TRAGIC PLAYS

Evening Star, Issue 20316, 26 October 1929, Page 22

TRAGIC PLAYS

WHY WE MODERNS DISLIKE THEM Moat people agree that tragedy is the highest form of. drama, but few support it (writes Clifford Bax, “ the London ‘Daily Telegraph). Popularly it' is supposed to be depressing, and most people go to the . theatre with a wish to forget the griefs and difficulties of life. A tragedy ought really l to be invigorating rather, than depressing, for it reveals the spiritual fight which is put up by somebody, who confronts the worst that life can do to him, -arid who goes down gallantly; and, ’remembering that tragedy was most popular in two of the greatest ages—those of Pericles and Queen Elizabeth—we might suppose at farst that a generation which cannot stomach it must-be in poor health. I want, however, to suggest that the decay of tragedy is chiefly due to a cause w hich, so fat as I know, has never been diagnosed. I want to suggest, in fact, that it is froin th© saia© cans© that our contemporaries keep away both from tragedy and from the church. A friend told me some, little time ago that he had been to a certain play —not a tragedy, but a study in emotion. I asked him if he had liked it, and ■he hesitated. I then asked him if he had found it too sentimental for his taste, and he replied: “No it wasn’t . that, but the truth is that I resent being made to feel in public. Primitive people are not self-conscious. Thev are not ashamed of sharing their emotions. On the contrary, they like it. And this is true also of unsophisticated' persons Two charwomen will readily sob together, but not two duchesses. EMOTION IN PUBLIC. Again; it is the simpler of our fellowcountrymen who can best jollify together. In fact, my friend’s dislike of being made to feel in public ” is typical of social development at a certain level—at least in Great Britain. The feeling which he expressed begins when a child' has spent .his first term af a preparatory school; and at the; university it becomes so pronounced that the conversation of most undergraduates is monotonously flippant. In-a word, the more 'educated we are the more selfconscious we become. I remember, for instance, how I used to be taken, as a boy, to “religious worship,” and how I could never overi,*ome my surprise at finding the congre^

cation so mannerly and subdued. I could not rid myself of the supposition that a multitude of men and women who were aspiring toward the Spirit ot the Universe must be on the point or experiencing the greatest of all emotions. Needless to say, no member ot that assembly so lost himself as to rorget appearances. The ‘ worshippers were too civilised not to bear in mind that, an hour later, they would be chatting together in the street. . Perhaps, indeed, they were too civilised to be able to worship. That, at least, is what I felt when, some years afterwards, I was present at a religious dance in New Guinea. It was clear that no member of that dancing group was afraid of what the others would subsequently think about him. Bach contributed as much as he could to a “ pool ” of religious emotion, and, by so doing, probably achieved an intensification of spirit which he could not have induced by himself. AN UNREALISED NEED. We have lost the capacity to forget ourselves and to* share emotions. A man goes to church and finds that, emotionally, nothing happens to him. He comes out as he went in. He then realises that he cannot think and feel religiously when other people, many ot whom he knows, are looking on, and so ho decides to keep his religion to himself. In this way the churches become emptier and emptier. They come, in the end, to stand as relics ot ah earlier civilisation when it seemed obvious both that religion was more important than anything else, and that men should set up largo buildings in which they could all assemble for the principal experience of the week. The churches are empty and the theatres are frivolous for the same reason —that we are too self-conscious to be willing, or even able, to feel together.. We like to keep our social intercourse on a superficial level. We try to hold everyone at a distance from our emotional life. We can join in laughing at comedies because they will not cause us to give ourselves away; and we avoid tragedies not so much because they make us experience a deep emotion as because they may make us behave in an uncivilised manner. A tragedy, in short, is socially uncomfortable.

Ironically enough, we. who dare not show our feelings and* who shun the danger of being made to feel together; are just the persons who most need what tragedy could do for us. For if we never realise our profoundest emotions they tend, as Aristotle divined and Freud demonstrated, to fester in the unconscious mind,