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Lectures on Dramatic Art and Literature

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Title: Lectures on Dramatic Art and Literature

Author: August Wilhelm von Schlegel

Translator: John Black


        
Release date: December 1, 2004 [eBook #7148]
                Most recently updated: December 30, 2020

Language: English

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Produced by Anne Soulard, Tiffany Vergon
and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team.




"Were I to pray for a taste which should stand me in stead under every
variety of circumstances, and be a source of happiness and cheerfulness to
me during life, and a shield against its ills, however things might go
amiss and the world frown upon me, it would he a taste for reading....
Give a man this taste, and the means of gratifying it, and you can hardly
fail of making him a happy man; unless, indeed, you put into his hands a
most perverse selection of Books. You place him in contact with the best
society in every period of history,--with the wisest, the wittiest, the
tenderest, the bravest, and the purest characters who have adorned
humanity. You make him a denizen of all nations, a contemporary of all
ages. The world has been created for him."--SIR JOHN HERSCHEL. _Address
on the opening of the Eton Library_, 1833.


LECTURES ON DRAMATIC ART AND LITERATURE

BY
AUGUST WILHELM SCHLEGEL.




CONTENTS.


Preface of the Translator.

Author's Preface.

Memoir of the Life of Augustus William Schlegel.

LECTURE I.

Introduction--Spirit of True Criticism--Difference of Taste between the
Ancients and Moderns--Classical and Romantic Poetry and Art--Division of
Dramatic Literature; the Ancients, their Imitators, and the Romantic Poets.

LECTURE II.

Definition of the Drama--View of the Theatres of all Nations--Theatrical
Effect--Importance of the Stage--Principal Species of the Drama.

LECTURE III.

Essence of Tragedy and Comedy--Earnestness and Sport--How far it is
possible to become acquainted with the Ancients without knowing Original
Languages--Winkelmann.

LECTURE IV.

Structure of the Stage among the Greeks--Their Acting--Use of Masks--False
comparison of Ancient Tragedy to the Opera--Tragical Lyric Poetry.

LECTURE V.

Essence of the Greek Tragedies--Ideality of the Representation--Idea of
Fate--Source of the Pleasure derived from Tragical Representations--Import
of the Chorus--The materials of Greek Tragedy derived from Mythology--
Comparison with the Plastic Arts.

LECTURE VI.

Progress of the Tragic Art among the Greeks--Various styles of Tragic Art
--Aeschylus--Connexion in a Trilogy of Aeschylus--His remaining Works.

LECTURE VII.

Life and Political Character of Sophocles--Character of his different
Tragedies.

LECTURE VIII.

Euripides--His Merits and Defects--Decline of Tragic Poetry through him.

LECTURE IX.

Comparison between the _Choephorae_ of Aeschylus, the _Electra_ of
Sophocles, and that of Euripides.

LECTURE X.

Character of the remaining Works of Euripides--The Satirical Drama--
Alexandrian Tragic Poets.

LECTURE XI.

The Old Comedy proved to be completely a contrast to Tragedy--Parody--
Ideality of Comedy the reverse of that of Tragedy--Mirthful Caprice--
Allegoric and Political Signification--The Chorus and its Parabases.

LECTURE XII.

Aristophanes--His Character as an Artist--Description and Character of his
remaining Works--A Scene, translated from the _Acharnae_, by way of
Appendix.

LECTURE XIII.

Whether the Middle Comedy was a distinct species--Origin of the New
Comedy--A mixed species--Its prosaic character--Whether versification is
essential to Comedy--Subordinate kinds--Pieces of Character, and of
Intrigue--The Comic of observation, of self-consciousness, and arbitrary
Comic--Morality of Comedy.

LECTURE XIV.

Plautus and Terence as Imitators of the Greeks, here examined and
characterized in the absence of the Originals they copied--Motives of the
Athenian Comedy from Manners and Society--Portrait-Statues of two
Comedians.

LECTURE XV.

Roman Theatre--Native kinds: Atellane Fables, Mimes, Comoedia Togata--
Greek Tragedy transplanted to Rome--Tragic Authors of a former Epoch, and
of the Augustan Age--Idea of a National Roman Tragedy--Causes of the want
of success of the Romans in Tragedy--Seneca.

LECTURE XVI.

The Italians--Pastoral Dramas of Tasso and Guarini--Small progress in
Tragedy--Metastasio and Alfieri--Character of both--Comedies of Ariosto,
Aretin, Porta--Improvisatore Masks--Goldoni--Gozzi--Latest state.

LECTURE XVII.

Antiquities of the French Stage--Influence of Aristotle and the Imitation
of the Ancients--Investigation of the Three Unities--What is Unity of
Action?--Unity of Time--Was it observed by the Greeks?--Unity of Place as
connected with it.

LECTURE XVIII.

Mischief resulting to the French Stage from too narrow Interpretation of
the Rules of Unity--Influence of these rules on French Tragedy--Manner of
treating Mythological and Historical Materials--Idea of Tragical Dignity--
Observation of Conventional Rules--False System of Expositions.

LECTURE XIX.

Use at first made of the Spanish Theatre by the French--General Character
of Corneille, Racine, and Voltaire--Review of the principal Works of
Corneille and of Racine--Thomas Corneille and Crebillon.

LECTURE XX.

Voltaire--Tragedies on Greek Subjects: _Oedipe_, _Merope_, _Oreste_--
Tragedies on Roman Subjects: _Brute_, _Mort de César_, _Catiline_, _Le
Triumvirat_--Earlier Pieces: _Zaire_, _Alzire_, _Mahomet_, _Semiramis_,
And _Tancred_.

LECTURE XXI.

French Comedy--Molière--Criticism of his Works--Scarron, Boursault,
Regnard; Comedies in the Time of the Regency; Marivaux and Destouches;
Piron and Gresset--Later Attempts--The Heroic Opera: Quinault--Operettes
and Vaudevilles--Diderot's attempted Change of the Theatre--The Weeping
Drama--Beaumarchais--Melo-Dramas--Merits and Defects of the Histrionic Art.

LECTURE XXII.

Comparison of the English and Spanish Theatres--Spirit of the Romantic
Drama--Shakspeare--His Age and the Circumstances of his Life.

LECTURE XXIII.

Ignorance or Learning of Shakspeare--Costume as observed by Shakspeare,
and how far necessary, or may be dispensed with, in the Drama--Shakspeare
the greatest drawer of Character--Vindication of the genuineness of his
pathos--Play on Words--Moral Delicacy--Irony-Mixture of the Tragic and
Comic--The part of the Fool or Clown--Shakspeare's Language and
Versification.

LECTURE XXIV.

Criticisms on Shakspeare's Comedies.

LECTURE XXV.

Criticisms on Shakspeare's Tragedies.

LECTURE XXVI.

Criticisms on Shakspeare's Historical Dramas.

LECTURE XXVII.

Two Periods of the English Theatre: the first the most important--The
first Conformation of the Stage, and its Advantages--State of the
Histrionic Art in Shakspeare's Time--Antiquities of Dramatic Literature--
Lilly, Marlow, Heywood--Ben Jonson; Criticism of his Works--Masques--
Beaumont and Fletcher--General Characterization of these Poets, and
Remarks on some of their Pieces--Massinger and other Contemporaries of
Charles I.

LECTURE XXVIII.

Closing of the Stage by the Puritans--Revival of the Stage under Charles
II.--Depravity of Taste and Morals--Dryden, Otway, and others--
Characterization of the Comic Poets from Wycherley and Congreve to the
Middle of the Eighteenth Century--Tragedies of the same Period--Rowe--
Addison's _Cato_--Later Pieces--Familiar Tragedy: Lillo--Garrick--
Latest State.

LECTURE XXIX.

Spanish Theatre--Its three Periods: Cervantes, Lope de Vega, Calderon--
Spirit of the Spanish Poetry in general--Influence of the National History
on it--Form, and various Species of the Spanish Drama--Decline since the
beginning of the Eighteenth Century.

LECTURE XXX.

Origin of the German Theatre--Hans Sachs--Gryphius--The Age of Gottsched--
Wretched Imitation of the French--Lessing, Goethe, and Schiller--Review of
their Works--Their Influence on Chivalrous Dramas, Affecting Dramas, and
Family Pictures--Prospect for Futurity.




PREFACE OF THE TRANSLATOR.


The Lectures of A. W. SCHLEGEL on Dramatic Poetry have obtained high
celebrity on the Continent, and been much alluded to of late in several
publications in this country. The boldness of his attacks on rules which
are considered as sacred by the French critics, and on works of which the
French nation in general have long been proud, called forth a more than
ordinary degree of indignation against his work in France. It was amusing
enough to observe the hostility carried on against him in the Parisian
Journals. The writers in these Journals found it much easier to condemn M.
SCHLEGEL than to refute him: they allowed that what he said was very
ingenious, and had a great appearance of truth; but still they said it was
not truth. They never, however, as far as I could observe, thought proper
to grapple with him, to point out anything unfounded in his premises, or
illogical in the conclusions which he drew from them; they generally
confined themselves to mere assertions, or to minute and unimportant
observations by which the real question was in no manner affected.

In this country the work will no doubt meet with a very different
reception. Here we have no want of scholars to appreciate the value of his
views of the ancient drama; and it will be no disadvantage to him, in our
eyes, that he has been unsparing in his attack on the literature of our
enemies. It will hardly fail to astonish us, however, to find a stranger
better acquainted with the brightest poetical ornament of this country
than any of ourselves; and that the admiration of the English nation for
Shakspeare should first obtain a truly enlightened interpreter in a critic
of Germany.

It is not for me, however, to enlarge on the merits of a work which has
already obtained so high a reputation. I shall better consult my own
advantage in giving a short extract from the animated account of M.
SCHLEGEL'S Lectures in the late work on Germany by Madame de Staël:--

"W. SCHLEGEL has given a course of Dramatic Literature at Vienna, which
comprises every thing remarkable that has been composed for the theatre,
from the time of the Grecians to our own days. It is not a barren
nomenclature of the works of the various authors: he seizes the spirit of
their different sorts of literature with all the imagination of a poet. We
are sensible that to produce such consequences extraordinary studies are
required: but learning is not perceived in this work, except by his
perfect knowledge of the _chefs-d'oeuvre_ of composition. In a few
pages we reap the fruit of the labour of a whole life; every opinion
formed by the author, every epithet given to the writers of whom he
speaks, is beautiful and just, concise and animated. He has found the art
of treating the finest pieces of poetry as so many wonders of nature, and
of painting them in lively colours, which do not injure the justness of
the outline; for we cannot repeat too often, that imagination, far from
being an enemy to truth, brings it forward more than any other faculty of
the mind; and all those who depend upon it as an excuse for indefinite
terms or exaggerated expressions, are at least as destitute of poetry as
of good sense.

"An analysis of the principles on which both Tragedy and Comedy are
founded, is treated in this course with much depth of philosophy. This
kind of merit is often found among the German writers; but SCHLEGEL has no
equal in the art of inspiring his own admiration; in general, be shows
himself attached to a simple taste, sometimes bordering on rusticity; but
he deviates from his usual opinions in favour of the inhabitants of the
South. Their play on words is not the object of his censure; he detests
the affectation which owes its existence to the spirit of society: but
that which is excited by the luxury of imagination pleases him, in poetry,
as the profusion of colours and perfumes would do in nature. SCHLEGEL,
after having acquired a great reputation by his translation of Shakspeare,
became also enamoured of Calderon, but with a very different sort of
attachment from that with which Shakspeare had inspired him; for while the
English author is deep and gloomy in his knowledge of the human heart, the
Spanish poet gives himself up with pleasure and delight to the beauty of
life, to the sincerity of faith, and to all the brilliancy of those
virtues which derive their colouring from the sunshine of the soul.

"I was at Vienna when W. SCHLEGEL gave his public course of Lectures. I
expected only good sense and instruction, where the object was merely to
convey information: I was astonished to hear a critic as eloquent as an
orator, and who, far from falling upon defects, which are the eternal food
of mean and little jealousy, sought only the means of reviving a creative
genius."

Thus far Madame de Staël. In taking upon me to become the interpreter of a
work of this description to my countrymen, I am aware that I have incurred
no slight degree of responsibility. How I have executed my task it is not
for me to speak, but for the reader to judge. This much, however, I will
say,--that I have always endeavoured to discover the true meaning of the
author, and that I believe I have seldom mistaken it. Those who are best
acquainted with the psychological riches of the German language, will be
the most disposed to look on my labour with an eye of indulgence.




AUTHOR'S PREFACE.


From the size of the present work, it will not be expected that it should
contain either a course of Dramatic Literature bibliographically complete,
or a history of the theatre compiled with antiquarian accuracy. Of books
containing dry accounts and lists of names there are already enough. My
purpose was to give a general view, and to develope those ideas which
ought to guide us in our estimate of the value of the dramatic productions
of various ages and nations.

The greatest part of the following Lectures, with the exception of a few
observations of a secondary nature, the suggestion of the moment, were
delivered orally as they now appear in print. The only alteration consists
in a more commodious distribution, and here and there in additions, where
the limits of the time prevented me from handling many matters with
uniform minuteness. This may afford a compensation for the animation of
oral delivery which sometimes throws a veil over deficiencies of
expression, and always excites a certain degree of expectation.

I delivered these Lectures, in the spring of 1808, at Vienna, to a
brilliant audience of nearly three hundred individuals of both sexes. The
inhabitants of Vienna have long been in the habit of refuting the
injurious descriptions which many writers of the North of Germany have
given of that capital, by the kindest reception of all learned men and
artists belonging to these regions, and by the most disinterested zeal for
the credit of our national literature, a zeal which a just sensibility has
not been able to cool. I found here the cordiality of better times united
with that amiable animation of the South, which is often denied to our
German seriousness, and the universal diffusion of a keen taste for
intellectual amusement. To this circumstance alone I must attribute it
that not a few of the men who hold the most important places at court, in
the state, and in the army, artists and literary men of merit, women of
the choicest social cultivation, paid me not merely an occasional visit,
but devoted to me an uninterrupted attention.

With joy I seize this fresh opportunity of laying my gratitude at the feet
of the benignant monarch who, in the permission to deliver these Lectures
communicated to me by way of distinction immediately from his own hand,
gave me an honourable testimony of his gracious confidence, which I as a
foreigner who had not the happiness to be born under his sceptre, and
merely felt myself bound as a German and a citizen of the world to wish
him every blessing and prosperity, could not possibly have merited.

Many enlightened patrons and zealous promoters of everything good and
becoming have merited my gratitude for the assistance which they gave to
my undertaking, and the encouragement which they afforded me during its
execution.

The whole of my auditors rendered my labour extremely agreeable by their
indulgence, their attentive participation, and their readiness to
distinguish, in a feeling manner, every passage which seemed worthy of
their applause.

It was a flattering moment, which I shall never forget, when, in the last
hour, after I had called up recollections of the old German renown sacred
to every one possessed of true patriotic sentiment, and when the minds of
my auditors were thus more solemnly attuned, I was at last obliged to take
my leave powerfully agitated by the reflection that our recent relation,
founded on a common love for a nobler mental cultivation, would be so soon
dissolved, and that I should never again see those together who were then
assembled around me. A general emotion was perceptible, excited by so much
that I could not say, but respecting which our hearts understood each
other. In the mental dominion of thought and poetry, inaccessible to
worldly power, the Germans, who are separated in so many ways from each
other, still feel their unity: and in this feeling, whose interpreter the
writer and orator must be, amidst our clouded prospects we may still
cherish the elevating presage of the great and immortal calling of our
people, who from time immemorial have remained unmixed in their present
habitations.

GENEVA, _February_, 1809.


OBSERVATION PREFIXED TO PART OF THE WORK PRINTED IN 1811.

The declaration in the Preface that these Lectures were, with some
additions, printed as they were delivered, is in so far to be corrected,
that the additions in the second part are much more considerable than in
the first. The restriction, in point of time in the oral delivery,
compelled me to leave more gaps in the last half than in the first. The
part respecting Shakspeare and the English theatre, in particular, has
been, almost altogether re-written. I have been prevented, partly by the
want of leisure and partly by the limits of the work, from treating of the
Spanish theatre with that fulness which its importance deserves.




MEMOIR OF THE LITERARY LIFE OF AUGUSTUS WILLIAM VON SCHLEGEL


AUGUSTUS WILLIAM VON SCHLEGEL, the author of the following Lectures, was,
with his no-less distinguished brother, Frederick, the son of John Adolph
Schlegel, a native of Saxony, and descended from a noble family. Holding a
high appointment in the Lutheran church, Adolph Schlegel distinguished
himself as a religious poet, and was the friend and associate of Rabener,
Gellert, and Klopstock. Celebrated for his eloquence in the pulpit, and
strictly diligent in the performance of his religious duties, he died in
1792, leaving an example to his children which no doubt had a happy
influence on them.

Of these, the seventh, Augustus William, was born in Hanover, September
5th, 1767. In his early childhood, he evinced a genuine susceptibility for
all that was good and noble; and this early promise of a generous and
virtuous disposition was carefully nurtured by the religious instruction
of his mother, an amiable and highly-gifted woman. Of this parent's pious
and judicious teaching, Augustus William had to the end of his days a
grateful remembrance, and he cherished for her throughout life a sincere
and affectionate esteem, whose ardour neither time nor distance could
diminish. The filial affection of her favourite son soothed the declining
years of his mother, and lightened the anxieties with which the critical
and troubled state of the times alarmed her old age. His further education
was carried on by a private tutor, who prepared him for the grammar-school
at Hanover, where he was distinguished both for his unremitting
application, to which he often sacrificed the hours of leisure and
recreation, and for the early display of a natural gift for language,
which enabled him immediately on the close of his academic career to
accept a tutorial appointment, which demanded of its holder a knowledge
not only of the classics but also of English and French. He also displayed
at a very early age a talent for poetry, and some of his juvenile
extempore effusions were remarkable for their easy versification and
rhythmical flow. In his eighteenth year he was called upon to deliver in
the Lyceum of his native city, the anniversary oration in honour of a
royal birthday. His address on this occasion excited an extraordinary
sensation both by the graceful elegance of the style and the interest of
the matter, written in hexameters. It embraced a short history of poetry
in Germany, and was relieved and animated with many judicious and striking
illustrations from the earliest Teutonic poets.

He now proceeded to the University of Göttingen as a student of theology,
which science, however, he shortly abandoned for the more congenial one of
philology. The propriety of this charge he amply attested by his Essay on
the Geography of Homer, which displayed both an intelligent and
comprehensive study of this difficult branch of classical archaeology.

At Göttingen he lived in the closest intimacy with Heyne, for whose
_Virgil_, in 1788 he completed an index; he also became acquainted
with the celebrated Michaelis. It was here too that he formed the
friendship of Bürger, to whose _Academie der Schönen Redekünste_, he
contributed his _Ariadne_, and an essay on _Dante_. The kindred genius of
Bürger favourably influenced his own mind and tastes, and moved him to
make the first known attempt to naturalize the Italian sonnet in Germany.

Towards the end of his university career he combined his own studies with
the private instruction of a rich young Englishman, born in the East
Indies, and at the close of it accepted the post of tutor to the only son
of Herr Muilmann, the celebrated Banker of Amsterdam. In this situation he
gained universal respect and esteem, but after three years he quitted it
to enter upon a wider sphere of literary activity. On his return to his
native country he was elected Professor in the University of Jena.
Schlegel's residence in this place, which may truly be called the classic
soil of German literature, as it gained him the acquaintance of his
eminent contemporaries Schiller and Goethe, marks a decisive epoch in the
formation of his intellectual character. At this date he contributed
largely to the _Horen_, and also to Schiller's _Musen-Almanach_, and
down to 1799 was one of the most fertile writers in the _Allgemeinen
Literatur-Zeitung_ of Jena. It was here, also, that he commenced his
translations of Shakspeare, (9 vols., Berlin, 1797-1810,) which produced a
salutary effect on the taste and judgment of his countrymen, and also on
Dramatic Art and theatrical representation in Germany. Notwithstanding the
favourable reception of this work he subsequently abandoned it, and on the
publication of a new edition, in 1825, he cheerfully consigned to Tieck
the revision of his own labours, and the completion of the yet
untranslated pieces.

