Lewis Campbell

“ Greek tragedy not only took shape and growth directly from the spirit of the time, but dealt with subjects of the most vital interest. For to the Athenians of the time of Cleisthenes or of Miltiades, and later still, the local or neighbouring hero was a living power, present in their midst, whose destinies were inseparably bound up with the national existence. Hence the imagination of the ancient spectator met the poet half-way and conspired with him in the production of an atmosphere of illusion. ”

“ The sovereignty of Zeus, the omniscience of Apollo, the continuance of life in Hades, the blessedness of the initiated; and again, the dreadful power of Fate and of the doom that has once gone forth,—all these are objects of his sincere belief and reverence, and enter as living elements into the fabric of his art, for they were constituent elements of the life that he knew. But that which dominates all else, the vital force which gives character and harmony to his work, is his intense interest in human life as such ”

“ Still more must anyone, in passing from the study of Shakespeare to that of ancient tragedy, be warned that he is entering upon a different sphere of art. Our English dramatist, when at his best, has indeed, like all great artists, a glorious simplicity of intention; but in his execution there is hardly any limit to the range and complexity of his modes of expression. In ancient tragedy, on the other hand, the whole work is far more completely dominated by a single tone. What complexity there is, is held firmly within the limits of a conscious harmony. ”

“ Unless the tragic poet is in earnest in his representation of life he must fail of the highest success; and if he is in earnest, he will, with more or less of consciousness, impress on his audience his own general view of life; in other words, his moral ideal. And this will not be lastingly impressive unless it is true. He will make the action appear to the spectators, as it would have appeared in reality to a considerate observer, who, while profoundly sympathising with the difficulties and weaknesses of noble human beings, could also meditate on the causes and results of action. ”

“ The tradition of a fore-determined doom is used by the poet as an instrument for evoking fear and pity; the blindness of the agents makes us feel doubly for their fate, and gives a deeper impression of the feebleness and nothingness of man. And yet this Man, who is nothing, a shadow passing away, is the central object of our sympathies, and this life of his, so feeble in the sight of heaven, yet seems with every drama of Sophocles that is seen or read, more rich in noble possibilities. ”

“ ETHICAL—THE AGE OF TRAGEDY.
Jonson's often-quoted eulogy on Shakespeare, "He was not of an age, but for all time," is in one sense true of all great tragedy, which is assured of permanence, because it springs from universal human nature. But tragedy is also the birth of a particular time. It is a plant that seldom flowers, and requires the concurrence of many causes for its full development. Many races have had the rudiments of the drama, and in several these have reached a certain maturity. ”

“ We are thus led to expand the definition with which we began, and to say that the "aim of tragedy" is to express and call forth a collective sympathy with ideal sorrow, and thus, while relieving and enlarging the heart, and refining and elevating its emotions, to infix and deepen the truths of human experience. We are also led to observe that the emotion called forth by tragedy is not adequately described, as in the old formula, by the words "pity" and "fear." There is another class of feelings, more nearly allied to intellect, which are not less appealed to. ”

“ Tragedy is here viewed as the representation of the whole of life in a typical example, and the tragic artist as one who can sum up the lessons of human vicissitude through the delineation of a particular crisis. And this, although hardly involved in the primary motive of tragedy, has certainly proved inseparable from the art in its most perfect realisations. The greatest tragic artists have been those "who saw life steadily and saw it whole," and the finest tragedies are those in which the interest is most comprehensive and universal. ”

“ But some exceptional spirit, touched to finer issues than the rest, and finding a peculiar charm in the tones which expressed human struggle and sorrow, desired to have them freed from the grosser elements, and varied from the conventional limitations that threatened to choke their music. From such beginnings we may imagine the tragic poet to have gradually become conscious of his peculiar function—that of stirring and soothing men by idealising for them the sadness of human life. ”

“ And that can hardly be a satisfying work of art, or fitted to command wide interest, which represents persons who are to seem worthy of sympathy as at such moments totally indifferent to morality. Still less can the poet or the spectator be carried out of the sphere of right. For tragedy is at once individual and universal: individual, because the persons act from motives resulting from their characters and situations, and believed as real: universal, because their lives are regarded as typifying the whole of human destiny. ”

