This, too, is an answer to the objection that if confrontation
is the dramatic essential, bare opposition, because the clearest
confrontation, would be the greatest drama, and the "Suppliants"
of Euripedes be indeed an example of it. Bare opposition is
never real confrontation in our sense, for that must be an
arrest, a mutual antagonism of all impulses of soul and sense.
It must possess the whole man. It needs to take in "all
thoughts, all passions, all delights," to be complete, and the
measure of its completeness is the measure of its aesthetic
value.
In the same way, the demand for profound truth and significance
in the drama is clearly to be reached from the purely dramatic
need. Inner "possession," the condition for our dramatic
tension, depends not alone on the cumulation of suggestions--
suggestion in its, so to speak, quantitative aspect. The
attitude of a character must be necessary in itself: that is,
it must be true to the great and general laws of life. If it
is fundamentally false, even with the longest and completest
preparation, it rings hollow. We cannot completely enter
into it. Thus we see that the one central requirement, the
dramatic germ, leads to the most far-reaching demands for
logic, sanity, and morality in the ideas of a play.
This should not be interpreted as exhausting the aesthetic
value of logic and morality in the drama. The drama is a
species of literature: and these qualities, apart from the
fact that they are necessary to the full dramatic moment,
have also an aesthetic effect proper to themselves. Thus
the development ha the beauty which lies in a necessary
progress; but this beauty is common to the epic, the novel,
and the symphony, while the unity given by the confrontation
and tension of simultaneous forces belongs to the drama alone.
It is therefore development as serving the dramatic end that
I have deduced.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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