The Tragic Fallacy, So-Called

THE TRAGIC FALLACY,- SO-CALLED ELMER EDGAR STOLL I M ODERN serious drama is mean and depressing, declared Mr. Krutch a few years ago, in a depressing though high-minded essay;1 and there was and still is some reason for his judgment. Ibsen, by his genius, rises above his contemporaries, but in comparison with his peers or betters before him he presents uninspiring situations and unsympathetic souls within them. These have not the sweetness or the greatness of poetry. Male and female alike, they are not, as the Shakespearean and Hellenic figures are, blessed with an imagination that comprehends the world about them or their own experience; nor are they richly dowered with virtue or its dramatic equivalent, largeness of life. His leading male characters-like Mr. Krutch, I 'do not 'call them heroes-have something of the coward, the Hincher or deserter in them, witness Bernick, Borkman, Peer Gynt, and Solness, and at the same time, of the trampling, devouring egoist; or they are lneddling, floundering idealists, such as Allmers and Gregers Werle; hypocrites, such as Helmer in The Dolts House; sentimentalists, such as young Ekdal in The Wild Duck; or victims of degeneracy or disease, such as Oswald in Ghosts. Most of his leading women are deficient in charm if not in virtue; and the murderesses Hedda, Rebe'cca, and the Empress Helena are not 'naive or impulsive but scheming and calculating. I t is the minor figures, like Little Eyolf, Hedvig in The Wild )"The Tragic Fallacy" (Allantic MonJhly, Nov., 1928). 457 THE UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO QUARTERLY Duck, and Hilda in The Master Builder (in the creation of whom the dramatist shakes off the burden of ethics or psychology) that are attractive or appealing; the chief figures on his stage are mostly the worse for the wear,grim an~ ungracious, bad-mannered and forbidding, the interest lying in the situation, whether external or internal, in the character as a study, not as an object of our affection or admiration. And that is the direct opposite of what we find in Shakespeare, despite the greater 'coarseness and crudity of deportment in Elizabethan life" somewhat reflected in the drama. On an al1xious sympathy, not an excited curiosity, Elizabethan and ancient tragedy depends.2 ' What, 'then, shall we say of other modern serious plays, English and French, German or Spanish? If the characters are often more attractive, they are seldom more, noble; if the situations are less ugly, they are seldom so intense. The English drama is the mast familiar; and let the reader summon up in memory Pinero's Second Mrs. Tanqueray and Iris, The Thunderbolt and Mid-Channel, sordid stories every one. The leading women are, however attractive, frail and shallow creatures, and the men with whom thay have to do are given even less virtue or distinction. The serious situations do not rise to the level 'of tragedy. The evil deeds are petty or ignoble, or are done in such a spirit. ((The pleasurable excitement of the emotions is the end and aim of tragedy;" but there are scenes, as in The Thunderbolt, where the pleasure is conspicuously lacking, the shame of the character for her own misdemeanourthe destruction of a will~being fully shared by the audience and eliciting not much more sympathy in their bO$OnlS than in that of the really magnanimous injured 2See ','The Dramatic Texture in Shakespeare" (Criterion, July, 1935). 458 THE TRAGIC FALLACY, SO-CALLED party on the stage. In O'Neill's Strange Interlude, Desire Under the Elms, and Mourning Becomes Electra there is a return to what may be called tragedy, at least so far as the doings of the characters are 'concerned; they commit crimes above the level of cheating or forgery, and possibly of JEschylean dimensions; but not of lEschylean dignity, and the perpetrators awaken more horror than terror, and pity for the most part ' only as specimens of the genus humanum. Certainly tragedy is now often fairly unrecognizable if our notion of it is only as it was in its prime. II Is there a reason for this state of affairs? Mr. !(rutch discovers it in our philosophy or in the life that we .lead...