Finally, we may consider one more aspect of the function of limitation in drama.
There is, as we briefly suggested in the foregoing studies, a constant and creative conflict between content and form, technique and medium. But of no less significance is a conflict arising from limitation of mood. And the equilibrium which here results is essential to the highest reach of dramatic art. Indeed, in considering it we may perceive certain of the basic relations between limitation and achievement in drama. It is seen most clearly in tragedy, for tragedy depends most intimately upon the preservation of a strict and limiting balance between two contrary readings of life and their sequent emotions at work within the poet's mind. Such equilibrium is thus the distinguishing mark of the highest achievement in this kind, individual works tending to approach supremacy in so far as they derive from this conflict and reveal this resultant balance.
Other characteristics of fine tragedy must of course be present also if this is to be achieved in any play. There must be strength of emotion revealed through character and through significant related actions and underlying thought which further relates passion and event. Again, as in all great drama, directness, rapidity, and shapeliness of presentation must serve the ends simultaneously of concentration and of probability, and the resulting beauty of passion, form, and thought will constitute dramatic poetry, whether the vehicle be prose or verse. Finally, this image of tragic circumstance which we call a tragedy must involve catastrophe, either material or spiritual, arising naturally from the action and forming an integral part of it.
A rough description such as this allows us to reject, without further examination, certain types of play which bear a superficial or partial resemblance to great tragedy. Melodrama fails to integrate passion and event by thought, fails sometimes to relate the catastrophe to the action, and lacks in general that depth of imagination upon which the revelation of character and emotion depend; again, a mere chronicle of evil or of pathetic event, even though shapely, may fail to satisfy our sense of tragedy from lack of intensity in passion and in thought; and a play in which death or destruction comes by accident will fail again, however finely imagined, because the catastrophe is not integral to the play and to its underlying thought.1
But in great tragedy there is an element common to the individual plays, though differing in form and theme, an element which marks both the treatment of the material and the nature of the resulting interpretation: it is the presence of that conflict, to which we have just referred, between two impressions made by his experience upon the poet's mind.
The part of this experience which is most clearly revealed is the intense awareness of evil and pain. But in conflict with this specific response to fact and event is another of a wholly different kind; the intuitive and often undefined apprehension of another universe implying other values. Beyond the realization of evil and pain (and the work of art will be great in proportion as this is profound), beyond the apprehension of an alien destiny that appears to shape man's action, there is the perception, at once more comprehensive and less explicit, of a possible resolution, of some reconciliation with or interpretation in terms of good. The impressions in conflict may be of various kinds; of a malevolent and a beneficent world-order; of apparent lawlessness against underlying law, a casual against a causal, a chaotic against a patterned universe. And the unresolved conflict between them will at first give rise to a sense of mystery; to the assumption that evil can never be sounded, however thoroughly it be analysed, that its causes will never fully reveal themselves, even to the most passionate questioning.
It is here that, in the finest tragic writing, there is equilibrium. The reality of evil and pain is not denied; if it were, tragedy would not speak to man's condition as it has done from the time of Aeschylus to the present day. Nevertheless, something is revealed which makes possible the transvaluation of the values upon which this rests; the works of art which we call tragedies are distinguished from others, not only by technical characteristics of subject-matter or form, but also by the balance maintained between conflicting readings of the universe and of man's condition and destiny. The supreme works in this kind reveal that balance in the highest degree, thus-satisfying most nearly man's need to find his complex and contradictory experience transmuted into the enduring form of art. Certain tragedies, it is true, fail to maintain complete balance, some lessening their hold on the imagination by presenting irremediable evil and a satanic universe, and some, with similar consequences, indicating remedies so immediate or so easily defined that men's judgement and innate sanity mistrust them. Both kinds may nevertheless remain within the category of tragedy, provided they do not destroy either of the elements in whose conflict the average man recognizes an essential part of his own dual experience.
The characteristic balance thus obtained results, as we have said, in a play of a certain quality. In content and in thought tragedy is, like all great art, an interpretation of some part of the universe of man's experience, but inasmuch as it is dramatic it is primarily an interpretation by implication, by the emphasis it lays on certain parts of that experience, the significance with which it invests them, rather than by explicit or direct commentary. The part of this experience which it selects involves suffering and some kind of catastrophe, and these significant of something more than the bare facts actually present. Balance is thus maintained in all great tragedy; suffering and catastrophe upon the one hand and upon the other a relation (often unspecified and undefined) with some fundamental or universal law whose operation justifies or compensates them. From this arises the conflict of impressions; evident evil against partially hidden yet immanent and overruling good. Thus far all tragedy is akin.
