VII
THE NATURE OF THE EMOTIONS OF THE DRAMA
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?
II
The analogy of Aristotle's conception of the emotion of tragedy with certain modern views is evident. To feel pain is to live intensely, it is said; to be absorbed in great, even though overwhelming, events is to make us realize our own pulsing life. The criticism to be made on this theory is, however, no less simple: it consists merely in denying the fact. It does not give us pleasure to have painful emotions or to see other people's sorrows, in spite of the remains of the "gorille feroce" in us, to which Taine and M. Faguet attribute this imputed pleasure. And if we feel pleasure, excitement, elevation in the representation of the tragic, it must be due to some other element in the experience than the mere self-realization involved in suffering. It is indeed our first impulse to say that the painful quality vanishes when the exciting events are known to be unreal; pity and fear are painful because too intense, and in the drama are just sufficiently moderated. The rejoinder is easy, that pity and fear are never anything, but painful down to the vanishing point. The slight pity for a child's bruised finger is not more pleasurable because less keen; while our feeling, whatever it is, for Ophelia or Gretchen, becomes more pleasurable in proportion to its intensity.
It is clear that the matter is not so simple as Aristotle's psychology would make it. Pity and fear do not in themselves produce pleasure, relief, and repose. These emotions as aroused by tragedy are either not what we know as pity and fear in real life, or the manner of their undergoing brings in an entirely new element, on which Aristotle has not touched. In some way or other the pity and fear of tragedy are not like the pity and fear of real life, and in this distinction lies the whole mystery of the dramatic Katharsis.
But there is an extension of Aristotle's theory, lineally descended from that of Lessing, which professes to elucidate this difference and must be taken account of, inasmuch as it represents the modern popular view. Professor Butcher, in his edition of the "Poetics," concludes, on the basis of a reference in the "Politics" implying that the Katharsis of enthusiasm is not identical with the Katharsis of pity and fear, that the word is to be taken less literally, as an expulsion of the morbid elements in the emotions,—and these he takes to be the selfish elements which cling to them in real life. Thus "the spectator, who is brought face to face with grander sufferings than his own, experiences a sympathetic ecstasy, a listing out of himself. It is precisely in this transport of feeling, which carries a man outside his individual self, that the distinctive tragic pleasure resides. Pity and fear are purged of the impure element which clings to them in life. In the glow of tragic excitement these feelings are so transformed that the net result is a noble emotional satisfaction."
In spite of our feeling that the literal and naive reading of the analogy was probably after all nearer Aristotle's meaning, we may accept the words of Professor Butcher as its modern formulation. They sound, indeed, all but a truism: yet they are seen on examination to glide lightly over some psychological difficulties. Firstly, the step is a long one from the pity and fear felt by the Greek toward or about the actors, to a sharing of their emotion. The one is a definite external relation, limited to two emotions; the other, the "sympathetic ecstasy," opens the door to all conceivable emotions, and needs at least to be justified. But, secondly, even suppose the step taken; suppose the "sympathetic imitation" conceded as a fact: the objections to Aristotle's interpretation are equally applicable to this. Why should this "transport of sympathetic feeling" not take the form of a transport of pain? Why should the net result be "a noble emotional satisfaction?" If pity and fear remain pity and fear, whether selfish or unselfish, it doth not yet appear why they are emotionally satisfactory. The "so transformed" of the passage quoted assumes the point at issue and begs the question. That is, if this transformation of feeling does indeed take place, there is at least nothing in the nature of the situation, as yet explained, to account for it. But explanation there must be. To this, the lost passage on the Katharsis must have been devoted; this, every thorough-going study of the theory of the drama must make an indispensable preliminary. What there is in the nature of tragic art capable of transforming painful to pleasurable emotion must be made clear. Before we can accept Professor Butcher's view of the function of Tragedy, its possibility as a psychological experience must be demonstrated. For the immediately pleasurable aesthetic effect of Tragedy, a certain kind of pity and fear, operating in a special way, are required. It must be thus only in the peculiar character of the emotions aroused that the distinctive nature of the tragic experience consists. What is this peculiar character?
III
A necessary step to the explanation of our pleasure in supposedly painful emotions is to make clear how we can feel any emotion at all in watching what we know to be unreal, and to show how this emotion is sympathetic, that is, imitative, rather than of an objective reference. In brief, why do we feel WITH, rather than toward or about, the actors?
