More akin to an opera than to a play it had, as its basis, music.
For the drama had developed out of the lyric ode, and retained
throughout what was at first its only element, the dance and song of a
mimetic chorus. By this centre of rhythmic motion and pregnant melody
the burden of the tale was caught up and echoed and echoed again, as the
living globe divided into spheres of answering song, the clear and
precise significance of the plot, never obscure to the head, being thus
brought home in music to the passion of the heart, the idea embodied in
lyric verse, the verse transfigured by song, and song and verse
reflected as in a mirror to the eye by the swing and beat of the limbs
they stirred to consonance of motion. And while such was the character
of the odes that broke the action of the play, the action itself was an
appeal not less to the ear and to the eye than to the passion and the
intellect. The circumstances of the representation, the huge auditorium
in the open air, lent themselves less to "acting" in our sense of the
term, than to attitude and declamation.
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