The True Proportions of Gay's Acis and Galatea

The Masque, or serenata, or pastoral opera, Acis and Galatea—in eighteenth-century printings it was indifferently categorized—has been not so much neglected as quite ignored by the biographers and critics of John Gay. In its entirety, words and music, it is a masterpiece, and the reasons for its lying unregarded, except by historians of music, deserve to be scrutinized because they signalize a recurrent failing on the part of those who write on the arts, when a work exists simultaneously in more than one medium. Only lately, in truth, has criticism begun to cope with Shakespeare himself as drama existent in and for living embodiment on a physical stage and nowhere else, not even in the mind of Coleridge. (Theatrical criticism is by habit only piecemeal commentary on separate productions.) Similarly, to set small matters beside great ones, only of late has the ballad of tradition begun to be considered as song and not as a literary or pseudo-literary genre, sufficient and self-sustaining in its text alone. And the bardic tradition of the Ugo-Slavs is teaching us much about the Homeric epics of which former generations were unaware. Signs, in fact, are here and there beginning to appear of an unwillingness to rest content with the one-dimensional conception of arts which are only half-fulfilled until they are realized in two dimensions or more. A drawing of a sculpture is not enough; a sculpture of an action is not enough; pantomime does not suffice the spoken scene; the verbal text of a musical scena will not satisfy. Nor can any of these be adequately criticized on a basis of missing dimensions.