Imágenes de páginas
PDF
EPUB

them in modern estimation, by investing them with the character of strollers:

Carried his vagrant players in a cart.

Horace says, his "poems;" though he adds, that they were sung by persons whose visages were smeared with wine-lees. It does not follow from this account that there was any reciprocity of declamation. One actor, it is most natural to suppose, in this dawn of the art, succeeded another, and a series of detached actions were represented in monologue by single performers. That nothing as yet approached to the interchange of sentiments by different actors at the same time, is evident from the testimony of Aristotle, who ascribes the addition of a second actor to Eschylus: he certainly means an interlocutor. Sophocles, he tells us, increased the number to three, and amplified the stage-decorations. Eschylus had first made the scene stationary, which in the time of Thespis was moveable, his theatre being supplied by a platform erected on a car. Comedy ran the same race; it might have had better models than the ribaldry of vintagers: it was preceded by the comic touches in the Iliad and Odyssey, and Homer's satire of Margites. Susarion, like Thespis, merely ingrafted action on satyric recitations. These were at first exhibited in the villages, and hence the title Comedy. Epicharmus reduced them to scenes, and did for comedy what Cherilus, Phrynicus, and Eschylus, had done for tragedy. His pieces were introduced on the Athenian stage by Pericles.

It must be obvious that if the first tragic essays were rude and vulgar, as they are uniformly described, the leap is too vast and too abrupt to the dignified and impassioned style, the faithful manners, the lofty invention, the serious and profound reflexion of Eschylus: nor can there be a doubt, that the same observation would apply to the remains of Epicharmus, did any such exist. The scenes which obtained the patronage of Pericles, and which heralded the caustic humour and grotesque fancy of Aristophanes, and the sense and delicacy of Menander, must have kept pace with those of the venerable refiner of tragedy.

As the learned blazoners of the superiority of the ancients seem to have considered the glory of Æschylus, as a poet, to be about equally balanced by his fame as a mechanist; and as the music and machinery of the Greek theatre are thought to divide the merit of its poetry,-it may be proper to say something on this head; and as, for myself, I venture to prefer the poetry, I shall reserve it as the last point for consideration.

The founders of tragedy seem unfortunately to have conceived that the known features of the actor would interfere with the truth of his personation. The lees of wine, it is most probable, were used as a disguise. The mask, adopted by Eschylus, must therefore have appeared a great improvement, and its advantages, with respect to fidelity of representation, were demonstrated in the facility with which the artists of the stage were enabled to copy the busts and coins (or, as in the case of Socrates, the living originals) of the characters presented on the scene: but what a poor substitute was this artificial portrait-modelling for the cruelty of Nero or the pride of Coriolanus, as expressed in the working features and fire-darting eye of Talma and Kemble! - Besides, the mask was of necessity accommodated to the reception of a mouth-piece, which was designed to reverberate the echo of the voice, and, we are told, to modulate or diversify its tones, by striking the lips and breath against a thicker or thinner plate of brass. Still, wheel within wheel of mechanism! The visage of Agamemnon or Ulysses, judged by the hideous frog-like masque of ancient sculpture, must have resembled, if it resembled any thing that bore an affinity to human, the famous head at Merlin's, into which the visitors were accustomed to shoot bullets for the amusing purpose of seeing this grim Saracenic physiognomy roll its eyes and gape with its jaws: signs of life and proofs of flexibility, in which unhappily the Grecian mask was deficient. It is contended, that owing to the vastness of the theatric area, the spectators could not have discerned the play of the natural features; and that, as the performances took place in open daylight, the lines of the face were not brought out in

such relief as they are by means of the false lights of the modern theatre. As an auxiliar proof we are reminded of the buskins which were necessary to raise the height of the actors in order to make them conspicuous at a distance. Others, however, take a bolder tone of defence in favour of the buskin; they tell us, that the heroes of old were supposed to have been of larger stature than their degenerate descendants, and that the being thus propped upon stilts was highly favourable to the maintaining a slow and solemn step becoming the state of tragedy. All, however, that can be said is, that the Greeks were ingenious in devising contrivances to obviate the fatal inconvenience of their enormous theatre: but we have reason to congratulate ourselves in possessing one of more limited dimensions. We may well rest satisfied with the art of making statues and puppets imitate men, and need not envy the art of the Greeks, in making men imitate statues and puppets.

