Page:The Theatre of the Greeks, a Treatise on the History and Exhibition of the Greek Drama, with Various Supplements.djvu/337

 ON THE KOMAN THEATEE. 311 be altogether distinct from that of the Greeks, and religious and patriotic in the old- Roman sense of the words. Truly creative poetry can only issue from the interior life of a people, and from religion, which is the root of that life. But the Roman religion was originally, and before they endeavoured to conceal the loss of its intrinsic substance by varnishing its outside with borrowed finery, of quite a different spirit from the reUgion of the Greeks. The latter had all the plastic flexibility of Art, the other the unchangeable fixity of the Priesthood. The Roman Faith, and the cere- monies established on it, were more earnest, more moral, and pious, — more pene- trating in their insight into Nature, more magical and mysterious than the Grecian Religion — than that part of it at least which was exoteric to the mysteries. As the Grecian Tragedy exhibits the free man struggling with destiny, so the spirit of a Roman Tragedy would be the prostration of all human motives beneath that hallowing binding force, Religio ^, and its revealed omnipresence in all things earthly. But when the craving for poetry of a cultivated character awoke in them, this spirit had long been extinct. The Patricians, originally an Etruscan school of priesthood, had be- come merely secular statesmen and warriors, who retained their hereditary sacerdotal character only as a political form. Their sacred books, their "Vedas, were become unintelligible to them, not so much by reason of the obsolete letter, as because they no longer possessed that higher science which was the key to the sanctuary. What the heroic legends of the Latins might have become under an earlier development, and what the colouring was that properly belonged to them, we may still see from some traces in Virgil, Propertius, and Ovid, though even these poets handled them only as matters of antiquarian interest. JMoreover, though the Romans now at last were for hellenizing in all things, they wanted that milder spirit of humanity which may be traced in Grecian History, Poetry, and Art, from the Homeric age downwards. From the severest ^^.rtue, which, Curtius-like, buried all personal inclinations in the bosom of native land, they passed with fearful rapidity to an equally unexampled profligacy of rapacity and lust. Never were they able to belie in their character the story of their first founder, suckled, not at the mothers breast, but by a ravening she-wolf. They were the Tragedians of the World's Histoiy, and many a drama of deep woe did they exhibit with kings led in fetters and pining in the dungeon: they were the iron necessity of all other nations ; the universal destroyers for the sake of piliug up at last from the ruins the mausoleum of their own dignity and freedom, amid the monotonous solitude of an obedient world. To them it was not given to touch the heart by the tempered accents of mental anguish, and to run with a light and forbearing hand through the scale of the feelings, In Tragedy, too, they naturally aimed at extremes, by over- leaping all intermediate gradations, both in the stoicism of heroic courage, and in the monstrous rage of abandoned lusts. Of all their ancient greatness nothing remained to them save only the defiance of pain and death, if need were that they should exchange for these a life of unbridled enjoyment. This seal, accordingly, of their own former nobility they stamped upon their tragic heroes with a self-complacent and vain-glorious profusion. Lastly, in the age of cultivated Literatm-e, the dramatic poets, in the midst of a people fond of spectacle, even to madness, nevertheless wanted a public for Poetry. In their triumphal processions, their gladiatorial games and beast-fights, all the mag- nificence in the world, all the marvels of foreign climes were led before the eye of 1 [Schlegel adopts the old, but incorrect derivation of rellUjio from rdifjare; see Varron. p. 482.]