The answer to this question requires a reference to the current theory of emotion. According to modern psychologists, emotion is constituted by the instinctive response to a situation; it is the feeling accompanying very complicated physical reactions, which have their roots in actions once useful in the history of mankind. Thus the familiar "expression" of anger, the flushed face, dilated nostril, clenched fist, are remains or marks of reactions serviceable in mortal combat. But these, the "coarser" bodily changes proper to anger, are accompanied by numberless organic reactions, the "feel" of all of which together is an indispensable element of the emotion of anger. The point to be noted in all this is that these reactions are ACTIONS, called up by something with which we literally HAVE TO DO.
A person involved in real experience does not reproduce the emotions about him, for in real life he must respond to the situation, take an attitude of help, consolation, warning; and the character of these reactions determines for him an emotion of his own. Even though he really do nothing, the multitudinous minor impulses to action going to make up his attitude appreciably interfere with the reproduction of the reactions of the object of his interest. In an exactly opposite way the artificial conditions of the spectator at a play, which reinforce the vivid reproduction of ideas, and check action, stifle those emotions directed toward the players, the objective emotions of which we have spoken. The spectator is completely cut off from all possibilities of influence on events. Between his world and that across the footlights an inexpressible gulf is fixed. He cannot take an "attitude," he can have nothing to do in this galere. Since he may not act, even those beginnings of action which make the basis of emotion are inhibited in him. The spectator at a play experiences much more clearly and sharply than the sympathetic observer; only the proportions of his mental contents are different. This, I say, accounts for the absence of the real pity and fear, which were supposed to be directed toward the persons in the play. But so far as yet appears there is every reason to expect the sympathetic reproduction of the emotions of the persons themselves.
Let us briefly recall the situation. The house is darkened and quiet; all lines converge to the stage, which is brightly lighted, and heightened in visual effect by every device known to art. The onlooker's mind is emptied of its content; all feeling of self is pushed down to its very lowest level. He has before him a situation which he understands through sight and hearing, and in which he follows the action not only by comprehension, but by instinctive imitation. This is the great vehicle of suggestion. We cannot see tears rise without moisture in our own eyes; we reproduce a yawn even against our will; the sudden or the regular movement of a companion we are forced to follow, at least incipiently. Now the expression which we imitate brings up in us to a certain extent the whole complex of ideas and feeling-tones belonging to that expression. Moreover, the more closely we attend to it, the more explicitly do we imitate it, by an evident psychological principle. Thus in the artificially contrived situation of the spectator at a play, he is forced, not only to understand intellectually, but also to FOLLOW, quite literally, the emotional movements of the actors. The process of understanding, raised to the highest pitch, involves by its very nature also reproduction of what is understood. The complex of the ideas and associations of the persons of the play is ideally reproduced. Are not the organic reactions belonging to these set up too?—not directly, in response to a situation in which the spectator may act, but directly, by reproduction of the mental contents of one who may act, the person of the drama. The final answer to this question contains, to my mind, the whole kernel of the dramatic mystery, and the starting-point for an aesthetic theory of tragedy.
IV
Every play contains at least two actors. The suggestion of states of mind does not come from the hero alone, but is given by two persons, or groups of persons, at once. These persons are, normally, in conflict. Othello menaces, Desdemona shrinks; Nora asserts her right, Hilmar his claim; L'Aiglon vaunts his inherited personality, Metternich—holds the candle to the mirror! But what of the spectator? He cannot at once shrink and menace, assert and deny, as the conditions of sympathetic reproduction would seem to demand. Real emotion implies a definite set of reactions of the nature of movements; and two opposed movements cannot take place at the same time. Ideas, however, can dwell together in amity. The spectator has a vivid picture of Othello and Desdemona together; but his reactions have neutralized each other, and his emotions, lacking their organic conditions, are in abeyance.
This is the typical dramatic moment, for it is the one which is alone characteristic of the drama. Only in the simultaneous realization of two opposing forces is the full mutual checking of emotional impulses possible, and it is only in this simultaneous realization that the drama differs from all other forms of art. When the two antagonistic purposes are actually presented to the onlooker in the same moment of time, then alone can be felt the vividness of realization, the tension of conflict, the balance of emotion, the "alleviation" of the true Katharsis!
But what is this? No emotion after all, when the very traditional test of our enjoyment of a play is the amount of feeling it arouses!—when hearts beat, hands clench, tears flow! Emotion there is, it may not be denied; but not the sympathetic emotions of the traditional theory.
