The Greek drama owed its power to the qualities of regularity and simplicity: the strength of the modern lies in subtlety and multiplicity. The external conditions of the Attic theatre, no less than the prevailing spirit of Greek tragic art, forced this simplicity and regularity upon the ancient dramatists. These conditions do not occur in the modern world. We have our little theatres, our limited audience, our unmasked actors, our scenical illusions, our freedom in the choice of subjects. Therefore to push the subtlety and multiplicity of tragic composition to the utmost—to arrange for the most swift and sudden changes of expression in the actor, for the most delicate development of a many-sided character, for the most complicated grouping of contrasted forms, and for the utmost realization of imaginative incidents—is the glory of a Shakespeare or a Goethe. The French dramatists made the mistake of clinging to the beggarly elements of the Attic stage, when they had no means of restoring its colossal grandeur. When it was open to them to rival the work of the ancients in a new and truly modern style, they hampered their genius by arbitrary rules, and thought that they were following the principles of the highest art, while they submitted to the mere necessities of a bygone form of presentation. If Racine had believed in Nemesis, if Versailles had afforded him a theatre and an audience like that of Athens, if his actors had worn masks, if sculpture had been the dominant art of modern Europe, he would have been following the right track. As it was, he became needlessly formal. The same blind enthusiasm for antiquity led to the doctrine of the unities, to the abstinence from bloodshed on the stage, and to the restriction of a play to five acts. Horace had advised a dramatist not to extend his tragedy beyond the fifth act, nor to allow Medea to murder her children within sight of the audience. All modern playwrights observe the rule of five acts: nor is there much to be said against it, except that the third act is apt to be languid for want of matter. But the Greeks disregarded this division: judging by the choric songs, we find that some of their tragedies have as many as seven, and some as few as two acts. Again, as to bloodshed on the stage, it is probable that if the Greek actors had not been so clumsily arrayed, we should have had many instances of their violation of this rule. Æschylus discloses the shambles where Agamemnon and Cassandra lie weltering in their blood, and hammers a stake through the body of Prometheus. Sophocles exhibits Œdipus with eyes torn out and bleeding on his cheeks. Euripides allows the mangled corpse of Astyanax to be brought upon the stage on his father's shield. There is nothing more ghastly in an actual murder than in these spectacles of slaughter and mutilation. With reference to the unities, the French critics demand that a drama shall proceed in the same place, and the playwrights are at infinite pains to manage that no change of scene shall occur. But Aristotle, whose authority they claim, is silent on the point; while the usage of the Greek drama shows more than one change of place—especially in the Ajax of Sophocles and in the Eumenides of Æschylus, where the scene is shifted from the temple of Phœbus at Delphi to the Areopagus at Athens. Still the exigencies of the Greek theatre made it advisable to alter the centre of action as little as possible; and as a matter of convenience this requirement was complied with. The circumstances of our own stage have removed this difficulty, and it is only on the childish principle of maintaining an impossible illusion that the unity of place can be observed with any propriety. The unity of time has more to say for itself. Aristotle remarks that it is better to have a drama completed within the space of a day: this rule flows from his just sense of the proportion of parts; a work of art ought to be such that the mind can easily comprehend it at a glance. Yet many Greek plays, such as the Agamemnon of Æschylus, where Agamemnon has time to return from Troy, or the Eumenides, where Orestes performs the journey from Delphi to Athens, disregard this rule in cases where it required no strain of the mind to bridge over the space of a few unimportant days or hours. When in the modern drama we are introduced to the hero of a play first as a child and then as a full-grown man, and are forced meanwhile to keep our attention on his acts in the interval as important to the dramatic evolution, there is a gross violation of æsthetical unity. About the unity of action all critics are agreed. It is the same as unity of interest, or unity of subject, the interest and the subject of a play being its action. A good tragedy must have but one action, just as a good epic or a good poem of any sort must have but one subject; for the simple reason that, as the eye cannot look at two things at once, so the mind cannot attend to two things at once. Modern poets have been apt to disregard this canon of common-sense: the underplots of many plays and the episodes of such epics as the Orlando of Ariosto are not sufficiently subordinated to the main design or interwoven with it. Aristotle is also right in saying that the unity of the hero is not the same as the unity of action: a play, for example, on the labors of Hercules could only be made a good drama if each labor were shown to be one step in the fulfilment of one divinely appointed task. Shakespeare has complied with the canon of the unity of action in all his tragedies. Whether Goethe has done so in Faust may admit of doubt. The identity of his hero seems to him sufficient for the tragic unity of his piece; yet he has given us another centre of interest in Margaret, whose story is but a mere episode in the experience of Faust. Unity of action in a tragedy, the very soul of which is action, is the same as organic coherence in a body; and therefore, as every work of art ought, according to the energetic metaphor of Plato, to be a living creature, with head, trunk, and limbs all vitalized by one thought, this unity is essential. Admitting this point, we may fairly say that the other rules of French dramatic criticism are not only arbitrary, but also founded on a mistake with regard to the Greek theatre and a misapprehension of the proper functions of the modern stage. Composing in obedience to them is like walking upon stilts in a country where there are no marshes to make the inconvenience necessary.