The ancients never considered their dramas disconnectedly from the music. Cicero speaks of a tragedy as excellent, because equally pathetic in the argument, the diction, and the notes: rebus, verbis, et modis. The modern serious opera is the traditionary image of ancient tragedy. In what concerns the representation and the music, we can scarcely doubt that the copy exceeds the archetype. The wonders of Grecian music, like the wonders of Grecian painting, must be judged by reference to certain data, supplied by facts. "The remains of the ancient painting," observes Perrault, "discover great skill in drawing, great judgment in the ordering of the postures, much nobleness and majesty in the air of the heads; but little design, at the same time, in the mixing of the colours, and none at all, in the perspective or the placing of the figures. Their colouring is all equally strong: nothing comes forward, nothing falls back in their pictures; the figures are almost all upon a line; so that their paintings appear like pieces in basso relievo coloured; all dry and immoveable; without union, without connexion, and that living softness which dis

tinguishes pictures from statues in marble or copper." Sir William Temple affirms, that the "science of music, so admired by the ancients, is wholly lost in the world; and that what we have now is made up of certain notes that fell into the fancy of a poor friar in chanting his matins." But the probability is, that the music of the ancients bore the greater resemblance to the chant of the friar. Their diagramma is thought not to have substantially dif fered from the scale of Guido; but it is ascertained that they had not nearly so many gradations of halfnotes and quarter-notes between the whole ones; and as the greater the number of the notes, the more complex, and therefore the more varied, the combination, it is demonstrable that the ancient music was comparatively defective in harmony.

Of the compass or power of their instruments we know little or nothing. The lyre was subdivided into at least ten species, varying in their number of strings, from three to seven and eleven; these were played by striking them with a small rod, called, from the act of striking, plectrum. The gravest sounds, on a principle the reverse of the modern, were produced from the uppermost chords; and they gave the appellation of high to the deeper notes, and of low to the more acute. What was called the chelys resembled the guitar. The tripodion had three keys, and a vase at the top, which acted as a sounding-board.

Of their flutes, we know only that the auletes, or flute-players, breathed the instrument à bec as it is called; as we do the clarionet; and not traversely through a hole in the side, as with the German flute. The double flutes, or right and left, which were used in the Roman theatre, were blown in the same manner: the right flute was fingered by the right hand of the musician, the left by the left. It is singular that we mistranslate the syrinx and the aulos; for with us the pipe conveys the idea of a shrill and the flute of a soft sound: but it was the reverse with the Greeks. Their aulos, which we call a flute, was sharp; their syrinx, or pipe, full and mellow.

• The criticism may apply to the modern school of painting in his own nation.

Whatever were the merits of their music, we perceive in its application the same mechanical artificiality which pervades the whole of their scenic arrangements. There was one sort of melody to regulate the recitation or recitative, and another to time the action: surely the last must have possessed any but a free and natural effect. The Romans were in the habit of introducing two actors on the stage at once, to express one character: The mute gesticulated, and the declaimer was motionless. Seneca, in his 121st epistle (var. ed. tom. 2. 601.), admires good stage actors (scena peritos) for the readiness with which their hand accompanies every subject and affection, and the exactness with which the gesture keeps pace with the velocity of the words. Commentators wish to disturb the reading here; and for "scene peritos" substitute saltationis; supposing that the allusion is to pantomimic actors; as if they only expressed by their gestures the rapid meaning of words. But Seneca is evidently speaking of the match of time between gesture and speech, in the above division of scenic labour assigned to two actors, who represent between them one person. It is unlikely that he is speaking of one single actor, for the promptitude with which a declaimer suits the action to the word," is not a subject of any extraordinary admiration. Valerius Maximus (1. 2. c. 4.) makes mention of a player of the name of Livius Andronicus, who, finding himself exhausted by being repeatedly called back to repeat his speeches, brought a boy to declaim for him, and a flute player to time the recitation, while he himself supplied the gesture; and with this arrangement the audience appeared to have been exceedingly well satisfied.

