The Tragic Fallacy

I

THROUGH the legacy of their art the great ages have transmitted to us a dim image of their glorious vitality. When we turn the pages of a Sophoclean or a Shakespearean tragedy we participate faintly in the experience which created it, and we sometimes presumptuously say that we ‘understand’ the spirit of these works. But the truth is that we see them, even at best and in the moments when our souls expand most nearly to their dimensions, through a glass darkly.

It is so much easier to appreciate than to create that an age too feeble to reach the heights achieved by the members of a preceding one can still see those heights towering above its impotence as we do when we perceive a Sophocles or a Shakespeare soaring in an air which we can never hope to breathe. We say that we can ’appreciate’ them, but what we mean is that we are just able to wonder, and we can never hope to participate in the glorious vision of human iife out of which they were created — not even to the extent of those humbler persons for whom they were written. To us the triumphant voices come from far away and tell of a heroic world which no longer exists; to them they spoke of immediate realities and revealed the inner meaning of events amid which they still lived.

When the life has entirely gone out of a work of art come down to us from the past, when we read it without any emotional comprehension whatsoever, and can no longer even imagine why the people for whom it was intended found it absorbing and satisfying, then, of course, it has ceased to be a work of art at all, and has dwindled into one of those deceptive ‘documents’ from which we get a false sense of comprehending through the intellect things which cannot be comprehended at all except by means of a kinship of feeling. And though all works from a past age have begun in this way to fade, there are some, like the great Greek or Elizabethan tragedies, which are still halfway between the work of art and the document. They no longer can have for us the immediacy which they had for those to whom they originally belonged, but they have not yet eluded us entirely. We no longer live in the world which they represent, but we can half imagine it, and we can measure the distance which we have moved away. Thus we write no tragedies to-day, but we can still talk about the tragic spirit, of which we should, perhaps, have no conception were it not for the works in question.

An age which could really appreciate Shakespeare or Sophocles would have something comparable to put beside them, — something like them, not necessarily in form or in spirit, but at least in magnitude, — some vision of life which would be, however different, equally ample and passionate. But when we move to put a modern masterpiece beside them, when we seek to compare them with, let us say, a Ghosts or a Weavers, we shrink as from the impulse to commit some folly, and we feel as though we were about to superimpose Bowling Green upon the Great Prairies in order to ascertain which is the larger.

The question, we see, is not primarily one of art, but of the two worlds which two minds inhabited. No increased powers of expression, no greater gift for words, could have transformed Ibsen into Shakespeare. The materials out of which the latter created his works — his conception of human dignity, his sense of the importance of human passions, his vision of the amplitude of human life — simply did not and could not exist for Ibsen, as they did not and could not exist for his contemporaries. God and Man and Nature had all somehow dwindled in the course of the intervening centuries, not because the realistic creed of modern art led us to seek out mean people, but because this meanness of human life was somehow thrust upon us by the operation of that same process which led to the development of realistic theories of art by which our vision could be justified.

Hence, though we still use, sometimes, the adjective ‘tragic’ to describe one or another of those modern works of literature which portray human misery and which end more sadly, even, than they begin, the term is a misnomer, since it is obvious that the works in question have nothing in common with the classical examples of the genre, and produce in the reader a sense of depression which is the exact opposite of that elation generated when the spirit of a Shakespeare rises joyously superior to the outward calamities which he recounts, and celebrates the greatness of the human spirit whose travail he describes.

Tragedies, in that only sense of the word which has any distinctive meaning, are no longer written in either the dramatic or any other form, and the fact is not to be accounted for in any merely literary terms. It is not the result of any fashion in literature or of any deliberate determination to write about human nature or character under different aspects. Neither does it come from any greater sensitiveness of feeling which would make us shrink from the contemplation of the suffering of Medea or Othello, nor from any greater optimism which would make us likely to see life in more cheerful terms. It is, on the contrary, the result of enfeeblements of the human spirit not unlike that described in an earlier essay of mine, and a further illustration of that gradual weakening of man’s confidence in his ability to impose upon the phenomenon of life an interpretation acceptable to his desires which is the subject of the whole of the present discussion.

