The Decline of Poetic Justice

“ JUST as might have happened in the old poetical-justice days,” says a brilliant critic in a recent account of a drama. Is poetic justice, then, obsolete? Was it ever a legitimate element of dramatic art? How has it happened that a strict insistence on its laws has prevailed at certain times, and been abandoned at other times? These questions are not only of some importance in the historical interpretation of the drama, but may be thought to have a wider interest in connection with any effort to determine the relations between art and experience, or between fiction and the moral law.

If we should seek to try to track the dogma of poetic justice to its sources, it would lead us, like most other matters of dramatic theory, back to the Poetics of Aristotle. For while Aristotle said nothing about the doctrine explicitly, his view of poetry as dealing with the general or universal — as distinguished from historical narrative, which deals with particular events — furnished the chief basis for the kind of poetic justice demanded by the critics of the Renaissance. Poetry, he said, relates what “ might be,” rather than what “ has been ”; and by that which “ might be ” he means that which is “ the probable or necessary consequence ” of a prior event. If, therefore, a good citizen is accidentally killed by the fall of a statue, it is a matter for history to make note of, but suggests no tragic pleasure to the poet. But if the citizen is a murderer, and if the statue is that of the man whom he has slain (the illustration is Aristotle’s own), then there is a special satisfaction — whether you call it moral or dramatic—in contemplating the relation of the accident to what has gone before. This is clearly poetic justice, or something very much like it.

Or, if one does not want to go back to Aristotle, there is Lord Bacon, who made a very similar observation (doubtless suggested by Aristotle) in The Advancement of Learning. Poetry he called “ feigned history,” and explained its noble charm by the fact that, while “ history propoundeth the successes and issues of actions not so agreeable to the merits of virtue and vice,” the greater art “ feigns them more just in retribution and more according to revealed providence.” So it gives “ some shadow of satisfaction to the mind of man in those points wherein the nature of things doth deny it for the world, said Bacon, is “ in proportion ” — that is, in symmetry or perfection of form — “ inferior to the soul.” A splendid and imperishable saying, and one which surely gives the best possible justification of poetic justice. For the essence of that device is this: in common experience we have seen the wicked in great power, spreading himself like a green bay tree, and we have not alw ays been so fortunate as the Psalmist in learning that he “ made a bad end.” We have seen John Smith die when by rights he should have lived, and John Jones live when by rights he should have died. We have seen lives vanish into nothingness which were seemingly moving toward well-determined and admirable ends, others that reaped where they had not sown, and still others that remained sterile, desultory, and meaningless, from beginning to end. What is poetry for, if not to give that “ satisfaction to the mind ” which such experiences fail to provide?

Now the critics of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, who tried to fit their judgments of all dramatic poetry to Aristotle’s theories, found the ancient drama on the whole well calculated to satisfy the idea of poetic justice which they derived from such passages as those just considered. To be sure, they did not find that all those characters in Greek tragedy who suffered were very bad, and that those who attained some happiness were distinguishingly good; but they did find that the suffering hero had committed some fault or error which brought his trouble upon him in accordance with the will of supernatural powers. The fault might not be strictly within the field of morals; it might be due — like that of Œdipus — to ignorance; it might even have been forced upon the culprit by the very powers who were to avenge it; these things could be explained as peculiarities of the ancient religions. But the important thing was that one knew why the penalty had come, and saw that the chain of cause and effect was inviolably maintained.

But when they turned to Shakespeare, — admittedly the most powerful, if not the most artistic of modern dramatists, — the critics found a very different state of affairs. His tragedies seemed often to violate, not only the classical doctrine of “probable or necessary ” consequences, but also the Old Testament doctrine of the intimate connection between suffering and sin. So, testing Shakespeare by these sacred rules, they found him wanting. There was Thomas Rymer, for example, now remembered chiefly by Macaulay’s having pilloried him as the very worst critic that ever lived. In fact, he was very far from being so; he was only an extremely rigid and consistent theorist, with no warmth of imaginative sympathy to interfere with the exact application of his doctrines. The ancient writers of tragedy, he said, knew as well as any of us that virtue is often oppressed and wickedness triumphant, but they also knew that such facts are’ “ unproper to illustrate the universal and eternal truths ” which it is the business of art to set forth. And he quaintly adds, “ For if the world can scarce be satisfied with God Almighty, whose holy will and purposes are not to be comprehended, a poet, in these matters, shall never be pardoned, whose ways and walks may without impiety be penetrated.”