Continuing attached to the University of Jena, where the dignity of
Professorship was associated with that of Member of the Council, he now
commenced a course of lectures on Aesthetics, and joined his brother
Frederick in the editorship of the _Athenaeum_, (3 vols., Berlin,
1796-1800,) an Aesthetico-critical journal, intended, while observing a
rigorous but an impartial spirit of criticism, to discover and foster
every grain of a truly vital development of mind. It was also during his
residence at Jena that he published the first edition of his Poems, among
which the religious pieces and the Sonnets on Art were greatly admired and
had many imitators. To the latter years of his residence at Jena, which
may be called the political portion of Schlegel's literary career, belongs
the _Gate of Honour for the Stage-President Von-Kotzebue_, (_Ehrenpforte
fur den Theater Präsidenten von Kotzebue_, 1800,) an ill-natured and much-
censured satire in reply to Kotzebue's attack, entitled the _Hyperborean
Ass_ (_Hyperboreischen Esee_). At this time he also collected several of
his own and brother Frederick's earlier and occasional contributions to
various periodicals, and these, together with the hitherto unpublished
dissertations on Bürger's works, make up the _Characteristiken u Kritiken_
(2 vols., Koenigsberg, 1801). Shortly afterwards he undertook with Tieck
the editorship of _Musen-Almanack_ for 1802. The two brothers were now
leading a truly scientific and poetic life, associating and co-operating
with many minds of a kindred spirit, who gathered round Tieck and Novalis
as their centre.

His marriage with the daughter of Michaelis was not a happy one, and was
quickly followed by a separation, upon which Schlegel proceeded to Berlin.
In this city, towards the end of 1802, he delivered his _Lectures on the
Present State of Literature and the Fine Arts_, which were afterwards
printed in the _Europa_, under his brother's editorship. The publication
in 1803 of his _Ion_, a drama in imitation of the ancients, but as a
composition unmarked by any peculiar display of vigour, led to an
interesting argument between himself, Bernhardi, and Schilling. This
discussion, which extended from its original subject to Euripides and
Dramatic Representation in general, was carried on in the _Journal for
the Polite World_ (_Zeitung fur die elegante Welt_,) which Schlegel
supported by his advice and contributions. In this periodical he also
entered the lists in opposition to Kotzebue and Merkel in the
_Freimüthige_ (_The Liberal_), and the merits of the so-called modern
school and its leaders, was the subject of a paper war, waged with the
bitterest acrimony of controversy, which did not scruple to employ the
sharpest weapons of personal abuse and ridicule.

At this date Schlegel was engaged upon his _Spanish Theatre_, (2
vols., Berlin, 1803-1809). In the execution of this work, much was
naturally demanded of the translator of Shakspeare, nor did he disappoint
the general expectator, although he had here far greater difficulties to
contend with. Not content with merely giving a faithful interpretation of
his author's meaning, he laid down and strictly observed the law of
adhering rigorously to all the measures, rhythms, and assonances of the
original. These two excellent translations, in each of which he has
brought to bear both the great command of his own, and a wonderful
quickness in catching the spirit of a foreign language, have earned for
Schlegel the foremost place among successful and able translators, while
his _Flowers of Italian, Spanish, and Portuguese Poetry_ (_Blumensträusse
d. Ital. Span. u. Portug. Poesie_, Berlin, 1804), furnish another proof
both of his skill in this pursuit and of the extent of his acquaintance
with European literature. Moreover, the merit of having by these
translations made Shakspeare and Calderon more widely known and better
appreciated in Germany would, in default of any other claim, alone entitle
him to take high rank in the annals of modern literature.

But a new and more important career was now open to him by his
introduction to Madame de Staël. Making a tour in Germany, this
distinguished woman arrived at Berlin in 1805, and desirous of acquainting
herself more thoroughly with German literature she selected Schlegel to
direct her studies of it, and at the same time confided to his charge the
completion of her children's education. Quitting Berlin he accompanied
this lady on her travels through Italy and France, and afterwards repaired
with her to her paternal seat at Coppet, on the Lake of Geneva, which now
became for some time his fixed abode. It was here that in 1807 he wrote in
French his _Parallel between the Phaedra of Euripides and the Phèdre of
Racine_, which produced a lively sensation in the literary circles of
Paris. This city had peculiar attractions for Schlegel, both in its
invaluable literary stores and its re-union of men of letters, among whom
his own views and opinions found many enthusiastic admirers and partisans,
notwithstanding that in his critical analysis of Racine's _Phèdre_ he
had presumed to attack what Frenchmen deemed the chiefest glory of their
literature, and had mortified their national vanity in its most sensitive
point.

In the spring of 1808 he visited Vienna, and there read to a brilliant
audience his _Lectures on Dramatic Art and Literature_, which, on their
publication, were hailed throughout Europe with marked approbation, and
which will, unquestionably, transmit his name to the latest posterity.
His object in these Lectures is both to take a rapid survey of dramatic
productions of different ages and nations, and to develope and determine
the general ideas by which their true artistic value must be judged. In
his travels with Madame de Staël he was introduced to the present King,
then the Crown Prince, of Bavaria, who bestowed on him many marks of his
respect and esteem, and about this time he took a part in the _German
Museum_ (_Deutsche Museum_), of his brother Frederick, contributing some
learned and profound dissertations on the _Lay of the Nibelungen_. In
1812, when the subjugated South no longer afforded an asylum to the
liberal-minded De Staël, with whose personal fortunes he felt himself
inseparably linked by that deep feeling of esteem and friendship which
speaks so touchingly and pathetically in some of his later poems, he
accompanied that lady on a visit to Stockholm, where he formed the
acquaintance of the Crown Prince.

The great political events of this period were not without their effect on
Schlegel's mind, and in 1813 he came forward as a political writer, when
his powerful pen was not without its effect in rousing the German mind
from the torpor into which it had sunk beneath the victorious military
despotism of France. But he was called upon to take a more active part in
the measures of these stirring times, and in this year entered the service
of the Crown Prince of Sweden, as secretary and counsellor at head
quarters. For this Prince he had a great personal regard, and estimated
highly both his virtues as a man and his talents as a general. The
services he rendered the Swedish Prince were duly appreciated and
rewarded, among other marks of distinction by a patent of nobility, in
virtue of which he prefixed the "Von" to his paternal name of Schlegel.
The Emperor Alexander, of whose religious elevation of character he always
spoke with admiration, also honoured him with his intimacy and many tokens
of esteem.

Upon the fall of Napoleon he returned to Coppet with Madame de Staël, and
in 1815 published a second volume of his _Poetical Works_, (Heildelberg,
1811-1815, 2nd edit., 2 vols., 1820). These are characterized not merely
by the brilliancy and purity of the language, but also by the variety and
richness of the imagery. Among these the _Arion_, _Pygmalion_, and _Der
Heilige Lucas_ (St. Luke,) the Sonnets, and the sublime elegy, _Rhine_,
dedicated to Madame de Staël, deserve especial mention, and give him a
just claim to a poet's crown.

On the death of his friend and patroness in 1819, he accepted the offer of
a professor's chair in Bonn, where he married a daughter of Professor
Paulus. This union, as short-lived as the first, was followed by a
separation in 1820. In his new position of academic tutor, while he
diligently promoted the study of the fine arts and sciences, both of the
Ancient and the Moderns, he applied himself with peculiar ardour to
Oriental literature, and particularly to the Sanscrit. As a fruit of these
studies, he published his _Indian Library_, (2 vols., Bonn, 1820-26);
he also set up a press for printing the great Sanscrit work, the
_Râmâjana_ (Bonn, 1825). He also edited the Sanscrit text, with a
Latin translation, of the Bhagavad-Gita, an episode of the great Indian
Epos, the _Mahâbhârata_ (Bonn, 1829). About this period his Oriental
studies took, him to France, and afterwards to England, where, in London
and in the college libraries of Oxford and Cambridge, and the East India
College at Hailesbury, he carefully examined the various collections of
Oriental MSS. On his return he was appointed Superintendent of the Museum
of Antiquities, and in 1827 delivered at Berlin a course of Lectures on
the _Theory and History of the Fine Arts_, (Berlin, 1827). These were
followed by his _Criticisms_, (Berlin, 1828), and his _Réflexion sur
l'Etude des Langues Asiatiques_, addressed to Sir James Mackintosh. Being
accused of a secret leaning to Roman Catholicism, (Kryptocatholicisme,) he
ably defended himself in a reply entitled _Explication de quelques
Malentendus_, (Berlin, 1828.)

A. W. Von Schlegel, besides being a Member of the Legion of Honour, was
invested with the decorations of several other Orders. He wrote French
with as much facility as his native language, and many French journals
were proud to number him among their contributors. He also assisted Madame
de Staël in her celebrated work _De l'Allemagne_, and superintended
the publication of her posthumous _Considérations sur la Révolution
Française_.

After this long career of successful literary activity, A. W. Von Schlegel
died at Bonn, 12 May, 1845. His death was thus noticed in the
_Athenaeum_:--

"This illustrious writer was, in conjunction with his brother Frederick,
as most European readers well know, the founder of the modern romantic
school of German literature, and as a critic fought many a hard battle for
his faith. The clearness of his insight into poetical and dramatic truth,
Englishmen will always be apt to estimate by the fact that it procured for
himself and for his countrymen the freedom of Shakspeare's enchanted
world, and the taste of all the marvellous things that, like the treasures
of Aladdin's garden, are fruit and gem at once upon its immortal boughs:--
Frenchmen will not readily forget that he disparaged Molière. The merit of
Schlegel's dramatic criticism ought not, however, to be thus limited.
Englishmen themselves are deeply indebted to him. His Lectures, translated
by Black, excited great interest here when first published, some thirty
years since, and have worthily taken a permanent place in our libraries."

His collection of books, which was rather extensive, and rich in Oriental,
especially Sanscrit literature, was sold by auction in Bonn, December,
1845. It appears by a chronological list prefixed to the catalogue, that
reckoning both his separate publications and those contributed to
periodicals, his printed works number no fewer than 126. Besides these he
left many unpublished manuscripts, which, says the _Athenaeum_, "he
bequeathed to the celebrated archaeologist, Welcker, professor at the
Royal University of Bonn, with a request that he would cause them to be
published."




DRAMATIC LITERATURE.


LECTURE I.

Introduction--Spirit of True Criticism--Difference of Taste between the
Ancients and Moderns--Classical and Romantic Poetry and Art--Division of
Dramatic Literature; the Ancients, their Imitators, and the Romantic
Poets.


The object of the present series of Lectures will be to combine the theory
of Dramatic Art with its history, and to bring before my auditors at once
its principles and its models.

It belongs to the general philosophical theory of poetry, and the other
fine arts, to establish the fundamental laws of the beautiful. Every art,
on the other hand, has its own special theory, designed to teach the
limits, the difficulties, and the means by which it must be regulated in
its attempt to realize those laws. For this purpose, certain scientific
investigations are indispensable to the artist, although they have but
little attraction for those whose admiration of art is confined to the
enjoyment of the actual productions of distinguished minds. The general
theory, on the other hand, seeks to analyze that essential faculty of
human nature--the sense of the beautiful, which at once calls the fine
arts into existence, and accounts for the satisfaction which arises from
the contemplation of them; and also points out the relation which subsists
between this and all other sentient and cognizant faculties of man. To the
man of thought and speculation, therefore, it is of the highest
importance, but by itself alone it is quite inadequate to guide and direct
the essays and practice of art.

Now, the history of the fine arts informs us what has been, and the theory
teaches what ought to be accomplished by them. But without some
intermediate and connecting link, both would remain independent and
separate from one and other, and each by itself, inadequate and defective.
This connecting link is furnished by criticism, which both elucidates the
history of the arts, and makes the theory fruitful. The comparing
together, and judging of the existing productions of the human mind,
necessarily throws light upon the conditions which are indispensable to
the creation of original and masterly works of art.

Ordinarily, indeed, men entertain a very erroneous notion of criticism,
and understand by it nothing more than a certain shrewdness in detecting
and exposing the faults of a work of art. As I have devoted the greater
part of my life to this pursuit, I may be excused if, by way of preface, I
seek to lay before my auditors my own ideas of the true genius of
criticism.

We see numbers of men, and even whole nations, so fettered by the
conventions of education and habits of life, that, even in the
appreciation of the fine arts, they cannot shake them off. Nothing to them
appears natural, appropriate, or beautiful, which is alien to their own
language, manners, and social relations. With this exclusive mode of
seeing and feeling, it is no doubt possible to attain, by means of
cultivation, to great nicety of discrimination within the narrow circle to
which it limits and circumscribes them. But no man can be a true critic or
connoisseur without universality of mind, without that flexibility which
enables him, by renouncing all personal predilections and blind habits, to
adapt himself to the peculiarities of other ages and nations--to feel
them, as it were, from their proper central point, and, what ennobles
human nature, to recognise and duly appreciate whatever is beautiful and
grand under the external accessories which were necessary to its
embodying, even though occasionally they may seem to disguise and distort
it. There is no monopoly of poetry for particular ages and nations; and
consequently that despotism in taste, which would seek to invest with
universal authority the rules which at first, perhaps, were but
arbitrarily advanced, is but a vain and empty pretension. Poetry, taken in
its widest acceptation, as the power of creating what is beautiful, and
representing it to the eye or the ear, is a universal gift of Heaven,
being shared to a certain extent even by those whom we call barbarians and
savages. Internal excellence is alone decisive, and where this exists, we
must not allow ourselves to be repelled by the external appearance.
Everything must be traced up to the root of human nature: if it has sprung
from thence, it has an undoubted worth of its own; but if, without
possessing a living germ, it is merely externally attached thereto, it
will never thrive nor acquire a proper growth. Many productions which
appear at first sight dazzling phenomena in the province of the fine arts,
and which as a whole have been honoured with the appellation of works of a
golden age, resemble the mimic gardens of children: impatient to witness
the work of their hands, they break off here and there branches and
flowers, and plant them in the earth; everything at first assumes a noble
appearance: the childish gardener struts proudly up and down among his
showy beds, till the rootless plants begin to droop, and hang their
withered leaves and blossoms, and nothing soon remains but the bare twigs,
while the dark forest, on which no art or care was ever bestowed, and
which towered up towards heaven long before human remembrance, bears every
blast unshaken, and fills the solitary beholder with religious awe.

Let us now apply the idea which we have been developing, of the
universality of true criticism, to the history of poetry and the fine
arts. This, like the so-called universal history, we generally limit (even
though beyond this range there may be much that is both remarkable and
worth knowing) to whatever has had a nearer or more remote influence on
the present civilisation of Europe: consequently, to the works of the
Greeks and Romans, and of those of the modern European nations, who first
and chiefly distinguished themselves in art and literature. It is well
known that, three centuries and a-half ago, the study of ancient
literature received a new life, by the diffusion of the Grecian language
(for the Latin never became extinct); the classical authors were brought
to light, and rendered universally accessible by means of the press; and
the monuments of ancient art were diligently disinterred and preserved.
All this powerfully excited the human mind, and formed a decided epoch in
the history of human civilisation; its manifold effects have extended to
our times, and will yet extend to an incalculable series of ages. But the
study of the ancients was forthwith most fatally perverted. The learned,
who were chiefly in the possession of this knowledge, and who were
incapable of distinguishing themselves by works of their own, claimed for
the ancients an unlimited authority, and with great appearance of reason,
since they are models in their kind. Maintaining that nothing could be
hoped for the human mind but from an imitation of antiquity, in the works
of the moderns they only valued what resembled, or seemed to bear a
resemblance to, those of the ancients. Everything else they rejected as
barbarous and unnatural. With the great poets and artists it was quite
otherwise. However strong their enthusiasm for the ancients, and however
determined their purpose of entering into competition with them, they were
compelled by their independence and originality of mind, to strike out a
path of their own, and to impress upon their productions the stamp of
their own genius. Such was the case with Dante among the Italians, the
father of modern poetry; acknowledging Virgil for his master, he has
produced a work which, of all others, most differs from the Aeneid, and in
our opinion far excels its pretended model in power, truth, compass, and
profundity. It was the same afterwards with Ariosto, who has most
unaccountably been compared to Homer, for nothing can be more unlike. So
in art with Michael Angelo and Raphael, who had no doubt deeply studied
the antique. When we ground our judgment of modern painters merely on
their greater or less resemblance to the ancients, we must necessarily be
unjust towards them, as Winkelmann undoubtedly has in the case of Raphael.
As the poets for the most part had their share of scholarship, it gave
rise to a curious struggle between their natural inclination and their
imaginary duty. When they sacrificed to the latter, they were praised by
the learned; but by yielding to the former, they became the favourites of
the people. What preserves the heroic poems of a Tasso and a Camoëns to
this day alive in the hearts and on the lips of their countrymen, is by no
means their imperfect resemblance to Virgil, or even to Homer, but in
Tasso the tender feeling of chivalrous love and honour, and in Camoëns the
glowing inspiration of heroic patriotism.

Those very ages, nations, and ranks, who felt least the want of a poetry
of their own, were the most assiduous in their imitation of the ancients;
accordingly, its results are but dull school exercises, which at best
excite a frigid admiration. But in the fine arts, mere imitation is always
fruitless; even what we borrow from others, to assume a true poetical
shape, must, as it were, be born again within us. Of what avail is all
foreign imitation? Art cannot exist without nature, and man can give
nothing to his fellow-men but himself.

Genuine successors and true rivals of the ancients, who, by virtue of
congenial talents and cultivation have walked in their path and worked in
their spirit, have ever been as rare as their mechanical spiritless
copyists are common. Seduced by the form, the great body of critics have
been but too indulgent to these servile imitators. These were held up as
correct modern classics, while the great truly living and popular poets,
whose reputation was a part of their nations' glory, and to whose
sublimity it was impossible to be altogether blind, were at best but
tolerated as rude and wild natural geniuses. But the unqualified
separation of genius and taste on which such a judgment proceeds, is
altogether untenable. Genius is the almost unconscious choice of the
highest degree of excellence, and, consequently, it is taste in its
highest activity.

In this state, nearly, matters continued till a period not far back, when
several inquiring minds, chiefly Germans, endeavoured to clear up the
misconception, and to give the ancients their due, without being
insensible to the merits of the moderns, although of a totally different
kind. The apparent contradiction did not intimidate them. The groundwork
of human nature is no doubt everywhere the same; but in all our
investigations, we may observe that, throughout the whole range of nature,
there is no elementary power so simple, but that it is capable of dividing
and diverging into opposite directions. The whole play of vital motion
hinges on harmony and contrast. Why, then, should not this phenomenon
recur on a grander scale in the history of man? In this idea we have
perhaps discovered the true key to the ancient and modern history of
poetry and the fine arts. Those who adopted it, gave to the peculiar
spirit of _modern_ art, as contrasted with the _antique_ or _classical_,
the name of _romantic_. The term is certainly not inappropriate; the word
is derived from _romance_--the name originally given to the languages
which were formed from the mixture of the Latin and the old Teutonic
dialects, in the same manner as modern civilisation is the fruit of the
heterogeneous union of the peculiarities of the northern nations and the
fragments of antiquity; whereas the civilisation of the ancients was much
more of a piece.

The distinction which we have just stated can hardly fail to appear well
founded, if it can be shown, so far as our knowledge of antiquity extends,
that the same contrast in the labours of the ancients and moderns runs
symmetrically, I might almost say systematically, throughout every branch
of art--that it is as evident in music and the plastic arts as in poetry.
This is a problem which, in its full extent, still remains to be
demonstrated, though, on particular portions of it, many excellent
observations have been advanced already.

