The Tragedy of Robert E. Lee

As explained by Aristotle among the defining factors in tragedy is the character (ethos) of the hero. The hero must be a great and good man whose downfall (hamartia) comes through an error produced by what has been called a “tragic flaw”, usually pride (hubris).

If any individual in American history cries out to have his story portrayed in art as a tragedy, it must be Robert E. Lee. That he was a great and a good man can hardly be doubted. Kinsman of George Washington, at the top of his class at West Point, brilliant general and scholar. He was by all accounts a gentleman in every sense of the word. His downfall also rose from a tragic flaw, placing his state above his country.

Bourgeois country that we are we do not produce great tragedies. Our art is more predisposed to comedy, e.g. Huckleberry Finn, the greatest of American novels, or melodrama, e.g. Gone With the Wind, the Civil War epic that laid the groundwork for so many that have followed. There have been some gallant attempts at producing a genuine tragedy that is legitimately American. The closest is probably Arthur Miller’s play Death of a Salesman but Theodore Dreiser’s An American Tragedy and F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby also clearly have aspirations in that direction. They’re all melodramas.

In terms of artistry and returning to the American Civil War, I would commend to your attention Stephen Vincent Benet’s novel length narrative poem, John Brown’s Body. Here’s a snippet:

There were three stout pillars that held up all
The weight and tradition of Wingate Hall.
One was Cudjo and one was you
And the third was the mistress, Mary Lou.
Mary Lou Wingate, as slightly made
And as hard to break as a rapier-blade.
Bristol’s daughter and Wingate’s bride,
Never well since the last child died
But staring at pain with courteous eyes.
When the pain outwits it, the body dies,
Meanwhile the body bears the pain.
She loved her hands and they made her vain,
The tiny hands of her generation
That gathered the reins of the whole plantation;
The velvet sheathing the steel demurely
In the trained, light grip that holds so surely.

[…]

Let us look at her now, let us see her plain,
She will never be quite like this again.
Her house is rocking under the blast
And she hears it tremble, and still stands fast,
But this is the last, this is the last.
The last of the wine and the white corn meal,
The last high fiddle singing the reel,
The last of the silk with the Paris label,
The last blood-thoroughbred safe in the stable
—Yellow corn meal and a jackass colt,
A door that swings on a broken bolt,
Brittle old letters spotted with tears
And a wound that rankles for fifty years—
This is the last of Wingate Hall,
The last bright August before the Fall,
Death has been near, and Death has passed,
But this is the last, this is the last.

I think it’s a beautiful, evocative work and I have substantial chunks of it committed to memory (including the passage above) but it, too, is a melodrama.

Yesterday Pat Lang leapt to the defense of Gen. Lee, his fellow Virginian:

I just heard Eleanor Clift the “liberal” journalist call Lee a traitor on MSNBC. IMO that description only applies to him and the rest of them if the notion prevails that the right of secession did not exist.

That was decided in blood 150 years ago. There is no right of secession.

In one of the most cold-blooded of acts of vengeance that I can recall in American history the victors in the American Civil War took Lee’s beautiful family estate, Arlington, and turned it into a cemetery for Union dead.