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This varied, copious, and brilliant polemic may or may not have been open in substance to the charge which the bolder and more thoroughgoing defenders of orthodoxy brought against it, that it committed the logical error of demanding submission on the part of supernaturalism to laws and limits to which, by its very essence, supernaturalism disclaimed allegiance. But the form of it was excellent. Mr. Huxley had read much, and had borrowed weapons and armour from more than one Schoolman and Father as well as from purely profane authors. He had an admirable style, free alike from the great faults of his contemporaries, "preciousness" and slipshodness, and a knack of crisp but not too mannered phrase recalling that of Swift or, still more, of Bentley. It has been said, with some truth as well as with some paradox, that a literary critic of the very first class was lost in him, at the salvage only of some scientific monographs, which like all their kind will be antiquated some day, and of some polemics which must suffer equally from the touch of time.

CHAPTER XI
DRAMA

At no period, probably, in the history of English literature, from the sixteenth century until that with which we are now dealing, would it have been possible to compress the history of the drama during a hundred years into the space which it is here proposed to give it. If we were dealing with the works of living men the historian might be justly charged with arrogant incompetence in not taking more notice of them. But, fortunately, that is not the case; and the brevity of the treatment is equally compatible with a belief that the plays of the present day are masterpieces, and with a suspicion that they are not. As to the past we have, with the exception of a few protesters, general consent that the English drama of the nineteenth century has displayed one curious and disastrous characteristic. The plays, as a rule, which have been good literature have either never been acted or have seldom succeeded as plays; the plays that have been acted and have been successful have seldom been good literature.

The best idea of the state of the drama between 1790 and 1810 may perhaps be obtained by any one who cares to look through – it would require a monomania, a desert island, or at least a succession of wet days in a country inn to enable any one to read through – the ten volumes of Mrs. Inchbald's Modern British Theatre, printed in 1811 "from the prompt-books of the Theatres Royal." This publication, supplementing the larger British Theatre of the same editor, contains more than two volumes of the works of Frederick Reynolds, a prolific playwright who was responsible for the English version of Werther in drama; another of Mrs. Inchbald's own writing and adaptation; one of Holcroft's later works; one of Cumberland's; and the other five made up of lesser pieces by Colman the younger, Dibdin, and others, serious plays in blank verse such as Hannah More's Percy, and the Honourable John St. John's Mary Queen of Scots, etc. More than one of these was a person of talent, more than one a person even of very great talent; while Holcroft and Colman, if not others, had displayed special ability for drama. Yet there is, perhaps, in the fifty plays of the ten volumes only one that can be called a good play, only one which is readable, and that is the Trip to Scarborough, which Sheridan simply adapted, which he did little more than edit, from Vanbrugh's Relapse. Outside these volumes the acting drama of the period may be best studied in the other and better work of the pair just mentioned, and in O'Keefe.

John O'Keefe, or O'Keeffe (for the name is spelt both ways), was a very long-lived man, who was born at Dublin in 1748 and died at Southampton in 1833. But in the later years of his life he suffered from blindness; and the period of his greatest dramatic activity almost exactly coincided with that of our first chapter. He is said to have written some fifty pieces, of various kinds, between 1781 and 1798; and in the latter year he published a collection of about thirty, referring in the preface to others which "an inconsiderate disposal of the copyright" prevented him from including. O'Keefe was to a certain extent a follower of Foote; but his pieces – though he was a practised actor – depended less upon his own powers of exposition than Foote's. They range from rather farcical comedies to pure farces and comediettas much interspersed with songs for music; and their strictly literary merit is not often great, while for sheer extravagance they require the utmost license of the boards to excuse them. There is, however, something much more taking in them than in most of the dramatic work of the time. For instance, the "wild farce" (referred to but not named by Lamb in his paper on Munden) of The Merry Mourners, though as "improbable" as Mrs. Barbauld thought The Ancient Mariner to be, has a singular hustle and bustle of sustained interest, and not a few shrewd strokes such as the following, which perhaps does not only apply to the end of the eighteenth century. "Your London ladies are so mannified with their switch rattans and coats, and watch-chain nibbities, and their tip-top hats and their cauliflower cravats, that, ecod! there's no mark of their being women except the petticoat." The Castle of Andalusia (1782) is an early and capital example of the bandit drama, and The Poor Soldier of the Irish comic opera. Wild Oats supplied favourite parts to the actors of the time in Rover and Ephraim Smooth; and, with a little good will, one may read even slight things like A Beggar on Horseback and The Doldrum with some amusement. But O'Keefe has few gifts beyond knowledge of the stage, Irish shrewdness, Irish rattle, and an honest, straightforward simplicity; and that one turns to him from other dramatists of the period with some relief, is even more to their discredit than to his credit.