In what writers is this most fully and most clearly revealed? In none perhaps more than in some of the major works of Aeschylus, Sophocles, Shakespeare, and Ibsen. Here, though the evidence of pain and evil is never denied, the final position is not despair or rebellion, but a perception of that in man's destiny which resolves pain in exultation. (It may rise at times to a willing collaboration with the purposes of the unrevealed powers whose presence is felt though never fully understood.) Some such balance as this is to be found in the work of most of the world's greatest tragic writers and we may observe not only its nature but the various means by which that nature is maintained. In certain types of formally archaic tragedy the outer action or story my indicate the reading of life derived from the evidence of evil in fact and event, while that other universe and its differing values may, as in the Aeschylean chorus, be presented directly as comment. In another type, while the outer action may still present that first reading, the second may depend upon an inner action proceeding independently, though in close relation with the outer, and consisting of the experience of individual minds exploring the world of thought or of imagination. Shakespeare's major tragedies and such of his contemporaries' as achieve tragic balance seem generally to be of this kind. In a third kind again, where there is little or no comment and yet no clearly distinguished inner action, the implications of form alone maintain the balance. This appears to be the nature of the equilibrium in certain of the plays of Sophocles.
Some of the tragedies of Aeschylus present the two balancing perceptions — which by their balance make the tragic mood — in different and separate mediums.2 To the action or story, which is the main part of the play, falls the presentation of evil and that measure of implicit comment, through emphasis and selection, which is inseparable from creative art. It is left to the choruses to make the explicit comment on the action which subordinates it to the surrounding universe of order and law whose significance would else be obscure. The balance is superbly achieved and maintained, but by a division of functions, the one reading of life being presented by strictly dramatic, the other by non-dramatic methods. The theme of the Agamemnon and the Choephori is the implacable evil of the responsibility for sin, but throughout the plays as through most of Shakespeare's, there are seemingly contradictory references to forms of good apparently outside the evil; Zeus is all-wise, all powerful, the ‘Saviour’, he who pities.3 But, unlike Shakespeare or any but a few other dramatists, Aeschylus comments not only on the fact but on the relationship between the two balancing forces. Without reducing the significance of suffering or of evil, and while yet maintaining the equilibrium between it and the enveloping beneficence of Zeus, Aeschylus reveals the process by which the two are linked. Zeus does not merely pity, but leads man through pain to wisdom, so that the very suffering which arose from the presence of evil becomes the means of conversion and beatitude. Zeus himself became the all-comprehending by no other road.
In the two strict tragedies, the Agamemnon and the Choephori, there is little more than this indication of the relation between the two and the tragic balance is maintained. In the third play, when the Erinyes become the Eumenides, we pass from the drama of tragic equilibrium to the drama of beatitude, and the process is elucidated in Aeschylus's picture of the reconciliation of the two forces.
This method is not peculiar to the Greek drama of the fifth century B.C. Though it involves an interruption of the strict dramatic effect, it falls completely out of use only when naturalism has a fictitious value, as in the fourth-wall drama of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in Europe. It will obviously be found in all imitations of or derivations from Greek drama at any period and in that breaking in of narrative method which appears to be natural to some drama, such as that of medieval Europe, in the early phases of its development. Modern variations may relate to either or both of these forerunners. Goethe, in the first part of Faust, assigned to his choric and prologue figures part at least of the function of redressing the tragic balance, and other kinds of extra-dramatic commentary are used for kindred purposes to the present day (as in Drink-water's Abraham Lincoln). Plays, again, which, with varying degrees of plausibility, temporarily invest certain of the characters from the main action with choric functions virtually use the same method. For so long as the choric commentary lasts (though it be only for a line or two) for so long the two balancing interpretations are presented in different and separate mediums. Many of the Elizabethans used this method, briefly and abstemiously, with fine effect: Webster had peculiar skill in this. And in much of the tragedy written in Europe during the last thirty years — to jump the intervening years with their many interesting uses, especially in Germany — the tendencies to expressionism on the one hand and to symbolism on the other have alike tempted playwrights to the same device, which they handle with confidence and fluency, but with somewhat less than Webster's effectiveness.
The balance between manifest evil and immanent good is maintained by a widely different process in the work of Shakespeare and most of his contemporaries. Except for a few extra-dramatic conventions irrelevant to the present issue, these plays are wholly dramatic in form, and such comment as there is is necessarily implicit. But here an outer and an inner action can be distinguished clearly; the outer, like the action of the Oresteia, presents by its story the reading of life which observes and admits the nature of evil and of suffering; again, as in Aeschylus's play, with that element of implicit comment which is inseparable from emphasis and selection. But behind this, coextensive with and yet frequently independent of it, is action on another plane of being which we may regard as an inner action, made up of the experiences of the minds, the thought-life of the characters. Though the distinction between the two does not become so marked in drama as to force itself upon the reader's observation until perhaps the middle of the nineteenth century,4 it is already visible in that of Shakespeare, and it is upon this inner action that the function devolves of maintaining tragic equilibrium by counterpoising the presentation of evil in the outer action. The thought-world of Cordelia or of Kent has relatively little effect upon the course of those events in Lear that are shaped by and shape the other characters; but it is of immense effect in our final impression of the universe revealed by the play, reaching its triumph in certain passages that, looking through death, create the harmony of the play.
