attained. If the autos sacramentales of Calderon, with their abstract and allegorical personages, and their intense feelings of Roman Catholicism, would fail to awaken profound sympathy save in a devoutly religious people like the Spaniards of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries—a people among whom the average feelings and intelligence of men and women would give life even to such personages in the sacred spectacle—the mysteries of medieval England would be something worse than a farce in the England of to-day. Turn where we may, we shall meet the relativity of dramatic art wherever a drama of any description has been developed.
§ 11. But the critical as well as the creative spirit of the drama serves to illustrate that limitation of literary art which results from the development of social and individual character. Such an illustration, for example, is supplied by the three famous unities over which so much angry and dogmatic discussion has been expended. The unities of time, place, and action have been very differently understood and derived. A. W. Schlegel has been at some trouble to show that they are not found in the Poetics—at least in the form which French criticism had fathered upon Aristotle. Coleridge sees in them the results of the Greek chorus, the centre of the Athenian drama, not to be easily moved from place to place, or from time to time. Others have regarded them as resulting from the architectural arrangements of the Greek theatre. Every one knows how differently they have been discussed and valued in different ages of European literature. Victor Hugo, for example, tells us that if we imprison the drama in a classical unity of place, "we only see the elbows of the action; its hands are elsewhere."[1] Shall we reduce our dramatic time to twenty-
- ↑ Preface to Cromwell (p. 24).