The tragedy of Othello was chosen — and very well chosen — by Rymer, to show the extreme results of neglecting this principle, on the part of the more or less barbarous Elizabethans. What unnatural crime had Desdemona committed, to bring such a judgment upon her? “ What instruction can we make out of this catastrophe? . . . How can it work, unless to delude our senses, disorder our thoughts, addle our brain, pervert our affections, corrupt our appetite, and fill our head with vanity, confusion, tintamarre, and jingle-jangle? ” Reading this, let us not abandon ourselves to invective — as most modern critics have done — against one who could so stultify himself as to make Othello the type of a bad play, but rather try seriously to conceive how a theorist, devoted to the orderly exhibition of poetic justice, must have been impressed by a dramatist who produced his most powerful effects by the presentation of suffering wholly undeserved, the result not only of malice but of trivial accidents, and horridly meaningless in its outcome. “ Topsy-turvy,” the word selected by Professor Saintsbury to characterize the prevailing impression produced on him by the tragedies of Ibsen, exactly expresses the similar impression produced in Rymer’s day by the tragedies of Shakespeare.

Against this view Addison dared to protest, but whether more for the honor of Shakespeare or of his own Cato, it would be difficult to say. Dr. Johnson, on the other hand, revering the author of Lear and Othello as heartily as any critic who ever lived, was forced to admit that he “makes no just distribution of good and evil,” but “ carries his personages indifferently through right and wrong, and at the close dismisses them without further care.” Johnson’s attitude was therefore taken by Schopenhauer as representative ” in all its dullness ” of that “ Protestant-rationalistic, or peculiarly Jewish, view of life which makes the demand for poetical justice, and finds satisfaction in it.” With Schopenhauer we are of course away at the opposite pole of criticism; and his interpretation of tragedy brings out vividly, by contrast, the insistent optimism of the dogma we are considering. For to this prince of pessimists “ t he true sense of tragedy is the deeper insight that it is not his own individual sins that the hero atones for, but original sin, — that is, the crime of existence itself.” The satisfaction of the spectator, from this standpoint, is not. that of such a purging pity as Aristotle dreamed of, but rather that of a fleeting glimpse into the eternal waste and vanity of the human lot.

So the old critics were right in condemning Shakespeare, having their view of the tragic art. In other words, they were right if they were right, — far righter than the moderns who hunt through these tragedies with a microscope for a “ tragic fault,” and assume that it must be hidden there, else they would not be legitimate drama at all. The old doctrine has warped and colored very much modern interpretation of Shakespeare, in many lands. The ordinary schoolmistress does not know that it has anything to do with Aristotle or Bacon, but has been taught that tragedy, like Providence, perfectly distinguishes the just from the unjust; and since Shakespeare can do no wrong, his plays are to be searched, like the ways of Providence, for this infinitely perfect discrimination. That another sort of tragedy may perhaps be founded upon the very inscrutability of the plotting of our lives, seems rarely to have been apprehended.

It is more than curious how we later folk, unwilling—like the men of Rymer’s time and Dr. Johnson’s — to condemn Shakespeare for what is not in his plays, have set ourselves to find it there; somewhat as the church fathers, concerned for the unreligiousness of the Song of Songs, supplied the lack by allegorical interpretation. The criticism gathering about Othello, as has already begun to appear, is particularly significant for our purpose. Of all our tragedies, perhaps, it leaves us with the most unrelieved and irreconcilable sense of suffering. So, despite its poetic splendor, Dr. Johnson exclaimed, after ending his annotation of the death-scene of Desdemona, “ It is not to be endured! ” And Dr. Furness adds his declaration: “ I do not shrink from saying that I wish this tragedy had never been written.” Now, to the unwarped reader, the story of Othello is that of two people who are well-nigh perfect both in their love toward each other and in their friendliness toward those about them, and whose fate is woven by malignant villainy, aided by mere circumstance; and, while villainy and circumstance are enabled to act as they do by virtue of certain well-defined traits of character in the victims, the entangling fate is in no obvious or natural sense the product of their characters. The intolerableness of the outcome is due to the fact that, not only does villainy overcome innocence, but the very stars in their courses seem to take sides with villainy.

