Tragedienne

“ Tragedy has always owed a double allegiance, to literature and to the theatre. A tragedy is a play, not merely a dialogue in [Pg 13] poetry or prose, but a play to be interpreted by actors before an audience in a theatre. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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." ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. Here by ’language with pleasurable accessories’ I mean that with rhythm and harmony or song superadded; and by ’the kinds separately’ I mean that some portions are worked out with verse only, and others in turn with song. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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? ”

“ DAMER'S GOLD In a lecture I gave last year on playwriting I said I had been forced to write comedy because it was wanted for our theatre, to put on at the end of the verse plays, but that I think tragedy is easier. For, I said, tragedy shows humanity in the grip of circumstance, of fate, of what our people call "the thing will happen," "the Woman in the Stars that does all." ”

“ No, the tragic (in its first sense, in the sense derived from the dramatic form from which it is named) is in the collision itself; it is the profound and, to our vision, the irreconcilable antagonism of different elements in life. And in life we accept it because we must; we transcend it because, as moral beings, we may. The sublime in actual tragic experience is the reaction of the unconquerable Soul. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ We are stirred by the painful emotions of our fellows as readily as by their pleasurable ones. The tragic plays a large part in many forms of literature and in sculpture, music, and painting. And tragedy, dedicated to painful actions, also interests, fascinates, absorbs us. ”

“ 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. ”

“ The purpose of the tragedian is to show the struggles of man against fate. According to Aristotle’s oft-quoted theory, the purpose of Tragedy is to act as a “purgative of the emotions by means of pity and terror.” As the surgeon lets blood in order to reduce fever, so the drama enables the spectator to acquire peace of soul through the vicarious sorrows of its heroes and heroines. Aristotle declares every tragedy to consist of two parts, the tying of the knot and the loosing of it. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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 ”

“ What is the substance of a Shakespearean tragedy, taken in abstraction both from its form and from the differences in point of substance between one tragedy and another? Or thus: What is the nature of the tragic aspect of life as represented by Shakespeare? What is the general fact shown now in this tragedy and now in that? And we are putting the same question when we ask: What is Shakespeare's tragic conception, or conception of tragedy? ”

“ Is it beyond the mark to say that the true tragic element, normal, deep-rooted, and universal—that the true tragic element of life only begins at the moment when so-called adventures, sorrows, and dangers have disappeared?... ”

“ 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. ”

“ Whereas the reading of a tragedy is a fine abstraction. It presents to the fancy just so much of external appearances as to make us feel that we are among flesh and blood, while by far the greater and better part of our imagination is employed upon the thoughts and internal machinery of the character. But in acting, scenery, dress, the most contemptible things, call upon us to judge of their naturalness. ”

“ English tragedies constitute a dramatic type, a literary form. This type has, to be sure, permitted many variations,—revenge tragedy, chronicle play, tragicomedy, domestic tragedy, sentimental tragedy, heroic play, or the closet tragedy of the romanticists—but every one of these species has had its connections with others, and in every period the tragedies of varying kinds have been related not only to one another but to those that have gone before. ”

“ It excites our sensibility by exhibiting the passions wound up to the utmost pitch by the power of imagination or the temptation of circumstances; and corrects their fatal excesses in ourselves by pointing to the greater extent of sufferings and of crimes to which they have led others. Tragedy creates a balance of the affections. It makes us thoughtful spectators in the lists of life. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Always some tragic incident is shadowed forth or thrust sidelong into the spectacle; and when once it has caught your eye you can look no more at the festal portions of the scene, except with reference to this one slightly suggested doom and sorrow. ”