A Critical Study of the Chorus in the Plays of Robert Garnier

Conventions in Art are born rather than made: like most conventions the Greek Chorus is a beautiful accident, and like most accidents, it is not perfect. Superbly as its great dramatists adapt and modify this relic of primitive religion to serve their art, just as Greek sculptors adapt their groups with an added beauty to the arbitrary triangle of the temple-pediment, there are times when we feel the Chorus an encumbrance and wish it away. On the other hand, the dramatists early realized how many important uses this standing stage-army could be made to serve. It can expound the past, comment on the present, forebode the future. It provides the past with a mouthpiece and the spectator with a counterpart of himself. It forms a living foreground of common humanity above which the heroes tower: a living background of pure poetry which turns lamentation into music and horror into peace. It provides both a wall, as Schiller held, severing drama like a magic circle from the real world, and a bridge between the heroic figures of legend and the average humanity of the audience.