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of the characters must find
their
solution by their own internal logic,
are
not
predetermined or moving toward any ideal conclusion. (The
Puritans, in
spite of
their
long faces and severe dress, are optimistic be–
cause they have that bullying arguing mentality which believes that
preaching at the other fellow must in the long run alter
his
habits and,
I suppose, because a
belief
in predestination does imply that the bells
of hell go ting-a-ling-a-ling for you but not for me!)
I will not quarrel with Mr. Cruttwell about the Puritans. I think
a good case can be made out for the
view
that their influence on poetry
in its
necessary complexity, sensuous concreteness and passion, was bad,
and that
this
was especially true of the influence of the greatest of
Puritan
poets, Milton. But
Puritanism
is
not necessarily allied to a ra–
tional
attitude
and a rational attitude
is
not necessarily opposed to the
tragic sense.
It
is
over the definition of the tragic sense that I quarrel with Mr.
Cruttwell. I think that puritans are insensitive to tragedy because they
themselves project the essential
Christian
moral optimism into
its
most
extreme form: the
wish
and the determination that "All shall be well,
and All shall be well" (for me
if
not for you). In other words I
wish
to maintain that the truly tragic sense is not Christian and never has
been. The truly tragic sense
is
awareness of
natural
law and dialectic.
It is concerned with error and its biological consequences, not
with
sin
and its punishment or redemption.
It
refuses the extra-mundane impli–
cation and dimension of
either
of these ideal consequences. The moral
conflicts of genuine tragedy are resolved in terms of themselves. (It is
interesting that the greatest Christian poem, Dante's,
which
is full of
dramatic incident and tensions, does not achieve the tragic form:
it
is
a 'Comedy' and the happy ending is there, but intellectual and off the
worldly stage.)
In short, the truly tragic
spirit is
Greek, not Christian, and Shakes–
pearean uniqueness, not only among his contemporaries, but in European
literature,
which we are always trying to deny, though
without
success,
because it baffles and almost irritates the theorizing mind, is due to the
fact that his spirit is naturally
Greek-anima naturaliter graeca.
His
interest in law and order is not fundamentally political and immediate
but natural, biological and psychological. His great tragedies are about
irrational violence done to natural
equilibrium
in the field of the mind
and heart, and about the re-establishment of the balance of nature.
The villains, the baffling lagos, the Gonerils and Regans,
in
particular,
with
their
apparently pointless malevolence, can be seen in
this
light,