A curious and early fruit of this gradual divorce between drama and literature was Joanna Baillie, a lady whose virtues, amiability, and in a way talents, caused her to be spoken of by her own contemporaries with an admiration which posterity has found it hard to echo as concerns her strictly literary position in drama – some of her shorter poems were good. She was born in 1762 at Bothwell, of a good Scotch family, and her mother was a sister of the great surgeon Hunter. This gift descended to her elder brother Matthew, who was very famous in his own day as an anatomist and physician. Partly to be near him, Joanna and her sister Agnes established themselves at Hampstead, where she often entertained Scott and other great people, and where she lived till 23rd February 1851. In 1798 she published the first of a series of Plays on the Passions, in which the eighteenth century theory of the ruling passion was carried out to the uncompromising and even whimsical extent of supplying a brace of dramas, a tragedy and a comedy, on each of the stronger passions, Hatred, Fear, Love, etc. The first volume, which opened with the rather striking closet drama of Basil, sometimes spoken of as Count Basil, was prefaced by an introductory discourse of considerable ability. The book, coming at a dead season of literature, was well received. It reached its third edition in the second year from its appearance, and one of its plays, De Montfort, was acted, with Kemble in the title part, not without success. A second volume followed in 1802, and a third in 1812. In 1804 one of Miscellaneous Plays had been issued, while others and some poems were added later. Joanna's plays in general, it was admitted, would not act (though the Ettrick Shepherd in the Noctes Ambrosianæ denies this), and it requires some effort to read them. The blank verse of the tragedies, though respectable, is uninspired; the local and historical colour, whether of Byzantine, Saxon, or Renaissance times, is of that fatal "property" character which has been noticed in the novel before Scott; and the passion-scheme is obviously inartistic. The comedies are sometimes genuinely funny; but they do not display either the direct and fresh observation of manners, or the genial creation of character, which alone can make comedy last. In short Miss Baillie was fortunate in the moment of her appearance, but she cannot be called either a great dramatist or a good one.

The school of Artificial Tragedy – the phrase, though not a consecrated one, is as legitimate as that of artificial comedy – which sprung up soon after the beginning of this century, and which continued during its first half or thereabouts, if not later, is a curious phenomenon in English history, and has hardly yet received the attention it deserves. The tragedy of the eighteenth century is almost beneath contempt, being for the most part pale French echo or else transpontine melodrama, with a few plaster-cast attempts to reproduce an entirely misunderstood Shakespeare. It was impossible that the Romantic movement in itself, and the study of the Elizabethan drama which it induced, should not lead to the practise of tragedy, while the existence of the Kembles as players and managers, might be thought to promise well for the tragic stage.

Yet there has always been something out of joint with English nineteenth century tragedy. Of Lamb's John Woodvil and Godwin's Antonio mention has been made. Byron's tragedies are indeed by no means the worst part of his work; but they also shared the defects of that work as poetry, and they were not eminently distinguished for acting qualities. Scott had no dramatic faculty; Shelley's Cenci, despite its splendid poetry, is not actable; indeed the only one of the great English nineteenth century Pléiade who was successful on the stage was Coleridge; and Remorse and Zapolya are not masterpieces.

