Tragic Flaw Research Articles

The Art of Compromise and the Right of Self-Creation

When faced with the disaster of the Civil War, Americans prefer to conclude that the Union was secure except for slavery, the tragic flaw or alternatively, that fools had inherited and ruined a nearly perfect machine. This is not altogether surprising: we are a self-deceiving people who need history to affirm the righteousness of our pragmatic, ambitious innovations. Our exceptional virtue must be rooted in the founding or nowhere at all, and so we idolize a Constitution that sketched out more of a promise than a practical machine. The founders themselves worried endlessly that jealousy, greed, and local feeling would wreck their fragile system of self-government, and one suspects they would not have been surprised in 1861 to find the Union on the rocks over slavery. The elders of the second generation, however, expressed shock and dismay as the Union disintegrated, and historians ever since have shown a tendency to conflate the contemporaries' horror at the prospect of disunion with our retrospective horror at the basic contradictions that produced such a violent collision. Peter B. Knupfer's new book, The Union as It Is, strives to recover the perspective of the innocents and look with fresh eyes at the tradition of plain old political compromise within the American republican system. Knupfer locates the strategy of compromise inside the constitutional framework, and in doing so anchors the causes of the sectional crisis at the center instead of on the fringes of the American political tradition. Convinced (as were the framers) that the 1787 Constitution rested on expedient and fragile compromises, Knupfer sees the subsequent politics of sectional accommodation not as evidence of eroding consensus but as the original consensus itself. Party maneuvers to prevent sectional issues from invading national politics, while not anticipated by the antiparty founders, nevertheless carried forward, in Knupfer's view, the essential work of the delegates at Philadel-

A Semester's Flirtation with the Input Hypothesis

Three years ago, motivated by concern for stricter accountability to learner performance, I abandoned all my previously-used elementary Spanish texts and most of my customary methodology to embark afresh on the quest for classroom results that might evidence true proficiency. That process culminated last semester (Fall, 1987) in my implementation of what I understand of Stephen D. Krashen's Input Hypothesis. I make no claim to have implemented it well, only to have taken it seriously enough to give it a try. In 1985 I discovered Nicholas Shumway and David Forbes's Espaniol en espanol, a succinct, dialogless, eminently mature, direct method text package. Sensing that it was time for me to try a wholehearted direct method after skirting the issue for a quarter century, I adopted the package. During the subsequent two years of enthusiastic trial-and-error I gradually came to realize this text's tragic flaw: the give-and-take in Spanish on the structure of the language constitutes the beall and end-all of most of each chapter's activities. Students are supposed to use Spanish grammatical terminology to discuss Spanish grammar. Such an objective does ostensibly get the learners communicating in the TL, but what they communicate under such conditions is largely devoid of the target culturerelated content that, for so many of us, justifies required FL study within a liberal arts curriculum.

Between scylla and charybdis: Sociological objectivity and bias

The Greek notion of the tragic flaw refers to a virtue extended to such an extreme that it becomes a vice. Oedipus was so determined to restore his kingdom that he resolved to treat mercilessly the person responsible for its turmoil; it led to his self-destruction. Sociology has its tragic flaw as well. The virtue of the field is the pursuit of objectivity through scientific methods, which forces a researcher to see beyond personal, class, ethnic, national, temporal, and other biases. The sociological flaw is a myopic obsession with objectivity in which scientists too often believe they have become objective because they have tried to do so, following the formulas of positivist science. Personal prejudices are exchanged for abstract ones.

Polio Policy: A Bitter Pill to Swallow

Polio Policy: A Bitter Pill to Swallow

Names in Absalom, Absalom!

