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sion, took its origin in religious mysteries and rites of Dionysus; assumed shape at the hands of Thespis and Susarion, Phrynichus and Cratinus; received accomplished form in the master-works of Eschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, and Aristophanes; broke up into the tragedy of Agathon, Chæremon, Moschion, the middle Comedy of Plato and Antiphanes, the new Comedy of Menander and Philemon. In dealing with the later stages of the Attic Drama, it is, however, more proper to speak of divergences from the primitive stock than of absolute decadence. While we have good reason to believe that Tragedy declined after the age of Agathon, owing to the same cause which led to its decline in England-inability to alter or to vary an established type; the Comedy of Menander indicated no such exhaustion of the soil, no diminution of creative vigour. It was a new form, corresponding to altered conditions of Greek life; and in this respect it might be compared to our own Comedy of the Restoration.

To multiply instances would be superfluous. Yet I am loth to omit the illustration of this law of artistic development, which is furnished by Italian painting. Emerging from Byzantine or Romanesque tradition, painting traverses the stage of Giotto and the Giottesque schools; produces almost simultaneously in several provinces of Italy the intermediate art of Ghirlandajo and Bellini, of Mantegna and Signorelli, of Lippi and Perugino; concentrates its force in Raphael, Da Vinci, Michelangelo, Correggio, Titian; then, as though its inner source of life had been exhausted, breaks off into extravagance, debility, and facile formalism in the works of Giulio Romano, Perino

LAW OF ARTISTIC EVOLUTION.

9

del Vaga, Giorgio Vasari, Pietro da Cortona, the younger Caliari and Robusti, and countless hosts of academical revivalists and imitators. The slovenly and empty performance of those epigoni to the true heroes of Italian painting, in which, however, the tradition of a mighty style yet lingers, may not inaptly be paralleled by the loose and hasty plays of men like Davenant and Crowne, by their dislocated plots and conventional characters, by their blurred and sketchy treatment of old motives, and by the break-down of dramatic blank verse into a chaos of rhythmic incoherences.

Reverting once more to Gothic architecture, we notice precisely the same enervation and extravagance, the same facility of execution combined with the same formalism and fatuity, the same straining after novelty through an exhausted method, effects of over-ripeness and irresistible decay, in the flamboyance of French window-traceries, the sprawling casements and splayed ogees of expiring Perpendicular in England.

IV.

The critic, whether he be dealing with the English or the Attic Drama, with Gothic Architecture or Italian Painting, has to aim at seizing the essential nature of the product laid before him, at fixing on the culminating point in the development he traces, observing the gradual approaches toward maturity, and explaining the inevitable decadence by causes sought for in the matter of his theme. With this in view, the analogy between history and biography, between national genius in one

of its decisive epochs and individual genius in one of the world's heroes, is not to be contemned, provided we apply it with the freedom of a metaphor. There is nothing good, beautiful, or strong upon our planet, no religion and no empire, no phase of polity or form of art, however the idea of it may survive inviolable in the memory of ages, however its essential truth and spirit may abide beyond the reach of change and time, but in its actual historic manifestation is subject, like a human being, to birth, development, decay, and dissolution.

All the flowers of the spring

Meet to perfume our burying:

These have but their growing prime ;
And man does flourish but his time:
Survey our progress from our birth ;
We are set, we grow, we turn to earth.

Such reflections seem trite enough. But they have a point which either the carelessness of the observer or the pride of man is apt to overlook. Why, it is often asked, should such a process of the arts as that displayed in Italy not have continued through further phases and a richer growth? Why should a State like Venice have decayed? Why should Ford and Massinger have only led to Davenant and Crowne? The answer is that each particular polity, each specific form of art, has, like a plant or like a man, its destined evolution from a germ, its given stock of energy, its limited supply of vital force. To unfold and to exhibit its potential faculties, is all that each can do. Granted favouring circumstances and no thwarting influence, it will pass through the phases of adolescence, maturity, and old age. But it cannot alter its type. It has no power at a certain

THE PROBLEM FOR CRITICISM.

II

moment of its growth to turn aside and make itself a different thing. It cannot prolong existence on an altered track, or attain to perpetuity by successive metamorphoses.

Criticism seeks the individuality imprisoned in the germ, exhibited in the growth, exhausted in the season of decline. Critical biography sets itself to find the man himself, what made him operative, what hampered him in action, what, after all the injuries of chance and age, survives of him imperishable in the world of thoughts and things. Critical history seeks the potency of an epoch, of a nation, of an empire, of a faith; discriminates adventitious circumstance; allows for retardation, accident, and partial failure; discerns efficient factors; concentrates attention on specific qualities; traces the germ, the growth, the efflorescence, and the dwindling of a complex organism through the lives which worked instinctively in sympathy for its effectuation.

What differentiates biography and history in the sphere of criticism is, that the former deals with individuality manifested in a person, the latter with individuality, no less complete although more complicated, in a series and a company of persons. The former aims at demonstrating the unity of one man's work, subject to influences which make or mar it; the latter exhibits the unity of a work composed of the works of many men, subject to influences wider and more intricate which make or mar it. In the one case, criticism has to answer how the man did what he lived to do; in the other, how those many men contributed to what remains for survey as the single product of their several co-operative lives.

Applying these considerations to the subject of our study, it is not difficult to see that in Shakspere we have the culmination of dramatic art in England. To explain how Shakspere became possible, to show how he articulated what the nation struggled to express, to demonstrate how he necessitated a decline, is the critic's task. The individuality of the Elizabethan Drama is personified in Shakspere; and such a study as I have undertaken is a contribution toward his better understanding, and through that to a perception of the age and race which he expounded to the world.

V.

The succession in time of the stages I have tried to indicate must not be insisted on too harshly. These stages are observable at a distance better than on close inspection. The works by which we mark them, overlap and interpenetrate. Phenomena present themselves, defying the strictest systematic treatment, and seeming to contradict well-grounded generalisations. We are dealing with an organism compact of many organisms; and just as in the intellectual development of a person it often happens that thoughts of middle life precede maturity, while youthful fancies blossom on the verge of age, so here we find a poet of the prime surviving in the decadence, and verses written in the morning of the art anticipating its late afternoon. The rapidity with which the changes in our drama were accomplished introduces some confusion. We are sometimes at a loss whether to maintain the chronological or the ideal sequence, whether to treat our subject according

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