Now I
conceive that any interloper into the Greek chorus must have danced when
_they_ danced, or he would have been swept away by their impetus:
_nolens volens_, he must have rode along with the orchestral charge,
he must have rode on the crest of the choral billows, or he would have
been rode down by their impassioned sweep. Samson, and Oedipus, and
others, must have danced, if they sang; and they certainly _did_ sing, by
notoriously intermingling in the choral business.[6]
'But now,' says the plain English reader, 'what was the object of all
these elaborate devices? And how came it that the English tragedy, which
surely is as good as the Greek,' (and at this point a devil of defiance
whispers to him, like the quarrelsome servant of the Capulets or the
Montagus, 'say _better_,') 'that the English tragedy contented itself
with fewer of these artful resources than the Athenian?' I reply, that the
object of all these things was--to unrealize the scene. The English drama,
by its metrical dress, and by other arts more disguised, unrealized
itself, liberated itself from the oppression of life in its ordinary
standards, up to a certain height. Why it did not rise still higher, and
why the Grecian _did_, I will endeavor to explain. It was not that the
English tragedy was less impassioned; on the contrary, it was far more
so; the Greek being awful rather than impassioned; but the passion of each
is in a different key.
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