Editorial

Why do American dramatists seem unable to write firsthand tragic drama in the tradition of the Greek playwrights and Shakespeare? Is the writing of great tragedy incompatible with American civilization? These two LIFE editorials, written thirteen years apart (December 2, 1946, May18, 1959), discuss a problem that goes to the heart of our culture. --Editor, LIFE

America’s failure to create first-rate tragedies may not seem like a national disaster. Yet dramatic tragedy has been the chosen medium of history’s greatest artists, and out failure in it may betoken some deeper failure in the American character or scene.

A people who cannot witness great reminders of the tragic aspects of their own existence are not getting the most out of their life and perhaps cannot be ranked among the greatest civilizations. The people of Athens and Shakespeare’s England were able to suffer vicariously with their tragic heroes in an emotional workout that left them wiser and even more serene. That, said Aristotle, is the purpose of tragedy – to purge the emotions through pity and fear. But Americans disapprove of fear and want to free the world of it. Are we an essentially untragic people?

First, a few definitions, necessarily dogmatic. According to Aristotle, the first authority on the subject, tragedy must be “serious, complete and of a certain magnitude,” to which Webster’s dictionary adds that the hero “is by some passion or limitation brought to a catastrophe,” the action as a whole working out as “a manifestation of fate.”

Strictly speaking first-rate tragedy has been written in only two eras, by only four men: by Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripedes in the fifth century B.C. and by Shakespeare. Grade B tragedy (still very fine stuff) has been achieved by Corneille, Racine, Goethe, Ibsen and others, including composers of nineteenth century operas; and you can grade it on down from there. But high tragedy must not be confused with pathos, gloom or a mere unhappy ending.

A key word in Aristotle’s definition is “magnitude.” The Greek and Shakespearean heroes were princes, kings or generals at least, outsize characters whose fate involved the fate of whole cities or nations with their own. Compare King Oedipus or King Lear with what passes for a tragic hero on the American stage – the clerk hero of Elmer Rice’s Adding Machine, significantly named Mr. Zero, or the moronic Lennie in Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men.

Our heroes appeal not to our awe but to our power of sympathetic identification. Aided by naturalistic settings and dialog, we are above all made to feel at home, among equals or inferiors. The characters on our stage or screen may be rich and admirable. But we are always reminded of their humble origin, their wants or some other comfortable and exceedingly nontragic flaw. O’Neill’s The Iceman Cometh carries this democratic snobbism about as far as it can be carried: the characters all start out as a bunch of drunken bums and finish the same.

The requirement of “magnitude,” which our drama fails to meet, suggests that great tragedy may be incompatible with American democracy. Except at the Sinatra-fan level, we don’t really believe in heroes, and when they appear among us anyway we unfit them for tragedy by cutting them down to size. Just as we reacted to the phenomenon of Hitler by singing Der Fuhrer’s Face, so we debunk our own heroes, good or bad. American fiction has produced a few characters, such as Ahab in Moby Dick, who are of truly tragic magnitude. But the typical American reader tries to get around Ahab by dubbing him a fanatic.

One reason for the greatness of Ahab and for the high seriousness of much Victorian literature in comparison with our own was that our forebears shared a deep Christian sense of sin. This sense of sin was related to a sense of man’s cosmic importance, which we seem to have lost. To a Greek, also, man was the center of the universe; his very gods had man like attributes and were constantly involving themselves in man’s affairs, whether guiding him in battle or making love to his wife.

But modern man has moved from the center of the universe and reduced himself to a trivial biological specimen. He cannot esteem himself high enough for high tragedy. He can appraise, analyze, respect and belittle himself, but he cannot regard himself with awe.

Without awe, tragedy cannot achieve its greatest impact. And it may be that our belief that all men are equal, our refusal to admit the very concept of aristocracy, debars us from ever feeling the awe that the Athenians felt toward Oedipus or the Elizabethan groundlings toward Lear. In that case our failure to produce great tragedy may be a virtue, or at least a fair price to pay for our democracy. Maybe we are more like the Romans, who had had great political gifts and never produced any great tragedy either.

Yet democracy does produces heroes, and our history is replete with tragic themes. These themes and heroes may make great American tragedy if we get over our belittling habit and admit to ourselves that the average man is not the measure of all things. But even that won’t be enough. For while great tragedy is not necessarily incompatible with democracy, it is incompatible with another habit that lies deep in the American grain.

This habit is an optimistic faith in progress. Professor J.B. Bury, who wrote a history of The Idea of Progress, defines it to mean “that civilization has moved, is moving and will move in a desirable direction.” This idea is as old as modern science, stemming from Bacon and Descartes. But it has as firm a grip on the modern world as the expectation of Judgment Day had on the medieval world. And except among Russian Communists (for Marx swallowed it whole) the idea of progress has nowhere taken deeper root than in America.

Now why is the idea incompatible with high tragedy? Because we have let it replace the old convictions on which tragedy depends, that man is finite (or sinful) and that his destiny does not lie wholly in his own hands.

The idea of progress grew from the observable fact of science’s increasing conquest of material nature. But Darwin, Herbert Spencer and others stretched this observable fact into certain unprovable assumptions: namely, that “all environments [Darwin’s words] will tend to progress toward perfection,” that man himself is perfectible through scientific self-knowledge and that evil is not a permanent necessity in the world. Even devout men like Tennyson, whose Locksley Hall is the battle hymn of progress, could promote the new faith by assuming God was on its side.

