scenic exhibition; in that case they must have been thrown upon conflicts of tempestuous passion: the more tempestuous the better. But being, by the early religious character of tragedy, and by the colossal proportions of their theatres, imperiously driven to a life more awful and still-upon life as it existed in elder days, amongst men so far removed that they had become invested with a patriarchal or even an antediluvian mistiness of antiquity, and often into the rank of demi-gods -they felt it possible to present this mode of being in states of suffering, for suffering is enduring and indefinite; but never in states of conflict, for conflict is, by its nature, fugitive and evanescent. The tragedy of Greece is always held up as a thing long past -the tragedy of England as a thing now passing. We are invited by Sophocles or Euripides, as by some great necromancer, to see long-buried forms standing in solemn groups upon the stage-phantoms from Thebes or from Cyclopian cities. But Shakespeare is a Cornelius Agrippa, who shows us in his magic glass creatures yet breathing and actually mixing in the great game of life upon some distant field, inaccessible to us without a magician's aid.

The Greek drama, therefore, by its very necessities, proposing to itself only a few grand attitudes or situations, and brief dialogues, as the means of illuminating those situations, with scarcely any thing of action actually occurring on the stage-from these purposes derives its other peculiarities : in the elementary necessities lay the fundus of the rest.

V. The notion, for example, that murder or violent death was banished from the Greek stage, on the Parisian conceit of the shock which such bloody incidents would give to the taste, is perfectly erroneous. Not because it was sanguinary, but because it was action, had the Greeks an objection to such violences. No action of any kind proceeds legitimately on that stage. The persons of the drama are always in a reposing state so long as they are before the audience. And the very meaning of an act is, that in the intervals, the suspensions of the acts, any possible time may elapse, and any possible action may go on.

VI. Hence, also, a most erroneous theory has arisen about Fate as brooding over the Greek tragic scene.

This was a favourite notion of the two Schlegels. But it is evident that many Greek tragedies, both amongst those which survive, and amongst those the title and subjects of which are recorded, did not, and could not present any opening at all for this dark agency. Consequently it was not essential. And, even where it did intervene, the Schlegels seem to have misunderstood its purpose. A prophetic colouring, a colouring of ancient destiny, connected with a character or an event, has the effect of exalting and ennobling. But whatever tends towards this result, inevitably translates the persons and their situation from that condition of ordinary breathing life which it was the constant effort of the Greek tragedy to escape; and therefore it was, that the Greek poet preferred the gloomy idea of Fate: not because it was essential, but because it was elevating. It is for this reason, and apparently for this reason only, that Cassandra is connected by Æschylus with Agamemnon. The Sphynx, indeed, was connected with the horrid tale of Edipus in every version of the tale: but Cassandra was brought upon the stage out of no certain historic tradition, or proper relation to Agamemnon, but to confer the solemn and mysterious hoar of a dark prophe tic woe upon the dreadful catastrophe Fate was therefore used, not for it own direct moral value as a force ups on the will, but for its derivative power of ennobling and darkening.

VII. Hence, too, that habit amongst the tragic poets of travelling back to regions of forgotten fable and dark legendary mythus. Antiquity availed powerfully for their purposes, because of necessity it abstracted all petty details of individuality and local notoriety; all that would have composed a character. It acted as twilight acts, (which removes day's "mutable distinctions,") and reduced the historic person to that sublime state of monotonous gloom which suited the views of a poet who wanted only the situation, but would have repelled a poet who sought also for the complex features of a character. It is true that such remote and fabulous periods are visited at times, though not haunted, by the modern dramatist. Events are sought, even upon the French stage, from Gothic or from Moorish times. But in that case, the poet endeavours to im

