Antigone Article 02

8/14/2019 Antigone Article 02

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EDITH HAMILTON

:TheGREEKWAY

Chapter XITHE IDEA OF TRAGEDY

THE GREAT tragic artists of the world are four, and threeof them are Greek. It is in tragedy that the pre-eminenceof the Greeks can be seen most clearlv, Except for Shakespeare, the great three, iEschylus, Sophocles, Euripides,stand alone.Tragedy is an achievement peculiarly Greek.They were the first to perceive it and they lif ted it toits supreme height. Nor is it a matter that directly touchesonly the great artists who wrote tragedies; it concernsthe entire people aswell, who felt the appeal of the tragicto such a degree that they would gather thirty thousandstrong to see a performance. In tragedy the Greek g e W l ~penetrated farthest and it is the revelation of what wasmost profound in them.The special characteristic of the Greeks was theirpower 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 ar t by an absenceof struggle, marked by a caIrn and serenity which is

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THE IDEA OF TRAGEDY

~ a t i o n by the alchemy of poetry, and if poetry istrue 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 isa strange matter.There is indeed none stranger. A tragedy shows us painand gives us pleasure thereby. The greater the sufferingdepicted, the more terrible the events. the more intenseour pleasure. The most monstrous and appalling deedslife can show arc those the tragedian chooses, and by thespectacle he thus offers us, we are moved to a verypassion of enjoyment. There is food for wonder here,not to be passed over, as the superficial have done, bypointing out that the Romans made a hol iday of a gladiator's slaughter, and that even to-day fierce instincts,savage survivals, stir in the most civilized. Gram alltha t, and we are not a step advanced on the way to explaining the mystery of tragic pleasure. It has no kinshiRwith cruelty or thg IllS' for blood.- On this point it is i lluminating to consider ourevery-day use of the words t ragedy and tragic. Pain.sorrow, disaster, are always spoken of as depressing, asdragging down - the dark abyss of pain, a crushing

zZ9enough to bear new and intolerable truth - that is1Eschylus, the first writer of tragedy.

Tragedy belongs to the poets. Only they have"trod the sunlit heights and from life's dissonance struckone clear chord." None but poet can wri te a tragedy.or era edv is nothing less than pain transmuted into

THE GREEK WAYz3( theirs alone.There is, it seems to assure us, a region where

)beauty is truth, truth beauty. To it their artists would leadus, illumining life's dark confusions by gleams fitfulindeed 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 isi true, but t ruest of the tragic poets, for the reason that inthem the power of poetry confronts the inexplicable.

Tragedy was a Greek crea tion because in Greecethought was free. Men were thinking more and moredeeply about human life, and beginnwg to perceive020re a n : nore clearly tha t it was bound up wi th eviland that 1lliustlce was of the nature of t h i l 1 ~ And then,one day, this knowledge of something irremediablywrong in the world came to a poet with his poet's powerto See beau in the truth of human life, and the firsttragedy was written. As the author a a most distinguished book on the subject says: "The spirit of inquirymeets the spiri t of poetry and tragedy is bam." Malee itconcrete: early Greece with her godlike heroes andhero-gods fighting far on the ringing plains of windyTroy; with her lyric world, where every commonthingis touched wit h beauty - her twofold world ofpoetic creation. Then a new age dawns, not satisfiedwi th beauty of song and s to ry, an age tha t must gy toknow and to explain. And for the first time tragedyappears. A poet of surpassing magnitude, not contentwith the old sacred conventions, and of a soul grea t


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----- ~ - - - - - - - - - - ~ ~ - - - - - - -:::i ';;aasorrow, an overwhelming disaster. But speak of tragedyand ext raordinari ly the metaphor changes. Lif t us totragic heights, we say, and never anything else. Thedepths of pathos but never of tragedy, Always thehelgllt of t ragedy. A word is no light matter, ~ W o r d shave with truth been called fossil poetry, each, that is.a symbol of a creative though t. Th e whole philosophyof human nature is implicit in human speech. It is a matterto pause over, that the ins tinct of mankind has perceiveda difference, not of degree but of kind, between traRcpain and all other pain. There is something in tragedywhich marks it off f rom other disaster so sharp ly thatin our common speech we bear witness to the difference.

