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Burke’s mistake, however, implies a recognition of the ‘negative aspect’ in sublimity, and it may remind us of a truth. Instances of the sublime differ greatly in regard to the prominence and tone of this aspect. It is less marked, for example, and less obvious, in the case of a sublime rainbow or sunrise than in that of a sublime and ‘terrible’ thunderstorm. And in general we may say that the distinctive nature of sublimity appears most clearly where this aspect is most prominent, – so prominent, perhaps, that we have a more or less explicit sense of the littleness and powerlessness of ourselves, and indeed of the whole world of our usual experience. It is here that the object is most decidedly more than ‘glorious,’ or even ‘majestic,’ and that sublimity appears in antithesis to grace. Only we must not give an account of the sublime which fully applies to these cases alone, or suppose that the negative aspect is absent in other cases. If a rainbow or sunrise is really sublime, it is overwhelming as well as uplifting. Nor must we assume that the most distinctively sublime must also be the most sublime. The sunrise witnessed from an immense snowfield in the high Alps may be as sublime as an Alpine thunderstorm, though its sublimity is different.

(2) Grace and ‘beauty,’ it has been said, though not of course merely sensuous, are yet friendly to sense. It is their essence, in fact, to be a harmonious unity of sense and spirit, and so to reconcile powers which in much of our experience are conflicting and dissonant. But sublimity is harsh and hostile to sense. It makes us feel in ourselves and in the world the presence of something irresistibly superior to sense. And this is the reason why it does not soothe or delight, but uplifts us.

This statement recalls some of the ideas we have been considering, but it may easily mislead. For one thing, it is impossible for any sublimity whatever to be merely hostile to ‘sense,’ since everything aesthetic must appeal to sense or sensuous imagination, so that the sublime must at least express its hostility to sense by means of sense. And if we take the phrase in another meaning, the statement may mislead still, for it attributes to sublimity in general what is a characteristic only of certain forms of the sublime. Scores of examples could easily be quoted which show no hostility to sense: e. g. a sublime lion, or bull, or tree. And if we think of our old examples of the rainbow and the sunrise, or, better still, of a thunderstorm, or ‘The horse and his rider,’ or the ‘Sanctus’ in Bach’s Mass, we find the sublime thing actually making a powerful appeal to sense and depending for its sublimity on the vehemence or volume of this appeal. Diminish at all markedly in these cases the amount of light, colour, or sound, and the sublimity would vanish. Of course the appeal here is not merely to sense, but it is to sense.

But undoubtedly there is another kind of sublimity; and it is particularly interesting. Here, it is true, a sort of despite is done to the senses and what speaks to them. As we have seen, the greatness of soul in the sparrow is enhanced by contrast with the smallness and feebleness of its body, and pours contempt on the visible magnitude of the hound; and the stillness of night or death is sublime from its active negation of sound and motion. Again, there is a famous passage which depends for its effect on this, that, first, sublime things are introduced which appeal powerfully to sense, and then something else, which does not so appeal, is made to appear even more sublime and to put them to shame: first a great and strong wind, an earthquake, a fire; and after the fire a still small voice. Sometimes, again, as Burke observed, sublimity depends on, or is increased by, darkness, obscurity, vagueness, – refusal of satisfaction to the sense of sight. Often in these cases the sublime object is terrible, and its terror is increased by inability to see or distinguish it. Examples are the image of ‘the pestilence that walketh in darkness,’ or Milton’s description of Death, or the lines in the Book of Job:

 
In thoughts from the visions of the night
When deep sleep falleth on men,
Fear came upon me and trembling,
Which made all my bones to shake.
Then a spirit passed before my face;
The hair of my flesh stood up.
It stood still, but I could not discern the form thereof.
An image was before mine eyes.
There was silence, and I heard a voice.
 

It has been observed that attempts to illustrate such passages as these dissipate their sublimity by diminishing the obscurity of the object. Blake’s illustrations of the lines in Milton and in Job²⁵ show this, while his design of the morning-stars singing together is worthy even of the words.

We may trace this severity towards sense, again, in examples already mentioned, the ideas of Fate, of the eternal laws to which Antigone appeals, of Duty in Wordsworth’s ode. We imagine these powers as removed from sight, and indeed wholly immaterial, and yet as exercising sovereign dominion over the visible and material world. And their sublimity would be endangered if we tried to bring them nearer to sense by picturing the means by which they exercise their control.

