Page:The Waning of the Middle Ages (1924).djvu/381

Rh of “origins,” and holds simply that Tragedy burst from the brain of Æschylus like Athena from the head of Zeus, attaining at once its fullest imaginable stature. The justification of “the ways of God to Man,” “the Problem of Evil,” “the Riddle of the Universe”—in such phrases as these Professor Dixon’s conception of the scope of the Tragic theme are faintly adumbrated, and one is left wondering whether, without Æschylus’ lead, even Sophocles would have compassed it fully; of Euripides there is no question. Only once—with Shakespeare—was Tragedy reborn.

The history of Tragedy is thus not a literary one; it is to be sought rather in a way in which the world-philosophers, from Aristotle to Hegel and Nietsche, have reacted to it. In the tracing of these reactions lies perhaps the principal interest of a stimulating book.