Whose high upreared and abutting fronts Piece out our imperfections with your thoughts, And make imaginary puissance;" &c. It is very possible that the delicate taste of the Greeks, alive to this difficulty, chose rather to evade than encounter it, by that rule which confined the number of interlocutors, at one time on the stage, to three persons. But then mark the consequence: half the events of the drama must be told to the audience; and in lieu of the stirring and active scenes which keep attention alive, and prevent the performance from flagging, we have those interminably long stories which may be beautiful taken by themselves, and constitute a fine dramatic poem for the closet, but are quite unsuited to the stage. In one of the plays of Eschylus, the Seven before Thebes,' there is a spy, or messenger, who comes in and describes in a speech of many pages the details of the whole siege, with the arms and accoutrements of the besiegers! The costume, at least, of the Chinese stage is sufficiently appropriate to the characters represented, and on most occasions extremely splendid. Their gay silks and embroidery are lavished on the dresses of the actors; and as most of the serious plays are historical, and for obvious reasons do not touch on events that have occurred since the Tartar conquest, the costumes represent the ancient dress of China, which in the case of females is nearly the same now as ever, but, as regards men, very different.* The splendour of their theatrical wardrobe was remarked by Ysbrandt Ides, the Russian ambassador, as long ago as 1692: "First entered a very beautiful lady, magnificently dressed in cloth of gold, adorned with jewels, and *The Insurgents of 1850 re-assumed the old Chinese dress. a crown on her head, singing her speech with a charming voice and agreeable motion of the body, playing with her hands, in one of which she held her fan. The prologue thus performed, the play followed, the story of which turned upon a Chinese emperor, long since dead, who had behaved himself well towards his country, and in honour of whose memory the play was written. Sometimes he appeared in royal robes, with a flat ivory sceptre in his hand, and sometimes his officers showed themselves with ensigns, arms, and drums," &c. As the Chinese make no regular distinction between tragedy and comedy in their stage pieces, the claims of these to either title must be determined by the subject and the dialogue. The line is in general pretty strongly marked in the former, by the historical or mythological character of the personages, the grandeur and gravity of the subject, the tragical drift of the play, and the strict award of what is called poetical justice; in the latter by the more ordinary or domestic grade of the dramatis persona, the display of ludicrous characters and incidents, and the interweaving of jests into the dialogue. Some of their stage pieces are no doubt of a vulgar and indecent description; but these in general constitute the amusement of a particular class of society, and are generally adapted to the taste of those who call for them at private entertainments as already noticed. A list of the plays which the company of actors is prepared to represent is handed to the principal guest, who makes his selection in the way most likely to be agreeable to the audience. * The early travellers, as Bell and others, who have given an account of the impressions which they received from the Chinese theatrical performances, were able to judge of little more than the mere spectacle before them, *Not much worse than those of Wycherley, &c. and, being ignorant of the language, could give no account of the merits of the dramatic dialogue. The first specimen of a play was translated into French by the Jesuit Prémnare, who, although actually resident at Peking, and a most accomplished Chinese scholar (as appears from his Notitia Lingua Sinica), did not give more than the prose parts, leaving out the lyrical portions, or those which are sung to music, because, as he observes, "they are full of allusions to things unfamiliar to us, and figures of speech very difficult for us to observe." Voltaire made Prémare's translation of the Orphan of Chaou the groundwork of one of his best tragedies, 'L'Orphelin de la Chine : ' it is founded on an event which occurred about a hundred years before the birth of Confucius. A military leader, having usurped the lands of the house of Chaou, is determined on exterminating the whole race. A faithful dependant of the family saves the life of the orphan, and male heir, by concealing him and passing off his own child in his stead. The orphan is brought up in ignorance of his real condition until he reaches man's estate, when, the whole subject being revealed to him by his tutor and guardian, he revenges the fate of his family on the usurper, and recovers his rights. In this plot Dr. Hurd remarked a near resemblance in many points to that of the 'Electra' of Sophocles, where the young Orestes is reared by his pædagogus, or tutor, until he is old enough to enact summary justice on the murderers of his father Agamemnon. It would be easy to point out a number of instances in which the management of the Chinese plays assimilates them very remarkably to that of the Greek drama; and they may both be considered as originals, while the theatres of most other nations are copies. The first person who enters generally introduces himself to the audience. VOL. II. H exactly in the same way, and states briefly the opening circumstances of the action. "These prologues (observes Schlegel) make the beginnings of Euripides' plays very monotonous. It has a very awkward look for a person to come forward and say, I am so and so, this and that have been done, and what comes next is thus and thus.' He compares it to the labels proceeding from the mouths of the figures in old paintings; and there certainly appears the less need for so inartificial a proceeding on the Greek stage, inasmuch as the business of the prologue, or introduction, might have been transferred to the chorus. The occasional, though not very frequent or outrageous violation of the unities in the Chinese drama may easily be matched in most other languages, and examples of the same occur even in some of the thirty-three Greek tragedies that remain to us; for the unity of action is not observed in the 'Hercules Furens' of Euripides; nor that of time in the ' Agamemnon' of Æschylus, the 'Trachynians' of Sophocles, and the 'Suppliants' of Euripides; nor that of place in the Eumenides' of Eschylus. The unimportance, however, of a rigid attention to these famous unities has long since been determined, and it is admitted that even Aristotle, to whom they have all been attributed, mentions only that of action at any length, merely hints at that of time, and of place says nothing whatever. Prémare's specimen of the Chinese stage was followed, at the distance of about a century, by the author's translation of the Heir in Old Age,' which is in fact a comedy from the same collection (the hundred plays of Yuen) that had afforded the former sample. In this the translator supplied, for the first time, the lyrical or operatic portions which are sung to music, as well as the prose dialogue, having endeavoured, as he observes in the introduction, "to render both into English in such a manner as would best convey the spirit of the original, without departing far from its literal meaning." This was the more likely to be efficiently performed, as he was then resident in the country, and could avail himself of native references. The Heir in Old Age' serves to illustrate some very important points connected with Chinese character and customs. It shows the consequence which they attach to the due performance of the oblations at the tombs of departed ancestors, as well as to the leaving male representatives who may continue them; and at the same time describes the ceremonies at the tombs very exactly in detail. The play serves, moreover, to display the true relation of the handmaid to the legitimate wife, and proves a point on which we have before had occasion to insist, that the former is merely a domestic slave, and that both herself and offspring belong to the wife, properly so called, of which a man can legally have only one. * To give a brief abstract of this play from the introductory memoir-the dramatis persona are made up entirely of the members of a family in the middle class of life, consisting of a rich old man, his wife, a handmaid, his nephew, his son-in-law, and his daughter. The old man, having no son to console him in his age, and to perform the obsequies at his tomb, had, like the Jewish patriarch, taken a handmaid, whose pregnancy is announced at the * In the Penal Code there are some express safeguards for the rights of a wife, and it is provided that any man degrading his legal wife to the situation of a handmaid shall be punished with one hundred blows; and that he who during the life of his legitimate spouse treats any handmaid on an equality with her shall receive ninety blows, and both parties be restored to their proper stations. It is added, "He who, having a wife, marries another wife, shall be punished with ninety blows, and the second marriage shall be void." The notes on this law observe that "a wife is one whose person is equal in rank to that of her husband; a handmaid, one who is merely admitted to his presence." |