should have drawn those who heard the tale nearer to, or
further from, a certain cross which stood on Calvary some 1800 years ago?
May not the tale of Antigone heard from mother or from nurse have nerved
ere now some martyr-maiden to dare and suffer in an even holier cause?

But to return. This set purpose of the Athenian dramatists of the best
school to set before men a magnified humanity, explains much in their
dramas which seem to us at first not only strange but faulty. The masks
which gave one grand but unvarying type of countenance to each well-known
historic personage, and thus excluded the play of feature, animated
gesture, and almost all which we now consider as 'acting' proper; the
thicksoled cothurni which gave the actor a more than human stature; the
poverty (according to our notions) of the scenery, which usually
represented merely the front of a palace or other public place, and was
often though not always unchanged during the whole performance; the total
absence in fact, of anything like that scenic illusion which most
managers of theatres seem now to consider as their highest achievement;
the small number of the actors, two, or at most three only, being present
on the stage at once,--the simplicity of the action, in which intrigue
(in the play-house sense) and any complication of plot are utterly
absent; all this must have concentrated not the eye of the spectator on
the scene, but his ear upon the voice, and his emotions on the personages
who stood out before him without a background, sharp-cut and clear as a
group of statuary which is the same, place it where you will, complete in
itself--a world of beauty, independent of all other things and beings
save on the ground on which it needs must stand. It was the personage
rather than his surroundings, which was to be impressed by every word on
the spectator's heart and intellect; and the very essence of Greek
tragedy is expressed in the still famous words of Medea--

Che resta? Io.

Contrast this with the European drama--especially with the highest form
of it--our own Elizabethan. It resembles, as has been often said in
better words than mine, not statuary but painting. These dramas affect
colour, light, and shadow, background whether of town or country,
description of scenery where scenic machinery is inadequate, all in fact,
which can blend the action and the actors with the surrounding
circumstances, without letting them altogether melt into