Yet the fascination of the theatre, or at least of the drama, seemed to continue unaltered, and the attempts on or in it varied from the wild fantasy pieces of Beddoes (which no stage but the Elizabethan – if even that – could ever have welcomed) to the curious academic drama of which types extend not merely from Milman's Fazio in 1815 to Talfourd's Ion twenty years later, but further still. Of Milman notice has been taken in his far truer vocation as historian. Talfourd was a good lawyer, a worthy man, and as noted above, the friend and editor of Lamb. But his tragedies are very cold, and it is difficult to believe that Ion can have had any other attraction besides the popularity and skill of Macready, who indeed was greatly responsible for the appearance both of this and of better plays. In particular he stood usher to divers productions of Browning's which have been mentioned, such as the rather involved and impossible Strafford, and the intensely pathetic but not wholly straightforward Blot in the 'Scutcheon. This last is the one play of the century which – with a certain unsubstantiality of matter, a defect almost total in character, and a constant provocation to the fatal question, "Why are all these people behaving in this way?" – has the actual tragic vis in its central point.

The character, however, and the condemnation of the English drama of the first half of this century from the literary point of view, are summed up in the single statement that its most prominent and successful dramatist was James Sheridan Knowles. Born in 1784, and son of the great Sheridan's cousin at Cork, Knowles was introduced to London literary society pretty early. He tried soldiering (at least the militia) and medicine; but his bent towards the stage was too strong, and he became an actor, though never a very successful one, and a teacher of acting, though never a manager. He was about thirty when he turned dramatist, and though his plays justify the theatrical maxim that no one who has not practical knowledge of the stage can write a good acting play, they also justify the maxim of the study that in his day literary excellence had in some mysterious way obtained or suffered a divorce from dramatic merit. Not that these plays are exactly contemptible as literature, but that as literature they are not in the least remarkable. The most famous of his tragedies is Virginius, which dates, as performed in London at least, from 1820. It was preceded and followed by others, of which the best are perhaps Caius Gracchus (1815), and William Tell (1834). His comedies have worn better, and The Hunchback (1832), and the Love Chase (1836), are still interesting examples of last-century artificial comedy slightly refreshed. Independently of his technical knowledge, Knowles really had that knowledge of human nature without which drama is impossible, and he could write very respectable English. But the fatal thing about him is that he is content to dwell in decencies for ever. There is no inspiration in him; his style, his verse, his theme, his character, his treatment are all emphatically mediocre, and his technique as a dramatist deserves only a little, though a little, warmer praise.

Better as literature, and at least as good as drama, are the best plays of the first Lord Lytton, another of the eminent hands of Macready, who undoubtedly counted for something in the success of The Lady of Lyons, Richelieu, and Money, the two first produced in 1838, and the last in 1840. Richelieu is the nearest to Knowles in competence without excellence, the other two perhaps excel if not positively yet relatively. Many spectators quite recently, while unable to check laughter at the grandiloquent sentimentality and the stock situations of The Lady of Lyons, have been unable to avoid being touched by its real though ordinary pathos, and moved by its astonishing cleverness; while Money is probably the very best comic example of the hybrid kind above referred to, the modernised artificial comedy. But Bulwer's other plays, though the unsuccessful Duchesse de la Vallière is not bad reading, were less fortunate, and one of them is the subject of perhaps the most successful of Thackeray's early reviews in the grotesque style, preserved in the Yellowplush Papers.

It will be observed that, with the single and not very notable exception of Sheridan Knowles, almost all the names already mentioned are those of persons to whom drama was a mere by-work. Another exception may be found in James R. Planché (1796-1880), a man of no very exalted birth or elaborate education, but an archæologist of some merit, and from 1854 onwards an official representative of the honourable though discredited science of Heraldry as Rouge Croix Pursuivant and Somerset Herald. From 1818 onward Planché was the author, adapter, translator, and what not, of innumerable – they certainly run to hundreds – dramatic pieces of every possible sort from regular plays to sheer extravaganzas. He was happiest perhaps in the lighter and freer kinds, having a pleasant and never vulgar style of jocularity, a fair lyrical gift, and the indefinable knowledge of what is a play. But he stands only on the verge of literature proper, and the propriety, indeed the necessity, of including him here is the strongest possible evidence of the poverty of dramatic literature in our period. It would indeed only be possible to extend this chapter much by including men who have no real claim to appear, and who would too forcibly suggest the hired guests of story, introduced in order to avoid a too obtrusive confession of the absence of guests entitled to be present.

