The theory of modern drama is imitation of life.  It has nothing else and higher to offer; so, when it fails to imitate, we call it trash.  But the theory of Aeschylean Tragedy is the illumination of life.  Illumination of life, through a medium quite unlike life.  Art begins on a spiritual plane, and works down to realism in its decadence; then it ceases to be art at all, and becomes merely copying what we imagine to be nature,—­nature, often, as seen through a diseased liver and well-atrophied pineal gland.

True art imitates nature only in a very selective and limited way.  It chooses carefully what it shall imitate, and all to the end of illumination.  It paints a flower, or a sunset, not to reproduce the thing seen with the eyes, but to declare and set forth that mood of the Oversoul which the flower or the sunset expressed.  Flower-colors or sunset-colors cannot be reproduced in pigments; but you can do things with pigments and a brush that can tell the same story.  Or it can be done in words, in a poem; or with the notes of music;—­in both of which cases the medium used is still more, and totally, unlike the medium through which the Oversoul said its say in the sky or the blossom.

Nature is always expressing these moods of the Oversoul; but we get no news of them, as a rule, from our own sight and hearing; we must wait for the poets and artists to interpret them.  Life is always at work to teach us life; but we miss the grand lessons, usually, until some human Teacher enforces them.  His methods are the same as those of the artists:  between whose office and his there was at first no difference;—­Bard means only, originally, an Adept Teacher.  Such a one selects experiences out of life for his pupils, and illumines them through the circumstances under which they are applied; just as the true artist selects objects from nature, and by his manner of treating them, interprets the greatness that lies beyond.

So the drama-theory of Aeschylus.  He took fragments of possible experience, and let them be seen through a heightened and interpretative medium; with a light at once intense and somber-portentous thrown on them; and this not to reproduce the externalia and appearance of life, but to illumine its inner recesses; to enforce, in plays lasting an hour or so, the lessons life may take many incarnations to teach.  This cannot be done by realism, imitation or reproduction of the actual; than which life itself is always better.

What keeps us from seeing the meanings of life?  Personality.  Not only our own, but in all those about us.  Personality dodges and flickers always between our eyes and the solemn motions, the adumbrations of the augustness beyond.  We demand lots of personality in our drama; we call it character-drawing.  We want to see fellows like ourselves lounging or bustling about, and hear them chattering as we do;—­fellows with motives (like our own) all springing from the