Comparative Literature/Book 3/Chapter 3

by Hutcheson Macaulay Posnett

CHAPTER III.

POETRY OF THE CITY COMMONWEALTH.

§ 53. The peculiar poetic production of the city is the dramatic spectacle, whether in the rude shape of such plays as those of Hans Sachs or in the exquisite symmetry of Sophocles' Antigone. We do not, of course, mean to maintain either that all cities, if left to their own literary evolution, will of necessity produce a drama, or that no social conditions save those of city life have produced this form of literature. The Indian, Chinese, and Japanese dramas show the weakness of any such general assertions; and wherever an audience can be gathered together, to a passion-play like the Persian or a court-play like the Japanese, we may be sure that religion or royalty will supply the place of the city audience to a certain extent. But the religious or courtly spectacle cannot be regarded as a perfect substitute for the city drama. It is in the organisation of city life that the greatest variety of human character within the smallest space is produced; and this variety of human types allows dramatic analysis of character its fullest scope. Accordingly, the most admirable specimens of dramatic art have been the work of cities, from the Athens of Pericles to the London of Elizabeth and the Paris of Louis Quatorze. We are, however, at present concerned, not with the drama of national capitals, but only with that of the city as a self-developed community—the city commonwealth. In the drama of the city commonwealth we may not meet certain interesting features of the Chinese and Indian theatres—the prominence of physical nature, for example. In the same drama we may not find such a variety of character as in that of a national capital like Elizabethan London. But in the narrow range of the city commonwealth we shall perhaps be able to trace the effects of social evolution on the form and spirit of the dramatic spectacle with greater clearness than in the complicated life of modern nations, or the comparatively motionless society of India and China.

Still it must not be supposed that the dramas of the East are altogether unlike that of Athens. The singing-character of the Chinese theatre, for example, reminds us in some respects of the Athenian chorus, only that (like Shakspere's use of the chorus) an individual actor here takes the place of the Athenian group. Indeed, the lyrical drama of Japan presents so many likenesses to the Athenian that we shall here quote Mr. Basil Hall Chamberlain's description of the origin and form of this Eastern theatre.

"Towards the end of the fourteenth century," says Mr. Chamberlain,^[1] "in the hands of the Buddhist priesthood, who during that troublous period had become almost the sole repositories of taste and learning, arose the lyric drama, at first but an adaptation of the old religious dances, the choric songs accompanying which were expanded and improved. The next step was the introduction of individual personages which led to the adoption of a dramatic unity in the plot, though the supreme importance still assigned to the chorus left to the performance its mainly lyric character till, at a somewhat later period, the theatrical tendency became supreme and the romantic melodrama of the modern Japanese stage was evolved." Farther on Mr. Chamberlain describes the manner of representing this lyric drama. "The stage, which has remained unaltered in every respect from the beginning of the fifteenth century, when the early dramatists Seama and Otourmi acted at Kiyauto before the then Shiyauguñ (Shogun or Tycoon, as Europeans usually pronounce it) Yoshimasa, is a square wooden room, open upon all sides but one and supported on pillars, the side of the square being about eighteen English feet. It is surrounded by a quaint roof somewhat resembling those to be seen on the Japanese Buddhist temples, and is connected with the green-room by a gallery some nine feet wide. Upon this gallery part of the action occasionally takes place. Added on to the back of the square stage is a narrow space where sits the orchestra, consisting of one flute-player, two performers on instruments which in the absence of a more fitting name may be called tambourines, and one beater of the drum, while the chorus, whose number is not fixed, squat on the ground to the right of the spectator. In a line with the chorus, between it and the audience, sits the less important of the two actors during the greater portion of the piece. (Two was the number of the actors during the golden days of the art.) The back of the stage, the only side not open to the air, is painted with a pine tree, in accordance with ancient usage, while, equally in conformity with established rules, three small pine trees are planted in the court which divides the gallery from the space occupied by the less distinguished portion of the audience. The covered place for the audience, who all sit on the mats according to the immemorial custom of their countrymen, runs round three sides of the stage, the most honourable seats being those which directly face it. Masks are worn by such of the actors as take the parts of females or of supernatural beings; and the dresses are gorgeous in the extreme." Mr. Chamberlain then notices "the statuesque immobility of the actors and the peculiar intonation of the recitative. When once the ear has become used to its loudness it is by no means unpleasing, while the measured cadences of the chorus are from the very first both soothing and impressive. The music unfortunately cannot claim like praise, and the dancing executed by the chief character towards the close of each piece is tedious and meaningless to the European spectator. The performance occupies a whole day. For, although each piece takes on an average but one hour to represent, five or six are given in succession, and the intervals between them are filled up by the acting of comic scenes. Down to the time of the late revolution much ceremony and punctilious etiquette hedged in on every side those who were admitted to the honour of viewing this dramatic performance at the Shiyauguñ's court. Now the doors are open to all alike, but it is still chiefly the old aristocracy who make up the audience; and even they, highly trained as they are in the ancient literature, usually bring with them a book of the play to enable them to follow with the eye the difficult text, which is rendered still harder of comprehension by the varying tones of the choric chant."

In this description of the formal elements of the Japanese drama we cannot but be struck by several resemblances to the Athenian stage. The prominence of the chorus, of dance and song and music, the gradual introduction of individual actors distinct from the chorus, the gradual subordination of the chorus to the actors in the development of the drama, the small number of the actors, the use of masks and splendid dresses, the "statuesque immobility of the actors," the "intonation of the recitative," the representation of several plays in succession, have all their parallels in the famous drama of Athens. The chorus, as is well known, with its combination of dance, and song, and melody, and mimetic action, makes the central figure of the Athenian drama, the figure round which the rude beginnings of that drama take their rise and whose disapperance heralds its decay. Some of the leading differences between the dramas of modern Europe and that of Athens may be attributed to the choral and lyric source of the latter contrasted with the early predominance of dialogue in the former; and it is to be remembered that this Athenian chorus carries us back to those choral songs in which we have previously found the beginnings of literature. When we trace the rise of the Attic drama from sacred mysteries in which priests and priestesses acted the story of Demeter and Cora, or from the betrothal of the second archon's wife to Dionysus at the Anthesteria, or from such festival rites as that in which a maiden "representing one of the nymphs in the train of Dionysus" is pursued by a priest "bearing a hatchet and personating a being hostile to the god,"^[2] we must not forget that the choral song carries us back from the adult city community of Athens to the village festivals of early Attica. If the ethical ideas of the Athenian drama take their rise, as we have already seen, from the village community and clan, so also does the choral form. The chorus in the rapid progress of Athenian life and art is far more interesting than in the comparatively stationary civilisation of Japan; at Athens its rise and decay curiously illustrate early communal life and the evolution of individual action and thought; and the social development of the city commonwealth is thus reflected in the form as well as in the spirit of its drama.

