period here adverted to, that the drama had its birth;
and however a succeeding writer may have equalled or surpassed those
few great specimens of the Athenian drama which have been preserved to
us, it is indisputable that the art itself never was understood or
practised according to the true philosophy of it, as at Athens. For
the Athenians employed language, action, music, painting, the dance,
and religious institutions, to produce a common effect in the
representation of the highest idealisms of passion and of power; each
division in the art was made perfect in its kind by artists of the
most consummate skill, and was disciplined into a beautiful proportion
and unity one towards the other. On the modern stage a few only of the
elements capable of expressing the image of the poet's conception are
employed at once. We have tragedy without music and dancing; and music
and dancing without the highest impersonations of which they are the
fit accompaniment, and both without religion and solemnity. Religious
institution has indeed been usually banished from the stage. Our
system of divesting the actor's face of a mask, on which the many
expressions appropriated to his dramatic character might be moulded
into one permanent and unchanging expression, is favourable only to a
partial and inharmonious effect; it is fit for nothing but a
monologue, where all the attention may be directed to some great
master of ideal mimicry. The modern practice of blending comedy with
tragedy, though liable to great abuse in point of practice, is
undoubtedly an extension of the dramatic circle; but the comedy should
be as in _King Lear_, universal, ideal, and sublime. It is perhaps the
intervention of this principle which determines the balance in favour
of _King Lear_ against the _Oedipus Tyrannus_ or the _Agamemnon_, or,
if you will, the trilogies with which they are connected; unless the
intense power of the choral poetry, especially that of the latter,
should be considered as restoring the equilibrium. _King Lear_, if it
can sustain this comparison, may be judged to be the most perfect
specimen of the dramatic art existing in the world; in spite of the
narrow conditions to which the poet was subjected by the ignorance of
the philosophy of the drama which has prevailed in modern Europe.
Calderon, in his religious _Autos_, has attempted to fulfil some of
the high conditions of dramatic representation neglected by
Shakespeare; such as the estab