This brings us to another connexion of high symbolic significance. The drama of the West is ordinarily designated _Character-Drama_. That of the Greeks, on the other hand, is best described as _Situation-Drama_, and in the antithesis we can perceive what it is that Western, and what it is that Classical, man respectively feel as the basic life-form that is imperilled by the onsets of tragedy and fate. If in lieu of “direction” we say “irreversibility,” if we let ourselves sink into the terrible meaning of those words “too late” wherewith we resign a fleeting bit of the present to the _eternal_ past, we find the deep foundation of every tragic crisis. It is Time that is the tragic, and it is by the meaning that it intuitively attaches to Time that one Culture is differentiated from another; and consequently “tragedy” of the grand order has only developed in the Culture which has most passionately affirmed, and in that which has most passionately denied, Time. The sentiment of the ahistoric soul gives us a Classical tragedy of the moment, and that of the ultrahistorical soul puts before us Western tragedy that deals with the _development of a whole life_. Our tragedy arises from the feeling of an _inexorable_ Logic of becoming, while the Greek feels the _illogical, blind Casual of the moment_—the life of Lear matures inwardly towards a catastrophe, and that of Œdipus stumbles without warning upon a situation. And now one may perceive how it is that synchronously with Western drama there rose and fell a mighty portrait-art (culminating in Rembrandt), a kind of historical and biographical art which (_because_ it was so) was sternly discountenanced in Classical Greece at the apogee of Attic drama. Consider the veto on likeness-statuary in votive offerings[124] and note how—from Demetrius of Alopeke (about 400)[125]—a timid art of “ideal” portraiture began to venture forth when, and only when, grand tragedy had been thrown into the background by the light society-pieces of the “Middle Comedy.”[126] Fundamentally all Greek statues were standard masks, like the actors in the theatre of Dionysus; all bring to expression, in significantly strict form, _somatic_ attitudes and positions. Physiognomically they are _dumb_, corporeal and _of necessity_ nude—character-heads of definite individuals came only with the Hellenistic age. Once more we are reminded of the contrast between the Greek number-world, with its computations of tangible results, and the other, our own, in which the relations between groups of functions or equations or, generally, formula-elements of the same order are investigated morphologically, and the character of these relations fixed _as such_ in express laws. ----- Footnote 121: _Œd. Rex._, 642. κακῶς εἴληφα τοὐμὸν σῶμα σὺν τέχνῃ κακῇ. (Cf. Rudolf Hirsch, _Die Person_ (1914), p. 9.) Footnote 122: _Œd. Col._, 355. μαντεῖα ... ἃ τοῦδ’ ἐχρήσθη σώματος. Footnote 123: _Choëphoræ_, 710. ἐπὶ ναυάρχῳ σώματι ... τῷ βασιλείῳ.