when in that terrible speech of hers she justifies her crime
(ostensibly to the outer world, but really to her own conscience),
the way in which, by the sheer magnetism of irresistible personality,
she draws our sympathy to herself and her crime is unrivalled
out of Shakespeare and not surpassed even there. In
the Great Drama, in the A gamemnon, in Othello, in Hamlet, in
Macbeth, there is an imagination at work whose laws are inexorable,
are inevitable, as the laws by the operation of which the
planets move around the sun. But in this essay our business
with drama is confined entirely to its relations to epic.
Considering how large and on the whole how good is the body
of modern criticism upon drama, it is surprising how poor is
Ep;¢, ,,4 the modern criticism upon epic. Aristotle, compar-Drama
ing tragedy with epic, gives the palm to tragedy
C°'""“"°"' as being the more perfect art, and nothing can be
more ingenious than the way in which he has marshal led his
reasons. He tells us that tragedy as well as epic is capable
of producing its effect even without action; we can judge of
it perfectly, says he, by reading. He goes so far as to say
that, even in reading as well as in representation, tragedy has
an advantage over the epic, the advantage of greater clearness
and distinctness of impression. And in some measure this was
perhaps true of Greek tragedy, for as Muller in his Dissertations
on the Eumenides has well said, the ancients always remained
and wished to remain conscious that the whole was a Dionysian
entertainment; the quest of a commonplace d1r6.m came afterwards
And even of Romantic Drama it may be said that in
the time of Shakespeare, and indeed down through the 18th
century, it never lost entirely its character of a recitation as well
as a drama. It was not till melodrama began to be recognized
as a legitimate form of dramatic art that the dialogue had to be
struck from the dramatic action “ at full speed ”-struck like
sparks from the roadster's shoes. The truth is, however, that
it was idle for Aristotle to inquire which is the more important
branch of poetry, epic or tragedy. Equally idle would it be
for the modern critic to inquire how much romantic drama
gained and how much it lost by abandoning the chorus.
Much has been said as to the scope and the limits of epic and
dramatic poetry. If in epic the poet has the power to take the
imagination of his audience away from the dramatic centre and
show what is going on at the other end of the great web of the
world, he can do the same thing in drama by the chorus, and
also by the introduction into the dramatic circle of messengers
and others from the outside world. But, as regards epic poetry,
is it right that we should hear, as we sometimes do hear, the voice
of the poet himself as chorus bidding us contrast the present
picture with other pictures afar od, in order to enforce its teaching
and illustrate its pathos? This is a favourite method with
modern poets and a still more favourite one with prose narrators.
Does it not give an air of self-consciousness to poetry? Does
it not disturb the intensity of the poetic vision? Yet it has
the sanction of Homer, and who shall dare to challenge the
methods of the great father of epic? An instance occurs in
Ilzad v 158, where, in the midst of all the stress of fight, the poet
leaves the dramatic action to tell us what became of the inheritance
of Phaenops, after his two sons had been slain by
Diomedes Another instance occurs in iii 243- 244, where the
poet, after Helen's pathetic mention of her brothers, comments
on the causes of their absence, “ criticizes life ” in the approved
modern way, generalizes upon the impotence of human intelligence-the
impotence even of human love—to pierce the darkness
in which the web of human fate is woven. Thus she spoke
(the poet tells us); but the life-giving earth already possessed
them, there in Lacedaemon, in their dear native land '-5:5
¢6.'ro' 'rails 5' 557] Kzirexev d>vol§ 'aos aio.
év AaKe5ai/.Lol/L a.l., d>Dp iv 7|'0.T/DLEL 'yai[;.
This, of course, is “beautiful exceedingly, ” but, inasmuch as
the imagination at work is egoistic or lyrical, not dramatic, inasmuch
as the vision is relative, not absolute, it does not represent
that epic strength at its very highest which we call specially
“ Homeric, ” unless indeed we remember that with Homer the
Muses are omniscient: this certainly may give the passage a
deep dramatic value it otherwise seems to lack.
The deepest of all the distinctions between dramatic and epic
methods has relation, however, to the nature of the dialogue.
