Lectures Delivered in America in 1874Kingsley, Charles
History
Lectures Delivered in America in 1874
Kingsley, Charles
Speeches, addresses, etc.
Yes, so it has been, under some form or other, in every race and
clime—ever since Eve ate of the magic fruit, that she might be as a god,
knowing good and evil, and found, poor thing, as most have since, that it
was far easier and more pleasant to know the evil than to know the good.
But that theatre was built that men might know therein the good as well
as the evil. To learn the evil, indeed, according to their light, and
the sure vengeance of Até and the Furies which tracks up the evil-doer.
But to learn also the good—lessons of piety, patriotism, heroism,
justice, mercy, self-sacrifice, and all that comes out of the hearts of
men and women not dragged _below_, but raised _above_ themselves; and
behind all—at least in the nobler and earlier tragedies of Æschylus and
Sophocles, before Euripides had introduced the tragedy of mere human
passion; that sensation tragedy, which is the only one the world knows
now, and of which the world is growing rapidly tired—behind all, I say,
lessons of the awful and unfathomable mystery of human existence, of
unseen destiny; of that seemingly capricious distribution of weal and
woe, to which we can find no solution on this side the grave, for which
the old Greek could find no solution whatsoever.
Therefore there was a central object in the old Greek theatre, most
important to it, but which does not exist in our theatres, and did not in
the old Roman; because our tragedies, like the Roman, are mere plays
concerning love, murder, and so forth, while the Greek were concerning
the deepest relations of man to the Unseen.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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