ABSTRACT
The most striking fact about modern tragic theory is that it is rooted in very much the same structure of ideas as modern tragedy itself, yet one of its paradoxical effects is its denial that modern tragedy is possible, after almost a century of important and continuous and insistent tragic art. Liberal tragedy inherited this separation between ultimate human values and the social system, but in a mode which it finally transformed. In politics this produced a new social consciousness of human destiny; in philosophy, analysis of the ideologies of religion and of social custom, together with new schemes of rational explanation; in literature, a new emphasis on the exact observation and description of the contemporary social world. The tragedy of naturalism is the tragedy of passive suffering, and the suffering is passive because man can only endure and can never really change his world.
