LECTURES ON THE DRAMATIC ART AND LITERATURE OF THE ANCIENT GREEKS AND ROMANS. BY AUGUSTUS W. VON SCHLEGEL. TRANSLATED FROM THE GERMAN. T THE Lectures, from which the following selection has been made for the purposes of this Work, are upon the Dramatic Art and Literature of the Ancients and Moderns. They were originally delivered to a mixed auditory at Vienna, in the year 1808, and published in 1809, with a second edition in 1816. Although the Author has not since their first delivery made any alteration with a view of bringing them up to the standard of discoveries subsequently made in the field of the Ancient Drama by professed philologists, (to which discoveries indeed these very Lectures contributed some impulse,) and therefore some of his statements require to be modified, as the reader will see in the original portion of the Work now in his hands, yet so far as the Translator of these pages is aware, this popular and perspicuous history and critique has not been superseded by any work of similar plan and extent. In this Edition the First and Second Lectures have been added, almost entire, to the Selection, and the whole translation has been carefully revised. FIRST LECTURE. EXTRACTS. Modern and Ancient taste, how contrasted. Both to be fairly recognized. Classical and Romantic Poetry, how based on the collective mental culture of the Ancient and Modern world. ... Preliminary exposition of the fundamental ideas, dramatic, theatrical: tragic, comic. Cursory survey of the Drama in different ages and countries of the world. It is well known that about three and a half centuries ago the study of ancient literature was revived by the diffusion of the Greek language (the Latin never became extinct): the classical authors were brought to light and rendered universally accessible by the art of printing; the monuments of ancient genius were diligently disinterred. All this supplied manifold excitements to the human mind, and formed a marked epoch in the history of our mental culture; it was fertile in effects which extend even to us, and will extend to an incalculable series of ages. But at the same time the study of the ancients was perverted to a deadly abuse. The learned, who were chiefly in possession of it, and were incompetent to distinguish themselves by works of their own, asserted for the ancients an unconditional authority; in fact with great shew of reason, for in their kind they are models. They maintained that only from imitation of the ancient writers is true salvation for the human genius to be hoped for; in the works of the moderns they appreciated only what was, or seemed to be, similar to those of the ancients; all else, they rejected as barbarous degeneracy. Quite otherwise was it with the great poets and artists. Lively as might be the enthusiasm with which the ancients inspired them, much as they might entertain the design of vying with them, still their independence and originality of mind constrained them to strike out into their own path, and to impress upon their productions the stamp of their own genius. Thus fared it, even before that revival, with Dante, the father of modern poetry: he avouched that he took Virgil as his teacher, but produced a work which, of all mentionable works, most differs in its make from the Eneid, and in our opinion very far surpassed his fancied master, in power, truth, compass, and profoundness. So was it likewise, at a later period, with Ariosto, who has perversely been compared with Homer nothing can be more unlike. So, in art, with Michelangelo and Raphael, who nevertheless were unquestionably great connoisseurs in the antiques. As the poets for the most part had their share of scholarship, the consequence was a schism in their own minds between the natural bent of their genius and the obligation of an imaginary duty. Where they sacrificed to the latter they were commended by the learned: so far as they followed the bent of the former, they were favourites with the people. That the heroic lays of a Tasso and a Camoëns still survive on the lips of their fellow-countrymen is assuredly not owing to their imperfect affinity with Virgil, or even with Homer; in Tasso it is the tender feeling of chivalrous love and honour, in Camoëns the glowing inspiration of patriotic enthusiasm. Those ages, nations, and ranks, which found the imitation of the ancients most to their liking, were precisely such as least felt the want of a self-formed poetry. The result was dead schoolexercises, which at best can excite but a frigid admiration. Bare imitation in the fine arts, is always fruitless of good: even what we borrow from others must, as it were, be born again within us, if ever it is to issue forth in the nature of poetry. What avails the dilettantism of composing with other people's ideas? Art cannot subsist without Nature, and man can give his fellow-men nothing but himself. Genuine successors of the ancients and true corrivals with them, walking in their path and working in their spirit by virtue of congenial talents and cultivation of mind, have ever been as rare as your handicraftsmanlike insipid copyists were and are numerous. The critics, bribed to their verdict by the mere extrinsicality of form, have for the most part very liberally sanctioned even these serviles. These were "correct modern classics," while the great and truly living popular poets, whom a nation, having once got them, would not consent to part with, and in whom moreover there were so many sublime traits that could not be overlooked, these they were fain at most to tolerate as rude wild geniuses. But the unconditional separation thus taken |