5 7 tHEN Quentin tells Shreve about General Compson's theory YV that Thomas Sutpen bestowed an invented surname on his Haitian son, we see the culmination of lively curiosity about Sutpen names that has persisted through three generations of Compsons. A deeply meaningful activity in Absalom, the Compsons' discussions about naming have nevertheless gone unnoticed in criticism except as troublesome inconsistencies in the novel's patterns of disclosure. General Compson's theory, it has been said, implies that he knew all along that Charles Bon was Sutpen's son.1 Such is not the case, however. Sutpen did tell General Compson that he abandoned son of tainted lineage, but he did not reveal the child's name-or any other names from his Haitian past. His silence on this topic led General Compson, and then the younger Compsons, to speculate about these withheld names, and about the naming practices at Sutpen's Hundred as well. These conjectures form motif that defines Sutpen's tragic flaw. Faulkner introduced the naming motif early in the first chapter, where the omniscient narrator begins to quote Rosa at the point where she asserts that He wasn't gentleman and then produces as evidence Sutpen's appearance in the community with a name which nobody ever heard before, knew for certain was his own.2 Mr. Compson's subsequent account of Sutpen's arrest during his courtship of Ellen's good name leaves no doubt about the community's opinion of him as one who might on occasion find it expedient to invent new name for himself. Years later General Compson would refine this view of Sutpen into the theory that he had invented surname for his first son.

Virtvs and Pietas in Seneca's Hercvles Fvrens

Anna Lydia Motto and John R. Clark in their recent article on Seneca's Hercules Furens sought to refute what was becoming the orthodox approach to the play — an approach based on Aristotelian poetics and the view that Hercules' madness is a natural phenomenon arising from a tragic flaw, usually identified as pride and ambition. A long list of scholars have contributed to this orthodox approach, which was most fully articulated by Jo-Ann Shelton, who saw Hercules' madness as ‘an internal, psychological development.’ In Shelton's very negative view of Hercules, ‘pride and ambition motivate [his] actions. And madness is an extension of his boastfulness.’ According to Shelton, ‘through [Juno's] words, we learn of, even as they are occurring, the progressive stages in the development of Hercules' pride, ambition and madness.’ This ‘naturalistic’ interpretation of Hercules' madness may appeal to twentieth century psychological critics, but it fails to account for the literary tradition behind the figure of Juno in Seneca's play, and in failing to do so it accepts at face value her allegations that Hercules is an ambitious, overreaching adventurer intent on storming the heavens. Motto and Clark rightly perceive that Hercules is ‘persecuted’ by Juno and persecuted ‘not for what he does,’ but ‘for what he is’ (that is, the bastard offspring of her husband's latest amour with a mortal woman) and that the play is not a story of ‘the abuse of strength and the growth of destructive pride,’ but ‘the story of deliberately oppressed and maligned greatness.’

Maxima Virtus in Seneca's Hercules Furens

The Hercules plays (the Hercules Furens and doubtful Hercules Oetaeus) differ signally from Seneca's other dramas and certainly deserve attention by themselves in a special place.' For one thing, Hercules is an honorable hero, one enshrined in Stoic pantheon; he is a demigod who literally experiences apotheosis. Thus, Senecan plays concerned with him do not merely conclude in a blaze of horror and with a spurt of climactic passion. In a special sense that is never for a moment true of Agamemnon or Medea or Phaedra or Oedipus or Atreus, Hercules endures. Indeed, he does more: Hercules transcends and superscribes his action and prevails. And, particularly in Hercules Furens, Herculean triumph is accomplished in human terms; his achievement is realized, not as a god, but as a man. Yet, when we turn to reception and reputation of Hercules Furens, we encounter difficulties among critics in comprehending Seneca's plays because of a chronic tendency to look for analogies and similarities to classic Greek theater and for adherence to doctrines laid down in terms of Aristotelian poetics. Simply put, Hercules' madness appears to a great number of interpreters as being caused by his hamartia or tragic flaw. Thus, R. W. Tobin asserts that the hero's folly is presented as an extension of his ambition and pride, his drive to carve a place for himself among gods.2 We ought, of course, to take exception to Tobin's employment of word folly, for surely Hercules' ravening, rampaging madness constitutes behavior that drastically exceeds foolishness or mere uncomprehending, clownish, idiot imbecility. Nevertheless, Tobin's central thesis is clear: Hercules' aspirations to godhood, to scale skies, constitute an out-and-out case of hubris that gods justifiably punish; from such a perspective, his madness is a piece of appropriate poetic justice.

