cted from any one
dramatic literature. They are often the result of particular
antecedents, and their growth is often affected by peculiar conditions.
Different nations or ages use the same names and may preserve some of
the same rules for species which in other respects their usage may have
materially modified from that of their neighbours or predecessors. The
very question of the use of measured or pedestrian speech as fit for
different kinds of drama, and therefore distinctive of them, cannot be
profitably discussed except in reference to particular literatures. In
the Chinese drama the most solemn themes are treated in the same
form--an admixture of verse and prose--which not so very long since was
characteristic of that airiest of Western dramatic species, the French
_vaudeville_. Who would undertake to define, except in the applications
which have been given to the words in successive generations, such terms
as "tragi-comedy," or indeed as "drama" (_drame_) itself? Yet this
uncertainty does not imply that all is confusion in the terminology as
to the species of the drama. In so far as they are distinguishable
according to the effects which their actions, or those which the
preponderating parts of their actions, produce, these species may
primarily be ranged in accordance with the broad difference established
by Aristotle between tragedy and comedy. "Tragic" and "comic" effects
differ in regard to the emotions of the mind which they excite; and a
drama is tragic or comic according as such effects are produced by it.
The strong or serious emotions are alone capable of exercising upon us
that influence which, employing a bold but marvellously happy figure,
Aristotle termed _purification_, and which a Greek comedian, after a
more matter-of-fact fashion, thus expressed:

"For whensoe'er a man observes his fellow
Bear wrongs more grievous than himself has known,
More easily he bears his own misfortunes."

That is to say, the petty troubles of self which disturb without
elevating the mind are driven out by the sympathetic participation in
greater griefs, which raises while it excites the mind employed upon
contemplating them. It is to these emotions--which are and can be no
others than pity and terror--that actions which we call tragic appeal.
_Naif_ as we may think Aristotle in desiderating for such actions a
complicated rather than a simple plot, he obviously means that in form
as well as in design they shoul