or variety of illusion, soon grew accustomed to require entertainment from the mere sensuous externals of the dramatic art,—gorgeous dresses, pantomime, and even rope-dancing. The actors with difficulty made head against this barbarous tendency. Fortunately the strength of the poetic tradition, their own talents, and the influence of the more refined part of the audience, so effectively aided their efforts that the old poetic plays kept possession of the stage through the eighteenth century. Surviving pictures of the great actors, performing romantic historical parts in their wigs and modern costume, allow us to perceive that imagination among the spectators of the period must still have been powerful enough to overcome the mere objections of prosaic sense. And the fine appreciation of the points of good acting, exhibited in such a poem as Churchill's Rosciad, further shows that the performer of ideal parts might still look for intelligent judges among the audience. Take, for example, the following estimate of Quin, as the representative of the old declamatory style, then iust giving place to the "natural" school headed by Garrick : Quin from afar, lured by the scent of fame, A stage Leviathan, put in his claim, Pupil of Betterton and Booth. Alone, Sullen he walked, and deemed the chair his own. His words were sterling weight, nervous and strong, Happy in art, he chiefly had pretence His eyes, in gloomy sockets taught to roll, With just desert his reputation grows : In Brute he shone unequalled: all agree In fancied scenes, as in life's real plan, But of course the judgment of the audience in general was based on a much wider principle. Pope lets us see what this was :— Booth enters. Hark the universal peal! "But has he spoken?" Not a syllable. What shook the stage and made the people stare ? As the public taste was in the days of Cibber, Addison, and Pope, so it continued. One by one the old poetical plays disappeared from the English stage: an atmosphere of prose closed round the theatre, and the actors naturally gave all their attention to developing the capacities of their art under the new conditions. The rhythmical declamation of verse on the stage is now practically a lost accomplishment. From time to time. the plays of Shakespeare are reproduced, but—judging from the amount of attention given to particular points in the exhibition--not for the sake of their poetry. What attracts the audience in them is the element of picturesque illusion, for which-in common with every Christmas pantomime-almost all of them afford opportunities. Old-world towns, shipwrecks, delightful gardens, moonlight effects, and medieval costumes, transport the spectator for a moment out of the work-a-day world: 1 The Rosciad. the poet and the actor modestly retire into the background, and the scene-painter enjoys an almost undivided triumph over the modern imagination. But though in the eighteenth century the form of the poetic drama vanished, its life was not lost, but only changed. In the ceaseless movement of national imagination, the dramatic form had gradually evolved itself out of the ancient roman, or fabliau; and now, in its course of circular migration, the spirit of the drama reappeared in the body of the modern Novel. It is a curious and significant fact that almost the last of the old-fashioned dramatists of England should have been the first, and in many respects the greatest, of her novelists. Fielding began his career by writing (in 1730) for the stage his mock-heroic Tom Thumb, a play in which, following the steps of Gay in his What d'ye Call It ? he sought to amuse his audience by parodying the tragic style of well-known dramas: his Pasquin (1736), a dramatic satire on the various corruptions of the age, is said to have contributed in no small measure to the passing of the Licensing Act of 1737. Driven from the theatre, the Genius of English invention transferred the love of adventurous action, the powerful delineation of character, the faithful portraiture of manners-qualities acquired by the discipline of a hundred and fifty years on the freest stage in Europeinto the pages of Tom Jones and Joseph Andrews. CHAPTER XIV A SURVEY OF ENGLISH POETRY IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY A NOTABLE passage in M. Taine's History of English Literature runs as follows: When we embrace at a glance the vast literary region which in England extends from the Restoration of the Stuarts to the French Revolution, we perceive that all its products, independently of their English character, bear the classic imprint, and that this imprint, peculiar to that region, is not met with either in the period which precedes or in that which follows. * * * There is no class of literature in which the phenomenon is more manifest than in poetry, and there is no moment at which it appears more clearly than in the reign of Queen Anne. The poets in that age succeed in attaining the art of which they previously only had glimpses. For sixty years they have been approaching it: now they grasp it, handle it, use, and exaggerate it. Their style is at once finished and artificial. Open the first comer, Parnell or Philips, Addison or Prior, Gay or Tickell, and you find in each a certain turn of wit, of versification, of language. Pass to the second, the same turn reappears; it may almost be said that one has copied the other. Skim the poems of a third : there is the same diction, the same apostrophes, the same manner of placing the epithet, and rounding the period. Dip into the works of the whole troop: with some small individual differences they seem all of them cast in the same mould; one is more of an epicurean, another more of a moralist, a third more of a wit; but everywhere you feel the reign of noble language, oratorical pomp, classic correctness; the substantive is attended by its groom-in-waiting, the adjective; the symmetrical architecture is balanced by antithesis; the verb, as in Lucan and Statius, displays itself flanked by a noun garnished with its epithet; the verse may be said to have been turned out of a machine, so uniform is its structure; we forget what it means to say; we are tempted to count its syllables on our fingers; we know beforehand with what poetic ornaments it will be decorated. It has a theatrical dress, oppositions, allusions, mythologic elegances, reminiscences of Greek or Latin. It has a scholastic solidity, sententious maxims, philosophic platitudes, moral developments, oratorical exactness. You might fancy yourself to be before a natural family of plants; though they differ in size, colour, accidental appearances, and names, yet at bottom there is no variation in the type; the stamens are equal in number, inserted in the same way, about similar pistils, and above leaves arranged on the same plan; whoever knows one knows all the others; there is a common organism and structure which carries with it the character of all the tribe. If you run over the family you will find there, without doubt, some striking plant which shows the type in its fullest development, while in the neighbourhood, in various degrees, the same type goes on altering and degenerating, till it ends by losing itself in the surrounding families. In the same way, here, we see the classical style finding its centre in the neighbourhood of Pope, and particularly in Pope himself, then half effacing itself, mixing itself with foreign elements, and finally disappearing in the poetry which succeeded it.1 I have translated the above passage in full because it obviously runs counter to the view of English Poetry in the eighteenth century which has been presented in this volume. It deserves also to be put side by side with the passage I have previously cited from M. Taine,2 as an illustration of the virtues and defects of the bird's-eyeview method of writing literary history. M. Taine deals in the same summary fashion with the "classical" period. of English Literature as, in the other case, he dealt with the literature of the Middle Ages. Applying his critical principles to his own History, it may be said that by "embracing at a glance," "skimming" and "dipping into" a number of works in a given literary period, an intelligent critic may readily form a rough generalisation of its characteristics, which shall be brilliant, suggestive, and in many respects true. But unless he is also prepared, 1 Translated from Taine's Histoire de la Littérature Anglaise, iv. 175-178. 2 Preface to vol. i. pp. xv-xviii. |