I will take a last example. It has probably been mentioned in almost every account of the sublime since Longinus quoted it in his work on Elevation of Style. And it is of special interest here because it illustrates at one and the same time the two kinds of sublimity which we are engaged in distinguishing. ‘God said, Let there be light, and there was light.’ The idea of the first and instantaneous appearance of light, and that the whole light of the whole world, is already sublime; and its primary appeal is to sense. The further idea that this transcendently glorious apparition is due to mere words, to a breath – our symbol of tenuity, evanescence, impotence to influence material bulk – heightens enormously the impression of absolutely immeasurable power.

To sum up, then, on this matter. It is not safe to distinguish the sublime from the ‘beautiful’ by its hostility to sense. The sublime may impress its overwhelming greatness in either of two ways, by an appeal to sense, or by a kind of despite done to it. Nor can we assert, if we think of the sunrise, the thunderstorm, or of sublime music, that the second of these ways is more distinctive of the sublime than the first. But perhaps we may say this. In ‘beauty’ that which appears in a sensuous form seems to rest in it, to be perfectly embodied in it, and to have no tendency to pass beyond it. In the sublime, even where no such tendency is felt and sublimity is nearest to ‘beauty,’ we still feel the presence of a power held in reserve, which could with ease exceed its present expression. In some forms of sublimity, again, the sensuous embodiment seems threatening to break in its effort to express what appears in it. And in others we definitely feel that the power which for a moment intimates its presence to sense is infinite and utterly uncontainable by any or all vehicles of its manifestation. Here we are furthest (in a way) from sense, and furthest also from ‘beauty.’

(3) I come finally and, as it will at first seem, needlessly to an idea which has already been touched on. The words ‘boundless,’ ‘illimitable,’ ‘infinite,’ constantly recur in discussions of sublimity, and it cannot be denied that our experience constantly provokes them. The sublime has been said to awake in us the consciousness of our own infinity. It has been said, again, to represent in all cases the inadequacy of all finite forms to express the infinite. And so we may be told that, even if we do not adopt some such formula, but continue to speak of ‘greatness,’ we ought at least to go beyond the adjective ‘exceeding’ or ‘overwhelming,’ and to substitute ‘immeasurable’ or ‘incomparable’ or ‘infinite.’

Now, at the point we have reached, it would seem we might at once answer that a claim is here being made for the sublime in general which really holds good only of one kind of sublimity. Sometimes the sublime object is apprehended as the Infinite, or again as an expression of it. This is, for example, a point of view frequent in Hebrew poetry. Sometimes, again, the object (e. g. time or the heavens) is apprehended, not indeed as the Infinite, but still as infinite or immeasurable. But how are we to say that a sublime lion or mountain, or Satan or Lady Macbeth, is apprehended as the Infinite, or as infinite, or (usually) as even an expression of the Infinite? And how are we to say that the greatness of most sublime objects is apprehended as incomparable or immeasurable? It is only failure to observe these distinctions that leads to errors like one recorded in Coleridge’s Table-talk (July 25, 1832): ‘Could you ever discover anything sublime, in our sense of the word, in the classic Greek literature? I never could. Sublimity is Hebrew by birth.’

This reply, however, though sound so far as it goes, does not settle the question raised. It may still be maintained that sublimity in all cases, and even when we have no idea of infinity before us, does represent the inadequacy of all finite forms to express the infinite. And it is unfortunately impossible for us to deal fully with this contention. It would carry us into the region of metaphysics; and, while believing that no theory of the sublime can be complete which stops short of that region, I am aiming in this lecture at no such theory, but only at a result which may hold good without regard to further developments. All that I can do is to add a few words on the question whether, going beyond the adjective ‘exceeding’ or ‘overwhelming,’ we can say that the sublime is the beautiful which has immeasurable, incomparable, or infinite greatness. And the answer which I suggest and will go on to explain may be put thus: the greatness is only sometimes immeasurable, but it is always unmeasured.

