which can be contented with imaginative expression. When the fables were no longer believed, when philosophy was attaining clearness, the native air of tragedy was spent (See above, c. 3, p. 16.)
It was impossible all at once to make a new beginning and to leap, theatre and all, out of the age of Pericles into that of Lessing and Goethe. There are isolated scenes and speeches in Euripides, which might seem to give promise of a dramatic art more comprehensive and more real than had been known hitherto, an art in which "the whole tragedy and comedy of life," of which Plato wrote, would be represented in the light of true ideas, without the inconvenient trappings of mythology. But these are, after all, but splendid patches on an inharmonious work, the occasional springing of a plant, "which bears a golden flower, but not in this soil."
The very narrowness of his range, indeed, gave to the ancient poet a capital advantage in point of reality. Greek tragedy not only took shape and growth directly from the spirit of the time, but dealt with subjects of the most vital interest. For to the Athenians of the time of Cleisthenes or of Miltiades, and later still, the local or neighbouring hero was a living power, present in their midst, whose destinies were inseparably bound up with the national existence. Hence the imagination of the ancient spectator met the poet half-way and conspired with him in the production of an atmosphere of illusion. For, as Aristotle puts it, "what is possible is credible, and what once happened was clearly possible." Whereas the utmost that can be said for a modern fable is that "the story is extant, and written in very choice Italian."
The protagonist of modern fiction is a shadowy being, who is to us only what the poet makes him. Even in going to hear an historical play we think of it chiefly as a work of imagination. Very different was the eager expectation with which the Athenians awaited the coming on of Theseus or of Heracles.
