This statement will be more convincing when illustrated with examples
drawn from various manifestations of the tragic spirit--in narrative
poetry and the novel as well as in the drama.
I have emphasised the effect of science; and at first thought it might
seem that the great romantics of a century ago, who preceded the
scientific disillusionment, still kept the heroic tradition alive. It
is true that they inherited the tradition, but in their hands it became
not heroism but heroics. The romantic tendency was to seek thrills
rather than truth, and to draw less from human nature than from a
literary fashion.
_Hernani_ and _Ruy Blas_, for example, are highly effective
constructions of clap-trap, to which Hugo’s beautiful and rhetorical
verse gives a semblance of significance. But they can be taken
seriously only by abandoning the intelligence. To-day they seem no more
tragic than Dumas _père_ or the _mélodrames_ of the Boulevards from
which Hugo learned his technic. As melodrama they are, to be sure,
still entertaining.
Such romantic literature of escape did not of course decrease in
popularity with the development of science, but it distinctly lost
literary prestige. After the fifties and sixties the romantic who would
be taken seriously had to cope with scepticism and disillusionment.
Thus Rostand, writing _Cyrano de Bergerac_, was careful to preserve the
smile of sophistication; he delicately played with pathos, and even
flirted with comedy. We can take the extravagances of the drama half
in the spirit of play and enjoy them as a fairy tale. Its heroism is
the heroism of fancy, not of life. It is in a similar spirit that we
enjoy the thrillers and detective tales of to-day. We seek them for
recreation only; and it is difficult to imagine that such romance can
ever again be thought of as seriously tragic.
The romantic writer, however, can scarcely be expected to be content
with the rôle of popular entertainer. Though for the past fifty years
on the defensive, he has persisted in attempting the exaltation of
tragic art. Maeterlinck, for example, sought to reconcile pessimism
with romance by developing a fatalistic “static drama” and throwing
over it a Pre-Raphaelite mist of romantic symbolism. With him a symbol
became less a visible sign of another object than a stimulant to
emotional intoxication; and if we look at the early plays with clear
heads we see that they are rooted in a determinism fatal to the heroic
tradition. Later Maeterlinck grew more optimistic, but in _Monna
Vanna_, which was inspired by Browning, we get exaltation of passion
rather than will.
Whereas Maeterlinck tried to preserve romantic values, if not heroism,
by reconciling them with science, the great Russians, Tolstoi and
Dostoevski, evaded scientific pessimism by escape into a romanticised
Christianity. The result was no less fatal to heroism. As they saw it,
the Christian paradox was that the worst persons achieve the greatest
regeneration; and they presented it with extreme violence. Thus in
Tolstoi’s _The Power of Darkness_ the leading character is not only
a drunkard, a lecher, and a murderer of his own child, but he is
hopelessly craven, stupid, and weak. Yet he wins salvation by public
confession. Such a conversion seems more emotional than religious,
since it is the result of no discipline of the will. But apart from
such questions it would appear obvious that such a play as this is
poles apart from heroic tragedy. It is Tolstoi’s sentimentalised
conception of Christian poetic justice which is exalted.
The exaltation which the romanticist failed to achieve, the scientific
naturalist did not even attempt. Ibsen, apart from his great intrinsic
importance, is interesting because he shows the transition from the
one mode to the other. His early plays were modelled after Scribe and
Schiller; and use of the sagas links him with the heroic tradition.
Though sceptically, he exalted the will and prophesied the superman.
But his mature work shows the effect of science: men are portrayed
more as victims than shapers of events, and responsibility is shifted
from the individual to society. His transition from romanticism to
scientific naturalism was made easy by the fact that romanticism had
already identified man with nature. Disillusion concerning the latter
brought about degradation of the former.
Though the increasing use of symbolism gives Ibsen’s later work a
romantic tone, the plays are built on studies of mental abnormalities
which seem almost intended to demonstrate the non-existence of heroism.
The fall of the master builder is indeed a symbol of the falsity of
what Shaw calls “ideals.” But Ibsen’s anti-heroic tendency is seen
perhaps most forcefully in the famous tragedy of his middle period.
In _Ghosts_ the formal resemblances to Greek tragedy and the element of
human error obscure the essential differences. The animus vitalising
the action is the attack upon a false code of morals--or “ideals”--of
which the heroine is the victim. And, as is proper in a naturalist
tragedy, the _Spirocheta pallida_ is made the _deus ex machina_. The
emotional effect, furthermore, is not elevation but horror. We can
admire the author for honesty and daring, but not the characters. The
best of them, Mrs. Alving, is admirable only in intention, and false to
her convictions, as the author makes a point of showing. She is at the
curtain so far from a “spiritual victory” that there remains for her a
dilemma which is probably the cruelest in dramatic literature: killing
her own son or letting him live an idiot.
The contrast between this play and, let us say, _Hamlet_ is plain when
we compare Oswald’s cry, “The sun--the sun,” and the final speech of
Fortinbras:
Bear Hamlet, like a soldier, to the stage;
For he was likely, had he been put on,
To have prov’d most royally; and for his passage,
The soldiers’ music and the rites of war
Speak loudly for him.
The former is the bitter irony of disillusion, the very mockery of the
romantic cliché, “Then came the dawn.” The latter ends the play with
eloquent praise.[39]