The greater and more strictly literary names of those who have tried the stage in the intervals of happier studies, from Miss Mitford and R. H. Horne to Tennyson, have been mentioned elsewhere; and there is no need to return to them. Dr. James Westland Marston (1820-90) was once much praised, and was an author of Macready's. Miss Isabella Harwood, daughter of the second editor of the Saturday Review, produced under the pseudonym of "Ross Neil" a series of closet-dramas of excellent composition and really poetical fancy, but wanting the one thing needful. Perhaps a few other writers might with pains be added; and of course every reviewer knows that the flow of five-act tragedies, though less abundant than of old, has continued. But, on the whole, the sentence already put in more than one form remains true and firm – that in this period the dramatic work of those who have been really men and women of letters is generally far inferior to their other work, and that, with the rarest exceptions, the dramatic work of those who have not excelled in other kinds of literature is not literature at all.

CHAPTER XII
CONCLUSION

A conclusion which avows that it might almost as well have presented itself as a preface may seem to be self-condemned; it must be the business of the following pages to justify it. In summing up on such a great matter as this it is desirable – it is indeed necessary – to indicate, in broader lines than at the mere outset would have seemed appropriate or indeed possible, the general course of thought and of speech, of literary matter and literary form, during the century and more which is submitted to the view. We can thus place individuals in their position to each other and to the whole more boldly and with less reserve; we can sketch the general character of existing movements, the movers in which have been exempt from individual consideration by virtue of their life and work being incomplete; we can at once record accomplishment and indicate tendency.

The period dealt with in the first chapter of this book illustrates the differences in appeal of such periods to the merely dilettante and "tasting" critic, and to the student of literature in the historical and comparative fashion. To the former it is one of the most ungrateful of all such sub-periods or sub-divisions in English literature. He finds in it none, or at most Boswell's Johnson, Burns, and the Lyrical Ballads (this last at its extreme end), of the chief and principal things on which alone he delights to fix his attention. Its better poetry, such as that of Cowper and Crabbe, he regards at best with a forced esteem; its worse is almost below his disgust. Its fiction is preposterous and childish; it contributes nothing even to the less "bellettristic" departments of literature that is worth his attention; it is a tedious dead season about which there is nothing tolerable except the prospect of getting rid of it before very long.

To the latter – to the historical and comparative student – on the other hand, it has an interest of an absolutely unique kind. As was observed in a former volume of this history, the other great blossoming time of English literature – that which we call Elizabethan, and by which we mean the last five and twenty years of the Queen's reign and the fifty or sixty after her death – was preceded by no certain signs except those of restless seeking. Here, on the contrary, with no greater advantage of looking back, we can see the old fruit dropping off and the new forming, in a dozen different kinds and a hundred different ways. Extravagance on one side always provokes extravagance on the other; and because the impatient revolt of Coleridge and some others of the actual leaders into the Promised Land chose to present the eighteenth century as a mere wilderness in respect of poetry, enjoyment of nature, and so forth, there have been of late years critics who maintained that the poetical decadence of that century is all a delusion; in other words (it may be supposed) that Akenside and Mason are the poetical equals of Herrick and Donne. The via media, as almost always, is here also the via veritatis. The poets of the eighteenth century were poets; but the poetical stream did not, as a rule, run very high or strong in their channels, and they were tempted to make up for the sluggishness and shallowness of the water by playing rather artificial and rococo tricks with the banks. The fiction of the eighteenth century was, at its greatest, equal to the greatest ever seen; but it was as yet advancing with uncertain steps, and had not nearly explored its own domain. The history of the eighteenth century had returned to the true sense of history, and was endeavouring to be accurate; but it only once attained – it is true that with Gibbon it probably attained once for all – a perfect combination of diligence and range, of matter and of style.

