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LITERARY CRITICISM.

THEORY OF GREEK TRAGEDY.

THE Greek tragedy is a dark problem. We cannot say that the Greek drama is such in any more comprehensive sense; for the comedy of Greece depends essentially upon the same principles as our own. Comedy, as the reflex of the current of social life, will shift in correspondence to the shifting movements of civilization. Inevitably as human intercourse in cities grows more refined, comedy will grow more subtle; it will build itself on distinctions of character less grossly defined, and on features of manners more delicate and impalpable. But the fundus, the ultimate resource, the well-head of the comic, must forever be sought in the same field, namely, the ludicrous of incident, or the ludicrous of situation, or the ludicrous which arises in a mixed way between the character and the situation. The age of Aristophanes, for example, answered, in some respects, to our own earliest dramatic era, namely, from 1588 to 1635,-an age not (as Dr. Johnson assumes it to have been, in his elaborate preface to Shakspeare) rude or gross; on the contrary, far more intense with intellectual instincts and agencies

than his own, which was an age of collapse. But in the England of Shakspeare, as in the Athens of Aristophanes, the surface of society in cities still rocked, or at least undulated, with the groundswell surviving from periods of intestine tumult and insecurity. The times were still martial and restless; men still wore swords in pacific assemblies ; the intellect of the age was a fermenting intellect ; it was a revolutionary intellect. And comedy itself, colored by the moving pageantries of life, was more sinewy, more audacious in its movements; spoke with something more of an impassioned tone; and was hung with draperies more rich, more voluminous, more picturesque. On the other hand, the age of the Athenian Menander, or the English Congreve, though still an unsettled age, was far less insecure in its condition of police, and far less showy in its exterior aspect. In England it is true that a picturesque costume still prevailed; the whole people were still draped professionally; each man's dress proclaimed his calling; and so far it might be said, "natio comoedia est." But the characteristic and dividing spirit had fled, whilst the forms survived; and those middle men had universally arisen whose equivocal relations to different employments broke down the strength of contrast between them. Comedy, therefore, was thrown more exclusively upon. the interior man; upon the nuances of his nature, or upon the finer spirit of his manners. It was now the acknowledged duty of comedy to fathom the coynesses of human nature, and to arrest the fleeting phenomena of human demeanor.

But tragedy stood upon another footing. Whilst

the comic muse in every age acknowledges a relationship which is more than sisterly, in fact, little short of absolute identity, the tragic muse of Greece and England stand so far aloof as hardly to recognize each other under any common designation. Few people have ever studied the Grecian drama; and hence may be explained the possibility that so little should have been said by critics upon its characteristic differences, and nothing at all upon the philosophic ground of these differences. Hence may be explained the fact that, whilst Greek tragedy has always been a problem in criticism, it is still a problem of which no man has attempted the solution. This problem it is our intention briefly to investigate.

I. There are cases occasionally occurring in the English drama and the Spanish, where a play is exhibited within a play. To go no further, every person remembers the remarkable instance of this in Hamlet. Sometimes the same thing takes place in painting. We see a chamber, suppose, exhibited by the artist, on the walls of which (as a customary piece of furniture) hangs a picture. And as this picture again might represent a room furnished with pictures, in the mere logical possibility of the case we might imagine this descent into a life below a life going on ad infinitum. Practically, however, the process is soon stopped. A retrocession of this nature is difficult to manage. The original picture is a mimic,- an unreal life. But this unreal life is itself a real life with respect to the secondary picture; which again must be supposed realized with relation to the tertiary picture, if such a thing were attempted. Consequently, at every step of the in

trovolution (to neologize a little in a case justifying a neologism), something must be done to differentiate the gradations, and to express the subordinations of life; because each term in the descending series, being first of all a mode of non-reality to the spectator, is next to assume the functions of a real life in its relations to the next lower or interior term of the series.

What the painter does in order to produce this peculiar modification of appearances, so that an object shall affect us first of all as an idealized or unreal thing, and next as itself a sort of relation to some secondary object still more intensely unreal, we shall not attempt to describe; for in some technical points we should, perhaps, fail to satisfy the reader; and without technical explanations we could not satisfy the question. But, as to the poet, all the depths of philosophy (at least, of any known and recognized philosophy) would less avail to explain, speculatively, the principles which, in such a case, should guide him, than Shakspeare has explained by his practice. The problem before him was one of his own suggesting; the difficulty was of his own making. It was, so to differentiate a drama that it might stand within a drama, precisely as a painter places a picture within a picture; and therefore that the secondary or inner drama should be non-realized upon a scale that would throw, by comparison, a reflex coloring of reality upon the principal drama This was the problem,- this was the thing to be accomplished; and the secret, the law, of the process by which he accomplishes this is, to swell, tumefy, stiffen, not the diction only, but the tenor of

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