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period when Greeks imitated Greeks; namely, when the Alexandrian poets
began learnedly and critically to compose dramas after the model of
the great tragic writers. The reverse of this was the case with the
Romans; they received the form and substance of their dramas from the
Greeks; they never attempted to act according to their own discretion,
or to express their own way of thinking; and hence they occupy so
insignificant a place in the history of dramatic art. Among the
nations of modern Europe, the English and Spaniards alone (for the
German stage is but forming) possess as yet a theatre entirely
original and national, which, in its own peculiar shape, has
arrived at maturity.

[Illustration: #AUGUST WILHELM SCHLEGEL#]

Those critics who consider the authority of the ancients, as models,
to be such that in poetry, as in all the other arts, there can be no
safety out of the pale of imitation, affirm that, as the nations in
question have not followed this course, they have brought nothing but
irregular works on the stage, which, though they may possess
occasional passages of splendor and beauty, must yet, as a whole, be
forever reprobated as barbarous and wanting in form. We have already,
in the introductory part of these Lectures, stated our sentiments
generally on this way of thinking; but we must now examine the subject
somewhat more closely.

If the assertion be well founded, all that distinguishes the works of
the greatest English and Spanish dramatists, a Shakespeare and a
Calderon, must rank them far below the ancients; they could in no wise
be of importance for theory, and would at most appear remarkable, on
the assumption that the obstinacy of these nations in refusing to
comply with the rules may have afforded a more ample field to the
poets to display their native originality, though at the expense of
art. But even this assumption, on a closer examination, appears
extremely questionable. The poetic spirit requires to be limited, that
it may move with a becoming liberty within its proper precincts, as
has been felt by all nations on the first invention of metre; it must
act according to laws derivable from its own essence, otherwise its
strength will evaporate in boundless vacuity.

The works of genius cannot therefore be permitted to be without form;
but of this there is no danger. However, that we may answer this
objection of want of form, we must understand the exact meaning of the
term "form," si