Pity, awe, reconciliation, exaltation—there are the elements that make up tragic pleasure. No play is a tragedy that does not call them forth. So the philosophers say, all in agreement with the common judgment of mankind, that tragedy is something above and beyond the dissonance of pain. But what it is that causes a play to call forth these feelings, what is the essential element in a tragedy, Hegel alone seeks to define. In a notable passage he says that the only tragic subject is a spiritual struggle in which each side has a claim upon our sympathy. But, as his critics have pointed out, he would thus exclude the tragedy of the suffering of the innocent, and a definition which does not include the death of Cordelia or of Deianira cannot be taken as final.
The suffering of the innocent, indeed, can itself be so differently treated as to necessitate completely different categories. In one of the greatest tragedies, the Prometheus of Æschylus, the main actor is an innocent sufferer, but, beyond this purely formal connection, that passionate rebel, defying God and all the powers of the universe, has no relationship whatever to the lovely, loving Cordelia. An inclusive definition of tragedy must cover cases as diverse in circumstance and in the character of the protagonist as the whole range of life and letters can afford it. It must include such opposites as Antigone, the high-souled maiden who goes with open eyes to her death rather than leave her brother’s body unburied, and Macbeth, the ambition-mad, the murderer of his king and guest. These two plays, seemingly so totally unlike, call forth the same response. Tragic pleasure of the greatest intensity is caused by them both. They have something in common, but the philosophers do not tell us what it is. Their concern is with what a tragedy makes us feel, not with what makes a tragedy.
Only twice in literary history has there been a great period of tragedy, in the Athens of Pericles and in Elizabethan England. What these two periods had in common, two thousand years and more apart in time, that they expressed themselves in the same fashion, may give us some hint of the nature of tragedy, for far from being periods of darkness and defeat, each was a time when life was seen exalted, a time of thrilling and unfathomable possibilities. They held their heads high, those men who conquered at Marathon and Salamis, and those who fought Spain and saw the Great Armada sink. The world was a place of wonder; mankind was beauteous; life was lived on the crest of the wave. More than all, the poignant joy of heroism had stirred men’s hearts. Not stuff for tragedy, would you say? But on the crest of the wave one must feel either tragically or joyously; one cannot feel tamely. The temper of mind that sees tragedy in life has not for its opposite the temper that sees joy. The opposite pole to the tragic view of life is the sordid view. When humanity is seen as devoid of dignity and significance, trivial, mean, and sunk in dreary hopelessness, then the spirit of tragedy departs. “Sometime let gorgeous tragedy in sceptred pall come sweeping by.” At the opposite pole stands Gorki with The Lower Depths.
Other poets may, the tragedian must, seek for the significance of life. An error strangely common is that this significance for tragic purposes depends, in some sort, upon outward circumstance, on
pomp and feast and revelry,
With mask, and antique pageantry—
Nothing of all that touches tragedy. The surface of life is comedy’s concern; tragedy is indifferent to it. We do not, to be sure, go to Main Street or to Zenith for tragedy, but the reason has nothing to do with their dull familiarity. There is no reason inherent in the house itself why Babbitt’s home in Zenith should not be the scene of a tragedy quite as well as the Castle of Elsinore. The only reason it is not is Babbitt himself. “That singular swing toward elevation” which Schopenhauer discerned in tragedy, does not take any of its impetus from outside things.
The dignity and the significance of human life—of these, and of these alone, tragedy will never let go. Without them there is no tragedy. To answer the question, what makes a tragedy, is to answer the question wherein lies the essential significance of life, what the dignity of humanity depends upon in the last analysis. Here the tragedians speak to us with no uncertain voice. The great tragedies themselves offer the solution to the problem they propound. It is by our power to suffer, above all, that we are of more value than the sparrows. Endow them with a greater or as great a potentiality of pain and our foremost place in the world would no longer be undisputed. Deep down, when we search out the reason for our conviction of the transcendent worth of each human being, we know that it is because of the possibility that each can suffer so terribly. What do outside trappings matter, Zenith or Elsinore? Tragedy’s preoccupation is with suffering.