We cannot apprehend an object as sublime while we apprehend it as comparably, measurably, or finitely great. Let the thing be what it may – physical, vital, or spiritual – the moment we say to ourselves, ‘It is very great, but I know how great,’ or ‘It is very great, but something else is as great or greater,’ at that moment it has ceased to be sublime. Outside the consciousness of its sublimity we may be perfectly well aware that a thing is limited, measurable, equal or inferior to something else. But then we are not finding it sublime. And when we are so finding it, we are absorbed in its greatness, and have no thought either of the limits of that or of its equality or inferiority to anything else. The lion of whom we are thinking, ‘An elephant could kill him,’ is no sublime lion. The Falls of Schaffhausen are sublime when you are lost in astonishment at them, but not when you are saying to yourself ‘What must Niagara be!’ This seems indubitable, and hence we may say that, in one sense, all sublimity has unmeasured greatness, and that no greatness is sublime which we apprehend as finite.

But the absence of a consciousness of measure or finitude is one thing; the presence of a consciousness of immeasurableness or infinity is another. The first belongs to all sublimity, the second only to one kind of it, – to that where we attempt to measure, or find limits to, the greatness of the thing. If we make this attempt, as when we try in imagination to number the stars or to find an end to time, then it is essential to sublimity that we should fail, and so fail that the idea of immeasurability or endlessness emerges. In like manner, if we compare things, nothing will appear sublime whose greatness is surpassed or even equalled by that of something else; and, if this process of comparison is pursued, in the end nothing will be found sublime except the absolute totality (however it may be imagined). And this kind of sublimity, which arises from attempts to measure or compare, is often exceedingly striking. But it is only one kind. For it is an entire delusion – though a very common one in theories of the sublime – to suppose that we must attempt to measure or compare. On the contrary, in the majority of cases our impression of overwhelming greatness is accompanied neither by any idea that this greatness has a measure, nor by the idea that it is immeasurable or infinite.²⁶

It will not do, then, to lay it down that the sublime is the beautiful which has immeasurable, incomparable, or infinite greatness. But I suggest that, after the explanations given, we may conveniently use the adjective ‘unmeasured,’ so long as we remember that this means one thing where we do not measure at all, and another thing where we try to measure and fail. And, this being so, it seems that we may say that all sublimity, and not only that in which the idea of infinite greatness or of the Infinite emerges, is an image of infinity; for in all, through a certain check or limitation and the overcoming of it, we reach the perception or the imaginative idea of something which, on the one hand, has a positive nature, and, on the other, is either not determined as finite or is determined as infinite. But we must not add that this makes the sublime superior to the ‘beautiful.’ For the ‘beautiful’ too, though in a different way, is an image of infinity. In ‘beauty,’ as we said, that which appears in a sensuous form seems to rest in that form, to be wholly embodied in it; it shows no tendency to pass beyond it, and intimates no reserve of force that might strain or break it. So that the ‘beautiful’ thing is a whole complete in itself, and in moments when beauty fills our souls we know what Wordsworth meant when he said ‘the least of things seemed infinite,’ though each thing, being but one of many, must from another point of view, here suppressed, be finite. ‘Beauty,’ then, we may perhaps say, is the image of the total presence of the Infinite within any limits it may choose to assume; sublimity the image of its boundlessness, and of its rejection of any pretension to independence or absoluteness on the part of its finite forms; the one the image of its immanence, the other of its transcendence.

Within an hour I could attempt no more than an outline of our subject. That is inevitable; and so is another defect, which I regret more. In analysing any kind of aesthetic experience we have to begin by disentangling the threads that meet in it; and when we can only make a beginning, no time is left for the further task of showing how they are interwoven. We distinguish, for example, one kind of sublimity from another, and we must do so; but in the actual experience, the single instance, these kinds often melt together. I take one case of this. Trying to overlook the field in which sublimity appears, we say that there is a sublimity of inorganic things, and of things vital, and of things spiritual, and that these kinds differ. And this is true; and perhaps it is also true that sometimes we experience one of these kinds, so to say, quite pure and unmixed with others. But it is not always, perhaps not usually so. More frequently kind mingles with kind, and we mutilate the experience when we name it after one of them. In life the imagination, touched at one point, tingles all over and responds at all points. It is offered an impression of physical or vital greatness, but at once it brings from the other end of its world reminiscences of quite another order, and fuses the impression with them. Or an appeal is made to the sense of spiritual greatness, but there rises before the imagination a vision with the outlines and hues of material Nature. Offer it a sunset – a mere collection of coloured lines and spots – and they become to it regrets and hopes and longings too deep for tears. Tell it of souls made perfect in bliss, and it sees an immeasurable rose, or city-walls that flash with the light of all the gems on earth. The truth that a sparrow and a mountain are different, and that Socrates is not Satan, interests it but little. What it cares for is the truth that, when they are sublime, they are all the same; for each becomes infinite, and it feels in each its own infinity.

