Shakespearean Tragedy | Page 9

or genius, or immense force, we realise the full power
and reach of the soul, and the conflict in which it engages acquires that
magnitude which stirs not only sympathy and pity, but admiration,
terror, and awe.
The easiest way to bring home to oneself the nature of the tragic
character is to compare it with a character of another kind. Dramas like
Cymbeline and the _Winter's Tale_, which might seem destined to end
tragically, but actually end otherwise, owe their happy ending largely to
the fact that the principal characters fail to reach tragic dimensions.
And, conversely, if these persons were put in the place of the tragic
heroes, the dramas in which they appeared would cease to be tragedies.
Posthumus would never have acted as Othello did; Othello, on his side,
would have met Iachimo's challenge with something more than words.
If, like Posthumus, he had remained convinced of his wife's infidelity,
he would not have repented her execution; if, like Leontes, he had
come to believe that by an unjust accusation he had caused her death,
he would never have lived on, like Leontes. In the same way the villain
Iachimo has no touch of tragic greatness. But Iago comes nearer to it,
and if Iago had slandered Imogen and had supposed his slanders to
have led to her death, he certainly would not have turned melancholy
and wished to die. One reason why the end of the Merchant of Venice
fails to satisfy us is that Shylock is a tragic character, and that we
cannot believe in his accepting his defeat and the conditions imposed
on him. This was a case where Shakespeare's imagination ran away
with him, so that he drew a figure with which the destined pleasant
ending would not harmonise.
In the circumstances where we see the hero placed, his tragic trait,
which is also his greatness, is fatal to him. To meet these circumstances
something is required which a smaller man might have given, but
which the hero cannot give. He errs, by action or omission; and his
error, joining with other causes, brings on him ruin. This is always so

with Shakespeare. As we have seen, the idea of the tragic hero as a
being destroyed simply and solely by external forces is quite alien to
him; and not less so is the idea of the hero as contributing to his
destruction only by acts in which we see no flaw. But the fatal
imperfection or error, which is never absent, is of different kinds and
degrees. At one extreme stands the excess and precipitancy of Romeo,
which scarcely, if at all, diminish our regard for him; at the other the
murderous ambition of Richard III. In most cases the tragic error
involves no conscious breach of right; in some (_e.g._ that of Brutus or
Othello) it is accompanied by a full conviction of right. In Hamlet there
is a painful consciousness that duty is being neglected; in Antony a
clear knowledge that the worse of two courses is being pursued; but
Richard and Macbeth are the only heroes who do what they themselves
recognise to be villainous. It is important to observe that Shakespeare
does admit such heroes,[9] and also that he appears to feel, and exerts
himself to meet, the difficulty that arises from their admission. The
difficulty is that the spectator must desire their defeat and even their
destruction; and yet this desire, and the satisfaction of it, are not tragic
feelings. Shakespeare gives to Richard therefore a power which excites
astonishment, and a courage which extorts admiration. He gives to
Macbeth a similar, though less extraordinary, greatness, and adds to it a
conscience so terrifying in its warnings and so maddening in its
reproaches that the spectacle of inward torment compels a horrified
sympathy and awe which balance, at the least, the desire for the hero's
ruin.
The tragic hero with Shakespeare, then, need not be 'good,' though
generally he is 'good' and therefore at once wins sympathy in his error.
But it is necessary that he should have so much of greatness that in his
error and fall we may be vividly conscious of the possibilities of human
nature.[10] Hence, in the first place, a Shakespearean tragedy is never,
like some miscalled tragedies, depressing. No one ever closes the book
with the feeling that man is a poor mean creature. He may be wretched
and he may be awful, but he is not small. His lot may be heart-rending
and mysterious, but it is not contemptible. The most confirmed of
cynics ceases to be a cynic while he reads these plays. And with this
greatness of the tragic hero (which is not always confined to him) is

connected, secondly, what I venture to describe as the centre of