§ 54. In Athens a group of persons—for such, of course, is the nature of the chorus—is the earliest centre of dramatic interest. The songs and dances of this group make the body of the dramatic spectacle; and though its leaders may now and then come forward separately (like the leaders of a Russian Khorovod), or its members may answer each other assembled round the altar of Dionysus, such responses and glimpses of individual action do not yet bring us to any regular dialogue, much less to any display of personal character. The chorus is the literary link between the sacred festivals of early Attic village communities and the semi-religious theatre of Athenian tragedy; but the æsthetic pleasures of character-drawing are only developed out of this group of worshippers by that profound change in the social character of Athenian men and women which allowed the tragic stage to become the vehicle of Euripidean casuistry, and converted the idealism of the old comedy into the everyday personages of Menander. Let us follow some of the formal and spiritual changes through which the Athenian drama passed in the course of this individualising process.

One of the first steps towards a drama of personal character seems to have been taken about 536 B.C, when Thespis is said to have added to the choral group one actor (he was called the ύποκριτὴς, or "answerer," because he "answered" the songs of the chorus) whose dialogue with the chorus offered some scope for the display of individuality. This new departure of the old Athenian spectacles was carried still farther by Phrynichus (B.C 512), who made this actor play female parts for the first time. Meanwhile the chorus itself was becoming more flexible; the old chorus of Satyrs, the appropriate accompaniment of the Bacchic festival, was being displaced by choruses suited to the particular subject of the play, and in the time of Chœrilus (524 B.C) the Satyric drama seems to have been separated from regular tragedy. Thus, on the one hand, the old group of worshippers are being gradually transformed into a group personage with a general character conformable to the particular play, while, on the other hand, the individual actor is introducing dramatic personality distinct from groups or abstract personages. The Bacchic festal costume of the actors, their "stiff angular movements," their tragic masks, the monotonous kind of chant in which the dialogue is rather sung than spoken,^[3] may remind us still of theatres so slightly developed as the Japanese, but the progress of dialogue and character is rapidly carrying us towards a dramatic region into which Japanese, Chinese, and even Indian dramatists, compared with the Athenian masters, have hardly ever penetrated. For the Athenian dramatists, becoming secular artists instead of religious teachers, are learning to depict personality with all its shades of thought and sentiment even through the hackneyed heroic personages of their sacred spectacle, and the vigorous growth of Athenian life is beginning to supply them, perhaps unconsciously, with new types of human nature.

But though the ἠθοποιΐα, or character-drawing of individuals, marks the master-hand of the Athenian dramatist, both the formal and spiritual elements of the Athenian stage long retained survivals from the choral group of earlier days. The whole structure of the Athenian theatre, as Müller says, "may be traced to the chorus whose station was the original centre of the whole performance." The orchestra grew out of the χόρος, or "dancing place" of Homeric times, to which we have previously alluded in connection with the choral song-dances of the clan. In the centre of the orchestra the altar of Dionysus, round which the dithyrambic chorus used to dance in a circle, gave way to a sort of raised platform, the thymele, as was called, which, besides serving as a resting-place for the chorus, significantly marked the religious origin of the Athenian drama. The openness of the theatre to the sky and the remarkably long but shallow stage—two formal features of the Athenian theatre not to be overlooked—may likewise be attributed to the presence of the chorus. Again, whatever the mixed origin of the "unities" as expressed by French critics may have been, there can be little doubt that a certain fixity of time and place was in a manner necessitated by the chorus, which could not be easily shifted either in space or time. Finally, the Athenian conception of dramatic authorship, which subordinated the word-composition to the public production of the play, was partially due to the trouble and expense of teaching the choral songs and dances.

§ 55. But the formal prominence of the chorus in the early Athenian drama is scarcely more marked than the spiritual. It is here, indeed, that we find the clearestlinks between the chorus and the social conditions of early Attica. The dramatisation of human action in groups or abstract personages closely reflects the prominence of group life and unindividualised thought in early societies; hence it was only when individualised conduct and sentiment became the groundwork of average Athenian character that the subtleties of Euripides showed their hostility not only to the old prominence of the chorus, but also to those mythical personages of the sacred spectacle who were too abstract to suit an age of small personalities. Three striking features of the Æschylean drama are therefore to be explained by the early social life of Athens—the predominance of the chorus in the plays of Æschylus, his leaning to abstract or impersonal dramatis personæ, and his ethical machinery of inherited guilt. The chorus is the central point in the spiritual as well as in the formal elements of the old Attic drama; but the reason for this is not to be found in the chorus itself as the production of conscious dramatic art—for the rude drama of early Attica had as little to do with art as an Indian Buffalo-dance—but in the dême life of early Attica, in the small social groups which here, as everywhere else in the world, once subordinated all personal action and thought to their own collective being. It was one great work of city life at Athens to cut down this collective being into individual units, each with his separate personal character and destiny, and the progress of this work is reflected very closely in the progress of the Attic drama.

In the seven extant plays of Æschylus there are only about seventeen individual personages, the rest of the forty-five dramatis personæ being either groups, as the chorus itself, or general and abstract personages such as the herald and the messenger, Might and Force. In the Suppliants personal character has hardly any place at all; for neither Danaus nor the king of the Argives (who with the chorus and a herald make up all the dramatis personaæ) can be called a study of character. In Prometheus allegorical and divine personages interest themselves in that vast struggle between Man and Fate before which all the necessary littleness of personal humanity disappears. In the Persæ we can hardly count the ghost of Dareius as a personal character—it rather typifies the sunken sun of Persian conquest; and if Atossa and Xerxes are real human personages, they are also general types of Persian ostentation and pride; for the play, like some Chinese plays, rather points the moral of a great historical event than attempts to describe human character in individuals, and, as even Müller is forced to admit, "looks at first glance more like a lament over the misfortunes of the Persians than a tragic drama." Again, in the Seven against Thebes, Eteocles, Ismene, Antigone are no doubt human personages, but the "pivot upon which the whole piece turns"—Polynices' resolution to meet his brother in combat while recognising the fatal act as the effect of his father's curse—carries us back to the early life and morals of Attica as plainly as any abstract personage or the choral group itself. But it is needless to run through all the extant plays of Æschylus in our search for impersonal or, as modern critics would say, "undramatic" elements. No doubt even within his extant plays there are signs of a growing subordination of the chorus-that of the Choëphorœ, as Mr. Mahaffy observes,^[4] is not only the confidant but the accomplice of the actors. But the fact that the chorus is the central character (if we may so apply a term long restricted to personal action by modern criticism) in the Suppliants, Persæ, and Eumenides would be alone sufficient to prove the prominence of the group on the stage of Æschylus.

