III. im in as he quotes Bossu and Rapin, as if he took them for instructors. ¿is, ill lore Yet it differs from it, and Dryden enumerates all that' an English pit can blame on the French stage. He says: any ... "The beauties of the French poesy are the beauties of a statue, of but not of a man, because not animated with the soul of poesy, ind which is imitation of humour and passions. . . . He who will us look upon their plays which have been written till these last me ten years, or thereabouts, will find it an hard matter to pick out ok two or three passable humours amongst them. Corneille him- les self, their arch-poet, what has he produced except the Liar? and les you know how it was cried up in France; but when it came it, upon the English stage, though well translated, . . . the most sifavourable to it would not put it in competition with many of er Fletcher's or Ben Jonson's. . . . Their verses are to me the coldest I have ever read, . . . their speeches being so many he declamations. When the French stage came to be reformed by im Cardinal Richelieu, those long harangues were introduced,. comply with the gravity of a churchman. Look upon the CirAnd for and the Pompey; they are not so properly to be called plays woundlong discourses of reasons of state; and Polieucte, in matters religion is as solemn as the long stops upon our organs. Sin that time it is grown into a custom, and their actors speak ignity the hour-glass, like our parsons. . . . I deny not but this mathors' suit well enough with the French; for as we who are a mores or sullen people, come to be diverted at our plays, so they, who are to a of an airy and gay temper, come thither to make themselvend a more serious," "1 nis mble As for the tumults and combats which the French re-y in legate behind the scenes, "nature has so formed our yle. countrymen to fierceness, . . . they will scarcely suffer rds, combats and other objects of horror to be taken from them." "2 Thus the French, by fettering themselves with 1 An Essay of Dramatic Poesy, xv. 337-341. 2 Ibid. 343. st of HAP. II. DRYDEN. 11 ese scruples,1 and confining themselves in their unities d their rules, have removed action from their stage, ad brought themselves down to unbearable monotony nd dryness. They lack originality, naturalness, variety, Contented to be thinly regular : Their tongue, enfeebled, is refined too much, re fit for manly thought, and strengthened with allay."2 em laugh as much as they like at Fletcher and spe; there is in them "a more masculine fancy rear spirit in the writing than there is in any of Fresh." auh exaggerated, this criticism is good; and beits good, I mistrust the works which the writer preface of All for Love, v. 308, Dryden says: "In this anners does the excellency of French poetry consist. Their the most civil people breathing, but their good breeding nds to a word of sense; all their wit is in their ceremony; the genius which animates our stage. . . . Thus, their is so scrupulous in point of decency, that he will rather self to death than accuse his step-mother to his father; and I am sure, will commend him for it: But we of grosser ens are apt to think that this excess of generosity is not but with fools and madmen. . . . But take Hippolytus poetic fit, and I suppose he would think it a wiser part to dle on the right horse, and chuse rather to live with the of a plain-spoken honest man, than to die with the infamy uous villain. . . . (The poet) has chosen to give him the antry, sent him to travel from Athens to Paris, taught him ove, and transformed the Hippolytus of Euripides into lippolite." This criticism shows in a small compass all the ase and freedom of thought of Dryden; but, at the same he coarseness of his education and of his age. ... le xiv., to Mr. Motteux, xi. 70. is to produce. It is dangerous for an artist to be excel lent in theory; the creative spirit is hardly consonan with the criticising spirit: he who, quietly seated on th shore, discusses and compares, is hardly capable plunging straight and boldly into the stormy sea of in vention. Moreover, Dryden holds himself too evenly poised betwixt the moods; original artists love exclusively and unjustly a certain idea and a certain world; the rest disappears from their eyes; confined one region of art, they deny or scorn the other; it isecause they are limited that they are strong. We see beforehand that Dryden, pushed one way by his nglish mind, will be drawn another way by his Frem rules: that he will alternately venture and partly rest in himself; that he will attain mediocrity, that is, Latitude; that his faults will be incongruities, that is, absurdities. All original art is self-regulated, and no origin art can be regulated from without: it carries its own outerpoise, and does not receive it from elsewhere; it onstitutes an inviolable whole; it is an animated existace, which lives on its own blood, and which languish or dies if deprived of some of its blood and supplied the veins of another. Shakspeare's imagination be guided by Racine's reason, nor Racine's reason exalted by Shakspeare's imagination; each is gooi. itself, and excludes its rival; to unite them woul to produce a bastard, a weakling, and a monster order, violent and sudden action, harsh words, h depth, truth, exact imitation of reality, and tha dra outbursts of mad passions,-these features of Sha become each other. Order, measure, eloquence cratic refinement, worldly urbanity, exquisite p ing of delicacy and virtue, all Racine's features her. It would destroy the one to attenuate, the o inflame him. Their whole being and beauty in the agreement of their parts: to mar this ement would be to abolish their being and their In order to produce, we must invent a perd harmonious conception: we must not mingle strange and opposite ones. Dryden has left undone he should have done, and has done what he should ave done. e had, moreover, the worst of audiences, debauched frivolous, void of individual taste, floundering amid sed recollections of the national literature and defarmed imitations of foreign literature, expecting nothing from the stage but the pleasure of the senses or the gratification of curiosity. In reality, the drama, like every work of art, only gives life and truth to a profound ideal of man and of existence; there is a hidden philosophy under its circumvolutions and vinces, and the public ought to be capable of compretending it, as the poet is of conceiving it. The audence must have reflected or felt with energy or refinement, in order to take in energetic or refined choghts, Hamlet and Iphigénie will never move a vulgr roisterer or a lover of money. The character weeps on the stage only rehearses our own tears; interest is but sympathy; and the drama is like whexternal conscience, which shows us what we are, t we love, what we have felt. What could the ha teach to gamesters like St. Albans, drunkards Rochester, prostitutes like Castlemaine, old boys Charles II.? What spectators were those coarse enureans, incapable even of an assumed decency, 1).rs of brutal pleasures, barbarians in their sports st obscene in words, void of honour, humanity, politene who made the court a house of ill fame! The splend decorations, change of scenes, the patter of long ver and forced sentiments, the observance of a few ru imported from Paris,-such was the natural fo their vanity and folly, and such the theatre of English Restoration. I take one of Dryden's tragedies, very celebrat time past, Tyrannic Love, or the Royal Martyrs Jes 011 the d in fine 3 St. title, and fit to make a stir. The royal martyr i who Catharine, a princess of royal blood as it appears, Sse is brought before the tyrant Maximin. She conf her faith, and a pagan philosopher Apollonius i loose against her, to refute her. Maximin says: "War is my province !-Priest, why stand you mute? You gain by heaven, and, therefore, should dispute." Thus encouraged, the priest argues; but St. Cath replies in the following words: "... Reason with your fond religion fights, For many gods are many infinites; This to the first philosophers was known, Who, under various names, ador'd but one."1 Apollonius scratches his ear a little, and then ans that there are great truths and good moral rula paganism. The pious logician immediately replie "Then let the whole dispute concluded be Being nonplussed, Apollonius is converted on the 1 Tyrannic Love, iii. 2. 1. 2 Ibid. se |