The Psychology of Beauty, Ethel D. Puffer [the ebook reader .txt] 📗

more is to be found in the psychological analysis of the will itself—theoretically, the two states are nearly identical. Thus this continual anticipation and “coming true” takes on the feeling-tone of all volition; and so in music, as I have shown at length, and in drama, and to a degree in all forms of literature, we have the illusion of the triumphant will. This is the secret of that creative joy felt by the spectator at a drama, which has been so often noted. It is this illusion of the triumphant will, too, which enters largely into our acceptance of the tragic end. Much has been said, in the “dispute over tragedy,” of the so-called “Resignation” of the tragic hero, and of the audience in relation to his fate. But I believe that these writers are wrong in connecting this resignation primarily with a moral attitude.

What is foreseen as perfectly inevitable, is sufficiently “accepted” in the psychological sense—that is, vividly imagined and awaited,—to contribute to this illusion of volition. Hence arise, for the catastrophe of drama, that exaltation and stern joy which are indissolubly connected with the experience of will in real life.

VI

We have spoken of the dramatic, and have desired to show that its peculiar aesthetic experience arises out of the tension or balance of emotion in the confrontation of opposing forces. If this is a fruitful theory, it should throw light on the distinction between the different forms of the drama, and on the principal issues of that “Dispute over Tragedy” which is always with us.

 

The possible results of a meeting of two forces are these.

Both forces, or one force, may be destroyed; or, short of destruction, the two may melt into harmony, or one may give way before the other. I think it may be said that these alternatives represent the distinctions of Tragedy and Comedy.

When two aims are absolutely irreconcilable, and when the forces tending to them are important,—that is, powerful,—there must be somewhere destruction, and we have tragedy. When they are reconcilable, if they are important, we have serious comedy; when not important, or not envisaged as important, we have light comedy. Thus Tragedy and Comedy are closely related,—

more closely than we are prone to think. In the words of the late Professor Everett, in “Poetry, Comedy, and Duty:” “The tragic is, like the comic, simply the incongruous. The great Tragedy of Nature, which is called the Struggle for Existence, results simply from a greater or less incongruousness between any form of life and its surroundings….The comic is found in an incongruous relation considered merely as to its FORM, while the tragic is found in an incongruous relation taken as to its reality.” For this word incongruity I would substitute collision or conflict. When there is no way out, we have Tragedy; when there is a way out, we have Comedy. And when things are taken superficially enough, there always is a way out, for we can at least always agree to disagree. In any case, the end of the conflict is a period, repose, unity. This seems to be borne out by immediate introspection. The feelings with which we come from a great tragedy or a great comedy are indeed almost identical. The excitement, tension, sunk into repose, are common to both; the satisfaction with a good ending is strangely paralleled by our resignation to a bad one,—

significant of our real indifference to the fact, so long as the Aesthetic Unity is reached.

 

In George Meredith’s wonderful little essay on the Comic Spirit, this view is rather remarkably confirmed. He has defined Comedy as the contrast of the middle way, the way of common sense, with our human vagaries, “Comme un point fixe fait remarquer l’emportement des autres.” Comedy, he says, teaches the world to understand what ails it….“Comedy is the fountain of sound sense,” and again, “the use of the true comedy is to awaken thoughtful laughter.” “Men’s future upon earth does not attract it; their honesty and shapeliness in the present does; and whenever they wax out of proportion, overblown, affected, pretentious, bombastical, hypocritical, pedantic, fantastically delicate; whenever it sees them self-deceived or hoodwinked, given to run riot in idolatries, drifting into vanities, congregating in absurdities, planning shortsightedly, plotting dementedly; whenever they are at variance with their professions, and violate the unwritten but perceptible laws binding them in consideration one to another; whenever they offend sound reason, fair justice; are false in humility or moved with conceit, individually or in the bulk—the Spirit overhead will look humorously malign and cast an oblique light on them, followed by volleys of silvery laughter. That is the Comic Spirit.” The Comic Spirit is the just common sense, the subconscious wisdom of the ages. There IS a golden mean, the Comic Spirit shows it to us in the light of our flashing laughter at the deviation therefrom. And because there is, even the unreconciled—reconcilable—difference or conflict is not serious. That is why true Comedy seems to find its best field in a developed social life. The incongruities of human nature hurt is they are pressed too deep, because they are irreconcilable; they too quickly edge the tragic gulf.

But the incongruities of the conventional life do not hurt when pressed. To change our metaphor, adjustment to the middle way is here so easily credible and possible, that it is the very hunting-ground for the Comic Spirit.

