ABSTRACT
Aristotle never argued that pity and fear balanced one another. That was for I. A. Richards to tell in his Principles of Literary Criticism (1924). If the force of the one exceeded that of the other, he said, author should no longer have tragedy, and this made him declare: It is the relation between the two sets of impulses, Pity and Terror, which gives its specific character to Tragedy, and from that relation the peculiar poise of the Tragic experience springs. Una Ellis-Fermor in The Frontiers of Drama (1945) has a chapter on ‘The Equilibrium of Tragedy’ in which she argues that a characteristic effect of tragedy is the sense of a balance between the view that the world is governed by an alien and hostile destiny and the view that somehow this apparent evil may be explained in terms of good.
