Aristotle's definition of tragedy, founded upon a vast experience, we need not doubt, of the best Greek dramas, offers another point of contrast between the ancient and the modern art. "Tragedy," he says, "is an imitation of an action that is weighty, complete, and of a proper magnitude; it proceeds by action and not by narration; and it effects through pity and terror a purgation of the like passions in the minds of the spectators." This definition, which has caused great difficulty for commentators, turns upon the meaning of the κάθαρσις,[109] or purgation, which tragedy is supposed to effect. It is quite clear that all poetry which stirs the feelings of pity and terror need not at the same time purge them in or from the souls of the listeners, except only in so far as true art is elevating and purifying. Therefore Aristotle must have had some special quality of the tragic art to which he was accustomed in his mind. His words seem to express that it is the function of the tragic drama to appeal to our deepest sympathies and strongest passions, to arouse them, but at the same time to pacify them, and, as it were, to draw off the dangerous stuff that lies upon our soul—to resolve the perturbation of the mind in some transcendental contemplation.[110] This is what the greatest Greek tragedies achieve. They are almost invariably closed by some sentence of the Chorus in which the unsearchableness of God's dealings is set forth, and by which we are made to feel that, after the fitful strife and fever of human wills, the eternal counsels of Zeus remain unchanged, while the moral order of the world, shaken and distorted by the passions of heroic sufferers, abides in the serenity of the ideal. Furthermore, there is in the very substance of almost all Greek tragedies a more obvious healing of wounds and restoration of harmony than this. The trilogy of Prometheus was concluded by the absorption of the Titan's vehement will in that of Zeus. The trilogy of Orestes ends with the benediction of Pallas and Phœbus upon the righteous man who had redeemed the errors of his house. Sophocles allows us a glimpse of Antigone bringing peace and joy to her father and brothers in Hades. The old Œdipus, after his life-wanderings and crimes and woes, is made a blessed dæmon through the mercy of propitiated deities. Hippolytus is reconciled to his father, and is cheered and cooled in his death-fever by the presence of the maiden Artemis. Thus the terror and pity which have been roused in each of these cases are allayed by the actual climax of the plot which has excited them: grief itself becomes a chariot for surmounting the sources of grief. But the modern drama does not offer this κάθαρσις: its passions too often remain unreconciled in their original antagonism: the note on which the symphony terminates is not unfrequently discordant or exciting. Where is the κάθαρσις in King Lear? Are our passions purged in any definite sense by the close of the first part of Faust? We are rather left with the sense of inexpiable guilt and unalleviated suffering, with yearnings excited which shall never be quelled. The greatest works of modern fiction—the novels of Balzac, with their philosophy of wickedness triumphant; the novels of George Eliot, with their dismal lesson of the feebleness of human effort; the tragedies of Shakespeare, with the silence of the grave for their conclusion—intensify and embitter that "struggle to be what we are not, and to do what we cannot" which Hazlitt gives as an equivalent for life.[111] The greatest creative poet of this generation writes ἀνάγκη upon his title-page. The chief poet of the century makes his hero exclaim:
Entbehren sollst du, sollst entbehren.
Such purification of the passions as modern art achieves is to be found most eminently in the choric movements of Handel, in the symphonies of Beethoven, in all the great achievements of music. Ancient art aimed at the perfect within definite limits, because human life in the ancient world was circumscribed by mundane limitations, and its conditions were unhesitatingly accepted. Our art aims at the infinite, because we are forever striving after a completion which cannot be attained. It was not for nothing that Christianity, with its widening of spiritual horizons, closed the ancient and inaugurated the modern age:
Une immense espérance a traversé la terre;
Malgré nous vers le ciel il faut lever les yeux.
In that fixed mood of restless expectation, in that persistent attitude of the soul upraised to sweep the heavens, there lies the secret of modern art. Life to the Greek belonged to the category of τὸ πέρας, or the definite: it was like a crystal in its well-defined consistency. Our life, whether we regard it from the point of view of science or of religion, belongs to the ἄπειρον, or the undetermined: it is only one term of an infinite series, the significance whereof is relative to the unknown quantities beyond it. Consequently modern art is nowhere satisfied with merely æsthetic forms. The soul with its maladies imperiously demands expression. Michael Angelo was not contented, like Pheidias or Praxiteles, with carving the serenity of godlike men and women. In the figures upon the tombs of the Medici he fashioned four moods of the tortured, aching, anguished soul, to whom the burden of this life is all but intolerable. His frescos in the Sistine Chapel are subordinated to the expression of one thought—the doom of God which will descend upon the soul of man. Christianity destroyed beyond all possibility of reconstruction the free, frank sensuality of paganism. It convicted humanity of sin, and taught men to occupy themselves with the internal warfare of their flesh and spirit as that which is alone eternally important. Life itself, according to the modern formula, is a conflict which will be concluded one way or the other beyond the grave. Meanwhile upon this earth the conflict is undetermined. Therefore art, which reflects life, represents the battle, and dares not to anticipate its outcome. In this relation the very pathology of the soul becomes poetic. Ἐρᾶν ἀδυνάτων, said the Greek proverb, νόσος τῆς ψυχῆς—to desire impossible things is a disease of the soul. But l'amour de l'impossible—the straining of the soul after the infinite, the desire to approximate in this world to a dream of the ecstatic fancy—all the rapture of saints, the self-denial of solitaries, the death in life of penitents—is not defined by us as a disease. On the contrary, this passion for the impossible has been held through many centuries of modern history to be the truest sign of the