8. In tragedy, as the product of a more cultivated age, these
characteristics appear more strongly than in the primitive epic. The
Homeric poems are still legendary narratives, though narratives
unconsciously transmuted by the highest art. Tragedy, on the contrary,
has no extraneous elements. It implies a conscious effort of the spirit,
made for its own sake, to re-create human life according to spiritual
laws; to transport itself from a world, where chance and appetite seem
hourly to give the lie to its self-assertion, into one where it may work
unimpeded by anything but the antagonism inherent in itself and the
presence of an overruling law. This result is attained simply by the
action of the proper instruments of thought, abstraction and synthesis.
The tragedian presents to us scenes of life, not its continuous flow of
incident. In "Macbeth," for instance, there is an hiatus of some years
between the earlier and later acts;[7] but we are not sensible of the
void; for the passions which lead to the catastrophe are but the
development of those which appear at the beginning, and to the law
against which they struggle "a thousand years are but as yesterday."
Time, however, is but one among many circumstances which the tragedian
ignores. The common facts of life as it is, and always must have been,
the influence of custom, the transition of passion into mechanical
habit, the impossibility of continuous effort, the necessary
arrangements of society, the wants of our animal nature and all that
results from them, these are excluded from view, and so much only of the
material of humanity is retained as can take its form from the action of
the spirit, and become a vehicle of pure passion. But the synthesis
keeps pace with the abstraction, for the tragedian creates not passions
but men. The outer garment, the flesh itself, is stript off from man,
that the spirit may be left to re-clothe itself, according to its proper
impulses and its proper laws. The false distinctions of dress, of
manner, of physiognomy, are obliterated, that the true individuality
which results from the internal modifications of passion may be seen in
clearer outline. These modifications are as infinite and as complex as
the spirit of man itself; and if the characters of the ancient
dramatists, in their broad simplicity, fail to exhibit the finer
lineaments of real life, yet in Shakespeare the variations of pure
passion are as numerous and as subtle as those of the fleshly or
customary mask by which man thinks that he knows his neighbour. The
essential difference lies in the fact that they are variations of the
spiritual, not the animal, man; that they arise from the qualifications
of the spirit by itself, not from its intermixture with matter. It is
this which gives tragedy its power over life. The problem of the
diabolic nature, of the possibility of a "fallen spirit," is not for
man to solve. He may be satisfied with the diagnosis of his own disease,
with the knowledge that it is his littleness, not his greatness, that
separates him from the divine; that not intellectual pride, not
spiritual self-assertion, but the meanness of his ordinary desires, the
degradation of his higher nature to the pursuit of animal ends, keep him
under the curse. From this curse tragedy, in its measure, helps to
relieve him. It "purifies his passions"[8] by extricating them from
their earthly immersion. For an hour, it may be, or a day, it raises him
into a world of absolute ideality, where he may forget his wants and his
vanity, and lose himself in a struggle in which the combatants are the
forces of the spirit, and of which the end is that annihilation in
collision with destiny which is but the blank side of reconciliation
with it. And though his sojourn in this region be short, yet, when he
falls again, the smell of the divine fire has passed upon him, and he
bears about him, for a time at least, among the rank vapours of the
earth, something of the freshness and fragrance of the higher air.