Dram

“ Romances give more of Wonder, Novels more Delight. And with reverence be it spoken, and the Parallel kept at due distance, there is something of equality in the Proportion which they bear in reference to one another, with that betwen Comedy and Tragedy; but the Drama is the long extracted from Romance and History: ’tis the Midwife to Industry, and brings forth alive the Conceptions of the Brain. ”

“ Not only have they described the adventures of their souls among masterpieces, but the adventures of their kidneys, spleens and cæca as well. Each has held the mirror of drama up to his own nature, with all its idiosyncrasies. ”

“ In looking back, those stand out as the real things—the prosaic grind of existence falls away and shows itself as mere illusion. After all, what would life be without contrasts? They are the chief elements of drama. ”

“ As an exquisite embodiment of the poet's visions and a realisation of human intellectuality, gilding with refulgent light our dreamy moments, and laying open a new and magic world before the mental eye, the drama is gone—perfectly gone. ”

“ Thus the silent drama may become vibrant with emotional music and resonant with tongues that need no interpreter, for all nations understand the universal language of the heart. The most sublime characters and valiant deeds, ravishing color and mellifluous voices, are in our soul; sublime sympathy is in our world-old heart; profound understanding is in our God-given reason, and this multi-glorious human marvel is gratified to the utmost in having its humanity called into active being. ”

“ Here are the dramatic poets, which are, in my opinion, the best of all, and the masters of passion. There are two kinds: the comic dramatists, who move us so agreeably, and the tragic dramatists, who rouse our passions and shake our dispostions. ”

“ After very judiciously observing, that there is the same relation between romances and novels as between tragedy and comedy, he proceeds thus: ‘Since all traditions must indisputably give glace to the drama, and since there is no possibility of giving that life to the writing, or repetition of a story, which it has in the action; I resolved in another beauty to imitate dramatic writing, namely, in the design, contexture, and result in the plot. I have not observed it before in a novel. ”

“ That thrilled through each pulse and each vein,
Or the sound of a voice that still lingers
And hurts with a haunting refrain?
Is it done? is the life drama ended?
You have put all the lights out, and yet,
Though the curtain, rung down, has descended,
Can the actors go home and forget?
Ah, no! they will turn in their sleeping
With a strange restless pain in their hearts,
And in darkness, and anguish, and weeping,
Will dream they are playing their parts. ”

“ Plot and melodrama were in every life; in some so briefly as hardly to be recognized, in others--in that of certain men and women in the public eye, for instance--they were almost in the nature of a continuous performance. ”

“ Dramas brought to a close or still in progress are foreshadowed by the sight of such actors as these, not the dramas that are played before the footlights and against a background of painted canvas, but dumb dramas of life, frost-bound dramas that sere hearts like fire, dramas that do not end with the actors' lives. ”

“ Drama is the poetry of conduct, romance the poetry of circumstance. The pleasure that we take in life is of two sorts—the active and the passive. Now we are conscious of a great command over our destiny ”

“ For, as we have already proved, the drama is the grotesque in conjunction with the sublime, the soul within the body; it is tragedy beneath comedy. Do you not see that, by affording you repose from one impression by means of another, by sharpening the tragic upon the comic, the merry upon the terrible, and at need calling in the charms of the opera, these performances, while presenting but one play, would be worth a multitude of others? ”

“ And now I may add intelligibly that the drama of primitive man is performed in an equally dramaturgic spirit, whether seen, as in its merely culminating or final enactment, or unseen and often secret, as in its long-continued preparations. ”

“ There I fixed my attention on a single drama, and that one of the poet's best; but here I consider everything from the most general points of view, and relatively to the highest requisitions of art; and that my enthusiasm for ancient tragedy may not appear blind and extravagant, I must justify it by a keen examination into the traces of its degeneracy and decline.
We may compare perfection in art and poetry to the summit of a steep mountain, on which an uprolled load cannot long maintain its position, but immediately rolls down again the other side irresistibly. ”

“ The printed drama is like a bubbling and sunlit spring, encountered only by wanderers into the hills and awaiting the bottling process of the theatre to carry its tonic waters far and wide among an expectant and emotionally ill people. ”

“ When the ruling idea of his life gained ascendancy over his mind—the idea that drama is, of all arts, the one that can exercise the greatest amount of influence over the world—it aroused the most active emotions in his whole being. ”

“ But let the imagery be ever so great or splendid, if it be such only as the governing passion loves to conceive and paint, and if it be no further dilated on, and with no greater sollicitude and curiosity, than the natural working of the passion demands, the Drama is so far from rejecting such Poetry that it glories in it, as what is most essential to its true end and design. ”

“ The drama, so long as it continues to express poetry, is a prismatic and many-sided mirror, which collects the brightest rays of human nature and divides and reproduces them from the simplicity of these elementary forms, and touches them with majesty and beauty, and multiplies all that it reflects, and endows it with the power of propagating its like wherever it may fall. ”

“ The five-act drama—serious or humourous, poetic or prosaic—is like a box of fixed dimensions and inelastic material, into which a mass of precious things are to be packed away. It is a problem in ingenuity and a problem of the most interesting kind. ”

“ As the unwritten play of a great dramatist lies in his mind before it is uttered or acted, with every problem solved and every contingency provided for—so we believe the whole extended drama lay in the Eternal Mind—the path of struggle and pain—the cross-currents of human will—the glorious conclusion of it all. ”

“ Romances are to show us heroic ideals. Lyrics of joy, of sorrow, of passion, of emotion natural and spiritual, are to be sung. The sense of beauty is to grow. The drama is to arise from beginnings to be but faintly traced in early days. Epic poetry is to take a great place. ”

