ABSTRACT
What is the reason’, asks St. Augustine in the third book of his Confessions, ‘… that a spectator desires to be made sad when he beholds doleful and tragical passages, which he himself could not endure to suffer? … and if the calamities of the person represented (either fallen out long since or utterly feigned) be so lamely set out, that no passion be moved in the spectator, he goes away surfeited and reporting scurvily of it. But if he be moved to passion, he sits it out very attentively, and even weeps for joy again. Are tears therefore loved, and passions?’ 1 The happy combination of pagan learning and Christian compassion enabled Augustine to put his finger directly on the crucial spot of tragedy: why do we, the spectators, take pleasure in seeing a representation of suffering? Why are we both attracted to and repelled by the spectacle of the suffering of a fellow creature? This is indeed the paradox of tragedy, that we enjoy where we should suffer, that we suffer as we enjoy, that we should get so perverse a pleasure out of the depiction of human misery. Hitherto, we have considered this problem in its historical development; we have seen that our response to tragedy is a response deeply rooted in the past of man, which tragedy has the power to evoke afresh. I should like now to examine the problem from another angle of approach: this time from the point of view of the theory of tragedy, my intent being to show that both modes of procedure, the historical and the critical, though they start from opposite sides of the problem, so to speak, arrive in the end at the same destination.
