crowning issues of one or more representative lives had to be summed up and manifested in a few scenes. And this must be done with completeness of effect. The struggle of man with fate must be displayed in its rise, its culmination, and its close. When in addition to this it was required that the action should seem literally continuous, so that the presence of the Chorus throughout should not be felt as improbable, the severity of requirement was extreme. The difficulty was met by choosing the most critical moment for representation; and in so far the imagination of the spectator was less exercised than when, as in Shakespeare, he is called upon to witness a series of actions more or less widely separated in time. The ancient drama is thus characterised by intense concentration. And this has the further advantage of helping proportion, and giving depth to the composition by a sort of perspective. The necessity for employing narrative spares the audience such incidental scenes as the blinding of Gloucester and the murder of Banquo on the stage.

The great size of the Dionysiac theatre, with the consequent use of the mask, speaking-tube, and buskin, may well seem at first sight to have constituted a serious impediment to naturalness in the ancient drama. But mechanical obstacles are the artist's opportunities. And while all these

causes conspired to maintain simplicity and to intensify concentration, it cannot be alleged that they betrayed the great tragic poets into offences against nature. Each seems to have been present in spirit, not in the theatre itself, but at the imagined scene; and, strange though it may appear, it is certainly true that a speech of Ajax or of Oedipus may be broken up and varied in declamation to a moderate-sized audience without any essential departure from the meaning of the poet, but rather with the effect of interpreting him more faithfully. Similarly, there are delicate shades and turns of feeling in Euripides to which the mask and speaking-tube cannot have given adequate effect. It is clear that some conventions were discounted, and that much was left to the imagination, including many of the horrors described as present in the scene.1 But where this is so, a great poet, instead of clipping the wings of his own fancy, rather indulges it the more. Witness the description of the English and French camps in Henry V., where the author was well aware that the representation on the stage would

much disgrace

With four or five most vile and ragged foils
The name of Agincourt.

There must always be some correlation between

1 Stapfer, Shakespeare et les Tragiques Grecs, p. 24.

"naturalness" and convention.1

Nor is it possible

for us now to ascertain with what approximate success Greek actors may have represented nature, though encumbered with the paraphernalia of their theatre. There will be an opportunity for returning to this subject in Chapter v.

Besides the attributes of simplicity and concentration, ancient tragedy is stamped with a degree of objectivity and outwardness which, on the whole, differentiates its creations from those of the modern drama, steeped as this so often is with the introspectiveness or self-reflectiveness that pervades the modern world. In a Shakespearian tragedy, while there is no loss of that reality of presentation which alone can convince or move an audience, there is not only a richness of content which sometimes veils from us the artistic harmony, but the work presupposes a higher degree of conscious self-analysis than had any place in ancient Greek art. The arena of conflict is no longer the family or the state, Olympus or the world at large, but is laid within a human soul. So Brutus says—

Between the acting of a dreadful thing
And the first motion, all the interim is
Like a phantasma or a hideous dream.

The Genius and the mortal instruments

1 The frequent soliloquies in Hamlet and Macbeth would have been censured as unnatural by an ancient critic.

Are then in council, and the state of man,
Like to a little kingdom, suffers then
The nature of an insurrection.

Some anticipation of this great change also is traceable in Euripides; but his reflection is apt to degenerate into sentimentalism, and his psychological analysis into sophistry.

Under all the differences between Shakespeare and the old tragedians there is an essential community. The unity of motive, which the simplicity of the ancient drama makes so manifest, is present also amidst the multifariousness of Shakespeare. It is more really observable in Macbeth or Hamlet than in the Andromache, Hercules Furens, Orestes, or many another play of Euripides. No scene in any of the English masterpieces is so manifestly foisted in for a merely mechanical purposé as the dialogue between the heroine and Aegeus in the Medea. And in one great point-the nature of the tragic hero and of the tragic life—the greatest works of Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Shakespeare are entirely at one.

As to the historical connection between Ancient and Modern which is sometimes assumed1-while it is certainly true that modern tragedy, like modern sculpture, sprang into life together with the revival of classical learning, it is not less

1 Wilson's Hindu Theatre, Introd. p. II; see Pollard's Miracle Plays, Introd.

certain that, in the advance from Titus Andronicus to Romeo and Juliet, and from Romeo and Juliet to Macbeth, Shakespeare was not guided by any study of Aeschylus and Sophocles, nor of "Seneca by candlelight," but by the genius of his art.

1 Ency. Brit. art. "Drama," p. 431 A. "In no respect is the progress of his technical skill more apparent—an assertion which the comparison of plays clearly ascribable to successive periods of his life would satisfactorily establish.”