Tragedies usually make good reading – classical tragedies, at any rate. You know where you are with those, and you know that even if everyone dies in the end there will usually be some point to it. Hamlet had vengeance, Achilles had everlasting fame, Oedipus… well, at least Oedipus had the satisfaction of no longer having to keep running from his doom.
And, of course, there is the advantage that by the time you get to reading classical tragedy you’re old enough to either revel in the glory or not care about it, and at any rate it won’t depress you.
The Little Match Girl, on the other hand… That was probably the first story I read with the protagonist catching it at the end. I have nothing against Andersen. I like Andersen. All the same, I am forced to ask: is it necessary, or even wise, to tell children of impressionable years a story that effectively comes down to a poor, abused little girl freezing to death one winter night?
Children young enough to be reading it for the first time are quite likely to be unaware of even the concept of mortality yet, and what makes it worse is that it is all so pointless. What did the girl gain from her death other than a paradise that, it must be admitted, she could equally easily have attained at a ripe old age like her grandmother?
In this I approve, like Horatio, antique Roman tendencies. Literature and philosophy are entirely different things, and they need not always find their perfection in their union. Philosophy demands reason. Most of the greatest poets and writers of history are too busy rousing your blood and stirring your soul to waste time on logic. Were Orestes and Electra right or wrong to kill Clytemnestra? Does it really matter, anyway? If the playwright can make you sympathize, the playwright’s job is done.
Not even the greatest writers can keep their political and philosophical views entirely out of their works, nor should they even try. But stating views and then getting on with it is one thing. Those who set out to prove points are usually forced to chase logic with such assiduity that there is little possibility of blood-rousing and soul-stirring – much as Homer would have been, had he stopped every few paragraphs for a commentary, however neatly inserted and beautifully written, about the relative merits of desires of the flesh and excellence of the soul.
Perhaps, in this as in most things, greatness is in knowing what not to do.
