Robortelli (1548), however, ascribes a more æsthetic function to tragedy. By the representation of sad and atrocious deeds, tragedy produces terror and commiseration in the spectator's mind. The exercise of terror and commiseration purges the mind of these very passions; for the spectator, seeing things performed which are very similar to the actual facts of life, becomes accustomed to sorrow and pity, and these emotions are gradually diminished.[152] Moreover, by seeing the sufferings of others, men sorrow less at their own, recognizing such things as common to human nature. Robortelli's conception of the function of tragedy is, therefore, not an ethical one; the effect of tragedy is understood primarily as diminishing pity and fear in our minds by accustoming us to the sight of deeds that produce these emotions. A similar interpretation of the katharsis is given by Vettori (1560) and Castelvetro (1570).[153] The latter compares the process of purgation with the emotions which are excited by a pestilence. At first the infected populace is crazed by excitement, but gradually becomes accustomed to the sight of the disease, and the emotions of the people are thus tempered and allayed.
A somewhat different conception of katharsis is that of Maggi. According to him, we are to understand by purgation the liberation through pity and fear of passions similar to these, but not pity and fear themselves; for Maggi cannot understand how tragedy, which induces pity and fear in the hearer, should at the same time remove these perturbations.[154] Moreover, pity and fear are useful emotions, while such passions as avarice, lust, anger, are certainly not. In another place, Maggi, relying on citations from Plato, Aristotle, and Alexander of Aphrodisias, explains the pleasure we receive from tragedy, by pointing out that we feel sorrow by reason of the human heart within us, which is carried out of itself by the sight of misery; while we feel pleasure because it is human and natural to feel pity. Pleasure and pain are thus fundamentally the same.[155] Varchi[156] is at one with Maggi in interpreting the katharsis as a purgation, not of pity and fear themselves, but of emotions similar to them.
For Scaliger (1561) the aim of tragedy, like that of all poetry, is a purely ethical one. It is not enough to move the spectators to admiration and dismay, as some critics say Æschylus does; it is also the poet's function to teach, to move, and to delight. The poet teaches character through actions, in order that we should embrace and imitate the good, and abstain from the bad. The joy of evil men is turned in tragedy to bitterness, and the sorrow of good men to joy.[157] Scaliger is here following the extreme view of poetic justice which we have found expressed in so many of the Renaissance writers. In the last century, Dr. Johnson, in censuring Shakespeare for the tragic fate meted out to Cordelia and other blameless characters, showed himself an inheritor of this Renaissance tradition, just as we shall see that Lessing was in other matters. For Scaliger the moral aim of the drama is attained both indirectly, by the representation of wickedness ultimately punished and virtue ultimately rewarded, and more directly by the enunciation of moral precepts throughout the play. With the Senecan model before him, such precepts (sententiæ) became the very props of tragedy,—sunt enim quasi columnæ aut pilæ quædam universæ fabricæ illius,—and so they remained in modern classical tragedy. Minturno points out that these sententiæ are to be used most in tragedy and least in epic poetry.[158]
Minturno also follows Scaliger in conceiving that the purpose of tragedy is to teach, to delight, and to move. It teaches by setting before us an example of the life and manners of superior men, who by reason of human error have fallen into extreme unhappiness. It delights us by the beauty of its verse, its diction, its song, and the like. Lastly, it moves us to wonder, by terrifying us and exciting our pity, thus purging our minds of such matters. This process of purgation is likened by Minturno to the method of a physician: "As a physician eradicates, by means of poisonous medicine, the perfervid poison of disease which affects the body, so tragedy purges the mind of its impetuous perturbations by the force of these emotions beautifully expressed in verse."[159]
According to this interpretation of the katharsis, tragedy is a mode of homœopathic treatment, effecting the cure of one emotion by means of a similar one; and we find Milton, in the preface to Samson Agonistes, explaining the katharsis in much the same manner:—
"Tragedy, as it was anciently composed, hath been ever held the gravest, moralest, and most profitable of all other poems; therefore 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 up 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."
This passage has been regarded by Twining, Bernays, and other modern scholars as a remarkable indication of Milton's scholarship and critical insight;[160] but after all, it need hardly be said, he was merely following the interpretation of the Italian commentators on the Poetics. Their writings he had studied and knew thoroughly, had imbibed all the critical ideas of the Italian Renaissance, and in the very preface from which we have just quoted, filled as it is with ideas that may be traced back to Italian sources, he acknowledges following "the ancients and Italians," as of great "authority and fame." Like Milton, Minturno conceived of tragedy as having an ethical aim; but both Milton and Minturno clearly perceived that by katharsis Aristotle had reference not to a moral, but to an emotional, effect.
One of the most interesting discussions on the meaning of the katharsis is to be found in a letter of Sperone Speroni[161] written in 1565. His explanation of the passage itself is quite an impossible one, if only on philological grounds; but his argument is very interesting and very modern. He points out that pity and fear may be conceived of as keeping the spirit of men in bondage, and hence it is proper that we should be purged of these emotions. But he insists that Aristotle cannot refer to the complete eradication of pity and fear—a conception which is Stoic rather than Peripatetic, for Aristotle does not require us to free ourselves from emotions, but to regulate them, since in themselves they are not bad.
III. The Characters of Tragedy
Aristotle's conception of the ideal tragic hero is based on the assumption that the function of tragedy is to produce the katharsis, or purgation, of pity and fear,—"pity being felt for a person who, if not wholly innocent, meets with suffering beyond his deserts; fear being awakened when the sufferer is a man of like nature with ourselves."[162] From this it follows that if tragedy represents the fall of an entirely good man from prosperity to adversity, neither pity nor fear is produced, and the result merely shocks and repels us. If an entirely bad man is represented as undergoing a change from distress to prosperity, not only do we feel no pity and no fear, but even the sense of justice is left unsatisfied. If, on the contrary, such a man entirely bad falls from prosperity into adversity and distress, the moral sense is indeed satisfied, but without the tragic emotions of pity and fear. The ideal hero is therefore morally between the two extremes, neither eminently good nor entirely bad, though leaning to the side of goodness; and the misfortune which falls upon him is the result of some great flaw of character or fatal error of conduct.[163]