“ No basis was permanently found for a really national tragedy; while literary comedy, after turning from the direct imitation of Latin models to a more popular form, lost itself in an abandoned immorality of tone and in reckless insolence of invective against particular classes of society. Though its productivity long continued, the poetic drama more and more concentrated its efforts upon subordinate or subsidiary species, artificial in origin and decorative in purpose, and surrendered its substance to the overpowering aids of music, dancing and spectacle. ”

“ To mould a subject—be it a Greek legend, or a portion of a Tudor chronicle, or one out of a hundred Italian tales, or a true story of modern life—into the action or fable of a play, is the primary task of the dramatist, and with this all-important process the creative part of his work really begins. Although his conception may expand or modify itself as he executes it, yet upon the conception the execution must largely depend. ”

“ Thus it came to be overlooked that there is nothing in Aristotle’s statement to show that in his judgment unity of time and place are, like unity of action, absolute dramatic laws. Their object is by representing an action as visibly continuous to render its unity more distinctly or easily perceptible. But the imagination is capable of constructing for itself the bridges required for preserving to an action, conceived of as such, its character of continuousness. ”

“ The events of real life, the facts of history, even the imitative incidents of narrative fiction, are like the waves of a ceaseless flood; that which binds a group or body of them into a single action is the bond of the dramatic idea ”

“ He proved, what before him had only been suspected, that Shakespeare, though in hopeless conflict with certain rules dating from the siècle de Louis XIV, was not in conflict with those laws of the drama which are of its very essence, and that, accordingly, if Shakespeare and the rules in question could not be harmonized, it was only so much the worse for the rules. To illustrate from great works, and expound with their aid, the organic processes of the art to which they belong, is not only among the highest, it is also one of the most useful functions of literary and artistic criticism. ”

“ Greek tragedy itself, though treating subjects derived from no historic age, had established a standard of manners from which in its decline it did not depart with impunity. Again, the imitation of manners of a particular age or country may or may not be of moment in a play. In some dramas, and in some species of drama, time and place are so purely imaginary and so much a matter of indifference that the adoption of a purely conventional standard of manners, or at least the exclusion of any definitely fixed standard, is here desirable. ”

“ The ripest glories of the Spanish drama belong to an age of national decay—mindful, it is true, of the ideas of a greater past. The chivalrous enthusiasm pervading so many of the masterpieces of its literature is indeed a distinctive feature of the Spanish nation in all, even in the least hopeful, periods of its later history ”

“ On the other hand, the modern French drama has largely employed another device—quite legitimate in itself—for increasing the interest of an action without destroying its unity. This may be called the dramatic use of backgrounds, the depiction of surroundings on which the action or its chief characters seem sympathetically to reflect themselves, backbiting “good villagers” or academicians who inspire one another—with tedium. But a really double or multiple action, logically carried out as such, is inconceivable in a single drama, though many a play is palpably only two plays knotted into one. ”

“ Without an action in the sense stated—without a plot, in a word—there can be no drama. But the very simplest action will satisfy the dramatic test; a mystery representing the story of Cain and Abel without a deviation from the simple biblical narrative, a farce exhibiting the stalest trick played by designing sobriety upon oblivious drunkenness, may each of them be a complete drama. But even to this point, the imitation of action by action in however crude a form, not all peoples have advanced. ”

“ For, with all its inventiveness and vigour, the genius of Lope primarily set itself the task of pleasing his public,—the very spirit of whose inner as well as outer life is accordingly mirrored in his dramatic works. In them we have, in the words of Lope’s French translator Baret, “the movement, the clamour, the conflict of unforeseen intrigues suitable to unreflecting spectators; perpetual flatteries addressed to an unextinguishable national pride; the painting of passions dear to a people never tired of admiring itself; the absolute sway of the point of honour ”

“ The supposed necessity that an action should consist of one event is an erroneous interpretation of the law that it should be, as an action, one. For an event is but an element in an action, though it may be an element of decisive moment. The assassination of Caesar is not the action of a Caesar tragedy; the loss of his treasure is not the action of The Miser. Again, unity of action, while excluding those unconnected episodes which Aristotle so severely condemns, does not prohibit the introduction of one or even more subsidiary actions as contributing to the progress of the main action. ”

“ Study and reflection enable him, with the aid of experience and of the intuition which genius bestows, but which experience may in a high degree supply, to interpret, to combine, and to supplement given materials. But in the transformation of the conception into the represented character the actor’s functions are really creative; for here he becomes the character by means which belong to his art alone. ”

“ By the time of the close of the great war, the theatre had sunk into a mere amusement of the populace, which during the greater part of the 18th century, while allowing the old masters the measure of favour which accords with traditional esteem, continued to uphold the representatives of the old drama in its degeneracy—authors on the level of their audiences. But the Spanish court was now French, and in the drama, even more than in any other form of art, France was the arbiter of taste in Europe. ”

“ But no dramaturgic achievement in the century could compare in grandeur either of conception or of execution with Richard Wagner’s Bayreuth performances, where, for the first time in the history of the modern stage, the artistic instinct ruled supreme in all the conditions of the work and its presentment. Though the Ring of the Nibelungs and its successors belong to opera rather than drama proper, the importance of their production (1876) should be overlooked by no student of the dramatic art. ”

