But above all Mnemosyne, and her daughter Polyhymnia, must be propitiated by an art that would remember all things, Like Calchas in Homer, the pantomime must know all ‘that is, that was, that shall be’; nothing must escape his ever ready memory. Faithfully to represent his subject, adequately to express his own conceptions, to make plain all that might be obscure;—these are the first essentials for the pantomime, to whom no higher compliment could be paid than Thucydides’s tribute to Pericles, who, he says, ‘could not only conceive a wise policy, but render it intelligible to his hearers’; the intelligibility, in the present case, depending on clearness of gesticulation.
For his materials, he must draw continually, as I have said, upon his unfailing memory of ancient story; and memory must be backed by taste and judgement. He must know the history of the world, from the time when it first emerged from Chaos down to the days of Egyptian Cleopatra. These limitations we will concede to the pantomime’s wide field of knowledge; but within them he must be familiar with every detail:—the mutilation of Uranus, the origin of Aphrodite, the battle of Titans, the birth of Zeus, Rhea’s deception, her substitution of a stone for her child, the binding of Cronus, the partition of the world between the three brothers.
