his plays, he cannot leave it out, since it is an essential constituent element of any truthful portrayal of life. But he need not take thought about it. His work will have ethical validity in proportion as his own vision of life is truthful. While the dramatic author can never appear on the stage in his own person, and while he cannot speak for himself, commenting on his characters as the novelist may if he chooses, there is no literary form in which the author expresses himself more completely than he does in the drama. Shakspere does not intervene in the action, as Thackeray does, to hold confidential colloquy with us; and yet Shakspere's philosophy is quite as clear to us as Thackeray's. Molière the man, with his abhorrence of affectation, with his hatred of hypocrisy, with his gentle and alluring humanity, stands revealed in his plays, although we have not a single letter of his to take us into his confidence; and his correspondence, if we had it, would not substitute another portrait for that which rises before us after a study of his plays. As George Sand once wrote to Flaubert: "Real painting is full of the soul which impels the brush." And a truthful painter of human life cannot hope to hide his own soul, however adroitly he may think that he has concealed it.

Here is another reason for a sudden diminution of interest as we follow a play. The author may have begun veraciously enough, only to yield at last to the temptation of contaminating truth and of contorting it for the sake of quick effect. If we perceive this, we resent it; and the stronger our feeling the more certainly is our sympathetic attention diminished. We expected the bread of life; and we find ourselves put off with a

stone. It needs to be noted also that even veracity may momentarily disconcert us, if it pierces deeper than we relish. The author may have a wider knowledge and a deeper vision; and he may go searchingly below the surface, disclosing things ugly and abhorrent. This may shock us, but what shocks us is not necessarily immoral. Very often, indeed, it is profoundly moral, with the particular morality which we happen most to need. Morality is not in the choice of subject-matter, else would "Edipus" and "Othello," the "Scarlet Letter" and "Anna Karénina" be immoral. It is in treatment, in the stern firmness which braces the soul for combat with evil, or in the looseness of tone which tends to relax the fiber. It is not in the avoidance of dangerous topics that morality lies, but in the temper with which they are treated.

So it is that in a real work of art, there is no one obvious moral; there are as many separate morals as there are spectators of that work. Every man finds his own moral for himself, as he gages the total effect on himself, whether he is ethically strengthened or weakened by that work of art. Sarcey declared that, after seeing a certain play by the younger Dumas, — a piece which most English-speaking spectators would not be likely to find ethically stimulating, "it is difficult not to take home with you a wish to examine your conscience and a certain disquieting wonder as to the result; this is the sign by which we can know a truly moral work.”

CHAPTER XI

THE ELIZABETHAN DRAMATISTS

Forty poets, amongst them ten of superior rank, as well as one, the greatest of all artists who have represented the soul in words; many hundreds of pieces, and nearly fifty masterpieces; the drama extended over all the provinces of history, imagination, and fancy, expanded so as to embrace comedy, tragedy, pastoral and fanciful literature, to represent all degrees of human condition, and all the caprices of human invention, to express all the perceptible details of actual truth, and all the philosophic grandeur of general reflection; the stage disencumbered of all precept and freed from all imitation, given up and appropriated in the minutest particulars to the reigning taste and public intelligence: all this was a vast and manifold work, capable by its flexibility, its greatness, and its form, of receiving and preserving the exact imprint of the age and of the nation. — H. TAINE, History of English Literature.

I

THERE have been four or five periods in history when the drama has risen to a supreme height. The first of these was in Greece when Eschylus, Sophocles and Euripides, Aristophanes and Menander, followed one another in swift succession. The second and the third were almost simultaneous in England and in Spain, when Marlowe, Shakspere, and Ben Jonson led the way in the one language, while Lope de Vega and Calderon revealed the lyrical richness of the other. The fourth was in France, when Molière followed Corneille and preceded Racine. And we may perhaps add a fifth period, in France again, in the middle of the nineteenth century, when Victor Hugo and the elder Dumas were followed by Augier and the younger Dumas.

Each of these epochs of superb playmaking has its own characteristics; and each of them will amply reward lifelong study. Yet for us who have English as our mother-tongue, there is no doubt which is the most interesting of the five. It is that splendid expression of the poetic power of our race, which took place in the spacious days of Elizabeth, and which died down in the leaner years of James. In any study of the drama among us, the plays of Shakspere and of his gifted contemporaries must always be the center of our in

terest.

There is no denying that the dominant characteristic of the English-speaking race is energy, and that this energy never expressed itself in literature more completely than it did in the later years of Elizabeth's reign. There was then the most abundant revelation of the power and passion of this sturdy people, the most magnificent luxuriance of its essential imagination, and a sudden outflowering of the vigor of a hardy and prolific stock. And above all the turmoil of those glorious days, there towered aloft the genius of Shakspere. Small wonder is it that many lovers of literature have been blinded by the effulgence of all this genius, and have closed their eyes to all except its glory, unable to perceive anything but absolute perfection. So long have we made a habit of using a megaphone to proclaim its manifest and manifold beauties, that a microphone would suffice for our infrequent and unwilling admissions that all was not equally faultless in this splendid era. Some of us still recall the shock of surprise with which we first happened upon a passage in one of Matthew Arnold's essays, seeming to suggest that there might be weak places in Shakspere's works, and that

even his genius did not always maintain him at the topmost pinnacle of transcendent achievement.

But to adopt an attitude of insistent admiration is to renounce the privilege and the duty of criticism, as Gautier did when he declared that, if ever he found a single line of Hugo's to fall short in any way, he would not confess it to himself alone, in a cellar, on a dark night. We deny ourselves the pleasure of knowing wherein the Elizabethan poets are truly mighty, if we give them all credit for all possible excellence, or if we carelessly fail to see clearly that even the mightiest of them does not always sustain himself at his highest level. The work of the great Elizabethans is what it is; and for that we love it. But also it is not what it is not; and we ought to be honest enough not to claim for it the qualities which it lacks, and which it could not have because they are inconsistent with those it actually has. Largeness of vision it has, and depth of insight, and the gift of life itself, and many another manifestation of the energy of the race. These possessions are beyond question; and yet, because it possesses these qualities, because it has sweep, and penetration, youthful daring, and robust vitality, it is often violent, often trivial, often grotesque. Reckless and illrestrained, it is likely to be wanting in taste and lacking in logic. Energy it has above all things else, and a compelling imaginative fire; but balance and proportion it rarely reveals. Infrequently do we find symmetry and harmony, qualities somewhat incompatible with the wastefulness of effort always characteristic of this masterful people.

More than any other group of the Elizabethans, have the dramatists suffered from this practice of indiscrim