striking contrast to the lectures of A W. Schlegel, which we recently examined. We will endeavor, in a brief notice, to convey some notion of its contents.

The first condition of dramatic poetry is that its passion be true. And at the theatre no passion is true but that which is general; that which all the world feels. The heart of the audience is to be moved only by that which is common to all men; psychological curiosities, idiosyncrasies, bizarreries, and exceptions, may interest, but

Manfreds, Antonys, sentimental villains, and virtuous courtesans.

The second defect inherent in the choice of singularities and exceptions in matters of passion, is exaggeration. When a poet represents a simple natural passion, he has a rule and measure: he sees how passions act upon men, and what he sees he paints. But when he represents a character which is an exception to the ordinary rules of human feeling, where is his measure? In endeavoring to imagine what would be the

they do not move. Here lies the difference thoughts and feelings of such a person, he between the ancient and modern drama, leaves the general ground of experience to between Racine and Victor Hugo. The plunge into the regions of fancy: the result old poet selects for his subjects the most is the portrait of a madman. Let us also universal passions; and these passions, remember that when the passions are exagwhich are simple in their nature, he repre-gerated they all resemble each other, and sents with simplicity. The modern poet, lose their distinctive characteristics. On on the contrary, seeks exceptional and bi- entering a theatre at the close of a modern

zarre cases with as much diligence as the ancient poet avoided them Take the example of Love. When the drama has exhausted the emotions which the exhibition of the simple passion excites, it seeks emotion in the painting of singular and fantastic passions; this singularity rapidly leads to extravagance in the incidents, and melodrame triumphs; for what is melodrame but the substitution of physical for mental effects? 'Marion de Lorme' is an exam

play, and on seeing the heroine a prey to a convulsive frenzy, on hearing her cries and sobs as she wrings her hands and drags herself along the ground, how are we to know whether it is grief, rage, love, or hate, which drives her to these excesses? Passions are only various and distinguishable from each other whilst they are moderate: they have then their natural language and gestures, and they interest by their diversity. When they become excessive they become uniform;

ple of the over-refining tendency of modern and exaggeration, which is supposed to give poets. Victor Hugo has there painted the relief and contrast to passion, only destroys purity of love in the breast of a courtesan; it.

the thing is possible, but not vraisemblable; If to the foregoing we add, that the tenit is an exception, a contrast, and therefore dency of modern art is material, that it

undramatic. Modern literature manifests

seeks to excite the senses more than the feelings, and excites even the feelings only through the senses, we shall have tolerably expressed the general ideas of M. Saint Marc Girardin on the subject. Let us follow him now into some details.

a striking tendency towards the exceptional in character and passion; it loves to elevate the exception into the importance of the rule; it prefers idiosyncrasies to natural passions; it seizes on a detail, a feature, or a contrast, and out of this makes a "Every feeling," he says, "has its histocharacter. But idiosyncrasies and excep-ry; and this history is interesting because tions have two great faults; monotony and it is the abridgment of the history of humanexaggeration. ity. Although the feelings do not change, Exceptions and curiosities soon become yet they suffer from the effect of religious monotonous. Bizarre people are only amus- and political revolutions. They retain their ing for an hour; we afterwards become tired nature, but they change their expression; of seeing their ideas and sentiments revolving in the same eccentric circle. There is, in truth, something more tedious than being like all the world, and that is being always the same. Commonplace people are more tolerable than monotonous people. Remember also that bizarrerie is easily imitated. Consisting as it does of only one times when fashion has pretended to disparticular trait, a detail, not an ensemble, it own this love of life; when stoicism, or is easily copied, Hence the multiplicity of epicureanism, has erected contempt of

and it is in studying these changes of expression that literary criticism writes, without meaning it, the history of the world."

His lectures are contributions towards such a history. The love of life is the first passion of which he treats: it is also the most elementary of all. There have been death into a system: but this has always And she compares herself to Niobe, whom,

given a natural expression to their feelings, She subsequently reproaches the Thebans

been an affectation. At all times, and with all men, love of life has been a real and intense passion. At all times, when men have

a strong illustration of her horror of death.

with indifference to her fate, and the gods with injustice. Iphigenia is less proud and less resolute, and her passionate entreaties for life are expressed without reShe, too, regrets the light of the

they have expressed their love of life. Achilles, the ideal of Greek manliness, and who was always willing to sacrifice his life to something greater, yet when complimented by Ulysses, who meets him in Hades, on serve. his now commanding the dead, and thereby being greater than when he ruled over the day; she, too, dreads the shades; she, too, living, Achilles mournfully replies that he would rather be a day-laborer and a slave happy life, she says, is preferable to a if alive, than a king amongst the dead.- splendid death; κακῶς ζῆν κρεῖσσον, ἡ θανεῖν

(Od. xi., 487.)

