PROLOGUE THIRD.

ILLUSTRATING THE SCENICAL HARMONY OF A DRAMA AND THE SPECIAL CHARACTERISTICS OF ITS FIVE PARTS.

The

HAVING discovered the numerical principle of dramatic action in the individual body, and the reason for expecting the same numerical principle in the collective body of humanity, we naturally look for this dramatic division in two different ways, geographically in space and historically in time. The one will constitute the scenery of the drama; the other its action. Every drama must have its scenery-scenery too in harmonious agreement with the passional and personal performance. Comic Muse delights in incongruities. She introduces a love scene in an eel-pie shop and makes a traveller sing a musical burlesque to the great Sphinx of Egypt, or the Statues of Memnon on the Plain of Goorna: her parson reads the burial service at a wedding, and her jester bandies quips and cranks with a flash of lightning. Discord, or contrast at least, is her element, and she not unfrequently produces her effects by deliberate violation of the laws of propriety. Not so the Tragic Muse:

SCENICAL HARMONY OF AN ORDINARY DRAMA. 11

her scene is all in harmony with the spirit of the performers. With a deed of terror she makes the elements mourn: the thunder roars, the waves rage, the wind soughs, and the owl screeches in the dark night. Majesty walks in palaces or forests, amid the grandeur and magnificence of nature or art; love nestles in gardens amid fragrant perfumes, brilliant flowers and vigorous evergreens, with bindweed or mistletoe twining the sturdy trunks, and trellices laden with the riches of the vine; melancholy pines under weeping willows; and rapine elaborates its heartless machinations amid ruinous heaps of dismantled towers, unroofed cottages, rugged precipices, and deserted gardens. All is one. The mystic spirit of the scene is omnipresent throughout. The picture is merely the hieroglyph that reveals the soul of the speaker: it is the background of the portrait that relieves the figure. The true artist anxiously studies it. Even a broken bough will tell a tale with voiceless eloquence; and a stone without moss, on which the wanderer sits, is a story without words, which the heart apprehends in the winking of an eyelid.

The scenery is the space, the events and the persons are the time; and here, too, the harmony of dramatic arrangement is indispensable. The characters must ever be appropriate for the action. The rough are not selected for elegant and gentle deeds, nor the gentle for works of cruelty and violence. The characters change as the action changes,

and the simple or the artful, the selfish or the generous, are successively introduced as the plot thickens and their presence is demanded. Between an individual and a universal drama, however, there is this difference: that whereas individuals are the heroes and dramatis persona of the one, of the other the heroes and the characters are nations and classes. The one is the drama of individual, the other of collective, man; the one is of human construction, the other is divine.

Now, what is the natural development of either of these two forms? Nature teaches us that all development of any value to man is from worse to better; to reward or retribution. The hero may die, but he dies gloriously; the villain must suffer, and be execrated also. Retribution to the criminal is demanded by the moral sense, and that is the moral to which tragedy tends, even when the destiny of the good is deplorable. A dark fate impends over virtue in the doleful accessories of the tragic drama; but even when hope refuses to lend a sunbeam of comfort from the social world, it gleams from heaven in the faith of the sufferer. The development is upwards and onwards, either socially and domestically, or morally and religiously; or the artist has forgotten his mission, and his effort is a failure. A dramatic providence, without a gradual development from a worse to a better, in one sense or other, is a dramatic abortion -a Juggernaut, a Moloch, a Belial, or other

monster, which can only be worshipped by the depraved taste, and be lost amid the multitude of them that perish.

In

What, then, is this development? In the first place a position is described that presents a difficulty; for without the difficulty there is no interest to be excited. In the second place, an effort is to be made to get out of this difficulty. The effort is accompanied with new difficulties. In the third place, a hopeful scheme is devised on purpose to complete the effort. the fourth place, the scheme fails, and the difficulties increase, and the plot thickens. In the fifth place, a great and almost unexpected deliverance or catastrophe occurs. This is the general character of a drama, more or less. And there is a natural reason for all these five peculiarities. The first is self-evident, the second seems equally so; but it is not so evident that the hopeful scheme of the third should be a failure. Why should it be a failure? Why not a gradual continuation of the effort in the second act to effect a deliverance? There is an admirable reason why this ought not to be, in the fact that the disappointment arising from a hopeful scheme of deliverance is one of the most universal, and at the same time, distressing features of that severe ordeal of moral discipline which characterises the providential government of the world And it is an indispensable character of all moral teaching, and especially of dramatic teaching, that

it should reveal the agency of a higher power that watches over us and brings us deliverance when hope is lost after our utmost efforts, and that leads the guilty by a path of fancied security into the very catastrophe which he intended for others. The failure of the middle scheme is the preparation for man's extremity and God's opportunity; and the dénouement is invariably an unexpected result, in which divine justice or mercy is revealed by a quick, a smart and a marvellous combination of simultaneous accidents which Heaven alone could overrule and fit so admirably in time and space.

It is by no means necessary that these leading ideas should be slavishly followed in any drama; and perhaps in many they may not even be perceived. But it must be very evident to every one, that, if a drama is divided into five parts, like a deal board or a sheet of paper, without any regard to special characteristics, it will not be a drama of five acts, but a drama of one act divided into five parts. Each act of a drama has its distinctive character, like the five fingers, the thumb being the first or fifth, and equal in power and interest to all the rest. The first, the third, and the fifth acts, like alternate notes in music, are naturally akin; so also are are the second and the fourth. The first is the statement of the problem; the third is a false or defective attempt at solution ; the fifth is the true solution. In the first act of

66

'Hamlet," a poem, which is generally regarded as