“ Consider the potential for creating drama, alone! Every word ever read or spoken, every emotion ever conveyed, every gesture of anger, love, jealousy, pain, pleasure—all this raw material glittering brightly, ready to pour out in new conflicts, dramatic situations, sharp pungent dialogue—"
He made me sense his enthusiasm, but I couldn't quite feel it. Would such a tremendous ability necessarily be good? ”

“ Do not our fiction and drama to-day—the drama a belated ally of the Novel in this and other regards—find in the delineation of the eternal feminine under new conditions of our time, its chief, its most significant motif? ”

“ In everything that is light and bright and ornamental the realistic story has a full advantage over the melodrama. But, at least, the melodrama has one indisputable advantage over the realistic story. ”

“ Delicious drams! why have you not the art
To kill this gnawing Book-worm in my heart? ”

“ I have seen the human drama from a veiled corner, where all the outer tragedy and comedy have reproduced themselves in microcosm within. From this inner torment of souls the human scene without has interpreted itself to me in unusual and even illuminating ways. ”

“ And now remembering this, let us turn to certain of the world's greatest works of art—I mean its dramas: for just as poetry is the most articulate of all the arts, so is the drama the most comprehensive form of poetry. In the drama we have the very thing we are now in want of. We have life as a whole—that complex aggregate of details, which forms, as it were, the mental landscape of existence, presented to us in a 'questionable shape,' at once concentrated and intensified. ”

“ Now it is part of the ideality of the highest sort of dramatic poetry, that it presents us with a kind of profoundly significant and animated instants, a mere gesture, a look, a smile, perhaps—some brief and wholly concrete moment— into which, however, all the motives, all the interests and effects of a long history, have condensed themselves, and which seem to absorb past and future in an intense consciousness of the present. ”

“ You might quite as well call it the Human Drama, the Human Tragedy.' 'Yes,' said he, 'and you, you are writing the Human Epic.' 'The title in this case,' I replied, 'would be too imposing. What I should like to write is the human pastoral, the human ballad, the human romance. To put it plainly, you have the desire and the ability to paint the human being as you see him. ”

“ And I do not wish to limit Poetry, as there is a new tendency to do, merely to the short dramatic poem, the ballad and the lyric, though it certainly is a convenience not to take these as the normal manifestations of Poetry in order to see more clearly the inter-relation of such different forms as the Drama, the Epic, and the song with music. In the Drama, the emotional conflict which is the whole cause and meaning of Poetry is concentrated in the mental problems of the leading character or characters. ”

“ The drama reproduces promiscuously uglinesses, basenesses, horrors, unclean details, profligate and ferocious manners, the whole reality of life just as it is, when it is unrestrained by decorum, common-sense, reason, and duty. ”

“ As plot is the science of structure, so dramatics is the art of treatment. Plot is a matter of selection; drama one of application of the selected material. We take it for granted that all plot material is inherently—tho crudely, perhaps—dramatic. We hint at both plot and treatment when we state that drama is a supreme human experience interpreted by characters in terms of emotion with piercing effect. ”

“ In a lengthened preliminary dissertation, she discoursed regarding the drama in all its relations, maintaining the ascendency of simple nature over every species of adornment and decoration. "Let one simple trait of the human heart, one expression of passion, genuine and true to nature," she wrote, "be introduced, and it will stand forth alone in the boldness of reality, whilst the false and unnatural around it fades away upon every side, like the rising exhalations of the morning." ”

“ "Wherever there is human nature, there is drama. ”

“ Can those, who, loving the drama, and feeling its beauties with a true classic spirit, wish to see the public taste won over to the tragic muse, hope that it can be accomplished, or can they be surprised that on the contrary, tragedy so often excites merriment when they reflect upon the way dramatic poetry is often delivered upon the stage. ”

“ A melodrama full of plot and murder and hair-breadth escape, in which the hero wins his way to the heroine through unheard of perils from swindlers, assassins, jealous rivals, and all the other dramatis personæ of melodrama. ”

“ By the introduction of a metrical dialogue an important progress has been made towards the poetical tragedy. A few lyrical dramas have been successful on the stage, and poetry, by its own living energy, has triumphed over prevailing prejudices. ”

“ These latter are rather imaginative than passionate; the stages of their woe impress them as the acts of a drama, which they cannot bring themselves to cut short, so various are the possibilities of its dark motive. ”

“ It is only thanks to such a low, trivial understanding of the significance of the drama that there appears among us that infinite quantity of dramatic works describing men's actions, positions, characters, and frames of mind, not only void of any spiritual substance, but often of any human sense. ”

“ Among the many signs of the total decay of dramatic mind and spirit in this age, a frequent piece of criticism passed upon modern plays appears to me a very conclusive one—"Such a play is exceedingly full of dramatic effect, but there's no poetry in it." ”

“ However, it is to the dramatic artist only that ability is given to breathe nobility into the whole and to charge the singleness of effect with a vitality which marks a milestone in countless lives.
In this chapter we have found that the essence of drama is conflict— a clash of wills and its outcome; that the dramatic consists in those flashes which reveal life at its significant, crucial moments ”

“ let not censure term our fate our choice,
The stage but echoes back the publick voice;
The drama's laws the drama's patrons give,
For we that live to please, must please to live. ”

“ Out of the narrative interest, a primary instinct with men, and out of the interest, only gradually developed, in individual character for its own sake, is evolved a special literary form, called drama. ”

“ The drama, in its finished literary and histrionic sense, is seen when a story, instead of being merely described in forms, words, or colors,—as by sculpture, narrative, and painting,—is exhibited by fit personages in living action with all the appropriate accessories of looks, attitudes, tones, articulations, gestures, and deeds. ”