To explain that fact and to make clear how the creation of classical tragedy did consist in the successful effort to impose such a satisfactory interpretation will require, perhaps, the special section which follows, although the truth of the fact that great tragedy does impose such an interpretation must be evident to anyone who has ever risen from the reading of Œdipus or Lear with that feeling of exultation which comes when we have been able, by rare good fortune, to enter into its spirit as completely as is possible for us of a remoter and emotionally enfeebled age. Meanwhile one anticipatory remark may be ventured. If the plays and the novels of to-day deal with littler people and less mighty emotions, it is not because we have become interested in commonplace souls and their unglamorous adventures, but because we have come, willy-nilly, to see the soul of man as commonplace and its emotions as mean.

II

Tragedy, said Aristotle, is the ‘imitation of noble actions,’and though it is some twenty-five hundred years since the dictum was uttered, there is only one respect in which we are inclined to modify it. To us ‘imitation’ seems a rather naïve word to apply to that process by which observation is turned into art, and we seek for one which would define, or at least imply, the nature of that interposition of the personality of the artist between the object and the beholder which constitutes his function, and by means of which he transmits a modified version rather than a mere imitation of the thing which he has contemplated.

In the search for this word, the æstheticians of romanticism invented the term ‘expression’ to describe the artistic purpose to which apparent imitation was subservient. Psychologists, on the other hand, feeling that the artistic process was primarily one by which reality is modified in such a way as to render it more acceptable to the desires of the artist, employed various terms in the effort to describe that distortion which the wish may produce in vision. And, though many of the newer critics reject both romanticism and psychology, even they insist upon the fundamental fact that in art we are concerned not with mere imitation, but with the imposition of some form upon the material which it would not have if it were merely copied as a camera copies. Tragedy is not, then, as Aristotle said, the imitation of noble actions, for, indeed, no one knows what a noble action is, or whether or not such a thing as nobility exists in nature apart from the mind of man. Certainly the action of Achilles in dragging the dead body of Hector around the walls of Troy and under the eyes of Andromache, who had begged to be allowed to give it decent burial, is not to us a noble action, though it was such to Homer, who made it the subject of a noble passage in a noble poem. Certainly, too, the same action might conceivably be made the subject of a tragedy and the subject of a farce, depending upon the way in which it was treated; so that to say that tragedy is the imitation of a noble action is to be guilty of assuming, first, that art and photography are the same end, second, that there may be something inherently noble in an act as distinguished from the motives which prompted it or from the point of view from which it is regarded.

Nevertheless, the idea of nobility is inseparable from the idea of tragedy, which cannot exist without it. If tragedy is not the imitation or even the modified representation of noble actions, it is certainly a representation of actions considered noble, and herein lies its essential nature, since no man can conceive it unless he is capable of believing in the greatness and importance of man. Its action is usually, if not always, calamitous, because it is only in calamity that the human spirit has the opportunity to reveal itself triumphant over the outward universe, which fails to conquer it; but this calamity in tragedy is only a means to an end, and the essential thing which distinguishes real tragedy from those distressing modern works sometimes called by its name is the fact that it is in the former alone that the artist has found himself capable of considering and of making us consider that his people and his actions have that amplitude and importance which make them noble.

Tragedy arises, then, when, as in Periclean Greece or Elizabethan England, a people fully aware of the calamities of life is nevertheless serenely confident of the greatness of man, whose mighty passions and supreme fortitude are revealed when one of these calamities overtakes him.

