Hutcheson Macaulay Posnett

“ The dramatist draws his characters of men and women not for himself, not to be visible only to his own eyes, or to eyes as penetrating as his own, but to live and move and have their being in the sympathies and antipathies, in the senses and emotions, in the imaginations and intellect of his audience. This is the reason why the drama discloses in some respects better than any other branch of literature the average character of the age. ”

“ The main characteristics of Roman, as of Alexandrian, world-literature are its individualism and the colossal personality of the emperor, who, in an age when force alone held the community together, absorbed as the world-god all the divinity Roman courtiers could feel. In the satirists of Rome we have the spirit of this individualism crying aloud, a spirit which only takes permanent possession of a community when a profound belief in human selfishness has become the terrible substitute for a creed. ”

“ The great instrument of moral good is the imagination. Poetry and the principle of self, of which money is the visible incarnation, are respectively the God and Mammon of the world. What were virtue, love, patriotism, friendship, what were the scenery of this beautiful world which we inhabit, what were our consolations on this side of the grave and what our aspirations beyond it, if poetry did not ascend to bring light and fire from those eternal regions where the owl-winged faculty of calculation dare not ever soar? ”

“ Language, in fact, is a sound-catalogue of all the objects and thoughts familiar to the community to which it belongs, be that community ever so small or ever so large, be it an African tribe or the widespread speakers of English or Arabic, be its average senses—sight, hearing, touch, taste—as sharp, but unæsthetic, as those of an American Indian, or as æsthetically appreciative, though perhaps physically inferior, as those of the most cultured people. With the contents of this catalogue the individual makers of a group's literature must be content. ”

“ Not realised as an idea of the intellect, not reflected upon as an emotion of the heart, but profoundly felt to be the centre of social life, this common kinship is as real as though it could be touched in the person of that communal ancestor from whose loins the group is sprung or thought to be sprung, whose imaginary presence sanctifies every festival of common joys, whose favour is to be propitiated in every common affliction, and to whom, in company with others long since gathered to their fathers, it is the destiny of the clansman, sooner or later, to return. ”

“ To sympathise truly with the dramas of Sophocles or Aristophanes, we must be largely acquainted with the contemporary spirit of social life at Athens, or even with minute points in Athenian politics. To sympathise with the odes of Pindar we must possess some of a Dissen's learning as well as a musical imagination which no learning can create. But the idylls of Theocritus present man and Nature in such simplicity that we take in all at a glance. Take, for instance, part of the twenty-first idyll as a picture in which the human interest predominates ”

“ Days without writing when poetic guilds were the great conservators of human tradition—days of courtly imitators crowning their brows with the withered roses of buried poets—days of democratic art when he who has the living spirit is free to choose its proper embodiment—so various are the epochs of social life and literature to which "poetic diction" may belong, so different are the facts and the ideas which it may express. ”

“ It is this individualism which invests with such intense feeling our "lyric" poetry of youth and age, which lingers over personal associations within the limits of its own time and space with a sadness almost inexpressible in the language of any group, and which watches the withering of its own passions and emotions with the conviction that "there's not a joy the world can give like that it takes away." ”

“ When we look at the East in general and the civilisation of India in particular, we must candidly admit that there are large districts of the world's surface in which city life has exerted no influence compared with the municipal systems of Greece and Rome and the nations which have risen among their ruins. If Rome passed at a single stride from a city commonwealth to a world-empire without waiting to grow into a nation, the social evolution of the East seems to have passed from the village community to world-empire without experiencing the stage of isolated city commonwealths. ”

“ So, too, with the expanding town-sovereignty of Rome. Into the wilderness of nature and men uncivilised she throws her outposts of armed towns, and views with infinitely deeper sympathy the tiresome regularity of her military roads than all the splendid scenery of lake and mountain coming within the widening horizon of her empire. This is the march of human force armed cap-a-pie; before it nature is good for growing corn, raising men and cattle, for the soldier's ambuscade or the evolutions of horse and foot—and that is all. ”

“ The mere presence of a beautiful physical environment can do little towards the creation of a beautiful literature if social life moves under conditions adverse to sentiments of sympathy with nature. This man who, like Wordsworth's Wanderer, has lived among the wildest and grandest scenery earth can offer, is moved by none but petty motives, and reflects in his spirit neither the dignity nor the beauty of his native mountains. ”

“ In truth, the artist lives and must live, if he will act at all, a life of limitation fancied to be limitless. If he should know and feel his limits, if he should eat of the fatal tree of science and his eyes be opened, the ideas he expresses are likely to be revealed ephemeral in their essence, and his hands are apt to lose their cunning in a craft which has lost its divinity. For, however paradoxical it may appear, the true glimmerings of human divinity are visible, not in the creation of the artist, but in the reflection of the critic. ”

“ 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. ”

“ To assume a position on the border-lands of Science and Literature is perhaps to provoke the hostility of both the great parties into which our modern thinkers and educationists may be divided. The men of Literature may declare that we have fallen into the hands of the Philistines, and that the mere attempt to explain literary development by scientific principles is worthy of none but a Philistine. The men of Science may be inclined to underrate the value of a study which the unveiled presence of that mysterious element, imagination, makes apparently less definite than their own. ”

