The Cosmic Poet (1903-1908)
possible. The inevitable shortcoming of any conceivable possible performance of The Dynasts is the manifest impossibility to do adequate justice to the remarkable expression of the author's philosophy as found in the work. Nearly all of the passages recited by the muses are reported to have been taken from the sections allotted to the "Pities." Although we can imagine the effect of this procedure to have been very satisfactory, the probability is that the poem suffered a total loss of the great spiritual conflict presented by the supernatural creations of the author, which in the reading overshadows and dominates the whole of the terrestrial action. We are told in the poem that the speech of mortals should sound rather thin when heard in comparison with the chantings of the divinities. In a production where, we are told, the "Immanent Will" is hardly mentioned at all, and then only near the close, the loss of philosophical unity must have been considerable. "The vast sweep of the poem," Mr. Harold Child says, "its poetic unity, its infinite variety, its mystery and majesty, in fact all the bigness of it—these were lost. The proportions were destroyed. Man became huge and the heavens were tucked away in corners."
Scenic impossibilities have been overcome by both Æschylus and Thomas Hardy by the simplest of all means, the use of description. When the ancient dramatist cannot have the scene he wishes placed before the physical eye of his audience, he presents it to the mind's eye by letting one of the dramatis personæ describe it. This is true of the description of the setting of the Prometheus, and of the Battle of Salamis, which is re-
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