EVOLUTIONARY PRINCIPLES 41 



a kind of flamboyant brilliance and beauty was all that now 

 survived of the great impassioned tragedy of the Athenians. 

 The type had worked itself out. It never afterwards revived 

 again, for the simple reason that its forces were exhausted, 

 that every vein of gold in the mine had been excavated, that 

 the noble vintage had been drunk to the lees, that what the 

 germ could yield of vital structure was exhibited. Those 

 who quarrel with Euripides, and who deplore the extrava- 

 gances of Agathon and Chseremon (poets beloved by Aristotle)? 

 have to face the fact for this is what I am insisting on 

 that Agathon could not have taken up tragedy exactly where 

 Euripides left it, any more than Euripides could have 

 stayed at the same point as Sophocles, or than Sophocles 

 could have refrained from refining upon yEschylus, or than 

 ^Eschylus could have kept his art within the archaic 

 limits of Phrynichus, or than Phrynichus and Thespis could 

 have avoided emphasising the dramatic element with which 

 the Dionysiac choruses were pregnant. Each playwright, 

 the representative no doubt of many who have perished, was 

 a necessary link in the production of that totality which we 

 call the Attic Drama. It is absurd to blame Thespis because 

 he was uncouth, as to blame a stalk because it is stalky ; as 

 unscientific to condemn Chseremon because he left nothing 

 after him, as it is to condemn a husk because it is husky. 

 Stalk and husk, leaf and flower and fruitage, are necessary 

 to the plant in nature ; and it is the business of criticism to 

 recognise that an analogous necessity, rendering all parts 

 significant, governs that more complex growth which the spirit 

 of a nation evolves in art, and which, unlike the grass of the 

 field, has no power of self-reproduction. 



Greek sculpture furnishes another illustration of this 

 sequence, although the variety of schools which arose in 

 different provinces of Hellas, and by their reciprocal influence 

 upon the art prolonged its flourishing period, renders it a less 

 perfect example than the Attic Drama. Nevertheless, when 

 we consider the successive stages through which sculpture 

 passed, from the austere, through the sublimely beautiful, 

 to the simply elegant and the realistically striking, we shall 