“ Shelley, in his Defence of Poetry, maintained that "the connection of poetry and social good is more observable in the drama than in any other form; and it is indisputable that the highest perfection of human society has ever corresponded with the highest dramatic excellence, and that the corruption or extinction of the drama in a nation where it has once flourished marks a corruption of manners and an extinction of the energies which sustain the soul of social life; for the end of social corruption is to destroy all sensibility to pleasure." ”

“ Look on the green hues of the willows—afar one might have thought them clouds of mist all balanced in the air. ... The flowers and willows seem to sigh at our approach; the breeze, the moon, are fuller still of sympathy; 'tis they that bring to life the varied colours that we love. A poet in such moments of delight might feel constrained to pour out in sweet verse the feelings of his soul. ”

“ As in Rome there had set in a conflict between old Roman family sentiments and the individualising spirit of the Greeks, as in Rome nobles of light and leading had been delighted to exchange archaic sentiments of family life and archaic measures like the Saturnian for the cultured thought and harmonious metres of Greece, so in Russia there set in a conflict between French individualism, dear to the court and nobles, and the social feelings of the Russian commune and family. ”

“ The heart and hand of the Arab are remembered, his blood is to be avenged, but his spirit haunts not the rocks any more than that of his dead camel. The heritage of blood is a material burden which must be taken up and borne; it is no ghost-voice crying from the grave. All this is in keeping with the clan spirit which turns away from the shadow-world of kinsmen, where punishment or reward are yet unknown, to the sphere of the dead man's achievements and the very real work of revenge. For the murdered Arab is only the central figure of a group ”

“ This singing personage, with figurative, showy, and lyrical diction, his voice aided by a musical accompaniment, is a link between the poet and the audience, like the chorus of the Greek theatre, only with this difference, that he remains no stranger to the action. On the contrary, the singing personage is the hero of the piece, who, when the catastrophe occurs, always remains on the stage to rouse the sorrow of the spectators and draw forth their tears. ”

“ 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. ”

“ But it is not so easy to grasp the facts that "literature," far from enshrining universal forms and ideas of beauty, owes both its creative and critical works to the development of social life; that familiar general or special conceptions suggested by the word drop off one by one as we retrace the steps of such development; and that all our subtle literary distinctions finally disappear in the songs of those isolated clans and tribes whose fusion produced the people and the language of future art and criticism. ”

“ The Athenian spirit in its full life and vigour could not brook the thought of a time when it was not, threw a kind of glamour over the past history of Hellas, and universalised its own ideas at the expense alike of contemporary states of Greek society less developed than its own, and of the early life of chief and clan. Thus, to select a literary example, the dramatic spectacles and forensic pleading of Athens underlie the general canons of Aristotle's poetic and rhetorical criticism, and supply the living particulars which his philosophy expands into ideal forms. ”

“ The isolated city commonwealths of Greece saw beyond their own walls little but the work-fields of their slaves, or an exposed borderland which war and brigandage were perpetually devastating; where roads, if they existed at all, were as often the highways of enemies as the conductors of friends, and where the best of nature's favours would be a network of impassable rocks, to be valued for their practical defence, not admired for any beauty of their scenery. ”

“ Nor like Florence, split into factions almost as permanently hostile as those of Rome, is Athens oppressed by membership of any world-empire; the freedom of her thought knows not the restrictions of a world-religion, and that of her art is unoppressed by models whose imitation cannot but disappoint and whose existence often damps the ardour of young genius. ”

“ Christianity, like the eagle wounded by an arrow which a feather of its own had winged, is to-day attacked by social and physical theories which claim to rule a wider empire of time and space; but at the Christianising of Europe, this majestic world-religion must have opened up such visions of human unity as the barbarians would have needed centuries of internal conflict, civilisation, and philosophy to approximate. To the Europe of the barbarian hordes Christianity came as a ready-made philosophy—a philosophy, moreover, not too refined to touch certain deep feelings of clan life ”

“ The drama is a picture of individual character, social life, and, to some degree—in Indian, Chinese, and Japanese plays to a considerable degree—physical nature. If its characters and social life are patchworks of different ages—sentiments of blood-revenge blended with courtly refinement, associations of Elizabethan London in the Rome of Cæsar or the Athens of Alcibiades—we only enjoy the medley seriously so long as we are unconscious of the historical contrasts which, to the eye of those who can see them, cannot but lend the most solemn tragedy a look of caricature. ”

“ 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. ”

“ In the eyes of the clan the inheritance of such responsibility seems not a whit less reasonable than the acquisition of rights in the common lands by birth. In the eyes of the clan the selection of this or that person for punishment seems as reasonable as the escape of others by death from the only known sphere of punishment—human clan life. Indeed, this corporate liability for sins is the only possible moral sanction so long as the individual's intention is left out of sight, his personal being dimly realised, and his personal share in a future life but vaguely felt. ”