SWINBURNE S TRAGEDIES. 163 



captions of their audience with that sense of ideal form which 

 made the Greeks masters in art to all succeeding generations. 

 Aristophanes is beyond question the highest type of pure comedy, 

 etherealising his humour by the infusion, or intensifying it by the 

 contrast of poetry, and deodorising the personality of his sarcasm 

 by a sprinkle from the clearest springs of fancy. His satire, 

 aimed as it was at typical characteristics, is as fresh as ever; but 

 we doubt whether an Aristophanic drama, retaining its exact 

 form, but adapted to present events and personages, would keep 

 the stage as it is kept by The Rivals, for example, immeasur 

 ably inferior as that is in every element of genius except the 

 prime one of liveliness. Something similar in purpose to the 

 parabasis was essayed in one, at least, of the comedies of 

 Beaumont and Fletcher, and in our time by Tieck ; but it took, 

 of necessity, a different form of expression, and does not seem 

 to have been successful. Indeed, the fact that what is called 

 the legitimate drama of modern times in England, Spain, and 

 France has been strictly a growth, and not a manufacture, that 

 in each country it took a different form, and that, in all, the 

 period of its culminating and beginning to decline might be 

 measured by a generation, seems to point us toward some 

 natural and inevitable law of human nature, and to show that, 

 while the principles of art are immutable, their application must 

 accommodate itself to the material supplied them by the time 

 and by the national character and traditions. The Spanish 

 tragedy inclines more toward the lyrical, the French toward 

 the epical, the English toward the historical, in the represen 

 tation of real life ; the Spanish and English agree in the Teu 

 tonic peculiarity of admitting the humorous offset of the clown, 

 though in the one case he parodies the leading motive of the 

 drama, and represents the self-consciousness of the dramatist, 

 while in the other he heightens the tragic effect by contrast 

 (as in the grave-digging scene of * Hamlet ), and suggests that 

 stolid but wholesome indifference of the general life of what, 

 for want of a better term, we call Nature to the sin and 

 suffering, the weakness and misfortunes of the individual man. 

 All these nations had the same ancient examples before them, 

 had the same reverence for antiquity, yet they involuntarily 

 deviated, more or less happily, into originality, success, and the 

 freedom of a living creativeness. The higher kinds of literature, 

 the only kinds that live on because they had life at the start, 

 are not, then, it should seem, the fabric of scholarship, of 

 criticism, diligently studying and as diligently copying the best 