But what have the critics made of all this? The answer is to be found in certain charitably inconspicuous pages at the back of Dr. Furness’s Variorum edition. There is much industrious fumbling for the necessary “tragic fault.” Is it in Othello or Desdemona that it can be found? Snider, author of a System of Shakspere’s Dramas, discovers it in Othello, and accepts Iago’s own theory that the Moor has been faithless to Desdemona and treacherous to his under-officer. And one gets a clear view of the reasoning in a circle which brought the writer to this extraordinary position: “Thus we see one of the fundamental rules of Shakespeare vindicated, —that man cannot escape his own deed; . . . while, without the view above developed [the italics are mine], he must appear as an innocent sufferer deceived by a malicious villain.”

A German critic named Gensichen finds Othello unfaithful in a milder fashion. “Had Othello retained a trace of the gallantry of a lover, he would have picked up the handkerchief that Desdemona let fall. ... It was through this neglect of a courteous act that Othello himself provided Iago with the weightiest proof of his wife’s infidelity.” Another example of the fact that for the most exquisite parody one must not go to the satirist but to the most serious of men.

Other interpreters, less gallant, turn to Desdemona for the source of trouble. Thus Héraud, in Shakspere, his Inner Life, after lightly assuming that Othello himself could not be innocent, or he would not so easily have disbelieved in innocence, finds that the tragedy was possible only through Desdemona’s want of truthfulness. “ Virtuous as she otherwise is, she has one foible, — a habit of fibbing.” This fatal habit brings her to her death-bed, and persists to the moment when she tells Emilia that she has killed herself, — divine and glorious lie! (But these last words are not Héraud’s.) Bodenstedt, on the other hand, finds Desdemona’s guilt in her treatment of her father. “ I am sure that here, as in Lear, it was the earnest purpose of Shakespeare to represent a serious wrong done by a child to a father; . . . and so long as family ties are held sacred, Desdemona will be held guilty toward her father by every healthy mind.” Still others have hinted darkly that she earned retribution by daring to join white blood with that of different hue. This group of citations may be fitly closed by one from Ludwig, which, though not touching precisely the same matter as the others, exemplifies the same insistent desire to have the master poet mete out perfect justice in his ordering of human life. “ In every character of every play,” says this amazing writer, “ the punishment is in proportion to the wrong-doing.” Surely, one thinks, this is a hasty generalization; he has forgotten Othello and Lear. But no: “ How mild is the punishment of Desdemona, or Cordelia, for a slight wrong; how fearful that of Macbeth! ”! (The critic’s point of exclamation here is quite insufficient; I therefore add another.)

But these are, of course, not typical critics, at least for English-speaking countries. They are representative only of the survival of a decaying formula. Others face the conditions more frankly, though not condemning Shakespeare on account of them; and of these some waver in their position, perplexed by the contrast between traditional theory and the facts, while some (like Schopenhauer) glory in the boldness with which the great poet faced the facts and threw poetic justice to the winds. Perhaps the prevalent tendency of criticism in our time is toward the belief that Shakespeare, at the period represented by the great tragedies, deliberately rejected all hopefuld interpretations of the human lot, and dared to set forth the inscrutable spectacle of man prostrated by a will seemingly stronger but not kinder than his own.

It may be worth while to inquire why it is that the old dogma has been so largely rejected in both the theory and practice of recent literature. For that this is increasingly true there can be little doubt. In the cruder forms of literature, to be sure, on the stage or off, poetic justice always remains; for the child-mind, whether in actual childhood or older immaturity, persists in enjoying the frank and clear-cut distribution of awards, — the “ lived happily ever after ” for the good, and a vaguer but equally certain end for the bad. But latter-day ethics, having rebelled against the use of a system of rewards and punishments as the chief means toward spiritual safety, is dissatisfied with the morality of such pictures of life as throw these rewards and punishments into strong relief. If one should take the pains to examine the fiction prepared for juvenile reading in our time, comparing it with that bestowed upon earlier generations, the change would probably appear still more conspicuous than in literature of a more pretentious sort. At any rate I take to be typical an instance which has lately come under my eye, in a book designed for readers of a very tender age. It deals with a fine-frocked maiden who went walking in her Sunday hat, and suggests an impending moral, concerning which, however, we are presently undeceived.

Even the dreaming child, then, while we may still conceal from him the full grimness of the moral chaos, is nowadays denied the contemplation of an ideal world where every act bears prompt and visible fruit after its own kind.