In the drama of Sophocles the chorus is being supplanted by individual characterisation. Only one of Sophocles' extant plays derives its name from the chorus—the Trachiniæ; and here, in marked contrast with the Suppliants of Æschylus, the figures of Hercules and Deianira keep the chorus completely in the background. The dialogue, the true medium of character-drawing, was now being developed by the increased number of actors. If a third actor had been introduced in the Agamemnon, Choëphorœ, and Eumenides of Æschylus (his other extant tragedies are constructed for two actors), all the plays of Sophocles are adapted for three actors, excepting the Œdipus at Colonus, which could not be acted without the introduction of a fourth; and, with this increase of actors, dialogue was narrowing the domain of choral song. This reduction of the choral element in the Athenian drama is easily seen by comparing the proportion of the entire play assigned to the chorus in the tragedies of Sophocles with the proportion so assigned by Æschylus. In Sophocles' Œdipus Rex a little more than one fourth of the play is assigned to the chorus; in his Antigone a little less than one fourth; in his Ajax a little more than one fifth; in his Œdipus at Colonus a little less than one fifth; in his Trachiniæ one sixth; and in his Electra and Philoctetes about one seventh. Thus, using the extant plays of Sophocles as the basis of calculation and allowing for some uncertainty in the choral lines, we may say that on the average he assigned about one fifth of his play to the chorus. But, on examining the extant plays of Æschylus, we find that more than one half of the Suppliants is assigned to the chorus; that somewhat less than one half is so assigned in the Agamemnon, Seven against Thebes, Persæ, Choëphorœ, and Eumenides; and that in the Prometheus^[5] alone does the proportion sink so low as that of one-fifth. Hence it appears that the chorus occupies about twice as large a space in the Æschylean as in the Sophoclean drama; and an increased prominence of individual character in the latter is profoundly in accordance with this change. Sophocles' Antigone, Electra, Ajax, Philoctetes, Œdipus, stand out more independently from the choral group than any Æschylean personage, and transfer dramatic interest from the choral ode to the individual dialogue. It is true that in the plays of Sophocles associations of early clan life still live side by side with the growing dominion of individualism; in the Antigone, for example, the conflict between family rites (such as the familia of Rome would have sternly maintained) and the commands of the State—a conflict sure to set in as clan custom gave way to State law—is the mainspring of the dramatic action; and inherited guilt is almost as powerfully depicted in the Œdipus Rex as in the Æschylean trilogy. But in the extant plays of Sophocles we have nothing resembling the abstract personages of the Prometheus Bound, nothing resembling the allegorical spirit of that famous tragedy; on the Sophoclean contrasted with the Æschylean stage character is being reduced from the dimensions of group life and colossal personifications to individuality like that of men and women, but still ideally great.

In the drama of Euripides this double process of individualising character and subordinating the chorus to the dialogue reaches its farthest tragic development, and most clearly reflects the altered conditions of social life at Athens. Aristophanes, in his Frogs, notes this prominence of dialogue at the expense of the choral songs. "Let some one bring me a lyre," says Æschylus in his contest with Euripides; "and yet what occasion for a lyre against him? Where is she that rattles with the castanets? Come hither, Muse of Euripides, to whose accompaniment these songs are adapted for singing." Not mediating between opposing parties (save to some extent in the Medea), as the chorus of Sophocles had fulfilled its dramatic function, much less dominating the entire drama as in Æschylus, the chorus of Euripides is often an inferior actor, the confidant of the protagonist, while its odes are frequently "arbitrarily inserted (embolima) as a lyrical and musical interlude between the acts without any reference to the subject of the play, much in the same way as these pauses are nowadays filled up with instrumental music ad libitum." Of the nineteen extant tragedies of Euripides, five indeed derive their names from the chorus—the Hêrakleidæ, Suppliants, Trojan Women, Bacchæ, and Phœnissæ; but we need only compare the proportion of each of these dramas assigned to the chorus with the proportion so assigned in the Suppliants of Æschylus to realise the complete subordination into which the central figure of the old drama has fallen. In the Suppliants of Æschylus, as we have already observed, considerably more than one-half of the entire play is assigned to the chorus; in the Hêrakleidæ of Euripides less than one-fifth of the play is so assigned; in his Suppliants and Trojan Women about one-fifth is so assigned; in his Bacchæ about one-fourth belongs to the chorus, and in his Phœnissæ little more than one-sixth.

This subordination of the chorus to the dialogue in Euripides is accompanied by the withdrawal of the ethical pivot of the old drama. None of the extant plays of Euripides makes the clan ethic its real centre of interest. The religious horrors of inherited guilt are supplanted by subtle analyses of personal character, and the rhetoric of the contemporary law-court and assembly are now much more effective than the moral preaching of early tragedy. On the stage of Euripides everything of real interest is individual, nothing impersonal; the chorus has here survived into conditions of action and thought in which it is out of place, and the stereotyped practice of taking the dramatis personæ from the old mythical heroes of Hellas is now a lumbering impediment to a tragedian who had little in common with old Greek morality or heroism. The chorus of Æschylus, says Euripides, in the Frogs, "used to hurl four series of songs one after another without ceasing, while the few characters he used were silent." The "son of the market-place," the "gossip-gleaner," prays to his "own peculiar gods"—"O Air and thou well-hung tongue and sagacity and sharp-smelling nostrils, may I rightly refute whatever arguments I assail!"—but Æschylus claims to have fulfilled the true poetic function ("to make the people in the cities better") by composing a drama "full of martial spirit" (the Seven against Thebes)—"every man that saw it would long to be a warrior"—while Euripides had been teaching men "to practise loquacity and wordiness." Such had been the progress of the Athenian drama—from the moral and religious spectacle, with its central group of worshippers, to an aesthetic exhibition of personal character; and now the conservative comedian was revolting from the new drama of art to the old drama of moral teaching—an Athenian victory for the Chinese ideal of the theatre.