But, it is to be well noted, not with all suffering. There are degrees in our high estate of pain. It is not given to all to suffer alike. We differ in nothing more than in our power to feel. There are souls of little and of great degree, and upon that degree the dignity and significance of each life depend. There is no dignity like the dignity of a soul in agony.
Here I and sorrows sit;
Here is my throne, bid kings come bow to it.
Tragedy is enthroned, and to her realm those alone are admitted who belong to the only true aristocracy, that of all passionate souls. Tragedy’s one essential is a soul that can feel greatly. Given such a one and any catastrophe may be tragic. But the earth may be removed and the mountains be carried into the midst of the sea, and if only the small and shallow are confounded, tragedy is absent.
One dark page of Roman history tells of a little seven-year-old girl, daughter of a man judged guilty of death and so herself condemned to die, and how she passed through the staring crowds sobbing and asking, “What had she done wrong! If they would tell her, she would never do it again”—and so on to the black prison and the executioner. That breaks the heart, but is not tragedy, it is pathos. No heights are there for the soul to mount to, but only the dark depths where there are tears for things. Undeserved suffering is not in itself tragic. Death is not tragic in itself, not the death of the beautiful and the young, the lovely and beloved. Death felt and suffered as Macbeth feels and suffers is tragic. Death felt as Lear feels Cordelia’s death is tragic. Ophelia’s death is not a tragedy. She being what she is, it could be so only if Hamlet’s and Laertes’ grief were tragic grief. The conflicting claims of the law of God and the law of man are not what make the tragedy of the Antigone. It is Antigone herself, so great, so tortured. Hamlet’s hesitation to kill his uncle is not tragic. The tragedy is his power to feel. Change all the circumstances of the drama and Hamlet in the grip of any calamity would be tragic, just as Polonius would never be, however awful the catastrophe. The suffering of a soul that can suffer greatly—that and only that, is tragedy.
It follows, then, that tragedy has nothing to do with the distinction between Realism and Romanticism. The contrary has always been maintained. The Greek went to the myths for their subjects, we are told, to insure remoteness from real life which does not admit of high tragedy. “Realism is the ruin of tragedy,” says the latest writer on the subject. It is not true. If indeed Realism were conceived of as dealing only with the usual, tragedy would be ruled out, for the soul capable of a great passion is not usual. But if nothing human is alien to Realism, then tragedy is of her domain, for the unusual is as real as the usual. When the Moscow Art Players presented the Brothers Karamazoff there was seen on the stage an absurd little man in dirty clothes who waved his arms about and shuffled and sobbed, the farthest possible remove from the traditional figures of tragedy, and yet tragedy was there in his person, stripped of her gorgeous pall, but sceptred truly, speaking the authentic voice of human agony in a struggle past the power of the human heart to bear. A drearier setting, a more typically realistic setting, it would be hard to find, but to see the play was to feel pity and awe before a man dignified by one thing only, made great by what he could suffer. Ibsen’s plays are not tragedies. Whether Ibsen is a realist or not—the Realism of one generation is apt to be the Romanticism of the next—small souls are his dramatis personæ and his plays are dramas with an unh
appy ending. The end of Ghosts leaves us with a sense of shuddering horror and cold anger against a society where such things can be, and these are not tragic feelings.
The greatest realistic works of fiction have been written by the French and the Russians. To read one of the great Frenchmen’s books is to feel mingled despair and loathing for mankind, so base, so trivial and so wretched. But to read a great Russian novel is to have an altogether different experience. The baseness, the beast in us, the misery of life, are there as plain to see as in the French book, but what we are left with is not despair and not loathing, but a sense of pity and wonder before mankind that can so suffer. The Russian sees life in that way because the Russian genius is primarily poetical; the French genius is not. Anna Karénina is a tragedy; Madame Bovary is not. Realism and Romanticism, or comparative degrees of Realism, have nothing to do with the matter. It is a case of the small soul against the great soul and the power of a writer whose special endowment is “voir clair dans ce qui est” against the intuition of a poet.