To some degree already in Shakespeare, as in all major dramatists, a third means of balance is disclosed, and in a few, of a rare quality, it appears to be the only means and to work alone. Perhaps the earliest instances of this kind are to be found in some of the plays of Sophocles,5 where the interpretative function of the choric odes is less than in those of Aeschylus; here the balance is achieved within the strictly dramatic part of the play, yet without the help of any discernible separate inner action. The presence of a beneficent world-order, of immanent good, is implied in such plays as Oedipus or Macbeth by the presence of form6 as an integral part of the work of art even when evil or suffering is the theme. The impression left upon the mind is of an equilibrium between the manifestation of evil and the embodiment of the principle of order. Beauty of form and expression then represent by implication the forces of righteousness and beneficence of which Aeschylus speaks directly in the choric odes. In plays of this group, harmony of form is achieved despite the inherent evil or hideousness of the theme, and so profound is the transmutation that it becomes an image of that reconciliation by which order and beauty convert all things into themselves, by which the Erinyes become the Eumenides and we pass from an Inferno to a Paradiso.
We have already noticed that on either side of this central group, in which the equilibrium of tragedy is thus maintained, there are to be found other types of great tragic drama in which the balance is threatened by a greater emphasis upon the positive or the negative interpretation, by the acceptance in the poet's mind primarily of the latent or potential good or of the manifest evil. Poets who differ as widely as Milton and Ibsen may be found in the first group and those as far apart as Euripides, Marlowe, and Strindberg in the second.
In Milton's Samson Agonistes we found a peculiarly clear instance of that overbalancing in the direction of positive interpretation which is inseparable from religious drama and renders its strict form incompatible with tragedy. What was there said of Milton may be said, with certain modifications in detail, of Calderon at one extreme and of certain modern plays at the other.7 But not all the plays that overset the balance on the positive side are religious drama, nor is the dissolution of the tragic mood always effected by a progression into beatitude. The last hundred years have produced notable groups of plays which lay so strong an emphasis upon the remediable nature of evil and indicate so strong a confidence in the near or immediate removal of suffering by the modification of social conditions that they cease to be tragedy as surely, though by a different road, as does religious drama. Ibsen, whose social problem plays are largely responsible for the growth of this kind, seldom wrote plays of even technically tragic form while his belief in this social amelioration was at its height.8 But the heritage passes to his successors, Hauptmann and Toller in Germany, Galsworthy in England, Odets in America, and a host of others in both continents.
Characteristic of certain of their tragedies, though not of all in equal degree, is the temporal nature of the suffering. Though not as a rule accidental or insufficiently related to action or to theme, it yet does not move us as does suffering whose cause is in part at least inexplicable. For in each of these plays a remedy is known or can be guessed at. In The Weavers, The Machine Wreckers,9 The Silver Box, Justice; in many of the plays of Brieux; even in the work of Elizabeth Baker, Stanley Houghton, and Granville Barker, social readjustments not utterly beyond human might would resolve most of the evil that causes the suffering and so leads to catastrophe, material or spiritual.10 In its extreme form such drama shades into the propaganda play, which lies outside the scope of this study,11 where the remedy is specific and the case immediate; Clifford Odets' Waiting for Lefty leaves no impression of pity or bewilderment, but focusses the mind by indignation and wrath upon the remedy. This so lessens the significance of pain, through offering the assurance of a cure, that the play falls out of harmony even with man's cruder impression of the fundamental nature of evil. As Toller himself pointed out, there is a clear distinction to be drawn between the drama which is primarily social propaganda and that which is in reality tragic: ‘For only unnecessary suffering can be vanquished, the suffering which arises out of the unreason of humanity, out of inadequate social system. There must always remain a residue of suffering, the lonely suffering imposed upon mankind by life and death. And only this residue is necessary and inevitable, is the tragic element of life and of life's symbolizer, art.’12
The mood of this social drama, then, even when it assumes the technical form of tragedy, is not in essence tragic, for the evil arises precisely out of this ‘inadequate social system’, and more significant than the material chosen is the emphasis and orientation given to it. Any given play of this group, that is to say, might have been written in the tragic mood if the light had been focused, not upon a defect in the machinery of justice (which is adjustable), but upon that streak of innate injustice in man's nature which is far less accessible, which would express itself no doubt in some other form if not in this. It is worth observing in this connection that the latter half of Ibsen's own career reveals a steady progression from the non-tragic to the tragic emphasis, from the examination of evil in its more readily remediable forms to the exploration of deeper and deeper-lying evil and, finally, to that which baffles prescription. As we pass from the Pillars of Society to The Wild Duck, we reach the borders of central, balanced tragedy and with Rosmer and Borkman we enter the world of Orestes and Hamlet. For all its earnestness, this social drama rests, in fact, upon a more superficial reading of life than tragedy ‘of the centre’, and in this it contrasts sharply with religious drama of which the finest kinds seek out and resolve the potent and seemingly ineradicable forms of evil. It is not without significance that few great dramatists have touched it or continued long to write it; most of them pass on to the pro founder forms of meditative tragedy or to that drama which, as we have already suggested, passes beyond tragedy itself.