§ 56. But, in truth, Aristophanes' dramas reflect the individualism of contemporary Athens, the characteristics of the men and women who subjected the old traditional morality of Athens to the dissolvent of all creeds—individual reason—almost as clearly as any dramas of Euripides. The conservative comedian saw farther than the tragic sophist, but his penetrating sight was sharpened by the same conscious contrast of things old and new in which Euripides found the pleasures of purely negative thought. The secret of Aristophanes—by far the most astonishing figure in the whole crowd of Athenian poets and philosophers and orators, a man whose poetry, exquisite in spite of being perpetually draggled through the mire, is full of profound reflection in spite of its uproarious wit—the secret of this solemn jester, this conservative revolutionist, this religious atheist, this communistic defender of Attic aristocracy, is also the secret of Euripides. The time-spirit of individualism is in each; but the one accepts it as a blessing because he sees only the freedom of negative thinking, the other scorns and derides and hates it because his eagle glance foresees the destruction of old Athenian sympathies it must effect. But Aristophanes just as little as Euripides can live out of or above the new conditions of Athenian thought and action; he is a citizen not of his own Cuckoo-town, but of Athens with all its limitations of space and time.

It is, in fact, through the Aristophanic comedy that the Attic drama from Euripides onwards accompanies the development of social life at Athens. Tragedy had now run its course, and in the hands of men who disbelieved the myths and customary morals upon which it had been founded must have tended more and more to run into burlesque. In the lyrical tragedies of the æsthete Agathon; in the dramas in which Critias and Dionysius, tyrant of Syracuse, aired their speculations on political and social topics; in the plays of Chæremon, whose Centaur seems to have been "a compound of epic, lyric, and dramatic poetry,"^[6] and who is called by Aristotle "a poet to be read," we may trace the gradual extinction of Attic tragedy. The glorious odes of the tragic chorus seem to have died away into descriptive and rhetorical writing intended rather for the scholar's eye than the public ear; and this stage-oratory belongs rather to the development of Attic prose than to that of Attic verse. The rapid decline of tragedy is, in fact, due to the decay of those moral characteristics of the Athenian audience which had primarily given to tragedy its vital force. Even dramatic studies of personal character gradually lost their interest when divorced from social sympathy and great moral problems; and soon little remained but a spectacular medley enlivened by descriptions of female beauty, or natural scenery, or by rhetorical declamation of a thoroughly metallic ring. The majestic spirit of tragedy departed at the touch of an individualism which could only laugh at its own littleness.

Both the processes we have already observed in the development of the tragic drama—the subordination of the chorus and the reduction of abstract and heroic to human and individual character—are repeated in the progress of Attic comedy; to this progress we shall accordingly now turn. The comedy like the tragedy of Athens had originated in the choral worship of Bacchus; but the development of the comic chorus seems to have been checked by the tyranny of Peisistratus. We know little or nothing of the earliest Attic comedians. Susarion, who probably flourished in Solon's time, before Thespis; and Chionides, who is reckoned by Aristotle the first of Attic comedians; even Cratinus, who died so late as 423 B.C, and Eupolis, who began to bring out comedies as late as 429 B.C, are for us little more than names. We cannot, therefore, recover any such graduated change in the chorus and characters of comedy as the tragedies of Æschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides enable us to observe. Still, the eleven extant comedies of Aristophanes compared with fragments of later comedians and the Latin imitations of the "New Comedy" made by Plautus and Terence, enable us to watch a part of the development of comedy at Athens, a part which the better-known development of tragedy aids us in understanding. As in tragedy, the comic stage represented an open space in the background of which were public and private buildings; as in tragedy, the number of the comic actors is limited to three, and masks and gay costumes, such as would have been used in the old choral carnival of Bacchus, are worn. The chorus, indeed, is almost as prominent in the earlier dramas of Aristophanes as in Æschylus, and the parabasis, or address of the chorus to the audience in the middle of the comedy, whether it was the nucleus of the comic drama or an afterthought, at least marks the chorus as the central figure. Out of the eleven extant comedies of Aristophanes six^[7] are named after the chorus; and though the Thesmophoriazousæ and Ecclesiazousæ do not necessarily take their names from their choruses of women, they also seem to look to the chorus as the centre of the piece. No extant play of Aristophanes, not even the Plutus, which approaches so closely to the later comedy in its want of political allusions, is without a chorus; but the new comedy of Menander and Philemon, which, by borrowing its characters and incidents from contemporary Athenian life, completed the humanising process begun by Euripides in tragedy, gave up the choral form altogether; and even the Middle Comedy, which preceded the New, according to a remark of Platonius "had no parabasis because there was no chorus."

This disappearance of the chorus in comedy may, no doubt, have been hastened by the inability of the State or the wealthier citizens to meet the choral expenses in the days of Athenian decline; but that the impoverishment of Athens is in itself no sufficient explanation of the disappearance of the chorus, is clear from the fact that in the age when comedy and tragedy began and were developed in their choral forms Athens was a far poorer city than in the days of the Middle and New Comedy. The rise and fall of the choral form in comedy as well as in tragedy are to be explained by causes more deeply connected with average Athenian character than the presence or absence of wealth; and one notable feature of the old comedy serves as a guide-post to such causes. This feature is the constant use of allegorical and abstract personages throughout the Aristophanic comedy; and we shall now illustrate this usage at some length.

§ 57. In the earliest play of Aristophanes, the Dætaleis,^[8] or Feasters, so called after its chorus, "the chorus were conceived as a company of revellers who had banqueted in a temple of Hercules (in whose worship eating and drinking bore a prominent part), and were engaged in witnessing a contest between the old frugal and modest system of education and the frivolous and talkative education of modern times, in the persons of two young men, Temperate (σώφρων) and Profligate (καταπύγων). Brother Profligate was represented, in a dialogue between him and his aged father, as a despiser of Homer, as accurately acquainted with legal expressions (in order, of course, to employ them in pettifogging quibbles), and as a zealous partisan of the sophist Thrasymachus, and of Alcibiades, the leader of the frivolous youth of the day."^[9] Passing from this earliest but non-extant comedy of Aristophanes to the extant Plutus, which came out nearly forty years later (388 B.C), and was "the last piece which the aged poet brought forward himself," we are again met by allegory and allegorical personages—Plutus, the god of wealth, Just Man, Poverty. The intervening plays of Aristophanes are full of similar personages—Dêmus (People), the old citizen of Athens, in whom the Athenians are personified in the Knights; Just Argument (Logos) and Unjust Argument, in the Clouds, reminding us of such "characters" as Heresy and Understanding in Calderon's Divine Philothea; War and Tumult in the Peace, itself the name of another allegorical personage. Indeed, as any careful reader of Aristophanes must have observed, many of his apparently real personages dissolve into groups and general types the moment we examine them: such are Dicæopolis in the Acharnians and Trygæus in the Peace, representatives of the Athenian peace-party; Lysistrata, a female representative of the same party, in the Lysistrata; and Praxagora, the female exponent of women's rights in the Ecclesiazousæ. In these and other examples Aristophanic personages turn out, on closer inspection, not to be individuals at all, but only types of a certain class or group. In fact, to such a degree does this class character prevail in Aristophanes' plays, that even living persons do not seem to be introduced simply as persons, but as types of philosophic, poetical, or political thought. Thus the name of Socrates is used in the Clouds rather as a class-name for the sophists in general than as the proper name of the famous ethical philosopher, with whom Aristophanes would seem to have been on very friendly terms; and though Euripides and Cleon are certainly hit at as persons, no one can read the passages in which they are introduced without observing that they are also general names, the former for the sophistic corrupters of what Aristophanes regarded as the best morals and aesthetic taste of Athens, the latter for the demagogues who at once flattered and enslaved the populace.

