mism was against any conclusion so
discouraging to repentance. The lingering Miracles, it is true, still
presented the sublimest of all tragedies in the Fall of Man and the
apparent triumph of the Pharisees over Jesus. Between them, however, and
the kind of drama that succeeded the Moralities, too great a gulf was
fixed. Contemporaries of those original spirits, Heywood and Udall,
could hardly revert for inspiration to the discredited performances of
villages and of a few provincial towns. Tragedy had to wait until there
was matured and made popular an Interlude from which the conflict of
Virtues and Vices, with the orthodox triumph of the former, had been
purged away, leaving to the author complete liberty alike in character
and action. When that came, Tragedy returned to the stage, a stranger
with strange stories to tell. Persia and Ancient Rome sent their tyrants
and their heroines to contest for public favour with home-born knaves
and fools. Nor were the newcomers above borrowing the services of those
same knaves and fools. The Vice was given a place, low clownish fellows
were admitted to relieve the harrowed feelings, and our old
acquaintance, Herod, was summoned from the Miracles to lend his aid.

Yet even so--and probably because it was so--Tragedy was ill at ease.
She had called in low comedy and rant to please the foolish, only to
find herself infected and degraded by their company. Moreover, the
bustle of incident, the abrupt changes from grave to gay and to grave
again, jangled her sad majestic harmonies with shrill interrupting
discords. It had not been so in Greece. It had not been so even in
Italy, where Roman Seneca, fearing the least decline to a lower plane of
dignity and impressiveness, had disciplined tragedy by an imposition of
artificial but not unskilful restraints. In place of the strong
unbroken sweep of a resistless current, which characterized the
evolution of an Aeschylean drama, he had insisted on an orderly division
of a plot into acts and scenes, as though one should break up the sheer
plunge of a single waterfall into a well-balanced group of cascades. Yet
he was wise in his generation, securing by this means a carefully
proportioned development which, in the absence of that genius which
inspired the Greek dramatists, might otherwise have been lost. Once
strong and free in the plays of Aeschylus and his compeers, hampered and
constantly under guidance but still dignified and noble in the Se