[13] Schlegel has a passage that hits the core of the matter:  “Rousseau recognized the contrast in Music, and showed that rhythm and melody was the ruling principle of ancient as harmony is of modern music.  On the imaging arts, Hemsterhuys made this ingenious remark, that the ancient painters were perhaps too much of sculptors, modern sculptors too much of painters.  This touches the very point of difference; for the spirit of collective ancient art and poetry is plastic, as that of the modern is picturesque.”  And again:  “The Pantheon is not more different from Westminster Abbey or the Church of St. Stephen at Vienna than the structure of a tragedy of Sophocles from a drama of Shakespeare.  The comparison between these two wonderful productions of poetry and architecture might be carried still further.”  Coleridge also has some very choice remarks on the subject:  “I will note down the fundamental characteristics which contradistinguish the ancient literature from the modern generally, but which more especially appear in prominence in the tragic drama.  The ancient was allied to statuary, the modern refers to painting.  In the first there is a predominance of rhythm and melody; in the second, of harmony and counterpoint.  The Greeks idolized the finite, and therefore were masters of all grace, elegance, proportion, fancy, dignity, majesty,—­of whatever, in short, is capable of being definitely conveyed by defined forms and thoughts; the moderns revere the infinite, and affect the indefinite as a vehicle of the infinite; hence their passions, their obscure hopes and fears, their wandering through the unknown, their grander moral feelings, their more august conception of man as man, their future rather than their past,—­in a word, their sublimity.”

Now, taking these two things together, namely, the historic spirit and method, and also the breadth and amplitude of matter and design, both of which belong to the Gothic Drama, and are indeed of its nature;—­taking these together, it cannot but be seen, I think, that the work must have a much larger scope, a far more varied and expansive scene, than is consistent with the Minor Unities.  If, for example, a man would represent any impressive course or body of historical events, the historic order and process of the thing plainly necessitate a form very different from that of the Classic Drama:  the work must needs use considerable diversity of time and place, else narrative and description will have to be substituted, in a great measure, for representation; that is, the right dramatic form must be sacrificed to what, after all, has no proper coherence or consanguinity with the nature and genius of the work.  As to which of the two is better in itself, whether the austere and simple beauty of the Sophoclean tragedy, or the colossal grandeur and massiveness of such a drama as King Lear, this is not for me to say:  for myself, however, I cannot choose but prefer the latter; for this too has a beauty of its own; but it is indeed an awful beauty, and to my sense all the better for being so.  Be this as it may, it is certain that the human mind had quite outgrown the formal limitations of the Classic Drama.[14]