1903.

NOTES ²⁷

I add here a few remarks on some points which it was not convenient to discuss in the lecture.

1. We have seen that in the apprehension of sublimity we do not always employ comparison or attempt to measure. To feel a thing overwhelmingly great it is not necessary to have before the mind either the idea of something less great, or any standard of greatness. To argue that this must be necessary because ‘great’ means nothing except as opposed to ‘small,’ is like arguing that I cannot have a perception of pride without thinking of humility.

This point seems to me quite clear. But a question remains. If we go below consciousness, what is it that happens in us? The apprehension of sublimity implies that we have received an exceedingly strong impression. This as a matter of fact must mean an impression very much stronger than something else; and this something else must be, so to say, a standard with which the impression is unconsciously compared. What then is it?

Stated in the most general terms, it must apparently be the usual or average strength of impressions.

But this unconscious standard takes particular concrete forms in various classes of cases. Not seldom it seems to be our sense of our own power or of average human power. This is especially so where the thing felt to be sublime is, in the relevant respect, in eodem genere with ourselves. A sublime lion, for example, is immensely superior to us, or to the average man, in muscular force and so in dangerousness, Tourgénieff’s sparrow in courage and love, a god in all sorts of ways. And the use of this unconscious standard is probably the reason of the fact, noted in the lecture, that it is difficult to feel sublimity, as regards vital force, in a creature smaller than ourselves.

But this is not the only standard. A sublime lion is not only immensely stronger than we are, but is generally also exceptional among lions; and so with a sublime tree or bridge or thunderstorm. So that we seem also to use as unconscious standard the idea of the average of the kind to which the thing belongs. An average thunderstorm hardly seems sublime, and yet it is overwhelmingly superior to us in power.²⁸

What, again, is the psychical machinery employed when we attempt to measure the shoreless sea, or time, and find them immeasurable? Is there any standard of the ‘usual’ here? I will leave this question to more skilled psychologists than myself.

2. Since the impression produced by sublimity is one of very exceptional strength, we are not able to feel it continuously for long, though we can repeat it after a pause. In this the sublime differs from the ‘beautiful,’ on which we like to dwell after our first surprise is over. A tragedy or symphony that was sublime from beginning to end could not be so experienced. Living among mountains, we feel their beauty more or less constantly, their sublimity only by flashes.

3. If our account of the impression produced by sublimity is true, why should not any sensation whatever produce this impression merely by gaining extraordinary strength? It seems to me it would, supposing at its normal strength it conformed to the general requirements of aesthetic experience, and supposing the requisite accession of strength did not remove this conformity. But this, in one respect at least, it would do. It would make the light, sound, smell, physiologically painful, and we should feel it as painful or even dangerous. We find this in the case of lightning. If it is to be felt as aesthetic it must not pass a certain degree of brightness; or, as we sometimes say, it must not be too ‘near.’

HEGEL’S THEORY OF TRAGEDY ²⁹

Since Aristotle dealt with tragedy, and, as usual, drew the main features of his subject with those sure and simple strokes which no later hand has rivalled, the only philosopher who has treated it in a manner both original and searching is Hegel. I propose here to give a sketch of Hegel’s theory, and to add some remarks upon it. But I cannot possibly do justice in a sketch to a theory which fills many pages of the Aesthetik; which I must tear from its connections with the author’s general view of poetry, and with the rest of his philosophy³⁰; and which I must try to exhibit as far as possible in the language of ordinary literature. To estimate this theory, therefore, from my sketch would be neither safe nor just – all the more because, in the interest of immediate clearness, I have not scrupled to insert without warning various remarks and illustrations for which Hegel is not responsible.

On certain characteristics of tragedy the briefest reminder will suffice. A large part of the nature of this form of drama is common to the drama in all its forms; and of this nothing need be said. It will be agreed, further, that in all tragedy there is some sort of collision or conflict – conflict of feelings, modes of thought, desires, wills, purposes; conflict of persons with one another, or with circumstances, or with themselves; one, several, or all of these kinds of conflict, as the case may be. Again, it may be taken for granted that a tragedy is a story of unhappiness or suffering, and excites such feelings as pity and fear. To this, if we followed the present usage of the term, we should add that the story of unhappiness must have an unhappy end; by which we mean in effect that the conflict must close with the death of one or more of the principal characters. But this usage of the word ‘tragedy’ is comparatively recent; it leaves us without a name for many plays, in many languages, which deal with unhappiness without ending unhappily; and Hegel takes the word in its older and wider sense.