In all these respects the list might, if it were proper, be extended to much greater length. The twenty years from 1780 to 1800 show us in the most fascinating manner the turn of the tide, not as yet coming in three feet abreast, rather creeping up by tortuous channels and chance depressions, but rising and forcing a way wherever it could. In the poets, major and minor, of the period, omitting, and even not wholly omitting, Burns and Blake – who are of no time intrinsically, but who, as it happens, belong accidentally to this time as exponents, the one of the refreshing influence of dialect and freedom from literary convention, the other of the refreshing influence of sympathy with old models and mystical dreaming – all the restlessness of the approaching crisis is seen. Nothing in literature is more interesting than to watch the effect of the half-unconscious aims and desires of Cowper and Crabbe, to see how they try to put the new wine in the old bottles, to compare them with Goldsmith and Thomson on the one hand, with Wordsworth and Coleridge on the other. Hayley perhaps alone, or almost alone, is rebel to the comparative method. Hayley is one of these hopeless creatures who abound at all periods, and whose native cast of nothingness takes a faint fashion from the time. But even in the verse of "Monk" Lewis we see the itch for new measures, the craving for lyric movement; even in the day-flies of the Della Crusca group the desire to be "something different." And then in Bowles, with his sonnets of places, in Sayers, with his rhymeless Pindarics, we come upon the actual guides to the right way, guides the oddest, the blindest, the most stumbling, but still – as not merely chronology but the positive testimony and the still more positive practice of those who followed them show – real guides and no misleaders.

Least studied, perhaps, because of its want of positive savour in comparison with their later achievements, but more interesting than all of these, is the early work of Southey, Coleridge, and Wordsworth themselves, and the work, not merely early but later, of men like Rogers and Campbell. Here the spectacle already presented in Crabbe and Cowper is repeated; but the process is in a further stage, and the fermentation is determining, according to the nature of the fermenting material. On Rogers it is nearly powerless; in Campbell only in his lyrics does it succeed in breaking up and dissolving the old crust; in Southey the effect is never quite complete; in Coleridge and Wordsworth, but especially in Coleridge, the leaven changes all the latter lump. Thenceforward the process is reversed. Instead of instances of advance amid a mass of inertia or aimless wandering we have instances of reaction amid a mass of advance. The work of the revolutionary time is done; the scholar, contrary to Goethe's dictum, has now not merely to exercise himself but to perfect.

The phenomena of the time in fiction are of the same character, but they lead as yet to no such distinct turn. The tale-telling of Beckford is like the singing of Burns, not uncoloured by the time, but still in the main purely individual; the purpose of the novels of Holcroft, Godwin, and Bage is groping in the dark; the Radcliffian romance and its exaggeration by Lewis exhibit the same uncertainty, the same application of the Rule of False. And there is for once a more philosophical and less cowardly explanation – that Scott, the Joshua in this instance, as Coleridge and Wordsworth were in the other, was occupied elsewhere before he sought the Palestine of the novel. For it must be remembered that prose fiction, though it had been cultivated in a scattered and tentative way for thousands of years, was up to this time the most inorganic of literary kinds. Poets, when they chose to give themselves up to poetry and to turn their backs on convention, were almost as well off then as now. They had but to open the great Greeks of the fifth and fourth centuries before Christ, the Latins such as Lucretius and Catullus, the great mediæval, the great Renaissance examples of their own art, to see, as soon as they chose to see, where and how to go right. The adventurer in fiction was destitute of any such assistance. Only a few examples of much real excellence in his art were before him; many of those existing (including most of the mediæval instances) were hardly before him at all; and none of these, with the exception of the eighteenth century novel of manners and character (which, in the nature of the case, was at that special time the last thing he wanted to imitate), and the short tale of France and Italy, could be said to have been brought to anything like perfection. Hence the wanderings and the stumblings here were far greater, the touch of the groping hands far feebler and less sure than even in poetry; but the crying for the light was there too, and it was to be heard in time. Even as it was, before the century closed, Miss Edgeworth had given important new lines to fiction, and was on the eve of opening the most fertile of all its seams or veins, that of national or provincial character; the purpose-novel just referred to was full of future, though it might be a future of a perilous and disputable kind; the terror-romance, subdued to saner limits and informed with greater knowledge and greater genius, was not soon to cease out of the land; and, a detail not to be neglected, the ever increasing popularity of the novel was making it more and more certain that it would number good intellects sooner or later.