There are plays, on the other hand, that derive primarily from a negative or destructive reading of life, and these also serve to define the limitations of strict tragedy and to reveal the ease with which its balance can be destroyed by disregarding their boundaries. Here also deviations from the centre may be of two kinds, approximately equivalent to the two we have just traced. Just as the constructive thinker may destroy tragic balance by the assurance either of religious revaluation or of social readjustment, so the playwright of the opposite kind may destroy it by the assumption of a spiritually evil world-order or of an irremediable mechanism or chaos. The first approximates to Satanism, the second to pessimistic materialism; both destroy the balance in ways opposite and parallel to those we have just examined. The first, the Satanists, are necessarily among the rarest tragic writers, for their interpretation involves, not the mere observation of evil phenomena, but the assumption of a system. More common are the writers of the second group (to be set over against the social reformers), who view event and transcribe it with quiet or with savage despair and admit neither qualifying evidence nor hope.
A large part of the social-problem drama of our day, that part which is critical without being constructive, may be of this later kind: when, in addition, the form is that of tragedy, we find such plays as Strindberg's Miss Julia or The Father, Granville Barker's Waste, George Kaiser's From Morn to Midnight, the Capeks' The Insect Play, Elmer Rice's The Adding Machine, and Lenormand's L'Homme et ses Fantômes. Few of these plays are great tragedy and, as we suggested in speaking of the social-problem play of the preceding category, few can fairly be named with that tragedy of the centre which we took as our point of departure. And this follows naturally from the relaxing of that tension imposed by the inherent limitations of the tragic mood: except in the rare instances of the religious drama or of its anti-type, the Satanic drama, it is seldom that a play which for any reason evades this law of balance has greatness of passion and of thought. Many of them prove, however, of great interest in analysis, revealing clearly the destruction of balance by negation.
Such plays reveal a clear conception of misery, which they usually study (like their anti-type of the previous group) in terms of one, precisely-drawn social organization, though they too sometimes attempt to give this universality. Their theatre technique is often brilliant and nothing, in situation or emotion, seems forced or pretentious; such work may well be too savage and too honest for staginess. Even when a modern reader has allowed for the disturbance of his judgement by the immediacy of a contemporary theme, he may still see much that would grip the imagination of a generation that came to the play knowing nothing of those immediate conditions. In many of these plays the resources of episode, dialogue, setting, and theatre device are used with bare economy and striking effect, to show the imprisonment of the human soul in circumstance. We watch a vicious circle contract like the curves of a helical spring; the surroundings limit the experience, the experience limits the power of reason and imagination, and the maimed imagination then in turn avoids such experience as change of circumstance might allow. Nevertheless, we are conscious that what we have before us falls short in some way of tragedy. The presentation of evil and of suffering may be as implacable as the writer's strength can make it, but we are left with the disturbing conviction that what we have witnessed is an incomplete reading of life.
This theme and this treatment may be found in the characteristic play of the theatre at one extreme or in the reflective play of psychological analysis at the other, in plays as widely severed as Rice's The Adding Machine13 and Lenormand's Simoun. The unquestioned assumption that suffering is the work of a malevolent machine does not satisfy our understanding, for it no more fits the whole of our experience than does Clifford Odets' opposite and parallel assumption that the evil of the world is remediable by a change of social organization. The interpretation in terms of a limited mechanistic scheme involves no equilibrium, for the play does not lead the mind outward towards a wider emotional and speculative affirmation; it imprisons it instead in a limited area of pain. Such plays place themselves outside the category of tragedy because, by laying the whole emphasis upon evil and suffering, they destroy all balance. And this is true of a large number of modern plays that haunt us by their simultaneous force and restraint, bringing home to our imaginations their themes of misery, grief, defeat, and injustice. Nevertheless we refuse to call them tragedy because they do not square with the whole of our experience.
