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drama was the natural outgrowth of a passionate and adven

turous era.

If we seek the causes for this decline, we shall find a main one, it is believed, in the practical, positive temper of the age. Intellect has been diverted to other and utilitarian objects,— invention, discovery, journalism. Writers and readers are occupied with new ideas, new themes, new forms. The early stage, moreover, was an important means of instruction, and a primary means of entertainment. But facilities for amusing and instructing the people greatly multiplied. That office is now assumed very largely by the novel and the press. The times are no less stirring, but surplus desire has at present a thousand outlets where it then had one. The diffusion of literature brings intellectual diversion to every fireside at a cheaper rate than dramatic performances. Again, this degeneracy has been confirmed by theatrical management. Formerly, while dramatists were often actors, managers were one or both; to-day, the latter are merely a trading, monetary class. The introduction of movable scenery has begotten and fostered the love of scenic effects. The theatre, as a commercial institution, strives to draw 'the crowd' by ephemeral and dazzling display. The stress is transferred from the mental to the physical. Sensuous appeals take the place of ideas and sentiments. Pomp and noise supply the need of vivid language and vigorous thought. Here, as described by a newspaper critic, is the pageant of a modern play:

It includes a burning house, a modern bar-room, real gin cock-tails, a river-side pier, a steamboat in motion, the grand saloon or state-cabin of the steamboat, the deck of the same, the wheel-house, the funnels, and the steamboat in flames; and all these objects are presented with singular fidelity to their originals.'

How wide the contrast between this show and the meagre equipment on which the grand old Elizabethans could rely! Of a similar play a like critic observes:

It is not a work of literature, but a work of business. The piece is a rough conglomeration of the nothings of the passing hour-objects and incidents drawn, but not always drawn with accuracy, from the streets, the public conveyances, the haunts of profligacy. These nothings are offered for their own sake, and not made tributary to any intellectual purpose whatever.'

Finally, with the spread of the religious movement at the close of the last century, a reaction set in against the theatre, and had the natural effect of lowering its tone and manners, as well as its

In these days of iconoclasm it is good to read:

'I see the wrong that round me lies,

I feel the guilt within;

I hear, with groan and travail-cries,
The world confess its sin.

Yet, in the maddening maze of things,
And tossed by storm and flood,

To one fixed stake my spirit clings;
I know that God is good!'1

The manly and pathetic reflections in Snow-bound, as well as its pictures of winter life and landscape, are admirable. Questions of Life is replete with felicitous thoughts and phrases. The Tent on the Beach is celebrated. In these and later poems, the author is seen to be a poet of steady growth. There is no falling off as the shadows thicken. If in his last volume we miss the fire of his first, the loss is amply compensated by a more artistic workmanship, and by the calmer, deeper tone of thought and feeling. There is no probability that a new school, of which the rough barbaric realisms' of Whitman are the supposed nucleus, will ever draw the nation away from the stainless pages of Whittier and his leading contemporaries, chief among whom is Longfellow-the central figure in our poetical literature.

Drama.-The downward tendency of the stage, as a field for literary effort, has continued to the present hour. However it may be explained, the fact is clear, that, with few exceptions

as Bulwer's Richelieu and Lady of Lyons-the dramas written by men of genius within the present period have not been of the available kind; while the authors of successful plays have not been men of genius, and most of them are scarcely known in the literary world. Browning represents the dramatic element of recent times, such as it is; but, in the original sense of the term, he is not a dramatist at all. He has not the peculiar faculty for the invention of incidents adapted to dramatic effect, nor the power of forgetting himself in the separate creations which he strives to inform. Tennyson's Queen Mary is a forced effort, the result of deliberate forethought, a dramatic poem rather than a stage-drama. Beyond all the rest, yet vainly, Swinburne seeks to renew the vigor of other days, when the

Eternal Goodness.

drama was the natural outgrowth of a passionate and adven

turous era.

If we seek the causes for this decline, we shall find a main one, it is believed, in the practical, positive temper of the age. Intellect has been diverted to other and utilitarian objects,invention, discovery, journalism. Writers and readers are occupied with new ideas, new themes, new forms. The early stage, moreover, was an important means of instruction, and a primary means of entertainment. But facilities for amusing and instructing the people greatly multiplied. That office is now assumed very largely by the novel and the press. The times are no less stirring, but surplus desire has at present a thousand outlets where it then had one. The diffusion of literature brings intellectual diversion to every fireside at a cheaper rate than dramatic performances. Again, this degeneracy has been confirmed by theatrical management. Formerly, while dramatists were often actors, managers were one or both; to-day, the latter are merely a trading, monetary class. The introduction of movable scenery has begotten and fostered the love of scenic effects. The theatre, as a commercial institution, strives to draw 'the crowd' by ephemeral and dazzling display. The stress is transferred from the mental to the physical. Sensuous appeals take the place of ideas and sentiments. Pomp and noise supply the need of vivid language and vigorous thought. Here, as described by a newspaper critic, is the pageant of a modern play:

'It includes a burning house, a modern bar-room, real gin cock-tails, a river-side pier, a steamboat in motion, the grand saloon or state-cabin of the steamboat, the deck of the same, the wheel-house, the funnels, and the steamboat in flames; and all these objects are presented with singular fidelity to their originals.'