In the dearth of extant Athenian comedies it is, of course, impossible to feel certain that this use of abstract and allegorical personages is derived from the earliest practice of the comic stage. But when it is remembered that early Athenian tragedy discloses the same impersonal tendency alike in its characters and its ethical principles, when it is farther remembered that the group-nature of the chorus in comedy as in tragedy easily lends itself to impersonal and allegorical uses,^[10] and when the weakness of personality is found to be one of the most striking points of likeness in all early communities, it may be regarded as highly probable that this characteristic of the old comedy is to be taken as a survival from the early social conditions of Attica through the earliest forms of the comic spectacle. Moreover, there is a special reason for this survival having become in time the peculiar property of the comic drama. In tragedy, so long as Athenian average character was rather social than individual, character-types were as free from the grotesque as Justice, Mercy, or any other abstract personages of the medieval morality-play. But just as the development of individualism in England produced the thoroughly individualised drama of Marlowe, Shakspere, and their followers; just as its inferior development in Spain allowed the allegorical personages of Calderon's autos sacramentales^[11] to retain their intense interest for a Catholic audience; so its rapid development in Athens made mere types of character more and more grotesque, and less and less in keeping with serious thought. In this way, far more than through any sense of restriction, the habit of taking dramatic personages from the early Greek myths aided the fall of Attic tragedy; for though, as has been often observed, the tragedians were by no means tied down to any one view of a mythical character, their use of these types must have strongly militated against the seriousness of tragedy as soon as individualism of character came to be expected by the audience. Comedy, accordingly, after a time stepped into the shoes of tragedy, and applied to its own purposes the worn-out properties of the tragic stage. But the farther progress of Athenian individualism (much like the same progress in modern Europe) failed to find even a comic interest in typical and allegorical personages at all to be compared with the ridiculous little units of everyday life, and so the new comedians made their own kith and kin the puppets of their stage.^[12]

§ 58. Thus the social development of Athens is reflected with peculiar accuracy in her dramatic—a development from the life of the group to that of the individual, from the ethics of the clan to personal responsibility, from a spectacle in which groups of men and women, or impersonal abstractions, or heroic types predominate to a drama of character in which persons borrowed from contemporary life humanise the stage. In Rome the development of individualism was a slower and more confused process; yet even here, in spite of Greek imitation and patrician culture, we may find in the progress of the drama some marks of social evolution. For in Rome, as in Athens, the rude forms of the early drama foreshadowed a popular literature; and, had her political and social factions amalgamated before her acquaintance with Greek civilisation, a truly Roman drama might have been produced. Plainly the old ritual of Rome, as in the hymn of the Fratres Arvales previously translated, contained, like some of the Vedic hymns, the germs of a dramatic spectacle. Responsive songs, too, like the Fescennine and the triumphal, would aid this dramatic tendency; and the absence of epic or lyric (personal) poetry would allow greater room for a drama of some kind. Professor Teuffel, indeed, tells us that "the Romans possessed a tendency to preserve and cherish the recollection of past events, and, as they perceived that metre facilitated both recollection and tradition, we find here a field favourable to the development of epic poetry."^[13] But peoples who have never developed an epic (the Chinese, for example) have possessed in a high degree this "tendency to cherish the ecollection of past events," and the value of metre as a support for the memory has been recognised all the world over. It would be as absurd to suppose that the fables of a Lokman should suffice to create a drama (as Voltaire seems to have supposed in his introductory letter to L'Orphelin de la Chine) as to think that the use of metre and a desire to chronicle the past suffice to create "a field favourable to the development of epic poetry." The form and spirit of poetry depend to a large extent upon social life; and, as already observed, Niebuhr's theory of an early ballad-poetry (with which the imaginary epic of early Rome has been closely connected) strangely overlooks this dependence. The life of the city commonwealth is not favourable to the growth of epic poetry; for the heroes of the epic are always exalted above the level of human character, always hostile to the democratic sentiments of the city. Moreover, the city life of Rome was peculiarly opposed to the individualised spirit of epic poetry; for the communal organisation of the gentes checked the rise of any literary forms in which personal character would predominate. We shall, therefore, believe that Roman poetry, if left to itself, would have assumed neither the epic nor the lyric, but the dramatic form.

The nature of the early Roman drama, so far as we can now recover it by the aid of a few scattered references, was exactly such as the social conditions of early Rome would lead us to anticipate. This drama (if we may so call it) was a comic spectacle in which personal character had little or no place. Thus the Atellane plays (so called from Atella, a small town in Campania) admirably suited the unindividualised life of early Rome, for their principal personages were not "characters" in the modern artistic sense, but fixed types. Such are Maccus, Pappus, Bucco, Dossenus, and the peculiarly Roman Mania, Lamia, Pytho, Manducus. Maccus, for example, is a stupid glutton wearing ass's ears; Pappus, a vain old man constantly cheated by his wife and son; Dossenus, a cunning sharper. These typical personages remind us of the Cain^[14] or the "Vice with his dagger of lath" in our old morality plays, and like them belong to an age in which personality was weakly realised. It is to be remembered that the diction of the Atellane plays, like that of the Mimes, was plebeian—an index to the popular character of these rude dramatic spectacles.