Finally, there is the rare negative form which might be called Satanic tragedy, the drama which oversets tragic balance, not merely by denying immanent good, but by implying a Satanic universe, a world-order behind the manifestation of event as evil as the event itself. To this kind belong among others, some of the plays of Euripides, Marlowe's Faustus, some of Strindberg; among the more recent writers Lenormand sometimes approaches it.14 This group of plays contrasts sharply with the two we have just considered, in that, at its height, magnitude of theme and power of passion again appear as distinguishing characteristics. This was true also of its direct opposite, religious drama,15 for there also some attempt at interpretation of life formed a background of thought and found its way directly or indirectly into the total effect even of the outer action. But in the drama of Satanism not only is there a more or less clearly implied interpretation of the universe surrounding the events, but, by reason of its conflict with the systems of positive religion, this interpretation will generally be original to the writer. Thus, in the major Satanic drama there is presupposed a mind both comprehensive and original, strong and wide enough in scope to synthesize disparate material into an organic system and with an individualism tenacious enough to withstand the imaginative force of prevailing assumptions. Nevertheless, even the plays of this group disturb, in greater or less degree, that supreme balance which characterizes tragedy ‘of the centre’. Though in less degree than the other negative plays, those of materialistic pessimism, they fall short by presenting a universe — even though patterned and not chaotic — which corresponds but imperfectly with the dual, if contradictory, experience of man.
The peculiar Satanic negation appears in different ways in the plays of Euripides and of Marlowe. Euripides uses the facilities of the Greek chorus to comment upon a universe controlled now by an evil world-order and now by mixture of casualty and cause, while Marlowe, in Dr Faustus, uses the more consistently dramatic Jacobean form to present a steadfast picture of an evil world-order on which there is no comment except by implication.
Euripides, through the familiar imagery of the old gods, reveals the irresponsible, meaningless or even malevolent forces that overbear man's valour. His gods, it is true, are more powerful than man, but certain of them are less noble, and from them comes the frustration which annuls creation, confuses valour, and cripples wisdom.16
Even in those plays where this interpretation is less clearly defined, the perception of pain and the poet's sympathy with it outweigh all else. And Euripides' nearest approach to a vindication of life's processes would appear to be Hecuba's in the Troades, where she justifies the sufferings of Troy as the raw material of art.17
Marlowe, whose tragedy appears at its height and in characteristic form in Faustus, takes up a unique position as a tragic thinker, because of the implacable paradox on which his reading of the universe rests; man's innate fallibility on the one hand, and, on the other, the infallibility demanded by inflexible law.18 To this paradox there is only one conclusion: ‘Why then belike we must sin and so consequently die.’ The precision and finality of this deduction indicate a vision terrifying alike in its assumptions and in its omissions. For implicit in Marlowe's premiss is the predestination of man to destruction by some determinate power capable of purpose and intention, and, as such purpose can only be sadistic, the world order it implies must derive from a Satanism more nearly absolute than that of Euripides.19
But neither in this play nor elsewhere does Marlowe state this assumption in explicit terms and the implication itself rests on a few passages in Faustus.20 Even there it is rather by silence and omission that he reveals his belief that evil is not only inherent in man's destiny but both irremediable and predetermined. Only a consistent vision of a Satanic universe could beget the initial paradox; never does Marlowe raise the question: Why, if the laws of the universe be such, should man, himself a part of that universe, be so irreconcileably opposed to them? To a convinced Satanist it is, in fact, no paradox. Given a sadistic and malevolent power directing the world-order there is no inducement to postulate a further transcendent power or intelligence, relating or reconciling the contradictions of man's capacity and God's demands. And so Marlowe achieves, not a balance between two interpretations of the universe, but immobility and rigidity of protest. In his drama the spirit of man is set against the universe, but there is no equilibrium between two worlds of thought. For Marlowe, at the time of Faustus, did not question the nature of the world-order. He saw it steadily and saw it evil.
