Here again the modern acrobat, who is guided by a real feeling for his
art, is in accord with the principles which the Greeks obeyed. In Attic
tragedy, for example, there are no exhibitions of violence, no scuffles,
and no assassinations, and this is not so much because the Greeks
shrank from scenes of blood, as some critics have vainly contended, but
rather because the actors in the Attic drama were raised on thick boots
and were topped by towering masks, which made it almost impossible for
them to take part in episodes of vigorous action, in hand-to-hand
struggles, in murders before the eyes of the spectators, without danger
of displacing the mask, and thereby distracting the attention of the
audience from the immediate purpose of the dramatic poet. What could not
be done gracefully the Greeks refrained from attempting. The exhibition
of difficulty for the sake of difficulty, still more the failure to
accomplish a "stunt" for the sake of calling attention to its
difficulty--these things the Greeks abhorred. They would as surely have
disapproved of the misguided artifices of the acrobats who make a
practise of failing once or twice in order to multiply the immediate
effect of their ultimate success as they would reprove the exhibition of
a difficulty conquered for its own sake. It is only in the best
acrobatic performances that we moderns are privileged to perceive what
was a constant delight to the Greeks--the beauty of the human form, in
its finest physical perfection, certain of its strength and easy in its
grace.
(1912.)