higher faculties and emotions. And as serious subjects were to
be expressed in verse and music, which gave stateliness, doubtless,
even to the richest burlesques of Aristophanes, and lifted them out
of mere street-buffoonery into an ideal fairyland of the grotesque,
how much more stateliness must verse and music have added to their
tragedy! And how much have we lost, toward a true appreciation of
their dramatic art, by losing almost utterly not only the laws of
their melody and harmony, but even the true metric time of their
odes!--music and metre, which must have surely been as noble as their
poetry, their sculpture, their architecture, possessed by the same
exquisite sense of form and of proportion. One thing we can
understand--how this musical form of the drama, which still remains
to us in lower shapes, in the oratorio, in the opera, must have
helped to raise their tragedies into that ideal sphere in which they
all, like the "Antigone," live and move. So ideal and yet so human;
nay rather, truly ideal, because truly human. The gods, the heroes,
the kings, the princesses of Greek tragedy were dear to the hearts of
Greek republicans, not merely as the founders of their states, not
merely as the tutelary deities, many of them, of their country: but
as men and women like themselves, only more vast; with mightier
wills, mightier virtues, mightier sorrows, and often mightier crimes;
their inward free-will battling, as Schlegel has well seen, against
outward circumstance and overruling fate, as every man should battle,
unless he sink to be a brute. "In tragedy," says Schlegel--uttering
thus a deep and momentous truth--"the gods themselves either come
forward as the servants of destiny and mediate executors of its
decrees, or approve themselves godlike only by asserting their
liberty of action and entering upon the same struggles with fate
which man himself has to encounter." And I believe this, that this
Greek tragedy, with its godlike men and manlike gods, and heroes who
had become gods by the very vastness of their humanity, was a
preparation, and it may be a necessary preparation, for the true
Christian faith in a Son of Man, who is at once utterly human and
utterly divine. That man is made in the likeness of God--is the root
idea, only half-conscious, only half-expressed, but instinctive,
without which neither the Greek Tragedies nor the Homeric Poems, six
hundred years before them, could have been composed. D