“ Tragedy is sure to reflect the deepest morality of the age in which it lives. And this, in regard to ethical reflection, is most likely to be an age of growth or transition. A rude or frivolous period can have no tragedy; a "reasoned" philosophy of life, perhaps, would leave no room for it. It seems to flourish most when the collective interest in life is greatest, and reflection at the same time most ardent, but not yet mature. ”

“ Considered so far, the want to which tragedy ministers is not the craving for excitement but the need for expression.
2. A direct result of tragic representation is the enlargement of sympathy. The poet sets before the spectators a life different from and yet akin to theirs, which, however strange to them, powerfully stirs their hearts. Consider the effect of this, not on an individual reader, but on a dense assemblage of spectators. Will not each of them experience a fulness and refinement of sympathy with every other, for which their ordinary work and striving gives little room? ”

“ This is what the Greeks meant by saying that tragedy is "serious representation," σπουδαία μίμησις.
Mere blind, unreflecting passion can never by itself be an adequate subject for tragic treatment before rational men. The unconsciousness of tragic persons has the effect of pathos only when our imagination contemplates it by the light of reason. The poet in displaying the situation must somehow make felt what he conceives to be its true nature. ”

“ But for one person who receives the entire impress of a play of Sophocles at the first glance there are very many, by no means incapable of understanding him, who pass him by with a disappointed feeling that what is so smooth and finished cannot be otherwise than cold, and who contrast this superficial glimpse of a great poet with the instantaneous thrill which overpowered them at the first reading of the Cassandra scene in the Agamemnon of Æschylus, or the passionate speeches of Medea in Euripides. ”

“ The pessimist definition of the art as one whose purpose is to detach the spectator from the will to live, however applicable to the Hercules Furens or to Hernani, bears no relation to the Prometheus or the Antigone. These works are the expressions of an age of hopeful energy, and have the effect of deepening the conviction that liberty, affection, truth, are realities that make life, indeed, "worth living." Tragedy did not spring up in Ionia, but in Attica. ”

“ For all who have any depth in them, however habitually light-hearted, such an occasional overflow is tranqullising, while those whose burden presses heavily are eased and comforted. They are rapt from the narrow contemplation of their own destiny into a world where all private trouble is annihilated, and yet is typified so as to give an excuse for tears. ”

“ Epic poetry abounds with aids to the imagination. Situations are described, characters indicated, motives explained. Although the early epics were meant to be recited and not read, the only serious demand they make upon a reader is that of continuous attention. And if it sometimes requires an effort to realise the drift of lyric poetry, yet, when the single mood of feeling which has prompted the poet is once caught, he is sure to make himself understood, even though his words are no longer sung. ”

“ They were a people who had lately learned that political freedom is an excellent thing, but knew not yet all that it meant, or into what struggles and dangers it might hereafter carry them; a people who had learned and had taught mankind that national independence is a thing worth fighting for, but had too weak a hold of the other lesson which they had also taught by their example, that the federation of free peoples is nobler than any form of tyranny; a people with glorious memories and boundless possibilities, but surrounded with unknown dangers. ”

“ The same spirit of sadness is expressed in the words of Artabanus to Xerxes, who had wept over the mortality of his great army: "Not one of these whom thou beholdest but will often think it better for himself to die than to live. The sweetness of life once tasted, the cruel hand of God is presently felt." ”

“ And while Zeus is absolute, and the predominance under him of Athena in the Ajax, and of Apollo in several plays, is clearly acknowledged, the poet's sympathy for the mystic side of all religion, his reverence for the powers of the under-world—that longing for things unseen, and for the revelation of eternal truths, which the Eleusinian worship had encouraged—has a deeper and more pervading influence upon his work. ”

“ After that brief excursion into the region of contemporary history, tragedy had returned within the cycle of Hellenic legend. The art in fact stood on the border-line between two worlds: that of heroic tradition, which to the people's imagination was still real, and which they had begun to connect with existing political relations, and that of philosophic thought, which was still in that early phase which can be contented with imaginative expression. When the fables were no longer believed, when philosophy was attaining clearness, the native air of tragedy was spent (See above, c. 3, p. 16.) ”

“ Intense participation in a great cause, as in Dante and Milton, may assist creative imagination in some forms, but such preoccupations are but little favourable to purely dramatic art. And if the tragic genius is once present in its fulness, every life contains enough of sadness to give it ample food. ”

