music to the passion of the heart, the idea embodied in
lyric verse, the verse transfigured by song, and song and verse
reflected as in a mirror to the eye by the swing and beat of the limbs
they stirred to consonance of motion. And while such was the character
of the odes that broke the action of the play, the action itself was an
appeal not less to the ear and to the eye than to the passion and the
intellect. The circumstances of the representation, the huge auditorium
in the open air, lent themselves less to "acting" in our sense of the
term, than to attitude and declamation. The actors raised on high boots
above their natural height, their faces hidden in masks and their tones
mechanically magnified, must have relied for their effects not upon
facial play, or rapid and subtle variations of voice and gesture, but
upon a certain statuesque beauty of pose, and a chanting intonation of
that majestic iambic verse whose measure would have been obscured by a
rapid and conversational delivery. The representation would thus become
moving sculpture to the eye, and to the ear, as it were, a sleep of
music between the intenser interludes of the chorus; and the spectator
without being drawn away by an imitative realism from the calm of
impassioned contemplation into the fever and fret of a veritable actor
on the scene, received an impression based throughout on that clear
intellectual foundation, that almost prosaic lucidity of sentiment and
plot, which is preserved to us in the written text, but raised by the
accompanying appeal to the sense, made as it must have been made by such
artists as the Greeks, by the grouping of forms and colours, the
recitative, the dance and the song, to such a greatness and height of
aesthetic significance as can hardly have been realised by any other
form of art production.

The nearest modern analogy to what the ancient drama must have been is
to be found probably in the operas of Wagner, who indeed was strongly
influenced by the tragedy of the Greeks. It was his ideal like theirs,
to combine the various branches of art, employing not only music but
poetry, sculpture, painting and the dance, for the representation of his
dramatic theme; and his conception also to make art the interpreter of
life, reflecting in a national drama the national consciousness, the
highest action and the deepest passion and thought of the German race.
To consider how far in this attempt he falls short of or goes beyond t