6 Pu, Frye 
or the unintelligible into the sphere of human interests, they 
threaten again the security of man’s dearest illusions, they trouble 
his spirit and fill him with nameless apprehensions for the sanity 
and good faith of that order in which humanity with its quivering 
and importunate conscience is helplessly and irrevocably involved. 
For after all the tragic qualm is perhaps nothing more or less than 
a sudden and appalling recognition of our desperate plight in a 
universe apparently indiscriminate of good and evil as of hap- 
piness and misery. 
Without the tragic qualm, then, in the dramatic data there is no 
tragedy. But this is not enough; it is but preliminary—in Plato’s 
words, Ta pd tpaywdias. It is necessary that the qualm should 
be allayed, that the quarrel between the certainties of experience 
and the exactions of conscience should be composed, and that con- 
fidence should be restored. In addition to making sure of the 
emotions proper to his stuff in itself, the poet must also manage in 
such a way as to answer the question mutely propounded by his 
fable: if such things can be, what becomes of the law of eternal 
righteousness as given in the heart of man? Such is the ques- 
tion which the drama, as “the imitation of an action,” forces re- 
lentlessly upon the attention of the audience. And the whole 
- function of tragedy, as a literary genre, is to resolve this doubt, 
in one way or another, through the medium of the action too, but 
of the action as a dramatic, not as an actual, performance. Other- 
wise there is no art—nothing but a dull dead stereotype of reality 
with all its contradictions, incoherences, and inconsequences—and 
with all its resultant incredibility. Senseless assassination or aim- 
less annihilation may indeed present a problem, but the problem is 
insoluble. And where there is no solution, either by fault of the 
circumstances or by fault of the poet, there is no genuine tragedy. 
If I may venture for a little while into the thicket of critical 
exegesis, this or something very like it seems to me to be what 
Aristotle had in mind in speaking of the “ purgation of the pas- 
sions” as the end of tragic poetry. The eventual relaxation of 
the emotions of pity and horror, which were characteristic of the 
tragic qualm as it affected the sensibilities of the Greek by reason 
of certain conditions which I shall have the temerity to discuss be- 
304 