μη δη μοι θανατον γε παραυδα φαιδιμ' Οδυσσεῦ.
βουλοίμην κ' ἐπαρουρος έων θητευεμεν άλλῳ
ἀνδρι παρ ̓ ἀκληρῳ, ᾧ μη βιοτος πολυς είη,
ἡ πασιν νεκυεσσι καταφθιμενοισιν ἀνασσειν.

revolts instinctively against death: an un

καλῶς.* And the audience sympathize with her. So would the reader, could he but read her touching speech; but the splendid original we dare not, and Potter's feeble translation we will not, quote.

Polyxena is more resigned, because she has less to regret. Homeless and fatherless, she can only live to be a slave; and she resigns herself to death, but without pomp,

Compare also, 'hateful old age,' γηραϊ τε στυγερῳ, (ΙΙ. xix. 356), which energetically expresses his love of life. This would appear contemptible to Stoicism, but in their without stoical affectation. The Polyxena of secret hearts all men sympathize with it. Seneca, on the contrary, invites death with M. Girardin selects as illustrations of the bravado, her magnanimity borders upon love of life, the Ajax' and 'Antigone' of Sophocles, the 'Iphigenia' and 'Polyxena' of Euripides, the 'Polyxena' of Seneca, the 'Iphigénie' of Racine, and the Catarina' of Victor Hugo. Let us follow him

in his course.

Antigone, Polyxena, and Iphigenia, are three maidens sacrificed in the flower of their age. Neither of them affects a courage or contempt she does not feel; neither of them resigns willingly her youth and hopes; all three weep without shame: weep and yet resign themselves. We see here a triumph of art which excites pity without exhausting it; which mixes the plaint with the resignation, that they may excite pity and respect, and that these two feelings may temper each other in the spectator's breast. Antigone is a martyr, sacrificing herself to her religious sentiments; but she has not the resignation of a martyr. In bidding

adieu to life she knows and feels what she is quitting:

Behold me, fellow-citizens;

I tread the last path

I see the last beam of the sun

I shall see it no more.

For the all-reposing Hades leads me

To the Acherontic shores.

No hymeneal rites may charm me,

hymene

No nuptial hymn be sung.

Antigone, ed. Böckh, v. 775.

fury, and she terrifies Pyrrhus, who is to
immolate her :-
Audax virago non tulit retro gradum:
Conversa ad ictum stat, truci vultu ferox.
Tam fortis animus omnium mentes ferit,
Novumque monstrum, est Pyrrhus ad cædem

piger.‡

of all evil: mors adeò extra omne malum

est, ut sit extra omnem malorum metum. There is nothing after death, for death itself is nothing.

Post mortem nihil est, ipsaque mors nihil.*

Such was the doctrine. What was the

practice? At that period of languor and luxury, as M. Nisard well says, a period of monstrous effeminacies, of appetites to which the world could scarcely suffice, of perfumed baths, of easy and disorderly intrigues, there were daily men of all ranks, of all fortunes, of all ages, who released themselves from their evils by suicide. Marcellinus || is attacked with a painful

but curable malady; he is young, rich, has sage; notice not merely the beauty of the slaves, friends, every thing to make life verse, but the delicacy of the feeling; no

pleasant-no matter, he conceives the fancy of dying. He assembles his friends and consults them as if he were about to marry. After discussing with them the project of suicide, he puts it to the vote. Some advise him to do as he pleases, but a stoic present bids him die bravely. He fol

tice how fine the transition from obedience to the implied prayer. She offers herself as a victim, because it is her father's will. But can he will it? Can he slay the darling of his eyes, the child who first lisped the name of father, who listened to the warrior's exploits, and flattered him by ask

lowed the advice and killed himself. Suicide ing him the names of the countries he was was a fashion. The great teacher of the doc-going to conquer? The conclusion of her trine ended his contemptible existence ac- speech is touched with the same delicate cording to his precepts; but it was by the hand.

order of Nero; during his life he had Ne craignez rien ! mon cœur de votre honneur shown no contempt of life's enjoyments.