Riders to Cibola by Norman Zollinger

Reviews 77 and stunted Indian-Spanish son-in-law. . . . from Hill Man Alejandro, maker of leather stood only as tall as his ancient bench . . . from The Brujo of Santos: A Folktale The first time I saw him, he rose out of the grass of a hill, his eyes straight into mine, big head low . . . from Wolf Triptych Wilson’s choice of this rhetorical mode is, I am happy to say, intelli­ gently suited to the basic conceptual framework of the collection: the attempt to create “legend” out of man’s struggle to survive in the great Southwest, that land of power and beauty and mystery. In such a place, man, too, can only reach significance if he is trans­ formed into the mythic and the legendary, by reason of his courage, his resourcefulness, and, most of all, his capacity to endure. And so, Wilson presents old cowboys, leather-workers, outlaws, his parents, and Spanish women on their way to church as figures of power and mystery. The limitations imposed by such materials and methods are evident in those poems where the attempt to transform the commonplace to legend fails (Climbing in the Organ Mountains), where the focus moves from the specific to the generalized (The New Mexican), and where the primary mode seems to be the lyrical (Vision). Overwhelmingly, however, the material and methods combine so well that if we read the poems out loud, imagining ourselves drawn close about a campfire high in the mountains, we will experience again the imaginative power of a story well-told. One final word: the volume itself is printed and arranged with the same quiet concern for craftsmanship as are the poems. ALAN STEINBERG, Idaho State University Riders to Cibola. By Norman Zollinger. (Santa Fe: Museum of New Mex­ ico Press, 1977. 258 pages, $10.95.) Set in southern New Mexico, Riders to Cibola follows three genera­ tions of the McAndrews family of the D Cross A ranch from the late ter­ ritorial days (1905), when ranching flourished as a way of life, to the present 78 Western American Literature decade, when most of the ranches seem to be disappearing rapidly. The novel’s protagonist — a Mexican vaquero and ranch foreman named Ignacio Ortiz — serves the McAndrews family for more than sixty years, never wavering in his early promise to the older Douglas McAndrews to “keep the fence tight.” For Ignacio, “keeping the fence tight” means riding herd on Jamie McAndrews, Douglas’ son, as well as serving the whole family in the roles of trusted employee and virtually adopted son-brother-uncle. The novel follows the changes in the New Mexico range country through statehood, the two world wars, and the Depression, and in the process it details the effects of mechanization on ranching — such as the replacing of horses with pickup trucks and the changing public ethos in regard to the land — with a realism seldom seen in contemporary fiction. Ignacio Ortiz is almost infallible: always dependable, always anxious to serve and to suffer, he is perhaps a little too good to be believed. Douglas McAndrews approximates god-head. He is reminiscent of Colonel James Brewton in the first section of Conrad Richter’s The Sea of Grass, but in contrast with Brewton, McAndrews is without the hint of a tragic flaw, and is therefore a characterization of limited dimension. Despite the overdrawn portraits and a number of scenes that border on the melodramatic or sentimental, Riders to Cibola is an engaging novel of power and eloquence and one that should invite comparison to The Sea of Grass and the modern-day Westerns of such authors as Clair Huffaker and Max Evans. This is good company to be in. GEARY HOBSON, University of New Mexico Captain Mayne Reid. By Joan Steele. (Boston: Twayne Publishers/G. K. Hall & Co., 1978. 149 pages, $8.95.) Given that the study of popular literature has been largely excluded from traditional literary histories, it follows that a good deal of literary history needs to be rewritten in order to present a more accurate and bal­ anced view of our literary past. The publication of Joan Steele’s Captain Mayne Reid is a step in that important direction, dealing...

