The Life of Thomas Hardy
The general formal plan of The Dynasts has a distinct family relationship with that of Greek tragedy. As a trilogy it bears the same sort of resemblance to the classical form that a full-grown lion bears to a kitten. There is in it the same unity of theme and treatment, although greatly enlarged and complicated. Each part is complete in itself, like the separate Greek plays, and yet all three are indissolubly bound together by the absolute identity of the underlying theme and the philosophical background. Here Hardy is much closer to Æschylus than to either Sophocles or Euripides, because the elder dramatist felt the trilogy, and not the single play, as the essential dramatic unit. Nearly all the puzzling critical problems with which the Prometheus Bound is surrounded, and all the misconceptions which have grown up with regard to its ultimate ethical significance, would almost certainly be cleared up if its two companion-plays had come down to us. As the play stands, it is dramatically a small formal unit, but ethically a headless torso. It presents to the audience a truly remarkable πλοχή, or complication, but hardly a shadow of a λύσις, or solution. As tragedy developed after Æschylus, as the importance of the chorus was diminished, as plays became longer because of the extra time thus given for the spoken dialogue itself, and as realism gradually crept in, the single play became the unit, and we find Euripides writing three almost independent plays. Æschylus might be said to have produced three-act tragedies; Euripides, cycles of loosely-connected one-act "social dramas." In its general form The Dynasts is Æschylean, while the works of Ibsen and of the manufacturers of the "well-
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