To those who mistakenly think of tragedy as something gloomy or depressing, who are incapable of recognizing the elation which its celebration of human greatness inspires, and who, therefore, confuse it with things merely miserable or pathetic, it must be a paradox that the happiest, most vigorous, and most confident ages which the world has ever known — the Periclean and the Elizabethan — should be exactly those which created and which most relished the mightiest tragedies; but the paradox is, of course, resolved by the fact that tragedy is essentially an expression, not of despair, but of the triumph over despair and of confidence in the value of human life. If Shakespeare himself ever had that ‘dark period’ which his critics and biographers have imagined for him, it was at least no darkness like that bleak and arid despair which sometimes settles over modern spirits. In the midst of it he created both the elemental grandeur of Othello and the pensive majesty of Hamlet, and, holding them up to his contemporaries, he said in the words of his own Miranda: ‘O brave new world, that has such people in ’t!’

All works of art which deserve their name have a happy end. This is indeed the thing which constitutes them art and through which they perform their function. Whatever the character of the events, fortunate or unfortunate, which they recount, they so mould or arrange or interpret them that we accept gladly the conclusion which they reach and would not have it otherwise. They may conduct us into the realm of pure fancy, where wish and fact are identical and the world is remade exactly after the fashion of the heart’s desire, or they may yield some greater or less allegiance to fact; but they must always reconcile us in one way or another to the representation which they make, and the distinctions between the genre are simply the distinctions between the means by which this reconciliation is effected.

Comedy laughs the minor mishaps of its characters away; drama solves all the difficulties it allows to arise; and melodrama, separating good from evil by simple lines, distributes its rewards and punishments in accordance with the principles of a naïve justice satisfying the simple souls of its audience, which are neither philosophical enough to question its primitive ethics nor critical enough to object to the way in which its neat events violate the laws of probability. Tragedy, the greatest and the most difficult of the arts, can adopt none of these methods; and yet it must reach its own happy end in its own way. Though its conclusion must be, by its premise, outwardly calamitous, though it must speak to those who know that the good man is cut off and that the fairest things are the first to perish, yet it must leave them, as Othello does, content that this is so. We must be and we are glad that Juliet dies, and glad that Lear is turned out into the storm.

Milton set out, he said, to justify the ways of God to man; and his phrase, if it be interpreted broadly enough, may be taken as describing the function of all art, which must, in some way or other, make the life which it seems to represent satisfactory to those who see its reflection in the magic mirror, and must gratify, or at least reconcile, the desires of the beholder — not necessarily, as the more naïve exponents of Freudian psychology maintain, by gratifying individual and often eccentric wishes, but at least by satisfying the universally human desire to find in the world some justice, some meaning, or, at the very least, some recognizable order. Hence it is that every real tragedy, however tremendous it may be, is an affirmation of faith in life, a declaration that, even if God is not in His Heaven, then at least Man is in his World.

We accept gladly the outward defeats which it describes for the sake of the inward victories which it reveals. Juliet died, but not before she had shown how great and resplendent a thing love could be; Othello plunged the dagger into his own breast, but not before he had revealed that greatness of soul which makes his death seem unimportant. Had he died in the instant when he struck the blow, had he perished still believing that the world was as completely black as he saw it before the innocence of Desdemona was revealed to him, then, for him at least, the world would have been merely damnable; but Shakespeare kept him alive long enough to allow him to learn his error and hence to die, not in despair, but in the full acceptance of the tragic reconciliation to life. Perhaps it would be pleasanter if men could believe what the child is taught, — that the good are happy and that things turn out as they should, — but it is far more important to be able to believe, as Shakespeare did, that however much things in the outward world may go awry, man has, nevertheless, splendors of his own, and that, in short, Love and Honor and Glory are not words, but realities.

Thus for the great ages tragedy is not an expression of despair, but the means by which they saved themselves from it. It is a profession of faith, and a sort of religion — a way of looking at life by virtue of which it is robbed of its pain. The sturdy soul of the tragic author seizes upon suffering and uses it as a means by which joy may be wrung out of existence, but it is not to be forgotten that he is enabled to do so only because of his belief in the greatness of human nature, and because, though he has lost the child’s faith in life, he has not lost his far more important faith in human nature. A tragic writer does not have to believe in God, but he must believe in man.

