As loose the bonds or make them strong There are who rest not; who think long At the sun's hour of morning-song, Known of souls only, and those souls free, The sacred spaces of the sea."1 All these are delicate records of states of mind which represent ideas so etherial as to almost elude the attempt to express them in words. I cite these passages, therefore, not so much as examples of Mr. Swinburne's poetry, but rather as examples of the high degree of development to which poetry has attained as the interpreter of thought. 1 Prelude to Songs before Sunrise. CHAPTER X THE DRAMA AS A COMPOSITE ART IF in literature the internal element has become allimportant, in the drama the external element has acquired an equal significance. That which the drama has, and literature has not, is stage representation; and it is this-the representation of the real by the real-which makes the drama a separate art. But the representation of the real by the real is not identical with the reality of ordinary life. It is necessary to have this fact clearly before us at the outset; the fact that actuality, not reality, reality heightened and intensified by concentration, something that is not less, but more than reality, is the essence of the drama. It is a selected specimen of life rather than life itself which is brought upon the stage: the play of mind is more strenuous, the colour is brighter, the sound is clearer and more musical, the action is more decisive, the characters are types, not individuals, the atmosphere in which they move is more electric. The drama is more real than life. If this be allowed, the difficulty of accepting the realism of the stage, when we refuse to recognize the realism of painting and poetry, vanishes. But how can this be? A moment's consideration will show that it is not a paradox, but a truth. Life, the sense of life, is measured by sensation, not by existence. Sensation depends upon two factorsexternal stimuli and the individual mind. If a combination of external stimuli can be so arranged as to produce an effect upon the mind, more powerful and more varied than any effect produced in the ordinary experience of everyday life, then the result achieved is an increase of sensation, and this increased sensation brings with it an increased sense of life. I deal with averages, not with exceptional cases. There are moments of supreme intensity in the life of every one, when the sense of life is realized in a supreme degree. I omit these from the comparison. As thus limited, the proposition that the sense of life, which the drama produces in the mind of the spectator, is greater than that which he ordinarily experiences, will commend itself to every observer. Even in the Greek tragedy Aristotle notices the power to produce sensation as a distinctive merit. 'Tragedy," he says, 'has all that Epic has, and in addition a very considerable element of power in music and scenic accessories; and it is music which gives the greatest vividness to the combination of pleasurable emotions produced by Tragedy.' And 1 Poetics, 1462". the Greek drama was immeasurably inferior in actuality to the modern drama. The history of the drama begins with sensation, and it seems probable that it will end in sensation. The powerful but vague emotion aroused by music and the dance was expressed in the rustic ballad dance performed in honour of Dionysus; and the dithyramb was the progenitor alike of tragedy and comedy. The ebb and flow of human passion was present in this manifestation of elementary impulses ; desire and satiety, joy and sorrow, activity and rest followed in natural alternation, and each element was appropriated and developed by one of the two poetic temperaments, the grave and brooding, and the gay and sensuous. 'What divided poetry,' Aristotle says, 'was the divergences of individual character. For while the graver poets imitated noble actions and the actions of noble persons, the lighter took those of worthless persons for their subjects, commencing with lampoons, as the former had commenced with hymns and encomia."1 Thus the vintage song and village revel both developed into musical performances, rendered by a trained chorus, who united in rhythmic movements which expressed the dominant feeling of the words they sung. To the lyric element, introduced by the choral odes, was added an epic element, the 'episodes,' or parenthetic passages, recited between the choral performances. The rhapsodist became 1 Ib. 1448b. first the equal, and afterwards the superior of the coryphæus. The answerer' became the actor, and the episodes the drama. But before this change, the dramatic poet had, in his desire to provide his characters with a diction approaching most nearly to that of common speech, substituted the quick iambics of satire for the leisured hexameters of Epic. And so tragedy, where the seriousness of true poetry was preserved, was for Aristotle the highest and most developed form of 'poetry.' It had gradually united in itself the best elements of Lyric, Epic, and satire; it retained within due limits the services of instrumental music, of rhythmic motion and gesture, and it had added those of stage representation. 6 And in the modern drama a like process of growth and selection may be observed. In its advance towards specialization it has tended to divest itself of certain elements of poetry and to extend others; and in addition it has allied itself in an increasing degree with the arts of the eye.' The differences between the Greek and the modern drama are significant, for an examination of these differences indicates in the clearest manner the special objects which the dramatic artist and the actor unitedly seek to achieve to-day. The structure of the Greek drama in its representative form of tragedy is described by Aristotle.' 'The parts in the sense of separate divisions,' he 1 Ib 1452o. |