But for the seeming loss
the compensation is ample. These saints of literature descend from their
canopied remoteness to be even more precious as men like ourselves, our
companions in field and street, speaking the same tongue, though in many
dialects, and owning one creed under the most diverse masks of form.
Much of that merit of structure which is claimed for the ancient tragedy
is due, if I am not mistaken, to circumstances external to the drama
itself,--to custom, to convention, to the exigencies of the theatre. It
is formal rather than organic. The _Prometheus_ seems to me one of the
few Greek tragedies in which the whole creation has developed itself in
perfect proportion from one central germ of living conception. The motive
of the ancient drama is generally outside of it, while in the modern (at
least in the English) it is necessarily within. Goethe, in a thoughtful
essay,[132] written many years later than his famous criticism of Hamlet
in _Wilhelm Meister_, says that the distinction between the two is the
difference between _sollen_ and _wollen_, that is, between _must_ and
_would_. He means that in the Greek drama the catastrophe is foreordained
by an inexorable Destiny, while the element of Freewill, and consequently
of choice, is the very axis of the modern.
Pages:
261
262
263
264
265
266
267
268
269
270
271
272
273
274
275
276
277
278
279
280
281
282
283
284
285