And if, then, the tragic spirit is in reality the product of a religious faith, in which, sometimes at least, faith in the greatness of God is replaced by faith in the greatness of man, it serves, of course, to perform the function of religion, to make life tolerable for those who participate in its beneficent illusion. It purges the souls of those who might otherwise despair, and it makes endurable the realization that the events of the outward world do not correspond with the desires of the heart, and thus in its own particular way it does what all religions do, for it gives a rationality, a meaning, and a justification to the universe. But if it has the strength it has also the weakness of all faiths, since it may — nay, it must — be ultimately lost, as reality, encroaching further and further into the realm of imagination, leaves less and less room in which that imagination can build its refuge.

III

It is, indeed, only at a certain stage in the development of the realistic intelligence of a people that the tragic faith can exist. A naïver people, still possessed of the child’s faith that the universe coincides exactly with its desires, has only — and needs only — its happy and childlike mythology, which arrives inevitably at its happy end, where the only ones who suffer ‘deserve’ to do so, and in which, therefore, life is represented as directly and easily acceptable. A too sophisticated society, on the other hand, — one which, like ours, has outgrown not merely the simple optimism of the child, but also that vigorous, one might almost say adolescent, faith in the nobility of man which marks a Sophocles or a Shakespeare, — has neither fairy tales to assure it that all is always right in the end nor tragedies to make it believe that it rises superior in soul to the outward calamities which befall it.

Distrusting its thought, despising its passions, realizing its impotent unimportance in the universe, it can tell itself no stories except those which make it still more acutely aware of its trivial miseries. When its heroes — sad misnomer for the pitiful creatures who people contemporary fiction — are struck down it is not, as in the case of Œdipus, by the gods that they are struck, but only, as with Oswald Alving, by syphilis, for they know that the gods, even if they existed, would not trouble with them, and they cannot attribute to themselves in art an importance in which they do not believe. Their so-called tragedies do not and cannot end with one of those splendid calamities which in Shakespeare seem to reverberate through the universe, because they cannot believe that the universe trembles when their love is, like Romeo’s, cut off, or when the place where they, small as they are, have gathered up their trivial treasure is, like Othello’s sanctuary, defiled. Instead, mean misery piles on mean misery, petty misfortune follows petty misfortune, and despair becomes intolerable because it is no longer even significant or important.

Ibsen once made one of his characters say that he did not read much in the classics because he found them ‘irrelevant,’ and the adjective was brilliantly chosen because it held implication even beyond those of which Ibsen was consciously aware. What is it that made the classics irrelevant to him and to us? Is it not just exactly those to him impossible premises which make tragedy what it is, those assumptions that the soul of man is great, that the universe, together with whatever gods may be, concerned itself with him, and that he is, in a word, noble? He turned to village politics for exactly the same reason that his contemporaries and his successors have, each in his own way, sought out some aspect of the common man and his common life — because, that is to say, here was at least something small enough for him to be able to believe.

Bearing this fact in mind, let us compare a modern ‘tragedy’ with one of the great works of a happy age, not in order to judge of their relative technical merits, but in order to determine to what extent the former deserves its name by achieving a tragic solution capable of purging the soul or of reconciling the emotions to the life which it pictures. And, in order to make the comparison as fruitful as possible, let us choose Hamlet on the one hand and on the other a play like Ghosts, which was not only written by perhaps the most powerful as well as the most typical of modern writers, but which is, in addition, the one of his works which seems most nearly to escape that triviality which cannot be entirely escaped by anyone who feels, as all contemporary minds do, that man is relatively trivial.

In Hamlet a prince (‘ In apprehension how like a god!') has thrust upon him from the unseen world a duty to redress a wrong which concerns not merely him, his mother, and his uncle, but the moral order of the universe. Erasing all trivial fond records from his mind, abandoning at once both his studies and his romance, because it has been his good fortune to be called upon to take part in an action of cosmic importance, he plunges at first, not into action, but into thought, weighing the claims which are made upon him and contemplating the grandiose complexities of the universe. And when the time comes at last for him to die he dies, not as a failure, but as a success. Not only has the universe regained the balance which had been upset by what seemed the monstrous crime of the guilty pair (‘There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so’), but in the process by which that readjustment was made a mighty mind has been given the opportunity, first to contemplate the magnificent scheme of which it was a part, and then to demonstrate the greatness of its spirit by playing a rôle in the grand style which it called for. We do not need to despair in such a world if it has such creatures in it.