“ The art in which a nation takes delight and pride at the moment when its own life is culminating, has a supreme chance of reaching its own highest form; and the drama, being a thing dependent upon "public means" (χορηγίας δεόμενον) could not have grown at all, had not this service been willingly undertaken as a public burden (λειτουργία) . The Pisistratidæ, indeed, might have undertaken this for their own glory. But in the succeeding age this liberality on the part of wealthier men was but the outward sign of the spontaneous universal interest. ”

“ Less speculative than Æschylus, less sceptical than Euripides, he acknowledges in each event a revelation of the divine will, which he regards as just even when inscrutable. But his strongest lights are thrown upon the human figures themselves, which appear out of the darkness and go into darkness again. So far as this can be achieved by art, the predestined catastrophe is brought about by the natural effect of circumstances on character, according to the saying of Heraclitus in the previous century, "Man's character is his destiny." ”

“ What he has done is to make the weird tale a means for revealing the inmost workings of the heart, for moving awe and pity in the highest degree and for impressing anew the old lesson of the sacredness of the family. In thus humanising an archaic horror, which, because archaic, had the stronger claim on the imagination, there remains a certain amount of inevitable incongruity ”

“ The protagonist of modern fiction is a shadowy being, who is to us only what the poet makes him. Even in going to hear an historical play we think of it chiefly as a work of imagination. Very different was the eager expectation with which the Athenians awaited the coming on of Theseus or of Heracles. Yet these objects of reverence were sufficiently removed in time to give scope for a free handling of the fables concerning them; a freedom used more deliberately by Sophocles than by Shakespeare. ”

“ But Drama, as the most concentrated and concrete form of imaginative creation, can never be fully presented in writing or in print; and few readers can even dimly picture to themselves the effect which would be produced on a fit audience by the right performance either of single scenes or of a whole play. ”

“ The inexhaustible moral wisdom that combined with the art of Shakespeare in creating Macbeth, Hamlet, Lear, and Othello, affords the more astonishing proof of what has been said, because these plays were produced, not for solemn exhibition at an annual religious festival, but simply to please an audience who came night after night to "see away their shilling." ”

“ The true national significance of Greek tragedy, however,—a chief cause of that vital reality in which it is pre-eminent—lies not in contemporary allusions, but in the broad fact that it is instinct with the beliefs, the memories, the aspirations, the moral convictions of the Athenian people, when in the full tide of their career ”

“ It is possible to hold this truth, and yet to affirm the distinction between two kinds of tragic artist, one possessed, like Æschylus, with the consciousness of a moral and religious mission, and inspired with principles which directly inform his work; the other before all else an artist, who, notwithstanding, conveys deep lessons ”

“ But when men are drawn together to a spectacle of imagined woe, placed vividly before the faithful witness of the eye, the fountain of tears within them is unlocked, and society of grief is gained without confession. ”

“ Sophocles is indeed so human, so penetrated with the great primary emotions and universal experience of the race, that he may find a sympathetic audience even amongst those who have given but little attention to his surroundings, just as, without technical preparation, one who has an eye for beauty may admire the Venus of Melos, or the Sistine Madonna. ”

“ Yet amidst the darkness which surrounds the human lot, Sophocles is possessed by the conviction that obedience to the "eternal laws" of equity, piety, and mercy contains the assurance of blessedness, and that no lasting harm can happen to the noble soul that holds fast its integrity. ”

“ The divine justice in which he believes is the outcome of a never-ending struggle. Even the will of Zeus, which he regards as now identical with justice, is not believed by him to have been always at one with benevolence and wisdom. The moral cosmos is preceded by a moral chaos, out of which it grows.
This mental attitude is already typical of the place held by tragedy in the development of ethical reflection: a position intermediate between the dicta of early experience dashed with superstition, and the speculations of philosophy ”

“ Athens and the drama.—By a coincidence fruitful in results, the worship of the Theban Dionysus had been carried from Eleutheræ to Athens, and had taken firm root in the affections of the people, before the grand awakening of national life which had its triumph in the Persian War. Without the reforms of Cleisthenes, without Marathon, Attic tragedy would have existed, but could never have attained perfection. ”