prove and strengthen any traits of character that tradition may have preserved, or by a direct effort of power to create them altogether, where his tory presents a blank neutrality ;whereas the Greek poet used simply that faint outline of character, in its gross distinctions of good and bad, which the situation itself implied. For example, the Creon of Thebes is pretty uniformly exhibited as tyrannical and cruel. But that was the mere result of his position as a rival originally for the throne, and still more as the executive minister of the popular vengeance against Polynices for having brought a tide of war against his mother land: in that representative character, Creon is compelled to acts of cruelty against Antigone in her sublime exercise of natural piety-both sisterly and filial; and this cruelty to her and to the miserable wreck her father, making the very wrath of Heaven an argument for further persecution, terminates in leaving him an object of hatred to the spectator. But after all, his conduct seems to have been purely official and ministerial. Nor, if the reader think otherwise, will he find any further emanation from Creon's individual will or heart than the mere blank expression of tyranny in a public cause: nothing, in short, of that complexity and interweaving of qualities, that interaction of moral and intellectual powers, which we moderns understand by a character. In short, all the rude outlines of character on the Greek stage were, in the first place, mere inheritances from tradition, and generally mere determinations from the situation and in no instance did the qualities of a man's will, heart, or constitutional temperament, manifest themselves by and through a collision or strife amongst each other; which is our test of a dramatic character. And therefore it was, that elder or even fabulous ages were used as the true natural field of the tragic poet; partly because antiquity ennobled; partly also because, by abstracting the individualities of a character, it left the historic figure in that neutral state which was most entirely passive to the moulding and determining power of the situation.

Two objections we foresee-1st, That even Æschylus, the sublimest of the Greek tragedians, did not always go back to a high antiquity. He himself had fought in the Persian war; and

yet he brings both Xerxes and his father Darius (by means of his apparition) upon the stage; though the very Marathon of the father was but ten years earlier than the Thermopylæ and Salamis of the son. But in this instance the scene is not properly Grecian: it is referred by the mind to Susa, the capital of Persia, far eastward even of Babylon, and four months' march from Hellas. Remoteness of space in that case countervailed the proximity in point of time; though it may be doubted whether, without the benefit of the supernatural, it would, even in that case, have satisfied the Grecian taste. And it certainly would not, had the whole reference of the piece not been so intensely Athenian. For, when we talk of Grecian tragedy, we must remember that, after all, the Pagan tragedy was in any proper sense exclusively Athenian; and the tendency of the Grecian taste, in its general Grecian character, was in various instances modified or absolutely controlled by that special feature of its existence.

2dly, It will be urged, as indicating this craving after antiquity to be no peculiar or distinguishing feature of the Greek stage, that we moderns also turn away sometimes with dislike from a modern subject. Thus, if it had no other fault, the Charles I. of Banks is. coldly received by English readers, doubtless; but not because it is too modern. The objection to it is, that a

parliamentary war is too intensely political; and political, moreover, in a way which doubly defeated its otherwise tragic power; first, because questions too notorious and too domineering of law and civil polity were then at issue; the very same which came to a final hearing and settlement at 1688-9. Our very form of government at this day is the result of the struggle then going on a fact which eclipses and dwarfs any separate or private interest of an individual prince, though otherwise and by his personal character in the highest degree an object of tragic pity and reverence. Secondly, because the political interest afloat at that era (1649) was too complex and intricate; it wanted the simplicity of a poetic interest. That is the objection to Charles I. as a tragedy; not because modern, but because too domineeringly political; and because the political features of the case were too many and too intricate.

VIII. Thus far, therefore, we now comprehend the purposes and true locus to the human imagination of the Grecian tragedy-that it was a most imposing scenic exhibition of a few grand situations; grand from their very simplicity, and from the consequences which awaited their dénouement; and seeking support to this grandeur from constantly fixing its eye upon elder ages lost in shades of antiquity; or, if departing from that ideal now and then, doing so with a view to patriotic objects, and seeking an occasional dispensation from the rigour of art in the popular indulgence to whatever touched the glory of Athens. Let the reader take, along with them, two other circumstances, and he will then complete the idea of this stately drama: first, the character of the DIALOGUE; secondly, the functions of the CHORUS.