How wide the contrast between this show and the meagre equipment on which the grand old Elizabethans could rely! Of a similar play a like critic observes:

'It is not a work of literature, but a work of business. The piece is a rough conglomeration of the nothings of the passing hour-objects and incidents drawn, but not always drawn with accuracy, from the streets, the public conveyances, the haunts of profligacy. These nothings are offered for their own sake, and not made tributary to any intellectual purpose whatever.'

Finally, with the spread of the religious movement at the close of the last century, a reaction set in against the theatre, and had the natural effect of lowering its tone and manners, as well as its

plied readers, and excited curiosity touching every department of knowledge, is beyond dispute. That it is a great intellectual convenience, is equally patent. It is the democratic form of literature to the multitude who have neither the money to purchase books nor the leisure to read them. It abbreviates and systematizes labor, condensing the researches of the few for the disposal of the many.

On the other hand- while the evils to be deplored are far less than the blessings conferred-constant reading of reviews, so far as it accustoms the reader to accept information at second-hand, tends to make him superficial, to induce the feeling of submission and dependence. So far, also, as its attitude is partisan, he is liable to the infection of partisan habits. Criticism is much a form of personal expression. It is an assistant, not a finality. Often it is only the self-revelation of a man. The greatest works have made their way seemingly without the slightest reference to the opinions and protests of critics.

Undoubtedly the newspaper of the future will be less commercial and more literary. It will have a more catholic spirit. It will have a juster sense of moral and social values. It will devote more space to the remedial and purifying agencies of society, less to the frivolities and vices which now exclude so much of greater moment and sweeter import, which only cater to a prurient taste, and stimulate a morbid desire for low excitements. A paper that treats crime as a jest, that labels immorality as 'rich developments,' that puts forward uncleanness with startling head-lines and exhaustive detail, to become the daily food of children and youth,—is a moral scourge. Few things can be of graver importance to the parent than the selection of a family paper, destined to occupy the thoughts and to possess the imagination of forming and susceptive minds. Let us be grateful to the noble men and women who are honestly trying to realize their own ideal, and to make the press what it ought to be,— an emanation from the best spirit and culture.

Essay. It is the province of some to spread out a topic in all its breadth and variety; of others, to touch upon many subjects, but to exhaust none. The aggregate of good done by these gleaners in the fields of thought is not easily to be estimated. How much should we lose of what is most attractive

and valuable in English literature, if the productions of even the later essayists were left out of the account! They are a legitimate and most characteristic outgrowth of the national and dominant tendencies, reflecting that practical morality which has filled the last two centuries with dissertations on the rule of duty, and that freedom of discussion which has been asserted for so many ages by English writers, enforced by the public sense, then secured by the laws.

Slight but spirited essays are no uncommon feature of the daily and weekly journal; while the contributors to our leading periodicals, and the authors of the well-known series of English Men of Letters, represent such a mass of critical opinion as was never before brought together. It is generally admitted, however, that reviewing has lost something of its authority by the newspaper press, which, tending to constrain it within the limits of a quarter-column and the party creed, has in a measure turned it into a fatal facility of stock phrases and commonplace ideas. A few papers, indeed, keep up the traditions of better days, and a standard of excellence, in some respects really high, is not seldom reached; but the average 'notice' in even these is too empirical and hasty. The enormous multiplication of books has doubtless tended to this decadence, in which, though the reviewer may have a sound head and a good heart, with a wish to find merit and a purpose to exhibit it, he rarely has time to look beyond the preface.

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While our critics seem not to have the collective force, the recognized leading, of the race that has passed away, they perhaps have a more enlarged and profound conception of their functions. Without neglecting form, they think more of the matter, the energy and nobleness of the thoughts and sentiments. Not without some acrimony, they evince less personal rancor than formerly, when the critics composed a tribunal. Interesting examples of this higher, wider, more earnest criticism may be found in Vaughan's Hours with the Mystics, Taylor's Notes on Books, Masson's British Novelists, Shairp's Aspects of Poetry; above all, in the works of Carlyle, Arnold, Froude, and Ruskin. The first, our 'modern Ezekiel,' will be treated by himself. He requires a wide and open space. Matthew Arnold (1822- ) is by many relished rather as a critic

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