The Lionel-Scene in Schiller's Jungfrau von Orleans: A Psychological Interpretation

Thus summarizes August von Platen with characteristic malevolence and epigrammatic succinctness the main artistic weakness which he, like Kotzebue and Tieck before him and nearly every nineteenthcentury critic after him, felt undermined the structural unity of Schiller's romantic tragedy, Die Jungfrau von Orleans. It was not so much the alteration of historical fact in the figure of Schiller's Johanna which caused such distress among the critics; rather it seemed that in creating for aesthetic purposes a dramatic character whose existence lay outside the realm of historical fact Schiller had violated certain psychological laws basic to mankind, particularly in the Lionelscene, thus rendering the entire work, despite the author's intentions to the contrary, artistically ineffective. Platen and his contemporaries could perceive no motivation for Johanna's sudden love for the English field commander, and saw in the tragic flaw which brings about Johanna's downfall little more than an angedichtete Schwiiche. If such were the case, they argued, Johanna's guilt would then be spurious as well, for it would arise from a flaw which was not in itself a genuine one. Otto Ludwig, perhaps the most relentless and uncompromising of Schiller's censurers among the Poetic Realists, states his objections in the following way:

Fish Doing Things with Austin and Searle

Concluding his elegant application of theory of speech acts to Coriolanus, Stanley E. Fish remarks his primary claim not analysis exhaustive but that it doesn't The theory apt for play because play is about what theory 'about.' Insofar as analysis illuminates Coriolanus' failure to understand how reality of citizens' Rome made by language, there little to fault. This a trenchant analysis of Coriolanus' blind spot, his tragic flaw. But this analysis does not adequately-and I believe Fish would admit thisrepresent positivities of Coriolanus' own Rome. In asserting wholly and intractably conventional Fish nullifies Coriolanus' own view ofwords and things. That is, speech act analysis ignores episteme its own, our own, episteme supersedes. Even granting Fish's clinical motive, to extent this analysis reduces drama to a mere demonstration of Coriolanus' linguistic naivete, it does cheat. If, as one contemporary critic persuasively argues, meaning a happening, an event, a matter of the developing responses of and not imbedded in utterance, reader obligated, it seems to me, to withhold evaluation even of competing views of nature of language which even Plato shows no certainty about. Fish deprives us of nothing less than tragic element of play. I don't care to enlist in current Battle of Books between critics and historians, nor to argue whether Shakespeare derives his ideas on language or other matters from Plato, Aristotle, or diverse middlemen. I do care, however, play be allowed to function to its fullest extent as a tragic event. If we hold with Hegel tragedy constituted by necessity of a choice by protagonist between two positives, two goods, by which something lost just as something gained, we are obliged to attempt to render Coriolanus' dilemma in positive terms in order to experience fully tragedy. Fish's analysis eliminates all positivities of Coriolanus' choice. In this way Coriolanus excluded from those works which do not allow a reader

The Good and the True

My target in this paper is a certain dogma about the rationality of wants. The dogma is that the formal conditions for the consistency of wants mirror the formal conditions for the consistency of beliefs. In so far as the relation of wanting to the good is analogous to the relation of believing to the true, this amounts to the doctrine that the 'structure of the good' is analogous to the 'structure of the true'. The good, like the true, can never conflict with itself: hence it is as irrational to want contraries as to believe them. I shall refer to this doctrine as 'the Unity of the Good'. A few impressionistic historical reminders should suffice to show that it has behind it much of our philosophical tradition. In Plato's middle Dialogues, all good things have a single cause and exemplar in the Form of the Good. The connection of the Unity of the good with the unity of the true is attested by Plato's penchant for the doctrine that the virtues are all one, and that the one which they all are, is knowledge. In Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics, some doubts are expressed about the unity of the Form of the Good, on the ground that 'good' can be predicated in all the categories. One might try to infer from this that Aristotle thought two goods might conflict, where they belong to different categories: but I do not see how to work this out. In any case, Aristotle appears to settle for an architectonic view of the organization of ends, which is another version of the Unity of the Good. Conflicts are seen to be merely apparent as soon as one takes account of the subordination of all ends to the comprehensive political good [NE Io94b.]. Perhaps as a consequence, Aristotle has bequeathed us a smooth way of getting around the most striking class of counterexamples to the unity of the good: I refer to his explanation of Tragedy as springing from the hero's 'tragic flaw'. (A more plausible view of Tragedy is Hegel's, who sees it as a 'collision' of right with right.) In Aristotle, however, there is no logical link between the Unity of the Good and epistemology: though it happens that the Political Good has something to do with securing the peaceful pursuit of

