The Teaching of Tragedy.
No characters appeal more powerfully to the imagination than those
impressive figures about whom the literature of tragedy
moves,--figures associated with the greatest passions and the most
appalling sorrows. The well-balanced man, who rises step by step
through discipline and work to the highest place of influence and
power, is applauded and admired; but the heart of the world goes out
to those who, like OEdipus, are overmatched by a fate which pursues
with relentless step, or, like Hamlet, are overweighted with tasks too
heavy or too terrible for them. Agamemnon, OEdipus, Orestes, Hamlet,
Lear, Père Goriot, are supreme figures in that world of the
imagination in which the poets have endeavoured both to reflect and to
interpret the world as men see it and act in it.
The essence of tragedy is the collision between the individual will,
impulse, or action, and society in some form of its organisation, or
those unwritten laws of life which we call the laws of God. The tragic
character is always a lawbreaker, but not always a criminal; he is,
indeed, often the servant of a new idea which sets him, as in the case
of Giordano Bruno, in opposition to an established order of knowledge;
he is sometimes, as in the case of Socrates, a teacher of truths which
make him a menace to lower conceptions of citizenship and narrower
ideas of personal life; or he is, as in the case of Othello and Paolo,
the victim of passions which overpower the will and throw the whole
life out of relation to its moral and social environment. The interest
with which the tragic character is always invested is due not only to
the exceptional experience in which the tragic situation always
culminates, but also to the self-surrender which precedes the penalty
and the expiation.
There is a fallacy at the bottom of the admiration we feel when a rich
nature throws restraint of any kind to the winds and gives itself up
wholly to some impulse or passion,--the fallacy of supposing that by a
violent break with existing conditions freedom can be secured; for the
world loves freedom, even when it is too slothful or too cowardly to
pay the price which it exacts. That admiration arises, however, from a
sound instinct,--the instinct which makes us love both power and
self-sacrifice, even when the first is ill-directed and the second
wasted. The vast majority of men are content to do their work quietly
and in obscurity, with no disclosure of originality, freshness, or
force; they obey law, conform to custom, respect the conventionalities
of their age; they appear to be lacking in representative quality;
they are, apparently, the faithful and uninteresting drudges of
society. There are, it is true, a host of commonplace persons, in
every generation, who perform uninteresting tasks in a mechanical
spirit; but it must not be inferred that a man is either craven or
cowardly because he does not break from the circle in which he finds
himself and make a bold and picturesque rush for freedom; it may be
that freedom is to be won for him in the silent and faithful doing of
the work which lies next him; it is certain that the highest power and
the noblest freedom are secured, not by the submission which fears to
fight, but by that which accepts the discipline for the sake of the
mastery which is conditioned upon it.
There are, however, conditions which no man can control, and which are
in their nature essentially tragic; and men and women who are involved
in these conditions cannot elude a fate for which they are not
responsible and from which they cannot escape. This was true of many
of the greatest characters in classical tragedy, and it is true also
of many of the characters in modern tragedy. The world looks with
bated breath on a struggle of the noblest heroism, in which men and
women, matched against overwhelming social forces, bear their part
with sublime and unfaltering courage, and by the completeness of their
self-surrender assert their sovereignty even in the hour when disaster
seems to crush and destroy them. To these striking figures, isolated
by the greatness of their fate, the heart of the world has always gone
out as to the noblest of its children. Solitary in the possession of
some new conception of duty or of truth, separated from the mass of
their fellows by that lack of sympathy which springs from imperfect
comprehension of higher aims or deeper insight, these sublime
strugglers against ignorance, prejudice, caste, and power, become the
heroes and martyrs of the race; they announce the advent of new
conceptions of social order and individual rights; they incarnate the
imperishable soul of humanity in its long and terrible endeavour to
bring the institutions and the ideas of men into harmony with a higher
order of life.
The tragic element has, therefore, many aspects,--sometimes lawless
and destructive, sometimes self-sacrificing and instructive; but its
illustration in literature in any form is not only profoundly
interesting, but profoundly instructive as well. In no other literary
form is the stuff of which life is made wrought into such commanding
figures; in no other form are the deeper possibilities of life brought
into such clear view; in no other form are the fundamental laws of
life disclosed in a light at once so searching and so beautiful in its
revealing power. If all the histories were lost and all the ethical
discussions forgotten, the moral quality of life and the tremendous
significance of character would find adequate illustration in the
great tragedies. They lay bare the very heart of man under all
historic conditions; they make us aware of the range of his
experiences; they uncover the depths by which he is surrounded. They
enable us to see, in lightning flashes, the undiscovered territory
which incloses the little island on which we live; they light up the
mysterious background of invisible forces against which we play our
parts and work out our destiny.
To the student of literature, who strives not only to enjoy but to
comprehend, tragedy brings all the materials for a deep and genuine
education. Instead of a philosophical or ethical statement of
principles, it offers living illustration of ethical law as revealed
in the greatest deeds and the most heroic experiences; it discloses
the secret of the age which created it,--for in no other literary form
are the fundamental conceptions of a period so deeply involved or so
clearly set forth. The very springs of Greek character are uncovered
in the Greek tragedies; and the tremendous forces liberated by the
Renaissance are nowhere else so strikingly brought to light as in that
group of tragedies which were produced in so many countries, by so
many men, at the close of that momentous epoch. When literature runs
mainly to the tragic form, it may be assumed that the spiritual force
of the race has expressed itself afresh, and that a race, or a group
of races, has passed through one of those searching experiences which
bring men again face to face with the facts of life; for the
production of tragedy involves thought of such depth, insight of such
clearness, and imaginative power of such quality and range that it is
possible, on a great scale, only when the springs of passion and
action have been profoundly stirred. The appearance of tragedy marks,
therefore, those moments when men manifest, without calculation or
restraint, all the power that is in them; and into no other literary
form is the vital force poured so lavishly. It is the instinctive
recognition of this unveiling of the soul of man which gives the
tragedy such impressiveness even when it is haltingly represented on
the stage, and which subdues the imagination to its mood when the
solitary reader comes under its spell. The life of the race is sacred
in those great passages which record its sufferings; and nothing makes
us so aware of our unity with our kind in all times and under all
circumstances as the community of suffering in which, actively or
passively, all men share.
In the tragedy the student of literature is brought into the most
intimate relation with his race in those moments when its deepest
experiences are laid bare; he enters into its life when that life is
passing through its most momentous passages; he is present in those
hidden places where it confesses its highest hopes, reveals its most
terrible passions, suffers its most appalling punishments, and passes
on, through anguish and sacrifice, to its new day of thought and
achievement.