“ It is true that the actor only temporarily interprets, and sometimes misinterprets, the dramatist, while occasionally he reveals dramatic possibilities in a character or situation which remained hidden from their literary inventor. But this only shows that the courses of the dramatic and the histrionic arts do not run parallel; it does not contradict the fact that their conjunction is, on the one side as well as on the other, indispensable. No drama is more than potentially such till it is acted. ”

“ It is one of those exceptional works which, by circumstance as well as by merit, have become the property of the world’s literature at large. Thus, both in Italian and in other literatures, the pastoral drama became a distinct species, characterized, like the great body of modern pastoral poetry in general, by a tendency either towards the artificial or towards the burlesque. Its artificiality affected the entire growth of Italian comedy, including the commedia dell’ arte, and impressed itself in an intensified form upon the opera. ”

“ Potent as has been the influence of foreign dramatic literatures—whether French or Scandinavian—and that of a movement which has been common to them all, and from which the German was perhaps the least likely to exclude itself, the most notable feature in the recent history of the German drama has been its quick response to wholly new demands, which, though the attempt was made with some persistence, could no longer be met without an effort to span the widths and sound the depths of a more spacious and more self-conscious era. ”

“ The eye, unaided or armed with a telescope, is able to see, as points of light, stars subtending no sensible angle. The visibility of a star is a question of brightness simply, and has nothing to do with resolving power. The latter element enters only when it is a question of recognizing the duplicity of a double star, or of distinguishing detail upon the surface of a planet. So in the microscope there is nothing except lack of light to hinder the visibility of an object however small. ”

“ The details of historic fidelity, and the lesser shades distinguishing the varieties of social usage, will be introduced by him at his choice, or left to be supplied by the actor. Where the reproduction of manners becomes the primary purpose of a play, its effect can only be of an inferior kind; and a drama purely of manners is a contradiction in terms.
No complete system of dramatic species can be abstracted from any one dramatic literature. They are often the result of particular antecedents, and their growth is often affected by peculiar conditions. ”

“ The Spanish drama neither sought nor could seek to emancipate itself from views and forms of religious life more than ever sacred to the Spanish people since the glorious days of Ferdinand and Isabella; and it is not so much in the beginnings as in the great age of Spanish dramatic literature that it seems most difficult to distinguish between what is to be termed a religious and what a secular play. ”

“ In the matter of comic as well as of serious characterization—in the individualizing of characters and in evolving them as it were out of the progress of the action—the modern drama has not only advanced, but in a sense revolutionized, the dramatic art, as inherited from its ancient masters. ”

“ Neither the great authorities on dramatic theory nor the resolute and acute apologists of more or less transitory phases of the drama—Corneille, Dryden and many later successors—have exhausted the statement of the means which the drama has proved, or may prove, capable of employing. The multitude of technical terms and formulae which has gathered round the practice of the most living and the most Protean of arts has at no time seriously interfered with the operation of creative power. ”

“ Aristotle, whom we still justly revere as the originator of the theory of the drama, and thus its great νομοθέτης, was, no doubt, in his practical knowledge of it, confined to its Greek examples, yet his object was not to produce another generation of great Attic tragedians, but rather to show how it was by following the necessary laws of their art that the great masters, true to themselves and to their artistic ends, had achieved what they had achieved. ”

“ The Completeness of action.historian, for instance, is aware that the complete exposition of a body of events and transactions at which he aims can never be more than partially accomplished, since he may present only what he knows, and all human knowledge is imperfect. But Art is limited by no such uncertainty. The dramatist, in treating an action as one, comprehends the whole of it in the form of his work, since, to him who has conceived it, all its parts, from cause to effect, are equally clear. It is his fault if in the action of his drama anything is left unaccounted for—not motivé ”

“ In other words, no characterization can be effective which is not what may be called economical, i.e. which does not strictly limit itself to suiting the purposes of the action. Even the minor characters should not idly intervene; while the chief characters should predominate over, or determine, the course of the action, its entire conception should harmonize with their distinctive features. It is only a Prometheus whom the gods bind fast to a rock, only a Juliet who will venture into a living death for her Romeo. ”

“ The youthful genius of the greatest of German poets was itself under the influences of this period, when it produced the first of its masterpieces. But Goethe’s Götz von Berlichingen (1773) , both by the choice and treatment of its national theme, and by the incomparable freshness and originality of its style, holds a position of its own in German dramatic literature. Though its defiant irregularity of form prevented its complete success upon the stage, yet its influence is far from being represented by the series of mostly feeble imitations to which it gave rise. ”

“ But experience has necessarily from time to time established certain rules of practice, and from the adoption of particular systems of division for particular species of the drama—such as that into five acts for a regular tragedy or comedy, which Roman example has caused to be so largely followed—has naturally resulted a certain uniformity of relation between the conduct of an action and the outward sections of a play. ”

“ The varieties in the treatment of the growth or second stage of the action are infinite; it is here that the greatest freedom is manifestly permissible; that in the Indian drama the personages make long journeys across the stage; and that, with the help of their under-plots, the masters of the modern tragic and the comic drama—notably those unequalled weavers of intrigues, the Spaniards—are able most fully to exercise their inventive faculties. If the growth is too rapid, the climax will fail of its effect ”

“ The formation of a sharp image of the radiant point requires that the illumination become insignificant when ξ, η attain small values, and this insignificance can only arise as a consequence of discrepancies of phase among the secondary waves from various parts of the aperture. So long as there is no sensible discrepancy of phase there can be no sensible diminution of brightness as compared with that to be found at the focal point itself. ”