The strength that yields to temptation

An Ideal Husband
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Oscar Wilde
Act 2

Sir Robert Chiltern:
Weak? Oh, I am sick of hearing that phrase. Sick of using it about others. Weak? Do you really think, Arthur, that it is weakness that yields to temptation?  I tell you that there are terrible temptations that it requires strength, strength and courage, to yield to. To stake all one’s life on a single moment, to risk everything on one throw, whether the stake be power or pleasure, I care not—there is no weakness in that. There is a horrible, a terrible courage. I had that courage. 

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Perhaps it isn't apropos to draw any connections between a Wildean comedy and a Shakespearean tragedy, but I think there is something of Macbeth in Sir Robert's sentiment: the nightmarish courage involved in yielding to a heinous and horrific temptation. The royal greatness Macbeth sought was not the greatness he ultimately achieved. It was his willingness to grasp the nettle, to embrace an impossible and appalling ambition, that finally thrust him into tragic greatness. Lady Macbeth was overcome by a spot of blood; Macbeth found the will to wade through a river of the stuff. For so many years that has been the image I've associated with Macbeth: a single, battered figure, trudging through thick water, soaked to the bone with the mortality of common men, tearing fear and fate and morality off his back—compelled by a strength and courage that is as implacable as the doom that reaches for him from behind. 

"And betimes I will, to the weird sisters:
More shall they speak; for now I am bent to know,
By the worst means, the worst. For mine own good,
All causes shall give way: I am in blood
Stepp'd in so far that, should I wade no more,
Returning were as tedious as go o'er..."
Macbeth, Act III, Scene IV

The common hero

Tragedy and the Common Man
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- Arthur Miller

In this age few tragedies are written. It has often been held that the lack is due to a paucity of heroes among us, or else that modern man has had the blood drawn out of his organs of belief by the skepticism of science, and the heroic attack on life cannot feed on an attitude of reserve and circumspection. For one reason or another, we are often held to be below tragedy - or tragedy above us. The inevitable conclusion is, of course, that the tragic mode is archaic, fit only for the very highly placed, the kings or the kingly, and where this admission is not made in so many words it is most often implied.

I believe that the common man is as apt a subject for tragedy in its highest sense as kings were. On the face of it this ought to be obvious in the light of modern psychiatry, which bases its analysis upon classific formulations, such as Oedipus and Orestes complexes, for instances, which were enacted by royal beings, but which apply to everyone in similar emotional situations.

More simply, when the question of tragedy in art is not at issue, we never hesitate to attribute to the well-placed and the exalted the very same mental processes as the lowly. And finally, if the exaltation of tragic action were truly a property of the high-bred character alone, it is inconceivable that the mass of mankind should cherish tragedy above all other forms, let alone be capable of understanding it.

As a general rule, to which there may be exceptions unknown to me, I think the tragic feeling is evoked in us when we are in the presence of a character who is ready to lay down his life, if need be, to secure one thing - his sense of personal dignity. From Orestes to Hamlet, Medea to Macbeth, the underlying struggle is that of the individual attempting to gain his "rightful" position in his society.

Sometimes he is one who has been displaced from it, sometimes one who seeks to attain it for the first time, but the fateful wound from which the inevitable events spiral is the wound of indignity and its dominant force is indignation. Tragedy, then, is the consequence of a man's total compulsion to evaluate himself justly.