In all other directions, with the single exception of drama, in which there was neither performance nor promise, so far as literature was concerned, to any great extent, the same restlessness of effort, and not always the same incompetence of result was seen. The fact of the revolutionary war abroad and the coercive policy thereby necessitated at home may have somewhat postponed the appearance of the new kind of periodical, in all shapes from quarterly to daily, which was to be so great a feature of the next age; but the same causes increased the desire for it and prepared not a few of its constituents. It is impossible for any tolerably careful reader not to notice how much more "modern," to use an unphilosophical but indispensable term, is the political satire both in verse and prose, which has been noticed in the first chapter of this book, than the things of more or less the same kind that immediately preceded it. It was an accident, no doubt, that made the Anti-Jacobin ridicule Darwin's caricature of eighteenth century style in poetry; yet that ridicule did far more to put this particular convention out of fashion than all the attacks of the same paper on innovators like Coleridge (who at that time had hardly attempted their literary innovations) could do harm. The very interest in foreign affairs, brought about by the most universal war that had ever been known, helped to introduce the foreign element which was to play so large a part in literature; and little affection as the critic may have for the principles of Godwin or of Paine, he cannot deny that the spirit of inquiry, the rally and shock of attack and defence, are things a great deal better for literature than a placid contentment with accepted conventions.

Theology indeed may share with drama the reproach of having very little that is good to show from this time, or indeed for a long time to come. For the non-conformist sects and the Low Church party, which had resulted from the Evangelical movement in the earlier eighteenth century, were, the Unitarians excepted, for the most part illiterate. The Deist controversy had ceased, or, as conducted against Paine, required no literary skill; and the High Church movement had not begun. Philosophy, not productive of very much, was more active; and the intensely alien and novel styles of German thought were certain in time to produce their effect, while their working was in exact line with all the other tendencies we have been surveying.

In short, during these twenty years, literature in almost all its parts was being thoroughly "boxed about." The hands that stirred it were not of the strongest as yet, they were absolutely unskilled, and for the most part they had not even any very clear conception of what they wanted to do. But almost everybody felt that something had to be done, and was anxious – even childishly anxious – to do something. It by no means always happens that such anxiety is rewarded or is a good sign; but it is always a noteworthy one, and in this instance there is no doubt about either the fact of the reward or its goodness.

The subsequent history of poetry during the century divides itself in an exceedingly interesting way, which has not perhaps yet been subjected to full critical comment. There are in it five pretty sharply marked periods of some ten or fifteen years each, which are distinguished, the first, third, and fifth, by the appearance in more or less numbers of poets of very high merit, and of characteristics more or less distinctly original; the second and fourth by poetic growths, not indeed scanty in amount and sometimes exquisite in quality, but tentative, fragmentary, and undecided. It will of course be understood that in this, as in all literary classifications, mathematical accuracy must not be expected, and that the lives of many of the poets mentioned necessarily extend long before and after the periods which their poetical production specially distinguishes. In fact the life of Wordsworth covers as nearly as possible the whole five sub-periods mentioned, reckoning from his own birth-year to that of almost the youngest of the poets, of whom we shall here take account. And perhaps there are few better ways of realising the extraordinary eminence of English nineteenth century poetry than by observing, that during these eighty years there was never a single one at which more or fewer persons were not in existence, who had produced or were to produce poetry of the first class. And the more the five-fold division indicated is examined and analysed the more curious and interesting will its phenomena appear.