Nietzsche and Spengler on Hamlet: An Elaboration and Synthesis

Nietzsche and Spengler on Hamlet: An Elaboration and Synthesis William R. Brashear I When Hamlet remarks on how “the native hue of resolution is sicklied o’er with the pale cast of thought” and on how he has thought “too precisely on th’ event” [Italics supplied], his choice of words would suggest that he himself regards as a distinct weakness the power of mind which dissolves meaning and pur­ pose into nothingness and ultimate futility. And within the context of his role or character as Prince of Denmark and wronged and traumatized son he is justified in considering it in this light, for it hinders him from making such decisions and taking such actions as are expected of him or imposed upon him by the milieu in which he exists as character or personality, the stage and setting of his temporal being. Most critics who have found in Hamlet’s reflective powers the primal cause of his in­ action and indecision have agreed with him that this is weak­ ness or imbalance, and here we must acknowledge the persisting influence of the theory of tragic flaw. Not only is something rotten in Denmark, but something must be “wrong” with Hamlet. The view of Hamlet as a tragedy of reflection has, of course, many variations. Schlegel found the Prince lost in “labyrinths of thought” and Coleridge emphasized the imbalance of “an al­ most enormous intellectual activity and a proportionate aversion to real action consequent upon it.” Commentators have always tended to see themselves in Hamlet, and it has been especially remarked that Coleridge saw in him much of his own reflective and vacillating temperament; but it should in addition be ob106 William R. Brashear 107 served that Coleridge was not indisposed to think of himself as weak or ill, and this judgment he may also have transferred to some extent. In the last analysis, perhaps the fullest and most judicious reading of Hamlet as the speculative and imaginative genius is that of A. C. Bradley: There was a necessity in his soul driving him to penetrate below the surface and to question what others took for granted. That fixed habitual look which the world wears for most men did not exist for him. He was for ever unmaking his world and rebuilding it in thought, dissolving what to others were solid facts, and discovering what to others were old truths. There were no old truths for Hamlet.1 In these lines Bradley comes closer than any other English critic to Nietzsche’s view of Hamlet as the profound thinker, the Dionysiac thinker, who sees too deeply into and too fully about life to be able to espouse any cause or commit himself to any action. But Bradley turns off from the path that may have led him to Nietzsche’s conclusions, and his Hamlet in the end is not Nietzsche’s “whole” man, but, again, an overbalanced, flawed character. His habit of mind, his speculative genius, is, for Brad­ ley, a partial cause and a symptom of his malady, and is at once “melancholic,” “morbid,” and “dangerous” (pp. 103-108). What in the end then proves to be Nietzsche’s unique con­ tribution to Hamlet criticism is that he saw unqualified strength and magnitude where others saw weakness in strength and limi­ tation in magnitude. His Hamlet is extraordinary because he is whole and sound. For this same reason he is tragic, and this is in keeping with Nietzsche’s conclusion (which is also Eugene O’Neill’s) that the sound and healthy view of life is the tragic view. To think deeply is to think tragically. We are, indeed, ac­ customed to recognize in tragedy the element of “inevitability,” and this is surely the ultimate psychic inevitability that lies be­ hind tragedy: that to think deeply enough is to see nothingness, and to penetrate the veil of objective and posited values is to be confronted by the terrifying and meaningless chaos of infinity, what Nietzsche named the Dionysiac realm. To be aware of this, to confront this, if only fleetingly, is to attain tragic stature; to evade or suppress it, as we all must in our daily lives, is to...

Cultural Alienation: In Cold Blood

“If the protagonist of the book can be said to be our own culture (and this does not seem so far fetched, as Kansas is in many ways at the cultural as well as geographical heart of the nation), we see still another characteristic of Greek drama—the nobility of the hero, his pride, and his tragic flaw. The Clutter family clearly embody the culture at its self-identified best, self-made, hard working, civic minded, helpful to others. And the murderers clearly show us the flaw.”