Among the foreign authors who wrote before this school can be said to have
been formed in Germany, we may mention Rousseau, who acknowledged the
contrast in music, and showed that rhythm and melody were the prevailing
principles of ancient, as harmony is that of modern music. In his
prejudices against harmony, however, we cannot at all concur. On the
subject of the arts of design an ingenious observation was made by
Hemsterhuys, that the ancient painters were perhaps too much of sculptors,
and the modern sculptors too much of painters. This is the exact point of
difference; for, as I shall distinctly show in the sequel, the spirit of
ancient art and poetry is _plastic_, but that of the moderns
_pìcturesque_.

By an example taken from another art, that of architecture, I shall
endeavour to illustrate what I mean by this contrast. Throughout the
Middle Ages there prevailed, and in the latter centuries of that aera was
carried to perfection, a style of architecture, which has been called
Gothic, but ought really to have been termed old German. When, on the
general revival of classical antiquity, the imitation of Grecian
architecture became prevalent, and but too frequently without a due regard
to the difference of climate and manners or to the purpose of the
building, the zealots of this new taste, passing a sweeping sentence of
condemnation on the Gothic, reprobated it as tasteless, gloomy, and
barbarous. This was in some degree pardonable in the Italians, among whom
a love for ancient architecture, cherished by hereditary remains of
classical edifices, and the similarity of their climate to that of the
Greeks and Romans, might, in some sort, be said to be innate. But we
Northerns are not so easily to be talked out of the powerful, solemn
impressions which seize upon the mind at entering a Gothic cathedral. We
feel, on the contrary, a strong desire to investigate and to justify the
source of this impression. A very slight attention will convince us, that
the Gothic architecture displays not only an extraordinary degree of
mechanical skill, but also a marvellous power of invention; and, on a
closer examination, we recognize its profound significance, and perceive
that as well as the Grecian it constitutes in itself a complete and
finished system.

To the application!--The Pantheon is not more different from Westminster
Abbey or the church of St. Stephen at Vienna, than the structure of a
tragedy of Sophocles from a drama of Shakspeare. The comparison between
these wonderful productions of poetry and architecture might be carried
still farther. But does our admiration of the one compel us to depreciate
the other? May we not admit that each is great and admirable in its kind,
although the one is, and is meant to be, different from the other? The
experiment is worth attempting. We will quarrel with no man for his
predilection either for the Grecian or the Gothic. The world is wide, and
affords room for a great diversity of objects. Narrow and blindly adopted
prepossessions will never constitute a genuine critic or connoisseur, who
ought, on the contrary, to possess the power of dwelling with liberal
impartiality on the most discrepant views, renouncing the while all
personal inclinations.

For our present object, the justification, namely, of the grand division
which we lay down in the history of art, and according to which we
conceive ourselves equally warranted in establishing the same division in
dramatic literature, it might be sufficient merely to have stated this
contrast between the ancient, or classical, and the romantic. But as there
are exclusive admirers of the ancients, who never cease asserting that all
deviation from them is merely the whim of a new school of critics, who,
expressing themselves in language full of mystery, cautiously avoid
conveying their sentiments in a tangible shape, I shall endeavour to
explain the origin and spirit of the _romantic_, and then leave the
world to judge if the use of the word, and of the idea which it is
intended to convey, be thereby justified.

The mental culture of the Greeks was a finished education in the school of
Nature. Of a beautiful and noble race, endowed with susceptible senses and
a cheerful spirit under a mild sky, they lived and bloomed in the full
health of existence; and, favoured by a rare combination of circumstances,
accomplished all that the finite nature of man is capable of. The whole of
their art and poetry is the expression of a consciousness of this harmony
of all their faculties. They invented the poetry of joy.

Their religion was the deification of the powers of nature and of the
earthly life: but this worship, which, among other nations, clouded the
imagination with hideous shapes, and hardened the heart to cruelty,
assumed, among the Greeks, a mild, a grand, and a dignified form.
Superstition, too often the tyrant of the human faculties, seemed to have
here contributed to their freest development. It cherished the arts by
which it was adorned, and its idols became the models of ideal beauty.

But however highly the Greeks may have succeeded in the Beautiful, and
even in the Moral, we cannot concede any higher character to their
civilisation than that of a refined and ennobled sensuality. Of course
this must be understood generally. The conjectures of a few philosophers,
and the irradiations of poetical inspiration, constitute an occasional
exception. Man can never altogether turn aside his thoughts from infinity,
and some obscure recollections will always remind him of the home he has
lost; but we are now speaking of the predominant tendency of his
endeavours.

Religion is the root of human existence. Were it possible for man to
renounce all religion, including that which is unconscious, independent of
the will, he would become a mere surface without any internal substance.
When this centre is disturbed, the whole system of the mental faculties
and feelings takes a new shape.

And this is what has actually taken place in modern Europe through the
introduction of Christianity. This sublime and beneficent religion has
regenerated the ancient world from its state of exhaustion and debasement;
it is the guiding principle in the history of modern nations, and even at
this day, when many suppose they have shaken off its authority, they still
find themselves much more influenced by it in their views of human affairs
than they themselves are aware.

After Christianity, the character of Europe has, since the commencement of
the Middle Ages, been chiefly influenced by the Germanic race of northern
conquerors, who infused new life and vigour into a degenerated people. The
stern nature of the North drives man back within himself; and what is lost
in the free sportive development of the senses, must, in noble
dispositions, be compensated by earnestness of mind. Hence the honest
cordiality with which Christianity was welcomed by all the Teutonic
tribes, so that among no other race of men has it penetrated more deeply
into the inner man, displayed more powerful effects, or become more
interwoven with all human feelings and sensibilities.

The rough, but honest heroism of the northern conquerors, by its admixture
with the sentiments of Christianity, gave rise to chivalry, of which the
object was, by vows which should be looked upon as sacred, to guard the
practice of arms from every rude and ungenerous abuse of force into which
it was so likely to sink.

With the virtues of chivalry was associated a new and purer spirit of
love, an inspired homage for genuine female worth, which was now revered
as the acmè of human excellence, and, maintained by religion itself under
the image of a virgin mother, infused into all hearts a mysterious sense
of the purity of love.

As Christianity did not, like the heathen worship, rest satisfied with
certain external acts, but claimed an authority over the whole inward man
and the most hidden movement of the heart; the feeling of moral
independence took refuge in the domain of honour, a worldly morality, as
it were, which subsisting alongside of, was often at variance with that of
religion, but yet in so far resembling it that it never calculated
consequences, but consecrated unconditionally certain principles of
action, which like the articles of faith, were elevated far beyond the
investigation of a casuistical reasoning.

Chivalry, love, and honour, together with religion itself, are the
subjects of that poetry of nature which poured itself out in the Middle
Ages with incredible fulness, and preceded the more artistic cultivation
of the romantic spirit. This age had also its mythology, consisting of
chivalrous tales and legends; but its wonders and its heroism were the
very reverse of those of the ancient mythology.

Several inquirers who, in other respects, entertain the same conception of
the peculiarities of the moderns, and trace them to the same source that
we do, have placed the essence of the northern poetry in melancholy; and
to this, when properly understood, we have nothing to object.

Among the Greeks human nature was in itself all-sufficient; it was
conscious of no defects, and aspired to no higher perfection than that
which it could actually attain by the exercise of its own energies. We,
however, are taught by superior wisdom that man, through a grievous
transgression, forfeited the place for which he was originally destined;
and that the sole destination of his earthly existence is to struggle to
regain his lost position, which, if left to his own strength, he can never
accomplish. The old religion of the senses sought no higher possession
than outward and perishable blessings; and immortality, so far as it was
believed, stood shadow-like in the obscure distance, a faint dream of this
sunny waking life. The very reverse of all this is the case with the
Christian view: every thing finite and mortal is lost in the contemplation
of infinity; life has become shadow and darkness, and the first day of our
real existence dawns in the world beyond the grave. Such a religion must
waken the vague foreboding, which slumbers in every feeling heart, into a
distinct consciousness that the happiness after which we are here striving
is unattainable; that no external object can ever entirely fill our souls;
and that all earthly enjoyment is but a fleeting and momentary illusion.
When the soul, resting as it were under the willows of exile, [Footnote:
_Trauerweiden der verbannung_, literally _the weeping willows of
banishment_, an allusion, as every reader must know, to the 137th
Psalm. Linnaeus, from this Psalm, calls the weeping willow _Salix
Babylonica_.--TRANS.] breathes out its longing for its distant home,
what else but melancholy can be the key-note of its songs? Hence the
poetry of the ancients was the poetry of enjoyment, and ours is that of
desire: the former has its foundation in the scene which is present, while
the latter hovers betwixt recollection and hope. Let me not be understood
as affirming that everything flows in one unvarying strain of wailing and
complaint, and that the voice of melancholy is always loudly heard. As the
austerity of tragedy was not incompatible with the joyous views of the
Greeks, so that romantic poetry whose origin I have been describing, can
assume every tone, even that of the liveliest joy; but still it will
always, in some indescribable way, bear traces of the source from which it
originated. The feeling of the moderns is, upon the whole, more inward,
their fancy more incorporeal, and their thoughts more contemplative. In
nature, it is true, the boundaries of objects run more into one another,
and things are not so distinctly separated as we must exhibit them in
order to convey distinct notions of them.

The Grecian ideal of human nature was perfect unison and proportion
between all the powers,--a natural harmony. The moderns, on the contrary,
have arrived at the consciousness of an internal discord which renders
such an ideal impossible; and hence the endeavour of their poetry is to
reconcile these two worlds between which we find ourselves divided, and to
blend them indissolubly together. The impressions of the senses are to be
hallowed, as it were, by a mysterious connexion with higher feelings; and
the soul, on the other hand, embodies its forebodings, or indescribable
intuitions of infinity, in types and symbols borrowed from the visible
world.

In Grecian art and poetry we find an original and unconscious unity of
form and matter; in the modern, so far as it has remained true to its own
spirit, we observe a keen struggle to unite the two, as being naturally in
opposition to each other. The Grecian executed what it proposed in the
utmost perfection; but the modern can only do justice to its endeavours
after what is infinite by approximation; and, from a certain appearance of
imperfection, is in greater danger of not being duly appreciated.

It would lead us too far, if in the separate arts of architecture, music,
and painting (for the moderns have never had a sculpture of their own), we
should endeavour to point out the distinctions which we have here
announced, to show the contrast observable in the character of the same
arts among the ancients and moderns, and at the same time to demonstrate
the kindred aim of both.

Neither can we here enter into a more particular consideration of the
different kinds and forms of romantic poetry in general, but must return
to our more immediate subject, which is dramatic art and literature. The
division of this, as of the other departments of art, into the antique and
the romantic, at once points out to us the course which we have to pursue.

We shall begin with the ancients; then proceed to their imitators, their
genuine or supposed successors among the moderns; and lastly, we shall
consider those poets of later times, who, either disregarding the
classical models, or purposely deviating from them, have struck out a path
for themselves.

Of the ancient dramatists, the Greeks alone are of any importance. In this
branch of art the Romans were at first mere translators of the Greeks, and
afterwards imitators, and not always very successful ones. Besides, of
their dramatic labours very little has been preserved. Among modern
nations an endeavour to restore the ancient stage, and, where possible, to
improve it, has been shown in a very lively manner by the Italians and the
French. In other nations, also, attempts of the same kind, more or less
earnest, have at times, especially of late, been made in tragedy; for in
comedy, the form under which it appears in Plautus and Terence has
certainly been more generally prevalent. Of all studied imitations of the
ancient tragedy the French is the most brilliant essay, has acquired the
greatest renown, and consequently deserves the most attentive
consideration. After the French come the modern Italians; viz., Metastasio
and Alfieri. The romantic drama, which, strictly speaking, can neither be
called tragedy nor comedy in the sense of the ancients, is indigenous only
to England and Spain. In both it began to flourish at the same time,
somewhat more than two hundred years ago, being brought to perfection by
Shakspeare in the former country, and in the latter by Lope de Vega.

The German stage is the last of all, and has been influenced in the
greatest variety of ways by all those which preceded it. It will be most
appropriate, therefore, to enter upon its consideration last of all. By
this course we shall be better enabled to judge of the directions which it
has hitherto taken, and to point out the prospects which are still open to
it.

When I promise to go through the history of the Greek and Roman, of the
Italian and French, and of the English and Spanish theatres, in the few
hours which are dedicated to these Lectures, I wish it to be understood
that I can only enter into such an account of them as will comprehend
their most essential peculiarities under general points of view. Although
I confine myself to a single domain of poetry, still the mass of materials
comprehended within it is too extensive to be taken in by the eye at once,
and this would be the case were I even to limit myself to one of its
subordinate departments. We might read ourselves to death with farces. In
the ordinary histories of literature the poets of one language, and one
description, are enumerated in succession, without any further
discrimination, like the Assyrian and Egyptian kings in the old universal
histories. There are persons who have an unconquerable passion for the
titles of books, and we willingly concede to them the privilege of
increasing their number by books on the titles of books. It is much the
same thing, however, as in the history of a war to give the name of every
soldier who fought in the ranks of the hostile armies. It is usual,
however, to speak only of the generals, and those who may have performed
actions of distinction. In like manner the battles of the human mind, if I
may use the expression, have been won by a few intellectual heroes. The
history of the development of art and its various forms may be therefore
exhibited in the characters of a number, by no means considerable, of
elevated and creative minds.




LECTURE II.

Definition of the Drama--View of the Theatres of all Nations--Theatrical
Effect--Importance of the Stage--Principal Species of the Drama.


Before, however, entering upon such a history as we have now described, it
will be necessary to examine what is meant by _dramatic_, _theatrical_,
_tragic_, and _comic_.

What is dramatic? To many the answer will seem very easy: where various
persons are introduced conversing together, and the poet does not speak in
his own person. This is, however, merely the first external foundation of
the form; and that is dialogue. But the characters may express thoughts
and sentiments without operating any change on each other, and so leave
the minds of both in exactly the same state in which they were at the
commencement; in such a case, however interesting the conversation may be,
it cannot be said to possess a dramatic interest. I shall make this clear
by alluding to a more tranquil species of dialogue, not adapted for the
stage, the philosophic. When, in Plato, Socrates asks the conceited
sophist Hippias, what is the meaning of the beautiful, the latter is at
once ready with a superficial answer, but is afterwards compelled by the
ironical objections of Socrates to give up his former definition, and to
grope about him for other ideas, till, ashamed at last and irritated at
the superiority of the sage who has convicted him of his ignorance, he is
forced to quit the field: this dialogue is not merely philosophically
instructive, but arrests the attention like a drama in miniature. And
justly, therefore, has this lively movement in the thoughts, this stretch
of expectation for the issue, in a word, the dramatic cast of the
dialogues of Plato, been always celebrated.

From this we may conceive wherein consists the great charm of dramatic
poetry. Action is the true enjoyment of life, nay, life itself. Mere
passive enjoyments may lull us into a state of listless complacency, but
even then, if possessed of the least internal activity, we cannot avoid
being soon wearied. The great bulk of mankind merely from their situation
in life, or from their incapacity for extraordinary exertions, are
confined within a narrow circle of insignificant operations. Their days
flow on in succession under the sleepy rule of custom, their life advances
by an insensible progress, and the bursting torrent of the first passions
of youth soon settles into a stagnant marsh. From the discontent which
this occasions they are compelled to have recourse to all sorts of
diversions, which uniformly consist in a species of occupation that may be
renounced at pleasure, and though a struggle with difficulties, yet with
difficulties that are easily surmounted. But of all diversions the theatre
is undoubtedly the most entertaining. Here we may see others act even when
we cannot act to any great purpose ourselves. The highest object of human
activity is man, and in the drama we see men, measuring their powers with
each other, as intellectual and moral beings, either as friends or foes,
influencing each other by their opinions, sentiments, and passions, and
decisively determining their reciprocal relations and circumstances. The
art of the poet accordingly consists in separating from the fable whatever
does not essentially belong to it, whatever, in the daily necessities of
real life, and the petty occupations to which they give rise, interrupts
the progress of important actions, and concentrating within a narrow space
a number of events calculated to attract the minds of the hearers and to
fill them with attention and expectation. In this manner he gives us a
renovated picture of life; a compendium of whatever is moving and
progressive in human existence.

But this is not all. Even in a lively oral narration, it is not unusual to
introduce persons in conversation with each other, and to give a
corresponding variety to the tone and the expression. But the gaps, which
these conversations leave in the story, the narrator fills up in his own
name with a description of the accompanying circumstances, and other
particulars. The dramatic poet must renounce all such expedients; but for
this he is richly recompensed in the following invention. He requires each
of the characters in his story to be personated by a living individual;
that this individual should, in sex, age, and figure, meet as near as may
be the prevalent conceptions of his fictitious original, nay, assume his
entire personality; that every speech should be delivered in a suitable
tone of voice, and accompanied by appropriate action and gesture; and that
those external circumstances should be added which are necessary to give
the hearers a clear idea of what is going forward. Moreover, these
representatives of the creatures of his imagination must appear in the
costume belonging to their assumed rank, and to their age and country;
partly for the sake of greater resemblance, and partly because, even in
dress, there is something characteristic. Lastly, he must see them placed
in a locality, which, in some degree, resembles that where, according to
his fable, the action took place, because this also contributes to the
resemblance: he places them, _i.e._, on a scene. All this brings us to the
idea of the _theatre_. It is evident that the very form of dramatic
poetry, that is, the exhibition of an action by dialogue without the aid
of narrative, implies the theatre as its necessary complement. We allow
that there are dramatic works which were not originally designed for
the stage, and not calculated to produce any great effect there, which
nevertheless afford great pleasure in the perusal. I am, however, very
much inclined to doubt whether they would produce the same strong
impression, with which they affect us, upon a person who had never seen or
heard a description of a theatre. In reading dramatic works, we are
accustomed ourselves to supply the representation.

The invention of dramatic art, and of the theatre, seems a very obvious
and natural one. Man has a great disposition to mimicry; when he enters
vividly into the situation, sentiments, and passions of others, he
involuntarily puts on a resemblance to them in his gestures. Children are
perpetually going out of themselves; it is one of their chief amusements
to represent those grown people whom they have had an opportunity of
observing, or whatever strikes their fancy; and with the happy pliancy of
their imagination, they can exhibit all the characteristics of any dignity
they may choose to assume, be it that of a father, a schoolmaster, or a
king. But one step more was requisite for the invention of the drama,
namely, to separate and extract the mimetic elements from the separate
parts of social life, and to present them to itself again collectively in
one mass; yet in many nations it has not been taken. In the very minute
description of ancient Egypt given by Herodotus and other writers, I do
not recollect observing the smallest trace of it. The Etruscans, on the
contrary, who in many respects resembled the Egyptians, had theatrical
representations; and what is singular enough, the Etruscan name for an
actor _histrio_, is preserved in living languages even to the present
day. The Arabians and Persians, though possessed of a rich poetical
literature, are unacquainted with the drama. It was the same with Europe
in the Middle Ages. On the introduction of Christianity, the plays handed
down from the Greeks and Romans were set aside, partly because they had
reference to heathen ideas, and partly because they had degenerated into
the most shameless immorality; nor were they again revived till after the
lapse of nearly a thousand years. Even in the fourteenth century, in that
complete picture which Boccacio gives us of the existing frame of society,
we do not find the smallest trace of plays. In place of them they had
simply their _conteurs_, _menestriers_, _jongleurs_. On the other hand we
are by no means entitled to assume that the invention of the drama was
made once for all in the world, to be afterwards borrowed by one people
from another. The English circumnavigators tell us, that among the
islanders of the South Seas, who in every mental qualification and
acquirement are at the lowest grade of civilization, they yet observed a
rude drama in which a common incident in life was imitated for the sake of
diversion. And to pass to the other extremity of the world, among the
Indians, whose social institutions and mental cultivation descend
unquestionably from a remote antiquity, plays were known long before they
could have experienced any foreign influence. It has lately been made
known to Europe that they possess a rich dramatic literature, which goes
backward through nearly two thousand years. The only specimen of their
plays (nataks) hitherto known to us in the delightful Sakontala, which,
notwithstanding the foreign colouring of its native climate, bears in its
general structure such a striking resemblance to our own romantic drama,
that we might be inclined to suspect we owe this resemblance to the
predilection for Shakspeare entertained by the English translator (Sir
William Jones), if his fidelity were not attested by other learned
orientalists. The drama, indeed, seems to have been a favourite amusement
of the Native Princes; and to owe to this circumstance that tone of
refined society which prevails in it. Uggargini (Oude?) is specially named
as a seat of this art. Under the Mahommedan rulers it naturally fell into
decay: the national tongue was strange to them, Persian being the language
of the court; and moreover, the mythology which was so intimately
interwoven with poetry was irreconcilable with their religious notions.
Generally, indeed, we know of no Mahommedan nation that has accomplished
any thing in dramatic poetry, or even had any notion of it. The Chinese
again have their standing national theatre, standing perhaps in every
sense of the word; and I do not doubt, that in the establishment of
arbitrary rules, and the delicate observance of insignificant
conventionalities, they leave the most correct Europeans very far behind
them. When the new European stage sprung up in the fifteenth century, with
its allegorical and religious pieces called Moralities and Mysteries, its
rise was uninfluenced by the ancient dramatists, who did not come into
circulation till some time afterwards. In those rude beginnings lay the
germ of the romantic drama as a peculiar invention.

