[14] Two thousand years lie between Shakespeare and the flourishing period of the ancient tragedy.  In this interval Christianity laid open unknown depths of mind:  the Teutonic race, in their dispersion, filled wide spaces of the Earth; the Crusaders opened the way to the East, voyages of discovery revealed the West and the form of the whole globe; new spheres of knowledge presented themselves; whole nations and periods of time arose and passed away; a thousand forms of life, public and private, religious and political, had come and gone; the circle of views, ideas, experiences, and interests was immensely enlarged, the mind thereby made deeper and broader, wants increased, passions more various and refined, the conflict of human endeavours more diversified and intricate, the resources of the mind immeasurable; all in a way quite foreign to the childish times of antiquity.  This abundance of external and internal material streamed into the sphere of Art on all sides:  poetry could not resist it without injury, and even ruin.—­GERVINUS.

But what are the conditions of building, in right artistic order, a work of such vastness and complexity?  As the mind is taken away from the laws of time and place, it must be delivered over to the higher laws of reason.  So that the work lies under the necessity of proceeding in such a way as to make the spectator live in his imagination, not in his senses, and even his senses must, for the time being, be made imaginative, or be ensouled.  That is, instead of the formal or numerical unities of time and place, we must have the unities of intellectual time and intellectual space:  the further the artist departs from the local and chronological succession of things, the more strict and manifest must be their logical and productive succession.  Incidents and characters are to be represented, not in the order of sensible juxtaposition or procession, but in that of cause and effect, of principle and consequence.  Whether, therefore, they stand ten minutes or ten months, ten feet or ten miles, asunder, matters not, provided they are really and evidently united in this way; that is, provided the unities of action and interest are made strong enough and clear enough to overcome the diversities of time and place.  For, here, it is not where and when a given thing happened, but how it was produced, and why, whence it came and whither it tended, what caused it to be as it was, and to do as it did, that we are mainly concerned with.

The same principle is further illustrated in the well-known nakedness of the Elizabethan stage in respect of furniture and scenic accompaniment.  The weakness, if such it were, appears to have been the source of vast strength.  It is to this poverty of the old stage that we owe, in part, the immense riches of the Shakespearian Drama, since it was thereby put to the necessity of making up for the defect of sensuous impression by working on the rational, moral, and imaginative forces of