Page:Hutcheson Macaulay Posnett - Comparative Literature (1886).djvu/378

 his historical plays, was as little hampered in his creative imagination as the Attic dramatists, when they used the heroes of old Greek story as a canvas on which almost any variety of character might be depicted. Still, we must admit that the truly creative conception of dramatic art is opposed to the necessary restrictions-of historic fact, and must look upon the early "histories," with their improprieties of time and place and character, rather as secular imitations of the sacred story detailed in the Mysteries, than as a sign that the drama had now passed out of its religious tutelage and the region of moral abstractions into the sphere of artistic "realism." For dramatic "realism" means something more than the copying of historic fact; it means the putting together of a character in such a way that it shall wear the look of an individual reality without being an exact reproduction of any personage we already know; it means that the dramatic personage must be at once an individual and something more, an abstract type and something less—in a word, a double-faced entity containing both an individual and a general element, and so reproducing in art the most profound truth of human experience—that individual being is only realisable as a contrast between self and not-self.

IV. This dramatic realism is only possible where social conditions foster sufficient personal freedom in action and thought to allow a vivid realisation of personal as distinct from corporate being; it is only possible where socialism is not carried into such an excess as to merge individuality in group life, and where individualism is not carried into such an excess as to make personality insignificant by destroying all bonds of social thought and action. Dramatic realism needs personal freedom from communal restraints, various types of personality, and, coexisting