32 Prosser Hall Frye 



Racine's Providence, I must confess that to me his Phedre is 

 more appealing than Euripides', not only in her reticences and 

 indiscretions but in that by virtue of which they subsist — her own 

 being. For after all, how much richer the character of the 

 former than that of the latter ! And the change of taste or senti- 

 ment, if I am right in my diagnosis, is far from trivial ; for it is 

 inevitable that this enhancement of personality, which is at the 

 bottom of it, should have exerted a tremendous influence upon 

 the modern treatment, not only of character itself, but also of 

 the issues and eventualities of the action. 



In order to explain these consequences, however, I must refer 

 hurriedly to the intellectual structure of tragedy as far as it fur- 

 nishes a scaffolding for the problem which is the peculiar con- 

 cern of the genre.^^ Universally, tragedy would appear to in- 

 clude two components — the " fable," which represents the fact 

 upon which it is founded, and the " art," whereby this raw ma- 

 terial is fashioned into drama. As far as the subject-matter goes, 

 the sentiment of tragedy seems to be aroused by the perception, 

 in some event or other, of a dissidence between the demands of 

 conscience and the data of experience — between our notion of 

 justice or equity and our knowledge of actuality. Obviously this 

 dissidence must be a serious one — so serious, indeed, as to upset 

 momentarily our feeling of moral security — to trouble and per- 

 plex and even confound for the time being our intelligence. This 

 temporary sense of queasy and vertiginous insecurity I would 

 call, with Aristotle's term catharsis in mind, the tragic qualm. 

 From what precedes it is evident that the subject of tragedy in- 

 volves a contretemps — or as Aristotle puts it for his own stage, a 

 metabasis — and implies the agency of fortune. Any occurrence 

 which meets these conditions, does in a measure inspire the on- 

 looker with the crude sentiment, and in so far raises the question, 

 of tragedy. 



But such a state of consternation is intolerable — especially if 

 it is prevalent, as happens particularly whenever the tenure of 



2^ I have already expressed myself at large on this topic in a paper on 

 "The Theory of Greek Tragedy," published in University Studies for 

 October, 1913, which I summarize here as briefly as possible. 



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