I
THAT psychologist who, writing on the problems of dramatic
art, called his brochure "The Dispute over Tragedy," gave
the right name to a singular situation. Of all the riddles
of aesthetic experi8ence, none has been so early propounded,
so indefatigably attempted, so variously and unsatisfactorily
solved, as this. What is dramatic? What constitutes a
tragedy? How can we take pleasure in painful experiences?
These questions are like Banquo's ghost, and will not down.
The ingenious Bernays has said that it was all the fault of
Aristotle. The last phrase of the famous definition in the
"Poetics," which should relate the nature, end, and aim of
tragedy, is left, in his works as we have them, probably
through the suppression or loss of context, without elucidating
commentary. And the writers on tragedy have ever since so
striven to guess his meaning, and to make their answers square
with contemporary drama, that they have given comparatively
slight attention to the immediate, unbiased investigation of
the phenomenon itself. Aristotle's definition is as follows:<1>
"Tragedy, then, is an imitation of an action that is serious,
complete, and of a certain magnitude; in language embellished
with each kind of artistic ornament, the several kinds being
found in separate parts of the play: in the form of action,
not of narrative; through pity and fear effecting the proper
purgation of these emotions." In what follows, he takes up
and explains this definition, phrase by phrase, until the very
last. What is meant by the Purgation (Katharsis) through pity
and fear? It is at least what tragedy "effects," and is thus
evidently the function of tragedy. But a thing is determined,
constructed, judged, according to its function; the function
is, so to speak, its genetic formula. With a clear view of
that, the rest of the definition could conceivably have been
constructed without further explanation; without it, the key
to the whole fails. "Purgation of these emotions;" did it
mean purification of the emotions, or purgation of the soul
FROM the emotions? And what emotions? Pity and fear, or
"these and suchlike," thus including all emotions that tragedy
could bring to expression?
<1> S.H. Butcher, _Aristotle's Theory of Poetry and Fine Art_,
1895.
Our knowledge of the severely moral bent of the explicit art
criticism of the Greeks has inclined many to accept the first
interpretation; and modern interests impel in the same direction.
It is natural to think of the generally elevating and softening
effects of great art as a kind of moral clarifying, and the
question how this should be effected just by pity and fear was
not pressed. So Lessing in the "Hamburgische Dramaturgie" takes
Katharsis as the conversion of the emotions in general into
virtuous dispositions.
Before we ask ourselves seriously how far this represents our
experience of the drama, we must question its fidelity to the
thought of Aristotle; and that question seems to have received
a final answer in the exhaustive discussion of Bernays.<1>
Without going into his arguments, suffice it to say that
Aristotle, scientist and physician's son as he was, had in
mind in using this striking metaphor of the Katharsis of the
emotions, a perfectly definite procedure, familiar in the
treatment, by exciting music, of persons overcome by the ecstasy
or "enthusiasm" characteristic of certain religious rites.
Bernays quotes Milton's preface to "Samson Agonistes:" "Tragedy
is said by Aristotle to be of power, by raising pity and fear,
or terror, to purge the mind of those and such like passions;
that is, to temper and reduce them to just measure with a kind
of delight, stirred by reading or seeing those passions well
imitated. Nor is Nature wanting in her own effects to make
good his assertion; for so in physic, things of melancholic
hue and quality are used against melancholy, sour against
sour, salt to remove salt humours," adding "the homoeopathic
comparison shows how near he was to the correct notion."
Bernays concludes that by Katharsis is denoted the "alleviating discharge" of the emotions themselves. In other words, pity
and fear are bad, and it is a good thing to get rid of them
in a harmless way, as it is better to be vaccinated than to
have small pox.
<1> _Zwei adhandlungen uber d. Aristotelische Theories d.
Drama_, 1880.
Now this alleviating discharge is pleasurable (meth hedones),
and the pleasure seems, from allied passages, to arise not in
the accomplished relief from oppression, but in the process
itself. This becomes intelligible from the point of view of
Aristotle's definition of pleasure as an ecstatic condition of
the soul. For every emotion contains, according to Aristotle,
be it ever so painful, an ecstatic degree would effect, at the
same time with an alleviating discharge, a pleasure also. Pity
and fear are aroused to be allayed, and to give pleasure in the
arousing and the relief.
Such, approximately, is Aristotle's view of the Tragic Emotion,
or Katharsis. Is it also our own? To clear the field for this
inquiry, it will be well first of all to insist on a distinction
which is mostly discounted in significance because taken for
granted. We speak o Aristotle's Katharsis as the Tragic Emotion,
forgetting that to-day Tragedy and the Tragic are no longer
identical. Aristotle conceives himself to be dealing with the
peculiar emotion aroused by a certain dramatic form, the name
of which ha nothing to do with its content. For Tragedy is
literally goat-song, perhaps from the goat-skins worn by the
first performers of tragedy disguised as satyrs. Since then
we have borrowed the name of that dramatic form to apply to
events which have the same type or issue as in that form. In
popular speech to-day the word tragic attaches itself rather
to the catastrophe than to the struggle, and therefore, I cannot
but think, modern discussion of "the tragic" is wrong in
attempting to combine the Aristotelian and the modern shades
of meaning, and to embody them both in a single definition.
Aristotle is dealing with the whole effect of the dramatic
representation of what we should call a tragic occurrence. It
is really the theory of the dramatic experience and not of the
tragic, in our sense, which occupies him. Therefore, as I say,
we must not assume, with many modern critics, than an analysis
of the tragic in experience will solve the problem of the
Katharsis. Our "tragic event," it is true, is of the kind
which dramatically treated helped to bring about this peculiar
effect. But the question of Aristotle and our problem of
Katharsis is the problem of the emotion aroused by the Tragic
Drama. What, then, is the nature of dramatic emotion?