"Call no man happy till his
life be ended," said Sophocles, quoting from an earlier sage; and it
needed no profundity of wisdom to recognize in the "happy ending" of
comedy a conventional, ephemeral thing. But when, after all the
peripeties of life, the hero "home has gone and ta'en his wages," we
feel that, at any rate, we have looked destiny squarely in the face,
without evasion or subterfuge. Perhaps the true justification of tragedy
as a form of art is that, after this experience, we should feel life to
be, not less worth living, but greater and more significant than before.
This is no place, however, for a discussion of the aesthetic basis of
tragedy in general.[1] What is here required, from the point of view of
craftsmanship, is not so much a glorification of the tragic ending, as a
warning against its facile misuse. A very great play may, and often
must, end in death; but you cannot make a play great by simply killing
off your protagonist. Death is, after all, a very inexpensive means of
avoiding anticlimax.
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