And why this change? As a part, for one thing certainly, of the general advance of what we call Realism. The sense that he is drawing “ the thing as he sees it ” is the characteristic inspiration of the modern artist, and a similar sense of facing the realities without flinching inspires in like manner much of contemporary thought, almost to the point of bravado. From this standpoint we find a representative critic of the day lately writing: “The centuries of dreaminess have gone by, perhaps forever, and to-day man looks with keen, unclouded vision into the verities of his existence, asking no one to prophesy smooth things, but banishing illusions, uncovering nakedness, and facing with a certain hard composure . . . the ghastly facts that render human life so terrible.” If this is what we have been slowly attaining, what wonder that poetic justice has steadily faded ?

And here, as elsewhere, what we vaguely call Romanticism has joined with realism to the same end; for the two, though often quarreling between themselves, always join to make war upon the forces of conservatism. That spirit of daring which finds “ relief from the commonplace ” in so many diverse ways, frequently finds it in the inversion of the axioms of poetic justice. “ Whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he also reap ” is one of those axioms which at times it is a real pleasure to turn upside down; at any rate, the harvests of those who reap where they have not sown are more unhackneyed and piquant. Hence a certain satisfaction in a chaotic world, — a satisfaction which, like all the romantic joys, comes as a reaction from the outworn classical joy in a world so well ordered as to be positively wearisome.

Nor can these literary movements be kept separate from the development of radicalism and increasingly “ free ” thought in regions of speculation and faith. To suppose, as some do, that our time is the most unbelieving which the race has known, is to be ignorant of or to forget the spiritual history of periods no more remote than the eighteenth century. But it is quite true that rebellion against traditional beliefs, at any rate among those speaking the English language, finds nowadays a more easy foothold and a freer air than formerly. And we are all familiar with a kind of anti-Calvinism which may either take the form of finding the universe a meaningless and ungoverned thing, or, going still further round the circle, may find it actually suggestive of predestined evil, — of a power not ourselves that makes for unrighteousness. Readers of literature are acquainted with this last phase in the writings of Mr. Thomas Hardy, whose pathetic human creations are driven before a malevolence too persistent and effective to be fortuitous. Here, I repeat, we have gone almost around the circle, and come to a sort of poetic injustice which may be thought to take the place of poetic justice as an orderly force making for tragic ends.

Certain of the tragedies of Ibsen illustrate, in very interesting ways, different phases of the development we have been considering. In Ghosts we seem to be not altogether remote from “ the old poetical-justice days"; sowing and reaping are at any rate clear enough, though their relation is a larger one than that of the individual life, and the spirit of rebellion against old conventions appears also in the rejection of all mitigation of the tragic pain through the element of beauty. In Hedda Gabler, again, there is at least no complete triumph of injustice in the catastrophe; yet here, besides the intensified rejection of every vestige of tragic beauty, there is a further refusal to make the characters and their sorrows suggest some universal significance. The extraordinary individuality, not to say triviality, of the persons concerned seems designed to prevent us from thinking of them as other than passing motes and midges, dancing toward a destruction which has significance, if at all, for themselves alone. And in The Wild Duck, which both Ibsen and his disciples tell us marks a period of profound growth, beyond any of the other dramas, we have poetic justice treated to the process of reductio ad absurdum, and going down, amid the wreckage of truth, beauty, and idealism, in one ironic yet poignantly tragic crash. Over the dead body of the girl Hedvig, Molvik — representing the maudlin inanity of conventional consolation — repeats the words of Scripture: —

“The child is not dead, but sleepeth.”

To which Relling — apparently standing for the clear-sightedness of disillusion — replies, —

“ Bosh! ”

And the same character interprets the catastrophe with this conclusion of the whole matter: —

“ Life would be quite tolerable, after all, if only we could be rid of the confounded duns that keep on pestering us, in our poverty, with the claim of the ideal.”

Of course there is good reason furnished for the disillusion, — and it is no part of my present purpose to question the justness of Ibsen’s view of those problems raised in the play; the point to be observed is that the petty absurdities of idealism, which for ages have been one of the great themes of comedy, are here made the very stuff of tragedy, when the vanishment of poetic justice is complete.

Let me instance a final and equally significant case of revolt against the conventionalism of the old school of poetic justice, in this case outside the drama but masked in the form of poetry, — The Ordeal of the late John Davidson. This extraordinary poem is the story of an innocent queen wrongly accused of sin, who demands the ancient trial of ordeal by fire, in perfect confidence that her vindication will follow. The king consents that the issue shall be left in the hands of God, and gives himself to prayer for a happy outcome:

Then the ordeal: —

Here, it will be seen, is the very negation of the ancient powers of poetry. Ideal truth goes down before particular fact. And the instance may be thought to exemplify a mingling of all three of the tendencies which we have been considering as antagonistic to poetic justice, — realism, romanticism, and skeptical radicalism. For the catastrophe was perhaps chosen because of the feeling, “This is what really happened”; or, perhaps, in order to avoid an outcome so conventional as to be triumphantly foreseen; or, again, perhaps in protest against the blind piety that sees a moral order in this immoral and disorderly world; — for any of these reasons, or for all three at once.