Passing on from these admitted characteristics of tragedy, we may best approach Hegel’s peculiar view by observing that he lays particular stress on one of them. That a tragedy is a story of suffering is probably to many people the most obvious fact about it. Hegel says very little of this; partly, perhaps, because it is obvious, but more because the essential point to him is not the suffering but its cause, namely, the action or conflict. Mere suffering, he would say, is not tragic, but only the suffering that comes of a special kind of action. Pity for mere misfortune, like fear of it, is not tragic pity or fear. These are due to the spectacle of the conflict and its attendant suffering, which do not appeal simply to our sensibilities or our instinct of self-preservation, but also to our deeper mind or spirit (Geist, a word which, with its adjective, I shall translate ‘spirit,’ ‘spiritual,’ because our words ‘mind’ and ‘mental’ suggest something merely intellectual).

The reason why the tragic conflict thus appeals to the spirit is that it is itself a conflict of the spirit. It is a conflict, that is to say, between powers that rule the world of man’s will and action – his ‘ethical substance.’ The family and the state, the bond of parent and child, of brother and sister, of husband and wife, of citizen and ruler, or citizen and citizen, with the obligations and feelings appropriate to these bonds; and again the powers of personal love and honour, or of devotion to a great cause or an ideal interest like religion or science or some kind of social welfare – such are the forces exhibited in tragic action; not indeed alone, not without others less affirmative and perhaps even evil, but still in preponderating mass. And as they form the substance of man, are common to all civilised men, and are acknowledged as powers rightfully claiming human allegiance, their exhibition in tragedy has that interest, at once deep and universal, which is essential to a great work of art.

In many a work of art, in many a statue, picture, tale, or song, such powers are shown in solitary peace or harmonious co-operation. Tragedy shows them in collision. Their nature is divine, and in religion they appear as gods; but, as seen in the world of tragic action, they have left the repose of Olympus, have entered into human wills, and now meet as foes. And this spectacle, if sublime, is also terrible. The essentially tragic fact is the self-division and intestinal warfare of the ethical substance, not so much the war of good with evil as the war of good with good. Two of these isolated powers face each other, making incompatible demands. The family claims what the state refuses, love requires what honour forbids. The competing forces are both in themselves rightful, and so far the claim of each is equally justified; but the right of each is pushed into a wrong, because it ignores the right of the other, and demands that absolute sway which belongs to neither alone, but to the whole of which each is but a part.

And one reason why this happens lies in the nature of the characters through whom these claims are made. It is the nature of the tragic hero, at once his greatness and his doom, that he knows no shrinking or half-heartedness, but identifies himself wholly with the power that moves him, and will admit the justification of no other power. However varied and rich his inner life and character may be, in the conflict it is all concentrated in one point. Antigone is the determination to do her duty to her dead brother; Romeo is not a son or a citizen as well as a lover, he is lover pure and simple, and his love is the whole of him.

The end of the tragic conflict is the denial of both the exclusive claims. It is not the work of chance or blank fate; it is the act of the ethical substance itself, asserting its absoluteness against the excessive pretensions of its particular powers. In that sense, as proceeding from an absolute right which cancels claims based on right but pushed into wrong, it may be called the act of ‘eternal justice.’ Sometimes it can end the conflict peacefully, and the tragedy closes with a solution. Appearing as a divine being, the spiritual unity reconciles by some adjustment the claims of the contending powers (Eumenides); or at its bidding one of them softens its demand (Philoctetes); or again, as in the more beautiful solution of the Oedipus Coloneus, the hero by his own self-condemnation and inward purification reconciles himself with the supreme justice, and is accepted by it. But sometimes the quarrel is pressed to extremes; the denial of the one-sided claims involves the death of one or more of the persons concerned; and we have a catastrophe. The ultimate power thus appears as a destructive force. Yet even here, as Hegel insists, the end is not without an aspect of reconciliation. For that which is denied is not the rightful powers with which the combatants have identified themselves. On the contrary, those powers, and with them the only thing for which the combatants cared, are affirmed. What is denied is the exclusive and therefore wrongful assertion of their right.

