and of Macbeth and
Lady Macbeth--untrue to our imaginative experience. When we are immersed
in a tragedy, we feel towards dispositions, actions, and persons such
emotions as attraction and repulsion, pity, wonder, fear, horror,
perhaps hatred; but we do not _judge_. This is a point of view which
emerges only when, in reading a play, we slip, by our own fault or the
dramatist's, from the tragic position, or when, in thinking about the
play afterwards, we fall back on our everyday legal and moral notions.
But tragedy does not belong, any more than religion belongs, to the
sphere of these notions; neither does the imaginative attitude in
presence of it. While we are in its world we watch what is, seeing that
so it happened and must have happened, feeling that it is piteous,
dreadful, awful, mysterious, but neither passing sentence on the agents,
nor asking whether the behaviour of the ultimate power towards them is
just. And, therefore, the use of such language in attempts to render our
imaginative experience in terms of the understanding is, to say the
least, full of danger.[13]
Let us attempt then to re-state the idea that the ultimate power in the
tragic world is a moral order. Let us put aside the ideas of justice and
merit, and speak simply of good and evil.
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