FEELINGS.-NATIONAL CHARACTER.-ERA IN NATIONAL

WHAT was the origin of the Grecian drama? and how came it to attain to such perfection in Greece alone out of the whole ancient world, and in Athens alone among all the states of Greece? What was it in its earliest stage of existence? By what steps was it fostered and developed into maturity? What was its true meaning and spirit? what its influence upon that nation by which it was so tenderly nurtured? What, in a word, is the history of its rise and decay? These are subjects of deep and living interest alike to the historian, the philosopher, and the poet; and it is to questions such as these that we purpose to give some answer in the following pages. First, then, as to its origin. It is at once clear

that we cannot for one moment admit, with Hase and other writers, that the mere "love of amusement and spectacle" is a principle of sufficient depth and strength to have given birth to the Grecian drama. The same, too, may be said of that innate "love of imitation "t to which so many phi losophical minds, from Plato ‡ down to Copleston § in our own day, have been content to refer it. Nor, again, even if we take a wider view of the term μíμnois, and consider it as equivalent to the "love of expression" in its broadest sense, as Aristotle || and almost all other authors have done, can we think that an adequate solution is furnished to our question. So neither can we assent to those who would regard the ancient drama as devised for the special purpose of "moulding the national mind to religion and morality, by purifying and elevating the passions, to which it appeals so forcibly, or who,

*Hase's Ancient Greeks, ch. xx.

"If a love of imitation and a delight in disguising the real person under a mask were the basis upon which this style of poetry was raised, the drama would have been as natural and as universal among men as these qualities are common to their nature.". Müller, Lit. of Gr., ch. xxi.

Plato, Rep. iii. p. 273.

....

§ Prælect. Academ., iv.

| Poet, ch. i.: ἐποποιΐα δὴ καὶ ἡ τῆς τραγῳδίας ποίησις, ἔτι δὲ κωμῳδία καὶ διθυραμβοποιητική . πᾶσαι τυγχάνουσιν οὖσαι μιμήσεις τὸ σύνολον. What Aristotle meant by the word μuhoes here, will be best understood by comparing the expression in chap. xxiii., περὶ μὲν οὖν τῆς τραγῳδίας καὶ τῆς ἐν τῷ πράττειν μιμήσεως. The term Meola, in this sense, is correctly rendered by the annotators "imitando exprimere." Donaldson, however, understands the term as equivalent to fiction as opposed to actual facts. Compare Twining's Dissertation, pp. 27. 37.

with Schlegel, would resolve it into "a feeling of the dignity of human nature excited by the fortunes of the great models exhibited to us," or to our ability "to trace a higher order of things impressed upon the ordinary current of events and secretly revealed in them." Still less can it be held that a mere "love of strong emotions excited in the breast" is an adequate cause of tragic pleasure.”

It is clear, to those who know anything of the human heart and human passions, and have also studied the religious character of ancient Greece, that it is to some far more primary and elementary principle of man's moral nature that we must look, if we would find that which in reality gave life and being to the drama of the Greeks.

The truth, then, is that, as in fact no historical origin can be assigned to the drama in ancient times, we are forced to refer it to some inherent principle of the human mind. The reader will already have anticipated our meaning, when we say that it is the religion of ancient Greece, as modified by the constitutional tendencies of the national and especially the Athenian mind, which furnishes the only satisfactory answer to our inquiry.

The prominent feature of religion, as it appears in the earliest period of a nation's existence, is, as Wachsmüth calls it, a "striving after objectivity,"a restless desire to portray the abstract and unseen

See M'Dermott's "Philosophical Enquiry into the Source of Pleasure derived from Tragic Representations," 1824.

in concrete and visible shapes and forms. Now this strong principle is especially characteristic of the more rude and uneducated ages of both national and individual existence. And the first idea which powerfully seizes upon the mind at such periods, is the idea of Deity, as recognised in his attributes of power, goodness, and wisdom, and in the outward manifestations of the natural world.

Now, if this, as a matter of fact, be true of nations in general, it will be found to hold good in a still more striking degree of the Hellenic nation. From the earliest times their "singular impatience of pure thought," their love of marvel and of fiction, together with their lofty aspirations after the beautiful and the true, and the keenness of their religious susceptibilities, have marked out their race from the rest of mankind as religious and poetical in the very highest degree. Their intense love of the fine arts lent a very powerful assistance to their efforts to realise the unseen world; and from being thus connected with the all-absorbing theme of religion, the fine arts, in their turn, received an impetus in Greece which was unknown elsewhere. To the religious principle, then, is to be ascribed the early progress which was made by them in poetry, in painting, in architecture, and in music, as being so many obvious methods in which their yearning after the unseen Deity found its natural outward expression. Here, then, in that same principle

* Donaldson's Theatre of Greeks, ch. i.