 

The reputed masterpiece of Moliere shows us Alceste and Celimene in the end still at odds. But light-heartedness and sincerity are not to common sense incompatible, and thus we are rightly led up to the impasse by paths of laughter. Wherever the middle way is divined, there is the possible entrance of the Spirit of Comedy. It is certainly a detriment to the purely Tragic effect of Pinero’s greatest play, that the middle way, the possibility of reconciliation, is shadowed forth in the last word,—the cry of the stepdaughter of the Second Mrs.

Tanqueray, “If I had only been more merciful!” Dumas fils would never have allowed that. He would have written his play around that thought, and made it indeed a reconciling drama—

or he would have suppressed the cry. The end of Romeo and Juliet—date I confess it?—has always hovered for me close to that border which is not sublime. For the hapless lovers missed all for want of a little common sense. There was naught inevitable in their plight. I see the Comic Spirit leaning across to stay the hand of the impetuous Romeo. Why not take a moment’s sober thought? she murmurs.

 

Tragedy ensues when there is no way out. It is not that ruin or death for those in whom these forces are embodied is of the essence of the situation; only that in the complete destruction of a force or purpose when it has been embodied in a strong desperate character, the death of that character is usually involved. There is no solution but to cut the knot. The tragic has been defined as “that quality of experience whereby, in and through some serious collision, followed by fatal catastrophe or inner ruin, something valuable in personality becomes manifest, either as sublime or admirable in the hero, or as triumph of an idea.” But “Lear,” “Macbeth,” “Hamlet,”

“Oedipus King,” “Othello,” exist to contravene this view. 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. In tragic literature another appears. We are helped in transcending the essential contradictions of life presented to us, because the conditions of literature in “preparing” an event create for us the illusion of volition, the acceptance of fate. And in the tragic drama, to all these elements of the complex experience, there is added the exaltation of the aesthetic “arrest,” the tension of confrontations.

 

The question of the “highest” or “most tragic” form of tragedy seems to have been settled by general agreement. It has been held that the tragic of the justified opposing force is the more full of meaning and importance, for the reason that more interesting and complex feelings are called into play on each side than in the case of the unjustified opposing force. But the definition of the tragic drama we have won seems further to illuminate our undoubted preference for this type. We demand aesthetically all that will make the confrontation, the dramatic tension, more clearly felt; and we cannot realize fully a side which should be unjustified. In such a play as Maeterlinck’s “Aglavaine and Selysette” there is no movement, and even the conflict is subterranean; yet, as all the characters are in their way noble, and in their way justified, we find it among the most poignant of his plays. Nay, more, in any situation the more nearly the conflict is shown to be absolutely inevitable, arising out of the very nature of life as we know it,—completely justified, or at least FELT as inevitable on both sides,—the more are we shaken by the distinctive tragic emotion. The conflict of duties to one’s self and to the world is the sharpest of tragedies. Luther, as Freytag well shows, is a really tragic figure from the moment when we conceive of the inner connection of his intolerance with all that is good and great in his nature.

As the expression of such a conflict of impulses good in themselves, “Magda” is a great tragedy than the “Joy of Living;” “Ghosts” than “Hedda Gabler;” the story of “Francesca Da Rimini” (I do not mean D’Annunzio’s play) than “La Citta Morta.”

 

What, then, shall be said of the so-called tragic “Guilt,” in which the hero rushes on impiously to his doom? It is clear that this question is closely related to the much-debated “Greatness” of the tragic hero. If there is guilt, there must be also greatness, to impress that side of the canvas on our vision. It is, indeed, almost a quantitative problem.

Strength, energy, depth of passion, breadth of vision, power and place, ravish our attention and our unconscious imitation.

What is lacking in extensity of associative reproduction must be added in intensity. And, in fact, we find that it is the giants who bear the tragic “Schuld.” Hamlet is not guilty; rather “one like ourselves,” in Aristotle’s phrase, and therefore he need not be great. I agree with Volkelt’s view that even the traditional tremendous will of the tragic hero may be dispensed with. No doubt it is most often strength of will which brings out the original conflict. But that conflict once given, as it is given, for example, in “Hamlet,”

the main point is to increase the weight of each side, which can indeed be done by other elements of greatness. On the other hand, I disagree with Volkelt’s reason for thus exempting will, which is, that the contrast feeling of “how great a fall was there” may be given by other qualities in the hero than that of will. As I have urged, it is not the catastrophe which is of the tragic essence, and therefore not for the sake of the catastrophe that we should marshal our elements. The climax of tragedy and of our feeling is in the deadlock of forces, and whatever is not absolutely essential thereto may be done without.

VII

The phenomenon of our aesthetic reaction on the so-called painful experiences of the drama has then been discussed at length and accounted for. There is an undoubted emotional experience of great intensity; and yet that emotion turns out to be not the emotion IN the drama,