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.
