EVOLUTIONARY PRINCIPLES 39 



describes the relation of the earliest Greek playwrights to the 

 epical body of mythology and legend, which they handled 

 by another method. The Drama had small beginnings, 

 apparently in choral songs, to which the recitations of one 

 or more persons setting forth an action came to be super- 

 added. But occasional and arbitrary as this lyrical form 

 may seem to have been, it determined the type of the 

 accomplished drama ; nor were material circumstances in the 

 Greek theatres, as in those of London, wanting which con- 

 firmed the type, and helped to make it what we call Classical 

 as distinguished from Eomantic. Most important of these 

 circumstances was the large size of the public buildings used 

 for dramatic exhibitions, with their long shallow stage, and 

 orchestra adapted to the celebration of Dionysiac rites. To 

 these details were due the stationary sculpturesque character 

 of Attic tragedy, the employment of masks and buskins, the 

 prominent part assigned to the chorus, and the conduct of 

 violent action off the stage. Classical drama, from the mere 

 character of its environments, could not be so mobile, could 

 not make such direct appeals to the senses and the fancy of 

 the audience as the drama which sprang up in booths and 

 narrow wooden boxes. The former had affinities to bas- 

 reliefs on temple fronts, the latter to a puppet-show. Once 

 formed, the Greek type subsisted till its dissolution ; even the 

 mechanical attempt to revive it by a Roman poet (Seneca 

 perhaps) under very altered conditions, when the significance 

 of the original form was lost, reproduced the lyrical element 

 and the stationary sculpturesque mode of presentation which 

 was proper to the Attic stage. 



What we dimly know about Thespis and Phrynichus 

 proves that the dramatic type initiated by the earlier Bacchic 

 poets underwent in their hands a process of expansion similar 

 to that which Greene and his companions gave to the 

 Romantic plays of England. ^Eschylus, like Marlowe, but 

 with a tenfold weight of spiritual force, determined and fixed 

 the type unalterably. He exhibited the mythus chosen for 

 each special work in its entirety, and allowed full prominence 

 to the religious idea which formed the kernel of the elder 



