Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: May 24, 2025
So when the perceptions that constitute the bodily part of a discourse have no concatenation as things, when they appear rather to stand apart as independent limbs and separate unities, when they betray the utter disorder of a sportive imagination, obedient to itself alone, then the clothing has aesthetic freedom and the wants of the fancy are satisfied.
I take those to be the dramatic unities, so far as I have been enabled to bestow attention upon them, and I have read much upon the subject, and thought much.
The nature of man, how it is affected by diversity of circumstances, by nationality, descent, rank and occupation, by the relations of class to class, of society to the individual, of personal will to a controlling destiny, this may be said to form the motive of the volume; and though such action as there is in it takes place chiefly at the court of one of the minor states of Germany, this narrow field was evidently selected on a similar principle to that of the Greek drama, with its "unities" of time and place and the narratives and explanations of the Chorus.
To the unities of time and place he has shewn no regard, and perhaps a nearer view of the principles on which they stand will diminish their value, and withdraw from them the veneration which, from the time of Corneille, they have very generally received by discovering that they have given more trouble to the poet, than pleasure to the auditor.
Although the ancient drama frequently violated the three unities of action, time, and place, it always preserved a fourth unity, which we may call unity of mood.
In Johnson's pages at any rate, there is "always an appeal open," as he says, "from criticism to nature." And, though all his prejudices, except those of the Anti-Gallican, must have carried him to the side of the unities, he goes straight to the truth of experience, obtains there a decisive answer, and records it in a few pages of masterly reasoning.
Representation is far from idle, since it brings to focus those mechanical unities which otherwise would have existed only potentially and at the option of a roving eye. In evoking consciousness nature makes this delimination real and unambiguous; there are henceforth actual centres and actual interests in the mechanical flux.
The unities are no doubt in fiction, if not in drama, something of a caricature; but it is seldom possible to neglect them to the extent of years and decades without paying the penalty; and Thackeray is not of those who have evaded payment.
The conflict of stupidities that had caused the war was overlaid and forgotten by a hundred thousand devotions, by countless heroic deaths and sufferings, by a pacification largely conceived and broadly handled. The nation had displayed a belated regard for its honour and a sustained passion for great unities.
Men despised real history and broke with it, to be subjected all the more to the tyranny of historical ghosts. While the poets were fettered in blind worship of the unities of Aristotle as of a fundamental historical law, Houdart, without understanding a word of Greek, corrected Homer, whose poetry did not seem to conform sufficiently to rule.
Word Of The Day
Others Looking