is characteristic of all art, and in proportion as the artist is great will his selective power be true and unerring, never rejecting the significant and retaining the unessential. To this end, however, he needs large and deep knowledge of his subject. Wordsworth said that a simple recital of the facts of a given phenomenon might be at once formally accurate and essentially untrue because it had been made either mechanically or ignorantly, noting the unessential and the significant without discriminating between them. Such discrimination comes with knowledge, which enables us to check our observation of particular instances by a knowledge of the universal, gained through observation of other particular instances.

It will now be evident what was meant by saying that art is in its nature both universal and personal or selective. It becomes the one by means of the other, for the selection will reject the accidental and temporary and retain the essential and permanent. In this selective process the personality of the artist is tested; upon his personality depends the value of his work to others. If it is deep enough and big enough to be in unison with the individuality (if the expression is legitimate) of humanity, he will see in his subject, be it landscape or human soul, the things that all humanity must see when it looks deeply enough, though it may need his quickened vision to point them out. Thus the artist must be at once different from his fellow-man, and like him. “Once in a while an individual Ideal, when expressed, enlightens the world of art, and then we have the artistic genius; he is the prophet who shows to others an ideal field which they at once recognize as effective for themselves, although but for him it would have been unknown to them. To express his own ideal must be the artist’s work.” [1] Of the ideal in this sense Amiel’s remark is true: “The ideal, after all, is truer than the real; for the ideal is the eternal element in perishable things: it is their type, their sum, their raison d’être, their formula in the book pf the Creator, and therefore at once the most exact and the most condensed expression of them.” [2]

[1 H.R. Marshall, Aesthetic Principles, p. 97.]

[2 Amiel, Journal, p. 105.]

The danger in this selective art-process is evident, especially if we note some phases of it in painting. The extremists of the so-called “impressionist” school are simply carrying this process to its farthest issue. They reproduce of a landscape only a single aspect. All its possibilities of suggestion, its complexity and shading, are swept away to make room for the artist’s single impression. The result is rather remarkable. If one happens to approach such a picture from the right direction, with exactly the right light, and in a peculiarly receptive mood, one may receive from it an impression startlingly vivid. If, on the other hand, these conditions are not fulfilled, the picture may be absolutely meaningless to us. The reason is plain enough. The artist has so narrowed his presentation of impressions that it appeals to but few besides himself – it has become personal past the point of contact with others.

The same thing occurs in literature, though it is not so easily demonstrable. Schopenhauer is a case of the too narrowly selective, the viciously personal. He attempts satire, let us say; what results? Often enough, it is not satire, but invective, more or less hysterical. He is giving us things as they appear to him, but they appear to him as they do not appear to a sane man, and his work becomes interesting, not as art, but as pathology. If one would see the difference between satire and anger, that is, between legitimate and illegitimate personality, compare him with Juvenal or Swift at their best, or compare the fourth part of Gulliver’s Travels with the first three parts.

It is in finding the mean between this personal narrowness that is too selective, and the photographic impersonality that is not selective at all, that the individuality of the artist, his training and his ideals, are tested. It is this that determines how much his work shall possess of what we may call poetic, or artistic, truth. The difference between such truth and the truth of philosophy is not so much in the final result as in the means employed to reach it. The philosopher seeks to discover the essential and universal, and to state it in terms of the universal. The artist seeks to state it in terms of the particular. If he wishes to present the contrast between the misguided human heart, preoccupied with its gloomy or ghastly criminal purposes, and the sane and kindly standards of the world of freer men, the philosopher will state this in terms of universal application; the poet may symbolize it by the rough and sudden knocking at a castle gate, and the drowsy murmurs of a sleepy porter.

