The Theory of Greek Tragedy 21 
criticism would dream of classing pity and horror among them. 
For what is there so likely to move the latter as the spectacle of 
blind and infatuate iniquity; so likely to move the former as the 
spectacle of sudden and staggering adversity? The conflict of 
good and evil, I believe, is still, for all our sophistication, the 
surest and deepest of all emotional appeals. And in view of the 
facts I can conceive nothing more impudent than the pretension to 
range Aristotle among the partisans of such a doctrine as l’art 
pour l'art, because he has formulated tragedy in terms of the 
very emotions which are most closely identified with our moral 
perceptions. 
At the same time, pertinent as is his notation of that drama 
with which he was acquainted, it is a mistake to assume that his 
definition is true for tragedy in general or romantic tragedy in 
particular. Since neither problem nor solution is identical, as I 
have tried to show, it follows that the characteristic sentiment of 
the latter will be differently constituted with respect to its emo- 
tional notes. I do not mean to deny that pity and horror are in 
some sense elicited by every tragedy. They are both present to 
some extent and in some manner from the very nature of the 
genre. The apparent moral obliquity of the catastrophe, which is 
the motive of the qualm—itself, as I have tried to show, a con- 
stant factor—is bound to raise a kind of horror, as also a kind of 
pity for the luckless actor. But these feelings are quite different 
in timbre from the passions to which the Greek play is conditioned 
by its peculiar interpretation of tragic actuality. They have not 
the same purity or the same consistency; they are not in a fixed 
and definite ratio decisive of the character of the drama; they are 
variable and indeterminate. As a rule the modern protagonist is 
either a pathetic character, like Othello, or an antipathetic one, 
like Macbeth. Otherwise, in default of a solution authoritatively 
moral, we should be unable to bear his fate, to which we are 
reconciled, as I have already suggested, in the one case by an 
impression of his sentimental superiority to his situation, in the 
other case by a conviction of the poetical justice of his downfall. 
The active principle in the first case is sympathy; in the second, 
disapprobation. But sympathy is not identical with pity, or dis- 
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