A poetical work must vindicate itself: if the execution be defective,
little aid can be derived from commentaries.
On these grounds I might safely leave the chorus to be its own advocate,
if we had ever seen it presented in an appropriate manner. But it must
be remembered that a dramatic composition first assumes the character of
a whole by means of representation on the stage. The poet supplies only
the words, to which, in a lyrical tragedy, music and rhythmical motion
are essential accessories. It follows, then, that if the chorus is
deprived of accompaniments appealing so powerfully to the senses, it will
appear a superfluity in the economy of the drama--a mere hinderance to
the development of the plot--destructive to the illusion of the scene,
and wearisome to the spectators.
To do justice to the chorus, more especially if our aims in poetry be of
a grand and elevated character, we must transport ourselves from the
actual to a possible stage. It is the privilege of art to furnish for
itself whatever is requisite, and the accidental deficiency of
auxiliaries ought not to confine the plastic imagination of the poet. He
aspires to whatever is most dignified, he labors to realize the ideal in
his own mind--though in the execution of his purpose he must needs
accommodate himself to circumstances.
The assertion so commonly made that the public degrades art is not well
founded. It is the artist that brings the public to the level of his
own conceptions; and, in every age in which art has gone to decay, it has
fallen through its professors. The people need feeling alone, and
feeling they possess. They take their station before the curtain with
an unvoiced longing, with a multifarious capacity. They bring with them
an aptitude for what is highest--they derive the greatest pleasure from
what is judicious and true; and if, with these powers of appreciation,
they deign to be satisfied with inferior productions, still, if they have
once tasted what is excellent, they will in the end insist on having it
supplied to them.
It is sometimes objected that the poet may labor according to an ideal--
that the critic may judge from ideas, but that mere executive art is
subject to contingencies, and depends for effect on the occasion.
Managers will be obstinate; actors are bent on display--the audience is
inattentive and unruly. Their object is relaxation, and they are
disappointed if mental exertion be required, when they expected only
amusement. But if the theatre be made instrumental towards higher
objects, the diversion, of the spectator will not be increased, but
ennobled. It will be a diversion, but a poetical one. All art is
dedicated to pleasure, and there can be no higher and worthier end than
to make men happy. The true art is that which provides the highest
degree of pleasure; and this consists in the abandonment of the spirit to
the free play of all its faculties.
Every one expects from the imaginative arts a certain emancipation from
the bounds of reality: we are willing to give a scope to fancy, and
recreate ourselves with the possible. The man who expects it the least
will nevertheless forget his ordinary pursuits, his everyday existence
and individuality, and experience delight from uncommon incidents:--if he
be of a serious turn of mind he will acknowledge on the stage that moral
government of the world which he fails to discover in real life. But he
is, at the same time, perfectly aware that all is an empty show, and that
in a true sense he is feeding only on dreams. When he returns from the
theatre to the world of realities, he is again compressed within its
narrow bounds; he is its denizen as before--for it remains what it was,
and in him nothing has been changed. What, then, has he gained beyond a
momentary illusive pleasure which vanished with the occasion?
It is because a passing recreation is alone desired that a mere show of
truth is thought sufficient. I mean that probability or vraisemblance
which is so highly esteemed, but which the commonest workers are able to
substitute for the true.
Art has for its object not merely to afford a transient pleasure, to
excite to a momentary dream of liberty; its aim is to make us absolutely
free; and this it accomplishes by awakening, exercising, and perfecting
in us a power to remove to an objective distance the sensible world;
(which otherwise only burdens us as rugged matter, and presses us down
with a brute influence;) to transform it into the free working of our
spirit, and thus acquire a dominion over the material by means of ideas.
For the very reason also that true art requires somewhat of the objective
and real, it is not satisfied with a show of truth. It rears its ideal
edifice on truth itself--on the solid and deep foundations of nature.
But how art can be at once altogether ideal, yet in the strictest sense
real; how it can entirely leave the actual, and yet harmonize with
nature, is a problem to the multitude; and hence the distorted views
which prevail in regard to poetical and plastic works; for to ordinary
judgments these two requisites seem to counteract each other.
It is commonly supposed that one may be attained by the sacrifice of the
other;--the result is a failure to arrive at either. One to whom nature
has given a true sensibility, but denied the plastic imaginative power,
will be a faithful painter of the real; he will adapt casual appearances,
but never catch the spirit of nature. He will only reproduce to us the
matter of the world, which, not being our own work, the product of our
creative spirit, can never have the beneficent operation of art, of which
the essence is freedom. Serious indeed, but unpleasing, is the cast of
thought with which such an artist and poet dismisses us; we feel
ourselves painfully thrust back into the narrow sphere of reality by
means of the very art which ought to have emancipated us. On the other
hand, a writer endowed with a lively fancy, but destitute of warmth and
individuality of feeling, will not concern himself in the least about
truth; he will sport with the stuff of the world, and endeavor to
surprise by whimsical combinations; and as his whole performance is
nothing but foam and glitter, he will, it is true, engage the attention
for a time, but build up and confirm nothing in the understanding. His
playfulness is, like the gravity of the other, thoroughly unpoetical. To
string together at will fantastical images is not to travel into the
realm of the ideal; and the imitative reproduction of the actual cannot
be called the representation of nature. Both requisites stand so little
in contradiction to each other that they are rather one and the same
thing; that art is only true insomuch as it altogether forsakes the
actual, and becomes purely ideal. Nature herself is an idea of the mind,
and is never presented to the senses. She lies under the veil of
appearances, but is herself never apparent. To the art of the ideal
alone is lent, or rather absolutely given, the privilege to grasp the
spirit of the all and bind it in a corporeal form.
