THE IDEA OF TRAGEDY

The great tragic artists of the world are four, and three of them are Greek,  It is in tragedy that the pre-eminence of the Greeks can be seen most clearly.  Except for Shakespeare, the great three, Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, stand alone.  Tragedy is an achievement peculiarly Greek.  They were the first to perceive it and they lifted it to its supreme height  Nor is it a matter that directly touches only the great artists who wrote tragedies; it concerns the entire people as well, who felt the appeal of the tragic to such a degree that they would gather thirty thousand strong to see a performance.  In tragedy the Greek genius penetrated farthest and it is the revelation of what was most profound in them.

The special characteristic of the Greeks was their power to see the world clearly and at the same time as beautiful.  Because they were able to do this, they produced art, distinguished from all other art by an absence of struggle, marked by a calm and serenity which is theirs alone.  There is, it seems to assure us, a region where beauty is truth, truth beauty.  To it their artists would lead us, illumining life's dark confusions by gleams fitful indeed and wavering compared with the fixed light of religious faith, but by some magic of their own, satisfying, affording a vision of something inconclusive and yet of incalculable significance.  Of all the great poets this is true, but truest of the tragic poets, for the reason that in them the power of poetry confronts the inexplicable.

Tragedy was a Greek creation because in Greece thought was free.  Men were thinking more and more deeply about human life, and beginning to perceive more and more clearly that it was bound up with evil and that injustice was of the nature of things.  And then, one day, this knowledge of something irremediably wrong in the world came to a poet with his poet's power to see beauty in the truth of human life, and the first tragedy was written.  As the author of a most distinguished book on the subject says: "The spirit of inquiry meets the spirit of poetry and tragedy is born."  Make it concrete:  early Greece with her godlike heroes and hero-god fighting afar on the ringing plains of windy Troy; with her lyric world, where every common thing is touched with beauty--her twofold world of poetic creation.  Then a new age dawns, not satisfied with beauty of song and story, an age that must try to know and to explain.  And for the first time tragedy appears.  A poet of surpassing magnitude, not content with the old sacred conventions, and of a soul great enough to bear new and intolerable truth--that is Aeschylus, the first writer of tragedy.

Tragedy belongs to the poets.  Only they have "trod the sunlit heights and from life's dissonance struck one chord."  None but a poet can write a tragedy,  For tragedy is nothing less than pain transmuted into exaltation by the alchemy of poetry, and if poetry is true knowledge and the great poets guides safe to follow, this transmutation has arresting implications.

Pain changed into, or, let us say, charged with, exaltation.  It would seem that tragedy is a strange matter.  There is indeed none stranger.  A tragedy shows us pain and gives us pleasure thereby.  The greater the suffering depicted, the more terrible the events, the more intese our pleasure.  The most monstrous and appalling deeds life can show are those the tragedian chooses, and by the spectacle he thus offers us, we are moved to a very passion of enjoyment.  There is food for wonder here, not to be passed over, as the superficial have done, by pointing out that the Romans made a holiday of a gladiator's slaughter, and that even to-day fierce instincts, savage survivals, stir in the most civilized.  Grant all that, and we are not a step advanced on the way to explaining the mystery of tragic pleasure.  It has no kinship with cruelty or the lust for blood.

On this point it is illuminating to consider our every-day use of the words tragedy and tragic.  Pain, sorrow, disaster, are always spoken of as depressing, as dragging down--the dark abyss of pain, a crushing sorrow, an overwhelming disaster.  But speak of tragedy and extraordinarily the metaphor changes.  Lift us to tragic heights, we say, and never anything else.  The depths of pathos but never of tragedy.  Always the height of tragedy.  A word is no light matter.  Words have with truth been called fossil poetry, each that is, a symbol of creative thought.  The whole philosophy of human nature is implicit in human speech.  It is a matter to pause over, that the instinct of mankind has perceived a difference, not of degree but of kind, between tragic pain and all other pain.  There is something in tragedy which marks it off from other disaster so sharply that in our common speech we bear witness to the difference.

All those whose attention has been caught by the strange contradiction of pleasure through pain agree with this instinctive witness, and some of the most brilliant minds the world has known have concerned themselves with it.  Tragic pleasure, they tell us, us in a class by itself.  "Pity and awe," Aristotle called it, "and a sense of emotion purged and purified thereby."  "Reconciliation," said Hegel, which we may understand in the sense of life's temporary dissonance resolved into eternal harmony.  "Acceptance," said Schopenhauer, the temper of mind that says, "They will be done."  The reaffirmation of the will to live in the face of death," said Nietzsche, "and the joy of its inexhaustibility when so reaffirmed."

Pity, awe, reconciliation, exaltation--these 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