What emotion? The mutual checking of impulses in a balance, a tension, a conflict which is yet a bond; and this it is which is the clue to the excitement or exaltation which in the dramatic experience usurps the place of definite feeling. We have met this phenomenon before. Aesthetic emotion in general, we have heard, consists just in the union of a kind of stimulation or enhanced life, with repose; a heightening of the vital energies unaccompanied by any tendency to movement,—in short, that gathering of forces which we connect with action, and which is felt the more because action is checked. Just such a repose through equilibrium of impulses is given by the dramatic conflict. Introspection makes assurance doubly sure. The tense exaltation of the typical aesthetic experience, undirected, unlimited, pure of personal or particular reference, is reproduced in this nameless ecstasy of the tragic drama. The mysterious Katharsis, the emotion of tragedy, is, then, a special type of the unique aesthetic emotion.
And it is the singular peculiar characteristic of the drama— the face to face confrontation of forces—which furnishes these conditions. As we might have foreseen, the peculiar Katharsis, or pleasurable disappearance or alleviation of emotion in tragedy, is based on just those elements in which the drama differs from other forms of art. Confrontation, and not action, as the dramatic principle, is the important deduction from our theory;—is, indeed, but the objective aspect of it.
The view of confrontation as the dramatic principle is confirmed by dramatic literature. We emphasize in our study of Greek plays their simplicity of plot, their absence of intrigue, their sculptural, bas-relief quality. The Greek drama makes of a poem a crisis, says M. Faguet. A tragedy is a well-composed group, a fine contrast, a beautiful effect of imposing symmetry—as in the "Antigone," "on one side civil law in all its blind rigor, on the other moral law in all its splendor." The only element in common with the modern type is found in the conflict of wills. Could such a play as the "Suppliants" of Euripedes find any aesthetic justification, save that it has the one dramatic essential—confrontation, balance of emotions? The very scenes of short speeches, of objurgation or sententious repartee, which cannot but have for us an element of the grotesque, must have been as pleasing as they were to the Greek audience, from the fact that they brought to sharpest vision the confrontation of the two antagonists. The mediaeval drama, which has become popularly known in "Everyman," is nothing but a succession of duels, material or spiritual. It is indeed the two profiles confronting one another, our sympathy balanced, and suspended, as it were, between them, which characterize our recollections of this whole great field. The modern critics and comparers of English and French drama are fond of contrasting the full, rich, even prodigal characterization, rhetorical and lyrical beauty of the Shakespearean drama with the cold, clear, logical, but resistless movement of the French. Yet the contrast is not quite that between characterization and form; the essential form is common to both. In the first place, Elizabethan drama was platform drama—that is, by the testimony of contemporaries, little concerned with anything but the succession of more or less unconnected scenes between two or three persons. And we see clearly that the great dramatic power of "Hamlet," for instance, must lie, not in the movement of a wavering purpose, but in the separate scenes of his struggle, each one wonderfully rich, vivid, balanced, but almost a unit in itself. On the theory that the true dramatic form is logical progress, dramatic—as contrasted with literary—power would have to be denied to "Hamlet." The aesthetic meaning of "Lear" is not in the terrible retribution of pride and self-will, but in the cruel confrontation of father and daughters.
This is no less true of the first great French plays. It is certainly not the resistless movement of the intrigue which makes the "Misanthrope," "Tartufe," the "Precieuses Ridicules," masterpieces of comedy as well as of literature. Their dramatic value lies in their piquancy of confrontation. The tug-of-war between Alceste and Celimene, between Rodrigue and Chimene in "Le Cid," is what we think of as dramatic; and it is this same element which is found as well in the complicated and overflowing English plays. And in modern French drama, for all its "logic," the dominating factor is the "scene a faire,"—what I have called the scene of confrontation. The notoriously successful scene in the English drama of to-day, the duel of Sophy and Lord Quex— tolerably empty of real feeling or significance though it is— becomes successful merely through the consummate handling of the face-to-face element. Only by admitting this aesthetic moment of arrest can we allow dramatic value to such a play as "Les Affaires sont les Affaires"—a truly static drama. The hero of this is, in the words of a reviewer, "essentially the same force in magnitude and direction from the rise to the fall of the curtain. It does not move; it is we who are taken around it so that we may see its various facets. It is not moulded by the successive incidents of the play, but only disclosed by them; sibi constat." Yet we cannot deny to the play dramatic power; and the reason for this is, as I believe, because it does, after all, possess the dramatic essential—not action, but tension.