All those whose a tt en tion has been caugh t by thes trange con trad ic tion of pleasure through pain agreewith this instinctive witness, and some of the most briIIianr minds the world has known have concerned them-selves 'with it. Tragic pleasure, they tell tIS. is in a classby itself. "Pity and awe," Ari stot le called it, "and asense of emotion purged and purified thereby." "Reconciliation," said Hegel, which we may understand in thesense of life's temporary dissonance resolved into eternalharmony. "Acceptance," said Schopcnhauer, the temperof mind thatsays, "Thy will be done." "The reaffirmationof the will to live in the face of death ," said Nietzsche,Mand the joy of its inexhaustibility when so reaffirmed."

Pity, awe, reconcil iation, exaltat ion- these are theeIemcr;t; that m a k e - ~ a g i c - pleasure. No play is atragedy that does not call them forth. So the philosophers

23 TH E GREEK WA Y THE IDEA OF TRAGEDY 231say, all in agreement with the common judgment of mankind, that t ragedy is something above and beyond thedissonance of pain. But what it is that causes a p lay tocall forth these feelings, what is the essential element ina tragedy,lBegJ1lone seeks to define. In a notable passagehe says that the only tragic subject is a spiritual strugglein which each side has a claim upon our math .'But,,,= - ' ; : " : = ~ = ~ : : ' : " : ' : = " ' : ; : : : : : ; ' : ' 2 - " : : : : " ; ' T : : ' i " - ' c . ; . I : ; : = = ' ~- \as hiscritics have point e out, e would thus exclude the i,trag-edv of the suffering of the innocent, and a definition/ 'whlch' does not include the death of Cordelia or of S ~ < ; > p c o . ~ $Deianira cannot be taken as final. (oJ(V,SiDf1 +0 k

Th e suffering of the innocent, indeed. can itself beso differently treated as to necessitate completely different categories. In one of the greatest tragedies, thePrometheus of iEschylus , the main actor is an innocentsufferer, but, beyond this purely formal connection, thatpassionate rebel, defying God and all the powers of theuniverse, has no relationship whatever to the lovely,loving Cordelia. An inclusive definition of tragedy mustcover cases asdiverse in circumstance and in the characterof the protagonist as the whole range of life and letterscan afford it. It must include such opposites as'&ptigooc,lthe high-souled maiden who goes with open eyes to herdeath rather than leave her brother's body unburied, andMacbeth, the ambition-mad, the murderer of hisIcingandguest. These two plays, seemingly so totally unlike, callforth the same response. Tragic pleasure of the greatestintensttv is caused by them both. They have somethingin common, but the philosophers do not tell us what it


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__ """IIlI' 'liS_----......----THE GREEK WAY 233some

pomp and feast and revelry,With mask, and antIque pageantry'-

Nothing or all that touches tragedy. Th e surface of lifeis comedy's concern; tragedy is indifferent to it. We donot, to be sure , go to Main Street or to Zenith for tragedy.but t he reason has nothing to do with their dull familiarity. There is no reason inherent in the house i tself whyBabbi tt 's home in Zenith should no t be the scene of atragedy qui te as wel l as the Castle or Elsinore. Th e onlvreason it is not is Babbitt himself. "That singular swingtoward elevation" which Schopenhauer discerned intragedy, does no t t ake any of its impetus from outsidethings.

The digni ty and the significance of human life - orthese. and or these alone, tragedy will never let go. Wirhou t them there is no tragedy. To answer the g ~ e s t i o n ,what makes a tragedy. is to answer the guestion whereinlies the essential significance of life, what the dignity ofhumanity deFends uFon in the last analysis. Here thetragedians speak to us with no uncertain voice. The greattragedies themselves offer the solut ion to the problemthey propound. It is by our power to suffer, above a ll .that we are of more value than the sparrows. Endow themwith a greater or as great a poten tial ity of pain and ourf or emos t p lace in the world would no longer be undisputed. Deep down, when we search ont the reaSOD fQf

THE IDEA OF TRAGEDYthis significance fo r t ragic purposes depends , il lsort, upon outward circumstance, on

2} 2is. Their concern is with what a tragedy makes us feel,not with what makes a tragedy.

