our own, but in all those about us. Personality dodges
and flickers always between our eyes and the solemn motions, the
adumbrations of the augustness beyond. We demand lots of
personality in our drama; we call it character-drawing. We want
to see fellows like ourselves lounging or bustling about, and
hear them chattering as we do;--fellows with motives (like our
own) all springing from the personality. Human life is what
interests us: we desire to drink deep of it, and drink again and
again. The music that we wish to hear is the "still, sad music
of humanity";--that is, taking our theory at its best, and before
you come down to sheer 'jazz' and ragtime. But what interested
Aeschylus was that which lies beyond and within life. He said:
'You can get life in the Agora, on the Acropolis, any day of the
week; when you come to the theater you shall have something
else, and greater.'

So he set his scenes, either in a vast, remote, and mysterious
antiquity, or--in _The Persians_--at Susa before the palace of
the Great King: a setting as remote, splendid, vast, and
mysterious, to the Greek mind of the day, as the other. Things
should not be as like life, but as unlike life, as possible. The
plays themselves, as acted, were a combination of poetry, dance,
statuesque poses and motions and groupings; there was no action.
All the action was done off the scenes. They did not portray the
evolution of character; they hardly portrayed character--in the
personal sense--at all. The _dramatis personae_ are types,
symbols, the expression of natural forces, or principles in man.
In our drama you have a line, an extension forward in time; a
progression from this to that point in time;--in Greek Tragedy
you have a cross-section of time--a cutting through the atom of
time that glimpses may be caught of eternity. There was no
unfoldment of a story; but the presentation of a single mood.
In the chanted poetry and the solemn dance-movements a situation
was set forth; what led up to it being explained retrospectively.
The audience knew what was coming as well as the author did:
that Agamemnon, for instance, was to be murdered. So all
was written to play on their expectations, not on their surprise.
There was a succession of perfect pictures; these and the
poetry were to hold the interest, to work it up: to seize
upon the people, and lead them by ever-heightening accessions
of feeling into forgetfulness of their personal lives,