IX. From 150 to 180 lines of hexameter iambic verse compose the dialogue of each act.* This space is sufficient for the purpose of unfolding the situation to the spectator; but, as a means of unfolding a character, would have been by much too limited. For such a purpose, again, as this last, numerous scenes, dialogues, or soliloquies, must have been requisite; whereas generally, upon the Greek stage, a single scene, one dialogue between two interlocutors, occupies the entire act. The object of this dialogue was, of course, to bring forward the prominent points of the situation, and to improve the interest arising out of-1. its grandeur; 2. its statuesque arrangement to the eye; or, 3. the burden of tragic consequences which it announced. With such purposes,

so distinct from any which are pursued upon the modern stage, arose a corresponding distinction of the dialogue. Had the dialogue ministered to any purpose so progressive and so active as that of developing a character, with new incidents and changes of the speakers coming forward at every moment, as occasions for evoking the peculiarities of that character-in such a case the more it had resembled the movement, the fluctuations, the hurry of actual life and of real colloquial intercourse, the more it would have aided the views of the poet. But the purpose of the Greek dialogue was not progressive; essentially it was retrospective. For example, the Heracleidæ opens with a fine and impressive group as ever sculptor chiselled -a group of young children, princely daughters of a great hero, whose acts resound through all mythology; viz. of Hercules, of a Grecian cleanser and deliverer from monsters, once irresistible to quell the oppressor, but now dead, and himself the subject of outrage in the persons of his children. These youthful ladies, helpless from their sex, with their grandmother Alcmene, now aged and infirm, have arranged themselves as a marble group on the steps ascending to the altars of a local deity. They have but one guide, one champion-a brother in arms of the deceased Hercules, and his reverential friend; but this brave man also suffering, through years and martial toils, under the penalties of decaying strength. Such is the situation, such the inauguration of this solemn tragedy. The dialogue which follows between Iolaus, the faithful guardian of the ladies, and the local ruler of the land, takes

up this inaugural picture-so pompous from blazing altars and cloudy incense -so ceremonial from the known religious meaning of the attitudes-so beautiful from the loveliness of the youthful suppliants, rising tier above tier according to their ages, and the graduation of the altar steps-so moving in its picture of human calamity by the contrasting figure of the two grey-haired supporters so complete and orbicular in its delineation of human frailty by the surmounting circumstances of its crest, the altar, the priestess, the temple, the serene Grecian sky-this impressive picture, having of itself appealed to every one of thirty thousand hearts, having already challenged universal attention, is now explained and unfolded through the entire first act. Iolaus, the noble old warrior, who had clung the closer to the fluttering dovecot of his buried friend from the unmerited persecution which had assaulted them, comments to the stranger prince upon the spectacle before him a spectacle significant to Grecian eyes, intelligible at once to every body; but still rare, and witnessed in practice by nobody. The prince, Demophoon, is a ruler of Athens: the scene is placed in the Attic territory, but not in Athens; about fifteen miles, in fact, from that city, and not far from the dread field of Marathon. To the prince, Iolaus explains the lost condition of his young flock. The ruler of Argos had driven them out of every asylum in the Peloponnesus. From city to city he had followed them at the heels, with his cruel heralds of persecution. They were a party of unhappy fugitives, (most of them proclaiming their innocence by their very age and helplessness,) that had run the circle of Greek hospitality: every where had been hunted out like wild beasts, or those common nuisances from which their illustrious father had liberated the earth: that the long circuit of their unhappy wanderings had brought them at the last to Athens, in which they had a final confidence, as knowing well not only the justice of that state, but that she only would not be moved from her purposes by fear of the aggressor. No finer opening can be imagined. The statuesque beauty of the group, and the unparalleled persecution which the first act exposes, (a sort of misery and an absolute hostility of the human race to

which our experience suggests no corresponding case, except that of a leper in the middle ages, or the case of a man under a papal interdict,) fix the attention of the spectators beyond any other situation in Grecian tragedy. And the compliment to Athens, not verbal but involved in the very situation, gave a depth of interest to this drama, for the very tutelary region of the drama; which ought to stamp it with a sort of prerogative as in some respects the ideal tragedy or model of the Greek theatre.