Such in outline is Hegel’s main view. It may be illustrated more fully by two examples, favourites of his, taken from Aeschylus and Sophocles. Clytemnestra has murdered Agamemnon, her husband and king. Orestes, their son, is impelled by filial piety to avenge his father, and is ordered by Apollo to do so. But to kill a mother is to sin against filial piety. The spiritual substance is divided against itself. The sacred bond of father and son demands what the equally sacred bond of son and mother forbids. When, therefore, Orestes has done the deed, the Furies of his murdered mother claim him for their prey. He appeals to Apollo, who resists their claim. A solution is arrived at without a catastrophe. The cause is referred to Athene, who institutes at Athens a court of sworn judges. The votes of this court being equally divided, Athene gives her casting-vote for Orestes; while the Furies are at last appeased by a promise of everlasting honour at Athens.

In the Antigone, on the other hand, to Hegel the ‘perfect exemplar of tragedy,’ the solution is negative. The brother of Antigone has brought against his native city an army of foreigners bent on destroying it. He has been killed in the battle, and Creon, the ruler of the city, has issued an edict forbidding anyone on pain of death to bury the corpse. In so doing he not only dishonours the dead man, but violates the rights of the gods of the dead. Antigone without hesitation disobeys the edict, and Creon, despite the remonstrance of his son, who is affianced to her, persists in exacting the penalty. Warned by the prophet Teiresias, he gives way, but too late. Antigone, immured in a rocky chamber to starve, has anticipated her death. Her lover follows her example, and his mother refuses to survive him. Thus Antigone has lost her life through her absolute assertion of the family against the state; Creon has violated the sanctity of the family, and in return sees his own home laid in ruins. But in this catastrophe neither the right of the family nor that of the state is denied; what is denied is the absoluteness of the claim of each.

The danger of illustrations like these is that they divert attention from the principle illustrated to questions about the interpretation of particular works. So it will be here. I cannot stay to discuss these questions, which do not affect Hegel’s principle; but it will be well, before going further, to remove a misunderstanding of it which is generally to be found in criticisms of his treatment of the Eumenides and the Antigone. The main objection may be put thus: ‘Hegel talks of equally justified powers or claims. But Aeschylus never meant that Orestes and the Furies were equally justified; for Orestes was acquitted. Nor did Sophocles mean that Antigone and Creon were equally right. And how can it have been equally the duty of Orestes to kill his mother and not to kill her?’ But, in the first place, it is most important to observe that Hegel is not discussing at all what we should generally call the moral quality of the acts and persons concerned, or, in the ordinary sense, what it was their duty to do. And, in the second place, when he speaks of ‘equally justified’ powers, what he means, and, indeed, sometimes says, is that these powers are in themselves equally justified. The family and the state, the bond of father and son, the bond of mother and son, the bond of citizenship, these are each and all, one as much as another, powers rightfully claiming human allegiance. It is tragic that observance of one should involve the violation of another. These are Hegel’s propositions, and surely they are true. Their truth is quite unaffected by the fact (assuming it is one) that in the circumstances the act combining this observance of one and violation of another was morally right, or by the fact (if so it is) that one such act (say Antigone’s) was morally right, and another (say Creon’s) was morally wrong. It is sufficient for Hegel’s principle that the violation should take place, and that we should feel its weight. We do feel it. We may approve the act of Antigone or Orestes, but in approving it we still feel that it is no light matter to disobey the law or to murder a mother, that (as we might say) there is much justice in the pleas of the Furies and of Creon, and that the tragic effect depends upon these facts. If, again, it is objected that the underlying conflict in the Antigone is not between the family and the state, but between divine and human law, that objection, if sound, might touch Hegel’s interpretation,³¹ but it would not affect his principle, except for those who recognise no obligation in human law; and it will scarcely be contended that Sophocles is to be numbered among them. On the other hand, it is, I think, a matter for regret that Hegel employed such words as ‘right,’ ‘justified,’ and ‘justice.’ They do not mislead readers familiar with his writings, but to others they suggest associations with criminal law, or our everyday moral judgments, or perhaps the theory of ‘poetic justice’; and these are all out of place in a discussion on tragedy.