Page:The Theatre of the Greeks, a Treatise on the History and Exhibition of the Greek Drama, with Various Supplements.djvu/105

 A. w. schlegel's general survey of the drama. 87 Some writers, in other respects agreeing with us in our conception and derivation of the peculiar character of the moderns, have placed the essence of the northern poetry in melancholy, and, rightly understood, we have no objection to this ^iew of the matter. Among the Greeks, human nature was self-satisfied ; it had no misgiving of defect, and endeavoured after no other perfection than that which it actually could attain by the exercise of its own energies. A higher wisdom teaches us that human nature, through a grievous aberration, has lost the position originally assigned to it, and that the sole destination of its earthly existence is to struggle back thither, which, however, left to itself, it cannot. The old religion of the senses did but wish to earn outward perishable blessings; immortality, as far as it was believed, stood shadow-like in the obscure distance, a faded dream of this sunny waking life. Under the Christian view, it is just the reverse: the contemplation of the infinite has annihilated the finite; life has become the world of shadows, the night of being ; the eternal day of essential existence dawns only beyond the grave. Under such a religion, that mysterious fore- boding which slumbers in every feeling heart dannot but be wakened into distinct consciousness that we are in quest of a happiness which is unattainable here, that no external object will ever be altogether able to fill the capacity of the soul, that all enjoyment is a fleeting illusion. And when the soul sits down, as it were, beside these waters of Babylon, and breathes forth its longing aspirations towards the home from which it has become estranged, what else can be the key-note of its songs but heaviness of heart? And so it is. The poetry of the ancients was that of possession, ours is that of longing desire : the one stands firm on the soil of the present ; the other wavers betwixt reminiscence of the past, and bodeful intimations of the future. Let not this be understood to imply that all must flow away in monotonous lamenta- tion, the melancholy always uttering itself audibly, and drowning all besides. As under that cheerful view of things which the Greeks took, that austere Tragedy of theirs was still a possible phenomenon ; so that romantic poetry, which originated in the difierent views I have been describing, could run along the whole scale of the feelings, even up to the highest note of joy ; but stiU there will always be an inde- scribable something in which it shall carry the marks of its origin. The feeling of the moderns has, on the whole, become more deep and inward, the fancy more incorporeal, the thoughts more contemplative. To be sure, in nature the boundaries run into one another, and the things are not so sharply defined as one is under the necessity of doing in order to eliminate a theoretical idea. The Grecian ideal of human nature was, perfect unison and proportion of all powers, natural harmony. The moderns, on the contrary, have arrived at the con- sciousness of the disunion there is within, which renders such an ideal no longer possible ; hence the endeavour of their poetry is to make these two worlds, between which we feel ourselves to be divided, the world of sense and the world of spirit, at one with each other, and to blend them indissolubly together. The impressions of sense shall be hallowed, as it were, by their mysterious league with higher feelings, while the spirit will deposit its bodings or indescribable intuitions of the infinite, in types and emblems derived from the phenomena of the visible world. In Grecian art and poetry there is an original unconscious unity of form and matter; the modern, so far as it has remained faithful to its own proper spirit, attempts to bring about a more thorough interpenetration of both, considered as two opposites. The former solved its problem to perfection, the latter can satisfy its ad infinitum endeavour only in a way of approximation, and by reason of a certain semblance of incompleteness, is the rather in danger of being misappreciated.