If in our own theatres, in which nature is so far better imitated, we still find the appliances and appurtenances of the stage inadequate to the perfect embodying of the poet's conceptions; if, for instance, we retire dissatisfied and disappointed, not to say, disgusted, from the representation of Lear, the Tempest, and the

Winter's Tale, the causes of this unsatisfied feeling must have operated with accumulated force in reference to the mechanical stage of Greece. We need scarcely regret, that we can no longer hear the remonstrances of Electra howled through the orifice of a yawning mask, or see the actor of Agamemnon clamber on buskins, that we may wonder at the tallness of an old hero.

That the writers of tragedy have, from the oldest times, written with a view to the living personification of their characters, and relied on the plastic sensibility of the actor to give weight and pathos to their words and sentiments, does not impugn the principle of the poet's unapproachable superiority; of his proud independence of mechanism and mimickry. Yet the commentators on the ancient drama, and the critics of the modern, have invariably considered the poet with reference to the representation: have looked narrowly to the exits and entrances, calculated the congruities of place, and computed the credibility of the time consumed by the action. Quite as much glory, however, seems to have been attributed to Eschylus for his invention of the mask and buskin, as for his excitement of tragic emotion; and the language of Horace would ap pear to be intended in praise of the master of a puppet-show. The technicalities of the conduct of the fable, the exposition, the plot, and the dis covery, are watched and weighed as the symbol and the touchstone of dramatic excellence; and the French critics regard a departure from any one of the unities, as a betrayal of barbarous ignorance, or unskilfulness, which no mastery over the passions or the imagination can redeem. They remind us of the pitcritic in Sterne, minuting by a stopwatch the pauses in Garrick's soliloquy.

To the unity of time, the Greeks were not always attentive. They apparently thought, that the distrac tion occasioned by the intervention of the chorus would favour the illusion of an indefinite lapse of time, between the anticipation of an event and its

This, in the strict sense, exacts that the time of the action should be commensurate with that of the representation. Generally, it is defined by Aristotle to consist in the restriction of the action to the compass of a single day.

-consummation. Thus, in Euripides, we see Hippolitus leave the stage; the chorus laments his exile; and no sooner is the ode concluded, than a messenger returns to narrate the circumstances of the prince's death by a sea-monster, after having proceeded for some way on the road to Argos, and reached the desert that skirted the Saronic gulph. The unity of place exacted this sacrifice to its own immutable laws. Shak speare would at once have transported the spectators to the seashore. The Greeks have shown, in this and similar instances, that they were aware of the credulity of the imagination. They admitted, therefore, the principle of the rationality of making strict verisimilitude bend to poetic convenience. Had they been familiar with moveable scenes, this admission might have led to their acknowledgment of the utility which resulted from a change of place, which, instead of breaking the unity of the action, would, in fact, strengthen its coherency.

A strict regard, therefore, to the unity of place, induces a greater violation of dramatic probability than that which it is designed to obviate. It must inevitably happen, that the persons of the drama will often be unnaturally brought together, and collected in a spot where common sense would require that they should not meet. This is excellently shown by Dennis, in his remarks on the Cato of Addison, one of the best pieces of dramatic criticism in the English language. Another evil consequence is, the necessity of throwing many of the incidents of the story into dry narration; for dry it must unavoidably prove, as compared with representative action; and thus is reversed the maxim of Aristotle, which distinguishes the drama from the epopœa, by ascribing narration to the one, and imitation to the other. The only one of the three unities, which is of essential utility, and of paramount interest and importance, is then the unity of action; by which the events arise naturally out of each other (the episodes being not independent but auxiliar), and all concur to the disentanglement of the intrigue, or web of interposed difficulties, and the hastening of the final

catastrophe.

Macbeth and Othello are perfect instances of the unity of action, as are Agamemnon and Orestes among the Greeks.

In what the French call coups de théâtre, or striking scenic situations, no modern dramatist has excelled the Greeks. Witness the discovery of Phædra, suspended by her own hand, with the criminatory letter in her grasp, and that of Clytemnestra's corpse, by the removal of the veil, which Ægisthus supposed to conceal the dead body of Orestes. In the manners also, the lines of character by which the persons are discriminated from each other, we have the same truth and force of contrast, which affixes the stamp of individuality to the men and women of the "tale of Troy.”

