Trilogy

“ The antiquarian account of the trilogies is this: that in the more early times the poet did not contend for the prize with a single piece, but with three, which, however, were not always connected together in their subjects, and that to these was added a fourth,—namely, a satiric drama. All were acted in one day, one after another. The idea which, in relation to the tragic art, we must form of the trilogy, is this: a tragedy cannot be indefinitely lengthened and continued, like the Homeric Epos for instance, to which whole rhapsodies have been appended ”

“ This great trilogy, the life story of a musician, at first the sensation of musical circles in Paris, has come to be one of the most discussed books among literary circles in France, England and America.
Each volume of the American edition has its own individual interest, can be understood without the other, and comes to a definite conclusion. ”

“ Had the trilogy terminated with the death of the brothers such a catastrophe would have violated an essential canon of classical dramatic art, which requires the final reconciliation of the principles brought into collision during the action of the play. These principles, in the drama before us, are—duty to the family, and duty to the State; the harmonious action of which is necessary to the well-being of society. ”

“ The works which belong to this—from the Wallenstein trilogy to Tell—are the acknowledged masterpieces of the German poetic drama, treating historic themes reconstructed by conscious dramatic workmanship, and clothing their dialogue in a noble vestment of rhetorical verse. The plays of Schiller are the living embodiment of the theory of tragedy elaborated by Hegel, according to which its proper theme is the divine, or, in other words, the moving ethical, element in human action. In one of his later plays, The Bride of Messina, Schiller attempted a new use of the chorus of Greek tragedy ”

“ It is accorded, and of necessity, by the people in a drama: how necessary is it in a novel?
Let us define a plot. We have defined a story as a narrative of events arranged in their time-sequence. A plot is also a narrative of events, the emphasis falling on causality. "The king died and then the queen died," is a story. "The king died, and then the queen died of grief" is a plot. The time-sequence is preserved, but the sense of causality overshadows it. ”

“ Why then should not cycles of history, two, three, or more cycles of history, be allowed to exist, within which all the really important factors have their origin and development, and, it may be, work out their full destiny; successive great dramas of ages, the interest of which is self-contained, although there is enough of common ground between them and those which precede and follow to give them a simple continuity, and although there is doubtless in the divine mind one great plan of cosmical action in which each drama of the human ages serves as a single act or even a single incident? ”

“ The province of the epic is the poetical narrative of real or supposed events, and the representation of real, or at least natural, characters; and history, in its noblest examples, is an account of occurrences in which great events are commemorated, and distinguished men appear as agents and actors. Epic poetry and the drama are but narratives, the former partly and the latter wholly, in the form of a dialogue, but their characters and personages are usually, in part at least, the creations of the imagination. ”

“ Whereas, the history of our ancient kings—the events of their reigns, I mean,—are like stars in the sky;—whatever the real interspaces may be, and however great, they seem close to each other. The stars—the events—strike us and remain in our eye, little modified by the difference of dates. An historic drama is, therefore, a collection of events borrowed from history, but connected together in respect of cause and time, poetically and by dramatic fiction. ”

“ Growing up while the deeds of dead heroes were fresh in memory, most often recited before the sharers in such deeds, the saga, in its pure form, never goes from what is truth to its teller. Where the saga, as this one of the Volsungs, is founded upon the debris of songs and poems, even then very old, tales of mythological heroes, of men quite removed from the personal knowledge of the narrator, yet the story is so inwound with the tradition of his race, is so much a part of his thought-life, that every actor in it has for him a real existence. ”

“ The low, yellow thatched houses, where the wreath-makers live, still frame the street, and, as though it were yet twenty years ago, the simple wreaths of ivy, moss, and immortelles hang over the tiny doors with their old-fashioned latches. ”

“ With Marie I am safe. She is like a quiet summer evening, soothing and exciting at the same time. Sweet harmonies of peace fill one's soul, everything seems bright and lightsome, worries vanish from the brains like clearing mists, courage and hope expand the heart. When Marie laid her hand on my brow she swept away all my troubles, and life lay before me as on some quiet summer evening, rich in beauty and peace. Never has she set a nerve shrieking with pain or anger or disgust. ”

“ Something in the perfection of the saga is to be traced to the long winter’s evenings, when the whole household, gathered together at their spinning, weaving, and so on, would listen to one of their number who told anew some old story of adventure or achievement. In very truth the saga is a prose epic, and marked by every quality an epic should possess. ”

“ Finally, if the style of the movement require it, the whole may be introduced by a Prologue and summed up by an Epilogue. [15] It is hardly necessary to point out that the principle of perfect symmetry embodied in this form is precisely the same as that [53] on which is constructed a great drama or a great novel. At the outset our attention is divided between two main centres of interest; as the work proceeds the plan is complicated by the introduction of new centres; at its close the complications are cleared away and the interests identified. ”

“ And being past, these events appear as it were at a distance, at arms' length and remote; they lack the vivid reality of things present. Moreover, since the past is finished, unlike the present which is ever moving and creating itself anew, the epic, in comparison with the drama, comes to us with its parts as it were coexisting and complete, more after the manner of space than of time. ”

“ To the God of Rough-Hill.
To the God of Rough-Hill, the God of peace, the God of our happiness, we will build our floral temple. Here we will sit together, gazing far out over the land and let the world go by in its noisy way ; we will hear the hurricane roar, and see the storm break round us, sheltered by our quiet tent of peace. Here we will sit, while we are young and roses grow in our hearts ; here we will sit when the old years come and the fragrance of memories are round us. ”

“ If what is called history is so near mythology as, many times, to be confounded with it, what about romance and the historical drama in which events, entirely imaginative, must of necessity find a place? ”