In this wide diffusion of theatrical entertainments, the great difference
in dramatic talent which subsists between nations equally distinguished
for intellect, is something remarkable; so that theatrical talent would
seem to be a peculiar quality, essentially distinct from the poetical gift
in general. We do not wonder at the contrast in this respect between the
Greeks and the Romans, for the Greeks were altogether a nation of artists,
and the Romans a practical people. Among the latter the fine arts were
introduced as a corrupting article of luxury, both betokening and
accelerating the degeneracy of the times. They carried this luxury so far
with respect to the theatre itself, that the perfection in essentials was
sacrificed to the accessories of embellishment. Even among the Greeks
dramatic talent was far from universal. The theatre was invented in
Athens, and in Athens alone was it brought to perfection. The Doric dramas
of Epicharmus form only a slight exception to the truth of this remark.
All the great creative dramatists of the Greeks were born in Attica, and
formed their style in Athens. Widely as the Grecian race was spread,
successfully as everywhere almost it cultivated the fine arts, yet beyond
the bounds of Attica it was content to admire, without venturing to rival,
the productions of the Athenian stage.

Equally remarkable is the difference in this respect between the Spaniards
and their neighbours the Portuguese, though related to them both by
descent and by language. The Spaniards possess a dramatic literature of
inexhaustible wealth; in fertility their dramatists resemble the Greeks,
among whom more than a hundred pieces can frequently be assigned by name
to a single author. Whatever judgment may be pronounced on them in other
respects, the praise of invention has never yet been denied to them; their
claim to this has in fact been but too well established, since Italian,
French, and English writers have all availed themselves of the ingenious
inventions of the Spaniards, and often without acknowledging the source
from which they derived them. The Portuguese, on the other hand, while in
the other branches of poetry they rival the Spaniards, have in this
department accomplished hardly anything, and have never even possessed a
national theatre; visited from time to time by strolling players from
Spain, they chose rather to listen to a foreign dialect, which, without
previous study, they could not perfectly understand, than to invent, or
even to translate and imitate, for themselves.

Of the many talents for art and literature displayed by the Italians, the
dramatic is by no means pre-eminent, and this defect they seem to have
inherited from the Romans, in the same manner as their great talent for
mimicry and buffoonery goes back to the most ancient times. The
extemporary compositions called _Fabulae Atellanae_, the only original and
national form of the Roman drama, in respect of plan, were not perhaps
more perfect than the so-called _Commedia dell' Arte_, in which, the parts
being fixed and invariable, the dialogue is extemporised by masked actors.
In the ancient Saturnalia we have probably the germ of the present
carnival, which is entirely an Italian invention. The Opera and the Ballet
were also the invention of the Italians: two species of theatrical
amusement, in which the dramatic interest is entirely subordinate to music
and dancing.

If the German mind has not developed itself in the drama with the same
fulness and ease as in other departments of literature, this defect is
perhaps to be accounted for by the peculiar character of the nation. The
Germans are a speculative people; in other words, they wish to discover by
reflection and meditation, the principle of whatever they engage in. On
that very account they are not sufficiently practical; for if we wish to
act with skill and determination, we must make up our minds that we have
somehow or other become masters of our subject, and not be perpetually
recurring to an examination of the theory on which it rests; we must, as
it were, have settled down and contented ourselves with a certain partial
apprehension of the idea. But now in the invention and conduct of a drama
the practical spirit must prevail: the dramatic poet is not allowed to
dream away under his inspiration, he must take the straightest road to his
end; but the Germans are only too apt to lose sight of the object in the
course of their way to it. Besides, in the drama the nationality does
usually, nay, must show itself in the most marked manner, and the national
character of the Germans is modest and retiring: it loves not to make a
noisy display of itself; and the noble endeavour to become acquainted
with, and to appropriate to itself whatever is excellent in others, is not
seldom accompanied with an undervaluing of its own worth. For these
reasons the German stage has often, in form and matter, been more than
duly affected by foreign influence. Not indeed that the Germans propose to
themselves no higher object than the mere passive repetition of the
Grecian, the French, the Spanish, or the English theatre; but, as it
appears to me, they are in search of a more perfect form, which, excluding
all that is merely local or temporary, may combine whatever is truly
poetical in all these theatres. In the matter, however, the German
national features ought certainly to predominate.

After this rapid sketch of what may be called the map of dramatic
literature, we return to the examination of its fundamental ideas. Since,
as we have already shown, visible representation is essential to the very
form of the drama; a dramatic work may always be regarded from a double
point of view,--how far it is _poetical_, and how far it is _theatrical_.
The two are by no means inseparable. Let not, however, the expression
_poetical_ be misunderstood: I am not now speaking of the versification
and the ornaments of language; these, when not animated by some higher
excellence, are the least effective on the stage; but I speak of the
poetry in the spirit and design of a piece; and this may exist in as high
a degree when the drama is written in prose as in verse. What is it, then,
that makes a drama poetical? The very same, assuredly, that makes other
works so. It must in the first place be a connected whole, complete and
satisfactory within itself. But this is merely the negative definition of
a work of art, by which it is distinguished from the phenomena of nature,
which run into each other, and do not possess in themselves a complete and
independent existence. To be poetical it is necessary that a composition
should be a mirror of ideas, that is, thoughts and feelings which in their
character are necessary and eternally true, and soar above this earthly
life, and also that it should exhibit them embodied before us. What the
ideas are, which in this view are essential to the different departments
of the drama, will hereafter be the subject of our investigation. We shall
also, on the other hand, show that without them a drama becomes altogether
prosaic and empirical, that is to say, patched together by the
understanding out of the observations it has gathered from literal
reality.

But how does a dramatic work become theatrical, or fitted to appear with
advantage on the stage? In single instances it is often difficult to
determine whether a work possesses such a property or not. It is indeed
frequently the subject of great controversy, especially when the self-love
of authors and actors comes into collision; each shifts the blame of
failure on the other, and those who advocate the cause of the author
appeal to an imaginary perfection of the histrionic art, and complain of
the insufficiency of the existing means for its realization. But in
general the answer to this question is by no means so difficult. The
object proposed is to produce an impression on an assembled multitude, to
rivet their attention, and to excite their interest and sympathy. In this
respect the poet's occupation coincides with that of the orator. How then
does the latter attain his end? By perspicuity, rapidity, and energy.
Whatever exceeds the ordinary measure of patience or comprehension he must
diligently avoid. Moreover, when a number of men are assembled together,
they mutually distract each other's attention whenever their eyes and ears
are not drawn to a common object without and beyond themselves.

Hence the dramatic poet, as well as the orator, must from the very
commencement, by strong impressions, transport his hearers out of
themselves, and, as it were, take bodily possession of their attention.
There is a species of poetry which gently stirs a mind attuned to solitary
contemplation, as soft breezes elicit melody from the Aeolian harp.
However excellent this poetry may be in itself, without some other
accompaniments its tones would be lost on the stage. The melting
_harmonica_ is not calculated to regulate the march of an army, and
kindle its military enthusiasm. For this we must have piercing
instruments, but above all a strongly-marked rhythm, to quicken the
pulsation and give a more rapid movement to the animal spirits. The grand
requisite in a drama is to make this rhythm perceptible in the onward
progress of the action. When this has once been effected, the poet may all
the sooner halt in his rapid career, and indulge the bent of his own
genius. There are points, when the most elaborate and polished style, the
most enthusiastic lyrics, the most profound thoughts and remote allusions,
the smartest coruscations of wit, and the most dazzling flights of a
sportive or ethereal fancy, are all in their place, and when the willing
audience, even those who cannot entirely comprehend them, follow the whole
with a greedy ear, like music in unison with their feelings. Here the
poet's great art lies in availing himself of the effect of contrasts,
which enable him at one time to produce calm repose, profound
contemplation, and even the self-abandoned indifference of exhaustion, or
at another, the most tumultuous emotions, the most violent storm of the
passions. With respect to theatrical fitness, however, it must not be
forgotten that much must always depend on the capacities and humours of
the audience, and, consequently, on the national character in general, and
the particular degree of mental culture. Of all kinds of poetry the
dramatic is, in a certain sense, the most secular; for, issuing from the
stillness of an inspired mind, it yet fears not to exhibit itself in the
midst of the noise and tumult of social life. The dramatic poet is, more
than any other, obliged to court external favour and loud applause. But of
course it is only in appearance that he thus lowers himself to his
hearers; while, in reality, he is elevating them to himself.

In thus producing an impression on an assembled multitude the following
circumstance deserves to be weighed, in order to ascertain the whole
amount of its importance. In ordinary intercourse men exhibit only the
outward man to each other. They are withheld by mistrust or indifference
from allowing others to look into what passes within them; and to speak
with any thing like emotion or agitation of that which is nearest our
heart is considered unsuitable to the tone of polished society. The orator
and the dramatist find means to break through these barriers of
conventional reserve. While they transport their hearers into such lively
emotions that the outward signs thereof break forth involuntarily, every
man perceives those around him to be affected in the same manner and
degree, and those who before were strangers to one another, become in a
moment intimately acquainted. The tears which the dramatist or the orator
compels them to shed for calumniated innocence or dying heroism, make
friends and brothers of them all. Almost inconceivable is the power of a
visible communion of numbers to give intensity to those feelings of the
heart which usually retire into privacy, or only open themselves to the
confidence of friendship. The faith in the validity of such emotions
becomes irrefragable from its diffusion; we feel ourselves strong among so
many associates, and all hearts and minds flow together in one great and
irresistible stream. On this very account the privilege of influencing an
assembled crowd is exposed to most dangerous abuses. As one may
disinterestedly animate them, for the noblest and best of purposes, so
another may entangle them in the deceitful meshes of sophistry, and dazzle
them by the glare of a false magnanimity, whose vainglorious crimes may be
painted as virtues and even as sacrifices. Beneath the delightful charms
of oratory and poetry, the poison steals imperceptibly into ear and heart.
Above all others must the comic poet (seeing that his very occupation
keeps him always on the slippery brink of this precipice,) take heed, lest
he afford an opportunity for the lower and baser parts of human nature to
display themselves without restraint. When the sense of shame which
ordinarily keeps these baser propensities within the bounds of decency, is
once weakened by the sight of others' participation in them, our inherent
sympathy with what is vile will soon break out into the most unbridled
licentiousness.

The powerful nature of such an engine for either good or bad purposes has
in all times justly drawn the attention of the legislature to the drama.
Many regulations have been devised by different governments, to render it
subservient to their views and to guard against its abuse. The great
difficulty is to combine such a degree of freedom as is necessary for the
production of works of excellence, with the precautions demanded by the
customs and institutions of the different states. In Athens the theatre
enjoyed up to its maturity, under the patronage of religion, almost
unlimited freedom, and the public morality preserved it for a time from
degeneracy. The comedies of Aristophanes, which with our views and habits
appear to us so intolerably licentious, and in which the senate and the
people itself are unmercifully turned to ridicule, were the seal of
Athenian freedom. To meet this abuse, Plato, who lived in the very same
Athens, and either witnessed or foresaw the decline of art, proposed the
entire banishment of dramatic poets from his ideal republic. Few states,
however, have conceived it necessary to subscribe to this severe sentence
of condemnation; but few also have thought proper to leave the theatre to
itself without any superintendence. In many Christian countries the
dramatic art has been honoured by being made subservient to religion, in
the popular treatment and exhibition of religious subjects; and in Spain
more especially competition in this department has given birth to many
works which, neither devotion nor poetry will disown. In other states and
under other circumstances this has been thought both objectionable and
inexpedient. Wherever, however, the subsequent responsibility of the poet
and actor has been thought insufficient, and it has been deemed advisable
to submit every piece before its appearance on the stage to a previous
censorship, it has been generally found to fail in the very point which is
of the greatest importance: namely, the spirit and general impression of a
play. From the nature of the dramatic art, the poet must put into the
mouths of his characters much of which he does not himself approve, while
with respect to his own sentiments he claims to be judged by the spirit
and connexion of the whole. It may again happen that a piece is perfectly
inoffensive in its single speeches, and defies all censorship, while as a
whole it is calculated to produce the most pernicious effect. We have in
our own times seen but too many plays favourably received throughout
Europe, over-flowing with ebullitions of good-heartedness and traits of
magnanimity, and in which, notwithstanding, a keener eye cannot fail to
detect the hidden purpose of the writer to sap the foundations of moral
principle, and the veneration for whatever ought to be held sacred by man;
while all this sentimentality is only to bribe to his purpose the
effeminate soft-heartedness of his contemporaries [Footnote: The author it
is supposed alludes to Kotzebue.--TRANS.]. On the other hand, if any
person were to undertake the moral vindication of poor Aristophanes, who
has such a bad name, and whose licentiousness in particular passages, is
to our ideas quite intolerable, he will find good grounds for his defence
in the general object of his pieces, in which he at least displays the
sentiments of a patriotic citizen.

The purport of these observations is to evince the importance of the
subject we are considering. The theatre, where many arts are combined to
produce a magical effect; where the most lofty and profound poetry has for
its interpreter the most finished action, which is at once eloquence and
an animated picture; while architecture contributes her splendid
decorations, and painting her perspective illusions, and the aid of music
is called in to attune the mind, or to heighten by its strains the
emotions which already agitate it; the theatre, in short, where the whole
of the social and artistic enlightenment, which a nation possesses, the
fruit of many centuries of continued exertion, are brought into play
within the representation of a few short hours, has an extraordinary charm
for every age, sex, and rank, and has ever been the favourite amusement of
every cultivated people. Here, princes, statesmen, and generals, behold
the great events of past times, similar to those in which they themselves
are called upon to act, laid open in their inmost springs and motives;
here, too, the philosopher finds subject for profoundest reflection on the
nature and constitution of man; with curious eye the artist follows the
groups which pass rapidly before him, and from them impresses on his fancy
the germ of many a future picture; the susceptible youth opens his heart
to every elevating feeling; age becomes young again in recollection; even
childhood sits with anxious expectation before the gaudy curtain, which is
soon to be drawn up with its rustling sound, and to display to it so many
unknown wonders: all alike are diverted, all exhilarated, and all feel
themselves for a time raised above the daily cares, the troubles, and the
sorrows of life. As the drama, with the arts which are subservient to it,
may, from neglect and the mutual contempt of artists and the public, so
far degenerate, as to become nothing better than a trivial and stupid
amusement, and even a downright waste of time, we conceive that we are
attempting something more than a passing entertainment, if we propose to
enter on a consideration of the works produced by the most distinguished
nations in their most brilliant periods, and to institute an inquiry into
the means of ennobling and perfecting so important an art.




LECTURE III.

Essence of Tragedy and Comedy--Earnestness and Sport--How far it is
possible to become acquainted with the Ancients without knowing Original
Languages--Winkelmann.


The importance of our subject is, I think, fully proved. Let us now enter
upon a brief consideration of the two kinds into which all dramatic poetry
is divided, the _tragic_ and _comic_, and examine the meaning and import
of each.

The three principal kinds of poetry in general are the epic, the lyric,
and the dramatic. All the other subordinate species are either derived
from these, or formed by combination from them. If we would consider these
three leading kinds in their purity, we must go back to the forms in which
they appeared among the Greeks. For the theory of poetical art is most
conveniently illustrated by the history of Grecian poetry; for the latter
is well entitled to the appellation of systematical, since it furnishes
for every independent idea derived from experience the most distinct and
precise manifestation.

It is singular that epic and lyric poetry admit not of any such precise
division into two opposite species, as the dramatic does. The ludicrous
epopee has, it is true, been styled a peculiar species, but it is only an
accidental variety, a mere parody of the epos, and consists in applying
its solemn staidness of development, which seems only suitable to great
objects, to trifling and insignificant events. In lyric poetry there are
only intervals and gradations between the song, the ode, and the elegy,
but no proper contrast.

The spirit of epic poetry, as we recognise it in its father, Homer, is
clear self-possession. The epos is the calm quiet representation of an
action in progress. The poet relates joyful as well as mournful events,
but he relates them with equanimity, and considers them as already past,
and at a certain remoteness from our minds.

The lyric poem is the musical expression of mental emotions by language.
The essence of musical feeling consists in this, that we endeavour with
complacency to dwell on, and even to perpetuate in our souls, a joyful or
painful emotion. The feeling must consequently be already so far mitigated
as not to impel us by the desire of its pleasure or the dread of its pain,
to tear ourselves from it, but such as to allow us, unconcerned at the
fluctuations of feeling which time produces, to dwell upon and be absorbed
in a single moment of existence.

The dramatic poet, as well as the epic, represents external events, but he
represents them as real and present. In common with the lyric poet he also
claims our mental participation, but not in the same calm composedness;
the feeling of joy and sorrow which the dramatist excites is more
immediate and vehement. He calls forth all the emotions which the sight of
similar deeds and fortunes of living men would elicit, and it is only by
the total sum of the impression which he produces that he ultimately
resolves these conflicting emotions into a harmonious tone of feeling. As
he stands in such close proximity to real life, and endeavours to endue
his own imaginary creations with vitality, the equanimity of the epic poet
would in him be indifference; he must decidedly take part with one or
other of the leading views of human life, and constrain his audience also
to participate in the same feeling.

