62
•language, exhibiting the several elements of dramatic composition, in its different parts represented through the mstniment-. ality of agents not by narration, and purifying the affections of human nature by the influence of pity and terror."
In the Sanskrit dramas there is a total absence of the dis-
- tinction between Tragedy and Comedy. They never offer a
• calamitous conclusion, which, as Johnson remarks, was enough to constitute a Tragedy; and although they excite all the
> emotions of the human breast, terror and pity included, they never effect this object by leaving a painful impression upon •the mind of the spectator. "They are mixed compositions, in -which joy and sorrow, happiness and misery, are woven in, a mingled web—tragi-comie representations, in which good and -evil, right and wrong, truth and falsehood, are allowed to blend in confusion during the first acts of the drama. But in the last act, harmony is always restored, order succeeds to disorder, tranquillity to agitation; and the mind of the spectator, no longer perplexed by the apparent ascendancy of evil, is soothed and purified and made to acquiesce in the moral lesson deducible tfrom the plot." The Hindus in fact have no tragedy, and tragic catastrophe is prohibited by a positive rule. The death of either the hero or the heroine is never to be announced, and deatl| must invariably be inflicted out of the view of the spectators* The excepted topics are, hostile defiance, solemn imprecations, ; exile, degradation, and natural calamity ; whilst those of a less .grave or comic character, are biting, scratcWng, kissing, • eating, sleeping, bath and the marriage ceremony.
The Dramatic Unities.
61 With regard to the unities we have that of action fully vrecoginsed and a simplicity of business is enjoined quite in the