If the Greeks had left no tragedies behind for us, the highest reach of their power would be unknown. The three poets who were able to sound the depths of human agony were able also to recognize and reveal it as tragedy. The mystery of evil, they said, curtains that of which “every man whose soul is not a clod hath visions.” Pain could exalt and in tragedy for a moment men could have sight of a meaning beyond their grasp. “Yet had God not turned us in his hand and cast to earth our greatness,” Euripides makes the old Trojan queen say in her extremity, “we would have passed away giving nothing to men. They would have found no theme for song in us nor made great poems from our sorrows.”
Why is the death of the ordinary man a wretched, chilling thing which we turn from, while the death of the hero, always tragic, warms us with a sense of quickened life? Answer this question and the enigma of tragic pleasure is solved. “Never let me hear that brave blood has been shed in vain,” said Sir Walter Scott; “it sends an imperious challenge down through all the generations.” So the end of a tragedy challenges us. The great soul in pain and in death transforms pain and death. Through it we catch a glimpse of the Stoic Emperor’s Dear City of God, of a deeper and more ultimate reality than that in which our lives are lived.
XII
Aeschylus
The First Dramatist
When Nietzsche made his famous definition of tragic pleasure he fixed his eyes, like all the other philosophers in like case, not on the Muse herself but on a single tragedian. His “reaffirmation of the will to live in the face of death, and the joy of its inexhaustibility when so reaffirmed” is not the tragedy of Sophocles nor the tragedy of Euripides, but it is the very essence of the tragedy of Æschylus. The strange power tragedy has to present suffering and death in such a way as to exalt and not depress is to be felt in Æschylus’ plays as in those of no other tragic poet. He was the first tragedian; tragedy was his creation, and he set upon it the stamp of his own spirit.
It was a soldier-spirit. Æschylus was a Marathon-warrior, the title given to each of the little band who had beaten back the earlier tremendous Persian onslaught. As such, his epitaph would seem to show, he merited honor so lofty, no mention of his poetry could find place beside it:
Æschylus, the Athenian, Euphorion’s son, is dead. This tomb in Gela’s cornlands covers him. His glorious courage the hallowed field of Marathon could tell, and the longhaired Mede had knowledge of it.
Did he fight elsewhere too? There is no answer to this or to any other question about him except in so far as it can be found in what he wrote. The epitaph, a statement that he was descended from an aristocratic family, and a few dates—of the production of this or that play, and of his death—make up all the facts that have come down. There was no Plato to draw his portrait with sure, intimate touches and make him a living human being forever. As with Shakespeare, we know him only as he permits us through his plays, a doubtful matter in the case of the greatest poets whose province is the whole of life and who can identify themselves with everything there is, delight in conceiving an Iago equally with an Imogen, as Keats once said. Even so, Æschylus’ work, what we have of it, that is—seven plays only left from ninety—shows the main lines of his character and the temper of his mind as Shakespeare’s, with its boundless range, does not. A conclusion, however, to be checked by the consideration that if we had all those ninety plays, and of Shakespeare’s only seven tragedies, the exact reverse might appear to be the truth. And yet such is the overpowering impression each of Æschylus’ plays makes of his grandeur of mind and spirit, of the heroic mold he was cast in, it is not possible to conceive of his writing anything that would not have been so stamped.
So much we can conclude about the man himself, but of his actual life there are almost no indications. He was used to the ways of a great house, we gather, and despised the nouveau riche—he takes him off in the Zeus of the Prometheus, “the upstart god” who “shows forth his power for his brief day, his little moment of lording it.” If one is a slave, Clytemnestra tells the captive Trojan princess,
It is very well to serve in an old family,
Long used to riches. For indeed the man
Who reaps a sudden harvest beyond hope,
Is savage to his slaves above the rule.
