34 Prosser Hall Frye 



" how " advisedly ; for unlike the modern, he was not to be fobbed 

 off with anything less than a reason. In other words, with no 

 discernible difference as between two acts — or at least, of two 

 acts equally laudable as to purpose, why should the one promote 

 disaster and disgrace, the other prosperity and repute ? Or more 

 narrowly still, why in this particular instance, say, should a cer- 

 tain design which might be predicted on general principle and 

 analogy to further the advantage of its author — why should such 

 a course of conduct, on the contrary, plunge its pursuer into an 

 abyss of wretchedness and humiliation? How was such seeming 

 perversity of circumstance to be explained? Such, I believe, was 

 the riddle that ^schylus and Sophocles set themselves to read. 

 And they solved it by the affirmation, tacit or explicit, of a cosmic 

 law of righteousness, as a transgression of which they accounted 

 every such outward act a crime, reckoning its frustration and 

 disgrace a legitimate penalty of wrong-doing. 



Nor was this notion of a supra-mundane policing of human 

 activities singular to ^schylus and Sophocles. To be sure, it 

 had its scoffers like Thrasymachus and Callicles, and its critics 

 like Euripides. But it was so obviously a matter of course that 

 the dramatist was safe in appealing to it as the basis of his solu- 

 tion and in deducing the necessary corallaries from it acceptably 

 to his public. In this way, by the identification of adversity with 

 guilt, he was in a position to explain the sufferings of his pro- 

 tagonist by holding him responsible for the misconduct (and 

 notice how easily our own language falls in with the same kind 

 of reasoning) of which they were supposed to be the conse- 

 quences at the same time that he was able to soften the audience 

 to the proper degree of indulgence for the sufferer by represent- 

 ing his transgression as uncalculated and involuntary. But 

 though as the victim of a contretemps^ he might well be regarded 

 with a moderate pity, still as a transgressor and a source of im- 

 piety and pollution, he was an abomination^^ and an object of 

 horror. Hence the complementary emotions of pity and horror 

 by which Aristotle defines tragedy in exponents of the action. ^^ 



37 Miaff/jia and /iLda-Twp in the language of ^schylus and Sophocles. 



38 Poetics, VI, 2, and XIV, i. 



206 



