the like.  The figures would be dwarfed by the distances; stage whispers and the common inflexions of the speaking voice would be lost.  So none of these things belonged to Greek Tragedy.  The mere physical scale necessitated a different theory of art.  The stature of the actors had to be increased, or they would have looked like pygmies; their figures had to be draped and muffled, to hide the unnatural proportions thus given them.  A mask had to be worn, if only to make the head proportionate to the body; and the mask had to contain an arrangement for multiplying the voice, that it might carry to the whole audience.  That implied that the lines should be chanted, not spoken;—­though in any case, chanted they would be, for they were verse, not prose; and the Greeks had not forgotten, as we have, that verse is meant to be chanted.  So here, to begin with, the whole scheme implied something as unlike actual life as it well could be.  And then, too, there was the solemnity of the occasion—­the religious nature of the whole festival.

Thus, in substance De Quincey; who makes too little, perhaps, of the matter of that last sentence; and too much of what goes before.  We may say that it was rather the grand impersonal theory of the art that created the outward condition; not the conditions that created the theory.  Mahaffy went to Athens and measured the theater; and found it not so big by any means.  They could have worked out our theories and practice in it, had they wanted to, so far as that goes.  Coarse buffoonish country festivals do not of themselves evolve into grand art or solemn occasions; you must seek a cause for that evolution, and find it in an impulse arisen in some human mind.  Or minds indeed; for such impulses are very mysterious.  The Gods sow their seed in season; we do not see the sowing, but presently mark the greening of the brown earth.  The method of the Mysteries—­drama serious and religious—­had been drifting outwards:  things had been growing to a point where a great creative Soul could take hold of them and mold them to his wish.  If Aeschylus was not an Initiate of Eleusis, he had learnt, with the Pythagoreans, the method of the Mysteries of all lands.  He knew more, not less, than the common pillars of the Athenian Church and State.  I imagine it was he, in those thirteen consecutive years of his victories, who in part created, in part drew from his Pythagorean knowledge, those conventions and circumstances for Tragedy which suited him—­rather than that conventions already existing imposed formative limits on him.  His genius was aloof, impersonal, severe, and of the substance of the Eternal; such as would need precisely those conventions, and must have created them had they not been there.  Briefly, I believe that this is what happened.  Sent by Pythagoras to do what he could for Athens and Greece, he forged this mighty bolt of tragedy to be his weapon.