He had been Nero's pander, and he received a pander's wages. These were not trifles; besides his villas and superbly furnished palace, his hard cash alone amounted to 300,000 sestertia, or 2,421,8007. sterling of our money. (Tacit. xiii. 42.) After this, we may be permitted to doubt the sincerity of stoicism; nothing can stagger our conviction of its absurdity.

jaloux,

Ne fera point rougir un père tel que vous;
Et si je n'avais eu que ma vie à défendre,
J'aurai su renfermer un souvenir si tendre.
Mais à mon triste sort, vous le savez, seigneur,
Une mère, un amant attachaient leur bonheur

Ma mère est devant vous, et vous voyez ses larmes. Pardonnez aux efforts que je viens de tenter, Pour prévenir les pleurs que je vais leur couter. In the 'Iphigénie' of Racine we see neiThere is nothing in Euripides at all ther the Greek ingenuousness, nor the Ro- equal to this. Her prayer has treble force, man affectation. She is resigned, but with- because it does not seem to be a prayer. out bravado; she regrets life, but without She does not lose an inch of her dignity, not terror, without violence. There is some- a jot of her filial obedience, but she alludes thing touching in her respectful submis- to all that can make life dear, and gently sion:

Je saurai, s'il le faut, victime obéissante
Tendre au fer de Calchas une tête innocente,
Et, respectant le coup par vous-même ordonné,
Vous rendre tout le sang que vous ma vez donné:

places before her father's mind the extent of the sacrifice which he demands. 'Iphigénie,' says M. Girardin, 'immolates her grief to paternal authority; she is anxious not to offend by too loud a murmur. This is what Christianity has made of the human heart. Observe that Polyxena, in Seneca, braves death, because she despises life;

touching, because this submission is full of mute prayers for life; touching, because the life she sacrifices is dear to her, al- Iphigénie meets death calmly, because it though her father's will is dearer. Listen is her father's will, and for that father she to these sweet verses, which have the pathos of those in Euripides, from which they are imitated, together with an impress peculiarly Racinean.

Si pourtant ce respect, si cette obéissance
Paraît digne à vos yeux d'une autre récompense;
Si d'une mère en pleurs vous plaignez les ennuis,
J'ose vous dire ici qu'en l'état où je suis,
Peut être assez d'honneurs environnaient ma vie
Pour ne pas souhaiter qu'elle me fût ravie,
Ni qu'en me l'arrachant un sévère destin

Si près de ma naissance en eut marqué la fin.
Fille d'Agamemnon, c'est moi qui la première,
Seigneur, vous appelai de ce doux nom de père;
C'est moi, si long temps le plaisir de vos yeux,
Vous ai fait de ce nom remercier les dieux.
Hélas! avec plaisir je me faisais conter
Tous les noms des pays que vous allez dompter;
Et déjà d'Ilion présageant la conquête,
D'un triomphe si beau je préparais la tête.

has infinite and reverential love. The Iphigénie of Racine resembles more the Antigone of Sophocles than the Iphigenia of Euripides: indeed Racine, throughout, has nearer affinities to Sophocles, being the consummate flower of French art, as Sophocles was of the Greek; and we shall find a nearer resemblance to the passions of the Iphigenia of Euripides in the 'Catarina' of Victor Hugo: nearer, we mean, in respect of its unhesitating expression of the love of life, unmingled with any noble sentiments.

Angelo, the tyrant of Padua, tells Catarina that she must die, and bids her choose between the dagger or poison. She exclaims, 'No: 'tis horrible! I will not! I cannot! - Think a little, while there is yet

Pray, reader, notice the art of this pas- time. You are all-powerful, reflect. A

woman, a lonely woman, abandoned, with- | antique Iphigenia, for her regrets embrace out force and without defence, without pa- those things which are universal benefits, rents, without friends! Assassinate her! the light, the beauty of the skies, the Poison her in a miserable corner of her own house! O mother! mother! mother!