But the plebeians were not destined to be the makers of Roman comedy, much less of Roman literature in general, nor were such types as Maccus and Pappus to be individualised by the internal evolution of Roman society. The increase of Roman wealth and consequent pressure of strangers to Rome from the era of the First Punic War reproduced, but within a relatively narrower circle, the effects of the great Persian War on Athenian mind; and among the earliest of these effects was the discovery of Rome's literary nakedness compared with the intellectual riches of Greece. How to convey some of this intellectual wealth to Rome and there give it currency became the literary problem of the day; and at first the work of borrowing was attempted under a Roman dress and apparently in the hope of attracting all sorts and conditions of Roman society. Livius Andronicus, a Greek slave brought from Tarentum to Rome in 275 B.C represented his first play in 240 B.C The Livian play would seem to have been a rude performance, containing but a slight advance from pantomimic dancing towards personal dialogue; for, as Mr. Simcox observes, Livius "originated the curious division of labour whereby one actor, commonly himself, danced and acted while another, whom the audience were not supposed to see, sang the words which he would have sung himself if the exertion of singing and dancing at once had not been too overwhelming. Such a device implies that the public came for the spectacle, and held the pantomime more important than the song; so it is not strange that the plays of Livius Andronicus should have been very meagre, and that the dialogue should have been very little above stage directions, just serving to explain to the audience what was going on."^[15] But Livius was something more than a pantomimic dancer; his translation of the Odyssey into Saturnian verse shows that he was attempting to popularise Greek culture at Rome by exhibiting the Greek Muses in the coarse garb of the Italian Camenæ. In this bold attempt to assimilate the Greek to the Roman spirit rather than the Roman to the Greek, Nævius, whom Plautus, in the Miles Gloriosus, calls an "un-Greek poet," followed the example of Livius. A native of Campania, the home of the Atellanæ, Nævius brought out his first play at Rome in 235 B.C; and, though his works were mainly comic translations from the Greek, his desire to Romanise Greek culture will be seen not only from his introduction of the prætexta, or drama based on Roman history, two specimens of which (Clastidium and Romulus) are known to us by name, but also from his celebrated epic on the First Punic War, written in Saturnian verse.

§ 59. But this effort to Romanise the Greek spirit was necessarily a failure. Greek literature in general, and the drama in particular, had long been the expression of an intensely individualised life; and in the comedies of Philemon, Menander, Diphilus, subtle analyses of personal character had banished the heroic types of the old Athenian stage, while the display of personal motives exactly reflected a state of society in which the ephemeral life of the individual had swallowed up all thoughts of common destiny. The development of legal status at Rome (so far as we can now recover it) proves, indeed, that the gentile and family life of the patricians had advanced some way towards individualism before Greek thought acquired any considerable influence at Rome. But this slow progress was now to be expedited by contact with a spirit centuries its senior in evolution. Not only, therefore, was it impossible to bring down the Greek spirit to the level of the Roman, as Livius and Nævius had hoped to do, but only Romans whose social and political eminence allowed them wider and deeper experiences than most of their fellow-citizens could appreciate the new modes of thought so unlike those of their native city. Hence it was to be expected from the first that the development of literature would fall into the hands of the upper classes as soon as Greek influences acquired their certain mastery at Rome. It was also to be expected that the drama—a form of literature which loses its vitality in proportion as it becomes the property of a class—would undergo some strange transformation in passing from its Roman cradle into the adult life of the New Comedy. Since this transformation, so far as the present writer is acquainted, is unparalleled^[16] in the literary history of the world, and illustrates the progressive individualisation of Roman life, we shall discuss its nature at some length.

The great difficulties which Livius and Nævius had experienced in their attempts to Romanise the Greek drama had been the rude form and spirit of Roman literature in its "barbarous" state. The Saturnian measure was altogether inadequate to translate the Greek metres. Character-types, like Manducus, were altogether inadequate to express Greek personality. Were Greek metres, Greek characters, Greek ideas of place and time, to be transferred en masse from Athens to Rome? And, if all this had to be done, how were Roman associations to be kept from intruding when the language used was to be Latin and not Greek? These were the problems which Plautus faced and Terence solved; and it is because the plays of the former represent the transition from the Roman to the Greek associations that they are especially interesting to the scientific student of literature.

To touch upon the Plautine metre first, as the formal mark of this transition, all students of Plautus know that the main reason why his scansion is so difficult to ears accustomed to Vergilian and Horatian metres, is that in his plays the old accentual scansion, on which the Saturnian measure was based, modifies and occasionally overrides the Greek scansion by quantity; just as the mixture of accentual and syllabic scansion in Chaucer would seem to mark the junction of Saxon and Norman literatures. But the spirit of the Plautine comedy is even more distinctly transitional than the form. In the prologue to the Casina the difficulty of depicting the manners of a foreign country in such a way as to retain truth yet interest the spectators is clearly illustrated. Two slaves of the same household are seeking in marriage their fellow-slave; but, the marriage of slaves being unknown to the Romans, the difficulty must be explained. "I suppose," says the speaker of the prologue, "that some present are now talking thus among themselves: Faith, what's this now? Slaves' marriage? Would slaves be marrying or asking a wife for themselves? They've introduced a new thing that happens nowhere in the world.' (Novum áttulerunt quód fit nusquam géntium.) But I assert that this is done in Greece and Carthage, and here, too, in our own country in Apulia; in these places slaves' marriages are usually looked after even more carefully than those of freemen."^[17]

Truthfulness to time and place and social character must have been forced upon the Roman playwright by this constant necessity of realising his dramatis personæ in the midst of conditions different from those of the audience to which they spoke. Thus, the use of the Phoenician language by Hanno in the Pœnulus is to be partially explained by this constant contrast which must have produced the desire of realism on a minute scale. In the Indian drama a like effect was produced by similar causes, viz. the use of different languages or dialects by the dramatis personæ, and the introduction of personages in character and language very different from the educated Bráhman. Just as the Plautine comedy—as is proved not only by its Greek names, characters, places, but also by its Greek phrases, words, puns—is addressed to an audience thoroughly familiar with Greek language and life, and by its nature puts the playwright on his guard against untruthful descriptions, so the Indian drama, being addressed, as is expressly stated in the prelude to Málatí and Mádhava, to the Bráhmans, aimed at exact truth of language and character beyond the circle of the sacred caste. Technical Indian writers on the drama, clearly expressing the influences of caste in their conceptions of dramatic propriety, note with care the exact kind of sentiments proper to each character—a propriety which plainly reduces character to what in the East it has commonly been, a type. In Plautus we have also types, side by side with real characters such as Tyndarus in the Captivi; for not only are the leno, meretrix, coquus, sycophanta, parasite, stock characters, but we have such allegorical personages as the Lar the Aulularia, Auxilium in the Cistellaria, Arcturus in the Rudens, Luxuria and Inopia in the Trinumus. As we shall find elsewhere, the Indian rules both on propriety of typical characters and on propriety of language altogether surpass anything Plautine comedy could enable us to conceive; and, no doubt, this Indian realism of language and character is due to causes some of which are peculiar to India—the sacred classical tongue, the great variety of dialects, the presence of caste. Still the Indian drama will aid us in realising the conditions under which Plautus wrote. For just as in the Indian drama character is more typical than personal in our European sense, so in that state of Roman society in which the patrician gentes and familiæ supplied as perfect a substitute for the Indian's castes as European history can offer, we can easily see why Plautus should have preferred types to persons whenever they would suit his Greek stage; and just as realism of language and character forced itself on Indian critics from the sharply contrasted social conditions which the dramatists sought to personify on the stage, so the perpetual contrast of Greek manners and ideas with the Roman language he employed made the Roman dramatist, at least in the Pœnulus, more truthful to language than dramatic art permits.