“ We walk through the wood drinking the strong wine of spring, which the sun draws out of a thousand intoxicating essences. I see the blood mount in Greta's cheeks, I feel it throb in her hand as I hold it in mine. The wine of spring is in us, its enchanting drowsiness pours through our veins. ”

“ Grandmama is like a wax figure, not a muscle quivers in her large, regular, white face, surrounded by the goffered ruche of her cap. For the last two years she has not even had a piece of knitting in her hands. She sits like a symbol of peaceful old age, free from strife and worry. She speaks in the same monotonous voice, whether she expresses joy or sorrow, and she talks as slowly as if the finding of each word was an effort. ”

“ They represent accurately the mythological panorama, as it unrolled itself slowly through the centuries before the imagination and spirit of our ancestors accurately that divine drama, millennium—lasting, with its exits and entrances of gods. Millennium-lasting, and more so, for it is plain that one divine generation represents on the average a much greater space of time than a generation of mortal men. ”

“ EPILOGUE.
BY MR SMITH.
Our poet, gentlemen, thought to steal away,
Hoping those wretched rhymes, i' th' end o' th' play,
Might serve for epilogue; for truly he
Takes epilogues for arrant bribery.
H' observes your poet in our modern plays,
Humbly showeth, and then as humbly prays;
So that it can't be said, what they have writ
Was without fear, though often without wit.
He trusts (as ye say papists do) to merit;
Leaves you (like quakers) to be mov'd by th' spirit.
But since that epilogues are so much in vogue,
Take this as prologue to the epilogue. ”

“ We lay hand in hand, each filled with our own thoughts, and staring open-eyed into the darkness. Your little warm hand, Marie, rested so cautiously in mine, it did not move at all, as if it feared to break the silence. It seemed to me as though we flew on great silent wings through space, far away from sorrow and pain, to a sphere where time is not, where reign the dreamless sleep and the darkness that knows no fears. ”

“ Thus do the spirits of the remote past sit at our firesides still, and kindle the imagination of our little folks: and in the rich tapestry of story and picture which 239 each age weaves around it, elements from many different sources are continually and almost inextricably interwoven, as if the warp of human wonder and imagination was crossed with many coloured threads of mythological lore, history and allegory, symbolism and romance. ”

“ But, as is suggested in another chapter, the comparatively new art of the continuity writer is bound eventually to overcome its earlier handicaps and, in its bestowal upon the race of a novel medium through which creative genius can manifest itself, will beget a type of super-scenario-maker to which the screen’s future splendid achievements must be, of necessity, largely due.
The meaning of life Man doesn’t know. ”

“ Some one once called the novel the “modern epic.” There is just enough truth in the saying to give it social currency in conversation, but it is true, so far as we know, that the ancient epic preceded the ancient drama, creating the taste and the demand for emotions which the dramatists subsequently satisfied, and it was perhaps because the epic was wholly historical in a measure, that the drama was founded upon an historical basis. ”

“ I143 thought of the whole great series, each life rising and setting like a little day, each with its dawn and noon and sunset, each with its harvest of failure and success, of joy and sorrow, of friendships formed and enemies forgiven, of ideals realised or abandoned—pouring out of the womb of time and slowly bringing the soul through the discipline of all possible experience towards that perfection which proclaims it one with the entire universe—the Deity. ”

“ The narrative, then, the chronicle, the summary, which must represent the story-teller's ordered and arranged experience, and which must accordingly be of the nature of a picture, is to be strengthened, is to be raised to a power approaching that of drama, where the intervention of the story-teller is no longer felt. The freedom which the pictorial method gives to the novelist is unknown to the playwright ”

“ This commission has been held by various kinds of author since the beginning of history, and manifold are the lessons that have been recommended to the world by their authority; now epic, now courtly and idealist lyric, romantic drama, pedantic tragedy, funeral orations, analytical novels. They are not all amusing, and not all their prices are more than the rate of an old song. But they all have a value as trophies, as monuments of what was most important in their time, of the things in which the generations, wise and foolish, have put their trust and their whole soul. ”

“ For where history and literature fail us archæology supplies its circumstantial evidence, and if we scan, through the crystal lenses of uncoloured truth, the stage where the drama which we seek was enacted we shall see the sculptured semblances of the vanished actors, and be able to surmise in part the lost book of the play. ”

“ How truly the Founder himself had said, "Think you there will be no more tragedies and dramas in the world when we have reformed it, nothing but one dreary dead level of monotonous content? Ay, indeed, there will; for that, fear not; while the heart of man remains, there will be tragedy enough on earth and to spare for a hundred poets to take for their saddest epics." ”

“ It had cultivated the sense of a well-knit plot, of effective situation, and of the interplay of character and action—all elements transferable to prose narrative. And when, in the middle of the eighteenth century, we find the novel beginning to take the place of the stage as the dominant kind of imaginative entertainment, it is easy to see how much the younger form owed to the elder. ”

“ The publishers wanted to print a history that should have rhythm—a story which galloped rather than walked. And now that I have almost finished I discover that certain chapters gallop, that others wade slowly through the dreary sands of long forgotten ages—that a few parts do not make any progress at all, while still others indulge in a veritable jazz of action and romance. ”

“ My mother's grave lies far from the high road in a quiet corner, among hundreds of others. The invisible hand leads me along half-overgrown paths which wind in and out among the grassy mounds, and suddenly I stand in front of the small enclosure where mother rests with a child on either side, a large mound between two smaller. Fresh ivy covers all three and winds itself round the simple, marble cross, and over it a lilac-tree and a laburnum bend their heavy weight of blossoms. ”