Tragedian

“ Of all the arts, Tragedy is the proudest, the most triumphant; for it builds its shining citadel in the very centre of the enemy's country, on the very summit of his highest mountain; from its impregnable watchtowers, his camps and arsenals, his columns and forts, are all revealed; within its walls the free life continues, while the legions of Death and Pain and Despair, and all [54] the servile captains of tyrant Fate, afford the burghers of that dauntless city new spectacles of beauty. Happy those sacred ramparts, thrice happy the dwellers on that all-seeing eminence. ”

“ We maintain, therefore, that the first essential, the life and soul, so to speak, of Tragedy is the Plot; and that the Characters come second—compare the parallel in painting, where the most beautiful colours laid on without order will not give one the same pleasure as a simple black-and-white sketch of a portrait. We maintain that Tragedy is primarily an imitation of action, and that it is mainly for the sake of the action that it imitates the personal agents. ”

“ XIII. (Plot continued.) What constitutes Tragic Action. The change of fortune and the character of the hero as requisite to an ideal Tragedy. The unhappy ending more truly tragic than the 'poetic justice' which is in favour with a popular audience, and belongs rather to Comedy.
XIV. (Plot continued.) The tragic emotions of pity and fear should spring out of the Plot itself. To produce them by the Scenery or Stage Spectacle is entirely against the spirit of Tragedy. Examples of Tragic Incidents designed to heighten the emotional effect. ”

“ The harmony of the argument, the splendor of the verse, the grandeur of conception and expression may counterbalance the painfulness of the story. Yet more, tragedy may bring the inspiration of greatness and endurance, of purity and unselfishness of spirit. Its idealization of character, its revelation of beauty and power even in distress and downfall, may bring a reassurance that turns pity to exhilaration. In drama as in life there may come in moments of trial and ruin the visions of the eternities to console and exalt us. ”

“ Reserving hexameter poetry and Comedy for consideration hereafter, let us proceed now to the discussion of Tragedy; before doing so, however, we must gather up the definition resulting from what has been said. A tragedy, then, is the imitation of an action that is serious and also, as having magnitude, complete in itself; in language with pleasurable accessories, each kind brought in separately in the parts of the work; in a dramatic, not in a narrative form; with incidents arousing pity and fear, wherewith to accomplish its catharsis of such emotions. ”

“ From that point of view the man’s own soul scourged him to his death.
The whole combination of weird atmosphere, tragedy, grief, conscience, and superstition, is brought together in an artistic form that leads to a grimly startling catastrophe—the final mad fight with the seals. This is no common story of sensational event. It is a great human tragedy of grief and conscience, played to the weird music of the north as if by a Gaelic minstrel endowed with mystic powers. ”

“ Everywhere, from the crushed rocks beneath our feet to the soul of man, we see power, intelligence, life and glory, which astound us and seem to call for our worship. And everywhere we see them perishing, devouring one another and destroying themselves, often with dreadful pain, as though they came into being for no other end. Tragedy is the typical form of this mystery, because that greatness of soul which it exhibits oppressed, conflicting and destroyed, is the highest existence in our view. ”

“ Such was the source of the inspiration of classic tragedy, the spring of that stern and severe poetry which throws the lurid hues of a melancholy so profound upon the pallid and affrighted face of humanity. Man, struggling with all the gloomy energy of despair against this vague but formidable Horror, which no virtue or agony could conciliate—this dark Fate, the creation of his own misled and perverted intuitions—and vainly seeking to escape from the inflexible circle which he had traced around himself, is an object which cannot fail to awaken the deepest pity. ”

“ But tragedy—majestic tragedy, is worthy to stand before the sanctuary of Truth, and to be the priestess of her oracles. "Whatever in religion is holy and sublime, in virtue amiable or grave, whatsoever hath passion or admiration in all the changes of that which is called fortune from without, or the wily subtleties and refluxes of man's thought from within;" [66] —whatever is pitiful in the weakness, sublime in the strength, or terrible in the perversion of human intellect, these are the domain of Tragedy. ”