Turn now to Ghosts. Look upon this picture and upon that. A young man has inherited syphilis from his father. Struck by a to him mysterious malady, he returns to his northern village, learns the hopeless truth about himself, and persuades his mother to poison him. The incidents prove, perhaps, that pastors should not endeavor to keep a husband and wife together unless they know what they are doing. But what a world is this in which a great writer can deduce nothing more than that from his greatest work, and how are we to be purged or reconciled when we see it acted? Not only is the failure utter, but it is trivial and meaningless as well.

Yet the journey from Elsinore to Skien is precisely the journey which the human spirit has made, exchanging in the process princes for invalids and gods for disease. We say, as Ibsen would say, that the problems of Oswald Alving are more ‘relevant’ to our life than the problems of Hamlet, that the play in which the former appears is more ‘real’ than the other more glamorous one, but it is exactly because we find it so that we are condemned. We can believe in Oswald, but we cannot believe in Hamlet, and a light has gone out in the universe. Shakespeare justifies the ways of God to man, but in Ibsen there is no such happy end and with him tragedy, so called, has become an expression of our despair at finding that such justification is no longer possible.

Modern critics have sometimes been puzzled to account for the fact that the concern of ancient tragedy is almost exclusively with kings and courts. They have been tempted to accuse even Aristotle of a certain naïveté in assuming, as he seems to assume, that the nobility of which he speaks as necessary to a tragedy implies a nobility of rank as well as of soul, and they have sometimes regretted that Shakespeare did not devote himself more than he did to the serious consideration of those common woes of the common man which subsequent writers have exploited with increasing pertinacity. Yet the tendency to lay the scene of a tragedy at the court of a king is not the result of any arbitrary convention, but of the fact that the tragic writers believed easily in greatness just as we believe easily in meanness. To Shakespeare, robes and crowns and jewels are the garments most appropriate to man because they are the fitting outward manifestation of his inward majesty, but to us they seem absurd because the man who bears them has, in our estimation, so pitifully shrunk. We do not write about kings because we do not believe that any man is worthy to be one, and we do not write about courts because hovels seem to us to be dwellings more appropriate to the creatures who inhabit them. Any modern attempt to dress characters in robes ends only by making us aware of a comic incongruity, and any modern attempt to furnish them with a language resplendent like Shakespeare’s ends only in bombast.

True tragedy, capable of performing its function and of purging the soul by reconciling man to his woes, can exist only by virtue of a certain pathetic fallacy far more inclusive than that to which the name is commonly given. The romantics, feeble descendants of the tragic writers, to whom they are linked by their effort to see life and nature in grandiose terms, loved to imagine that the sea or the sky had a way of according itself with their moods, of storming when they stormed and smiling when they smiled. But the tragic spirit sustains itself by an assumption much more far-reaching and no more justified. Man, as it sees him, lives in a world which he may not dominate, but which is always aware of him. Occupying the exact centre of a universe which would have no meaning except for him, and being so little below the angels that, if he believes in God, he has no hesitation in imagining Him formed as he is formed and crowned with a crown like that which he or one of his fellows wears, he assumes that each of his acts reverberates through the universe. His passions are important to him because he believes them important throughout all time and all space; the very fact that he can sin (no modern can) means that this universe is watching his acts; and, though he may perish, a God leans out from infinity to strike him down.

And it is exactly because an Ibsen cannot think of man in any such terms as these that his persons have so shrunk and that his ‘tragedy’ has lost that power which real tragedy always has of making that infinitely ambitious creature called man content to accept his misery if only he can be made to feel great enough and important enough. An Oswald is not a Hamlet chiefly because he has lost that tie with the natural and supernatural world which the latter had. No ghost will leave the other world to warn or encourage him; there is no virtue and no vice which he can possibly have which can be really important; and when he dies neither his death nor the manner of it will be, outside the circle of two or three people as unnecessary as himself, any more important than that of a rat behind the arras.