As indeed He may be. But there is increasing evidence to the contrary. There is also evidence that the underpinnings of our faith in progress may be weakening, for the scientists themselves are no longer so sure. The leading physicist have long since regained an almost primitive awe of the universe, and H.G. Wells repudiated a lifelong worship of progress before he left a world for which his final epithet was “doomed formicary.” Bury’s book was written a generation before the atomic bomb, but the bomb gives these words of his a new point:

If there were good cause for believing that the earth would be uninhabitable in A.D. 2000 or 2010, the doctrine of Progress would lose its meaning and would automatically disappear.

To gain a sense of tragedy, Americans must therefore virtually reverse two of their dearest values: on the one hand, we must recover our awareness of evil, uncertainty and fear; on the other, we must gain a sense of man’s occasional greatness (which is quite a different thing from the “dignity of the common man”).

For tragedy, in essence, is the spectacle of a great man confronting his own finiteness and being punished for letting his reach exceed his grasp. The Greeks had two words for this - hybris, pride, and moira, fate – which told them that subtle dangers lurk in all human achievements and that the bigger they are the harder they fall.

But if Americans believe that there are no insoluble questions, they can’t ask tragic questions. And if they believe that punishment is only for ignorance or inadequate effort, they can’t get tragic answers.

That sense is to feel a due humility before the forces that are able to humble us, without wishing to avoid the contest where the humbling may take place. We will be a more civilized people when we get it.

II

Concerning Archibald MacLeish’s play J.B., we have a question not touched on by our commentators. Does its success indicate any change in America’s famous incapacity for great tragic drama?

That incapacity we explored some years ago. We there defined dramatic tragedy (the art of the greatest Greeks, Shakespeare and few others) as the ennobling spectacle of a great man confronting his own finiteness and being punished for letting his reach exceed his grasp. Is significant dramatic tragedy possible in a democratic (i.e. egalitarian) society? Even if the audience is ready, don’t American efforts to write serious tragedy still somehow fall short of the classical standards? Why? Two recent efforts bear on the point.

One is the Ballard of Baby Doe, the Moore-Latouche opera. Less than three years old, this opera is established in many critical minds as a real contribution to the classical tradition. The story is a great love triangle and the setting is Colorado silver mining in the eighties and nineties.

Haw Tabor has the attributes of a tragic hero. He was the richest and most powerful man of his time and place and Baby, his bride, was the loveliest filly. There is a great wedding scene in Washington (Tabor was briefly a senator) attended by President Chester A. Arthur, and a wonderful campaign speech of William Jennings Bryan delivered as an aria. The opera ends when Tabor’s silver luck runs out and he dies, old and broke, in 1899. But as no Coloradan needs to be reminded, Baby Doe did not die until 1935, older and broker than Tabor and more truly tragic.

She dies still guarding the dead Matchless Mine, faithful to his last words: “Hang on to the Matchless!” It took a three-day blizzard to end her thirty-six-year vigil and freeze her on the floor. But the opera hints at his fabulous fixation, this heroic dedication to the illusion of perpetual riches.

Instead its last words are Baby Doe’s farewell song to Tabor, declaring that their love has conquered all. The true story was better art than the opera. Good as it is, Baby Doe gets off stage too soon as a mere love story, and is therefore a case of American evasiveness when confronted with a genuinely tragic theme.

Now about J.B.? This exciting play deals audaciously with those eternal problems of life, death, the meaning of suffering and the existence of God, which this generation of Americans has become most eager to take seriously. If only for that reason (and there are others) J.B. is a welcome enlargement of the dimensions of the American theater.

J.B. can be considered either as a human drama or as a “theodicy” (an explanation of God). As a theodicy, the play required the fuller explanation, which MacLeish has elsewhere given, of how he sees God’s conflict with Satan and man’s role therein.

“In the struggle between good and evil,” says MacLeish, “God stakes his supremacy as God upon man’s fortitude and love…Man depends on God for all things; God depends on man for one,” that one being man’s love freely and unreasoningly given.

This might be called a proto-Christian theodicy.

Now consider J.B. as a human drama. The hero is denied one thing he thinks he needs the most: a clear explanation of his sufferings from God. The play is therefore a formal tragedy. But it is not a complete tragedy, for the catharsis is blurred by an ambiguous, humanistic ending. Instead of answers, J.B. gets his wife back and a chance at a fresh start.

The love they “blow on” is not divine love; it is pathetic, not transcendent. Thus the ending is too biological for good theodicy; and also a little too cozy for good tragedy. Is there a touch of that same escapism that spoils the end of Baby Doe?

Ever since Matthew Arnold marked the ebb of faith in “Dover Beach,” artists have used romantic love as a handy solvent for man’s philosophical dilemmas. But it is not so much a solvent as a way of changing the subject. Our dramatists seem incapable either of sticking to the stark tragic line that withholds this balm, or of transmuting the balm into the genuine solvent of divine love.

The reason for this incapacity is perhaps the agnosticism of the age, an age interested in God but still remote from Him. The ambiguity of J.B. reflects the ambiguity of the age. But by opening the question it may somewhat lessen our remoteness from God, and bring us closer to the day when Americans can confront the tragic aspects of their existence with ennobling humility instead of evasion.