“ The run pierced further than to that middle tragedy—pierced to a tragedy more intimate and dreadful—pierced through into the adjoining cell, where lay his child, his little love, perishing of cold and hunger. He read it all in an instant—the disastrous consequences of his own disaster. And he could not comfort or intervene while this, his pretty swan, was singing himself to death hard by.
Pity him in that minute. I think, poor wretch, his state was near the worse—so strong, and yet so helpless. He shrieked, he struck himself, he blasphemed. Monstrous? ”

“ Tragedy is a Dramatic Poem, imitating some great, but unfortunate Event, in a grave, majestic, and entertaining Style, to raise the Passions, especially those of Pity and Terror, and to purge the Mind of them.
This Definition, expresly, or by Implication, contains these several Parts; the Argument, or the Subject Matter, the Sentiments, the Language and Versification, the Characters and Manners, and, lastly, the Moral, or the propos'd Effect. All which agree in this, that they ought to be great and sublime; for with Regard to all these, Tragedy is the noblest Kind of Poetry, except one. ”

“ In a modern era, when it is commonly supposed that skeletons no longer hang in closets, that day after day brings commonplace occurrences or, at the best, trivial abnormalities to be explained to-morrow, that romance is dead, it is strange that Fate should have picked me, when, by custom and my own desire, I am aloof from all things turbulent, morbid, and uncanny, to play an unwilling part in so extraordinary a drama, or, possibly, a tragedy. ”

“ From the nature of its subjects, tragedy may claim a certain preëminence in literature. If it be not truer, as is sometimes asserted, than comedy or other fiction, it has the opportunity to be more intense, more profound, more permeating in its emotional effect. As of all forms of literature, we ask for truth to life in incident, character, and word; of tragedy we ask for truth in regard to those things that affect us most deeply,—pain, disaster, failure, death. ”

“ For whether in mid sea or 'mong the breakers of the farther shore, a wreck at last must mark the end of each and all. And every life, no matter if its every hour is rich with love and every moment jeweled with a joy, will, at its close, become a tragedy as sad and deep and dark as can be woven of the warp and woof of mystery and death. ”

“ Tragedy, on this view, is the exhibition of that convulsive reaction; and the fact that the spectacle does not leave us rebellious or desperate is due to a more or less distinct perception that the tragic suffering and death arise from collision, not with a fate or blank power, but with a moral power, a power akin to all that we admire and revere in the characters themselves. ”

“ In this sense, then, tragedy satisfies its definition as "the flight or elevation of life." The two indispensable supports which render this elevation possible, are metrical expression and great situations. "In the regeneration" the language of the market-place and the morning call may answer to the realised harmony of life; there may, indeed, be "the fifth act of a tragedy in every death-bed;" there may be no distinction of great or little, high or low. ”

“ The old tragedy, if we understand it, is a display of the affections of the heart and the energies of the will; the modern romantic tragedy is a mixture of fanciful exaggeration and indolent sensibility; the former is founded on real calamities and real purposes: the latter courts distress, affects horror, indulges in all the luxury of woe, and nurses its languid thoughts, and dainty sympathies, to fill up the void of action. ”

“ Tragedy is the summit of poetic art. Here the unspeakable pain, the wail of humanity, the triumph of evil, the mastery of chance is unfolded before us. It is one and the same will that appears throughout. ”

“ Who has dwelt with a more potent effect on that catastrophe which the drama of every human life must reach; whose scenes of death in its pathetic, pitiful, reverend, terrible, ghastly forms speak more to the imagination and more to the heart? ”

