Page:Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion volume 2.djvu/326

 merely of vicious scenes, and of private affairs springing out of the relations between fathers, sons, harlots, and slaves.

Amongst a people thus absorbed in the pursuit of finite ends, it was impossible that any lofty perception of moral and divine action, any theoretical or intellectual conception of those substantial powers could exist; and actions which might be theoretically interesting to them as spectators, although they had no reference to their practical interests, could have for them only an external crude reality, or, if they were to move them, a hideous reality.

In Greek drama it was what was spoken that was the main thing; the persons who acted retained a calm plastic attitude, and there was none of that mimic art, strictly so called, in which the face comes into play, but rather it was the spiritual element in the conceptions dramatised which produced the effect desired. Amongst the Romans, on the contrary, pantomime was the main thing—a form of giving expression to thoughts, which is not equal in value to the expression which can be clothed in speech.

The plays which ranked highest consisted, in fact, of nothing but the slaughter of animals and men, of the shedding of blood in streams, of life and death combats. They represent, as it were, the highest point to which imaginative conceptions could be brought amongst the Romans. There is in them no moral interest, no tragic collision in which misfortune or some ethical element constitutes the essential part. The spectators, who sought merely for entertainment, did not demand a representation of a spiritual history, but of one which was real and actual—a history, in fact, which represents the supreme change in what is finite, namely, barren, natural death—a history which is devoid of any substantial element, and is the quintessence of all that belongs to external life. These plays attained amongst the Romans such enormous