V
It will be demanded, however, what place there is then for a temporal factor, if the typical dramatic experience depends upon the great scene? It cannot be denied that the drama is a work of art developed in time, like music and poetry. It comes to a climax and a resolution; it evolves its harmonies like the symphony, in irrevocable order. We cannot afford to neglect, in such an aesthetic analysis, what is an undoubted element in dramatic effect, the so-called inevitable march of events. In answer to this objection we may hold that the temporal factor is a corollary of the primary demand for confrontation. It is necessary that the confrontation or conflict should be vividly imagined, with all possible associative reinforcements—that it should be brought up to the turn of the screw, as it were. For this, then, motivation is absolutely necessary. An attitude is only clearly "realized" when it is made to seem inevitable. It takes complete possession of our minds only when it inhibits all other possibilities. At any given scene, the power of a part to reproduce itself in us is measured by the convincing quality given it by motivation, and for this there must be a full body of associations to draw on, to round out and complete understanding. The villain of the play is, for instance, less completely "suggested" to us, because our associations are supposedly less rich for such characters; as a beggar hypnotized and made to feel himself a king has meagre mental equipment for the part. Now, this inner possession can come about only through the compelling force of a long course of preparation. In providing such an accumulation of impulses, none was greater than the younger Dumas—and none had to be greater! To make his audience accept—that is, identify itself with—the action of the hero in "Denise," or the mother's decision in "Les Idees de Mms. Aubray," so subversive of general social feeling, and thereby to experience fully the great dramatic moment in each play, there had to go the effect of innumerable small impulses. And to realize some situations is even beyond the scope of a play's development. It is an acute remark of Mr. G.K. Chesterton's, that many plays nowadays turn on problems of marriage: which subject is one for slow years of adjustment, patience, adaptation, endeavor; while the drama requires quick decisions, bouleversements, etc., and would do wisely to confine itself to fields in which such bouleversements can be made credible. At any rate, motivation is desirable for the dramatic confrontation, and time—the working-out—is an essential condition of motivation. To make the dramatic conflict ever sharper and deeper, until it either melts into harmony, or ceases through the destruction of one element, is the whole duty of the development, and makes it necessary. That development is temporal, is, dramatically, only a device for damming the flood that it may break at last with greater force.
This, too, is an answer to the objection that if confrontation is the dramatic essential, bare opposition, because the clearest confrontation, would be the greatest drama, and the "Suppliants" of Euripedes be indeed an example of it. Bare opposition is never real confrontation in our sense, for that must be an arrest, a mutual antagonism of all impulses of soul and sense. It must possess the whole man. It needs to take in "all thoughts, all passions, all delights," to be complete, and the measure of its completeness is the measure of its aesthetic value.
In the same way, the demand for profound truth and significance in the drama is clearly to be reached from the purely dramatic need. Inner "possession," the condition for our dramatic tension, depends not alone on the cumulation of suggestions— suggestion in its, so to speak, quantitative aspect. The attitude of a character must be necessary in itself: that is, it must be true to the great and general laws of life. If it is fundamentally false, even with the longest and completest preparation, it rings hollow. We cannot completely enter into it. Thus we see that the one central requirement, the dramatic germ, leads to the most far-reaching demands for logic, sanity, and morality in the ideas of a play.
This should not be interpreted as exhausting the aesthetic value of logic and morality in the drama. The drama is a species of literature: and these qualities, apart from the fact that they are necessary to the full dramatic moment, have also an aesthetic effect proper to themselves. Thus the development ha the beauty which lies in a necessary progress; but this beauty is common to the epic, the novel, and the symphony, while the unity given by the confrontation and tension of simultaneous forces belongs to the drama alone. It is therefore development as serving the dramatic end that I have deduced.
Yet we may well recall here the other aspect of the experience. Analogous to the pleasure in rhythm and in music, in which the awaited beat or tone slips, as it were, into a place already prepared for it, with the satisfaction of harmonious nervous adjustment, is the pleasure in an inevitable and irrevocable progress. For it is not felt as inevitable unless the whole crystallization of the situation makes such, and only such, an action or thought necessary at a certain point in the structure, makes it to a certain extent anticipated, and so recognized with acclaim on its appearance. We will an event in anticipating and accepting it; and we realize it as it comes. Nothing more is to be found in the psychological analysis of the will itself—theoretically, the two states are nearly identical. Thus this continual anticipation and "coming true" takes on the feeling-tone of all volition; and so in music, as I have shown at length, and in drama, and to a degree in all forms of literature, we have the illusion of the triumphant will. This is the secret of that creative joy felt by the spectator at a drama, which has been so often noted. It is this illusion of the triumphant will, too, which enters largely into our acceptance of the tragic end. Much has been said, in the "dispute over tragedy," of the so-called "Resignation" of the tragic hero, and of the audience in relation to his fate. But I believe that these writers are wrong in connecting this resignation primarily with a moral attitude. What is foreseen as perfectly inevitable, is sufficiently "accepted" in the psychological sense—that is, vividly imagined and awaited,—to contribute to this illusion of volition. Hence arise, for the catastrophe of drama, that exaltation and stern joy which are indissolubly connected with the experience of will in real life.
