Page:Life of Thomas Hardy - Brennecke.pdf/282

 The history of the drama shows that there is almost no limit to the imagination of an audience, if properly coaxed, in supplying the deficiencies of the theatre. Let us consider for a moment the stage-problem which the Prometheus must have presented in its day. The scene is a gigantic cleft or rock in the most desolate part of Scythia. Against this rock the Titan is suspended, nailed and bound in "indissoluble fetters of adamantine bonds." Later come the winged ocean nymphs, Oceanus himself, with his car drawn by hippogriffs, the mad heifer-maiden Io, and finally the god Hermes. Realistic presentation of such scenes is manifestly impossible, even to-day. How it was managed in the crude theatre of Æschylus must remain a source of conjecture. It is obviously a futile thing, then, to condemn the dramatic form of The Dynasts on the grounds of its impossibility as a stage-play. No play can be given with complete realism, and it is a difficult thing to set a definite limit beyond which the author must not tax the imagination. Neither the Prometheus nor the Eumenides, nor the Dynasts is a real stage-play, yet all of these have been acted with success, winning their audience by means of their inherent dramatic power and effectiveness. The Greeks did not seem to mind the fact that in the Prometheus the rock was possibly represented by some kind of wicker-work and Prometheus himself by a huge dummy, as has been conjectured, and the London audiences seem to have accepted gladly Granville Barker's ingenious conventional representation of the many dramatic "absurdities" of The Dynasts. Aristotle, with whom it is always a pleasure to agree in such things, has himself said that the