r.
The case was this: Peculiar embarrassments had arisen to the Athenian
dramatists as to time and place, from the chorus--out of which chorus
had grown the whole drama. The chorus, composed generally of men or
women, could not be moved from Susa to Memphis or from one year to
another, as might the spectator. This was a fetter, but, with the
address of great artists, they had turned their fetters into occasions
of ornament. But, in this act of beautifying their narrow field, they
had done nothing to enlarge it. They had submitted gracefully to what,
for _them_, was a religious necessity. But it was ridiculous that modern
dramatists, under no such necessity (because clogged with no inheritance
of a personal chorus), should voluntarily assume fetters which, having
no ceremonial and hallowed call for a chorus, could have no meaning. So
far Coleridge was kept right by his own sagacity and by his German
guides; but a very trifle of further communication with Voltaire, and
with the writers of whom Voltaire was speaking, would have introduced
him to two facts calculated a little to raise Voltaire in his esteem,
and very much to lower the only French writer (viz., Racine) whom he
ever thought fit to praise. With regard to Voltaire himself he would
have found that, so far from exalting the French poetic literature
_generally_ in proportion to that monstrous pre-eminence which he had
claimed for the French drama, on the contrary, from this very drama,
from the very pre-eminence, he drew an argument for the general
inferiority of the French poetry. The French drama, he argued, was
confessedly exalted amongst the French themselves beyond any other
section of their literature. But why? Why was this? If the drama had
prospered disproportionately under public favour, what caused that
favour? It was, said Voltaire, the social nature of the French, with
their consequent interest in whatever assumed the attire of conversation
or dialogue; and, secondly, it was the peculiar strength of their
language in that one function, which had been nursed and ripened by
this preponderance of social habits. Hence it happened that the drama
obtained at one and the same time a greater _interest_ for the French,
and also (by means of this culture given to conversational forms) most
unhappily for his lordship's critical discernment of flavours, as well
as his Greek literature, happens to be a respectable Joe Miller from the
era of Hierocles, and through _h