VI
We have spoken of the dramatic, and have desired to show that its peculiar aesthetic experience arises out of the tension or balance of emotion in the confrontation of opposing forces. If this is a fruitful theory, it should throw light on the distinction between the different forms of the drama, and on the principal issues of that "Dispute over Tragedy" which is always with us.
The possible results of a meeting of two forces are these. Both forces, or one force, may be destroyed; or, short of destruction, the two may melt into harmony, or one may give way before the other. I think it may be said that these alternatives represent the distinctions of Tragedy and Comedy. When two aims are absolutely irreconcilable, and when the forces tending to them are important,—that is, powerful,—there must be somewhere destruction, and we have tragedy. When they are reconcilable, if they are important, we have serious comedy; when not important, or not envisaged as important, we have light comedy. Thus Tragedy and Comedy are closely related,— more closely than we are prone to think. In the words of the late Professor Everett, in "Poetry, Comedy, and Duty:" "The tragic is, like the comic, simply the incongruous. The great Tragedy of Nature, which is called the Struggle for Existence, results simply from a greater or less incongruousness between any form of life and its surroundings….The comic is found in an incongruous relation considered merely as to its FORM, while the tragic is found in an incongruous relation taken as to its reality." For this word incongruity I would substitute collision or conflict. When there is no way out, we have Tragedy; when there is a way out, we have Comedy. And when things are taken superficially enough, there always is a way out, for we can at least always agree to disagree. In any case, the end of the conflict is a period, repose, unity. This seems to be borne out by immediate introspection. The feelings with which we come from a great tragedy or a great comedy are indeed almost identical. The excitement, tension, sunk into repose, are common to both; the satisfaction with a good ending is strangely paralleled by our resignation to a bad one,— significant of our real indifference to the fact, so long as the Aesthetic Unity is reached.
In George Meredith's wonderful little essay on the Comic Spirit, this view is rather remarkably confirmed. He has defined Comedy as the contrast of the middle way, the way of common sense, with our human vagaries, "Comme un point fixe fait remarquer l'emportement des autres." Comedy, he says, teaches the world to understand what ails it…."Comedy is the fountain of sound sense," and again, "the use of the true comedy is to awaken thoughtful laughter." "Men's future upon earth does not attract it; their honesty and shapeliness in the present does; and whenever they wax out of proportion, overblown, affected, pretentious, bombastical, hypocritical, pedantic, fantastically delicate; whenever it sees them self-deceived or hoodwinked, given to run riot in idolatries, drifting into vanities, congregating in absurdities, planning shortsightedly, plotting dementedly; whenever they are at variance with their professions, and violate the unwritten but perceptible laws binding them in consideration one to another; whenever they offend sound reason, fair justice; are false in humility or moved with conceit, individually or in the bulk—the Spirit overhead will look humorously malign and cast an oblique light on them, followed by volleys of silvery laughter. That is the Comic Spirit." The Comic Spirit is the just common sense, the subconscious wisdom of the ages. There IS a golden mean, the Comic Spirit shows it to us in the light of our flashing laughter at the deviation therefrom. And because there is, even the unreconciled—reconcilable—difference or conflict is not serious. That is why true Comedy seems to find its best field in a developed social life. The incongruities of human nature hurt is they are pressed too deep, because they are irreconcilable; they too quickly edge the tragic gulf. But the incongruities of the conventional life do not hurt when pressed. To change our metaphor, adjustment to the middle way is here so easily credible and possible, that it is the very hunting-ground for the Comic Spirit.