rina's passion that it is "the cry of the regretted his arms, his combats, his rebody in the agony, not the cry of the soul. nown; but who, like Antigone and IphigeIt is the flesh which revolts against death; nia, dwells only on the beams of the sun, but it is a purely instinctive and material the sacred land of his birth, the fountains revolt, in which the soul takes no part. I and the rivers, the fields of Troy, and witness the sensations of one condemned to Athens his second country: and compare death: I see the flesh quiver, the visage this also, as M. Girardin bids us, with the turn pale, the limbs trembling; I witness soliloquy of Hamlet, who speaks only of an agony. But why is the material death the whips and scorns of time. Thus dif

difference indicative of that between an-loved life, and they said so: when the time most treated by ancient poets. Phædra, Ajax, and Dido, do not argue respecting their right to dispose of their lives: they yield to the counsels of despair, without argument, without subtilizing, without plunging into profound reveries like Hamlet, without experiencing the diseased weariness of Werther, without cursing society like Chatterton. Their deaths are the explosions of despair, not the conclusions of a philosophic debate. They have been impatient at grief, and in a moment of anguish they have cast away life.

had loved tenderly. Philoctetes in pain madness of passion, without any mixture of howls like a wild beast, because he is in philosophy. This second species is the one agony and feels no shame in expressing it; but these shrieks have not softened his soul: he is still the same stern, implacable, terrible Philoctetes. The Romans, in their dread of becoming effeminate, became marble. They despised death, they despised pain. The gladiator was trained to be wounded, without a muscle indicating that the wound was painful; he was taught to look at impending death without a change of countenance. To be above pain was thought manly. They did not see that instead of being above humanity, in this they sunk miserably below it. You receive a blow, and you do not wince; so does a stone. You are face to face with death, and you have no regrets, you despise life; then are you unworthy of life. In Homer, not only the heroes, but the very gods express their pain, and the wounded Mars goes howling off the field. If it is a condition of our organization that we feel pain, it is only affectation to suppress the expression. Could silence stifle pain it were desirable; but to stifle the cry is not to stifle the feel

ing; and to have a feeling and pretend

not to have it, is not being above,

low humanity. If you despise pain why not also pleasure? and if both, wherein are you superior to the vegetable? The same sensibility which causes pain, produces also pleasure; to be free from either

is not to be human.

The passion of the love of life naturally leads us to the treatment of suicide in the ancient and modern drama; we will, therefore, accompany M. Saint Marc Girardin in his lectures on the subject. He justly remarks, that the idea of suicide is not an

instinctive, but a reflective one; the proof is, that fashion generally regulates the form of self-destruction. In ancient times, men died as stoics or as epicureans. In our times, suicides are imitated from the heroes of novels and dramas. The victims are all enthusiastic, melancholy, full of disdain for society, full of anger against the laws: in a word, such as the theatre has made them;

for in this respect the theatre does not borrow from society its suicidal ideas and passions, but society borrows them from the theatre.

Together with this species of suicide, wherein philosophy and passion unite, there is another species, which may be found in both ancient and modern society, and which is caused by the vehemence and

Lucemque perosi

Projicere animas.

But death has quickly cured them of that hate of life! How gladly would they reappear on earth, once more to enjoy the light of day, even at the expense of suffering those evils which they believed insupportable! Quam vellent æthere in alto Nunc et pauperiem et duros perferre labores! Fata obstant.*

In the tragedies of Seneca no one kills him

self without asserting a philosophical right;

to die in a moment of despair would be unworthy and unwise; a man must know that he is at liberty to kill himself if he pleases. Edipus discusses this point with his daughter. I have resigned the empire of Thebes, but not the empire of myself. I have power over my own life and death;

jus vitæ ac necis Meæ penes me est.

No one can interdict my death. Death is every where; God, in his wisdom, has willed it so. Ubique mors est; optime hoc cavit

Deus.' In Sophocles, on the contrary, Edipus, though he longs for death, dares not inflict it: he only prays Apollo to hasten the hour of his deliverance.

Seneca's plays are despicable rubbish, if viewed poetically; but there is one light in which they may advantageously be studied : and that is, in comparison with those of Sophocles, with reference to the different feelings and ideas entertained by the Greeks and Romans. Suicide, for example, is never treated in Sophocles as a question of philosophy; in Seneca, always. In the Geeek dramatist it is the effect of violent passion: hence dramatic. Even the suicide of Ajax, the most premeditated of all those in the