Both to the poets who have created high tragedy and to the critics of all eras who have thought deeply about it, its proper matter has always been that involved in some aspect or other of the Problem of Evil. In the theorists this is clear, from Aristotle down through what faint consideration tragedy was given in the Middle Ages, through the Renaissance in all lands, through the Reformation in some, through Cartesianism and Rousseauism wherever they penetrated, through English and American thought, to the twentieth century. Among the writers of tragedy the same unanimity has prevailed, from Aeschylus to Eugene O’Neill, from The Suppliants to Days-Without End. All have recognized that to be human means to yearn for happiness; and implicitly at least that tragedy is the quest of poetic insight, in so far as insight may be gained, into the riddle of high interference with human happiness.

In any consideration of the Problem of Evil, and therefore in tragedy, there is involved a theodicy: an attempt to penetrate the ways of God with unhappy mankind; a poetic exploration of human disappointment overhung by an Omnipotence that yet must be friendly; a wistfulness to reconcile in mortal vision, if it be possible, distant Divine Goodness and its permission or direction of instant human mishap; an intense effort of poetry to fuse these two factors together into one heightened picture of satisfying colour, light and shade, proportion and perspective. There is no question here of a clear-cut solution of the riddle—if that were possible tragedy would be shorn of most of its fascination and beauty; its only use would be its brief, poetic refreshment of a known answer that conceivably might need occasional rehearsal by short human memory, clouded ever anew by the turmoil of sublunary things.