The real
trouble was that death seemed to be the only method of avoiding
anticlimax.
It is a very sound rule that, before you determine to write a tragedy,
you should make sure that you have a really tragic theme: that you can
place your hero at such odds with life that reconciliation, or mere
endurance, would be morally base or psychologically improbable.
Moreover, you must strike deep into character before you are justified
in passing capital sentence on your personages. Death is a
disproportionate close for a commonplace and superficially-studied life.
It is true that quite commonplace people do die; indeed, they
preponderate in the bills of mortality; but death on the stage confers a
sort of distinction which ought not to be accorded without due and
sufficient cause. To one god in particular we may apply the Horatian
maxim, "Nec deus intersit, nisi dignus vindice nodus."
In German aesthetic theory, the conception _tragische Schuld_--"tragic
guilt"--plays a large part.
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