Chapter II

This statement will be more convincing when illustrated with examples drawn from various manifestations of the tragic spirit--in narrative poetry and the novel as well as in the drama.

I have emphasised the effect of science; and at first thought it might seem that the great romantics of a century ago, who preceded the scientific disillusionment, still kept the heroic tradition alive. It is true that they inherited the tradition, but in their hands it became not heroism but heroics. The romantic tendency was to seek thrills rather than truth, and to draw less from human nature than from a literary fashion.

_Hernani_ and _Ruy Blas_, for example, are highly effective constructions of clap-trap, to which Hugo’s beautiful and rhetorical verse gives a semblance of significance. But they can be taken seriously only by abandoning the intelligence. To-day they seem no more tragic than Dumas _père_ or the _mélodrames_ of the Boulevards from which Hugo learned his technic. As melodrama they are, to be sure, still entertaining.

Such romantic literature of escape did not of course decrease in popularity with the development of science, but it distinctly lost literary prestige. After the fifties and sixties the romantic who would be taken seriously had to cope with scepticism and disillusionment. Thus Rostand, writing _Cyrano de Bergerac_, was careful to preserve the smile of sophistication; he delicately played with pathos, and even flirted with comedy. We can take the extravagances of the drama half in the spirit of play and enjoy them as a fairy tale. Its heroism is the heroism of fancy, not of life. It is in a similar spirit that we enjoy the thrillers and detective tales of to-day. We seek them for recreation only; and it is difficult to imagine that such romance can ever again be thought of as seriously tragic.

The romantic writer, however, can scarcely be expected to be content with the rôle of popular entertainer. Though for the past fifty years on the defensive, he has persisted in attempting the exaltation of tragic art. Maeterlinck, for example, sought to reconcile pessimism with romance by developing a fatalistic “static drama” and throwing over it a Pre-Raphaelite mist of romantic symbolism. With him a symbol became less a visible sign of another object than a stimulant to emotional intoxication; and if we look at the early plays with clear heads we see that they are rooted in a determinism fatal to the heroic tradition. Later Maeterlinck grew more optimistic, but in _Monna Vanna_, which was inspired by Browning, we get exaltation of passion rather than will.

Whereas Maeterlinck tried to preserve romantic values, if not heroism, by reconciling them with science, the great Russians, Tolstoi and Dostoevski, evaded scientific pessimism by escape into a romanticised Christianity. The result was no less fatal to heroism. As they saw it, the Christian paradox was that the worst persons achieve the greatest regeneration; and they presented it with extreme violence. Thus in Tolstoi’s _The Power of Darkness_ the leading character is not only a drunkard, a lecher, and a murderer of his own child, but he is hopelessly craven, stupid, and weak. Yet he wins salvation by public confession. Such a conversion seems more emotional than religious, since it is the result of no discipline of the will. But apart from such questions it would appear obvious that such a play as this is poles apart from heroic tragedy. It is Tolstoi’s sentimentalised conception of Christian poetic justice which is exalted.

The exaltation which the romanticist failed to achieve, the scientific naturalist did not even attempt. Ibsen, apart from his great intrinsic importance, is interesting because he shows the transition from the one mode to the other. His early plays were modelled after Scribe and Schiller; and use of the sagas links him with the heroic tradition. Though sceptically, he exalted the will and prophesied the superman. But his mature work shows the effect of science: men are portrayed more as victims than shapers of events, and responsibility is shifted from the individual to society. His transition from romanticism to scientific naturalism was made easy by the fact that romanticism had already identified man with nature. Disillusion concerning the latter brought about degradation of the former.

Though the increasing use of symbolism gives Ibsen’s later work a romantic tone, the plays are built on studies of mental abnormalities which seem almost intended to demonstrate the non-existence of heroism. The fall of the master builder is indeed a symbol of the falsity of what Shaw calls “ideals.” But Ibsen’s anti-heroic tendency is seen perhaps most forcefully in the famous tragedy of his middle period.

In _Ghosts_ the formal resemblances to Greek tragedy and the element of human error obscure the essential differences. The animus vitalising the action is the attack upon a false code of morals--or “ideals”--of which the heroine is the victim. And, as is proper in a naturalist tragedy, the _Spirocheta pallida_ is made the _deus ex machina_. The emotional effect, furthermore, is not elevation but horror. We can admire the author for honesty and daring, but not the characters. The best of them, Mrs. Alving, is admirable only in intention, and false to her convictions, as the author makes a point of showing. She is at the curtain so far from a “spiritual victory” that there remains for her a dilemma which is probably the cruelest in dramatic literature: killing her own son or letting him live an idiot.

The contrast between this play and, let us say, _Hamlet_ is plain when we compare Oswald’s cry, “The sun--the sun,” and the final speech of Fortinbras:

Bear Hamlet, like a soldier, to the stage;
For he was likely, had he been put on,
To have prov’d most royally; and for his passage,
The soldiers’ music and the rites of war
Speak loudly for him.

The former is the bitter irony of disillusion, the very mockery of the romantic cliché, “Then came the dawn.” The latter ends the play with eloquent praise.[39]