So complete does Marlowe's Satanism seem in its indirect and outward expression that it is almost impossible to reconcile with its finality our persistent impression of tragic mystery in Faustus. How are we to reconcile the absence of tragic equilibrium in this, perhaps the most notable Satanic play in literature, with this recurrent and obstinate conviction that here, if anywhere, is tragedy? In part because the absence, even here, is more apparent than real. The framework of Marlowe's thought, the deductive process by which he arrives at his conclusion, is consistent and, within its limits, unassailable.21 But there are indications that it did not take into account the whole of his experience. The Satanic reading of life may, it is true, permit Faustus (and Marlowe) to confound Hell in Elysium and see Helen's beauty fairer than the evening air; for if these are themselves destructible, by so much is the mockery of man's fate more hideous. But there is one thing that Marlowe cannot subjugate to that world-order that predestines universal damnation — his own inarticulate and hardly acknowledged conviction that it is evil. From what source springs this passionate judgement, he does not appear to consider; but ‘Christ's blood streams in the firmament’ and there escapes — coherently, it may be, only in this single line — the implication of a deeper division in his mind, that his else consistent, Satanic interpretation has left unresolved. In that division, imaginatively revealed, though excluded from the logical demonstration of his thought, lie the dualism and conflict essential to the tragic mood. It does not constitute a balancing of one interpretation against another, but the absolute Satanism is flawed and the reader left with the impression of a potential balancing force to challenge its absolutism. Thus, even in the extreme case of Faustus, the most nearly Satanic tragedy that can be found, it would appear that in so far as drama is Satanic it loses tragic balance and in so far as it is tragic it is not Satanic. Moreover, in Marlowe's play, though in less degree than in the tragedies of the centre, there is to be found the same balancing of content by form that we remarked in the work of Sophocles. A partial challenge to the suffering and evil in the outer action comes from that beauty of form and style which itself gives the lie to the implication that the fundamental order of things is evil. For this itself implies harmony; as in the work of Sophocles, though not so fully, the revelation of beauty in form is an unwitting testimony to that beneficence or immanent good of which beauty and form are manifestations.
Nevertheless, in the plays of this last group, absolute tragic balance is overset, although magnitude of passion and thought again become possible, since the action is related to a surrounding universe greater in scope and significance than the figures and events that make up that action. And even though the direct inference be to a universe of implacable evil, this does not detract from the grandeur, though it may from the wholeness and saneness of the final impression. Moreover, beyond this direct influence lies the indirect and seemingly unwitting testimony of the ‘world of profit and delight’ that, residing in beauty, in form and in the unacknowledged sources of the poet's vision, maintains a partial balance in the play, despite his logical and intentional Satanism.
Admittedly, the suggestions we have just considered might, if pressed to the point of forming an argument, involve a petitio principii, inasmuch as the tragedies upon which we draw for evidence are themselves selected (even if unconsciously) by a mind in which the conclusion we later reach is already dormant. But they are suggestions only on the nature of certain perceived relations and Pascal's law still holds, for criticism as for much else: ‘Tu ne me chercherais pas si tu ne m'avais connu.’ The disability, in fact (if it be one), attaches to and must be acknowledged by all subjective criticism, and criticism is always in the last resort subjective. The logician himself admits that the conclusion of every syllogism is implicit in its major premiss and all that interpretation can do is to elucidate what is indeed obvious once it has been suggested.
The balance between the evil that is observed and the good that is guessed at is so common a part of human experience as to be perhaps its highest common factor. It is because tragedy reveals directly this equilibrium of conflicting thought and emotion that it has its enduring power. And it has been the attempt of this essay to indicate, first, that when tragedy departs from this norm and loses this correspondence with a universal experience it forfeits a part of its potency and, second, that this characteristic balance is the differentia of fine tragic art. In other words, it is precisely in this correspondence, and not in any of the outward characteristics by which the form can be described, that the essence of tragedy consists. It is then a mere matter of elucidation to indicate how and in what ways this balance is in practice preserved and by what deviations it may be destroyed. It may be observed in passing that the last three groups we considered, whether they were positive or negative, differed from the first, the religious drama, in that they destroyed the balance essential to the tragic mood by failing to satisfy that impression of two conflicting worlds of experience which reflects, at a certain phase, the totality of man's experience. Religious drama, on the other hand, supersedes the tragic mood by calling in the evidence of a wider surrounding universe of being, and destroys the balance by resolving the conflict.
It is now clear that tragedy is doubly subject to the law of limitation in art and that its subjection may throw some light upon the function of limitation itself. For it would appear to be subject not only to that which arises from its distinctive quality as an art, but to its own specific limitation in thought. The first of these conditions has been indicated in the preceding pages. The nature of the second, though implicit in what has there been said, may perhaps be briefly considered in conclusion.