To employ simpler and more intelligible language: the _tragic_ and
_comic_ bear the same relation to one another as _earnest_ and _sport_.
Every man, from his own experience, is acquainted with both these states
of mind; but to determine their essence and their source would demand deep
philosophical investigation. Both, indeed, bear the stamp of our common
nature; but earnestness belongs more to its moral, and mirth to its animal
part. The creatures destitute of reason are incapable either of earnest or
of sport. Animals seem indeed at times to labour as if they were earnestly
intent upon some aim, and as if they made the present moment subordinate
to the future; at other times they seem to sport, that is, they give
themselves up without object or purpose to the pleasure of existence: but
they do not possess consciousness, which alone can entitle these two
conditions to the names of earnest and sport. Man alone, of all the
animals with which we are acquainted, is capable of looking back towards
the past, and forward into futurity; and he has to purchase the enjoyment
of this noble privilege at a dear rate. Earnestness, in the most extensive
signification, is the direction of our mental powers to some aim. But as
soon as we begin to call ourselves to account for our actions, reason
compels us to fix this aim higher and higher, till we come at last to the
highest end of our existence: and here that longing for the infinite which
is inherent in our being, is baffled by the limits of our finite
existence. All that we do, all that we effect, is vain and perishable;
death stands everywhere in the back ground, and to it every well or ill-
spent moment brings us nearer and closer; and even when a man has been so
singularly fortunate as to reach the utmost term of life without any
grievous calamity, the inevitable doom still awaits him to leave or to be
left by all that is most dear to him on earth. There is no bond of love
without a separation, no enjoyment without the grief of losing it. When,
however, we contemplate the relations of our existence to the extreme
limit of possibilities: when we reflect on its entire dependence on a
chain of causes and effects, stretching beyond our ken: when we consider
how weak and helpless, and doomed to struggle against the enormous powers
of nature, and conflicting appetites, we are cast on the shores of an
unknown world, as it were, shipwrecked at our very birth; how we are
subject to all kinds of errors and deceptions, any one of which may
be our ruin; that in our passions we cherish an enemy in our bosoms; how
every moment demands from us, in the name of the most sacred duties, the
sacrifice of our dearest inclinations, and how at one blow we may be
robbed of all that we have acquired with much toil and difficulty; that
with every accession to our stores, the risk of loss is proportionately
increased, and we are only the more exposed to the malice of hostile
fortune: when we think upon all this, every heart which is not dead to
feeling must be overpowered by an inexpressible melancholy, for which
there is no other counter-poise than the consciousness of a vocation
transcending the limits of this earthly life. This is the tragic tone of
mind; and when the thought of the possible issues out of the mind as a
living reality, when this tone pervades and animates a visible
representation of the most striking instances of violent revolutions in a
man's fortunes, either prostrating his mental energies or calling forth
the most heroic endurance--then the result is _Tragic Poetry_. We thus see
how this kind of poetry has its foundation in our nature, while to a
certain extent we have also answered the question, why we are fond of
such mournful representations, and even find something consoling and
elevating in them? This tone of mind we have described is inseparable from
strong feeling; and although poetry cannot remove these internal
dissonances, she must at least endeavour to effect an ideal reconciliation
of them.

As earnestness, in the highest degree, is the essence of tragic
representation; so is sport of the comic. The disposition to mirth is a
forgetfulness of all gloomy considerations in the pleasant feeling of
present happiness. We are then inclined to view every thing in a sportive
light, and to allow nothing to disturb or ruffle our minds. The
imperfections and the irregularities of men are no longer an object of
dislike and compassion, but serve, by their strange inconsistencies, to
entertain the understanding and to amuse the fancy. The comic poet must
therefore carefully abstain from whatever is calculated to excite moral
indignation at the conduct, or sympathy with the situations of his
personages, because this would inevitably bring us back again into
earnestness. He must paint their irregularities as springing out of the
predominance of the animal part of their nature, and the incidents which
befal them as merely ludicrous distresses, which will be attended with no
fatal consequences. This is uniformly what takes place in what we call
Comedy, in which, however, there is still a mixture of seriousness, as I
shall show in the sequel. The oldest comedy of the Greeks was, however,
entirely sportive, and in that respect formed the most complete contrast
to their tragedy. Not only were the characters and situations of
individuals worked up into a comic picture of real life, but the whole
frame of society, the constitution, nature, and the gods, were all
fantastically painted in the most ridiculous and laughable colours.

When we have formed in this manner a pure idea of the tragic and comic, as
exhibited to us in Grecian examples, we shall then be enabled to analyze
the various corruptions of both, which the moderns have invented, to
discriminate their incongruous additions, and to separate their several
ingredients.

In the history of poetry and the fine arts among the Greeks, their
development was subject to an invariable law. Everything heterogeneous was
first excluded, and then all homogeneous elements were combined, and each
being perfected in itself, at last elevated into an independent and
harmonious unity. Hence with them each species is confined within its
natural boundaries, and the different styles distinctly marked. In
beginning, therefore, with the history of the Grecian art and poetry, we
are not merely observing the order of time, but also the order of ideas.

In the case of the majority of my hearers, I can hardly presume upon a
direct acquaintance with the Greeks, derived from the study of their
poetical works in the original language. Translations in prose, or even in
verse, in which they are but dressed up again in the modern taste, can
afford no true idea of the Grecian drama. True and faithful translations,
which endeavour in expression and versification to rise to the height of
the original, have as yet been attempted only in Germany. But although our
language is extremely flexible, and in many respects resembling the Greek,
it is after all a battle with unequal weapons; and stiffness and harshness
not unfrequently take the place of the easy sweetness of the Greek. But we
are even far from having yet done all that can perhaps be accomplished: I
know of no translation of a Greek tragedian deserving of unqualified
praise. But even supposing the translation as perfect as possible, and
deviating very slightly from the original, the reader who is unacquainted
with the other works of the Greeks, will be perpetually disturbed by the
foreign nature of the subject, by national peculiarities and numerous
allusions (which cannot be understood without some scholarship), and thus
unable to comprehend particular parts, he will be prevented from forming a
clear idea of the whole. So long as we have to struggle with difficulties
it is impossible to have any true enjoyment of a work of art. To feel the
ancients as we ought, we must have become in some degree one of
themselves, and breathed as it were the Grecian air.

What is the best means of becoming imbued with the spirit of the Greeks,
without a knowledge of their language? I answer without hesitation,--the
study of the antique; and if this is not always possible through the
originals, yet, by means of casts, it is to a certain extent within the
power of every man. These models of the human form require no
interpretation; their elevated character is imperishable, and will always
be recognized through all vicissitudes of time, and in every region under
heaven, wherever there exists a noble race of men akin to the Grecian (as
the European undoubtedly is), and wherever the unkindness of nature has
not degraded the human features too much below the pure standard, and, by
habituating them to their own deformity, rendered them insensible to
genuine corporeal beauty. Respecting the inimitable perfection of the
antique in its few remains of a first-rate character, there is but one
voice throughout the whole of civilized Europe; and if ever their merit
was called in question, it was in times when the modern arts of design had
sunk to the lowest depths of mannerism. Not only all intelligent artists,
but all men of any degree of taste, bow with enthusiastic adoration before
the masterly productions of ancient sculpture.

The best guide to conduct us to this sanctuary of the beautiful, with deep
and thoughtful contemplation, is the History of Art by our immortal
Winkelmann. In the description of particular works it no doubt leaves much
to be desired; nay, it even abounds in grave errors, but no man has so
deeply penetrated into the innermost spirit of Grecian art. Winkelmann
transformed himself completely into an ancient, and seemingly lived in his
own century, unmoved by its spirit and influences.

The immediate subject of his work is the plastic arts, but it contains
also many important hints concerning other branches of Grecian
civilisation, and is very useful as a preparation for the understanding of
their poetry, and especially their dramatic poetry. As the latter was
designed for visible representation before spectators, whose eye must have
been as difficult to please on the stage as elsewhere, we have no better
means of feeling the whole dignity of their tragic exhibitions, and of
giving it a sort of theatrical animation, than to keep these forms of gods
and heroes ever present to our fancy. The assertion may appear somewhat
strange at present, but I hope in the sequel to demonstrate its justice:
it is only before the groups of Niobe or Laocoön that we first enter into
the spirit of the tragedies of Sophocles.

We are yet in want of a work in which the entire poetic, artistic,
scientific, and social culture of the Greeks should be painted as one
grand and harmonious whole, as a true work of nature, prevaded by the most
wondrous symmetry and proportion of the parts, and traced through its
connected development in the same spirit which Winkelmann has executed in
the part which he attempted. An attempt has indeed been made in a popular
work, which is in everybody's hands, I mean the _Travels of the Younger
Anacharsis_. This book is valuable for its learning, and may be very
useful in diffusing a knowledge of antiquities; but, without censuring the
error of the dress in which it is exhibited, it betrays more good-will to
do justice to the Greeks, than ability to enter deeply into their spirit.
In this respect the work is in many points superficial, and even
disfigured with modern views. It is not the travels of a young Scythian,
but of an old Parisian.

The superior excellence of the Greeks in the fine arts, as I have already
said, is the most universally acknowledged. An enthusiasm for their
literature is in a great measure confined to the English and Germans,
among whom also the study of the Grecian language is the most zealously
prosecuted. It is singular that the French critics of all others, they who
so zealously acknowledge the remains of the theoretical writings of the
ancients on literature, Aristotle, Horace, Quinctilian, &c., as infallible
standards of taste, should yet distinguish themselves by the contemptuous
and irreverent manner in which they speak of their poetical compositions,
and especially of their dramatic literature. Look, for instance, into a
book very much read,--La Harpe's _Cours de Littérature_. It contains
many acute remarks on the French Theatre; but whoever should think to
learn the Greeks from it must be very ill advised: the author was as
deficient in a solid knowledge of their literature as in a sense for
appreciating it. Voltaire, also, often speaks most unwarrantably on this
subject: he elevates or lowers them at the suggestions of his caprice, or
according to the purpose of the moment to produce such or such an effect
on the mind of the public. I remember too to have read a cursory critique
of Metastasio's on the Greek tragedians, in which he treats them like so
many school-boys. Racine is much more modest, and cannot be in any manner
charged with this sort of presumption: even because he was the best
acquainted of all of them with the Greeks. It is easy to see into the
motives of these hostile critics. Their national and personal vanity has
much to do with the matter; conceiting themselves that they have far
surpassed the ancients, they venture to commit such observations to the
public, knowing that the works of the ancient poets have come down to us
in a dead language, accessible only to the learned, without the animating
accompaniment of recitation, music, ideal and truly plastic impersonation,
and scenic pomp; all which, in every respect worthy of the poetry, was on
the Athenian stage combined in such wonderful harmony, that if only it
could be represented to our eye and ear, it would at once strike dumb the
whole herd of these noisy and interested critics. The ancient statues
require no commentary; they speak for themselves, and everything like
competition on the part of a modern artist would be regarded as ridiculous
pretension. In respect of the theatre, they lay great stress on the
infancy of the art; and because these poets lived two thousand years
before us, they conclude that we must have made great progress since. In
this way poor Aeschylus especially is got rid of. But in sober truth, if
this was the infancy of dramatic art, it was the infancy of a Hercules,
who strangled serpents in his cradle.

I have already expressed my opinion on that blind partiality for the
ancients, which regards their excellence as a frigid faultlessness, and
which exhibits them as models, in such a way as to put a stop to
everything like improvement, and reduce us to abandon the exercise of art
as altogether fruitless. I, for my part, am disposed to believe that
poetry, as the fervid expression of our whole being, must assume new and
peculiar forms in different ages. Nevertheless, I cherish an enthusiastic
veneration for the Greeks, as a people endowed, by the peculiar favour of
Nature, with the most perfect genius for art; in the consciousness of
which, they gave to all the nations with which they were acquainted,
compared with themselves, the appellation of barbarians,--an appellation
in the use of which they were in some degree justified. I would not wish
to imitate certain travellers, who, on returning from a country which
their readers cannot easily visit, give such exaggerated accounts of it,
and relate so many marvels, as to hazard their own character for veracity.
I shall rather endeavour to characterize them as they appear to me after
sedulous and repeated study, without concealing their defects, and to
bring a living picture of the Grecian stage before the eyes of my hearers.

We shall treat first of the Tragedy of the Greeks, then of their
_Old_ Comedy, and lastly of the _New_ Comedy which arose out of it.

The same theatrical accompaniments were common to all the three kinds. We
must, therefore, give a short preliminary view of the theatre, its
architecture and decorations, that we may have a distinct idea of their
representation.

The histrionic art of the ancients had also many peculiarities: the use of
masks, for example, although these were quite different in tragedy and
comedy; in the former, _ideal_, and in the latter, at least in the Old
Comedy, somewhat caricatured.

In tragedy, we shall first consider what constituted its most distinctive
peculiarity among the ancients: the ideality of the representation, the
prevailing idea of destiny, and the chorus; and we shall lastly treat of
their mythology, as the materials of tragic poetry. We shall then proceed
to characterize, in the three tragedians of whom alone entire works still
remain, the different styles--that is, the necessary epochs in the history
of the tragic art.




LECTURE IV.

Structure of the Stage among the Greeks--Their Acting--Use of Masks--False
comparison of Ancient Tragedy to the Opera--Tragical Lyric Poetry.


When we hear the word "theatre," we naturally think of what with us bears
the same name; and yet nothing can be more different from our theatre, in
its entire structure, than that of the Greeks. If in reading the Grecian
pieces we associate our own stage with them, the light in which we shall
view them must be false in every respect.

The leading authority on this subject, and one, too, whose statements are
mathematically accurate, is Vitruvius, who also distinctly points out the
great difference between the Greek and Roman theatres. But these and
similar passages of the ancient writers have been most incorrectly
interpreted by architects unacquainted with the ancient dramatists
[Footnote: We have a remarkable instance of this in the pretended ancient
theatre of Palladio, at Vicenza. Herculaneum, it is true, had not then
been discovered; and it is difficult to understand the ruins of the
ancient theatre without having seen a complete one.]; and philologists, in
their turn, from ignorance of architecture, have also egregiously erred.
The ancient dramatists are still, therefore, greatly in want of that
illustration which a right understanding of their scenic arrangements is
calculated to throw upon them. In many tragedies I think that I have a
tolerably clear notion of the matter; but others, again, present
difficulties which are not easily solved. But it is in figuring the
representation of Aristophanes' comedies that I find myself most at a
loss: the ingenious poet must have brought his wonderful inventions before
the eyes of his audience in a manner equally bold and astonishing. Even
Barthélemy's description of the Grecian stage is not a little confused,
and his subjoined plan extremely incorrect; where he attempts to describe
the acting of a play, the _Antigone_ or the _Ajax_, for instance, he goes
altogether wrong. For this reason the following explanation will appear
the less superfluous [Footnote: I am partly indebted for them to the
elucidations of a learned architect, M. Genelli, of Berlin, author of the
ingenious _Letters on Vitruvius_. We have compared several Greek tragedies
with our interpretation of Vitruvius's description, and endeavoured to
figure to ourselves the manner in which they were represented; and I
afterwards found our ideas confirmed by an examination of the theatre of
Herculaneum, and the two very small ones at Pompeii.].

The theatres of the Greeks were quite open above, and their dramas were
always acted in day, and beneath the canopy of heaven. The Romans, indeed,
at an after period, may have screened the audience, by an awning, from the
sun; but luxury was scarcely ever carried so far by the Greeks. Such a
state of things appears very uncomfortable to us; but the Greeks had
nothing of effeminacy about them; and we must not forget, too, the
mildness of their climate. When a storm or a shower came on, the play was
of course interrupted, and the spectators sought shelter in the lofty
colonnade which ran behind their seats; but they were willing rather to
put up with such occasional inconveniences, than, by shutting themselves
up in a close and crowded house, entirely to forfeit the sunny brightness
of a religious solemnity--for such, in fact, their plays were [Footnote:
They carefully made choice of a beautiful situation. The theatre at
Tauromenium, at present Taormino, in Sicily, of which the ruins are still
visible, was, according to Hunter's description, situated in such a manner
that the audience had a view of Etna over the back-ground of the
theatre.]. To have covered in the scene itself, and imprisoned gods and
heroes in a dark and gloomy apartment, artificially lighted up, would have
appeared still more ridiculous to them. An action which so gloriously
attested their affinity with heaven, could fitly be exhibited only beneath
the free heaven, and, as it were, under the very eyes of the gods, for
whom, according to Seneca, the sight of a brave man struggling with
adversity is a suitable spectacle. With respect to the supposed
inconvenience, which, according to the assertion of many modern critics,
hence accrued, compelling the poets always to lay the scene of their
pieces out of doors, and consequently often forcing them to violate
probability, it was very little felt by Tragedy and the Older Comedy. The
Greeks, like many southern nations of the present day, lived much more in
the open air than we do, and transacted many things in public places which
with us usually take place within doors. Besides, the theatre did not
represent the street, but a front area belonging to the house, where the
altar stood on which sacrifices were offered to the household gods. Here,
therefore, the women, notwithstanding the retired life they led among the
Greeks, even those who were unmarried, might appear without any
impropriety. Neither was it impossible for them, if necessary, to give a
view of the interior of the house; and this was effected, as we shall
presently see; by means of the _Encyclema_.

But the principal ground of this practice was that publicity which,
according to the republican notion of the Greeks, was essential to all
grave and important transactions. This was signified by the presence of
the chorus, whose presence during many secret transactions has been judged
of according to rules of propriety inapplicable to the country, and so
most undeservedly censured.

The theatres of the ancients were, in comparison with the small scale of
ours, of colossal magnitude, partly for the sake of containing the whole
of the people, with the concourse of strangers who flocked to the
festivals, and partly to correspond with the majesty of the dramas
represented in them, which required to be seen at a respectful distance.
The seats of the spectators were formed by ascending steps which rose
round the semicircle of the orchestra, (called by us the pit,) so that all
could see with equal convenience. The diminution of effect by distance was
counteracted to the eye and ear by artificial contrivances consisting in
the employment of masks, and of an apparatus for increasing the loudness
of the voice, and of the cothurnus to give additional stature. Vitruvius
speaks also of vehicles of sound, distributed throughout the building; but
commentators are much at variance with respect to their nature. In general
it may be assumed, that the theatres of the ancients were constructed on
excellent acoustic principles.

Even the lowest tier of the amphitheatre was raised considerably above the
orchestra, and opposite to it was the stage, at an equal degree of
elevation. The hollow semicircle of the orchestra was unoccupied by
spectators, and was designed for another purpose. However, it was
otherwise with the Romans, though indeed the arrangement of their theatres
does not at present concern us.

The stage consisted of a strip which stretched from one end of the
building to the other, and of which the depth bore little proportion to
this breadth. This was called the _logeum_, in Latin _pulpitum_, and the
middle of it was the usual place for the persons who spoke. Behind
this middle part, the scene went inwards in a quadrangular form, with less
depth, however, than breadth. The space thus enclosed was called the
_proscenium_. The front of the logeum towards the orchestra was ornamented
with pilasters and small statues between them. The stage, erected on a
foundation of stonework, was a wooden platform resting on rafters. The
surrounding appurtenances of the stage, together with the rooms required
for the machinery, were also of wood. The wall of the building, directly
opposite to the seats of the spectators, was raised to a level with the
uppermost tier.

The scenic decoration was contrived in such a manner, that the principal
and nearest object covered the background, and the prospects of distance
were given at the two sides; the very reverse of the mode adopted by us.
The latter arrangement had also its rules: on the left, was the town to
which the palace, temple, or whatever occupied the middle, belonged; on
the right, the open country, landscape, mountains, sea-coast, &c. The
side-scenes were composed of triangles which turned on a pivot beneath;
and in this manner the change of scene was effected. According to an
observation on Virgil, by Servius, the change of scene was partly produced
by revolving, and partly by withdrawing. The former applies to the lateral
decorations, and the latter to the middle of the background. The partition
in the middle opened, disappeared at both sides, and exhibited to view a
new picture. But all the parts of the scene were not always changed at the
same time. In the back or central scene, it is probable, that much which
with us is only painted was given bodily. If this represented a palace or
temple, there was usually in the proscenium an altar, which in the
performance answered a number of purposes.

The decoration was for the most part architectural, but occasionally also
a painted landscape, as of Caucasus in the _Prometheus_, or in the
_Philoctetes_, of the desert island of Lemnos, and the rocks with its
cavern. From a passage of Plato it is clear, that the Greeks carried the
illusions of theatrical perspective much farther than, judging from some
wretched landscapes discovered in Herculaneum, we should be disposed to
allow.

In the back wall of the stage there was one main entrance, and two side
doors. It has been maintained, that from them it might be discovered
whether an actor played a principal or under part, as in the first case he
came in by the main entrance, but in the second, entered from either of
the sides. But this should be understood with the proviso, that this must
have varied according to the nature of the piece. As the middle scene was
generally a palace, in which the principal characters generally of royal
descent resided, they naturally came on the stage through the great door,
while the servants dwelt in the wings. But besides these three entrances,
which were directly opposite to the spectators, and were real doors, with
appropriate architectural decorations, there were also four side
entrances, to which the name of doors cannot properly apply: two, namely,
on the stage on the right and the left, towards the inner angles of the
proscenium, and two farther off, in the orchestra, also right and left.
The latter were intended properly for the chorus, but were likewise not
unfrequently used by the actors, who in such cases ascended to the stage
by one or other of the double flight of steps which ran from the orchestra
to the middle of the logeum. The entering from the right or the left of
itself indicated the place from which the dramatic personages must be
supposed to come. The situation of these entrances serves to explain many
passages in the ancient dramas, where the persons standing in the middle
see some one advancing, long before he approaches them.