In this matter of his soldiering, too, there are passages that would appear to strike unmistakably the note of personal experience: “Our beds were close to the enemy’s walls; our clothes were rotting with the wet; our hair full of vermin.” That is not war as the novice sees it. Even more pointed are the words in Clytemnestra’s announcement that Troy has fallen, when she pauses in the full flight of her tale of triumph to give a strange little realistic picture of a newly captured town:
The women have flung themselves on lifeless bodies, husbands, brothers—little children are clinging to the old dead that gave them life, sobbing from throats no longer free, above their dearest. And the victors—a night of roaming after battle has set them down hungry to breakfast on what the town affords, not billeted in order, but as chance directs.
That speech sounds oddly on a great queen’s lips. It seems an old soldier’s reminiscence, each clear detail part of a picture often seen. But these few passages are all there are that throw any light upon his way of life.
We are, the greatest of us, the product of our times. Æschylus lived in one of those brief periods of hope and endeavor which now and again light up the dark pages of history, when mankind makes a visible advance along its destined path without fear or faltering. A mere handful of men had driven back the hosts of the ruling world-power, so defeated that Persia was never again to repeat an invasion that had brought only disaster. The success of that great venture went thrillingly through the land. Life was lived at an intenser level. Peril, terror, and anguish had sharpened men’s spirits and deepened their insight. A victory achieved past all hope at the very moment when utter defeat and the loss of all things seemed certain had lifted them to an exultant courage. Men knew that they could do heroic deeds, for they had seen heroic deeds done by men. This was the moment for the birth of tragedy, that mysterious combination of pain and exaltation, which discloses an invincible spirit precisely when disaster is irreparable. Up to that time the poets of Greece had looked with a direct and un-self-conscious gaze upon the world and found it good. The glory of brave deeds and the loveliness of natural things had contented them. Æschylus was the poet of a new era. He bridged the tremendous gulf between the poetry of the beauty of the outside world and the poetry of the beauty of the pain of the world.
He was the first poet to grasp the bewildering strangeness of life, “the antagonism at the heart of the world.” He knew life as only the greatest poets can know it; he perceived the mystery of suffering. Mankind he saw fast bound to calamity by the working of unknown powers, committed to a strange venture, companioned by disaster. But to the heroic, desperate odds fling a challenge. The high spirit of his time was strong in Æschylus. He was, fir
st and last, the born fighter, to whom the consciousness of being matched against a great adversary suffices and who can dispense with success. Life for him was an adventure, perilous indeed, but men are not made for safe havens. The fullness of life is in the hazards of life. And, at the worst, there is that in us which can turn defeat into victory.
In a man of this heroic temper, a piercing insight into the awful truth of human anguish met supreme poetic power, and tragedy was brought into being. And if tragedy’s peculiar province is to show man’s misery at its blackest and man’s grandeur at its greatest, Æschylus is not only the creator of tragedy, he is the most truly tragic of all the tragedians. No one else has struck such ringing music from life’s dissonance. In his plays there is nothing of resignation or passive acceptance. Great spirits meet calamity greatly. The maidens who form the chorus of the Prometheus demand full knowledge of all the evil before them: “For when one lies sick, to face with clear eyes all the pain to come is sweet.” Antigone, about to do what means certain death to her, cries, “Courage! The power will be mine and the means to act.” When Clytemnestra has struck her blow and her husband has fallen dead, she opens the palace doors and proclaims what she has done:
Here I stand where I struck. So did I. Nothing do I deny. Twice did I strike him and twice he cried out, and his limbs failed and he fell. The third stroke I gave him, an offering to the god of Hell who holds fast the dead. And there he lay gasping and his blood spouted and splashed me with black spray, a dew of death, sweet to me as heaven’s sweet raindrops when the cornland buds.