Drama — and consequently tragedy, which can never escape the conditions common to all drama, but only refine upon and specialize them — must use as its primary material the world of experience, those events and actions which constitute actuality. It is its distinctive task to bring the presentation of these, by the resources of its peculiar technique into the sharpest possible focus; to produce, that is, the impression of immediacy. The indications it can give of the interpenetrating world of spiritual reality must necessarily be reconciled to this (a task of rare difficulty) and are generally subordinated to it, though, as we have seen, the highest tragedy depends for its power and its authority on the presence of an element of this conflicting evidence in its total effect. When this underlying reality forces itself irresistibly upon the poet's mind, finding its way into positive expression, the balance of tragedy is likely to be overset. The play then, if it remain dramatic in any exact sense of the term, takes on a form which is in truth no longer that of tragedy; Samson Agonistes cannot strictly be called tragic, and Shakespeare passes through the phase of the great, balanced tragedies to a later form expressive of a change in the relative evaluation of the outer action and the inner experience to which that action serves as manifestation. At this phase, common to the experience of many of the greatest dramatists, deed and event are, it would appear, primarily significant as images which make visible and manifest the reality which was hidden but immanent.22 What we in part discern in Shakespeare's thought, as we pass from Lear to the three concluding plays of his career, has its parallel in the passage of Euripides from the middle plays to the Bacchae, of Sophocles from the first to the second Oedipus, of Ibsen from the social dramas to the group which culminates in John Gabriel Borkman and When We Dead Awaken.23
There are, moreover, certain writers who appear never to touch the tragic mood. This mood is not, it need hardly be said, the prerogative of those who use the dramatic form called tragedy or denied to those whose age or race precludes it. Many writers in other forms, narrative verse or prose,24 have revealed that perception of tragic balance which would in drama have produced tragedy; Virgil had, of all men, this note of the potential tragic poet; the world he saw was poised betweeen those two conflicting interpretations that I have attempted to define; the influence of pain and evil at war with that of nobility in the spirit of man. But on the other hand many of the world's greatest poets have never touched this mood, and it must sometimes occur to the serious student of drama, and of its quintessence, tragedy, that their names are among the noblest and their thought among the most profound in poetry. Whereas Sophocles, Euripides, Shakespeare, Ibsen, even Aeschylus in the Eumenides, pass through and out of the tragic interpretation, Dante and Wordsworth never enter it in the fullness of their powers, and their major work is conceived in terms which do not allow of that Manichaeistic balance from which tragedy springs. And it is hard to resist the conclusion that the relation between their interpretation and that of tragedy as we have described it in these essays is, in fact, that of the double vision of the mystic to the vision focussed upon the manifestation only.25
And in essence this is what we suggested at the outset, that the religious interpretation of phenomena which means in fact the perception that they are only ‘appearances’ is incompatible with tragedy, which forever doubts whether their significance is ultimate or relative. Religion, whether it be positive or Satanic, declares that the unseen world is real and the actual a varyingly transparent veil.26 When, in its normal form, it is beatific, it transcends the tragic vision, even as Fox's ocean of light and love flowed over the ocean of darkness. The ends of tragedy can never be served by that interpretation which, while seeing with it that ‘in the world ye shall have tribulation’, sees also that which has ‘overcome the world’. For tragedy's concern is with that ‘tribulation’ while it still fills man's consciousness to the exclusion of all but a doubtful and half-discerned promise of transvaluation. In the next position, that of religious drama, the ‘world’, which is the proper theatre of tragedy, has been ‘overcome’; its seemingly solid structure has revealed itself as transparent in that irradiation which destroys the significance of outward event.
Tragedy then is an interim reading of life. And in so far as it does not rest its interpretation upon that ultimate conclusion, in so far as it maintains that balance which is the source of its strength and of its value, to that extent it is the result of relative limitation of thought. The paradox, again, is more apparent than real, for limitation, here also, has a specific function. Just as, in the sphere of technique, we discovered that the limitation of the art afforded strength to the orthodox dramatists and transcendent power to those who successfully challenged it (whether in the major questions of theme and scope or in minor problems of presentation), so now we observe that it is on the relative limitation of its thought that its universal and enduring value depends. Precisely because it is an interim reading of life, it speaks to the condition of all but a few at some period of their lives; for it reveals that balance, that uncertainty, which sees two worlds of being and cannot wholly accept either. It speaks more potently to those within its reach than any other literary kind, because it reveals this interim reading in terms of those very technical limitations which impose upon it the necessity for concentration of form and directness of method.
1 These are instances only of the types of play which fall short of the category of tragedy. Any reader of drama will readily think of many others.
2 And with this method we may associate all subsequent imitations of the Greek choric method, the many plays in which a virtually choric function is forced upon certain characters and one or two modern variations which will be noticed later.
3 Choephori, 639–45. Aeschylus uses the chorus for these references; certain of the Elizabethans assign a temporary choric function to characters within the action; Shakespeare always uses the pure dramatic method and his commentary or references come only from those characters whose nature is to speak them.
4 But to this group belongs a great part of the tragic work of Shakespeare, Lessing, Schiller, Hebbel, Ibsen, and such widely differing moderns as, to choose a few names at random, Galsworthy, Synge, and Hauptmann.
5 It is hard to find any other dramatist except Tcheckov in whom the tragic balance appears to depend entirely upon this, though it is a contributory factor to that balance in the work of nearly all great dramatists.
6 The functions of imagery which have already been indicated (Chapter VI) and those of prosody contribute to this effect. But the significance of form is more than the effect of the specific formal details.
