38. Whatever by reflected self-love inspires us with hope, fear, pity, terror, love, or mirth—whatever makes events, and time, and place, the ministers of character and pathos, let fiction or reality compose its tissue, is dramatic.
39. That which tells us, not what might be, but what is; circumscribes the grand and the pathetic with truth of time, place, custom; what gives "a local habitation and a name," is historic.
Coroll.—No human performance is either purely epic, dramatic, or historic. Novelty and feelings will make the historian sometimes launch out into the marvellous; or will warm his bosom and extort a tear.
The dramatist while gazing at some tremendous feature, or the pomp of superior agency, will drop the chain he holds, and be absorbed in the sublime; whilst the epic or lyric poet, forgetting his solitary grandeur, will sometimes descend and mix with his agents.
The tragic and the comic dramatists formed themselves on Hector and Andromache, on Irus and Ulysses. The spirit from the prison-house breathes like the shade of Patroclus; Octavia and the daughter of Soranus[5] melt like Ophelia and Alcestis.
40. Those who have assigned to the plastic arts beauty, strictly so called, as the ultimate end of imitation, have circumscribed the whole by a part.
Coroll.—The charms of Helen and of Niobe are instruments of sublimity: Meleager and Cordelia fall victims to the passions; Agrippina and Berenice give interest to truth.