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ABSENCE OF STUDIED ART.

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VIII.

In the Romantic Drama, men of the present age are struck by want of artistic modulation and gradation, strangely combined with vigorous conception and masterly reading of the inmost depths of nature. The design of a tragedy is often almost puerile in its simplicity. Even Othello falls into Iago's trap so stupidly as to refrigerate our feeling. The transitions from good to bad, from vice to virtue, from hate to love, in the same characters are palpably abrupt, almost to our sense impossible. What Goethe calls the Motiviren of a situation was neglected; but the situation itself was powerfully presented. Bellafront, in Dekker's most celebrated comedy, begins as a bold and beautiful bad woman. Love at first sight alters her whole temper, and she becomes a modest lady. Hipolyto, the man who wrought this change in her, reflecting on her loveliness, turns round, and tempts the very woman whom his earlier persuasions had saved from evil. Under both aspects, each of these characters is drawn with admirable force. They maintain their individuality, although the motives of these complex moral revolutions receive no sufficient development at the artist's hands. Probably Dekker relied upon the sympathies of an audience, themselves capable of passionate conversion; probably, he felt in his own heart divisions leading to like violent issues. He did not then appeal to such as read his drama at the present day, to scrutinising scholars and critical historians, but to men and women, still more fitted for sudden spiritual trans

formation, still more trembling on the border-line of good and evil, than are the folk for whom Revival Meetings and Salvation Armies shout their choruses and beat their drums in England now. The psychological excitements of to-day are but a feeble reflex from the stirrings of that epoch. We have to measure the operation of that drama, not by our blunted sensibilities, but by a far more sensitive, if grosser, instrument of taste. The final significance of the whole problem of Elizabethan literature lies in one point; the people, at that fortunate epoch, vibrated to Shakspere's delicacy, no less than to the rougher touch of men who had in them the crudest substance of Shaksperian art. Instead of making the allowances of our 'world-wearied flesh' and thought-tormented minds for them, we must confess that they threw open souls more fresh to simpler influences.

Nothing is more common in the plays of Massinger and Fletcher than for tyrants to be softened by the beauty of intended victims, for the tenderest strains of chivalrous affection to flow from lips which utter curses and revilings, for passionate love to take the place of implacable vengeance or brutal cruelty. Are we to say that these reversions from one temper to its opposite are unnatural? They are unnatural now. Were they unnatural then? Probably not. The critic therefore must defer to nature as it then existed, nor let his sense of truth be governed by the evidence of nature as it now is moulded, for a moment haply, into forms more firmly set.

The dramatists were well acquainted with fixed. types of character, and used these with a crudity which

CONCEPTION OF CHARACTER.

45

seems no less to shock our apprehension of reality. No sooner have we excused them for sudden and unexplained conversions, than we find ourselves compelled to meet the contrary charge, and defend them from the crime of well-nigh diabolical consistency. They show us bad men stubborn in perversity, whom innocence and beauty and eloquence have no power to charm. Such are Heywood's Tarquin, Fletcher's Rollo. The Flamineo and Bosola of Webster are villains of yet darker dye, ruffians whom only Italy could breed, courtiers refined in arts of wickedness, scholars perverted by their studies to defiant atheism, high-livers tainted with the basest vices, who, broken in repute, deprived of occupation, sell themselves to great men to subserve their pleasures and accomplish their revenge. In such men, the very refuse of humanity, there is no faith, no hope, no charity. Some fiend seems to have sat for their portraits. They are helpless in the chains of crime; their ill-deeds binding them to the bad masters whom they serve, and their seared consciences allowing them to execute with coldness devilish designs.

In order to explain such personages and to realise their action, it was necessary to exhibit horrors incredibly fantastic. Beaumont and Fletcher twice brought the agonies of death by poison on the stage. Webster paints a prince murdered by means of an envenomed helmet, a duchess strangled in her chamber, a sovereign lady poisoned by the kisses given to her husband's portrait. Ford adds the terror of incestuous passion to the death-scene of a sister murdered by a brother's hand. In Massinger's Virgin Martyr' a maiden is

insulted in her honour and driven to the stake. Marston's Antonio stabs an innocent boy who trusts and loves him. Hoffmann places on his victim's head a crown of red-hot iron. A human sacrifice, a father who kills his son and mutilates himself, a girl whose hands and tongue have been cut off, together with a score or so of murders, are exhibited upon the theatre in 'Titus Andronicus.' It is needless to multiply such details. The grossness of passion in that age, whether displayed in brutal and unbridled lust, or in hate, cruelty, and torture, was more than we can understand. The savagery of human nature moved by spasms; its settled barbarisms, no less than its revulsions and revolts, are now almost unintelligible. To harmonise and interpret such humanity in a work of sublime art, taxed all the powers of even Shakspere. He did this once with supreme tragic beauty in 'King Lear.' But if the world should rise against 'King Lear,' and cry, 'It is too terrible!'-would not the world be justified?

IX.

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Insanity was a tragic motive, used frequently by the romantic playwrights as an instrument for stirring pity and inspiring dread. To understand it, and to employ it successfully, was, however, given to few. The mad humours depicted in Fletcher's Pilgrim' and in Webster's Masque of Lunatics are fantastic appeals to the vulgar apprehension, rather than scientific studies. But the interspaces between sanity and frenzy, the vacillations of the mind upon a brink of horror, the yieldings of the reason to the fret of passions, have

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been seized with masterly correctness-by Massinger in Sir Giles Overreach, by Fletcher in the love-lunes of 'The Noble Gentleman,' by Ford in Palador's dejection, by Kyd or his coadjutor in crazy Hieronymo, by Marston in Andrugio and the disguised Antonio, and lastly, most effectively, by Webster in his picture of the Duchess. There is nothing more impressive than the consciousness of tottering reason in this lady, outraged by the company of maniacs and cut-throats. She argues with herself whether she be really mad or

not:

O that it were possible

To hold some two days' conference with the dead!
From them I should learn somewhat I am sure

I never shall know here. I'll tell you a miracle :

I am not mad yet to my cause of sorrow;

The heavens o'er my head seem made of molten brass,
The earth of flaming sulphur ; yet I am not mad.

I am acquainted with sad misery,

As the tanned galley-slave is with his oar:
Necessity makes me suffer constantly,
And custom makes it easy.

Extravagant passions, the love of love, the hate of hate, the spasms of indulged revenge, drive men to the verge of delirium. This state of exaltation, when the whole nature quivers beneath the weight of overpowering repulsion or desire, was admirably rendered even by men who could not seize the accent of pronounced insanity. Ferdinand, in the same tragedy by Webster, kills his sister from excess of jealousy and avarice. When he sees her corpse, his fancy, set on flame already by the fury of his hate, becomes a hell, which burns the image of her calm pale forehead, fixed eyes, and womanhood undone in years of beauty, on his reeling

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