THE ALBUM. No. V. ON ANCIENT AND MODERN TRAGEDY. THE consideration of ancient and modern writers, with reference to each other, is always a subject of great interest. It is satisfactory to trace the characteristic shades of difference in each class of authors, and to observe the gradual impression which literature has received from the discoveries of art, the researches of science, and the refinement of society. The difference of style between ancient and modern writers may be traced even in the complexion of their language. In the remote ages of literature, the images of descriptive writing are found to spring from observation of the works of nature, and from familiarity with the most simple and primitive employments. On the inspiring subject of war, the poets of that early day delight in comparisons with the savage fury of wild animals; while, in the more humble themes of domestic life, they invariably adduce the tilling of the ground and the labours of the distaff, to indicate the manly vigour of the husband, or the notable assiduity of his spouse. The style of modern writers is wholly of a different cast; their ideas and images are more artificial; they reject the simplicity of the Homeric age as unsuitable to the refinement of modern times, however becoming it might have been in the earliest stages of literature. That which was once natural, would now be deemed common-place; that which was formerly admired for simplicity, would now be censured for inelegance and barrenness. There is no kind of composition in which the ancients had made such progress as in dramatic writing. The poems of Homer are indeed a literary phænomenon ; but, considering the artificial character of the drama, its studied representation of nature, and intricate arrangement of plot, we are disposed to think the tragedies of the Greek stage no less admirable as works of genius, than the epic poetry of the first and greatest of bards. While the arts and sciences of our own age have to struggle with the overwhelming tide of opinion and prejudice; and even in their most prosperous course, to labour slowly and gradually through a series of years to ultimate excellence, the Drama seems to have started, like Minerva, at once into maturity, and to have braved those laws of progressive improvement by which the order of events is for the most part regulated. In the dramatic art, as in epic poetry, there seems to have been no mediocrity; nor do the plays of Eschylus appear more reconcileable with the rudeness of the age in which they were composed, than the poems of Homer. Nay, even less so; when we consider that in the time of Æschylus the drama had received not only the graces of language, but much also of lucid arrangement, and theatrical effect*. We are disposed to go still farther, and to inquire whether some of the plays of our own time so far excel * In the time of Thespis, the drama consisted of a recitation in verse, and a dialogue in strophe and anti-strophe. Eschylus, only fifty years afterwards, introduced a plot, a variety of characters, and appropriate scenery and decorations. In the time of Sophocles, twenty-two years after Eschylus, the drama had assumed nearly its present form. |