38 Prosser Hall Frye 



parable injury to others no less than to himself, the illusion of 

 his merits would vanish and his tragedy would turn into the ex- 

 ceptional type of which I have already spoken as the tragedy of 

 depravity or turpitude, exemplified by Macbeth and Richard III 

 and of which, as it is anomalous, I need speak no further in this 

 connection. Or else, the audience, deprived of their faith, in his 

 innate nobility, even if they succeeded by a miracle of subtlety in 

 retaining a purely intellectual confidence in his conscientiousness 

 despite the damning evidence of his own misdoing, would remain 

 unreconciled to the hardship of his lot, and the tragedy itself as 

 " art " would be a signal failure. There are no two ways about 

 it: while the Greek protagonist might be represented as simply 

 infatuate, the unavoidable outcome of the sentimental reconcilia- 

 tion is the " sympathetic "■ protagonist. 



I can not disguise that in all this there is more than a trace of 

 casuistry. But what then? Such is modern sentiment, romantic 

 even at its best and in spite of itself ; and since art must comply 

 with the convictions of its devotees, such is modern tragedy. In 

 contrast with the classic Greek it takes the hero subjectively, as 

 he is reflected in the mirror of self-consciousness, and not ob- 

 jectively, as he would impress the dispassionate observer. It 

 does not consider him an example but an exception, unique and 

 individual. It is less concerned to bring him to trial as the citi- 

 zen of a moral polity whose constitution he is under suspicion of 

 having violated than to plead in his behalf the privilege of an 

 unnaturalized sojourner in a strange land with whose institu- 

 tions, customs, and manners he is unfamiliar and to whose juris- 

 diction he is not properly subject. So patently unadapted are 

 Hamlet and Othello to their milieu that it is rather naive to ex- 

 press surprise at the havoc they play with it. In this respect 

 modern tragedy is uniformly confidential and biographical — not 

 common and public, not historical. It embodies a distinct and 

 hitherto unstudied variety of the " pathetic fallacy." Consis- 

 tently, it has ceased little by little, notwithstanding is early def- 

 erence for tradition, to draw its material from generally acces- 

 sible and verifiable sources, and has taken more and more to 



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