Somewhere beneath the seats of the spectators, a flight of stairs was
constructed, which was called the Charonic, and by which, unseen by the
audience, the shadows of the departed, ascended into the orchestra, and
thence to the stage. The furthermost brink of the logeum must sometimes
have represented the sea shore. Moreover the Greeks in general skilfully
availed themselves even of extra-scenic matters, and made them subservient
to the stage effect. Thus, I doubt not, but that in the _Eumenides_
the spectators were twice addressed as an assembled people; first, as the
Greeks invited by the Pythoness to consult the oracle; and a second time
as the Athenian multitude, when Pallas, by the herald, commands silence
during the trial about to commence. So too the frequent appeals to heaven
were undoubtedly addressed to the real heaven; and when Electra on her
first appearance exclaims: "O holy light, and thou air co-expansive with
earth!" she probably turned towards the actual sun ascending in the
heavens. The whole of this procedure is highly deserving of praise; and
though modern critics have censured the mixture of reality and imitation,
as destructive of theatrical illusion, this only proves that they have
misunderstood the essence of the illusion which a work of art aims at
producing. If we are to be truly deceived by a picture, that is, if we are
to believe in the reality of the object which we see, we must not perceive
its limits, but look at it through an opening; the frame at once declares
it for a picture. Now in stage-scenery we cannot avoid the use of
architectural contrivances, productive of the same effect on dramatic
representation as frames on pictures. It is consequently much better not
to attempt to disguise this fact, but leaving this kind of illusion for
those cases where it can be advantageously employed, to take it as a
permitted licence occasionally to step out of the limits of mere scenic
decoration. It was, generally speaking, a principle of the Greeks, with
respect to stage imitation, either to require a perfect representation,
and where this could not be accomplished, to be satisfied with merely
symbolical allusions.

The machinery for the descent of gods through the air, or the withdrawing
of men from the earth, was placed aloft behind the walls of the two sides
of the scene, and consequently removed from the sight of the spectators.
Even in the time of Aeschylus, great use was already made of it, as in the
_Prometheus_ he not only brings Oceanus through the air on a griffin,
but also in a winged chariot introduces the whole choir of ocean nymphs,
at least fifteen in number. There were also hollow places beneath the
stage into which, when necessary, the personages could disappear, and
contrivances for thunder and lightning, for the apparent fall or burning
of a house, &c.

To the hindmost wall of the scene an upper story could be added; whenever,
for instance, it was wished to represent a tower with a wide prospect, or
the like. Behind the great middle entrance there was a space for the
Exostra, a machine of a semicircular form, and covered above, which
represented the objects contained in it as in a house. This was used for
grand strokes of theatrical effect, as we may see from many pieces. On
such occasions the folding-doors of the entrance would naturally be open,
or the curtain which covered it withdrawn.

A stage curtain, which, we clearly see from a description of Ovid, was not
dropped, but drawn upwards, is mentioned both by Greek and Roman writers,
and the Latin appellation, _aulaeum_, is even borrowed from the Greeks. I
suspect, however, that the curtain was not much used at first on the Attic
stage. In the pieces of Aeschylus and Sophocles, the scene is evidently
empty at the opening as well as the conclusion, and seems therefore to
have required no preparation which needed to be shut out from the view of
the spectators. However, in many of the pieces of Euripides, and perhaps
also in the _Oedipus Tyrannus_, the stage is filled from the very first,
and presents a standing group which could not well have been assembled
under the very eyes of the spectators. It must, besides, be remembered,
that it was only the comparatively small proscenium, and not the logeum,
which was covered by the curtain which disappeared through a narrow
opening between two of the boards of the flooring, being wound up on a
roller beneath the stage.

The entrances of the chorus were beneath in the orchestra, in which it
generally remained, and in which also it performed its solemn dance,
moving backwards and forwards during the choral songs. In the front of the
orchestra, opposite to the middle of the scene, there was an elevation
with steps, resembling an altar, as high as the stage, which was called
the _Thymele_. This was the station of the chorus when it did not
sing, but merely looked on as an interested spectator of the action. At
such times the choragus, or leader of the chorus, took his station on the
top of the thymele, to see what was passing on the stage, and to converse
with the characters there present. For though the choral song was common
to the whole, yet when it took part in the dialogue, one usually spoke for
all the rest; and hence we may account for the shifting from _thou_
to _ye_ in addressing them. The thymele was situated in the very centre of
the building; all the measurements were made from it, and the semicircle
of the amphitheatre was described round it as the centre. It was,
therefore, an excellent contrivance to place the chorus, who were the
ideal representatives of the spectators, in the very spot where all the
radii converged.

The tragical imitation of the ancients was altogether ideal and
rhythmical; and in forming a judgment of it, we must always keep this in
view. It was ideal, in so far as it aimed at the highest grace and
dignity; and rhythmical, insomuch as the gestures and inflections of voice
were more solemnly measured than in real life. As the statuary of the
Greeks, setting out, with almost scientific strictness, with the most
general conception, sought to embody it again in various general
characters which were gradually invested with the charms of life, so that
the individual was the last thing to which they descended; in like manner
in the mimetic art, they began with the idea (the delineation of persons
with heroical grandeur, more than human dignity, and ideal beauty), then
passed to character, and made passion the last of all; which, in the
collision with the requisitions of either of the others, was forced to
give way. Fidelity of representation was less their object than beauty;
with us it is exactly the reverse. On this principle, the use of masks,
which appears astonishing to us, was not only justifiable, but absolutely
essential; far from considering them as a makeshift, the Greeks would
certainly, and with justice too, have looked upon it as a makeshift to be
obliged to allow a player with vulgar, ignoble, or strongly marked
features, to represent an Apollo or a Hercules; nay, rather they would
have deemed it downright profanation. How little is it in the power of the
most finished actor to change the character of his features! How
prejudicial must this be to the expression of passion, as all passion is
tinged more or less strongly by the character. Nor is there any need to
have recourse to the conjecture that they changed the masks in the
different scenes, for the purpose of exhibiting a greater degree of joy or
sorrow. I call it conjecture, though Barthélemy, in his _Anacharsis_,
considers it a settled point. He cites no authorities, and I do not
recollect any. For the expedient would by no means have been sufficient,
as the passions often change in the same scene, and this has reduced
modern critics to suppose, that the masks exhibited different appearances
on the two sides; and that now this, now that side was turned towards the
spectators, according to circumstances. Voltaire, in his Essay on the
Tragedy of the Ancients and Moderns, prefixed to _Semiramis_, has
actually gone this length. Amidst a multitude of supposed improprieties
which he heaps together to confound the admirers of ancient tragedy, he
urges the following: _Aucune nation_ (that is to say, excepting the
Greeks) _ne fait paraître ses acteurs sur des espèces d'échasses, le
visage couvert d'un masque, qui exprime la douleur d'un côté et la joie de
l'autre._ After a conscientious inquiry into the authorities for an
assertion so very improbable, and yet so boldly made, I can only find one
passage in Quinctilian, lib. xi. cap. 3, and an allusion of Platonius
still more vague. (Vide _Aristoph. ed. Küster, prolegom._ p. x.) Both
passages refer only to the new comedy, and only amount to this, that in
some characters the eyebrows were dissimilar. As to the intention of this,
I shall say a word or two hereafter, when I come to consider the new Greek
comedy. Voltaire, however, is without excuse, as the mention of the
cothurnus leaves no doubt that he alluded to tragic masks. But his error
had probably no such learned origin. In most cases, it would be a
fruitless task to trace the source of his mistakes. The whole description
of the Greek tragedy, as well as that of the cothurnus in particular, is
worthy of the man whose knowledge of antiquity was such, that in his Essay
on Tragedy, prefixed to _Brutus_, he boasts of having introduced the
Roman Senate on the stage in _red mantles_. No; the countenance remained
from beginning to end the very same, as we may see from the ancient masks
cut out in stone. For the expression of passion, the glances of the eye,
the motion of the arms and hands, the attitudes, and, lastly, the tones of
the voice, remained there. We complain of the loss of the play of the
features, without reflecting, that at such a great distance, its effect
would have been altogether lost.

We are not now inquiring whether, without the use of masks, it may not be
possible to attain a higher degree of separate excellence in the mimetic
art. This we would very willingly allow. Cicero, it is true, speaks of the
expression, the softness, and delicacy of the acting of Roscius, in the
same terms that a modern critic would apply to Garrick or Schröder. But I
will not lay any stress on the acting of this celebrated player, the
excellence of which has become proverbial, because it appears from a
passage in Cicero that he frequently played without a mask, and that this
was preferred: by his contemporaries. I doubt, however, whether this was
ever the case among the Greeks. But the same writer relates, that actors
in general, for the sake of acquiring the most perfect purity and
flexibility of voice (and not merely the musical voice, otherwise the
example would not have been applicable to the orator), submitted to such a
course of uninterrupted exercises, as our modern players, even the French,
who of all follow the strictest training, would consider a most
intolerable oppression. For the display of dexterity in the mimetic art,
without the accompaniment of words, was carried by the ancients in their
pantomimes, to a degree of perfection quite unknown to the moderns. In
tragedy, however, the great object in the art was the due subordination of
every element; the whole was to appear animated by one and the same
spirit, and hence, not merely the poetry, but the musical accompaniment,
the scenical decoration, and training of the actors, all issued from the
poet. The player was a mere instrument in his hands, and his merit
consisted in the accuracy with which he filled his part, and by no means
in arbitrary bravura, or ostentatious display of his own skill.

As from the nature of their writing materials, they had not a facility of
making many copies, the parts were learnt from the repeated recitation of
the poet, and the chorus was exercised in the same manner. This was called
_teaching a play_. As the poet was also a musician, and for the most
part a player likewise, this must have greatly contributed to the
perfection of the performance.

We may safely allow that the task of the modern player, who must change
his person without concealing it, is much more difficult; but this
difficulty affords no just criterion for deciding which of the two the
preference must be awarded, as a skilful representation of the noble and
the beautiful.

As the features of the player acquired a more decided expression from the
mask, as his voice was strengthened by a contrivance attached to the mask,
so the cothurnus, consisting of several soles of considerable thickness,
as may be seen in the ancient statues of Melpomene, raised his figure
considerably above the usual standard. The female parts were also played
by men, as the voice and general carriage of women would have been
inadequate to the energy of tragic heroines.

The forms of the masks, [Footnote: We have obtained a knowledge of them
from the imitations in stone which have come down to us. They display both
beauty and variety. That great variety must have taken place in the
tragical department (in the comic we can have no doubt about the matter)
is evident from the rich store of technical expressions in the Greek
language, for every gradation of the age, and character of masks. See the
_Onomasticon_ of Jul. Pollux. In the marble masks, however, we can
neither see the thinness of the mass from which the real masks were
executed, the more delicate colouring, nor the exquisite mechanism of the
fittings. The abundance of excellent workmen possessed by Athens, in
everything which had a reference to the plastic arts, will warrant the
conjecture that they were in this respect inimitable. Those who have seen
the masks of wax in the grand style, which in some degree contain the
whole head, lately contrived at the Roman carnival, may form to themselves
a pretty good idea of the theatrical masks of the ancients. They imitate
life, even to its movements, in a most masterly manner, and at such a
distance as that from which the ancient players were seen, the deception
is most perfect. They always contain the white of the eye, as we see it in
the ancient masks, and the person covered sees merely through the aperture
left for the iris. The ancients must sometimes have gone still farther,
and contrived also an iris for the masks, according to the anecdote of the
singer Thamyris, who, in a piece which was probably of Sophocles, made his
appearance with a black eye. Even accidental circumstances were imitated;
for instance, the cheeks of Tyro, streaming blood from the cruel conduct
of his stepmother. The head from the mask must no doubt have appeared
somewhat large for the rest of the figure; but this disproportion, in
tragedy at least, would not be perceived from the elevation of the
cothurnus.] and the whole appearance of the tragic figures, we may easily
suppose, were sufficiently beautiful and dignified. We should do well to
have the ancient sculpture always present to our minds; and the most
accurate conception, perhaps, that we can possibly have, is to imagine
them so many statues in the grand style endowed with life and motion. But,
as in sculpture, they were fond of dispensing as much as possible with
dress, for the sake of exhibiting the more essential beauty of the figure;
on the stage they would endeavour, from an opposite principle, to clothe
as much as they could well do, both from a regard to decency, and because
the actual forms of the body would not correspond sufficiently with the
beauty of the countenance. They would also exhibit their divinities, which
in sculpture we always observe either entirely naked, or only half
covered, in a complete dress. They had recourse to a number of means for
giving a suitable strength to the forms of the limbs, and thus restoring
proportion to the increased height of the player.

The great breadth of the theatre in proportion to its depth must have
given to the grouping of the figures the simple and distinct order of the
bas-relief. We moderns prefer on the stage, as elsewhere, groups of a
picturesque description, with figures more closely crowded together, and
partly concealing one another, and partly retiring into the distance; but
the ancients were so little fond of foreshortening, that even in their
painting they generally avoided it. Their movement kept time with the
rhythmus of the declamation, and in this accompaniment the utmost grace
and beauty were aimed at. The poetical conception required a certain
degree of repose in the action, and the keeping together certain masses,
so as to exhibit a succession of _statuesque_ situations, and it is
not improbable that the player remained for some time motionless in one
attitude. But we are not to suppose from this, that the Greeks were
contented with a cold and feeble representation of the passions. How could
we reconcile such a supposition with the fact, that whole lines of their
tragedies are frequently dedicated to inarticulate exclamations of pain,
with which we have nothing to correspond in any of our modern languages?

It has been often conjectured that the delivery of their dialogue
resembled the modern recitative. For such a conjecture there is no other
foundation than the fact that the Greek, like almost all southern
languages, was pronounced with a greater musical inflexion than ours of
the North. In other respects their tragic declamation must, I conceive,
have been altogether unlike recitative, being both much more measured, and
also far removed from its studied and artificial modulation.

So, again, the ancient tragedy, because it was accompanied with music and
dancing, [Footnote: Even Barthélemy falls into this error in a note to the
70th Chapter of _Anacharsis_.] has also been frequently compared with
the opera. But this comparison betrays an utter ignorance of the spirit of
classical antiquity. Their dancing and music had nothing but the name in
common with ours. In tragedy the primary object was the poetry, and
everything else was strictly and truly subordinate to it. But in the opera
the poetry is merely an accessory, the means of connecting the different
parts together; and it is almost lost amidst its many and more favoured
accompaniments. The best prescription for the composition of an opera is,
take a rapid poetical sketch and then fill up and colour the outlines by
the other arts. This anarchy of the arts, where music, dancing, and
decoration are seeking to outvie each other by the profuse display of
their most dazzling charms, constitutes the very essence of the opera.
What sort of opera-music would it be, which should set the words to a mere
rhythmical accompaniment of the simplest modulations? The fantastic magic
of the opera consists altogether in the revelry of emulation between the
different means, and in the medley of their profusion. This charm would at
once be destroyed by any approximation to the severity of the ancient
taste in any one point, even in that of the costume; for the contrast
would render the variety in all the other departments even the more
insupportable. Gay, tinselled, spangled draperies suit best to the opera;
and hence many things which have been censured as unnatural, such as
exhibiting heroes warbling and trilling in the excess of despondency, are
perfectly justifiable. This fairy world is not peopled by real men, but by
a singular kind of singing creatures. Neither is it any disadvantage that
the opera is brought before us in a language which we do not generally
understand; the words are altogether lost in the music, and the language
which is most harmonious and musical, and contains the greatest number of
open vowels for the airs, and distinct accents for recitative, is
therefore the best. It would be as incongruous to attempt to give to the
opera the simplicity of the Grecian Tragedy, as it is absurd to think of
comparing them together.

In the syllabic composition, which then at least prevailed universally in
Grecian music, the solemn choral song, of which we may form to ourselves
some idea from our artless national airs, and more especially from our
church-tunes, had no other instrumental accompaniment than a single flute,
which was such as not in the slightest degree to impair the distinctness
of the words. Otherwise it must hare increased the difficulty of the
choruses and lyrical songs, which, in general, are the part which
_we_ find it the hardest to understand of the ancient tragedy, and as
it must also have been for contemporary auditors. They abound in the most
involved constructions, the most unusual expressions, and the boldest
images and recondite allusions. Why then should the poets have lavished
such labour and art upon them, if it were all to be lost in the delivery?
Such a display of ornament without an object would have been very unlike
Grecian ways of thinking.

In the syllabic measures of their tragedies, there generally prevails a
highly finished regularity, but by no means a stiff symmetrical
uniformity. Besides the infinite variety of the lyrical strophes, which
the poet invented for each occasion, they have also a measure to suit the
transition in the tone of mind from the dialogue to the lyric, the
anapest; and two for the dialogue itself, one of which, by far the most
usual, the iambic trimeter, denoted the regular progress of the action,
and the other, the trochaic tetrameter, was expressive of the
impetuousness of passion. It would lead us too far into the depths of
metrical science, were we to venture at present on a more minute account
of the structure and significance of these measures. I merely wished to
make this remark, as so much has been said of the simplicity of the
ancient tragedy, which, no doubt, exists in the general plan, at least in
the two oldest poets; whereas in the execution and details the richest
variety of poetical ornament is employed. Of course it must be evident
that the utmost accuracy in the delivery of the different modes of
versification was expected from the player, as the delicacy of the Grecian
ear would not excuse, even in an orator, the false quantity of a single
syllable.




LECTURE V.

Essence of the Greek Tragedies--Ideality of the Representation--Idea of
Fate--Source of the Pleasure derived from Tragical Representations--Import
of the Chorus--The materials of Greek Tragedy derived from Mythology--
Comparison with the Plastic Arts.


We come now to the essence of Greek tragedy. That in conception it was
ideal, is universally allowed; this, however, must not be understood as
implying that all its characters were depicted as morally perfect. In such
a case what room could there be for that contrast and collision which the
very plot of a drama requires?--They have their weaknesses, errors, and
even crimes, but the manners are always elevated above reality, and every
person is invested with as high a portion of dignity as was compatible
with his part in the action. But this is not all. The ideality of the
representation chiefly consisted in the elevation of every thing in it to
a higher sphere. Tragic poetry wished to separate the image of humanity
which it presented to us, from the level of nature to which man is in
reality chained down, like a slave of the soil. How was this to be
accomplished? By exhibiting to us an image hovering in the air? But this
would have been incompatible with the law of gravitation and with the
earthly materials of which our bodies are framed. Frequently, what is
praised in art as _ideal_ is really nothing more. But this would give
us nothing more than airy evanescent shadows incapable of making any
durable impression on the mind. The Greeks, however, in their artistic
creations, succeeded most perfectly, in combining the ideal with the real,
or, to drop school terms, an elevation more than human with all the truth
of life, and in investing the manifestation of an idea with energetic
corporeity. They did not allow their figures to flit about without
consistency in empty space, but they fixed the statue of humanity on the
eternal and immovable basis of moral liberty; and that it might stand
there unshaken, formed it of stone or brass, or some more massive
substance than the bodies of living men, making an impression by its very
weight, and from its very elevation and magnificence only the more
completely subject to the laws of gravity.