In presenting this account of the oldtime poetic justice and of its modern antithesis, there has been no attempt to take sides for one or the other. It may rather be supposed that the account has been such as to be distasteful to the adherents of either extreme, since their respective Weaknesses have been pretty clearly implied. But one may tentatively assume that here, as elsewhere with literary schools or dogmas, neither is right, and neither is wrong, unless it attempts to exclude the other and hold the field for itself alone; and further, as with other opposing forces, that the point of greatest sanity and safety is found where both are in equilibrium, rather than where either shows its extreme power. Certainly it is hard for us to believe that we shall ever get back to the standpoint of the eighteenth-century critics who held, like John Dennis, that in a good plot “ the good must never fail to prosper, and the bad must always be punished; otherwise the incidents are liable to be imputed rather to chance than to sovereign justice.” And, on the other hand, it is very likely that another generation will consider that those poets and dramatists of our time whose method has just been exemplified, have taken an equally distorted view of the functions of art. For, at its best, art has commonly been true both to the facts of experience, and to the desire to transcend experience in the interest of what some would call the larger hope and others dare to call the larger truth.

This via media is exemplified, too, in the work of Shakespeare, — certainly in some of it, and perhaps even in that of the tragic period which we have seen has made so much difficulty for the critics. At any rate, that recent Shakespearean criticism which is probably soundest takes a different view of the great tragedies from that exemplified by either of the extremes which were noted above in connection with the problem of Othello. Professor Dowden, for example, admitting the unique painfulness of the play, hears behind it a high note of reconciliation and spiritual triumph. “ To die as Othello dies is indeed grievous. But to live as Iago lives . . . is more appalling.” There is a compensation for the ruin wrought by evil which does not depend upon the hope of a future life to make odds even. “ Desdemona’s love survived the ultimate trial. Othello dies ‘ upon a kiss.’ . . . Goodness is justified of her child. It is evil which suffers defeat. It is Iago whose whole existence has been most blind, purposeless, and miserable.” And this is precisely in harmony with the observations made by Professor Neilson concerning the alleged pessimism of the Shakespearean tragedy. To note only that good and bad go down in indiscriminate disaster is “ to lose sight of the most profound distinction running through these plays, the distinction between the spiritual and the physical. ... It is clear that Shakespeare hands over to natural and social law the bodies and temporal fortunes of good and bad alike; . . . but it is equally clear that he regards the spiritual life of his creations as by no means involved in this welter of suffering and death.” Even in Lear and Othello, then, we may find in the moment of physical disaster “ a moral purgation, a spiritual triumph.”

So long, then, as the great poets and dramatists of the past are our guides, the arts which they developed are not likely to abandon the effort to set forth the universal significance and the veiled but indestructible beauty of the human lot. If the individual experience often seems to be at odds with everything but itself; if Job suffers for no reason such as can be stated in general terms; if Juliet and Romeo are the victims of the animosities of their parents, and the sins of a thousand fathers are visited upon their unconspiring children; if Desdemona dies because her little pitiful life has found a number of malignantly potent trifles looming so big for the moment as to shut from view any source of active justice, — in the presence even of these experiences poetry still seeks to universalize its material, if only in crying,—

and to idealize it, too, in presenting human spirits that dare war against such odds and remain essentially unconquered. In this last consideration we are certainly brought near to the reconciling element which, in the great tragedies, preserves the larger poetic justice, though the small and technical justice of the old critics be violated. If Job had cringed before God, and confessed a guilt he did not feel in order to escape affliction; if Cordelia had saved herself by going over to her father’s foes; if the love of Desdemona had perished in the face of injustice and falsehood; then we should have had indeed a chaos of spiritual wreckage, a poetical injustice, for which no mere beauty of form could easily atone. But on the contrary, there remains in each case, amid the very crash and vanishing of all earthly hope, a spirit that transcends common humanity as far as its suffering has transcended common experience, proving anew through poetry that the world of the senses is “ inferior to the soul.”