Whenever a great
personality is represented, it is his personal suffering and fortitude
that win at once our pity and our admiration. For private sorrows, for
the ruin of character, for the death of those whom we are made to love,
there can be no complete atonement in the universal; because it is
with the individual that we are chiefly concerned. No; the
reconciliation lies where we have placed it--in tragedy, in the personal
heroism of the strong character; in pathos, in the vision, not in the
triumph, of the good.
The ordinary Protestant theological theory of tragedy is even more
inadequate than the Hegelian. For, by assuming that there is no genuine
loss in the world, that every evil is compensated for in the future
lives of the heroes, it takes away the sting from their sacrifice and
so deprives them of their crown of glory. It makes every adventure a
calculation of prudence and every despair a farce. It is remote from
the reality of experience where men stake all on a chance and, instead
of receiving the good by an act of grace, wring it by blood and tears
from evil.
On much the same level of thinking is the moralistic theory which
requires that the misfortunes of the hero should be the penalty for
some fault or weakness. This view, which has the authority of Aristotle,
is also based on the doctrine of the justice of the world-order. It
was pretty consistently carried out in the classical Greek drama;
although there suffering is not exacted as an external retribution,
but as the inevitable consequence of the turbulent passions of the
characters; for even the punishment for offenses against the gods is
of the nature of a personal revenge which they take.
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