Tragedy and the First Tragedian

TRAGEDY AND THE FIRST TRAGEDIAN E. T. OWEN H ow much of our conception of the Tragic is there in the tragedies of Aeschylus? The name "Tragedy" has in itself no" tragic" implications, and Aeschylus lived before the days of tragic theories. So far as we can see, the thing was largely in his hands to make what he liked of it. Was what he made of it Tragedy in our sense-in substance, I mean, not in form? Was his conception of the "tragic fact" (as Bradley calls it) fundamentally tire same as ours or even Aristotle's? Or, rather, did he aim at being" tragic" at all? Of the type of story with which Tragedy dealt before Aeschylus (for, strictly speaking, he is the first tragedian only in the sense that the work of his predecessors is lost), the most definite evidence I know is Aristotle's 'statement in the Poetics: "At first the poets recounted any stories they could find, but now the best tragedies are composed about a few houses, such as about Alcmaeon , Oedipus, Orestes, and any others to whom it happened to suffer or to do terrible things." As Aristotle was writing for persons who presumably knew the facts, we are not justified in taking the first part of his statement quite literally; the occasion, we may aSsume, to some extent limited the poets in their choice, but clearly they were not restricted to subjects tragic in Aristotle's sense or our own. What the tragedians did, according to Aristotle, was to find, by slow experimentation , the most effective sort of story to present under dramatic conditions; their plays were all tragedies in v1rtue of their technical form, but, in his view, those TRAGEDY AND THE FIRST TRAGEDIAN which moved an audience most deeply and directly were the ones that revealed the essential nature of the form; they showed what it could do best, and, therefore, what it was "meant" to be. That is how Aristotle arrives at pity and fear as the essential tragic emotionsnot essential in the sense of necessary to the existence of the thing, but as bringing out most fully the emotional capacity of the form; they are, in short, the most dramatically effective emotions to arouse. We may safely say, then, I think, that the" tragic" was not in the mind of Aeschylus as a conscious aim imposed by the conditions of his art. He could choose his subjects pretty well to suit himself and, within the limIts of the form, treat them how he liked; so that, if the result is Tragedy, it was something other than the name and what it stood for that made it so. And anyone turning from Aristotle's tragic formula to the Oresteia must feel that even if the formula is partly involved therein, it is simply dwarfed. A great man falling from prosperity to adversity through error or otherwise-the theme can be extracted from it, but would it ever have occurred to us to cal) it the subject of the Oresteia? And certainly Aeschylus was not led to his shaping of the Orestes story by the simple desire to bring out the fearful and pitiable possibilities of the theme. He does so without doubt, but not for their own sakes; they are incidental. He found pity and fear along the route he was following and used them for all they were worth, but they were not his goal. Two things, as it seems to me, were chiefly instrumen tal in determining the general shape of his tragic plot- viz., the function of the form with which he was dealing, and his individual interpretation of the sig499 THE UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO QUARTERLY nificance of that function. The upshot is that he tackles the primary problem of man's place in the universe. For the modern reader the approach to Aeschylean drama cannot be direct. If we read and judge it simply by our own dramatic standards, very little of it is interesting or even artistically intelligible. There are many impressive passages of poetry and occasionally highJy dramatic scenes, but even the Agamemnon, the most satisfying to us of his plays, is...