Saint Joan As Epic Tragedy

SEVERAL OF THE CRITICAL PROBLEMS related to Saint Joan stem from the unusual nature of the play—unusual, that is, for Shaw, for in no other Shaw play do we have a predominantly tragic tone.1 In the numerous commentaries on the play, we find three key questions frequently recurring: 1) Is Joan a tragic heroine with a tragic flaw or an innocent victim of circumstances? 2) Although Joan has our sympathies throughout, why does Shaw go to such elaborate lengths to align us intellectually on the side of her opposition? and 3) If the play is a tragedy, what is the purpose of the epilogue? In dealing with the above questions, I propose to consider Saint Joan as indeed a tragedy, but a special kind of tragedy, one that encompasses an epic design. The play is as consistently tragic in tone (at least from the first third of it to the end), as it is epic in structure. We may speculate on Shaw's reasons for not using the conventional tragic structure for Joan's story, but it is perhaps more rewarding to concern ourselves with the effects that Shaw achieves by coordinating epic and tragic elements.

The "Discovery Scene" in Billy Budd

IN 1952, writing in the Pacific Spectator, Tyros Hillway made a surprising statemeIlt about Professors Coxe and Chapman's dramatic adaptation of Herman Melville's Billy Budd. According to Mr. Hillway, ... the final interview between Billy and Captain Vere could not have been what Coxe and Chapman make of it; for they have Billy going to his doom bewildered and still appalled by the fact that he must suffer. In the book, on the other hand, he has clearly come at this point not only to an understanding of his fate but even to a willingness to accept it. As for the exact words used by Captain Vere in explaining matters to Billy, Melville, indeed, leaves us in ignorance. Not only do I disagree with Mr. Hillway, but I also feel that the exact opposite is true: in the play, Billy Budd is no longer bewildered when he climbs to his death, and he has finally recognized his tragic flaw. In fact, Coxe and Chapman have made Billy a kinetic character, whereas Melville's is static. In the novel there is no evidence to support the statement that Billy ''has clearly come at this point to an understanding of his fate." On the contrary, when Billy forgives Captain Vere, he does so out of the same blind ignorance and naivete that have characterized his short life.

The "Discovery Scene" in Billy Budd

THE ''DISCOVERY SCENE" IN BILLY BUDD IN 1952, writing in the Pacific Spectator, Tyros Hillway made a surprising statemeIlt about Professors Coxe and Chapman's dramatic adaptation of Herman Melville's Billy Budd. According to Mr. Hillway, ... the final interview between Billy and Captain Vere could not have been what Coxe and Chapman make of it; for they have Billy going to his doom bewildered and still appalled by the fact that he must suffer. In the book, on the other hand, he has clearly come at this point not only to an understanding of his fate but even to a willingness to accept it. As for the exact words used by Captain Vere in explaining matters to Billy, Melville, indeed, leaves us in ignorance.1 Not only do I disagree with Mr. Hillway, but I also feel that the exact opposite is true: in the play, Billy Budd is no longer bewildered when he climbs to his death, and he has finally recognized his tragic flaw. In fact, Coxe and Chapman have made Billy a kinetic character, whereas Melville's is static. In the novel there is no evidence to support the statement that Billy ''has clearly come at this point to an understanding of his fate." On the contrary, when Billy forgives Captain Vere, he does so out of the same blind ignorance and naivete that have characterized his short life. Let us look at the evidence. In the novel,2 Billy is a virile, handsome, ingenuous, good-natured, competent sailor who is loved by his shipmates . Melville identifies him with Alexander the Great (p. 135), Apollo (p. 141), Hercules (p. 145), Achilles (p. 207), a Catholic priest (p. 139), "a condertmed vestal priestess in the moment of being buried alive" (p. 226), and "the young Isaac" (p. 252). All of these allusions enhance the figure of Billy, adding to his stature and suggesting to the reader that there is a symbolical level of meaning which is the heart of the story. To even the most superficial reader, the novel is filled with religious overtones, Billy being equat~d with no less a figure than Jesus Christ. The Christian imagery is especially evident at the end of. the book in the description of Billy's crucifixion. Unlike Christ, however, Billy has one obvious physical flaw-his stammering. Melville tells us that like the beautiful Georgiana in Hawthorne's ''The Birthmark," Billy has one imperfection-the inability to articulate when emotionally disturbed. But 'that is not the lad's only 1. "Billy Budd: Melvine's Human Sacrifice," Pacific Spectator, VI (Summer 1952), 342-3. 2. Herman Melvine, Baly Budd, in Melville's Baly Budd, ed. F. Barron Freeman (Cambridge , 1948). AU references to the novel are to this edition. 339 340 MODERN DRAMA February flaw. Billy also suffers from ignorance. Even Pip in Moby-Dick has more intelligence than Billy. The other sailors recognize this limitation and nickname him "Baby" Budd. The symbolic significance of his last name also reinforces this idea. Billy is an easy victim of Claggart because he is blind to the evil which the Master-at-Arms represents. He is unable to comprehend Dansker's enigmatic warnings. He is, says Melville, like Adam before knowledge (pp. 147 and 219). A close study of the figures of speech used to describe Billy reveals not only -allusions to the famous biblical, mythological, and historical figures already mentioned, but also references to various lower forms of life, namely animals and birds. Thus Billy is identified with a goldfinch (p. 137), a 'Dlood horse" (p. 146), a St. Bernard (p. 147), an "iiliterate nightingale" (p. 147), a heifer (p. 193), and a "young horse" (p. 201); at the court-martial, he has a look of "dumb expressiveness not unlike that which a dog of generous breed might turn upon his master seeking in his face some elucidation of a previous gesture ambiguous to the canine intelligence" (p. 241). . It is my contention that this canine intelligence is Billy's tragic flaw. His heroic virtues are apt to dazzle us into losing sight of the fact that "a barbarian Billy radically was" (p. 260:. Nowhere in the novel can I...