Only twice in l iterary his tory has there been a greatpe riod or t ra gedy , in the Athens or Pericles and inEllzabethan England. What these two per iods had incommon, two thousand years and more apart in time,that they expressed themselves in the same fashion, maygive us some hint of the nature or t ragedy . for far frombe ing peri od s or darkness and defeat, each was a t imewhen lire waS seen exal ted , a time or thrilling and un-fathomable possibilities. TIley held their heads high,those men who conquered at Marathon and Salamis, andthose who fought Spain and saw the Great Armadasink. The world was a lace or wonderLmankind was

'7 beauteous; lire was lived on the crest or the wave.\"d'12- ""' than all. the ~ or heroism had stirred men'sf' (F _0" \ hearts. Not stuff for tragedy, would you say? But ond;?S ' ~ r e s t 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 itsa oSIte the temrer7 t at sees JOv. Ie opposite pole to the tragic view or

life is the sordid view. When humanity is seen as devoidor d igni ty and signi ficance, trivial , mean. and sunk indreary hopelessness, then the spiri t of tragedy departs."Sometime let gorgeous tragedy in scept red pall comesweeping by." At the opposite pole stands Gorki withThe Lower DePths.

Other poets may, the tragedian must.1eek f or t hesirmificance or lire. An error strangely common is that> _


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21< THE GREEK WAY~ ' 1 "( our conviction of the transcendent worth of each humanf )be ing, we Imow that it is because of the p ~ s s i b i l i t y that, each can suffer so ter ribly. 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 h i ~ h cstate of pain. It is notgiven to all to suffer alike.We differ in nothing more thanin our power to feel. There arc souls of little and of great

and upon that degree the dignity and significanceof each life depend. There is no dignity like the dignityof a soul in agony.

Here I and sorrows sit;Here is my throne, bid kings come bow to it.

Trazcdv is enthroned, and to her realm those aloneD ,are admit ted 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 anycatastrophe may be tragic. But the earth may be removedand the mountains be carried into the midst of the sea,and if only the small and shallow are confounded, tragedyis absent.

One dark page of Roman history tells of a littleseven-year-old girl, daughter of a man judged guilty ofdeath and so herself condemned to die, and how shepassed through the staring crowds sobbing and asking,"What had she done wrong? If they would tell her, shewould never do it again" - and so on to the black prison

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THE IDEA OF TRAGEDY 23)I and the executioner. That breaks the heart, but is not

(tragedy' it is pathos. No heights are there for the soul tomount to, but only the dark depths where there are tears

)for things. Undeserved suffering is not in itself tragic, '\Death isnot tragIc il l Itself, not the de.athof the beautiful1:'\and the young, the lovely and beloved. Death felt and = ')

I suffered as Macbeth feels and suffers is tragic. Death feltLJ/

' 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 manare not what make the tr agedy of the A n t i g o n ~ . 1 L i LAntigone herself, so great, so tortured. Hari1Iet's hesita-

) non to kill JUS uncle isnot tragic, I he tragedy is his.powerto feel. Change all the circumstances of the drama and;' Hamle t in the grip of any calamity would be tragIC, justas Polonius would never be, however awful the catas

trophe. The suffering of a soul that can suffer greatly-that and only that, istragedy.

It follows, then, that tragedy has nothing to do withthe distinction between Realism and Romanticism. Thecontrary has always been maintained. The Greeks wentto the myths for their subjects, we are told, to insureremoteness from real life which does not 2dmit of hightragedy. "Realism is the ruin of tragedy," says the latestwri te r on the subject. It is not true. If indeed Realismwere conceived of asdealing only With the usual. tragedywould be ruled out, for the soul capable of a great passionis not usual.But if nothing human isaliento Realism, then


