Page:The Theatre of the Greeks, a Treatise on the History and Exhibition of the Greek Drama, with Various Supplements.djvu/102

 84 A. w. schlegel's general survey of the drama. nature of poetry. What avails the dilettantism of composing Avith other people's ideas ? Art cannot subsist without Nature, and man can give his fellow-men nothing but himself. Genuine successors of the ancients and true co-rivals with them, walking in their path and working in their spirit by virtue of congenial talents and cultivation of mind, have ever been as rare as your handicraftsmanlike insipid copyists were and are numerous. The critics, bribed to their verdict by the mere extrinsicality of form, have for the most part very liberally sanctioned even these serviles. These were "correct modern classics," while the great and truly living popular poets, whom a nation, having once got them, would not consent to part with, and in whom moreover there were so many sublime traits that could not be overlooked, these they were fain at most to tolerate as rude wild geniuses. But the unconditional separation thus taken for granted between genius and taste is an idle evasion. Genius is neither more nor less than the faculty of electing, unconsciously in some measure, whatever is most excellent, and therefore is taste in its highest activity. Pretty much in this way matters proceeded, until, no long time since, some think- ing men, especially Germans, set themselves to adjust the misunderstanding; and at once to give the ancients their due, and yet fairly recognize the altogether different peculiarity of the moderns. They did not take fright at a seeming contradiction. Human nature is indeed in its basis one and indivisible, but all investigation declares that this cannot be predicated in such a sense concerning any one elementary power in all nature, as to exclude a possibility of divergence into two opposite directions. The whole play of vital motion rests upon attraction and repulsion. Why should not this phenomenon recur on the great scale in the history of mankind likewise? Perhaps in this thought we have discovered the true key to the ancient and modern history of poetry and the fine arts. They who assumed this, invented for the characteristic spirit of modern art, as contrasted to the antique or classical, the designation romantic. And not an inappropriate term either : the word is derived from romance, the name originally given to the popular languages which formed themselves by intermixture of the Latin with the dialects of the Old-German, in just the same way as modern culture was fused out of the foreign elements of the northern national character and the fragments of antiquity, whereas the culture of the ancients was much more of one piece. This hypothesis, thus briefly indicated, would carry with it a high degree of self- evidence, could it be shown that the self-same contrast between the endeavour of the ancients and moderns does symmetrically, I might say systematically, pervade all the manifestations of the artistic and poetic faculty, so far as we are acquainted with the phases of ancient mind : that it reveals itself in music, sculpture, painting, archi- tecture, &c, the same as in poetry: a problem which still remains to be worked out in its entire extent and compass, though much has been excellently well remarked and indicated in respect of the individual arts. To mention authors who have written in other parts of Europe, and prior to the rise of this " School " in Germany, — in music, Rousseau recognized the contrast, and showed that rhythm and melody were the prevailing principle of the ancient, as harmony is of the modern music. But he is contracted enough to reject the latter ; in which we cannot at all agree with him. With respect to the arts of design, Hemsterhuys makes a clever apophthegm : " The ancient painters seem to have been too much sculptors, the modern sculptors are too much painters," This goes to the very heart of the matter ; for, as I shall more expressly prove in the sequel, the spirit of all ancient art and poetry is plastic, as that of the modern is picturesque.