Yet, in truth, even art cannot present it to the senses, but by means of
her creative power to the imaginative faculty alone; and it is thus that
she becomes more true than all reality, and more real than all
experience. It follows from these premises that the artist can use no
single element taken from reality as he finds it--that his work must be
ideal in all its parts, if it be designed to have, as it were, an
intrinsic reality, and to harmonize with nature.
What is true of art and poetry, in the abstract, holds good as to their
various kinds; and we may apply what has been advanced to the subject of
tragedy. In this department it is still necessary to controvert the
ordinary notion of the natural, with which poetry is altogether
incompatible. A certain ideality has been allowed in painting, though, I
fear, on grounds rather conventional than intrinsic; but in dramatic
works what is desired is allusion, which, if it could be accomplished by
means of the actual, would be, at best, a paltry deception. All the
externals of a theatrical representation are opposed to this notion; all
is merely a symbol of the real. The day itself in a theatre is an
artificial one; the metrical dialogue is itself ideal; yet the conduct of
the play must forsooth be real, and the general effect sacrificed to a
part. Thus the French, who have utterly misconceived the spirit of the
ancients, adopted on their stage the unities of tine and place in the
most common and empirical sense; as though there were any place but the
bare ideal one, or any other time than the mere sequence of the
incidents.
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. But so long as these erroneous
views are entertained little has been done--for it is not enough barely
to tolerate as a poetical license that which is, in truth, the essence of
all poetry. The introduction of the chorus would be the last and
decisive step; and if it only served this end, namely, to declare open
and honorable warfare against naturalism in art, it would be for us a
living wall which tragedy had drawn around herself, to guard her from
contact with the world of reality, and maintain her own ideal soil, her
poetical freedom.
It is well-known that the Greek tragedy had its origin in the chorus; and
though in process of time it became independent, still it may be said
that poetically, and in spirit, the chorus was the source of its
existence, and that without these persevering supporters and witnesses of
the incident a totally different order of poetry would have grown out of
the drama. The abolition of the chorus, and the debasement of this
sensibly powerful organ into the characterless substitute of a confidant,
is by no means such an improvement in the tragedy as the French, and
their imitators, would have it supposed to be.
The old tragedy, which at first only concerned itself with gods, heroes
and kings introduced the chorus as an essential accompaniment. The poets
found it in nature, and for that reason employed it. It grew out of the
poetical aspect of real life. In the new tragedy it becomes an organ of
art, which aids in making the poetry prominent. The modern poet no
longer finds the chorus in nature; he must needs create and introduce it
poetically; that is, he must resolve on such an adaption of his story as
will admit of its retrocession to those primitive times and to that
simple form of life.
The chorus thus renders more substantial service to the modern dramatist
than to the old poet--and for this reason, that it transforms the
commonplace actual world into the old poetical one; that it enables him
to dispense with all that is repugnant to poetry, and conducts him back
to the most simple, original, and genuine motives of action. The palaces
of kings are in these days closed--courts of justice have been
transferred from the gates of cities to the interior of buildings;
writing has narrowed the province of speech; the people itself--the
sensibly living mass--when it does not operate as brute force, has become
a part of the civil polity, and thereby an abstract idea in our minds;
the deities have returned within the bosoms of mankind. The poet must
reopen the palaces--he must place courts of justice beneath the canopy of
heaven--restore the gods, reproduce every extreme which the artificial
frame of actual life has abolished--throw aside every factitious
influence on the mind or condition of man which impedes the manifestation
of his inward nature and primitive character, as the statuary rejects
modern costume:--and of all external circumstances adopts nothing but
what is palpable in the highest of forms--that of humanity.
But precisely as the painter throws around his figures draperies of ample
volume, to fill up the space of his picture richly and gracefully, to
arrange its several parts in harmonious masses, to give due play to
color, which charms and refreshes the eye--and at once to envelop human
forms in a spiritual veil, and make them visible--so the tragic poet
inlays and entwines his rigidly contracted plot and the strong outlines
of his characters with a tissue of lyrical magnificence, in which, as in
flowing robes of purple, they move freely and nobly, with a sustained
dignity and exalted repose.