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236 THE GREEK WAYtragedy is of her domain, for the unusual is as real as theusual When the Moscow Art Players presented theBrotbetsKaramazoffthere was seenon the stage anabsurdlittle man in dirty clothes who waved his arms about andshuffled and sobbed, the farthest possible remove from

)the traditional figures of tragedy, and yet tragedy wasthere in his person, s tr ipped of her gorgeous pall. butsceptred truly . speaking the authent ic voice of humanagony in a struggle !2ast the power of the human heart toliear. 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 nottragedies. Whether Ibsen isa realist or not ' - the Realismof one generation is apt to be the Romanticism of thenext - small soulsare his dramatis personz and his playsare dramas with an unhappy ending. The end of Gbostsleaves us with a sense of shuddering ho rro r and coldanger against a society where such things can be, and theseare not tragic feelings.

The greatest realistic works of fiction have beenwritten by the French and the Russians. To read one ofthe great Frenchmen's books is to feel mingled despairand loathing for mankind, so base, so trivial and sowretched. But to read a great Russian novel is to have analtogether different experience. The baseness. the beastin us, the misery of life. are there as plain to see as inthe French book, but wha t we are left with is not despair and not loathing, but a sense of pi ty and wonder

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THE IDEA OF TRAGEDY '37before mankind tha t can so suffer. The Russian seeslife in that way because the Russian genius is primarilypoetical; the French genius is not. Anna Karenina is atragedy; Madame Bovary is not. Realism and Romanti-

1)/ cistn.,or comparative degrees of Realism, have nothing todo WIththe matter. It is a caseof the small soul against theI great ;o;;':U;-d the power of a wnter whose special endow-

?ment IS VOlT clair damcequi est" against the intuition of.. poet. l.> Lu:h" -9vr"ft, see. cJet,-rly ~ a Cld-ua.lly is"\ . I f the Greeks h a left no tragedies behind for us, the\ highest reach of their power would be unlmown. The h:Jc\O)fhree p_oets..,who were able t 'Soundthe depths of uunans> l' I /

(L,. O.... t! (;a.gonYt-,vere able also to recogruzeAmd reveal it as t r a g ~ . " 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~ g h t of a mearung beyond their grasp. Yet had God notturned us l tl hiS hand and cast to ea rth our zreatness,"Euripides makes the old Trojan queen say in h ~ e x t r e ~ -iry, "we would have passed away giving nothing to men.They would have found no theme for song in us normade great poems from our sorrows."

( . .'Why,is the ~ e a t h of the ordinary man a wretched,I chilling thing which we turn from, while the death ofI the h e ~ o . always trag.ie, war:ns us with a sense of quick- \

ened life? Answer this quesuon and the enigma of tragicpleasure is solved. "Never let me hear tha t brave blood?as be,en shed in vain," said Sir Walter Scott; "ir sends animperious challenge down through all the generations."


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XIIterIESCTIYLUS /E F IRST DRAMA T

'VHICN Nietzsche de his famous/definit ion of t ragicpleasure he fixed his ey like all chc other philosophersm like case. not on the Mus'l.lierself but on a smgletragedian. His "reaffirmatio of the will to live in theface of death. and the joy/bf .1S inexhaustibility whenso reaffirmed" is not t h e / t r a g e d ~ Sophocles nor thetragedy of Euripides. !;ut it IS the H -,y essence of thetragedy of . i E s e h y l u ~ ( The strange p o \ ~ r tragedy hasto present suffering/and death in such a Vlay as to exaltand not depress is to be felt in iEschylus'''plays as il lthose of no other tragic poet. He was the first agedian;tragedy was Ius creation, and he set upon it the stampof his 0 ~ ' I 1 ~ i r i t .

It w a soldier-spirit. iEschylus was a lIlaratho warrror the title given to each of the little band who hadb c ~ t e / back the earlier tremendous Persian onslaught.As uch, his ~ r l t a p h would seem to show, he merited

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'3 3 THE GREEK WAY/ So the end of a t ragedy challenges us. The great soul in . \ ;[/ pam and il l death t r a n s f o n n ~ . ~ ~ 1 . and d e ~ t h . 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 il l(\"IUCh our lives arc lived.

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Antigone Article 02