Plautus, however, is by no means quite at home in the expression of Greek thought and action through the words and phrases of Rome's language. Technical phrases of Roman law meet us sometimes in his Athenian scenes, and remind us that we are really near the Forum, not the Ekklêsia. But the plays of Terence, with their smooth diction and thoroughly Greek associations, show the transition from the Romano-Greek to the purely Greek spirit to be a fait accompli. The efforts of Livius, Nævius, and to some degree even Plautus, had failed; the Greek drama had not been and could not have been Romanised either in form or spirit. In the hands of Terence, comedy became the expression of a polished class of Græcised Romans and gave up the attempt to be popular; at the same time, it made a quiet protest against patrician exclusiveness and the old strictness of the Roman familia by bringing the freedom of the Greek citizen directly before the eyes of the class whose wealth and power made them the patrons of literature.

It has been said with truth that "all the plays of Terence are written with a purpose; and this purpose is the same which animated the political leaders of free thought." When it is remembered that the aim of Terence was "to base conduct upon reason rather than tradition, and paternal authority upon kindness rather than fear," we may find a distinct reason for the repetition of certain characters in his plays. If his characters may be easily classified (as Terence himself in the prologue to the Eunuchus classifies them), if they look not so much like individuals as types of social and domestic relationships, these features are to be attributed to the influence of family life at Rome, and Terence's desire to remind his audience of family relations incomparably less servile than those which turned on the patria potestas. A Carthaginian by birth, Terence published his first play, the Andria, in 166 B.C, and his last, the Adelphœ, in 160 B.C The six comedies which represent this short dramatic career enable us to note various important changes in the tone of Roman culture. In his metres, language, and careful exclusion of Roman associations of place, time, incident, Terence breathes the spirit of the Græcised Roman, while Plautus, in spite of Greek metres and associations, has still something of the Romanised Greek about him. The literary refinement of Terence's language, which made his comedies even more influential as works to be read than as plays to be acted, his prologues dealing critically with the form or spirit of the drama, the absence of burlesque in his characters, and even the very names of his dramatis personæ,^[18] show that we have left the popular spectacle and entered the refined theatre of an educated class.

§ 60. But in these thoroughly Greek associations of the Terentian stage we may close our brief review of the progress of dramatic art in Rome. Terence, the slave from Carthage, drawing exact pictures of Greek life in the language of Rome for the edification of an audience which thinks Greek, transforms the drama into as curious a literary exotic as can be easily conceived. If such was the end of Rome's rude native comedy, in tragedy the Romans were from the first dependent on the Greeks. Without common mythology, without bonds of common religion, the divided city of plebeian and patrician could feel none of the public sentiments out of which tragedy arose at Athens. If a tragedy based on the ethics of clan life had been started in early Rome, it would have possessed nothing to interest and everything to repel the general body of the Roman populace; and such heroes as it exhibited must have summoned up recollections which no plebeian could have felt without shame and indignation. Common sympathies of religion, patriotism, social unity, being impossible, Rome had to borrow her tragedy from the Greeks, and for the service of that Greek spirit which was at once peculiarly attractive for the upper classes and the destroyer of their traditional thought. It was not the first or the last time that possessors of property became the disseminators of ideas fatal to their own ascendency; Athens had seen much of this social suicide, the Paris of the eighteenth century was to see much more of it. But patrician bonds of social duty and clan conceptions of sympathy and obligation were now out of keeping with the widened circle of Roman life, as much as the traditional morality of the Hebrew clans was out of keeping with ideas of personal responsibility in Ezekiel's age, as much as the traditional morality of primitive Athens was out of keeping with the expanded associations of the Periclean age. The discussion of Euripides whether men owe their character to inborn nature (φύσίς) or education, the repudiation of inherited sin by Ezekiel, and a famous line of Terence's Hautontimoroumenos—"Homo sum; humani nihil a me alienum puto"—alike mark in their respective social groups the clash between an ethic of narrow sympathies and conditions of social life too wide and too complex to be ruled by the old morality.

The line of Terence just quoted may be treated as the text of a new gospel at Rome, a gospel for which legal relaxations of old patrician exclusiveness had previously opened a way. This gospel of humanitas, expressed on the legal side by appeals to the JusNaturale (a fusion, as Sir Henry Maine has so well explained, of the old Jus Gentium of Rome with the νόμος φύσεως of the Greek Stoics), was on the literary side expressed by the scepticism of Ennius (209–169 B.C.), Pacuvius (220–132 B.C.), and, in lesser degree, Accius (170–94 B.C.). To these tragic poets Euripides supplied the same recurring model as Menander had supplied to the comedians. In their tragedies the strongly individualised spirit of Euripidean Athens was transferred to the home of men under the lifelong sway of the father's power, and women never freed from perpetual tutelage. The friendship of Ennius and Scipio Africanus symbolises the union of this individualised literature with the growth of personal independence from all restraints of gens or familia; and Ennius' translation of Euêmerus (the rationaliser of the Greek myths) expresses almost as clearly as his denial of a guiding providence in human affairs that purely personal conception of destiny which is fatal to every kind of social creed. "But superstitious seers and brazen-faced soothsayers," says Ennius in one of his plays,^[19] "lazy or mad, or forced by poverty, men who cannot see the path for themselves, point out the way for others, and ask a drachma from those to whom they promise wealth." In another fragment of the play which contains this vigorous attack on the seers and soothsayers of the old Roman religion, Ennius speaks thus: "A race of gods there is, I said, and always shall declare, but I think they care not what the human race is doing; for, if they cared, the good should get the good things and the evil bad, which is not so." Evidently communal morality and slavery proved in Rome as fatal to the future life as a sanction for personal conduct as they had proved in Athens. Pacuvius, in the same spirit as Ennius, finds the ruler of human life to be Temeritas or Chance; and if Accius, who lived late enough for Cicero to converse with him, displayed some tenderness for the old superstitions of Rome, this apparent relapse was probably due to the discovery that the nihilism of Greek thought could find intellectual weapons at least as readily for the communism of a Gracchus as for the literary taste of a Scipio.

