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substituting invention for interpretation. As far as the results 

 go, it is not wholly inexcusable to distrust the sincerity, if not 

 the legitimacy, of "private" tragedy altogether. For once the 

 dramatist has begun to rid himself of fidelity to the record 

 written or oral, there is nothing to prevent him from abusing his 

 audience's sympathy " at discretion" to the confusion of all moral 

 values' whatsoever. Indeed, he is bound by the nature of the 

 case to do a certain amount of violence to the judgment of his 

 audience. Euripides himself has shown how the trick may be 

 turned in his Medea, and Racine has not been slow to imitate 

 him in Phedre. I will not go so far as to say that Racine has 

 passed the bounds permissible to his genre, but I can not deny 

 that he has pushed our indulgence for his heroine to something 

 of an extreme. And if the "sympathetic" hero is capable of 

 such license while still subject to the authority of legend or 

 notorious fable, what limit to his excesses when these last fetters 

 are finally removed? The answer, I suspect, is Ibsen. How 

 many of the tremendous figures that dominated the Attic stage 

 in the heyday of its splendour are " sympathetic " ? Not Orestes, 

 nor Agamemnon, nor CEdipus Tyrannus, nor Electra, nor Cly- 

 temnestra. Prometheus and Antigone? Or do they only seem 

 so to us? For it is significant that these two pretty nearly ex- 

 haust the unqualified enthusiasm of the modern for ancient tra- 

 gedy. I omit to mention Philoctetes and CEdipus Coloneus be- 

 cause the " happy " tragedy in which they figure is as anomalous 

 to our experience as the tragedy of evil or turpitude was to that 

 of the Greek, and hence lends itself as little to comparison. But 

 if Antigone and Prometheus were, in reality, " sympathetic " 

 characters originally, they at least were so by disposition, not by 

 theatrical necessity, as is the case with their younger colleagues. 

 As for Hamlet, I sometimes wonder, for example, whether he 

 was actually so " sympathetic " as he is painted. The remark is 

 fatuous, of course, since Hamlet is just what Shakespeare has 

 made him, no more, no less. But it serves to illustrate the point, 

 if the point is worth making at all, since it assumes an afifect en- 

 tirely at variance with Aristotle's first-hand impression. On the 



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