NOTE

For the reading of these papers, with corrections and suggestions, I am indebted to my friends, Professor Frederic T. Blanchard and Assistant Professor Margaret S. Carhart, of the University of California in Los Angeles, Mr. William K. Kelsey, of the Detroit News, and Professor William G. Carr, of Pacific University.

ON THE ENJOYMENT OF TRAGEDY

T is a matter of common belief that every actor,

IT

even the super-fat comedian, yearns to play Hamlet and that every actress wants to attempt the role of Juliet. It is no less true that every student of the drama is occasionally tempted to square the dramatic circle, to solve some of the problems that have tantalized all critics of the drama.

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'-some one's death, a chorus-ending from Euripides, Mantell as Lear raise again the question, "Why do we enjoy tragedy?" True, it may raise many other questions, all the eternal "whys" that torture when we face life stark and undraped before us. And, as the easy answers fall away, we may leave some of these questions to philosophy, some to theology, others to æsthetics, for all these spheres of human thought contribute to the making of tragedy; but one question at least we must face for it belongs to us, the question we have just asked and shall attempt to answer, "Why do we enjoy tragedy?"

When we consider merely the material out of which tragedy is apparently created, the suspicions, murders, battles, adulteries; all the injustice, the suffering of the innocent for the guilty, the dilemmas that

must be faced and that lead only to death or to dishonor; when we consider these things we are inclined to say, "Surely no man enjoys spectacles such as these!" And yet nothing is more clear than that we do enjoy them, unless it is that that enjoyment is of the loftiest kind and akin to the emotions that possess us when we watch the sea in storm or face the solemn summit of El Capitan.

The cathedral, the symphony, and the tragedy have at least one element in common. They are complex. Their power to satisfy, to exalt the spirit, comes from no direct and simple appeal to some overpowering emotion. Each makes its approach through many channels and by reason of a carefully harmonized and unified set of forces. In tragedy, plot, characters, language are always present and each of them speaks to us in various ways. Since this is true it is to be expected that the reasons for our enjoyment of tragedy are also various and that now one, then another appears as the chief factor in that enjoyment. It is even probable that all the factors are present in the satisfaction we find in any tragedy, but in endlessly different combinations and proportions.

To see in tragedy a supreme example of the beautiful will always be, no doubt, to place oneself, at least in the eyes of many, among the Chestertonian seekers of wilful paradox. One can sympathize with