Page:Hutcheson Macaulay Posnett - Comparative Literature (1886).djvu/56

 four hours? The same poet and critic reminds us that every action has its own duration, that to apply the same time-measurements to every action would be to act like a shoemaker who could make only one size of shoe for all sizes of feet. Moreover, it is easy to show that "unity of action" is a very indefinite phrase, which might mean harmony of character with conditions of place and time, or harmony of events with the central incident of the drama, or both of these combined and confused. But it would be a serious error to rise from the study of conflicting opinions on the nature and origin of the unities with a self-satisfied belief that, whatever the classic rules may owe to the theatres of Athens and Paris, we may now rest in a broad declaration that we hold with the "Romantic School," and that the unities have no significance beyond the ancient drama and its modern imitators. The truth is that under an aspect conventional, pedantic, and therefore repulsive alike to creative and critical freedom, the unities conceal an attempt to solve certain problems involving the highest efforts of philosophic inquiry. The need of dramatic limitation in space, time, and action is no mere whim of critical fancy. It rests on truths which the evolution of man, socially and individually, establishes, and which his animal and physical environments amply confirm.

The drama is a picture of individual character, social life, and, to some degree—in Indian, Chinese, and Japanese plays to a considerable degree—physical nature. If its characters and social life are patchworks of different ages—sentiments of blood-revenge blended with courtly refinement, associations of Elizabethan London in the Rome of Cæsar or the Athens of Alcibiades—we only enjoy the medley seriously so long as we are unconscious of the historical contrasts which, to