The well-balanced man, who rises step by step
through discipline and work to the highest place of influence and
power, is applauded and admired; but the heart of the world goes out
to those who, like OEdipus, are overmatched by a fate which pursues
with relentless step, or, like Hamlet, are overweighted with tasks too
heavy or too terrible for them. Agamemnon, OEdipus, Orestes, Hamlet,
Lear, Pere Goriot, are supreme figures in that world of the
imagination in which the poets have endeavoured both to reflect and to
interpret the world as men see it and act in it.
The essence of tragedy is the collision between the individual will,
impulse, or action, and society in some form of its organisation, or
those unwritten laws of life which we call the laws of God. The tragic
character is always a lawbreaker, but not always a criminal; he is,
indeed, often the servant of a new idea which sets him, as in the case
of Giordano Bruno, in opposition to an established order of knowledge;
he is sometimes, as in the case of Socrates, a teacher of truths which
make him a menace to lower conceptions of citizenship and narrower
ideas of personal life; or he is, as in the case of Othello and Paolo,
the victim of passions which overpower the will and throw the whole
life out of relation to its moral and social environment.
Pages:
122
123
124
125
126
127
128
129
130
131
132
133
134
135
136
137
138
139
140
141
142
143
144
145
146