84 LITERATURE AND DRAMA 



bring our poetry and act it ? How stand your laws in this 

 respect ? " what answer ought we to give to these divine men ? 

 For myself I should reply thus : " Oh, most excellent of strangers, 

 we are ourselves, to the utmost of our power, poets of a tragedy 

 the most beautiful and the best ; for the whole of our polity 

 consists in an imitation of a life the most beautiful and best, 

 which we may say is in reality the truest tragedy." ' We here 

 see that Plato thought the object of tragedy was to represent 

 the noblest kind of life., and only rejected the imitation as un- 

 necessary where this life itself was to be seen. 



Aristotle defined what he meant by a tragedy with greater 

 fulness. He points out that a certain magnitude is necessary 

 in the event represented ; that the spectator as he follows the 

 action feels pity and a kind of awe which may be termed fear or 

 terror, and that he comes away from the spectacle chastened 

 and purified. The first part of his definition requires that the 

 action shall be heroic, or such as represents the thoughts, d 

 and feelings of great men. By the last part of his definitio 

 he, like Plato, required that the action should have moral beauty. 

 This does not imply that a play should be didactic, or deal only 

 with the actions of well-behaved persons. The teaching of the 

 dramatist is as the teaching of nature. See these heroes in 

 their strength and their weakness, live with them, and you will 

 learn from them. The function of the tragic poet, from 

 -^Bschylus to Shakespeare, has been to show us the intense life 

 of heroic men and women at the moment of their trial. 



But not all heroic or beautiful actions can be made the sub- 

 jects of a tragedy. Aristotle points out that the action must be 

 such as will stir certain moral emotions pity and fear he calls 

 them ; but the English words very imperfectly describe the 

 feelings roused by a great tragedy; those feelings give keen 

 pleasure, whereas pity and fear are painful. Sympathy may be 

 a better word ; the pleasure is to live a little while greatly with 

 the great ones of the world, to feel their feelings, to experience 

 their passions, to dare, to love, to hate with them, so that for a 

 little, while we too are great ; but words fail to describe emo- 

 tions to those who have not felt them. If it be suggested that 

 the sensation experienced while watching a tragedy is rather a 

 feeling with the persons of the drama than a feeling for them ; 



