personality.  Human life is what interests us:  we desire to drink deep of it, and drink again and again.  The music that we wish to hear is the “still, sad music of humanity";—­that is, taking our theory at its best, and before you come down to sheer ‘jazz’ and ragtime.  But what interested Aeschylus was that which lies beyond and within life.  He said:  ’You can get life in the Agora, on the Acropolis, any day of the week; when you come to the theater you shall have something else, and greater.’

So he set his scenes, either in a vast, remote, and mysterious antiquity, or—­in The Persians—­at Susa before the palace of the Great King:  a setting as remote, splendid, vast, and mysterious, to the Greek mind of the day, as the other.  Things should not be as like life, but as unlike life, as possible.  The plays themselves, as acted, were a combination of poetry, dance, statuesque poses and motions and groupings; there was no action.  All the action was done off the scenes.  They did not portray the evolution of character; they hardly portrayed character—­in the personal sense—­at all.  The dramatis personae are types, symbols, the expression of natural forces, or principles in man.  In our drama you have a line, an extension forward in time; a progression from this to that point in time;—­in Greek Tragedy you have a cross-section of time—­a cutting through the atom of time that glimpses may be caught of eternity.  There was no unfoldment of a story; but the presentation of a single mood.  In the chanted poetry and the solemn dance-movements a situation was set forth; what led up to it being explained retrospectively.  The audience knew what was coming as well as the author did:  that Agamemnon, for instance, was to be murdered.  So all was written to play on their expectations, not on their surprise.  There was a succession of perfect pictures; these and the poetry were to hold the interest, to work it up:  to seize upon the people, and lead them by ever-heightening accessions of feeling into forgetfulness of their personal lives, and absorption in the impersonal harmony, the spiritual receptivity, from which the grand truths are visible.  The actors’ masks allowed only the facial expression of a single mood; and it was a single mood the dramatist aimed to produce:  a unity; one great word.  There could be no grave-diggers; no quizzing of Polonious; no clouds very like a whale.  The whole drama is the unfoldment of a single moment:  that, say, in which Hamlet turns on Caudius and kills him—­rather, leads him out to kill him.  To that you are led by a little sparse dialog, ominous enough, and pregnant with dire significance, between two or three actors; many long speeches in which the story is told in retrospect; much chanting by the chorus—­Horatio multiplied by a dozen or so—­to make you feel Hamlet’s long indecision, and to allow you no escape from the knowledge that Claudius’ crime would bring about its karmic punishment.  It is a unity:  one thunderbolt from Zeus;—­first the growl and rumbling of the thunders; then the whirr of the dread missile,—­and lo, the man dead that was to die.  And through the bolt so hurled, so effective, and with it—­the eagle-bark—­Aeschylus crying Karma! to the Athenians.