Perhaps we may dub the illusion upon which the tragic spirit is nourished the Tragic, as opposed to the Pathetic, Fallacy; but fallacy though it is, upon its existence depends not merely the writing of tragedy, but the existence of that religious feeling of which tragedy is an expression, and by means of which a people aware of the dissonances of life manages nevertheless to hear them as harmony. Without it neither man nor his passions can seem great enough or important enough to justify the sufferings which they entail, and literature, expressing the mood of a people, begins to despair where once it exulted. Like the belief in love, and like most of the other mighty illusions by means of which human life has been given a value, the Tragic Fallacy depends ultimately upon the assumption which man so readily makes that something outside his own being, some ‘spirit not himself,’ — be it God, Nature, or that still vaguer thing called a Moral Order, — joins him in the emphasis which he places upon this or that and confirms him in his feeling that his passions and his opinions are important. When his instinctive faith in that correspondence between the outer and the inner world fades, his grasp upon the faith that sustained him fades also; and love, or tragedy, or what not, ceases to be the reality which it was because he is never strong enough in his own insignificant self to stand alone in a universe which snubs him with its indifference.

In both the modern and the ancient worlds tragedy was dead long before writers were aware of the fact. Seneca wrote his frigid melodramas under the impression that he was following in the footsteps of Sophocles, and Dryden probably thought that his All for Love was an improvement upon Shakespeare; but in time we came to see that no amount of rhetorical bombast could conceal the fact that grandeur was not to be counterfeited when the belief in its possibility was dead, and, turning from the hero to the common man, we inaugurated the era of realism. For us no choice remains except that between mere rhetoric and the frank consideration of man, who may be the highest of the anthropoids, but who is certainly too far below the angels to imagine either that the latter can concern themselves with him or that he can catch any glimpse of even the soles of their feet. We can no longer tell tales of the fall of noble men, because we do not believe that noble men exist. The best that we can achieve is pathos, and the most that we can do is to feel sorry for ourselves. Man has put off his royal robes, and it is only in sceptred pomp that tragedy can come sweeping by.

IV

Nietzsche was the last of the great philosophers to attempt a tragic justification of life. His central and famous dogma, ‘Life is good because it is painful,’sums up in a few words the desperate and almost meaningless paradox to which he was driven in his effort to reduce to rational terms the far more imaginative conception which is everywhere present but everywhere unanalyzed in a Sophocles and a Shakespeare, and by means of which they rise triumphant over the manifold miseries of life. But the very fact that Nietzsche could not even attempt to state in any except intellectual terms an attitude which is primarily unintellectual, and to which, indeed, intellectual analysis is inevitably fatal, is proof of the distance which he had been carried, by the rationalizing tendencies of the human mind, away from the possibility of the tragic solution which he sought; and the confused, half-insane violence of his work will reveal, by the contrast which it affords with the serenity of the tragic writers whom he admired, how great was his failure.

Fundamentally this failure was, moreover, conditioned by exactly the same thing which has conditioned the failure of all modern attempts to achieve what he attempted — by the fact, that is to say, that tragedy must have a hero if it is not to be merely an accusation against, instead of a justification of, the world in which it occurs. It is, as Aristotle said, an imitation of noble actions, and Nietzsche, for all his enthusiasm for the Greek tragic writers, was palsied by the universally modern incapacity to conceive man as noble. Out of this dilemma, out of his need to find a hero who could give to life as he saw it the only possible justification, was born the idea of the Superman; but the Superman is merely a hypothetical creature destined to become what man actually was in the eyes of the great tragic writers — a creature, as Hamlet said, ‘how infinite in faculty . . . in apprehension how like a god.’ Thus Nietzsche lived half in the past, through his literary enthusiasms, and half in the future, through his grandiose dreams; but, for all his professed determination to justify existence, he was no more able than the rest of us to find the present acceptable. Life, he said in effect, is not a tragedy now, but perhaps it will be when the Ape-man has been transformed into a hero (the Übermensch); and, trying to find that sufficient, he went mad.

