Page:The World as Will and Idea - Schopenhauer, tr. Haldane and Kemp - Volume 3.djvu/226

210 conditional, truth and correctness; analogous to Greek and Gothic architecture. Yet, on the other hand, we must remark here that all dramatic or narrative poems which transfer their scene to ancient Greece or Rome lose by this from the fact that our knowledge of antiquity, especially in what concerns the details of life, is insufficient, fragmentary, and not drawn from perception. This obliges the poet to avoid much and to content himself with generalities, whereby he becomes abstract, and his work loses that concreteness and individualisation which is throughout essential to poetry. It is this which gives all such works the peculiar appearance of emptiness and tediousness. Only Shakspeare's works of this kind are free from it; because without hesitation he has presented, under the names of Greeks and Romans, Englishmen of his own time.

It has been objected to many masterpieces of lyrical poetry, especially some Odes of Horace (see, for example, the second of the third book) and several of Goethe's songs (for example, "The Shepherd's Lament"), that they lack proper connection and are full of gaps in the thought. But here the logical connection is intentionally neglected, in order that the unity of the fundamental sensation and mood may take its place, which comes out more clearly just by the fact that it passes like a thread through the separate pearls, and brings about the quick changes of the objects of contemplation, in the same way as in music the transition from one key to another is brought about by the chord of the seventh, through which the still sounding fundamental note becomes the dominant of the new key. Most distinctly, even exaggeratedly, the quality here described is found in the Canzone of Petrarch which begins, "Mai non vo' più cantar, com' io soleva."

Accordingly, as in the lyrical poem the subjective element predominates, so in the drama, on the contrary, the objective element is alone and exclusively present.