Page:The Theatre of the Greeks, a Treatise on the History and Exhibition of the Greek Drama, with Various Supplements.djvu/22

 4 THE RELIGIOUS ORIGIN OF THE GREEK DRAMA. standing ^ We would rather state this principle to be that desire to express the abstract in the concrete, that " striving after objec- tivity," as it has been termed by a modern 'writer 2, that wish to render the conceivable perceivable, which is the ordinary charac- teristic of an uneducated mind. The inhabitants of southern Europe, in particular, have in all ages shown a singular impatience of pure thought, and have been continually endeavouring to represent under the human form, either allegorically or absolutely, the subjects of their contemplations 2. Now the first abstract idea which presented itself to the minds of rude but imaginative men was the idea of God, conceived in some one or other of his attributes. Unable to entertain the abstract notion of divinity, they called in the aid of art to bring under the control of their senses the subject of their thoughts, and willingly rendered to the visible and perishable the homage which they felt to be due to the invisible and eternal. By an extension of the same associations, their anthropomorphized divinity was supposed to need a dwelling-place ; hence the early improvements of archi- tecture on the shores of the Mediterranean. His worshippers would then attempt some outward expression of their gratitude and vene- ration:- — to meet this need, poetry arose among them*. The same feelings would suggest an imitation of the imagined suffer- ings or gladness of their deity ; and to this we owe the mimic ^ The German reader would do well to consult on this subject Von Raumer's Essay on the Poetic of Aristotle (Ahhandl. der Hist. Philologischen Klasse der Ron. ATcad. der Wissensch. 1828). We do not think Dr. Copleston's view of this subject (Prcelectiones Academicce, pp. 28 sqq.) sufficiently comprehensive. 2 Wachsmuth, Hell. Alterth. ii. 2, 113. ^ See Wordsworth's Excursion (Works, V. pp. 160 foil.). ^ Thus Strabo says, that "the whole art of poetry is the praise of the gods," 7} froirjTiKT] iracra vixvi/jtikt). X. p. 468. (The word o5cra, which is found in all the editions at the end of this sentence, has evidently arisen from a repetition of the first two syllables of the following word wcrai^Tws, and must be struck out. For the sense of the word iifjivrjTiKTf], comp. Plato, Legg. p. 700 A.) And Plato, Legg. vii. 799 A, would have all music and dancing consecrated to religion. When Herder says (Werke z. schon. Lit. und Kunst. ii. p. 82), "Poetry arose, not at the altars, but in wild merry dances; and as violence was restrained by the severest laws, an attempt was in like manner made to lay hold, by means of religion, on those drunken inclinations of men which escaped the control of the laws," he does not seem to deny the fact on which we have insisted, that religion and poetry are contempo- raneous effects of the same cause; at all events, he allows that poetry was at first merely the organ of religion. And although V. Cousin endeavours to prove that religion and poetry were the results of different necessities of the human mind, he also contends that they were analogous in their origin. "Le triomphe de Tin tuition religieuse est dans la creation du culte, comme le triomphe de I'idde du beau est dans la creation de Tart," &c. {Cours de Philosophie, p. 21, 2).