Page:The Theatre of the Greeks, a Treatise on the History and Exhibition of the Greek Drama, with Various Supplements.djvu/23

 THE RELIGIOUS ORIGIN OF THE GREEK DRAMA. 5 dances of ancient Hellas, and the first beginnings of the drama there. But although art and religious realism have much in common even in their latest applications, we are not to suppose that all attempts to give an outward embodiment to the religious idea are to be considered as real approximations to dramatic poetry. All art is not poetry, and all poetry is not the drama Poly- theistic worship and its concomitant idolatry are the most favour- able conditions for the development of art in all its forms and applications. And conversely, those nations and epochs which have been most remarkable for the cultivation of a pure and spi- ritual religion have been equally remarkable for a prevalent distaste and incompetency for the highest efforts of art. In ancient times, we have the case of the Israelites : for many years they strove with varying success to resist the temptations to idolatry which sur- rounded them on every side, and left to Greece and modern Europe the greatest aid to abstract thought, in the alphabet which we still ^ The view which we have taken in the text, of the origin of the fine arts, is, we conceive, nearly the same as that of Aristotle; for it appears to us pretty obvious that his treatise on Poetic was, like many of his other writings, composed expressly to confute the opinions of Plato, who taking the word /nifirjcrLS in its narrowest sense, to signify the imperfect counterfeiting, the servile and pedantic copying of an individual object, argued against iJ.[fjL7](ns in general as useless for moral purposes. Whereas Aristotle shows that if the word fxlfXTjais be not taken in this confined sense, but as equivalent to " representation," as implying the outward realisation of something in the mind, it does then include not only poetry, but, properly speaking, all the fine arts : and /xlfiTjaLS is therefore useful, in a moral relation, if art in general is of any moral use. That he understood fii/uLTja-is in this general sense is clear from his Rhetoric, III. l, § 8 : tcl dvo/xara fiifirj/JLaTci icrriv VTrrjp^e 5^ ij <pu)V7] ttolvtuv fJLifXTjTiKd- rarov tCjv fMopicou rjfjuv dib Kal at r^xi/at crvpeaTrjaav, "q re pa^ySta Koi i] VTOKpiTiKT] Kal al aWai. It was, however, as Schleiermacher justly observes {Anmerkungen zu Platons Staat, p. 543), not of art absolutely that Plato was speaking, but only of its moral efiects ; for doubtless Plato himself would have been most willing to assent to a definition of art which made it an approximation to or copy of the idea of the beautiful (comp. Plat. Resp. VI. p. 484 c) ; and this is only Aristotle's opinion ex- pressed in other words. Von Raumer truly remarks in the essay above quoted, p. 118, "The Trapadeiy/jLa (Poet. XV. 1 1, XXVI. 28), which Aristotle often designates as the object to be aimed at, is nothing but that which is now-a-days called the 'ideal,' and by which is understood the most utter opposite of a pedantic imitation." Herder also was fully aware that although Plato contradicts Aristotle in regard to the Dithyramb, he was speaking in quite a difierent connexion, "in ganz anderer Verbindung" {WerJce z. schon. Lit. u. Kunst. 11, p. 86). We may add, that our definition of ixlfxtj- CL% as a synonym for "art," which has also been given in direct terms by Mtiller {Handh. der Archdol. beginn.), "Die Kunst ist eine Darstellung {/xifj,r}(ni) d, h. eine Thatigkeit durch welche ein InnerHches ausserlich wird," "Art is a representation {fxifir]<Ti.s), i. e. an energy by means of which a subject becomes an object" (comp. I)oi'ians, IV. ch. 7, § 12), is the best way of explaining the pleasure which we derive from the efforts of the fancy and imagination, which, as has been very justly observed, is always much greater when "the allusion is from the material world to the intellec- tual, than when it is from the intellectual world to the material" (Stewart's Elements of the Philosophy of the Mind, 1. p. 306).