"Oh, ma-I do feel so ill!" faintly exclaimed Miss Tag-rag, turning deadly pale. Titmouse was on the verge of dropping on his knees, and confessing the trick, greatly agitated at the effect produced on Miss Tagrag; when Tag-rag's heavy hand was suddenly placed on his shoulder, and he whispered in a fierce under tone -"You impostor!" and that stopped Titmouse, and made something like a MAN of him. He was a fearful fool, but he did not want for mere pluck, and now it was roused. Mrs Tag-rag exclaimed, "Oh, you shocking scamp!" as she passed Titmouse, and led her daughter out of the room. "If I'm an impostor, sir, I'm no fit company for you, I suppose, sir, said Titmouse, rising." "Pay me my five-pound note," almost shouted Tag-rag. "Well, sir, if I'm poor, I an't a rogue," said Titmouse, preparing to give him what he asked for; when a faint shriek was heard, plainly from Miss Tag-rag, overhead. Then the seething caldron boiled over. "You infernal scoundrel," said Tag-rag, almost choked with fury; and suddenly seizing Titmouse by the collar, scarce giving him time, in passing, to get hold of his hat and stick, he urged him along through the passage, down the gravel walk, threw open the gate, thrust him furiously through it, and sent after him such a blast of execration, as was enough to drive him a hundred yards down the road. Titmouse did not fully recover his breath or his senses for more than half an hour afterwards. When he did, the first thing that occurred to him was, an inclination to fall down on his knees on the open road, and worship the sagacious and admirable GAMMON. And now, Tittlebat Titmouse, for some little time, I have done with you. Away!-give room to your betters. But don't think that I have yet "rifled all your sweetness," or am about to "fling you like a noisome weed away." Edinburgh: Printed by Ballantyne and Hughes, Paul's Work. BLACKWOOD'S EDINBURGH MAGAZINE. No. CCXCII. FEBRUARY, 1840. VOL. XLVII. THEORY OF GREEK TRAGEDY. THE Greek tragedy is a great 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 civilisation. 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 for ever be sought in the same field-viz. 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, viz. 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 ground On swell 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, coloured 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. 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 comadia 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 * " The whole people were still draped professionally." For example, physicians never appeared without the insignia of their calling; clergymen would have incurred the worst suspicions had they gone into the streets without a gown and bands. Ladies, again, universally wore masks, as the sole substitute known to our ancestors for the modern parasol; a fact, perhaps, now first noticed. NO. CCXCII. VOL, XLVII. K comedy to fathom the coynesses of human nature, and to arrest the fleeting phenomena of human demeanour. 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 recognise 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 introvolution, (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 tech nical explanations we could not satisfy the question. But, as to the poetall the depths of philosophy, at least of any known and recognised 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 nonrealized upon a scale that would throw, by comparison, a reflex colouring 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 the thought; in fact, to stilt it, and to give it a prominence and an ambition beyond the scale which he adopted for his ordinary life. It is, of course, therefore in rhymean artifice which Shakspeare employs with great effect on other similar occasions, (that is, occasions when he wished to solemnize or in any way differentiate the life;) it is condensed and massed as respects the flowing of the thoughts; it is rough and horrent with figures in strong relief, like the embossed gold of an ancient vase: and the movement of the scene is contracted into short gyrations-so unlike the free sweep and expansion of his general developments. Now, the Grecian tragedy stands in the very same circumstances, and rises from the same original basis. If, therefore, the reader can obtain a glimpse of the life within a life, which the painter sometimes exhibits to the eye, and which the Hamlet of Shakspeare exhibits to the mind then he may apprehend the original phasis under which we contemplate the Greek tragedy. II. But, to press further into the centre of things, perhaps the very first element in the situation of the Grecian tragedy, which operated by degrees to evoke all the rest, was the original elevation of the scale by which all was to be measured, in consequence of two accidents-1st, the sanctity of the ceremonies in which tragedy arose; 2d, the vast size of the ancient theatres. tenance; hence the mechanism by which it was made to swell the intonations of the voice like the brazen tubes of an organ. Here, then, you have a tragedy, by its very origin, in mere virtue of the accidents out of which it arose, standing upon the inspiration of religious feeling; pointing, like the spires of our English parish churches, up to heaven by mere necessity of its earliest purpose, from which it could not alter or swerve per saltum; so that an influence once there, was always there. Even from that cause, therefore, you have a tragedy ultra-human and Titanic. But next, from political causes falling in with that early religious cause, you have a tragedy forced into a more absolute and unalterable departure from a human standard. That figure so noble, that voice so profound, and, by the very construction of the theatres as well as of the masks, receiving such solemn reverberations, proclaim a being elevated above the ordinary human scale. And then comes the countenance always adjusted to the same unvarying tone of sentiment, viz. the presiding sentiment of the situation, which of itself would go far to recover the key-note of Greek tragedy. These things being given, we begin to perceive a life removed by a great gulf from the ordinary human life even of kings and heroes: we descry a life within a life. The first point we need not dwell on: every body is aware that tragedy in Greece grew by gradual expansions out of an idolatrous rite-out of sacrificial pomp: though we do not find any body who has noticed the consequent overruling effect which this had upon the quality of that tragedy: how, in fact, from this early cradle of tragedy, arose a sanctity which compelled all things to modulate into the same religious key. But next, the theatres why were they so vast in ancient cities, in Athens, in Syracuse, in Capua, in Rome? Purely