Coleridge on Shakespeare's Villains

HE Romantic writers have been accused, not merely by their enemies-the Babbitts and Mores-but even by their friends and by themselves of confounding good with evil, of writing so well of the devil because they were on the devil's side, and of leaving the wars of truth so they might uninterruptedly practice their slender lyric gift. But this thesis, of course, is factitious, and if their ethical standards did not always please their fellows or their critics, they were none the less concerned with morality if not with morals. English Romantic criticism of Shakespeare never tires of reminding us that he keeps the high road of morality, and Coleridge, adverting the opinion of a Greek writer . . . that none but a good man could be a great poet, . . . concurred, . . . and thought, moreover, that moral excellence was necessary the perfection of the understanding and the taste (MC, p. 225).1 For Coleridge, then, Shakespeare's moral nature was never suspect, and the mere fact that the plays delighted successive audiences proved, in view, that they and their author were rich in goodness (but not, he elsewhere indicates, in goodyness [MC, p. 427]), for it is impossible to keep up any pleasurable interest in a tale in which there is no goodness of heart (MC, p. 55). Thus, Coleridge's aesthetics are intimately related moral values, and we should not be surprised find that he is uneasy when in the presence of several of the plays which Willard Farnham has recently characterized as representing Shakespeare's Tragic Frontier. Some of the difficulties that critics encounter in these dramas, where the heroes are so deeply tainted that they cannot merely be said have a tragic flaw or miss the mark, may owe their origin the aesthetic inferiority of the works themselves, but we can clearly see that morality rather than aesthetics (however intimately the two may be related) is the cause of the embarrassment Coleridge exhibits in remarks on Coriolanus and Timon of Athens. Of the latter, his admiration of some parts . . . was unbounded; but he maintained that it was, on the whole, a painful and disagreeable production, because it gave only a disadvantageous picture of human nature, very inconsistent with what, he firmly believed, was our great poet's real view of the characters of fellowcreatures. .. . Coleridge could not help suspecting that the subject might have been taken up under some temporary feeling of vexation and disappointment (SC, I, 85). Surprisingly, however, Shakespeare's hero-villains were less of a problem Coleridge than were the out-and-out villains. And this was so, not only because the non-heroic villains act with unmitigated villainy, but also because the good characters, whose opinions we must, in general, honor and make our