He failed, as all moderns must fail when they attempt, like him, to embrace the tragic spirit as a religious faith, because the resurgence of that faith is not an intellectual but a vital phenomenon, something not achieved by taking thought, but born, on the contrary, out of an instinctive confidence in life which is nearer to the animals’ unquestioning allegiance to the scheme of nature than it is to that critical intelligence characteristic of a fully developed humanism. And, like other faiths, it is not to be recaptured merely by reaching an intellectual conviction that it would be desirable to do so.

Modern psychology has discovered — or at least strongly emphasized — the fact that under certain conditions desire produces belief; and, having discovered also that the more primitive a given mentality, the more completely are its opinions determined by its wishes, modern psychology has concluded that the best mind is that which most resists the tendency to believe a thing simply because it would be pleasant or advantageous to do so. But, justified as this conclusion may be from the intellectual point of view, it fails to take into account the fact that, in a universe as badly adapted as this one to human as distinguished from animal needs, this ability to will a belief may bestow an enormous vital advantage — as it did, for instance, in the case at present under discussion, where it made possible for Shakespeare the compensation of a tragic faith completely inaccessible to Nietzsche. Pure intelligence, incapable of being influenced by desire, and therefore also incapable of choosing one opinion rather than another simply because the one chosen is the more fruitful or beneficent, is doubtless a relatively perfect instrument for the pursuit of truth; but the question — likely, it would seem, to be answered in the negative — is simply whether or not the spirit of man can endure the literal and inhuman truth.

Certain ages and most simple people have conceived of the action which passes upon the stage of the universe as of something in the nature of a Divine Comedy — something, that is to say, which will reach its end with the words ‘and they lived happily ever after.’ Others, less naïve and therefore more aware of those maladjustments whose reality, at least so far as outward events are concerned, they could not escape, have imposed upon it another artistic form and called it a Divine Tragedy, accepting its catastrophe as we accept the catastrophe of an Othello, because of its grandeur. But a tragedy, divine or otherwise, must, it may again be repeated, have a hero, and from the universe, as we see it, both the Glory of God and the Glory of Man have departed. Our cosmos may be farcical or it may be pathetic, but it has not the dignity of tragedy and we cannot accept it as such.

Yet our need for the consolations of tragedy has not passed with the passing of our ability to conceive it. Indeed, the dissonances which it was tragedy’s function to resolve grow more insistent instead of diminishing. Our passions, our disappointments, and our sufferings remain important to us though important to nothing else, and they thrust themselves upon us with an urgency which makes it impossible for us to dismiss them as the mere trivialities which, so our intellects tell us, they are. And yet, in the absence of tragic faith or the possibility of achieving it, we have no way in which we may succeed in giving them the dignity which would not only render them tolerable, but would transform them, as they were transformed by the great ages, into joys. The death of Tragedy is, like the death of Love, one of those emotional fatalities as the result of which the human as distinguished from the natural world grows more and more a desert.

Poetry, said Santayana in his famous phrase, is ‘religion which is no longer believed,’ but it depends, nevertheless, upon its power to revive in us a sort of temporary or provisional credence, and the nearer it can come to producing an illusion of belief, the greater is its power as poetry. Once the tragic spirit was a living faith, and out of it tragedies were written. To-day these great expressions of a great faith have declined, not merely into poetry, but

into a kind of poetry whose premises are so far from any we can really accept that we can only partially and dimly grasp its meaning. We read but we do not write tragedies. The tragic solution of the problem of existence, the reconciliation to life by means of the tragic spirit, is, that is to say, now only a fiction surviving in art. When that art itself has become, as it probably will, completely meaningless, when we have ceased not only to write but to read tragic works, then it will be lost and in all real senses forgotten, since the devolution from Religion to Art to Document will be complete.