The definition is conveniently
portable, but it has its limitations. Goethe's attention was too
exclusively fixed on the Fate tragedies of the Greeks, and upon
Shakespeare among the moderns. In the Spanish drama, for example, custom,
loyalty, honor, and religion are as imperative and as inevitable as doom.
In the _Antigone_, on the other hand, the crisis lies in the character of
the protagonist. In this sense it is modern, and is the first example of
true character-painting in tragedy. But, from whatever cause, that
exquisite analysis of complex motives, and the display of them in action
and speech, which constitute for us the abiding charm of fiction, were
quite unknown to the ancients. They reached their height in Cervantes and
Shakespeare, and, though on a lower plane, still belong to the upper
region of art in Le Sage, Moliere, and Fielding. The personages of the
Greek tragedy seem to be commonly rather types than individuals. In the
modern tragedy, certainly in the four greatest of Shakespeare's
tragedies, there is still something very like Destiny, only the place of
it is changed. It is no longer above man, but in him; yet the catastrophe
is as sternly foredoomed in the characters of Lear, Othello, Macbeth, and
Hamlet as it could be by an infallible oracle.
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