12 P. H. Frye 
as sole umpire of the dénouwement or metabasis. If life were sud- 
denly to be conceived as a discipline of suffering, a school of char- 
acter alone, without reference to the welfare of the individual, our 
tragedy would have to be recast. I do not see how Lear or 
Oedipus could be regarded, on such a supposition, as a tragic 
figure. Indeed, in the Oedipus Coloneus, where Sophocles has 
taken this view to some extent and has modified the postulates of 
tragedy in some measure to suit it, the impression produced is not 
wholly a tragic one. The shock to the sensibilities upon which 
depends the effect of the action in tragedy, as distinguished from 
that of its resolution, consists capitally in seeing humanity fail, 
by some outrageous contretemps or other, of the well being to 
which it instinctively thinks itself entitled. And the peculiar 
feeling or quality of feeling which makes the qualm of one trag- 
edy differ from that of another is due, not to a care or a neglect 
of such a natural expectation, but to the particular manner in 
which it is raised to be disappointed—that is, finally to the char- 
acter of the two parties to the collision, that which serves to raise 
the hope or expectation and that which serves to disappoint it. 
Now in Shakespeare this collision or clash was seen to grow out 
of an inconsistency between the fairness of human promise or 
appearance and the dubiousness of mortal performance—or in 
terms of feeling, between the expectations raised by the hero’s 
personality and the disappointment caused by his subsequent 
career. In Greek tragedy, on the other hand, preoccupied as it is 
with the ends of action and its relation to prosperity, the collision 
originates in a discrepancy between the hero’s conduct and its 
consequences—between the favourable expectations raised by his 
action and the deplorable results that actually ensue from it, as 
when an act calculated to ensure success is in reality productive of 
calamity. But of the probable outcome of an act there is morally 
only one prognostic—the intention or purpose of its author. Acts 
of which happiness may consistently be predicted, whose termina- 
tion ought to be prosperous, are those whose intentions are good— 
or at least innocent. When such an act, deserving in itself of 
approval, turns out disastrously, like Antigone’s celebration of 
her brother’s funeral rites, there is bound to follow a strong feeling 
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