Inward liberty and external necessity are the two poles of the tragic
world. It is only by contrast with its opposite that each of these ideas
is brought into full manifestation. As the feeling of an internal power of
self-determination elevates the man above the unlimited dominion of
impulse and the instincts of nature; in a word, absolves him from nature's
guardianship, so the necessity, which alongside of her he must recognize,
is no mere natural necessity, but one lying beyond the world of sense in
the abyss of infinitude; consequently it exhibits itself as the
unfathomable power of Destiny. Hence this power extends also to the world
of gods: for the Grecian gods are mere powers of nature; and although
immeasurably higher than mortal man, yet, compared with infinitude, they
are on an equal footing with himself. In Homer and in the tragedians, the
gods are introduced in a manner altogether different. In the former their
appearance is arbitrary and accidental, and communicate to the epic poem
no higher interest than the charm of the wonderful. But in Tragedy the
gods either come forward as the servants of destiny, and mediate executors
of its decrees; or else approve themselves godlike only by asserting their
liberty of action, and entering upon the same struggles with fate which
man himself has to encounter.

This is the essence of the tragical in the sense of the ancients. We are
accustomed to give to all terrible or sorrowful events the appellation of
tragic, and it is certain that such events are selected in preference by
Tragedy, though a melancholy conclusion is by no means indispensably
necessary; and several ancient tragedies, viz., the _Eumenides_,
_Philoctetes_, and in some degree also the _Oedipus Coloneus_, without
mentioning many of the pieces of Euripides, have a happy and cheerful
termination.

But why does Tragedy select subjects so awfully repugnant to the wishes
and the wants of our sensuous nature? This question has often been asked,
and seldom satisfactorily answered. Some have said that the pleasure of
such representations arises from the comparison we make between the
calmness and tranquillity of our own situation, and the storms and
perplexities to which the victims of passion are exposed. But when we take
a warm interest in the persons of a tragedy, we cease to think of
ourselves; and when this is not the case, it is the best of all proofs
that we take but a feeble interest in the exhibited story, and that the
tragedy has failed in its effect. Others again have had recourse to a
supposed feeling for moral improvement, which is gratified by the view of
poetical justice in the reward of the good and the punishment of the
wicked. But he for whom the aspect of such dreadful examples could really
be wholesome, must be conscious of a base feeling of depression, very far
removed from genuine morality, and would experience humiliation rather
than elevation of mind. Besides, poetical justice is by no means
indispensable to a good tragedy; it may end with the suffering of the just
and the triumph of the wicked, if only the balance be preserved in the
spectator's own consciousness by the prospect of futurity. Little does it
mend the matter to say with Aristotle, that the object of tragedy is to
purify the passions by pity and terror. In the first place commentators
have never been able to agree as to the meaning of this proposition, and
have had recourse to the most forced explanations of it. Look, for
instance, into the _Dramaturgie_ of Lessing. Lessing gives a new
explanation of his own, and fancies he has found in Aristotle a poetical
Euclid. But mathematical demonstrations are liable to no misconception,
and geometrical evidence may well be supposed inapplicable to the theory
of the fine arts. Supposing, however, that tragedy does operate this moral
cure in us, still she does so by the painful feelings of terror and
compassion: and it remains to be proved how it is that we take a pleasure
in subjecting ourselves to such an operation.

Others have been pleased to say that we are attracted to theatrical
representations from the want of some violent agitation to rouse us out of
the torpor of our every-day life. Such a craving does exist; I have
already acknowledged the existence of this want, when speaking of the
attractions of the drama; but to it we must equally attribute the fights
of wild beasts among the Romans, nay, even the combats of the gladiators.
But must we, less indurated, and more inclined to tender feelings, require
demi-gods and heroes to descend, like so many desperate gladiators, into
the bloody arena of the tragic stage, in order to agitate our nerves by
the spectacle of their sufferings? No: it is not the sight of suffering
which constitutes the charm of a tragedy, or even of the games of the
circus, or of the fight of wild beasts. In the latter we see a display of
activity, strength, and courage; splendid qualities these, and related to
the mental and moral powers of man. The satisfaction, therefore, which we
derive from the representation, in a good tragedy, of powerful situations
and overwhelming sorrows, must be ascribed either to the feeling of the
dignity of human nature, excited in us by such grand instances of it as
are therein displayed, or to the trace of a higher order of things,
impressed on the apparently irregular course of events, and mysteriously
revealed in them; or perhaps to both these causes conjointly.

The true reason, therefore, why tragedy need not shun even the harshest
subject is, that a spiritual and invisible power can only be measured by
the opposition which it encounters from some external force capable of
being appreciated by the senses. The moral freedom of man, therefore, can
only be displayed in a conflict with his sensuous impulses: so long as no
higher call summons it to action, it is either actually dormant within
him, or appears to slumber, since otherwise it does but mechanically
fulfil its part as a mere power of nature. It is only amidst difficulties
and struggles that the moral part of man's nature avouches itself. If,
therefore, we must explain the distinctive aim of tragedy by way of
theory, we would give it thus: that to establish the claims of the mind to
a divine origin, its earthly existence must be disregarded as vain and
insignificant, all sorrows endured and all difficulties overcome.  With
respect to everything connected with this point, I refer my hearers to the
Section on the Sublime in Kant's _Criticism of the Judgment_ (_Kritik der
Urtheilskraft_), to the complete perfection of which nothing is wanting
but a more definite idea of the tragedy of the ancients, with which he
does not seem to have been very well acquainted.

I come now to another peculiarity which distinguishes the tragedy of the
ancients from ours, I mean the Chorus. We must consider it as a
personified reflection on the action which is going on; the incorporation
into the representation itself of the sentiments of the poet, as the
spokesman of the whole human race. This is its general poetical character;
and that is all that here concerns us, and that character is by no means
affected by the circumstance that the Chorus had a local origin in the
feasts of Bacchus, and that, moreover, it always retained among the Greeks
a peculiar national signification; publicity being, as we have already
said, according to their republican notions, essential to the completeness
of every important transaction. If in their compositions they reverted to
the heroic ages, in which monarchical polity was yet in force, they
nevertheless gave a certain republican cast to the families of their
heroes, by carrying on the action in presence either of the elders of the
people, or of other persons who represented some correspondent rank or
position in the social body. This publicity does not, it is true, quite
correspond with Homer's picture of the manners of the heroic age; but both
costume and mythology were handled by dramatic poetry with the same spirit
of independence and conscious liberty.

These thoughts, then, and these modes of feeling led to the introduction
of the Chorus, which, in order not to interfere with the appearance of
reality which the whole ought to possess, must adjust itself to the ever-
varying requisitions of the exhibited stories. Whatever it might be and do
in each particular piece, it represented in general, first the common mind
of the nation, and then the general sympathy of all mankind. In a word,
the Chorus is the ideal spectator. It mitigates the impression of a heart-
rending or moving story, while it conveys to the actual spectator a
lyrical and musical expression of his own emotions, and elevates him to
the region of contemplation.

Modern critics have never known what to make of the Chorus; and this is
the less to be wondered at, as Aristotle affords no satisfactory solution
of the matter. Its office is better painted by Horace, who ascribes to it
a general expression of moral sympathy, exhortation, instruction, and
warning. But the critics in question have either believed that its chief
object was to prevent the stage from ever being altogether empty, whereas
in truth the stage was not at all the proper place for the Chorus; or else
they have censured it as a superfluous and cumbersome appendage,
expressing their astonishment at the alleged absurdity of carrying on
secret transactions in the presence of assembled multitudes. They have
also considered it as the principal reason with the Greek tragedians for
the strict observance of the unity of place, as it could not be changed
without the removal of the Chorus; an act, which could not have been done
without some available pretext. Or lastly, they have believed that the
Chorus owed its continuance from the first origin of Tragedy merely to
accident; and as it is plain that in Euripides, the last of the three
great tragic poets, the choral songs have frequently little or no
connexion with the fable, and are nothing better than a mere episodical
ornament, they therefore conclude that the Greeks had only to take one
more step in the progress of dramatic art, to explode the Chorus
altogether. To refute these superficial conjectures, it is only necessary
to observe that Sophocles wrote a Treatise on the Chorus, in prose, in
opposition to the principles of some other poets; and that, far from
following blindly the practice which he found established, like an
intelligent artist he was able to assign reasons for his own doings.

Modern poets of the first rank have often, since the revival of the study
of the ancients, attempted to introduce the Chorus in their own pieces,
for the most part without a correct, and always without a vivid idea of
its real import. They seem to have forgotten that we have neither suitable
singing or dancing, nor, as our theatres are constructed, any convenient
place for it. On these accounts it is hardly likely to become naturalized
with us.

The Greek tragedy, in its pure and unaltered state, will always for our
theatres remain an exotic plant, which we can hardly hope to cultivate
with any success, even in the hot-house of learned art and criticism. The
Grecian mythology, which furnishes the materials of ancient tragedy, is as
foreign to the minds and imaginations of most of the spectators, as its
form and manner of representation. But to endeavour to force into that
form materials of a wholly different nature, an historical one, for
example, to assume that form, must always be a most unprofitable and
hopeless attempt.

I have called mythology the chief materials of tragedy. We know, indeed,
of two historical tragedies by Grecian authors: the _Capture of Miletus_,
of Phrynichus, and the _Persians_, of Aeschylus, a piece which still
exists; but these singular exceptions both belong to an epoch when the art
had not attained its full maturity, and among so many hundred examples of
a different description, only serve to establish more strongly the truth
of the rule. The sentence passed by the Athenians on Phrynichus, in which
they condemned him to a pecuniary fine because he had painfully agitated
them by representing on the stage a contemporary calamity, which with due
caution they might, perhaps, have avoided; however hard and arbitrary it
may appear in a judicial point of view, displays, however, a correct
feeling of the proprieties and limits of art. Oppressed by the
consciousness of the proximity and reality of the represented story, the
mind cannot retain that repose and self-possession which are necessary for
the reception of pure tragical impressions. The heroic fables, on the
other hand, came to view at a certain remoteness; and surrounded with a
certain halo of the marvellous. The marvellous possesses the advantage
that it can, in some measure, be at once believed and disbelieved:
believed in so far as it is supported by its connexion with other
opinions; disbelieved while we never take such an immediate interest in it
as we do in what wears the hue of the every-day life of our own
experience. The Grecian mythology was a web of national and local
traditions, held in equal honour as a sequence of religion, and as an
introduction to history; everywhere preserved in full vitality among the
people by ceremonies and monuments, already elaborated for the
requirements of art and the higher species of poetry by the diversified
manner in which it has been handled, and by the numerous epic or merely
mythical poets. The tragedians had only, therefore, to engraft one species
of poetry on another. Certain postulates, and those invariably serviceable
to the air of dignity and grandeur, and the removing of all meanness of
idea, were conceded to them at the very outset. Everything, down to the
very errors and weaknesses of that departed race of heroes who claimed
their descent from the gods, was ennobled by the sanctity of legend. Those
heroes were painted as beings endowed with more than human strength; but,
so far from possessing unerring virtue and wisdom, they were even depicted
as under the dominion of furious and unbridled passions. It was an age of
wild effervescence; the hand of social order had not as yet brought the
soil of morality into cultivation, and it yielded at the same time the
most beneficent and poisonous productions, with the fresh luxuriant
fulness of prolific nature. Here the occurrence of the monstrous and
horrible did not necessarily indicate that degradation and corruption out
of which alone, under the development of law and order, they could arise,
and which, in such a state of things, make them fill us with sentiments of
horror and aversion. The guilty beings of the fable are, if we may be
allowed the expression, exempt from human jurisdiction, and amenable to a
higher tribunal alone. Some, indeed, have advanced the opinion, that the
Greeks, as zealous republicans, took a particular pleasure in witnessing
the representation of the outrages and consequent calamities of the
different royal families, and are almost disposed to consider the ancient
tragedy in general as a satire on monarchical government. Such a party-
view, however, would have deadened the sympathy of the audience, and
consequently destroyed the effect which it was the aim of the tragedy to
produce.

Besides, it must be remarked that the royal families, whose crimes and
consequent sufferings afforded the most abundant materials for affecting
tragical pictures, were the Pelopidae of Mycenae, and the Labdacidae of
Thebes, families who had nothing to do with the political history of the
Athenians, for whom the pieces were composed. We do not see that the Attic
poets ever endeavoured to exhibit the ancient kings of their country in an
odious light; on the contrary, they always hold up their national hero,
Theseus, for public admiration, as a model of justice and moderation, the
champion of the oppressed, the first lawgiver, and even as the founder of
liberty. It was also one of their favourite modes of flattering the
people, to show to them Athens, even in the heroic ages, as distinguished
above all the other states of Greece, for obedience to the laws, for
humanity, and acknowledgment of the national rights of the Hellenes. That
universal revolution, by which the independent kingdoms of ancient Greece
were converted into a community of small free states, had separated the
heroic age from the age of social cultivation, by a wide interval, beyond
which a few families only attempted to trace their genealogy. This was
extremely advantageous for the ideal elevation of the characters of Greek
tragedy, as few human things will admit of a very close inspection without
betraying some imperfections. To the very different relations of the age
in which those heroes lived, the standard of mere civil and domestic
morality is not applicable, and to judge of them the feeling must go back
to the primary ingredients of human nature. Before the existence of
constitutions,--when as yet the notions of law and right were
undeveloped,--the sovereigns were their own lawgivers, in a world which as
yet was dependent on them; and the fullest scope was thus given to the
energetic will, either for good or for evil. Moreover, an age of
hereditary kingdom naturally exhibited more striking instances of sudden
changes of fortune than the later times of political equality. It was in
this respect that the high rank of the principal characters was essential,
or at least favourable to tragic impressiveness; and not, as some moderns
have pretended, because the changing fortunes of such persons exercise a
material influence on the happiness or misery of numbers, and therefore
they alone are sufficiently important to interest us in their behalf; nor,
again, because internal elevation of sentiment must be clothed with
external dignity, to call forth our respect and admiration. The Greek
tragedians paint the downfall of kingly houses without any reference to
its effects on the condition of the people; they show us the man in the
king, and, far from veiling their heroes from our sight by their purple
mantles, they allow us to look, through their vain splendour, into a bosom
torn and harrowed with grief and passion. That the main essential was not
so much the regal dignity as the heroic costume, is evident from those
tragedies of the moderns which have been written under different
circumstances indeed, but still upon this supposed principle: such, I
mean, as under the existence of monarchy have taken their subject from
kings and courts. Prom the existing reality they dare not draw, for
nothing is less suitable for tragedy than a court and a court life.
Wherever, therefore, they do not paint an ideal kingdom, with the manners
of some remote age, they invariably fall into stiffness and formality,
which are much more fatal to boldness of character, and to depth of
pathos, than the monotonous and equable relations of private life.

A few mythological fables alone seem originally marked out for tragedy:
such, for example, as the long-continued alternation of crime, revenge,
and curses, which we witness in the house of Atreus. When we examine the
names of the pieces which are lost, we have great difficulty in conceiving
how the mythological fables (such, at least, as they are known to us,)
could have furnished sufficient materials for the compass of an entire
tragedy. It is true, the poets, in the various editions of the same story,
had a great latitude of selection; and this very fluctuation of tradition
justified them in going still farther, and making considerable alterations
in the circumstances of an event, so that the inventions employed for this
purpose in one piece sometimes contradict the story as given by the same
poet in another. We must, however, principally explain the prolific
capability of mythology, for the purposes of tragedy, by the principle
which we observe in operation throughout the history of Grecian mind and
art; that, namely, the tendency which predominated for the time,
assimilated everything else to itself. As the heroic legend with all its
manifold discrepancies was easily developed into the tranquil fulness and
light variety of epic poetry, so afterwards it readily responded to the
demands which the tragic writers made upon it for earnestness, energy, and
compression; and whatever in this sifting process of transformation fell
out as inapplicable to tragedy, afforded materials for a sort of half
sportive, though still ideal representation, in the subordinate species
called the _satirical drama_.

I hope I shall be forgiven, if I attempt to illustrate the above
reflections on the essence of Ancient Tragedy, by a comparison borrowed
from the plastic arts, which will, I trust, be found somewhat more than a
mere fanciful resemblance.

The Homeric epic is, in poetry, what bas-relief is in sculpture, and
tragedy the distinct isolated group.

The poetry of Homer, sprung from the soil of legend, is not yet wholly
detached from it, even as the figures of a bas-relief adhere to an
extraneous backing of the original block. These figures are but slightly
raised, and in the epic poem all is painted as past and remote. In bas-
relief the figures are usually in profile, and in the epos all are
characterized in the simplest manner in relief; they are not grouped
together, but follow one another; so Homer's heroes advance, one by one,
in succession before us. It has been remarked that the _Iliad_ is not
definitively closed, but that we are left to suppose something both to
precede and to follow it. The bas-relief is equally without limit, and may
be continued _ad infinitum_, either from before or behind, on which
account the ancients preferred for it such subjects as admitted of an
indefinite extension, sacrificial processions, dances, and lines of
combatants, &c. Hence they also exhibited bas-reliefs on curved surfaces,
such as vases, or the frieze of a rotunda, where, by the curvature, the
two ends are withdrawn from our sight, and where, while we advance, one
object appears as another disappears. Reading Homer is very much like such
a circuit; the present object alone arresting our attention, we lose sight
of that which precedes, and do not concern ourselves about what is to
follow.

But in the distinct outstanding group, and in Tragedy, sculpture and
poetry alike bring before our eyes an independent and definite whole. To
distinguish it from natural reality, the former places it on a base as on
an ideal ground, detaching from it as much as possible all foreign and
accidental accessories, that the eye may rest wholly on the essential
objects, the figures themselves. These figures the sculptor works out with
their whole body and contour, and as he rejects the illusion of colours,
announces by the solidity and uniformity of the mass in which they are
constructed, a creation of no perishable existence, but endowed, with a
higher power of endurance.

Beauty is the aim of sculpture, and repose is most advantageous for the
display of beauty. Repose alone, therefore, is suitable to the single
figure. But a number of figures can only be combined together into unity,
_i.e., grouped_ by an action. The group represents beauty in motion,
and its aim is to combine both in the highest degree of perfection. This
can be effected even while portraying the most violent bodily or mental
anguish, if only the artist finds means so to temper the expression by
some trait of manly resistance, calm grandeur, or inherent sweetness,
that, with all the most moving truth, the lineaments of beauty shall yet
be undefaced. The observation of Winkelmann on this subject is inimitable.
He says, that "beauty with the ancients was the tongue on the balance of
expression," and in this sense the groups of Niobe and Laocoön are master-
pieces; the one in the sublime and severe; the other in the studied and
ornamental style.

The comparison with ancient tragedy is the more apposite here, as we know
that both Aeschylus and Sophocles produced a Niobe, and that Sophocles was
also the author of a Laocoön. In the group of the Laocoön the efforts of
the body in enduring, and of the mind in resisting, are balanced in
admirable equipoise. The children calling for help, tender objects of
compassion, not of admiration, recal our eyes to the father, who seems to
be in vain uplifting his eyes to the gods. The wreathed serpents represent
to us that inevitable destiny which often involves all the parties of an
action in one common ruin. And yet the beauty of proportion, the agreeable
flow of the outline, are not lost in this violent struggle; and a
representation, the most appalling to the senses, is yet managed with
forbearance, while a mild breath of gracefulness is diffused over the
whole.

In the group of Niobe there is the same perfect mixture of terror and
pity. The upturned looks of the mother, and the mouth half open in
supplication, seem yet to accuse the invisible wrath of heaven. The
daughter, clinging in the agonies of death to the bosom of her mother, in
her childish innocence has no fear but for herself: the innate impulse of
self-preservation was never more tenderly and affectingly expressed. On
the other hand, can there be a more beautiful image of self-devoting,
heroic magnanimity than Niobe, as she bends forward to receive, if
possible, in her own body the deadly shaft? Pride and defiance dissolve in
the depths of maternal love. The more than earthly dignity of the features
are the less marred by the agony, as under the rapid accumulation of blow
upon blow she seems, as in the deeply significant fable, already
petrifying into the stony torpor. But before this figure, thus
_twice_ struck into stone, and yet so full of life and soul,--before
this stony terminus of the limits of human endurance, the spectator melts
into tears.

