THE IDEA OF TRAGEDY 695 



comes the nearest to it, a work which depresses human vitality, and 

 therefore, as I take it, sins against humanity. Better examples can 

 perhaps be found in some of Zola's novels S'Assomoir, La Terre, 

 and others. 



Nevertheless, the conditions of life may be regarded as miserable, 

 and yet human actions stand on a higher plane than before. On a 

 dark background of gloom the higher qualities of the human being 

 his love, devotion, passion, self-denial, recklessness may stand out 

 in almost radiant colors. Let us grant with the pessimist that man, 

 as he exists in the midst of a nature that is alien to him, and under 

 social conditions which stunt or retard his growth, is not likely to 

 secure much happiness. Nature, as we know, is harsh and cruel, 

 and her laws are those which are terrible for the individual though 

 helpful, it may be, for the world's progress the laws of struggle for 

 existence, the survival of the fittest, and development by means of 

 unlimited competition. Or if we take it from another side of science 

 - the science of biology there is reason to suppose that the sins 

 of the fathers are visited on the children, and that many men and 

 women begin their careers crippled and maimed by a hereditary taint. 

 Or once more, the social order is found to be oppressive, framed as it 

 is for the convenience of the majority the incarnation of trium- 

 phant commonplace, the victory of the conventionally useful rather 

 than the ideally good, the despotism of a majority which, as Dr. 

 Stockmann declares in Ibsen's Enemy of the People, is at least quite 

 as often wrong as right. 



Such things may well breed a sort of pessimism, may produce for 

 the thinker and philosophic student a mood of nervelessness and 

 gloom. But the artist who approaches these subjects not as a thinker 

 or as a student, but as an observer of the flash and play of human 

 life, sees that on this background of darkness he can paint his human 

 beings with all their rich vitality and spontaneousness of effort, trans- 

 figured and ennobled by contrast. And he has this justification to 

 begin with that all the nobler and higher activities of man, whether 

 in founding States, creating rules of morality, or even building hospi- 

 tals, are done in the teeth of nature, and constitute a direct challenge 

 to the dull mechanical cruelty of her laws. But the sovereign vindi- 

 cation for the artist is the exceeding beauty of all human vitalities, 

 whether they are effective or ineffective, whether they succeed or fail. 



It is life as such that the artist loves, strong, exuberant, magnificent 

 life, defying laws of time and space, and conquering the impossible 

 circumscribed, indeed, if we look at its scientific conditions, but abso- 

 lutely free and untrammeled in its spiritual essence. If an artist 

 who feels the intoxication of life writes tragedies, they do not in 

 reality depress us, because, instead of making the pulse flag and beat 

 slower, they stir us, as it were, with a trumpet-call, they cause the 