In this review of the differences between our own tragedy and that of the Greeks I have scarcely touched upon those primary qualities which differentiate all modern from ancient art. The "sentiment of the infinite," which Renan regards as the chief legacy of mediævalism to modern civilization, and the preoccupation with the internal spirit rather than the external form which makes music the essentially modern, as sculpture was the essentially ancient art, are causes of innumerable peculiarities in our conception of tragedy. I have hardly alluded to these, but have endeavored to show that the immersion of Greek tragedy in religious ideas, the fixed body of mythical matter handled by the Greek dramatists in succession, and the actual conditions of the Attic theatre, will account for the greater number of those characteristics which distinguish Sophocles from Shakespeare, the prince of Greek from the prince of modern tragic poets.
FOOTNOTES:
[106] The scene in which Antigone takes leave of the Chorus within sight of her tomb is a good instance of this artificial treatment of passionate situations in the Attic drama. It has been censured by some critics as being unreasonably protracted. In reality it is in perfect accordance with the whole spirit of Greek tragedy. The emotions are brought into artistic relief: the figures are grouped like mourners on a sculptured monument: the antiphonal dirges of the princess and her attendants set the pulses of our sympathy in rhythmic movement, so that grief itself becomes idealized and glorified. The depth of feeling expressed, and the highly wrought form of its expression, together tend to rouse and chasten all that is profound and dignified in our emotions. Strophe after strophe, heart-beat by heart-beat, this wonderfully cadenced funeral song of her who is the bride of Acheron proceeds until the marble gates are shut upon Antigone.
[107] See vol. i. p. 34; vol. ii. p. [23].
[108] See vol. ii. p. [15]-24.
[109] The word κάθαρσις may possibly have been borrowed from medicine by Aristotle, and his meaning may, therefore, be that the surplus of the passions of which he speaks is literally purged out of the mental system by the action of tragedy. This suggestion was, I think, made by Bernays. It has been pointed out to me by my friend, Mr. E. Abbot, of Balliol College, that Aristotle, in another passage of the Poetics (xvii. 8), uses the word in a lustral meaning. The reference to it in a weighty passage of the Politics (viii. 7, 4) seems to prove that the purification was for the individual, not, as Goethe thought, for the passions as exhibited in the work of art itself.
[110] Milton's description of the poet's function in the Reason of Church Government urged against Prelacy contains a fine expansion of the phrase κάθαρσις in these words: "To allay the perturbation of the mind and set the affections in right tune." Milton in his own Samson Agonistes followed the Greek usage closely, and concluded the whole drama with a choric reflection upon the wisdom of God's dealings with the race of men. There, again, he expresses in the very last words of his play the same doctrine of κάθαρσις:
His servants He, with new acquist
Of true experience from this great event,
With peace and consolation hath dismissed,
And calm of mind, all passion spent.