EDITH HAMILTON

Chapter XI
:The THE IDEA OF TRAGEDY
THE GREAT tragic artists of the world are four, and three

GREEK of them are Greek. It is in tragedy that the pre-eminence

of the Greeks can be seen most clearlv, Except for Shake-
speare, the great three, iEschylus, Sophocles, Euripides,
stand alone. Tragedy is an achievement peculiarly Greek.

WAY 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 geWl~
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 pro-
duced art distinguished from all other art by an absence
of struggle, marked by a caIrn and serenity which is
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 THE GREEK WAY
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( 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, satisfy-
)
! ing, affording a vision of something inconclusive and yet
( of incalculable significance. Of all the great poets this is
i 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 beginnwg to perceive
020re an~ :nore clearly that it was bound up with evil
and that 1lliustlce was of the nature of thil1~ And then,
one day, this knowledge of something irremediably
wrong in the world came to a poet with his poet's power
to See beau in the truth of human life, and the first
tragedy was written. As the author a a most distin-
guished book on the subject says: "The spirit of inquiry
meets the spirit of poetry and tragedy is bam." Malee it
concrete: early Greece with her godlike heroes and
hero-gods fighting far on the ringing plains of windy
Troy; with her lyric world, where every common
thingis 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 gy 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
THE IDEA OF TRAGEDY zZ9
enough to bear new and intolerable truth - that is
1Eschylus, the first writer of tragedy.
Tragedy belongs to the poets. Only they have
"trod the sunlit heights and from life's dissonance struck
one clear chord." None but ~ poet can write a tragedy.
or era edv is nothing less than pain transmuted into
~ation 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 intense
our pleasure. The most monstrous and appalling deeds
life can show arc 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 glad-
iator's slaughter, and that even to-day fierce instincts,
savage survivals, stir in the most civilized. Gram all
that, and we are not a step advanced on the way to ex-
plaining the mystery of tragic pleasure. It has no kinshiR
with cruelty or thg IllS' 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
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23° THE GREEK WA Y
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
helgllt of tragedy. A word is no light matter, ~Words
have with truth been called fossil poetry, each, that is.
a symbol of a 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 traRc
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 briI-
Iianr minds the world has known have concerned them-
selves 'with it. Tragic pleasure, they tell tIS. is in a class
by itself. "Pity and awe," Aristotle called it, "and a
sense of emotion purged and purified thereby." "Recon-
ciliation," said Hegel, which we may understand in the
sense of life's temporary dissonance resolved into eternal
harmony. "Acceptance," said Schopcnhauer, the temper
of mind that says, "Thy will be done." "The reaffirmation
of the will to live in the face of death," said Nietzsche,
Mand the joy of its inexhaustibility when so reaffirmed."
Pity, awe, reconciliation, exaltation - these are the
eIemcr;t; that make-~agic-pleasure. No play is a
tragedy that does not call them forth. So the philosophers
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THE IDEA OF TRAGEDY 231
say, all in agreement with the common judgment of man-
kind, 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,lBe gJ1lone 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 math .'But,,,
as his critics have pointe out, e would thus exclude the i,
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trag-edv of the suffering of the innocent, and a definition/ '
whlch' does not include the death of Cordelia or of S ~<;>pco.~$
Deianira cannot be taken as final. (oJ(V,SiDf1 +0 k~
The suffering of the innocent, indeed. can itself be
so differently treated as to necessitate completely differ-
ent categories. In one of the greatest tragedies, the
Prometheus of iEschylus, 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'&ptigooc,l
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 Icing and
guest. These two plays, seemingly so totally unlike, call
forth the same response. Tragic pleasure of the greatest
intensttv is caused by them both. They have something
in common, but the philosophers do not tell us what it
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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 or tragedy, in the Athens or Pericles and in
Ellzabethan 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 or tragedy. for far from
being periods or darkness and defeat, each was a time
when lire waS seen exalted, a time or thrilling and un-
-fathomable possibilities. TIley 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 £lace or wonderLmankind was
'7 beauteous; lire was lived on the crest or the wave. ~
\"d'12- ""' than all. the ~Y or heroism had stirred men's
f' (F _0" \ hearts. Not stuff for tragedy, would you say? But on
d;?S' ~rest or the wave one must reel either tragically or
« joyously; one cannot reel tamely. ::rhe temper or mind
_i),."othat sees tragedy in life has not ror its a oSIte the temrer
7 t at sees JOv. Ie opposite pole to the tragic view or
life is the sordid view. When humanity is seen as devoid
or 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.1eek for the
sirmificance
I> or lire.
_ An error strangely common is that
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THE IDEA OF TRAGEDY 233