Thus, in spite of its imitative character, the drama of Rome derives its true interest from Rome's social life, and reflects the evolution of that life in a manner not to be mistaken. No greater dramatic contrast can be well conceived than that between a play of Euripides or Pacuvius, full of personal destiny and veiled or open disbelief in the gods and common creed, and the Indian drama, which in its very form (as in the benediction with which it opens) bears witness to the overwhelming influence of religious and caste ideas. Yet the starting-points of the Athenian and Roman dramas, especially the former, are by no means far removed from those of the Indian. What makes the dramas of Athens and Rome, however, so much more interesting than any of the Eastern world is the social evolution which underlies their progress. In the comparatively stationary life of India or China, there was little scope for such evolution or its dramatic influences; but in the narrow range of the Aryan city commonwealth we have an opportunity for watching dramatic variations of form and spirit closely in accordance with the development of a social life not too wide to be confusing, and not so rapid in its changes as to obscure the relations of cause and effect.

Footnotes

1. * Japanese Classical Poetry, p. 13.
2. K. O. Müller, Hist. Gk. Lit. (Donaldson's translation, vol. i. p. 381).
3. K. O. Müller quotes from Lucian the phrase repiáde Tà iaußeia, "to sing round the iambics," which certainly gives us a very graphic idea of the tragic "mouthing" referred to by Demosthenes in his savage attack on Æschines.
4. Hist. Class. Gk. Lit., vol. i. p. 269.
5. The proportion of this play assigned to the chorus is plainly an imperfect index to the impersonal action it contains. To judge this impersonal element fairly we should not only add to the chorus the lines attributed to Κράτος, but should decide how far Io, Okeanus, and even Prometheus himself are personages at all; for in this highly abstract play personality, as might be expected, is deficient.
6. K. O. Müller, Hist. Gk. Lit. (Donaldson's translation), vol. i. p. 509.
7. The Acharnians, the Knights, the Clouds, the Wasps, the Birds, the Frogs. Among non-extant dramas of Aristophanes called after the chorus we may name the Babylonians and the Feasters (Dætaleis).
8. Performed in B.C 427, but no longer extant.
9. K. O. Müller, Hist. Gk. Lit., vol. ii. p. 21.
10. The chorus of the Clouds and that of the Wasps will sufficiently illustrate such usage on the comic stage.
11. Thus in Belshazzar's Feast the dramatis personæ are the King Belshazzar, Daniel, Idolatry, Vanity, and a curious personage, called "The Thought," who in the first scene enters, dressed in a coat of many colours, as the fool. Among the dramatis personæ of the Divine Philothea are Sight, Hearing, Paganism, Judaism. See Denis Florence McCarthy's translations of these autos sacramentales.
12. Bearing in mind the historical development of the dramatic chorus at Athens as given above, we cannot but regard certain imitations of the classic form in modern times as singularly incongruous. The introduction of the Athenian chorus among the Hebrews in such plays as Racine's Athalie or Milton's Samson Agonistes is like writing Hebrew ideas for an English or French audience in Greek words. Yet the presence of the Athcnian chorus and stock characters (the Κῆρυξ and Messenger, in Samson Agonistes) among Hebrew associations never seems to strike critics as out of place, though if the Vidúshaka, or Buffoon of the Indian drama, had been transferred to Athens that incongruity would scarcely have been so great as this. But, in truth, the confusion of Hebrew and Greek with modern thought has done much, not only to close our eyes to such incongruities, but to stop the progress of that historical consciousness which cannot exist so long as such confusion is not felt. Of course such imitations of the Athenian drama as the Atalanta in Calydon or the Erechtheus are free from this charge of incongruity; for they represent the use of the Greek form within the legitimate range of the Greek spirit.
13. Hist. Lat. Lit. (Wagner's translation), vol. i. p. 27.
14. Shakspere's expression, "Cain-coloured beard" (Merry Wives, I. iv.), referring to the red hair worn by this stock personage of the morality-plays, reminds us of the custom on the Roman stage for old men to appear in white wigs (e.g. "Periplecomenus albicapillus," in the Miles Gloriosus) and slaves in red (e.g. "Si quis me quæret rufus," in the Phormio)—a custom probably derived from the typical dresses of the stock personages in the old comedy of Rome.
15. Even these performances of Livius, however, would seem to have been a considerable improvement on the older spectacles. Among these, the Saturæ appear to have been performances of the country clowns of Latium, in which separate songs or comic stories were sung or recited, with gesticulation and dancing, to the accompaniment of a tibia; their subjects were more varied than those of the Fescenninæ. The Mimes were performed by one principal actor; while in the Atellanæ "only the general plot was arranged, the rest being left to improvisation." The form of the Atellanæ "may be presumed to have been in most cases a simple dialogue, songs in Saturnian metre being perhaps interspersed; the jokes were coarse, accompanied by lively gesticulation which was also obscene." See Teuffel's Hist. Lat. Lit.
16. The Japanese drama is by some supposed to have been borrowed from the Chinese; but, even granting the truth of this supposition, these Eastern dramas are not sufficiently developed, and do not reflect states of society sufficiently developed, to be compared with the dramatic relations of Rome and Greece. And if the influence of the French drama on the Russian be cited as a parallel, we must remember that this influence of the French has been modified by that of the English and German dramas.
17. Professor Tyrrell, in the introduction to his excellent edition of the Miles Gloriosus, observes with truth that the Plautine prologues are, as a rule, spurious, containing sometimes (as in those of the Casina, Asinaria, Menæchmi, Pseudolus) references to Plautus of a kind which would seem to imply that he was no longer living. But, though the prologue of the Casina may not have been written by Plautus, the introduction of manners in in the play out of keeping with social life in Rome is not affected, and the need of an apology for such an introduction, whether it was felt by the author himself or by some later producers of the play, is likewise not affected.
18. Many names of the Plautine characters explain themselves—such are Artotrogus, "Breadeater," the parasite in Miles Gloriosus; Polymachæroplagides, "Macmanyswordblows," the boastful soldier in Pseudolus; Anthrax, "Coalman," the cook in Aulularia. In Terence, on the contrary, the same name, "Chremes," for example, is used for totally different characters, and of course without any meaning being conveyed by the name. The dramatic use of names intended to convey their own meaning is, in fact, a sign that character-drawing is subordinated to types; hence the constant use of such names in Aristophanes. In Mr. Ruskin's extravagant attempt to find meanings in Shakspere's dramatic names—Desdemona, δυσδαιμονία, "miserable fortune," Hamlet, "homely," Iago, "the supplanter," and so on—we have much more than a "note of provinciality in the highest excess," as Mr. Matthew Arnold has said; we have in it a complete failure to grasp the difference between characterisation through the medium of types and characterisation through the medium of individual personality, the latter and not the former being the essential feature of Shaksperian art. The characters in the Canterbury Tales are indeed types of social life in the England of Chaucer; but in the England of Shakspere and on the Shaksperian stage men and women possess an individuality impossible in the days of medieval guilds and serfage.
19. The Telamo.