Volume 1 — CHAPTER VII MUSIC AND PLASTIC (continued 2)
Charles Francis Atkinson translation
Lastly, consider Western tragedy; observe how the same feeling leads it to prefer “historical” material—meaning thereby not so much demonstrably actual or even possible, but remote and crusted subjects. That which the Faustian soul wanted, and must have, could not be expressed by any event of purely momentary meaning, lacking in distance of time or place, or by a tragic art of the Classical kind, or by a timeless myth. Our tragedies, consequently, are tragedies of the past and of the future—the latter category, in which men yet to be are shown as carriers of a Destiny, is represented in a certain sense by “Faust,” “Peer Gynt” and the “Götterdämmerung.” But tragedies of the present we have not, apart from the trivial social drama of the 19th Century.[323] If Shakespeare wanted on occasion to express anything of importance in the present, he at least removed the scene of it to some foreign land—Italy for preference—in which he had never been, and German poets likewise take England or France—always for the sake of getting rid of that nearness of time and place which the Attic drama emphasized even in the case of a mythological subject.
257CHAPTER VIII
MUSIC AND PLASTIC
II
ACT AND PORTRAIT
259