this significance for tragic purposes depends, ill some
sort, upon outward circumstance, on
pomp and feast and revelry,
With mask, and antIque pageantry'-
Nothing or 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 famil-
iarity. 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 or Elsinore. The onlv
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 - or
these. and or these alone, tragedy will never let go. Wirh-
out them there is no tragedy. To answer the g~estion,
what makes a tragedy. is to answer the guestion wherein
lies the essential significance of life, what the dignity of
humanity deFends uFon 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 undis-
puted. Deep down, when we search ont the reaSOD fQf
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THE GREEK WAY
( our conviction of the transcendent worth of each human
f )being, we Imow that it is because of the p~ssibility that
, each can suffer so terribly. What do outside trappmgs
) matter, Zenith or Elsinore? Tragedy's preoccupation IS
\. with suffering.
But, it is to be well noted. not with all suffering.
( )
There are degrecs in our hi~h cstate of pain. It is not
given to all to suffer alike. We differ in nothing more than
in our power to feel. There arc souls of little and of great
~ 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.
Trazcdv
D , 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
.5fi(. 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
THE IDEA OF TRAGEDY 23)
I and the executioner. That breaks the heart, but is not
tr agedy. ' 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, '\
1:'\
Death is not tragIc ill Itself, not the de.ath of the beautiful
and the young, the lovely and beloved. Death felt and = ')
I suffered as Macbeth feels and suffers is tragic. Death felt LJ
' 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)'
i£ 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 Antigon~.1LiL
\
Antigone herself, so great, so tortured. Hari1Iet's hesita-
non to kill JUS uncle is not tragic, I he 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 catas-
trophe. 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 Greeks went
to the myths for their subjects, we are told, to insure
remoteness from real life which does not 2dmit 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
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236 THE GREEK WAY
tragedy is of her domain, for the unusual is as real as the
usual When the Moscow Art Players presented the
Brotbets 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
t he 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 !2ast the power of the human heart to
liear. A drearier setting, a more typically realistic setting,
it would be hard to find, but to see the play was to feel
~ and ~ 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 personz and his plays
are dramas with an unhappy ending. The end of Gbosts
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 de-
spair and not loathing, but a sense of pity and wonder
THE IDEA OF TRAGEDY
'37
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 Karenina is a
tragedy; Madame Bovary is not. Realism and Romanti-
1)/ cistn.,or comparative degrees of Realism, have nothing to
do WIth the matter. It is a case of the small soul against the
I great ;o;;':U;-d the power of a wnter whose special endow-
ment IS VOlT clair dam ce qui est" against the intuition of
.. poet. l.> Lu:h" -9vr"ft, see. cJet,-rly ~at Cld-ua.lly is"
?\ . If the Greeks ha~ left no tragedies behind for us, the
\ highest reach of their power would be unlmown. The
~
h:Jc\O)
fhree p_oets..,who
L,.•• O....
were able t 'Sound the depths of uunans> l't! I (;~ /
(
a.gonYt-,vere able also to recogruzeAmd reveal it as trag~." CD
I he mystery of evil, tfiey said, curtains that of which
'every man whose soul is not a clod hath visions." Pain
c2.uld exalt and in tragedy for a moment men could ~
~ght of a mearung beyond their grasp. «Yet had God not
turned us ltl hiS hand and cast to earth our zreatness,"
Euripides makes the old Trojan queen say in h~r extre~­
iry, "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 ~eath of the ordinary man a wretched,
I chilling thing which we turn from, while the death of
I the he~o. always trag.ie, war:ns us with a sense of quick- •
ened life? Answer this quesuon and the enigma of tragic
\ pleasure is solved. "Never let me hear that brave blood
?as be,en shed in vain," said Sir Walter Scott; "ir sends an
imperious challenge down through all the generations."
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/ So the end of a tragedy challenges us. The great soul in . \ ;[
/ pam and ill death transfonn~ .~~1. and de~th. Through It 1::\Tr-"-j ~"~ )
( :.ve catch a ghmpse of the §t01C Emperor. s Dear CIty of
' \ God. of a deerer and morc ultimate reality than that ill

XII
(\"IUCh our lives arc lived.

pter
IESCTIYLUS /
E FIRST DRAMA T~

'VHICN Nietzsche de his famous/definition of tragic

pleasure he fixed his ey • like all chc other philosophers
m like case. not on the Mus'l.lierself but on a smgle
tragedian. His "reaffirmatio of the will to live in the
face of death. and the joy/bf .1S inexhaustibility when
so reaffirmed" is not the/traged~Sophocles nor the
tragedy of Euripides. !;ut it IS the H~-,ry essence of the
tragedy of .iEsehylu~( The strange po\~r tragedy has
to present suffering/and death in such a Vlay as to exalt
and not depress is to be felt in iEschylus'''plays as ill
those of no other tragic poet. He was the first agedian;
tragedy was Ius creation, and he set upon it the stamp
of his 0~'I1~irit.
It w a soldier-spirit. iEschylus was a lIlaratho •
warrror the title given to each of the little band who had
bc~te/ back the earlier tremendous Persian onslaught.
As uch, his ~rltaph would seem to show, he merited
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