Aristotle failed to point it out, and this is remarkable until we
remember that his work is but a fragment of a great system of
criticism. In epic poetry, and in all poetry that narrates,
whether the poet be Homer, Chaucer, Thomas the Rhymer,
Gottfried von Strasburg, or Turoldus, the action, of course,
moved by aid partly of narrative and partly by aid of dialogue,
but in drama the dialogue has a quality of suggestiveness and
subtle inference which we do not expect to find in any other
poetic form save perhaps that of the purely dramatic ballad.
In ancient drama this quality of suggestiveness and subtle
inference is seen not only in the dialogue, but in the choral odes.
The third ode of the Agamemnon is an extreme case in point,
where, by a kind of double entendre, the relations of Clytaemnestra
and Aegisthus are darkly alluded to under cover of allusions
to Paris and Helen. Of this dramatic subtlety Sophocles is
perhaps the greatest master; and certain critics have been led
to speak as though irony were heart-thought of Sophoclean
drama. But the suggestiveness of Sophocles is pathetic (as
Professor Lewis Campbell has well pointed out), not ironical.
This is one reason why drama more than epic seems to satisfy the
mere intellect of the reader, though this may be counterbalanced
by the hardness of mechanical structure which sometimes disturbs
the reader's imagination in tragedy.
When, for instance, a dramatist pays so much attention to the evolution of the plot as Sophocles does, it is inevitable that his characters should be more or less plot-ridden; they have to say and do now and then certain things which they would not say and do but for the exigencies of the plot. Indeed one of the advantage/s which epic certainly has over drama is that the story can be made to move as rapidly as the poet may desire without these mechanical modifications of character. The only kind of epic for Aristotle to consider was Greek epic, between which and all other epic the difference is one of kind, if the Itzad alone is taken to represent Greek epic. Th 0 k In speaking of the effect that surrounding conditions f 'ee seem to have upon the form in which the poetic energy EP ° of any time or country should express itself, we instanced the Ilzad as a typical case. The imagination vivifyin it is mainly dramatic. The characters represent much more than the mere variety of mood of the delineator. Notwithstanding all the splendid woiks of Calderon, Marlowe, Webster and Goethe, it is doubtful whether as a born dramatist the poet of the Itzad does not come nearer to Aeschylus and Shakespeare than does an other poet. His passion for making the heroes speak for themseii/es is almost a fault in the Ilmd considered as pure epic, and the unconscious way in which each actor is made to depict his own character is in the highest spirit of drama It is owing to this special it of the Ilzad that it stands apart from all other epic save that of] the Odyssey, where however, the dramatic vision is less vivid. It is owing to the dramatic imagination dis layed in the Ilzad that it is impossible to say, from internal evidence, whether the poem is to be classified with the epics of growth or with the epics of art. All epics are clearl divisible into two classes, first those which are a mere accretion ofy poems or traditionary ballads, and second, those which, though based indeed on tradition or history, have become so fused in the mind of one great poet, so stained, therefore, with the colour and temper of that mind, as to become new cr stallizations-inventions, in short, as we understand that wordl Each
kind of epic has excellencies peculiar to itself, accompanied by peculiar and indeed necessary defects. In the one we get the freedom-apparently scheme less and motiveless-of nature, but, as a consequence, miss that “hard acorn of thought” (to use the picturesque definition in the Volsunga Saga of the heart of a man) which the mind asks for as the core of every work of art. In the other this great requisite of an adequate central thou ht is found, but accompanied by a constriction, a lack of freedom, a cold artificiality, the obtrusion of a pedantic scheme, which would be intolerable to the natural mind unsophisticated by literary study. The flow of the one is as that of a river, the How of the other as that of a canal Yet, as has been already hinted, though the great charm of Nature herself is that she never teases us with any obtrusive exhibitions of scheme, she doubtless has a scheme somewhere, she does somewhere hide a “ hard acorn of thought ” of which the poem of the universe is the expanded expression. And, this bein so, art should have a scheme too; but in such a dilemma is she paced in this matter that the epic poet, unless he is evidently telling the