The reputed masterpiece of Moliere shows us Alceste and Celimene in the end still at odds. But light-heartedness and sincerity are not to common sense incompatible, and thus we are rightly led up to the impasse by paths of laughter. Wherever the middle way is divined, there is the possible entrance of the Spirit of Comedy. It is certainly a detriment to the purely Tragic effect of Pinero's greatest play, that the middle way, the possibility of reconciliation, is shadowed forth in the last word,—the cry of the stepdaughter of the Second Mrs. Tanqueray, "If I had only been more merciful!" Dumas fils would never have allowed that. He would have written his play around that thought, and made it indeed a reconciling drama— or he would have suppressed the cry. The end of Romeo and Juliet—date I confess it?—has always hovered for me close to that border which is not sublime. For the hapless lovers missed all for want of a little common sense. There was naught inevitable in their plight. I see the Comic Spirit leaning across to stay the hand of the impetuous Romeo. Why not take a moment's sober thought? she murmurs.
Tragedy ensues when there is no way out. It is not that ruin or death for those in whom these forces are embodied is of the essence of the situation; only that in the complete destruction of a force or purpose when it has been embodied in a strong desperate character, the death of that character is usually involved. There is no solution but to cut the knot. The tragic has been defined as "that quality of experience whereby, in and through some serious collision, followed by fatal catastrophe or inner ruin, something valuable in personality becomes manifest, either as sublime or admirable in the hero, or as triumph of an idea." But "Lear," "Macbeth," "Hamlet," "Oedipus King," "Othello," exist to contravene this view. No, the tragic (in its first sense, in the sense derived from the dramatic form from which it is named) is in the collision itself; it is the profound and, to our vision, the irreconcilable antagonism of different elements in life. And in life we accept it because we must; we transcend it because, as moral beings, we may. The sublime in actual tragic experience is the reaction of the unconquerable Soul. In tragic literature another appears. We are helped in transcending the essential contradictions of life presented to us, because the conditions of literature in "preparing" an event create for us the illusion of volition, the acceptance of fate. And in the tragic drama, to all these elements of the complex experience, there is added the exaltation of the aesthetic "arrest," the tension of confrontations.
The question of the "highest" or "most tragic" form of tragedy seems to have been settled by general agreement. It has been held that the tragic of the justified opposing force is the more full of meaning and importance, for the reason that more interesting and complex feelings are called into play on each side than in the case of the unjustified opposing force. But the definition of the tragic drama we have won seems further to illuminate our undoubted preference for this type. We demand aesthetically all that will make the confrontation, the dramatic tension, more clearly felt; and we cannot realize fully a side which should be unjustified. In such a play as Maeterlinck's "Aglavaine and Selysette" there is no movement, and even the conflict is subterranean; yet, as all the characters are in their way noble, and in their way justified, we find it among the most poignant of his plays. Nay, more, in any situation the more nearly the conflict is shown to be absolutely inevitable, arising out of the very nature of life as we know it,—completely justified, or at least FELT as inevitable on both sides,—the more are we shaken by the distinctive tragic emotion. The conflict of duties to one's self and to the world is the sharpest of tragedies. Luther, as Freytag well shows, is a really tragic figure from the moment when we conceive of the inner connection of his intolerance with all that is good and great in his nature. As the expression of such a conflict of impulses good in themselves, "Magda" is a great tragedy than the "Joy of Living;" "Ghosts" than "Hedda Gabler;" the story of "Francesca Da Rimini" (I do not mean D'Annunzio's play) than "La Citta Morta."
What, then, shall be said of the so-called tragic "Guilt," in which the hero rushes on impiously to his doom? It is clear that this question is closely related to the much-debated "Greatness" of the tragic hero. If there is guilt, there must be also greatness, to impress that side of the canvas on our vision. It is, indeed, almost a quantitative problem. Strength, energy, depth of passion, breadth of vision, power and place, ravish our attention and our unconscious imitation. What is lacking in extensity of associative reproduction must be added in intensity. And, in fact, we find that it is the giants who bear the tragic "Schuld." Hamlet is not guilty; rather "one like ourselves," in Aristotle's phrase, and therefore he need not be great. I agree with Volkelt's view that even the traditional tremendous will of the tragic hero may be dispensed with. No doubt it is most often strength of will which brings out the original conflict. But that conflict once given, as it is given, for example, in "Hamlet," the main point is to increase the weight of each side, which can indeed be done by other elements of greatness. On the other hand, I disagree with Volkelt's reason for thus exempting will, which is, that the contrast feeling of "how great a fall was there" may be given by other qualities in the hero than that of will. As I have urged, it is not the catastrophe which is of the tragic essence, and therefore not for the sake of the catastrophe that we should marshal our elements. The climax of tragedy and of our feeling is in the deadlock of forces, and whatever is not absolutely essential thereto may be done without.