THE INTELLECTUAL MILIEU.

13

to the order of time or according to the laws of artistic structure. Some authors stretch far out beyond their temporal limit toward the coming group; others lag behind, and by their style perpetuate the past. Another sort seem to stand alone, perplexing classification, refusing to take their place in any one of the groups which criticism studies to compose.

Lastly, like every other product of the modern world, there is nothing simple in the subject. Various forces combined to start the Drama in London. Various influences determined its development. For the English people it embodied a whole European phase of thought and feeling. It was for them the mirror of the sixteenth century, the compendium of all that the Renaissance had brought to light. It meant for England the recovery of Greek and Latin culture, the emancipation of the mind from medieval bondage, the emergence of the human spirit in its freedom. It meant newly discovered heavens, a larger earth, sail-swept oceans, awakened continents beyond Atlantic seas. It meant the pulse of now ascendant and puissant heart-blood through a people conscious of their unity and strength, the puberty and adolescence of a race which in its manhood was destined to give social freedom to the world. For England the Drama supplied a form commensurate with the great interests and mighty stirrings of that age. Into all these things it poured the spirit of that art which only was our own-the soul of poetry. Sculpture and painting we had none. Music lay yet

But

in the cradle, awaiting the touch of Italy upon her strings, the touch of Germany upon her keys. poetry, the metaphysic of all arts, was ours.

And

poetry, using the drama for a vehicle, conveyed to English minds what Italy, great mother of renascent Europe, had with all her arts, with all her industries. and sciences, made manifest. On man, as on the proper appanage of English thought, our poets, like a flight of eagles, swooped. Man was their quarry; and in the sphere of man's mixed nature there is nothing, save its baser parts, its carrion, unportrayed by them.

The

Reviewing this unique achievement of our literary genius, the critic is puzzled not only by its complexity, but also by its incompleteness as a work of art. Drama in England has no Attic purity of outline, no statuesque definition of form, no unimpeachable perfection of detail. The total effect of those accumulated plays might be compared to that of a painted window or a piece of tapestry, where the colour and assembled forms convey an ineffaceable impression, but which, when we examine the whole work more closely, seems to consist of hues laid side by side without a harmonising medium. The greatness of the material presented to our study lies less in the parts than in the mass, less in particular achievements than in the spirit which sustains and animates the whole. It is the volume and variety of this dramatic literature, poured forth with almost incoherent volubility by a crowd of poets, jostling together in the storm and stress of an instinctive impulse to express one cardinal conception of their art, each striving, after his own fashion, to grapple with a problem suggested by the temper of their race and age-it is the multitude of fellowworkers, and the bulk of work produced in concert, that impress the mind; the unity not of a simple and

IMPERFECTION OF ROMANTIC DRAMÀ.

15

coherent thing of beauty, but of an intricate and manymembered organism, striving after self-accomplishment, and reaching that accomplishment in Shakspere's art, which enthrals attention. Our dramatists produced very few plays which deserve the name of masterpiece. Yet, taken altogether, their works, although so different in quality and so uneven in execution, make up one vast and monumental edifice. The right point of view, therefore, for regarding them, is that from which in music we contemplate a symphony or chorus, or in painting judge the frescoed decoration of a hall, or in philosophy observe the genesis of an idea evolved by kindred and competing thinkers, or in architecture approach some huge cathedral of the Middle Ages.

Surveyed in its totality, the Elizabethan Drama is so complex in its animating motives, so imperfect in its details, that it may well seem to defy analysis. And yet it has the internal coherence of a real, a spiritual unity. It furnishes a rare specimen of literary evolution circumscribed within well-defined limits of time and place, confined to the conditions of a single nation at a certain moment of its growth. We are furthermore fortunate in possessing copious remains of its chief monuments illustrative of each successive stage. In spite of the Great Fire, in spite of Warburton's Cook, in spite of the indifference of two succeeding centuries, our stores of plays are abundant and amply representative. Through these we trace the seed sown in the Miracles and Interludes. We watch the root struck and the plant emerging in the fertile soil of the metropolis. We analyse the several elements which it rejected as unnecessary to its growth,

and those which it assimilated. We pluck the flower and fruitage of its prime. We follow it to its decay, fading, and finally cut off by frost. There is no similar instance of uninterrupted progress in the dramatic art. Through lack of documentary evidence, the origins of the Athenian Drama are obscure. From the dithyrambic and the Thespian age no remnants have survived. Our knowledge of the playwrights who competed with Sophocles is fragmentary and vague. The successors of Euripides owe their shadowy fame to a few dim notices, a poor collection of imperfect extracts.

VI.

It is not here the place to treat in detail of those intimate connections which may be traced between the many writers for our theatre. Suffice it to say that Shakspere forms a focus for all the rays of light which had emerged before his time, and that after him these rays were once more decomposed and scattered over a wide area. Thus at least we may regard the matter from our present point of survey. Yet during Shakspere's lifetime his predominance was by no means so obvious. To explain the defect of intelligence in Shakspere's contemporaries, to understand why they chose epithets like 'mellifluous,' 'sweet,' and 'gentle,' to describe the author of 'King Lear,' ' Othello,' and 'Troilus and Cressida ;' why they praised his 'right happy and copious industry' instead of dwelling on his interchange of tragic force and fanciful inventiveness; why the misconception of his now acknowledged place in literature extended even to Milton and to

SHAKSPERE AND THE MINOR PLAYWRIGHTS.

17

Dryden, will remain perhaps for ever impossible to every student of those times. But this intellectual obtuseness is itself instructive, when we regard Shakspere as the creature, not as the creator, of a widely diffused movement in the spirit of the nation, of which all his contemporaries were dimly conscious. They felt that behind him, as behind themselves, dwelt a motive force superior to all of them. Instead, then, of comparing him, as some have done, to the central orb of a solar system, from whom the planetary bodies take their light, it would be more correct to say that the fire of the age which burns in him so intensely, burned in them also, more dimly, but independently of him. He represents the English dramatic genius in its fullness. The subordinate playwrights bring into prominence minor qualities and special aspects of that genius. Men like Webster and Heywood, Jonson and Ford, Fletcher and Shirley, have an existence in literature outside Shakspere, and are only in an indirect sense satellites and vassals. Could Shakspere's works be obliterated from man's memory, they would still sustain the honours of the English stage with decent splendour. Still it is only when Shakspere shines among them, highest, purest, brightest of that brotherhood, that the real radiance. of his epoch is discernible-that the real value and meaning of their work become apparent.

The more we study Shakspere in relation to his predecessors, the more obliged are we to reverse Dryden's famous dictum that he found not, but created first the stage.' The fact is, that he found dramatic form already fixed. When he began to work

C