“ Modern tragedy, born in the Renaissance, the product of the germinating conflict of medieval and humanistic ideas and models, has never altogether lost the marks of its heritage from both lines of ancestry. Elizabethan tragedy, in particular, reveals in every lineament, in its scenic presentation, its methods of acting, its themes, structure, characters, style, theory, and artistic impulses, the influences both of the long centuries of medieval drama and also of the inspiration of the classics and the freer opportunity for individual effort which resulted from humanism. ”

“ So with the art of poetry: how imperatively, when it deals with the great emotions of tragedy, it must remove the actors from us, in proportion as the emotions are to elevate, and the tragedy is to please us by the tears it draws! Imagine our shock if a poet were to place on the stage some wise gentleman with whom we dined yesterday, and who was discovered to have killed his father and married his mother. ”

“ The tragic music of its measure, the swift yet solemn harmonies of dialogue and burden, hold in extract the very heart of a tragedy, the burning essence distilled from "Hate born of Love, and blind as he." ”

“ The Triumph of Death ends with a tragedy, as it also begins with one. Between the two extremes are to be found many pages of poetry, of tender appreciation of nature, of rare artistic skill, of subtle and penetrative analysis.’
Daily News.—'The close of the tragedy is swift and haunting. It is impossible to overpraise the art. Every page is enriched with descriptive passages of effects of nature, of music, of art, that arrest the imagination and linger in the memory. ”

“ All the time that the eye took in these light appearances and the brain passed these light criticisms, there was in the heart a barbaric pity and fear which men have never been able to utter from the beginning, but which is the power behind half the poems of the world. The mood cannot even adequately be suggested, except faintly by this statement that tragedy is the highest expression of the infinite value of human life. ”

“ For it is the inevitable, the "Fate" in Tragedy, that makes of it a heroic and joyful thing. It cannot be improvised like Comedy. It demands in its creator a sense of the eternal, just as Comedy, on the other hand, demands an exquisite appreciation of temporal fashion. Tragedy is the greater art ”

“ The night whose events I have a fancy to record, opened with a little comedy, and closed with a great tragedy; for a virtuous and useful life untimely ended is always tragical to those who see not as God sees. ”

“ By exhibiting a spectacle that may excite the fear of really dreadful calamity, and compassion for truly terrible misfortune, tragedy exalts the soul above the ordinary miseries of life, and nerves it to face the darker evils to which humanity in its blindness, sin, and self-pride is exposed. ”

“ The greatness of tragedy depends upon its allegiance to this meaning of literature. The dramatic form gives opportunity for a close approach to the semblance of actuality. The very subjects of tragedy, suffering and disaster, discourage the seeking of mere amusement or a contentment with mere beauty of expression. ”

“ They find all their plans frustrated. One exclaims "Prodigious!" while the other confesses that he is "lost in confusion." It is really a very bustling tragedy. There are in it only
1⁠Natural death,
1⁠Murder,
1⁠Poisoning,
3⁠Suicides,
And there is much thunder and lightning, rage, fury, and bombast throughout. There are horrors enough for a French novel, and it might be revived at a transpontine theatre with great effect. To speak of it in language applied to a different kind of composition: daggers, flames, and poison "dance through its pages in all the mazes of metaphorical confusion. ”

“ It was the nature of disaster with which the earliest tragic writers were, all unconsciously, preoccupied, and this it was that, though they knew it not, threw a solemn shadow round the hard and violent gestures of external death; and it is this, too, that has become the rallying-point of the most recent dramas, the centre of light with strange flames gleaming, about which revolve the souls of women and of men. And a step has been taken towards the mystery so that life’s terrors may be looked in the face. ”

“ Tragedy deals with pain, yet seeks to give us pleasure:—this crux has been greatly emphasized by the false antithesis between pain and pleasure. As a matter of fact, though our knowledge of the æsthetic emotions is scanty, a description of the effect of tragedy is hardly more obscure than that of any other form of literature or of any other of the fine arts. In life we are enormously interested in grief and suffering and disaster, as we are also in joy, pleasure, and success. ”