7 We may instance among the moderns (taking as wide a range as possible) Yeats' Countess Cathleen, Lunacharski's Faust and the City, and Mr O'Neill's Lazarus Laughed. These have the technical form of tragedy, but it is clear that they are drawn away from true tragic balance by the overpowering strength of the positive interpretation, whether this last is explicit or implicit.
8 Already in Ghosts and certainly in The Wild Duck there is the implication that no mere social adjustment will eliminate the causes of suffering, for these are too deeply rooted in man's nature to be reached from without.
9 It is perhaps only in these two plays that Hauptmann and Toller imply clearly that a remediable maladjustment is the main cause of the suffering and sin. In general their tragedy is more nearly balanced and implies clearly that the continuance of evil has in it an element of mystery akin to man's nature itself.
10 In certain of the later of these plays there is a tendency to combine spiritual catastrophe with material or to substitute it for it, while nevertheless implying that some at least of the causes are remediable. Such a combination is certainly ‘enough to make it no tragedy’.
11 Even when it has the superficial form of tragedy, the true propaganda play seldom maintains strict dramatic technique. It tends to revert to thinly disguised exposition. This may have many virtues but they are not those of drama.
12 The quotation here is from the author's Introduction to the English Translation of Seven Plays (1934), but the same distinction is drawn in the Letters and is implied in Masses and Man.
13 At the risk of becoming unnecessarily explicit we might examine this, a highly representative play of its kind. It is a study of the inarticulate and uncomprehending death-agonies of a human spirit imprisoned in the mean monotony and vulgar pretensions of present-day black-coat slavery. After the earlier scenes, of mingled naturalism and symbolism, have laid before us the process of this fate, there follows a group of scenes in a world beyond death whose analytic technique and freer tempo allow the author to generalize the experiences of the earlier acts in an implicit commentary upon the mis-using of the soul's capacity for life. There is no alleviation, poetic or comic; the only variations in the play are the skilful changes of tension. Life, through a succession of reincarnations, is controlled by a vast adding machine progressing rhythmically to a foreknown result. This mechanism, which cannot be called a world-order, for the inference is not clearly enough drawn in the play, tends only to evil and to destruction of spirit. There is no suggestion of surrounding law, but only of the self-contained laws by which the soul's downward and negative progression is determined — just as are the totals of the adding machine. There is no attempt to throw light upon this from any other direction; nothing conflicts with the impression of pain and evil because there are no other forces, except in the too easily stifled imagination of the central figure, the victim.
14 The vision of an evil world-order in Medea and the Troades appears consistent enough to justify regarding them as Satanic drama. Strindberg at his most coherent and forcible makes a similar reading of life (in Miss Julia and The Father), while Lenormand, slender as is his contribution in general, approaches it in A L'Ombre du Mal.
15 Provided always that we continue to restrict that term to the drama of religious experience and do not extend it to include all drama written in terms of given theological assumptions.
16 Some at least of the repetitions of this passage must be presumed to be Euripides' intention. (Medea, 1415–19, Alcestis, 1159–63, Helen, 1688–92, Bacchae, 1388–92, Andromache, 1284–48.)
17 Troades, 1240–45. Just so Deirdre, in the Cuchulainn cycle and in Synge's play, thinks of her sorrow as a song ‘that shall be sung for ever’.
Both these passages put briefly and explicitly an estimate of the function of art in which is implicit the conclusion drawn a few pages earlier in discussing the relation of form to tragic balance in the Sophoclean tragedy.
18 Like Fulke Greville after him, Marlowe, in the opening argument of the play, sees the
Wearisome condition of humanity,
Born under one law, to another bound.
19 More nearly indeed, than that of any dramatist known to me.
20 Principally I. i, I. iii, II. ii, V. i and ii. (The references are to Boas's edition.)
21 It is remarkable, indeed, that so clear a piece of deduction should be conveyed (even though, of necessity, piecemeal) in strict dramatic form.
22 In great poetry they always have this function in some measure; they most certainly do so in Shakespeare's tragedies. But in the later phase to which I am referring, it becomes increasingly difficult to put any other simultaneous interpretation upon them.
23 Goethe, less innately dramatic than any of these, could express his final interpretations in nothing less than the later additions to the second part of Faust.
24 We may instance, to go no further, Chaucer's Troilus and Cresseide and Tolstoy's Anna Karenina.
25 As Mr T.S. Eliot puts it (Family Reunion, Part II, Scene iii):
He sees the world as clearly as you or I see it,
It is only that he has seen a great deal more than that.
26 The materialistic interpretation, as we noticed earlier in this chapter, destroys the balance of tragedy equally effectively by seeing only the veil and declaring that ‘there is no light behind the curtain’.