10. These considerations may explain to us why the production of a great
tragedy is almost an impossibility in our own time. The age most
favourable to it would seem to be one in which men stand on the edge of
an old and but half-known world--as Aeschylus and Sophocles stood on the
edge of the mythologic, Shakespeare on that of the feudal world--an age
of sufficient culture and reflection for men to be conscious of the
glory they have left behind, while yet civilisation has not reached the
stage of acquiescence in things as they are, and scepticism as to all
beyond them. Those great situations furnished by the mysterious past, in
which passion quits the earth, soon lose their charm, and with the reign
of wonder that of tragedy ceases. At Athens it gives place to the new
comedy, whose highest boast was to copy present life ([Greek: ô Menandre
kai Bie, poteros ar' humôn poteron apemimêsato];):[10] in modern Europe
it has yielded to the novel.