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India, and must not the historian exhibit the events on both stages alike in progress?

"The Unity of Time," continues Voltaire, "is naturally connected with the two first. If the poet represents a conspiracy, and extends the action to fourteen days, he must give me an account of all that passes in these fourteen days." Yes, of all that belongs to the matter in hand: but all the rest he passes by in silence, as every good story-teller would, and it never enters any one's head to wish to have such an account. "If therefore he sets before me the events of fourteen days, we have here fourteen different actions, however small they may be."-Truly, if the poet were so clumsy as to wind off the fourteen days, one after another, visibly, so that there shall be just that number of days and nights, and the people shall go to bed and get up again just that number of times. But he thrusts into the back-ground the intervals which are marked by no visible advance in the action, he annihilates in his picture all the pauses of absolute rest, and with a flying touch gives us an exact, or pretty nearly exact conception of the elapsed interval. But why is the privilege of assuming a wider interval between the two extremes of the play than the material time of representation, important to the dramatist, nay, in many subjects, indispensable? Voltaire's instance of a conspiracy is here quite in place. A conspiracy plotted and executed in two hours is, in the first place, a thing incredible. Moreover, in reference to the characters of the acting persons, such a plot is quite different from one in which the conceived purpose, however dangerous, is silently persevered in by all the persons for a considerable time. Though the poet does not actually admit this period into his exhibition, he gives us a sort of perspective view of it in the minds of the characters, as in a mirror. In this sort of perspective Shakspeare is the greatest master I know: a single word often opens to view an almost interminable vista of previous states of mind. The poet who is tied down to the narrow limits of time, is obliged, in many subjects, to mutilate the action by beginning close before the last decisive stroke, or else unbecomingly hurry on its progress: in either case, he is forced to reduce to petty dimensions the great picture of a violent resolve, which is no momentary ebul

lition, but a fixed will, invincibly upheld in the midst of all exterior vicissitude, until the time of its accomplishment is ripe. Thus cut down, it will no longer be what Shakspeare has so often represented, and what he has described in the following lines:

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
Are then in council, and the state of man,
Like to a little kingdom, suffers then

The nature of an insurrection.

But why is the practice of the Greek and of the Romantic Poets so different in respect of their treatment of time and place? The spirit of our criticism will not allow us to follow the example of many of our modern critics, and unceremoniously pronounce the latter to be barbarous. On the contrary, we hold that they lived in very cultivated times, and were themselves exceedingly cultivated men. Next to the structure of the ancient theatres, which naturally led to the apparent indifference of time, and fixity of scene, the practice was favoured by the nature of the materials on which the Greek dramatists had to work. These materials were mythology, which in itself was fiction, and the treatment of which, in the hands of preceding poets, had collected into continuous and perspicuous masses what, in reality, was broken and scattered about in various ways. Moreover the heroic age, which they depicted, was at once very simple in its manners and marvellous in its incidents, and thus every thing of its own accord went straight to the mark of a tragic decision.

But the principal cause of the difference lies in the plastic spirit of the antique, and the picturesque spirit of romantic poetry. Sculpture directs our attention exclusively to the group which it sets before us, it divests it as much as possible of all external circumstances, and where these cannot be dispensed with, they are indicated as slightly as possible. Painting, on the contrary, delights to exhibit not only the principal figures, but the detail of the surrounding scenery, and all secondary circumstances, and to open a prospect into a boundless distance in the background: light and shade and perspective are its peculiar charms. Hence in the Dramatic, and especially in the

Tragic Art of the ancients, the external circumstances of place and time are in some measure annihilated, while in the romantic drama their alternations serve to adorn its more varied pictures. Or, to express myself differently: the principle of the antique poetry is ideal, that of the romantic is mystical; the former subjects space and time to the internal free-agency of the mind, the latter honours these incomprehensible essences as supernatural powers, in which there is a somewhat of indwelling divinity.

PART III.

EXCERPTA CRITICA.

H H

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