Page:Hutcheson Macaulay Posnett - Comparative Literature (1886).djvu/54

 All this is historically inaccurate; but it is so just because no dramatic or other poet is universal in his conceptions of character any more than in his conceptions of plants, or animals, or scenery. It is so because the social and individual developments of character prevent historical accuracy save at the expense of that conscious contrast between our own and different social and physical environments in which science delights but art perishes. It is so because historical accuracy is banished by the conditions of language and thought under which the dramatist writes, and through which his art must work. It is so because the dramatist's similes and metaphors, as well as his men and women, are not derived from "airy nothing," nor from an equally airy everything, but from a limited sphere of human associations, of animal and plant life, of physical nature. If a contemporary people, differing from ourselves in language and customs, should supply our stage with characters or incidents, strict accuracy is for similar reasons impossible. Thus the Persians of Æschylus, though the Athenians must have known a good deal about the would-be conquerors of Greece, are to a considerable degree Persians in Attic dress; and when Shakspere merely reminds us that we are in France by an occasional phrase like the Dauphin's "cheval volant," or by the mixture of French and English in the scene between Katharine and Alice, he displays a far deeper acquaintance with dramatic art than Plautus, who in his Pœnulus makes the Carthaginian Hanno deliver a speech in Phoenician which, for the benefit of the audience, he is compelled immediately to translate into Latin. So closely is the dramatist bound within the limited sphere of his audience's thoughts and feelings, so completely does he depend on their average associations and the degree of social evolution they have