In a higher organization, the material, or the elementary, need not be
visible; the chemical color vanishes in the finer tints of the
imaginative one. The material, however, has its peculiar effect, and may
be included in an artistical composition. But it must deserve its place
by animation, fulness and harmony, and give value to the ideal forms
which it surrounds instead of stifling them by its weight.
In respect of the pictorial art, this is obvious to ordinary
apprehension, yet in poetry likewise, and in the tragical kind, which is
our immediate subject, the same doctrine holds good. Whatever fascinates
the senses alone is mere matter, and the rude element of a work of art:--
if it takes the lead it will inevitably destroy the poetical--which lies
at the exact medium between the ideal and the sensible. But man is so
constituted that he is ever impatient to pass from what is fanciful to
what is common; and reflection must, therefore, have its place even in
tragedy. But to merit this place it must, by means of delivery, recover
what it wants in actual life; for if the two elements of poetry, the
ideal and the sensible, do not operate with an inward mutuality, they
must at least act as allies--or poetry is out of the question. If the
balance be not intrinsically perfect, the equipoise can only be
maintained by an agitation of both scales.
This is what the chorus effects in tragedy. It is in itself, not an
individual but a general conception; yet it is represented by a palpable
body which appeals to the senses with an imposing grandeur. It forsakes
the contracted sphere of the incidents to dilate itself over the past and
the future, over distant times and nations, and general humanity, to
deduce the grand results of life, and pronounce the lessons of wisdom.
But all this it does with the full power of fancy--with a bold lyrical
freedom which ascends, as with godlike step, to the topmost height of
worldly things; and it effects it in conjunction with the whole sensible
influence of melody and rhythm, in tones and movements.
The chorus thus exercises a purifying influence on tragic poetry,
insomuch as it keeps reflection apart from the incidents, and by this
separation arms it with a poetical vigor, as the painter, by means of a
rich drapery, changes the ordinary poverty of costume into a charm and
ornament.
But as the painter finds himself obliged to strengthen the tone of color
of the living subject, in order to counterbalance the material
influences--so the lyrical effusions of the chorus impose upon the poet
the necessity of a proportionate elevation of his general diction. It is
the chorus alone which entitles the poet to employ this fulness of tone,
which at once charms the senses, pervades the spirit, and expands the
mind. This one giant form on his canvas obliges him to mount all his
figures on the cothurnus, and thus impart a tragical grandeur to his
picture. If the chorus be taken away, the diction of the tragedy must
generally be lowered, or what is now great and majestic will appear
forced and overstrained. The old chorus introduced into the French
tragedy would present it in all its poverty, and reduce it to nothing;
yet, without doubt, the same accompaniment would impart to Shakspeare's
tragedy its true significance.
As the chorus gives life to the language--so also it gives repose to the
action; but it is that beautiful and lofty repose which is the
characteristic of a true work of art. For the mind of the spectator
ought to maintain its freedom through the most impassioned scenes; it
should not be the mere prey of impressions, but calmly and severely
detach itself from the emotions which it suffers. The commonplace
objection made to the chorus, that it disturbs the illusion, and blunts
the edge of the feelings, is what constitutes its highest recommendation;
for it is this blind force of the affections which the true artist
deprecates--this illusion is what he disdains to excite. If the strokes
which tragedy inflicts on our bosoms followed without respite, the
passion would overpower the action. We should mix ourselves with the
subject-matter, and no longer stand above it. It is by holding asunder
the different parts, and stepping between the passions with its composing
views, that the chorus restores to us our freedom, which would else be
lost in the tempest. The characters of the drama need this intermission
in order to collect themselves; for they are no real beings who obey the
impulse of the moment, and merely represent individuals--but ideal
persons and representatives of their species, who enunciate the deep
things of humanity.
Thus much on my attempt to revive the old chorus on the tragic stage. It
is true that choruses are not unknown to modern tragedy; but the chorus
of the Greek drama, as I have employed it--the chorus, as a single ideal
person, furthering and accompanying the whole plot--if of an entirely
distinct character; and when, in discussion on the Greek tragedy, I hear
mention made of choruses, I generally suspect the speaker's ignorance of
his subject. In my view the chorus has never been reproduced since the
decline of the old tragedy.
I have divided it into two parts, and represented it in contest with
itself; but this occurs where it acts as a real person, and as an
unthinking multitude. As chorus and an ideal person it is always one and
entire. I have also several times dispensed with its presence on the
stage. For this liberty I have the example of Aeschylus, the creator of
tragedy, and Sophocles, the greatest master of his art.
Another license it may be more difficult to excuse. I have blended
together the Christian religion and the pagan mythology, and introduced
recollections of the Moorish superstition. But the scene of the drama is
Messina--where these three religions either exercised a living influence,
or appealed to the senses in monumental remains. Besides, I consider it
a privilege of poetry to deal with different religions as a collective
whole. In which everything that bears an individual character, and
expresses a peculiar mode of feeling, has its place. Religion itself,
the idea of a Divine Power, lies under the veil of all religions; and it
must be permitted to the poet to represent it in the form which appears
the most appropriate to his subject.