An Estimate of the Value and Influence of Works of Fiction in Modern Times | Page 7

the action either in heroic ages--in the "past which was never present," when gods were more human and men more divine--or in heavenly places, and among the powers of the air. The action is simple in proportion to its remoteness from the reality of life, and rapid in proportion to its simplicity. It arises from the operation of the most elementary passions, the wrath of Achilles or the pride of Satan, in collision with an overruling power. For the animal wants and tricks of fortune, which entangle the web of man's affairs, it has no place. The animal element, if not banished from view altogether, becomes merely the organ of the ruling motions of the spirit; and fortune is lost in destiny or providence. Thus the incidents of the narrative cease to be mere incidents. They are held together by passion; they are themselves, so to speak, manifestations of passion working with more and more intensity to the final consummation. Not the laws which regulate curiosity, but those which regulate hope and awe, are the laws which they have to satisfy.

H. TRAGEDY AS PURIFIER OF THE PASSIONS
8. In tragedy, as the product of a more cultivated age, these characteristics appear more strongly than in the primitive epic. The Homeric poems are still legendary narratives, though narratives unconsciously transmuted by the highest art. Tragedy, on the contrary, has no extraneous elements. It implies a conscious effort of the spirit, made for its own sake, to re-create human life according to spiritual laws; to transport itself from a world, where chance and appetite seem hourly to give the lie to its self-assertion, into one where it may work unimpeded by anything but the antagonism inherent in itself and the presence of an overruling law. This result is attained simply by the action of the proper instruments of thought, abstraction and synthesis. The tragedian presents to us scenes of life, not its continuous flow of incident. In "Macbeth," for instance, there is an hiatus of some years between the earlier and later acts;[7] but we are not sensible of the void; for the passions which lead to the catastrophe are but the development of those which appear at the beginning, and to the law against which they struggle "a thousand years are but as yesterday." Time, however, is but one among many circumstances which the tragedian ignores. The common facts of life as it is, and always must have been, the influence of custom, the transition of passion into mechanical habit, the impossibility of continuous effort, the necessary arrangements of society, the wants of our animal nature and all that results from them, these are excluded from view, and so much only of the material of humanity is retained as can take its form from the action of the spirit, and become a vehicle of pure passion. But the synthesis keeps pace with the abstraction, for the tragedian creates not passions but men. The outer garment, the flesh itself, is stript off from man, that the spirit may be left to re-clothe itself, according to its proper impulses and its proper laws. The false distinctions of dress, of manner, of physiognomy, are obliterated, that the true individuality which results from the internal modifications of passion may be seen in clearer outline. These modifications are as infinite and as complex as the spirit of man itself; and if the characters of the ancient dramatists, in their broad simplicity, fail to exhibit the finer lineaments of real life, yet in Shakespeare the variations of pure passion are as numerous and as subtle as those of the fleshly or customary mask by which man thinks that he knows his neighbour. The essential difference lies in the fact that they are variations of the spiritual, not the animal, man; that they arise from the qualifications of the spirit by itself, not from its intermixture with matter. It is this which gives tragedy its power over life. The problem of the diabolic nature, of the possibility of a "fallen spirit," is not for man to solve. He may be satisfied with the diagnosis of his own disease, with the knowledge that it is his littleness, not his greatness, that separates him from the divine; that not intellectual pride, not spiritual self-assertion, but the meanness of his ordinary desires, the degradation of his higher nature to the pursuit of animal ends, keep him under the curse. From this curse tragedy, in its measure, helps to relieve him. It "purifies his passions"[8] by extricating them from their earthly immersion. For an hour, it may be, or a day, it raises him into a world of absolute ideality, where he may forget his wants and his vanity, and lose himself in a struggle in which the combatants are the forces of