Such a selective process is forced upon the dramatist, also, by the practical conditions of his problem. A play must, when acted, not exceed three hours, but this is an extreme estimate, and includes the time for scene-shifting and other waits; the business of the play itself ought not to use more than two-thirds of this time. He has, then, two hours in which to present his action, with its causes and results. Obviously, there are in real life few cases where such an action occupies so short a time; it is more apt to stretch over months or years, and its links are “the little, nameless, unremembered acts” of our daily life. The artist cannot possibly reproduce all these, and he must, therefore, be in a sense “untrue” to his model. [1] Yet, if he could reproduce them, he would not. For life, nature, in itself, as distinguished from nature as seen by us, is unemphatic. Its so-called contrasts, its humor, its varying emphasis, its “meaning,” have their existence, not in the things themselves, but in the mind of the observer. It is, therefore, the artist’s part to supply these, to mould his material, impressing upon it the stamp of his mind, and thus giving it emphasis, proportion, perspective, – which brings us back again to the selective process. Out of the infinite series of occurrences he chooses such links as seem to him most important, or such as may be made to symbolize more than themselves. These critical moments he emphasizes, the rest he lets go, trusting that from what we see we will infer what we do not see. [2]

[1 Cf. infra, pp. 14-16.]

[2 Cf. the discussion of “the unities” in the following chapter, especially pp. 14-19.]

Take Macbeth. The dramatist must present to us the moral ruin, – the spiritual disintegration of a man, with its inner causes. What does he do? He selects his moments, presents these, and lets them stand for all that goes between. We first hear of our hero as a high-minded and courageous soldier. Then we see him, fresh from victory, receive the first suggestion of greater honors to be won; we see how the idea takes hold of him, and we suspect that one so easily touched must have been less sound at heart than we and others had supposed. What goes on in his mind immediately after this we are not told, but after the scenes with Lady Macbeth, we can look back and imagine. That is, we find ourselves responding to the poet’s demand, we are become co-workers with him. After the murder, again, we get no insight into Macbeth’s inner life until after he has been made king. Then comes the banquet-scene, which, brief as it is, throws a blaze of light backward over the interval. We recognize with perfect certitude the disintegration that has been going on in a spirit that we now see to have been never really strong, either for good or evil. And now our mind can go forward without teaching, we shall expect from the harassed king no firmness of touch, we know his spirit is fevered, that he is the slave of his past. For Lady Macbeth we are given no clews through the course of the play until, at the end, we are allowed, for one brief glimpse, to see her off her guard, when her will of steel is relaxed in delirious sleep. But those few lurid moments reveal to us a whole life-history, and it is enough.

If one would realize the tremendous compression of the play, and get the full significance of its method, let him note how another artist has treated a similar theme. Dostoiefsky, in Crime and Punishment, gives us the history of a few days in a young man’s life, during which he commits a crime, and afterwards, hovering on the verge of madness, undergoes spiritual tortures of the most exquisite kind. His mental processes are given almost from minute to minute, not an hour is unaccounted for. The effect of the whole is, it is true, tremendous; but it is not the kind of effect that art ought to produce, it is not the purified “pity and fear” which makes a subject beautiful in art which is merely terrible in nature. The writer certainly possessed such knowledge of the human soul as is given to few; had he possessed also the power to wield this knowledge, his book would have been one of the grandest art-productions to which a man ever gave being. But one feels that he is not master of his inspiration, he is mastered by it, and the book has upon it the taint of madness from which the author, if we may trust report, was not wholly free. And thus it happens, that while Shakespeare had probably a less profound understanding than Dostoiefsky of the inner life of a sin-darkened soul, we feel that his drama is a great artistic creation, whereas of Dostoiefsky’s story we feel that it might have been this, but is not.

The discussion has led us to the verge of that never-dying controversy concerning the merits of the realistic and the idealistic in art. To enter upon it would carry us beyond the limits of our subject. Be it suggested, however, that the antithesis between the two terms is not absolute and fixed, for all true art is, as we have seen, ideal, and all true art is based in reality. The difference between the two schools is quantitative, it is a difference in the proportionate emphasis they lay upon these two aspects of art, and their divergence should never be so great as to lead them, the one beyond the limits of art into the photographic, the other beyond the limits of art into the over narrowly personal.