The chorus was chosen from that class of persons, which might be supposed with greatest probability to be the bye-standers or spectators of the chief incidents in the story. They did not merely, as the vulgar notion is, relieve the business of the scene by the charms of music and singing, or point the moral of the passing events; they served as links in the action; they helped on the discovery by intimations and warnings; they prophecied, reproved, exhorted, expostulated, supplicated, and consoled; they took themselves an interest in the transactions represented, and might be said to be negative actors in the proceedings which they observed: occasionally also they assumed a more positive character, and ranked among the personages most affected by the occurrences of the drama. Whether as interlocutors or as lyrical soliloquists, the characters of the chorus intersperse, with their general subject, reflexions on the ways of Providence and the nature of man, which indicate, no less than the speculations of Pindar and Plato, that even in the heathen world the Deity had not "left himself without witness."

It may seem inconsistent to introduce the name of Plato, the enemy equally of heroical and dramatic poetry, and the particular censurer of schylus. But this hostility to the epopœa and the drama was grounded, in part, on a mistaken theory: his censure of the tragic poets is only so far just as it affects their

66

only to delight, but also to magnanimity and morality. Wherefore it may seem, and with reason too, to partake of a kind of divinity, because it, erects and exalts the spirit with high raptures, by proportioning the images of things to the desires of the mind; not by buckling and bowing the mind to the nature of things, as reason and history do: and by these allurements and congruities, whereby it soothes the soul of man, joined also with symphony of music, whereby it may more sweetly insinuate itself, it has made itself a way to esteem even in very rude times, and with barbarous nations, where other learning has stood wholly excluded.” De Augmentis Scientiarum, Lib. 2. c. 13.

The argument and the style are alike worthy of Plato, to whom the author stands opposed. The reasoning of the latter, however, as a religious philosopher, and as a legislator, is in some points irrefragably just, as it is eloquently impressive.

use of the popular theology. It is remarkable, that Solon also was -hostile to the recitations of Thespis. One ground assumed by Plato is, that the excitement of the passions, by means of tragic emotion, is unfavourable to equanimity. But the exclusion of sympathy and experience is not the true secret of moral education. Aristotle shows himself a more practical philosopher in his apparent assent to the usefulness of tragic poetry, as purifying the passions by means of pity and terror." If history be " philosophy teaching by example," tragedy may claim the same honour in a more emphatical sense; for, as Bacon remarks," representative poetry," by which he means dramatical, ❝is visible history;" and what he observes of "narrative, or heroical poetry," applies equally to the dramatical; that it seems to be raised from a most noble foundation, and which makes most for the dignity of man's nature. For the sensible world be ing inferior in dignity to the rational soul, this poetry seems to give to human nature what history denies it; and to satisfy the mind with shadows, at least, of things, where the sub-stance is unattainable. For if the matter be thoroughly considered, a strong argument may be drawn from poetry, that a more illustrious magnitude of things, a more perfect goodness, and a more beautiful variety pleases the soul of man, than what it can by any method find in mere nature since the fall. Wherefore, seeing the acts and events, which are the subject of true history, are not of that amplitude as to content the soul of man, poetry is ready at hand to feign acts greater and more heroical. Seeing that true history propounds the successes of actions in no wise proportionable to the merit of virtue and vice, poetry corrects it, and exhibits issues and fortunes more agreeable to desert, and more according to the law of Providence. Seeing that true history, by representing actions and events more ordinary, and less interchanged, satiates the mind of man, poetry cheers and refreshes the same; chanting things rare and unexpected, and full of alternated variations. So that poetry serves and contributes not

In objecting to the Homeric Gods warring against each other, he throws out an intimation not unworthy the notice of some, who, having the benefit of revelation, ascribe to their deity attributes and qualities, which, if imitated by their fellow-men, they would deprecate with horror. "This (says Plato), is no true example; if, at least, it becomes those who are to be guardians of the state, to think it the highest infamy that we should fall easily into enmity with each other.” For the same reason, he condemns the "decking out in attractive story the wars of heroes with their near kindred and neighbours; but, if by any means we can be persuaded that no citizen should ever be at enmity with another, and that this would not be holy, then such rather should be the subjects to be related to boys by the elders and aged women, and such the themes of which the poets should be compelled to treat." De Republicâ, lib. 2.

He argues forcibly on Eschylus imputing mendacity and perfidy to the God Apollo. "Such as God is," he observes, "so should he ever be represented, whether he be made the subject of epic verses or odes, or tragedy. Is not God good, and is he

1

« AnteriorContinuar »