And the
cosmic disharmony appears all the more glaring. It ceases to be
chargeable to an external fate or God, to the environment or convention,
which might perhaps be mastered and remolded; and is seen pervading
the nature of reality itself, no accidental circumstance, but essential
evil, ineradicable. The greatest tragic poets see it thus. And then
blame turns to understanding and resentment into pity.
Retributive justice, as the motive force of tragedy, has for us lost
its meaning. We no longer feel the necessity of justifying the ways
of God to man, because we have ceased to believe that there exists any
single, responsible power. The good is not a preordained and
automatically accomplished fact, but an achievement of finite effort,
appearing here and there in the world when individuals, instead of
contending against each other, cooperate for their mutual advantage.
In addition to the comic, there is much artistic representation of
evil which can be classed neither as pathetic nor as tragic. Neither
moral admiration nor idealization are aroused by the characters
portrayed. They may be great criminals like Lady Macbeth or Iago, or
the undistinguished and disorderly people of modern realistic
literature, yet in either case we find them good to know. And we do
so, not merely because we enjoy, as disinterested onlookers, the
spectacle of human existence, but because the artist makes us enter
into it and realize its values. For even that which from the moral
point of view we pronounce evil is, so long as it maintains itself,
a good thing from its own point of view.
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