THE ORIGIN OF TRAGEDY.*
THE subject with which this volume deals is one of great and permanent interest, for noble tragedy appeals almost irre- sistibly to every mind. And the force of that appeal does not, we think, depend on the illusions of the stage, for scenery and acting are at the best only accessories, while they may often mar the true imaginative influence of a great play, but rather, perhaps, on the fact that dramatic poetry speaks to us always with a direct and personal voice. In all other forms of composition we feel somehow the presence of the writer ; it is the distinction of the drama that in it he totally disappears. We hear only the spoken word of men and women moved by like passions with ourselves, and however the written word may command the intellect, it is assuredly the spoken word which rules the heart. Men amass learning in their libraries, but it is only by listening to human speech that they come to understand humanity ; and when Jack and Jill, as they walk out on Sunday, recount the adventures of the week, the recurrent "says I" or "says he" of their discourse shows the ineradicable desire of our nature to hear what in particular circumstances a particular person actually said. The scene described may be of the most trivial—the tragedy, say, of a broken teacup followed by a month's warning—but it becomes effective just because those who take part in it are allowed to speak in their own words, to tell us for themselves what they think and feel, because, that is, it is unconsciously dramatised. And if this is so, then the true "origin," not only of tragedy, but of all dramatic art, must be sought in our innate longing to hear the language of emotion as it springs, or as we can conceive it springing, immediately from the lips. It is the living voice • The Origia of Tragedy. By William Ridgeway, Se.D., '.B.A., ac. Cam- bridge; At the University Press. 16s. 6d. net.]
that we all long to hear, and it is in this longing that the drama finds at once its strength and its source.
But however this may be—and Professor Ridgeway does not deal with the point—tragedy as we know it historically comes to us directly from. the Greeks, while the actual facts of its development in Greece have hitherto never been made clear. Aeschylus, the first tragic writer of whom any- thing survives, bursts upon our sight like some splendid meteor from amid almost impenetrable darkness. We admire, but cannot understand, his startling and stupendous greatness. Most of us, indeed, could say something about Thespis and his famous "waggon," or repeat some schoolboy story about a chorus of Satyrs which danced and sang around the altar of Dionysus, and about the leader of it occasionally making a. speech of his own until, as time went on, a second speaker was introduced ; and we might even round off our explanation with a tag from Horace to show that " tragedy " means "the goat-song," and was so called because the successful poet received a goat as his reward. But such an account labours under one fatal defect, for between Dionysus and tragedy, between orgiastic revelry and sad-eyed sorrow, the difference is too great to be bridged over. Prometheus tortured on his Caucasian crags, Cassandra chanting her own dirge as she enters the fatal halls of Atreus, Darius summoned from the sepulchre to hear of his son's ruin,—these are the themes with which Aeschylus deals, and they fit in badly with "the grotesque diction" of Satyrs or the Dionysian dithyramb which, as Archilochus tells us, the poet sings "when his soul is thunder-smitten with wine." The language of tragic dialogue is, in fact, the direct outcome of "the serious diction of the epic," while the choric songs are closely connected with that lyric poetry which reached its own culmination in Tyrtaeus, Sappho, and Alcaeus, so that the materials which the first writers of tragedy had ready to band are sufficiently clear. But how did they come to shape these materials into a new and higher form of art What accident or outward circumstance first induced some one to compose something which might be called a tragedy? That is the question which has long perplexed inquirers, and to which Professor Ridgeway now offers an illuminating reply. Taking his cue from a passage of Herodotus which states that the men of Sicyon, apparently as early as 600 B.C., honoured the hero Adrastus "with tragic dances (wain) alluding to his misfortunes," he connects the origin of tragedy, not with the wild and often obscene worship of a Thracian deity whose cult, as he shows, only reached Athens at a comparatively late period, but with a religious custom of immemorial antiquity. For in Greece, as almost everywhere throughout the ancient world, the tombs of departed heroes were regarded as objects not only of venera- tion but of worship. "The blameless King," under whose rule, as Homer tells us, "the black earth bears wheat and barley, and the trees are laden with fruit, and the sheep bring forth and fail not," was held by a natural instinct to be hardly less potent after his death. He still brings forth good or evil according as the spirit which dwells in his tomb is honoured or neglected. He delights in meat-offerings and drink-offerings, his altar-mound having sometimes an actual pipe by which blood or wine may still reach his thirsty soul. He loves, too, the solemn dance, the sacred hymn, and the recital of his deeds or sufferings while, as his worshippers, clad according to ancient ritual in primitive goat-skins, circle round his sepulchre, be contemplates the true "tragic chorus" from which all after tragedy has had its birth.
Such is Professor Ridgeway's main thesis; and although his particular arguments cannot be briefly stated, for he himself half-way through his book requires seventeen distinct headings in order to summarise them, yet enough has, perhaps, been said to show that he at least points out the way to truth. Indeed, he does much more, for he is not only a guide, but a pioneer. No man can wield the axe more vigorously, and he hews a path through what was a mere jungle of obscuring and obstructive theories with a robust arm ; while his references to the prominence of a tomb or barrow in many Greek plays, to the use of the Kommos or "lament for the dead" in many others, to the introduction elsewhere of ghosts "as part of the dramatic machinery," and the facts which he brings together from a vast range of anthropological knowledge, seem to afford solid ground for further advance-
Previous page