from democratic influences. Every citizen was entitled to a place at the public scenical representations. In Athens, for example, the state paid for him. He was present, by possibility and by legal fiction, at every performance; therefore, room must be prepared for him. And, allowing for the privileged foreigners, (the domiciled aliens called μετοικοι,) we are not surprised to hear that the Athenian theatre was adapted to an audience of thirty thousand persons. It is not enough to say naturally inevitably out of this prodigious compass, exactly ten times over the compass of the large Drury-Lane burned down a generation ago, arose certain immediate results that moulded the Greek tragedy in all its functions, purposes, and phenomena. The person must be aggrandized, the countenance must be idealized. For upon any stage corresponding in its scale to the colossal dimensions of such a house, the unassisted human figure would have been lost; the unexaggerated human features would have been seen as in a remote perspective, and besides, have had their expression lost; the unreverberated human voice would have been undistinguishable from the surrounding murmurs of the audience. tor; hehe cothurnus to raise robes to Hence the coth raise the ac- the spectator, however near its phan hide the disproportion thus resulting III. Here, therefore, is the first great landing-place, the first station, from which we can contemplate the Greek tragedy with advantage. It is, by comparison with the life of Shakspeare, what the inner life of the mimetic play in Hamlet is to the outer life of the Hamlet itself. It is a life below a life. That is it is a life treated upon a scale so sensibly different from the proper life of the spectator, as to impress him profoundly with the feeling of its idealization. Shakspeare's tragic life is our own life exalted and selected: the Greek tragic life presupposed another life, fore it. The tragedy was projected upon the eye from a vast profundity in the rear: and between this life and the spectator's, thrown into relief be tasmagoria might advance to him, was still an immeasurable gulf of to the figure; hence the mask shadows.. Hence, coming nearer still to the determinate nature and circumscrip tion of the Greek tragedy, it was not in any sense a development-1. Of human character; or, 2. Of human passion. Either of these objects, attributed to tragedy, at once inoculates it with a life essentially on the common human standard. But that neither was so much as dreamed of, in the Grecian tragedy, is evident from the mere mechanism and ordinary conduct of those dramas which survive; those especially which seem entitled to be viewed as fair models of the common standard. About a thousand lines, of which one-fifth must be deducted for the business of the chorus, may be taken as the average extent of a Greek tragic drama. Five acts, of one hundred and sixty lines each, allow no sweep at all for the systole and diastole, the contraction and expansion, the knot and the dénoue ment, of a tragic interest, according to our modern meaning. The ebb and flow, the inspiration and expiration, cannot find room to play in such a narrow scene. Were the interest made to turn at all upon the evolution of character, or of passion modified by character, and both growing upon the reader through various aspects of dialogue, of soliloquy, and of multiplied action-it would seem a storm in a wash-hand basin. A passion which advanced and precipitated itself through such rapid harlequin changes, would at best impress us with the feeling proper to a hasty melodrame, or perhaps serious pantomime. It would read like the imperfect outline of a play; or, still worse, would seem framed to move through such changes as might raise an excuse for the dancing and the lyric music. But the very external phenomena, the apparatus and scenic decorations of the Greek tragedy, all point to other functions. Shakspearethat is, English tragedy-postulates the intense life of flesh and blood, of animal sensibility, of man and woman-breathing, waking, stirring, palpitating with the pulses of hope and fear. In Greek tragedy, the very masks show the utter impossibility of these tempests or conflicts. Struggle there is none, internal or external: not like Hamlet's with his own constitutional inertia, and his gloomy irresolution of conscience; not like Macbeth's with his better feeling as a man, with his generosity as a host. Medea, the most tragic figure in the Greek scene, passes through no flux and reflux of passion, through no convulsions of jealousy on the one hand, or maternal love on the other. She is tossed to and fro by no hurricanes of wrath, wrenched by no pangs of anticipation. All that is supposed to have passed out of the spectator's presence. The dire conflict no more exhibits itself scenically and 'coram populo,' than the murder of her two innocent children. Were it possible that it should, how could the mask be justified? The apparatus of the stage would lose all decorum; and Grecian taste, or sense of the appropriate, which much outran the strength of Grecian creative power, would have been exposed to perpetual shocks. IV. The truth is now becoming palpable: certain great situations not passion in states of growth, of movement, of self-conflict-but fixed, unmoving situations were selected; these held on through the entire course of one or more acts. A lyric movement of the chorus, which closed the act, and gave notice that it was closed, sometimes changed this situation; but throughout the act it continued unchanged, like a statuesque attitude. The story of the tragedy was pretty nearly involved and told by implication in the tableaux vivans which presided through the several The very slight dialogue which goes on, seems meant rather as an additional exposition of the interest-a commentary on the attitude originally assumed than as any exhibition of passions growing and kindling under the eye of the spectator. The mask, with its monotonous expression, is not out of harmony with the scene ; for the passion is essentially fixed throughout, not mantling and undulating with the breath of change, but frozen into marble life. acts. And all this is both explicable in itself, and peremptorily determined, by the sort of idealized life-life in a state of remotion, unrealized, and translated into a neutral world of high cloudy antiquity - which the tragedy of Athens demanded for its atmosphere. Had the Greeks, in fact, framed to themselves the idea of a tumultuous passion-passion expressing itself by the agitations of fluctuating will, as any fit, or even possible, subject for scenic treatment; in that case they must have resorted to real life, the more real the better. Or, again, had real life offered to their conceptions a just field for |