12 Prosser Hall Frye 



an air of one-sidedness. But whether the theatre be dedicated 

 to Cypris or Dionysus makes httle difference ; the point is that 

 though the Greeks used other motives, they reached the same 

 destination by the same route. Their action is viewed in the 

 same manner, synthetically, as a spasm or fit of emotion ; it is by 

 madness, fatuity, or some other brief and violent distraction that 

 the Greek denouement is brought to pass. With them the tragic 

 motive is a passion too — a something suffered or endured, — eiret 

 TO. y epya fxov TreTrovdoT icrrl fxaXXov 7] SeSpaKora.**^ And like RacinC 

 again they were obliged to think of their hero's fatality as a kind 

 of distemper or malady. .It was not at random that Boileau with 

 Racine in mind enjoined the tragic poet, 



Et que I'amour, souvent de remors combattu, 

 Paroisse une foiblesse et non une vertu.^ 



Such a treatment is involved in the notion of the type, as the 

 Greeks with their usual penetration had not failed to discern. 



Ibsen, too, in reviving the type — the synthetic, as perhaps I 

 may now be permitted to call it from my description of the action 

 — has been forced to adopt the same dramatic tactics. Like 

 Racine's his is, in its own way, the tragedy of an apartment and 

 an obsession. Upon differences of tone and atmosphere.it is 

 needless to dwell ; one has only to recall those ill-ventilated, stove- 

 choked rooms of his, with their frost-blistered windows over- 

 looking the snow-bound and sea-haunted moors and firths of the 

 inclement north. But to all intents and purposes the mechanism 

 is of the same sort — for all its moral confusion the action is sub- 

 ject to the same simplification and the motive is conceived as an 

 infirmity. 



To return to Racine, one-sided as his partiality for love may 

 seem in the bulk, it still gives his single pieces a wonderful inten- 

 sity and power ; for after all there is no other human passion 

 quite so impetuous and headlong. And what it lacks of itself in 

 virulence it acquires by association with its accomplice passion, 

 jealousy. Hence his constant employment of this second and 



^■■' Gldipus Coloncus, 266-7. 

 ^ L'Art Poctique, Chant III. 



184 