Amid all the agitating emotions which these groups give rise to, there is
still a something in their aspect which attracts the mind and gives rise
to manifold contemplation; so the ancient tragedy leads us forward to the
highest reflections involved in the very sphere of things it sets before
us--reflections on the nature and the inexplicable mystery of man's being.




LECTURE VI.

Progress of the Tragic Art among the Greeks--Various styles of Tragic Art
--Aeschylus--Connexion in a Trilogy of Aeschylus--His remaining Works.


Of the inexhaustible stores possessed by the Greeks in the department of
tragedy, which the public competition at the Athenian festivals called
into being (as the rival poets always contended for a prize), very little
indeed has come down to us. We only possess works of three of their
numerous tragedians, Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides, and of these but
a few in proportion to the whole number of their compositions. The extant
dramas are such as were selected by the Alexandrian critics as the
foundation for the study of the older Grecian literature, not because they
alone were deserving of estimation, but because they afforded the best
illustration of the various styles of tragic art. Of each of the two older
poets, we have seven pieces remaining; in these, however, we have,
according to the testimony of the ancients, several of their most
distinguished productions. Of Euripides we have a much greater number, and
we might well exchange many of them for other works which are now lost;
for example, for the satirical dramas of Achaeus, Aeschylus, and
Sophocles, or, for the sake of comparison with Aeschylus, for some of
Phrynichus' pieces, or of Agathon's, whom Plato describes as effeminate,
but sweet and affecting, and who was a contemporary of Euripides, though
somewhat his junior.

Leaving to antiquarians to sift the stories about the waggon of the
strolling Thespis, the contests for the prize of a he-goat, from which the
name of tragedy is said to be derived, and the lees of wine with which the
first improvisatory actors smeared over their visages, from which rude
beginnings, it is pretended, Aeschylus, by one gigantic stride, gave to
tragedy that dignified form under which it appears in his works, we shall
proceed immediately to the consideration of the poets themselves.

The tragic style of Aeschylus (I use the word "style" in the sense it
receives in sculpture, and not in the exclusive signification of the
manner of writing,) is grand, severe, and not unfrequently hard: that of
Sophocles is marked by the most finished symmetry and harmonious
gracefulness: that of Euripides is soft and luxuriant; overflowing in his
easy copiousness, he often sacrifices the general effect to brilliant
passages. The analogies which the undisturbed development of the fine arts
among the Greeks everywhere furnishes, will enable us, throughout to
compare the epochs of tragic art with those of sculpture. Aeschylus is the
Phidias of Tragedy, Sophocles her Polycletus, and Euripides her Lysippus.
Phidias formed sublime images of the gods, but lent them an extrinsic
magnificence of material, and surrounded their majestic repose with images
of the most violent struggles in strong relief. Polycletus carried his art
to perfection of proportion, and hence one of his statues was called the
Standard of Beauty. Lysippus distinguished himself by the fire of his
works; but in his time Sculpture had deviated from its original
destination, and was much more desirous of expressing the charm of motion
and life than of adhering to ideality of form.

Aeschylus is to be considered as the creator of Tragedy: in full panoply
she sprung from his head, like Pallas from the head of Jupiter. He clad
her with dignity, and gave her an appropriate stage; he was the inventor
of scenic pomp, and not only instructed the chorus in singing and dancing,
but appeared himself as an actor. He was the first that expanded the
dialogue, and set limits to the lyrical part of tragedy, which, however,
still occupies too much space in his pieces. His characters are sketched
with a few bold and strong touches. His plots are simple in the extreme:
he did not understand the art of enriching and varying an action, and of
giving a measured march and progress to the complication and denouement.
Hence his action often stands still; a circumstance which becomes yet more
apparent, from the undue extension of his choral songs. But all his poetry
evinces a sublime and earnest mind. Terror is his element, and not the
softer affections, he holds up a head of Medusa before the petrified
spectators. In his handling Destiny appears austere in the extreme; she
hovers over the heads of mortals in all her gloomy majesty. The cothurnus
of Aeschylus has, as it were, the weight of iron: gigantic figures stalk
in upon it. It seems as if it required an effort for him to condescend to
paint mere men; he is ever bringing in gods, but especially the Titans,
those elder divinities who typify the gloomy powers of primaeval nature,
and who had been driven long ago into Tartarus before the presence of a
new and better order of things. He endeavours to swell out his language to
a gigantic sublimity, corresponding to the vast dimensions of his
personages. Hence he abounds in harsh compounds and over-strained
epithets, and the lyrical parts of his pieces are often, from their
involved construction, extremely obscure. In the singular strangeness of
his images and expressions he resembles Dante and Shakspeare. Yet in these
images there is no want of that terrific grace which almost all the
writers of antiquity commend in Aeschylus.

Aeschylus flourished in the very freshness and vigour of Grecian freedom,
and a proud sense of the glorious struggle by which it was won, seems to
have animated him and his poetry. He had been an eye-witness of the
greatest and most glorious event in the history of Greece, the overthrow
and annihilation of the Persian hosts under Darius and Xerxes, and had
fought with distinguished bravery in the memorable battles of Marathon and
Salamis. In the _Persians_ he has, in an indirect manner, sung the
triumph which he contributed to obtain, while he paints the downfall of
the Persian ascendancy, and the ignominious return of the despot, with
difficulty escaping with his life, to his royal residence. The battle of
Salamis he describes in the most vivid and glowing colours. Through the
whole of this piece, and the _Seven before Thebes_, there gushes forth a
warlike vein; the personal inclination of the poet for a soldier's
life, shines throughout with the most dazzling lustre. It was well
remarked by Gorgias, the sophist, that Mars, instead of Bacchus, had
inspired this last drama; for Bacchus, and not Apollo, was the tutelary
deity of tragic poets, which, on a first view of the matter, appears
somewhat singular, but then we must recollect that Bacchus was not merely
the god of wine and joy, but also the god of all higher kinds of
inspiration.

Among the remaining pieces of Aeschylus, we have what is highly deserving
of our attention--a complete _Trilogy_. The antiquarian account of
the trilogies is this: that in the more early times the poet did not
contend for the prize with a single piece, but with three, which, however,
were not always connected together in their subjects, and that to these
was added a fourth,--namely, a _satiric drama_. All were acted in one
day, one after another. The idea which, in relation to the tragic art, we
must form of the trilogy, is this: a tragedy cannot be indefinitely
lengthened and continued, like the Homeric Epos for instance, to which
whole rhapsodies have been appended; tragedy is too independent and
complete within itself for this; nevertheless, several tragedies may be
connected together in one great cycle by means of a common destiny running
through the actions of all. Hence the restriction to the number three
admits of a satisfactory explanation. It is the thesis, the antithesis,
and the synthesis. The advantage of this conjunction was that, by the
consideration of the connected fables, a more complete gratification was
furnished than could possibly be obtained from a single action. The
subjects of the three tragedies might be separated by a wide interval of
time, or follow close upon one another.

The three pieces which form the trilogy of Aeschylus, are the _Agamemnon_,
the _Choephorae_ or, we should call it, _Electra_, and the _Eumenides_ or
_Furies_. The subject of the first is the murder of Agamemnon by
Clytemnestra, on his return from Troy. In the second, Orestes avenges his
father by killing his mother: _facto pius et sceleratus eodem_. This deed,
although enjoined by the most powerful motives, is, however, repugnant to
the natural and moral order of things. Orestes, as a prince, was, it is
true, called upon to exercise justice, even on the members of his own
family; but we behold him here under the necessity of stealing in disguise
into the dwelling of the tyrannical usurper of his throne, and of going to
work like an assassin. The memory of his father pleads his excuse; but
however much Clytemnestra may have deserved her death, the voice of blood
cries from within. This conflict of natural duties is represented in the
_Eumenides_ in the form of a contention among the gods, some of whom
approve of the deed of Orestes, while others persecute him, till at last
Divine Wisdom, in the persona of Minerva, balances the opposite claims,
establishes peace, and puts an end to the long series of crime and
punishment which have desolated the royal house of Atreus.

A considerable interval takes place between the period of the first and
second pieces, during which Orestes grows up to manhood. The second and
third are connected together immediately in order of time. Upon the murder
of his mother, Orestes flees forthwith to Delphi, where we find him at the
commencement of the _Eumenides_.

In each of the two first pieces, there is a visible reference to the one
which follows. In _Agamemnon_, Cassandra and the chorus, at the close,
predict to the haughty Clytemnestra and her paramour, Aegisthus, the
punishment which awaits them at the hands of Orestes. In the _Choephorae_,
Orestes, upon the execution of the deed of retribution, finds that all
peace is gone: the furies of his mother begin to persecute him, and he
announces his resolution of taking refuge in Delphi.

The connexion is therefore evident throughout; and we may consider the
three pieces, which were connected together even in the representation, as
so many acts of one great and entire drama. I mention this as a
preliminary justification of the practice of Shakspeare and other modern
poets, to connect together in one representation a larger circle of human
destinies, as we can produce to the critics who object to this the
supposed example of the ancients.

In _Agamemnon_, it was the intention of Aeschylus to exhibit to us a
sudden fall from the highest pinnacle of prosperity and renown into the
abyss of ruin. The prince, the hero, the general of the combined forces of
the Greeks, in the very moment of success and the glorious achievement of
the destruction of Troy, the fame of which is to be re-echoed from the
mouths of the greatest poets of all ages, in the very act of crossing the
threshold of his home, after which he had so long sighed, and amidst the
fearless security of preparations for a festival, is butchered, according
to the expression of Homer, "like an ox in the stall," slain by his
faithless wife, his throne usurped by her worthless seducer, and his
children consigned to banishment or to hopeless servitude.

With the view of giving greater effect to this dreadful reverse of
fortune, the poet endeavours to throw a greater splendour over the
destruction of Troy. He has done this in the first half of the piece in a
manner peculiar to himself, which, however singular, must be allowed to be
impressive in the extreme, and well fitted to lay fast hold of the
imagination. It is of importance to Clytemnestra that she should not be
surprised by the sudden arrival of her husband; she has therefore arranged
an uninterrupted series of signal fires from Troy to Mycenae, to announce
to her that great event. The piece commences with the speech of a
watchman, who supplicates the gods for a deliverance from his labours, as
for ten long years he has been exposed to the cold dews of night, has
witnessed the changeful course of the stars, while looking in vain for the
expected signal; at the same time he sighs in secret over the corruption
which reigns within the royal house. At this moment he sees the long-
wished-for beacon blazing up, and hastens to announce it to his mistress.
A chorus of aged persons appears, and in their songs they go through the
whole history of the Trojan War, through all its eventful fluctuations of
fortune, from its origin, and recount all the prophecies relating to it,
and the sacrifice of Iphigenia, by which the sailing of the Greeks was
purchased. Clytemnestra explains to the chorus the joyful cause of the
sacrifice which she orders; and the herald Talthybius immediately makes
his appearance, who, as an eye-witness, relates the drama of the conquered
and plundered city, consigned as a prey to the flames, the joy of the
victors, and the glory of their leader. With reluctance, as if unwilling
to check their congratulatory prayers, he recounts to them the subsequent
misfortunes of the Greeks, their dispersion, and the shipwreck suffered by
many of them, an immediate symptom of the wrath of the gods. It is obvious
how little the unity of time was observed by the poet,--how much, on the
contrary, he avails himself of the prerogative of his mental dominion over
the powers of nature, to give wings to the circling hours in their course
towards the dreadful goal. Agamemnon now arrives, borne in a sort of
triumphal car; and seated on another, laden with booty, follows Cassandra,
his prisoner of war, and concubine also, according to the customary
privilege of heroes. Clytemnestra greets him with hypocritical joy and
veneration; she orders her slaves to cover the ground with the most costly
embroideries of purple, that it might not be touched by the foot of the
conqueror. Agamemnon, with wise moderation, refuses to accept an honour
due only to the gods; at last he yields to her solicitations, and enters
the palace. The chorus then begins to utter its dark forebodings.
Clytemnestra returns to allure, by friendly speeches, Cassandra also to
destruction. The latter is silent and unmoved, but the queen is hardly
gone, when, seized with prophetic furor, she breaks out into the most
confused and obscure lamentations, but presently unfolds her prophecies
more distinctly to the chorus; in spirit she beholds all the enormities
which have been perpetrated within that house--the repast of Thyestes,
which the sun refused to look upon; the ghosts of the mangled children
appear to her on the battlements of the palace. She also sees the death
which is preparing for her lord; and, though shuddering at the reek of
death, as if seized with madness, she rushes into the house to meet her
own inevitable doom, while from behind the scene we hear the groans of the
dying Agamemnon. The palace opens; Clytemnestra stands beside the body of
her king and husband; like an insolent criminal, she not only confesses
the deed, but boasts of and justifies it, as a righteous requital for
Agamemnon's sacrifice of Iphigenia to his own ambition. Her jealousy of
Cassandra, and criminal connexion with the worthless Aegisthus, who does
not appear till after the completion of the murder and towards the
conclusion of the piece, are motives which she hardly touches on, and
throws entirely into the background. This was necessary to preserve the
dignity of the subject; for, indeed, Clytemnestra could not with propriety
have been portrayed as a frail seduced woman--she must appear with the
features of that heroic age, so rich in bloody catastrophes, in which all
passions were violent, and men, both in good and evil, surpassed the
ordinary standard of later and more degenerated ages. What is more
revolting--what proves a deeper degeneracy of human nature, than horrid
crimes conceived in the bosom of cowardly effeminacy? If such crimes are
to be portrayed by the poet, he must neither seek to palliate them, nor to
mitigate our horror and aversion of them. Moreover, by bringing the
sacrifice of Iphigenia thus immediately before us, the poet has succeeded
in lessening the indignation which otherwise the foul and painful fate of
Agamemnon is calculated to awaken. He cannot be pronounced wholly
innocent; a former crime recoils on his own head: besides, according to
the religious idea of the ancients, an old curse hung over his house.
Aegisthus, the author of his destruction, is a son of that very Thyestes
on whom his father Atreus took such an unnatural revenge; and this fateful
connexion is vividly brought before our minds by the chorus, and more
especially by the prophecies of Cassandra.

I pass over the subsequent piece of the _Choephorae_ for the present;
I shall speak of it when I come to institute a comparison between the
manner in which the three poets have handled the same subject.

The fable of the _Eumenides_ is, as I have already said, the justification
of Orestes, and his absolution from blood-guiltiness: it is a trial, but a
trial where the accusers and the defenders and the presiding judges are
gods. And the manner in which the subject is treated corresponds with its
majesty and importance. The scene itself brought before the eyes of the
Greeks all the highest objects of veneration that they acknowledged.

It opens in front of the celebrated temple at Delphi, which occupies the
background; the aged Pythia enters in sacerdotal pomp, addresses her
prayers to all the gods who at any time presided, or still preside, over
the oracle, harangues the assembled people (represented by the actual
audience), and goes into the temple to seat herself on the tripod. She
returns full of consternation, and describes what she has seen in the
temple: a man, stained with blood, supplicating protection, surrounded by
sleeping women with snaky hair; she then makes her exit by the same
entrance as she came in by. Apollo now appears with Orestes, who is in a
traveller's garb, and carries a sword and olive-branch in his hands. He
promises him his farther protection, enjoins him to flee to Athens, and
commends him to the care of the present but invisible Mercury, to whose
safeguard travellers, and especially those who were under the necessity of
journeying by stealth, were usually consigned.

Orestes goes off at the side which was supposed to lead to foreign lands;
Apollo re-enters his temple, which remains open, and the Furies are seen
in the interior, sleeping on the benches. Clytemnestra's ghost now ascends
by the charonic stairs, and, passing through the orchestra, appears on the
stage. We are not to imagine it a haggard skeleton, but a figure with the
appearance of life, though paler, with the wound still open in her breast,
and shrouded in ethereal-coloured vestments. She calls on the Furies, in
the language of vehement reproach, and then disappears, probably through a
trap-door. The Furies awake, and not finding Orestes, they dance in wild
commotion round the stage, while they sing the choral song. Apollo again
comes out of the temple, and drives them away, as profaning his sanctuary.
We may imagine him appearing with the sublime displeasure of the Apollo of
the Vatican, with bow and quiver, but also clad with tunic and chlamys.

The scene now changes; but as the Greeks on such occasions were fond of
going the shortest way to work, the background probably remained
unchanged, and was now supposed to represent the temple of Minerva, on the
Areopagus, while the lateral decorations were converted into Athens and
its surrounding landscape. Orestes now enters, as from foreign land, and,
as a suppliant, embraces the statue of Pallas standing before the temple.
The chorus (who, according to the poet's own description, were clothed in
black, with purple girdles, and serpents in their hair, in masks having
perhaps something of the terrific beauty of Medusa-heads, and marking too
their great age on the principles of sculpture) follows close on his
steps, but for the rest of the piece remains below in the orchestra. The
Furies had at first behaved themselves like beasts of prey, furious at the
escape of their booty, but now, hymning with tranquil dignity the high and
terrible office they had among mortals, they claim the head of Orestes, as
forfeited to them, and devote it with mysterious charms to endless
torment. At the intercession of the suppliant, Pallas, the warrior-virgin,
appears in a chariot drawn by four horses. She inquires the cause of his
invocation, and listens with calm dignity to the mutual complaints of
Orestes and his adversaries, and, at the solicitation of the two parties,
finally undertakes, after due reflection, the office of umpire. The
assembled judges take their seats on the steps of the temple--the herald
commands silence among the people by sound of trumpet, just as in a real
trial. Apollo advances to advocate the cause of his suppliant, the Furies
in vain protest against his interference, and the arguments for and
against the deed are debated between them in short speeches. The judges
cast their ballots into the urn, Pallas throws in a white one; all is
wrought up to the highest pitch of expectation; Orestes, in agony of
suspense, exclaims to his protector--

  O Phoebus Apollo, how will the cause be decided?

The Furies on the other hand:

  O Night, black Mother, seest thou these doings?

Upon counting the black and white pebbles, they are found equal in number,
and the accused, therefore, by the decision of Pallas, is acquitted. He
breaks out into joyful thanksgiving, while the Furies on the other hand
declaim against the overbearing arrogance of these younger gods, who take
such liberties with those of Titanic race. Pallas bears their rage with
equanimity, addresses them in the language of kindness, and even of
veneration; and these so indomitable beings are unable to withstand the
charms of her mild eloquence. They promise to bless the land which is
under her tutelary protection, while on her part Pallas assigns them a
sanctuary in the Attic domain, where they are to be called the
_Eumenides_, that is, "the Benevolent Goddesses." The whole ends with
a solemn procession round the theatre, with hymns of blessing, while bands
of children, women, and old men, in purple robes and with torches in their
hands, accompany the Furies in their exit.

Let us now take a retrospective view of the whole trilogy. In the
_Agamemnon_ we have a predominance of free-will both in the plan and
execution of the deed: the principal character is a great criminal, and
the piece ends with the revolting impressions produced by the sight of
triumphant tyranny and crime. I have already pointed out the allusions it
contains to a preceding destiny.

The deed committed in the _Choephorae_ is partly enjoined by Apollo
as the appointment of fate, and partly originates in natural motives:
Orestes' desire of avenging his father, and his brotherly love for the
oppressed Electra. It is only after the execution of the deed that the
struggle between the most sacred feelings becomes manifest, and here again
the sympathies of the spectators are excited without being fully appeased.

From its very commencement, the _Eumenides_ stands on the very summit
of tragical elevation: all the past is here, as it were, concentrated into
a focus. Orestes has become the mere passive instrument of fate; and free
agency is transferred to the more elevated sphere of the gods. Pallas is
properly the principal character. That opposition between the most sacred
relations, which often occurs in life as a problem not to be solved by
man, is here represented as a contention in the world of the gods.

And this brings me to the pregnant meaning of the whole. The ancient
mythology

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