Page:The Theatre of the Greeks, a Treatise on the History and Exhibition of the Greek Drama, with Various Supplements.djvu/332

 APPENDIX TO PART I. ON THE EOMAN THEATRE. {From SchlegeVs Eighth Lecture.) Eoman Theatre. Native varieties. Atellane Fables, Mimes, Comoedia Togata. Greek Tragedy transplanted to Rome. Tragedians of the more ancient epoch, and of the Augustan age. Idea of a kind of Tragedy peculiarly Roman, but which never was realized. Why the Romans were never particularly happy in Tragic Art. Seneca. TN treating of the Dramatic Literature of the Romans, whose Theatre is every way im- -■- mediately attached to that of the Greeks, we have only to remark, properly speak- ing, one vast chasm, partly arising from the want of proper creative genius in this department, partly from the loss of almost all their written performances, with the exception only of a few fragments. The only extant works of the good classical age are those of Plautus and Terence, of whom I have already spoken as imitators of the Greeks. Poetry in general had no native growth in Rome. It was not till those later times, in which the original Rome, by aping foreign manners, was drawing nigh to her dissolution, that poetry came to be artificially cultivated among the other devices of luxurious living. In the Latin we have an instance of a language modelled into poetical expression, altogether after foreign forms of grammar and metre. This approximation to the Greek was at first effected with much violence : the Grsecism extended even to rude interpolation of foreign words and phrases. Gradually the poetic style was softened : of its former harshness we may perceive in Catullus the last vestiges, which however are not without a certain rugged charm. The language rejected those syntactical constructions, and especially the compounds, which were too much at variance with its own interior structure, and could not be lastingly agreeable to Roman ears ; and at last the poets of the Augustan age succeeded in effecting the happiest possible incorporation between the native and the borrowed elements. But scarcely was the desired equipoise obtained, when a pause ensued : all free development was impeded, and the poetical style, notwithstanding its apparent elevation into a bolder and more learned character, had in*etrievably imprisoned itself within the round of the phraseology it had once adopted. Thus the Latin language in poetry enjoyed but a brief interval of bloom between its unfashioned state and its second death. With the spirit also of their poetry it fared no better. It was not by the desire to enliven their holiday leisure by exhibitions, which bear away one's thoughts from the real world, that the Romans were led to the invention of theatrical amusements ; but in the disconsolateness of a dreary pestilence, against