This conception of the tragic hero was the subject of considerable discussion in the Renaissance; in fact, the first instance in Italian criticism of the application of Aristotelian ideas to the theory of tragedy is perhaps to be found in the reference of Daniello (1536) to the tragic hero's fate. Daniello, however, understood Aristotle's meaning very incompletely, for he points out that tragedy, in order to imitate most perfectly the miserable and the terrible, should not introduce just and virtuous men fallen into vice and injustice through the adversity of fortune, for this is more wicked than it is miserable and terrible, nor should evil men, on the contrary, be introduced as changed by prosperity into good and just men.[164] Here Daniello conceives of tragedy as representing the change of a man from vice to virtue, or from virtue to vice, through the medium of prosperity or misfortune. This is a curious misconception of Aristotle's meaning. Aristotle refers, not to the ethical effect of tragedy, but to the effect of the emotions of pity and terror upon the mind of the spectator, although of course he does not wish the catastrophe to shock the moral sense or the sense of justice.
Giraldi Cintio, some years after Daniello, follows Aristotle more closely in the conception of the tragic hero; and he affirms, moreover, that tragedy may end happily or unhappily so long as it inspires pity and terror. Now, Aristotle has expressly stated his disapprobation of the happy ending of tragedy, for in speaking of tragedies with a double thread and a double catastrophe, that is, tragedies in which the good are ultimately rewarded and the bad punished, he shows that such a conclusion is decidedly against the general tragic effect.[165] Scaliger's conception of the moral function of the tragic poet as rewarding virtue and punishing vice is therefore inconsistent with the Aristotelian conception; for, as Scaliger insists that every tragedy should end unhappily, it follows that only the good must survive and only the bad suffer. Another critic of this time, Capriano (1555), points out that the fatal ending of tragedy is due to the inability of certain illustrious men to conduct themselves with prudence; and this is more in keeping with Aristotle's true meaning.[166]
It has been seen that Aristotle regarded a perfectly good man as not fitted to be the ideal hero of tragedy. Minturno, however, asserts that tragedy is grave and illustrious because its characters are illustrious, and that therefore he can see no reason, despite Aristotle, why the lives of perfect men or Christian saints should not be represented on the stage, and why even the life of Christ would not be a fit subject for tragedy.[167] This is, indeed, Corneille's opinion, and in the examen of his Polyeucte he cites Minturno in justification of his own case. As regards the other characters of tragedy, Minturno states a curious distinction between characters fit for tragedy and those fit for comedy.[168] In the first place, he points out that no young girls, with the exception of female slaves, should appear in comedy, for the reason that the women of the people do not appear in public until marriage, and would be sullied by the company of the low characters of comedy, whereas the maidens of tragedy are princesses, accustomed to meet and converse with noblemen from girlhood. Secondly, married women are always represented in comedy as faithful, in tragedy as unfaithful to their husbands, for the reason that comedy concludes with friendship and tranquillity, and unfaithful relations could never end happily, while the love depicted in tragedy serves to bring about the tragic ruin of great houses. Thirdly, in comedy old men are often represented as in love, but never in tragedy, for an amorous old man is conducive to laughter, which comedy aims at producing, but which would be wholly out of keeping with the gravity required in tragedy. These distinctions are of course deduced from the practice of the Latin drama—the tragedies of Seneca on the one hand, and the comedies of Plautus and Terence on the other.
In a certain passage of Aristotle's Poetics there is a formulation of the requirements of character-drawing in the drama.[169] In this passage Aristotle says that the characters must be good; that they must be drawn with propriety, that is, in keeping with the type to which they belong; that they must be true to life, something quite distinct either from goodness or propriety; and that the characters must be self-consistent. This passage gave rise to a curious conception of character in the Renaissance and throughout the period of classicism. According to this, the conception of decorum, it was insisted that every old man should have such and such characteristics, every young man certain others, and so on for the soldier, the merchant, the Florentine or Parisian, and the like. This fixed and formal mode of regarding character was connected with the distinction of rank as the fundamental difference between the characters of tragedy and comedy, and it was really founded on a passage in Horace's Ars Poetica,—
"Ætatis cujusque notandi sunt tibi mores,"[170]
and on the rhetorical descriptions of the various characteristics of men in the second book of Aristotle's Rhetoric.
The explanation of the Renaissance conception of decorum may start from either of two points of view. In the first place, it is to be noted that Horace, and after him the critics of the Renaissance, set about to transpose to the domain of poetry the tentative distinctions of character formulated by Aristotle, in the Rhetoric, simply for the purposes of rhetorical exposition. These distinctions, it must be repeated, were rhetorical and not æsthetic, and they are therefore not alluded to by Aristotle in the Poetics. The result of the attempt to transpose them to the domain of poetry led to a hardening and crystallization of character in the classic drama. But the æsthetic misconception implied by such an attempt is only too obvious. In such a system poetry is held accountable, not to the ideal truth of human life, but to certain arbitrary, or at best merely empirical, formulæ of rhetorical theory. The Renaissance was in this merely doing for character what was being done for all the other elements of art. Every such element, when once discriminated and definitely formulated, became fixed as a necessary and inviolable substitute for the reality which had thus been analyzed.
But we may look at the principle of decorum from another point of view. A much deeper question—the question of social distinctions—is here involved. The observance of decorum necessitated the maintenance of the social distinctions which formed the basis of Renaissance life and of Renaissance literature. It was this same tendency which caused the tragedy of classicism to exclude all but characters of the highest rank. Speaking of narrative poetry, Muzio (1551), while allowing kings to mingle with the masses, considers it absolutely improper for one of the people, even for a moment, to assume the sceptre.[171] Accordingly, men as distinguished by the accidents of rank, profession, country, and not as distinguished by that only which art should take cognizance of, character, became the subjects of the literature of classicism; and in so far as this is true, that literature loses something of the profundity and the universality of the highest art.
This element of decorum is to be found in all the critics of the Renaissance from the time of Vida[172] and Daniello.[173] So essential became the observance of decorum that Muzio and Capriano both considered it the most serious charge to be made against Homer, that he was not always observant of it. Capriano, comparing Virgil with Homer, asserts that the Latin poet surpasses the Greek in eloquence, in dignity, in grandeur of style, but beyond everything in decorum.[174] The seeming vulgarity of some of Homer's similes, and even of the actions of some of his characters, appeared to the Renaissance a most serious blemish; and it was this that led Scaliger to rate Homer not only below Virgil, but even below Musæus. In Minturno and Scaliger we find every detail of character minutely analyzed. The poet is told how young men and old men should act, should talk, and should dress; and no deviations from these fixed formulæ were allowed under any circumstances. As a result of this, even when the poet liberated himself from these conceptions, and aimed at depicting character in its true sense, we find character, but never the development of character, portrayed in the neo-classic drama. The character was fixed from the beginning of the play to the end; and it is here that we may find the origin of Ben Jonson's conception of "humours." In one of Salviati's lectures, Del Trattato della Poetica,[175] Salviati defines a humour as "a peculiar quality of nature according to which every one is inclined to some special thing more than to any other." This would apply very distinctly to the sense in which the Elizabethans used the word. Thus Jonson himself, in the Induction of Every Man out of his Humour, after expounding the medical notion of a humour, says:—