The actors raised on high boots
above their natural height, their faces hidden in masks and their tones
mechanically magnified, must have relied for their effects not upon
facial play, or rapid and subtle variations of voice and gesture, but
upon a certain statuesque beauty of pose, and a chanting intonation of
that majestic iambic verse whose measure would have been obscured by a
rapid and conversational delivery. The representation would thus become
moving sculpture to the eye, and to the ear, as it were, a sleep of
music between the intenser interludes of the chorus; and the spectator
without being drawn away by an imitative realism from the calm of
impassioned contemplation into the fever and fret of a veritable actor
on the scene, received an impression based throughout on that clear
intellectual foundation, that almost prosaic lucidity of sentiment and
plot, which is preserved to us in the written text, but raised by the
accompanying appeal to the sense, made as it must have been made by such
artists as the Greeks, by the grouping of forms and colours, the
recitative, the dance and the song, to such a greatness and height of
aesthetic significance as can hardly have been realised by any other
form of art production.
Pages:
705
706
707
708
709
710
711
712
713
714
715
716
717
718
719
720
721
722
723
724
725
726
727
728
729