trange, of living in an imaginary world,
broke forth in a thousand ways; not merely in revelry and solemn
though fantastic songs, but in a hundred disguises, imitating the
subordinate beings--satyrs, pans, and nymphs, by whom the god was
surrounded, and through whom life seemed to pass from him into
vegetation, and branch off into a variety of beautiful or grotesque
forms--beings who were ever present to the fancy of the Greeks, as a
convenient step by which they could approach more nearly to the
presence of the Divinity." But even out of that seemingly bare
chaos, Athenian genius was learning how to construct, under Eupolis,
Cratinus, and Aristophanes, that elder school of comedy, which
remains not only unsurpassed, but unapproachable, save by Rabelais
alone, as the ideal cloudland of masquerading wisdom, in which the
whole universe goes mad--but with a subtle method in its madness.

Yes, so it has been, under some form or other, in every race and
clime--ever since Eve ate of the magic fruit, that she might be as a
god, knowing good and evil, and found, poor thing, as most have
since, that it was far easier and more pleasant to know the evil than
to know the good. But that theatre was built that men might know
therein the good as well as the evil. To learn the evil, indeed,
according to their light, and the sure vengeance of Ate and the
Furies which tracks up the evil-doer. But to learn also the good--
lessons of piety, patriotism, heroism, justice, mercy, self-
sacrifice, and all that comes out of the hearts of men and women not
dragged _below_, but raised _above_ themselves; and behind all--at
least in the nobler and earlier tragedies of AEschylus and Sophocles,
before Euripides had introduced the tragedy of mere human passion;
that sensation tragedy, which is the only one the world knows now,
and of which the world is growing rapidly tired--behind all, I say,
lessons of the awful and unfathomable mystery of human existence--of
unseen destiny; of that seemingly capricious distribution of weal and
woe, to which we can find no solution on this side the grave, for
which the old Greek could find no solution whatsoever.

Therefore there was a central object in the old Greek theatre, most
important to it, but which did not exist in the old Roman, and does
not exist in our theatres, because our tragedies, like the Roman, are
mere plays concerning love, murder, and so forth, while the Greek
were concerning the deepest