THE BOOK WAS DRENCHED - OUDL Home

General Introduction xxvii
Now we are in a position to attempt a positive formulation. Tragedy
or the tragic always makes certain basic assumptions. In the first place,
it always seems to assume the fundamental dignity and worth of man.
It assumes that somehow or other human life is meaningful and valuable.
It would never finally accept Macbeth's evaluation of life:
It is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.
It follows, therefore, that tragedy must concern itself with human valuer
of many sorts, man's happiness and misery, and all that these conceptions
involve.
As a corollary to this first assumption there is a second which tragedy
always appears to make. It assumes that, complex though man be, he
possesses a will, in some sense a will that is free, and that he is likewise
in some sense responsible for his actions. The tragic asserts that man
is somehow free to choose his course of action and that through his free
choice, his character is essentially revealed. For the present argument
it makes no difference whether man actually has free will or not—whether
certain philosophers and psychologists are right in denying free will
to man, or whether Dr. Johnson said the last word on the problem when
he remarked, "All theory is against the freedom of the will; all experience
for it." 16 Whatever may be the actual answer to the problem, tragedy,
or the tragic assumes that man has free will, and when one finds himself
in the realm of the tragic, it can only be meaningful to him if he realizes
that tragedy has made that assumption. If man is portrayed as a complete
puppet, even though at times it may seem so, if the blinded Gloucester
in King Lear is right when he cries,
As flies to wanton boys, are we to the gods,
They kill us for their sport.
—then there can be no tragedy. If man is a puppet, then he is mean,
contemptible, and nothing worth. But tragedy in its entirety, even when
it portrays man as he is swept to his doom by blind forces over which
he has no control, seems to affirm thaf he is not mean and not contemptible.
The other assumption which tragedy seems consistently to make is
that over and above man there exists some superhuman power or force.
This force appears under various names and in different forms. In
Bradley's interpretation of Shakespeare's essentially secular tragedy, it
is the mysterious "moral order." In the essentially religious Greek tragedy
16 Cf. P. E. More, The Sceptical Approach to Religion (Princeton, 1934) p. 27.