Racine 33 



life becomes generally precarious — in seasons of public insecurity, 

 for example, in times of war or pestilence — conditions under 

 which or the recollection of which tragedy is most likely to 

 flourish. In the interests of sanity, then, it is necessary that the 

 reason should be reconciled to existence and that the apprehen- 

 sions to which it is subjected by the perfidies of nature should be 

 composed and tranquillized. In other words, if the observer is 

 to be brought to acquiesce in the shocking terminations oi tra- 

 gedy, he must be made to find in the apparent miscarriage of 

 justice which the dramatist has chosen for his theme some solace 

 of a sort for his own outraged sense of propriety. This is the 

 " art " of tragedy. Without it there is only the representation of 

 some harrowing and inscrutable casualty. 



Now, as a matter of course, the gravest of such outrages occur 

 in connection with the conflict of good and evil on those occa- 

 sions when the latter seems to have won an unwarranted triumph 

 over the former to the detriment of the personal happiness or 

 well-being of its vanquished representatives. Hence tragedy has 

 ever sought pretty much to this one kind of subject. It has 

 always been moral and eudsemonistic. And it has been greatest 

 where its preoccupation with this topic has been most exclusive, 

 as was the case with the Attic drama of the great epoch. Among 

 moderns the New Englander has had something of the same con- 

 viction of moral immanence which inspired yEschylus and Sopho- 

 cles. For him as for them the world was compact of good and 

 evil ; there was no room for moral indifference, no neutral zone 

 in his universe — nothing but " the gods still sitting around him 

 on their thrones, — they alone with him alone." But his end was 

 not well-being but duty. And in this intent he was invulnerable 

 to adversity, the stage-manager of the tragic scene. Nay, to the 

 ' Puritan conscience with its suspicion of fortune and her works, 

 the very name of tragedy was anathema. 



To the Greek, however, with his moral and eudsemonistic lean- 

 ings — nor should his intellectual and inquisitive temper be for- 

 gotten either — the problem presented itself in some such guise as 

 this. Why did misery come to attach itself to a sort of action 

 naturally calculated to ensure happiness ? I say " why," not 



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