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Complete Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Complete Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge Author:Samuel Taylor Coleridge Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: comedy, contrasting with, ami opposing it. Tragedy, indeed, carried the thoughts into the mytholog'c world, in order to raise the emotions, the fears, and the ho... more »pes, which convince the inmost heart that their final cause is not to be discovered in the limits of rncrc mortal life, and force us into a presentiment, however dim, of a state in which those struggles of inward free will with outward necessity, which form the true subject of the tragedian, shall be reconciled and solved ;—the entertainment or new comedy, on the oilier hand, remained within the circle of experience. Instead of the tragic destiny, it introduced the power of clianco ; even in the few fragments of Mcnandcr and 1'hilcmoii now remaining to us, wo find many exclamations and rc/lcctiotm concerning chanco and fortune, ns in the Iragic poets concerning destiny. In tragedy, the moral law, either as obeyed or violated, above all consequences—its own maintenance or violation constituting the most important of all consequences—forms the ground ; the new comedy, and our modern comedy in general (Shakspcaro cxeepted as belitre), lies in prudence or imprudence, enlightened or misled self-love. The whole moral nyslern of the entertainment exactly like that of fable, consists in rules of prudence, with an exquisite conciseness, and at the same lime an exhaustive fulness of sense. An old critic said that tragedy was the flight or elevation of life, comedy (that of Mcnandcr) its arrangement or ordonnance. (5) Add to these fe.iturcs a portrait-like truth of character,—not so far indeed as that a bona fide individual should be described or imagined, but yet so that the features which ¡rive interest and permanence to the class should be individualized. The old tragedy moved in an ideal world,—the old comedy in a fantastic wo...« less