Now, this one dialogue, as filling one act of a particular drama, is quite sufficient to explain the view we take of the Greek tragic dialogue. It is altogether retrospective. It takes for its theme the visible group arranged on the stage before the spectators from the first. Looking back to this, the two interlocutors (supposed to come forward upon the stage) contrive between them, one by pertinent questions, the other by judicious management of his replies, to bring out those circumstances in the past fortunes and immediate circumstances of this interesting family, which may put the audience in possession of all which it is important for them to know. The reader sees the dark legendary character which invests the whole tale; and in the following acts this darkness is made more emphatic from the fact that incidents are used, of which contradictory versions existed, some poets adopting one version, some another: so cloudy and uncertain were the facts. All this apocryphal gloom aids that sanctity and awe which belong to another and a higher mode of life; to that slumbering life of sculpture, as opposed to painting, which we have called a life within a life. Grecian taste would inevitably require that the dialogue should be adjusted to this starting-point and standard. Accordingly, in the first place, the dialogue is always (and in a degree quite unperceived by the translators up to this time) severe, massy, simple, yet solemnized intentionally by the use of a select vocabulary, corresponding (in point of archaism and remoteness from ordinary use) to our scriptural vocabulary. Secondly, the metre is of a kind never yet examined with suitable care. There were two objects aimed at in the Greek iambic of the tragic drama; and in some measure these objects were in collision with each

other, unless most artfully managed. One was, to exhibit a purified imitation of real human conversation. The other was, to impress upon this colloquial form, thus far by its very nature recalling ordinary human life, a character of solemnity and religious conversation. Partly this was effected by arts of omission and commission; by banishing certain words or forms of words; by recalling others of high antiquity: particular tenses, for instance, were never used by the tragic poets; not even by Euripides, (the most Wordsworthian of the Athenian poets in the circumstance of having a peculiar theory of poetic diction, which lowered its tone of separation, and took it down from the cothurnus:) other verbal forms, again, were used nowhere but upon the stage. Partly, therefore, this consecration of the tragic style was effected by the antique cast, and the exclusive cast of its phraseology. But, partly also, it was effected by the metre. From whatever cause it may arise-chiefly, perhaps, from differences in the genius of the two languages certain it is, that the Latin iambics of Seneca, &c., (in the tragedies ascribed to him,) cannot be so read by an English mouth as to produce any thing like the sonorous rhythmus, and the grand intonation of the Greek iambics.

This is

a curious fact, and as yet, we believe, unnoticed. But, over and above this original adaptation of the Greek language to the iambic metre, we have no doubt whatever that the recitation of verse on the stage was of an artificial and semi-musical character. It was undoubtedly much more sustained and intonated with a slow and measur ed stateliness, * which, whilst harmonizing it with the other circumstances of solemnity in Greek tragedy, would bring it nearer to music. Beyond a doubt, it had the effect (and might have the effect even now, managed by

a good reader) of the recitative in the Italian opera: as, indeed, in other points, the Italian opera is a much nearer representative of the Greek tragedy, than the direct modern tragedy-professing that title.

X. As to the Chorus, nothing needs to be said upon this element of the Athenian tragedy. Every body knows how solemn, and therefore how solemnizing, must have been the richest and most lyrical music, the most passionate of the ancient poetry, the most dithyrambic of tragic and religious raptures, supported to the eye by the most hieroglyphic and therefore mysterious of dances. For the dances of the chorus-the strophe and the antistrophe - were symbolic, and therefore full of mysterious meanings; and not the less impressive, because these meanings and these symbols had lost their significancy to the mob; since the very cause of that loss lay in the antiquity of their origin. One great error which remains to be removed, is the notion that the chorus either did support, or was meant to support the office of a moral teacher. The chorus simply stood on the level of a sympathizing spectator, detached from the business and interests of the action; and its office was to guide or to interpret the sympathies of the audiHere was a great error of Milton's: but it is not an error of this place or subject. At present, it is sufficient to say, that the mysterious solemnity conferred by the chorus, presupposes, and is in perfect harmony with, our theory of a life within a lifea life sequestrated into some far off slumbering state, having the severe tranquillity of Hades a life symbolized by the marble life of sculpture; but utterly out of all symmetry and proportion to the realities of that human life which we moderns take up as the basis of our tragic drama.