The Christian Remembrancer (Volume 21) (Paperback)

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: which lived longer, actually underwent this last change, and, to the horror of conservative critics and their modern followers like Horace, dispensed with the Chorus altogether. Schlegel indeed treats with scorn the notion that the tragic Chorus would have shared a similar fate, believing apparently that it was artistically necessary as representing ' the ideal spectator, ' and consequently indestructible: but it is difficult to resist the evidence of history, or to see how the fact that Sophocles wrote a prose treatise on the Chorus proves that a post-Sophoclean school might not have done without it. It may be contended that such a change would have involved a total corruption of Greek tragic art, and that the classical drama could not have survived the shock, though such a plea is rather refuted by the example of comedy, which had at least as much to do with singing and dancing in its earlier days: still, even if we make the admission, the fact will remain that the tragedy of the Greeks had a certain tendency which, by natural progression, led it further and further from its dithyrambic original. We may say if we please that it reached its height at a particular period, after which it fell into decay: but we cannot deny that it had different aspects, and stretched out different ways; not being exclusively either a song or an idealized action, but affording no less scope for the exhibition of rhetorical dialogue or skilful construction of fable. Even as corruptions of the old tragedy these innovations would deserve attention, not only from the intrinsic importance of the process in itself?the successful corrupter of public taste being, as has been well said, only less great than its creator?but as being avowedly an onward step in a vaster development, leading directly to that m...