soul's health; and even where such superstition has not penetrated, poets like Byron have prided themselves upon the same temper displayed in their extravagant yearnings. Don Juan, enormous in his appetite for pleasure, and rebellious on the grave's brink beneath the hand of God; Faust, insatiable of curiosity, and careless of eternity in his lust for power; Tannhäuser, pursuing to the end his double life of love too sweet to be abandoned and of conscience too acutely sensitive to be stilled; these are our modern legends. These, with so little of mere action in them, so much of inner meaning and mental experience, yield the truest materials to our artists. Over and over again have Faust, Tannhäuser, and Don Juan supplied the poet with subjects wherein no merely local or temporary tragedy is set forth, but the destiny of the modern man is shown as in a magic mirror. Nor has the advent of science as yet restored our mind to that "passionless bride, divine tranquillity," which the Greeks enjoyed, and which alone could be the mother of such art as the antique. Although the sublime cheerfulness of Goethe shows by way of forecast how the scientific mood may lead to this result hereafter, for the present science has deepened and complicated our most distressing problems, has rendered the anxiety of man about his destiny still more cruel, has made him still more helpless in the effort to comprehend his relations to the universe, by seeming to prove that his most cherished hypotheses are mere illusions. Like a spoiled child, who has been taught to expect too much, to think about himself too much, and to rely too much on flattery, humanity, shrinking from the cold, calm atmosphere of science, still cries in feverish accents with St. Paul: "If Christ be not risen, then are we of men most wretched!" How strange would that sentence have sounded to Sophocles! How well it suits the tragedy of Shakespeare, which has for its ultimate Versöhnung the hope, felt, though unexpressed, of St. Paul's exclamation!
As a corollary to what has hitherto been said about the differences between the drama of Sophocles and that of Shakespeare, it follows that the former aims at depicting the destinies, and the latter the characters of men.[112] Shakespeare exhibits individual wills and passions clashing together and producing varied patterns in the web of life. Sophocles unfolds schemes and sequences of doomed events, where individual wills and passions play indeed their part, but where they are subordinated to the idea which the tragedian undertakes to illustrate. A play of Æschylus or Sophocles strikes us by the grandeur of the whole: a play of Shakespeare or Goethe overwhelms us by the force and frequence of combined and interacting motives. No analysis can be too searching or acute for the profound conception which pervades the Oresteia of Æschylus; but there is no single character in Æschylus or in Sophocles so worthy of minute investigation as that of Hamlet or of Faust. If a critic looks to the general effect of a tragedy, to the power of imagination displayed in its conception as a single work of art, he will prefer the Agamemnon to Macbeth; but if he seek for the creation of a complete and subtle human soul, he will abandon Clytemnestra for the Thane of Cawdor's wife. The antique drama aims at the presentation of tragic situations, determined and controlled by some mysterious force superior to the agents. The modern aims at the presentation of tragic situations, immediately produced and brought about by the free action of the dramatis personæ.
One advantage which the modern dramatist has over the ancient is that he may introduce very numerous persons in concerted action without the danger of confusion, and that of these many may be female. It has been ably argued by De Quincey that the Attic tragedians had small opportunity of studying the female character, and that it would have been indecorous for them to have painted women with the perfect freedom of a Cleopatra or a Vittoria Corombona.[113] Consequently their women are either superficially and slightly sketched like Ismene and Chrysothemis; or else they are marked by something masculine, as in the case of Clytemnestra and Medea; or again they move our sympathy not by the perfection of their womanliness but by the exhibition of some simple and sublime self-sacrifice—notable examples being the filial devotion of Antigone, the sisterly affection of Electra, the uncomplaining submission of Iphigeneia and Polyxena, the wifely self-abandonment of Alcestis, the almost frigid acquiescence in death of Makaria. The later Greek drama, and especially the drama of Euripides, abounded in these characters. They are incarnations of certain moral qualities. Like the masks which concealed the actor's face, they show one fixed and sustained mood of emotion: we find in them no hesitancy and difficult resolve, no ebb and flow of wavering inclination, but one immutable, magnificent, heroic fixity of purpose. In a word, they are conformed to the sculptural type of the Greek tragic art.
Owing to the very structure of the Attic stage, Greek tragedy could never have recourse to those formless, vague, and unsubstantial sources of terror and of charm which the modern dramatist has at his command. How could such airy nothings as the elves of the Tempest, the fairies of A Midsummer Nights-Dream, or the witches of Macbeth have been brought upon that colossal theatre in the full blaze of an Athenian noon? Figures of Thanatos and of Lyssa did indeed appear: the ghost of Clytemnestra roused the sleeping Furies in the courts of Delphi: the phantom of Darius hovered over his grave. But these spectres were sculpturesque—such as Pheidias might have carved in marble, and such as we see painted on so-called Etruscan vases. They were not Banquo-apparitions gliding into visible substance from the vacant gloom and retiring thitherward again. When such creatures of the diseased imagination had to be suggested, the seer, like Cassandra, before whose eyes the phantoms of the children of Thyestes passed, or Orestes, who drew his arrows upon an unseen cohort of threatening fiends, stared on vacancy. Shakespeare dares at times to realize such incorporeal beings, to give to them a voice and a visible form. Yet it may be doubted whether even in his tremendous supernatural apparatus the voice which shrieked to Macbeth "Sleep no more!" the mutterings of Lady Macbeth in her somnambulism, the spectre which Hamlet saw and his mother could not see, the dream of Clarence with its cry of injured ghosts, are not really the most appalling.