Page images
PDF
EPUB

could have supped with Novidienus, and found no use for his tables. The scattered members of the novelist are found everywhere among the writers of antiquity; and the Journey to Brundusium in esse, is proof enough that the expedition of a Roman Humphry Clinker might have been. Why might not the Sabine farm-house have been described as minutely as Pliny's grand villa, and yet as lightly as the pavilions of Lirias? or why should the complete and satisfactory, though untechnical description of such a scene of retirement have been devoid of luxury to the reader, who had, after a couple of volumes of the Suburra and the Via Sacra, been compelled to feel as if he had, in good carnest,

[ocr errors][merged small]

If we look for excitements of a darker kind, we cannot see why the Jews and Chaldeans of the Roman suburbs might not have been made as imposing as any Gipsies of our acquaintance; or why Canidia herself might not have presented as picturesque a full-length as Meg Merrilies. As for robbers and murderers and their caves, both Le Sage and Smollett have, as it is, taken their best pieces of that sort from Lucian; and indeed both this last writer, and the author, whoever he was, that passes under the name of Petronius, have in many places approached so closely the strain and tone of the most popular modern novelists, that we wonder at, scarcely less than we regret, the fact of their having missed the full career of a path which was so near them, and which, if they had once hit on it, must have been found so admirably adapted for the display of their peculiar talents.

It is a very common trait of human vanity to argue that because a thing was not, it could not have been. At what period are we to fix the commencement of the novel in posse? What mere theory can account for our having no English novel of the æra of the Canterbury Tales? Why should it have been impossible for a contemporary of Froissart to compose an admirable novel? Why should the country of Shakspeare have been without such a work, while he and Cervantes died on the same day? Was it impossible to introduce Mrs. Quickly in the same form of composition with Mrs. Towouse? Might not Justice Shallow's great chamber have been the scene of as many adventures as Squire Western's hall?-Might not Sir Hugh Evans or Holofernes have figured through books and chapters as nobly as Mr. Abraham Adams or Mr. Thwackum? Would Beatrice have been an insipid heroine in comparison with Sophia Western? Or must Autolycus have lost all his humour by figuring under a plain English name and surname at some Warwickshire wake? We beg leave, in public-dinner phrase, to deprecate the idea.'

[ocr errors]

We

We suspect, then, that the question why the moderns have and the ancients had not this form of composition, is not to be answered by any investigation as to the character of the materials respectively presented by ancient and by modern society and modes of life. Wherever the materials of a good tragedy or a good comedy or a good satire have been found, there also, we must continue to think, the materials of a good romance or novel might have been discovered. In a word, we apprehend, that the question is to be solved by reference, not at all to the materials made use of, but to certain circumstances in the situation of those to whom the product was to be addressed. Antique life, we have no doubt, afforded abundant matter for the pen of the novelist; but we have many doubts whether there was any antique public that would have adequately rewarded its exertions. The novel could not, we apprehend, have had a fair chance in those times in opposition to the drama.

The old Greeks, as a people, could not read, nor, if they could, was it possible to supply them, as a people, with books. The elements of their narrative and lyric poetry, therefore, were gradually blended together in a form of composition, which, in addition to the original accompaniments of music and dance, admitted those of action and spectacle; and with this, elaborated into perfection by consummate art and genius, the lively, the essentially southern imagination of a people whose talent was prodigiously superior to their knowledge, was abundantly satisfied. The Romans borrowed not only the form but the substance of their drama from the Greeks; and to little purpose, for the character of the people was essentially military; and the display of martial skill, the pomp of warlike processions, and, above all, the horrible interest of actual combats between man and beast, and man and man, seem to have left little room in the popular affections for the milder and more elegant excitements of dramatic art, even had the political circumstances of the country been as favourable as, in the only times when poetical art flourished in any shape, they were otherwise-to the theatrical display of the heroic characters and events of the national history on the one hand, or the free coram populo exposure of actual national manners on the other. The histrionic profession was, with one or two exceptions, the badge of general contempt; and mere dancers and singers divided the applause, even of the most luxurious times, with charioteers and gladiators. The Romans adopted the dramatic form, therefore, in vain; and, having little turn for invention in such matters, they created no form of their own to supply the want of a national drama.

The modern nations set out, like their predecessors, with, a literature

VOL. XXXIV. NO. LXVIII.

Z

literature of songs and ballads; but the wealth of their early ages being spent either in camps or in the country, and not, generally speaking, in great cities, the minstrel, as rude curiosity advanced towards refinement and fastidiousness, became a conteur—a romancer-instead of rising, as the Greek rhapsodist had done, into a dramatist. He had to wander singly from abbey to abbey, from castle to castle-instead of devoting himself with all appliances and means to boot' to the concentrated intelligence of a people in a capital. Thus, by degrees, the original heroic ballad passed into the prose romance of chivalry, while the brief and ludicrous strain of the Trouveur was refined into the novel of the Italians. In this state Cervantes found the imaginative prose of Europe. His genius blended the elements together, and thus ennobled, rather than invented, a form of composition, which has since, in all essential particulars, remained unchanged,—and which appears to have, in these later times, achieved a decided triumph of popularity over the dramatic form which our ancestors borrowed, directly or indirectly, from the literature of the Greeks.

There are few things in literary history more remarkable than the rapidity with which the modern drama attained its highest excellence, not in one country of Europe, but in every country where it can be said to have at all approached perfection. Cervantes vitnessed, in his own youth, the curta supellex and barbarous farces which he lived to see supplanted by the dramas of Lope de Vega; and but a few years intervened between his death and the production of the masterpieces of Calderon. A transition quite as sudden carried the French from their monkish Mysteries to Corneille and Molière; and here, at home, how few are the steps from Gammar Gurton's Needle to Romeo and Juliet! The literature of Germany stands by itself in nothing more strikingly than its history; but as to this department, the general rule is exemplified in it also; for the first of its dramatic names remain the greatest too.

How happens it, that the decline of the drama, as a popular form of composition, has been scarcely less rapid-certainly not a whit less marked-than its early progress had been? How happens it, that, after the lapse of two centuries, the Spaniards still speak of nobody but Lope and Calderon-that the French with difficulty recognise even Voltaire as entitled to be placed by the side of the three great dramatists of the age of Louis XIV.-and that we, though our imaginative literature has produced in the interim so many illustrious writers, scarcely dream, when the English drama is mentioned, of any names but those of Shakspeare, Jonson, and their immediate followers; if, indeed, it may not

be

be said that Shakspeare is to the English people, as a people, at this moment himself alone the English drama?

The answer, we apprehend, must be found, chiefly, in the simple fact, that the drama is a form of composition originally intended and adapted for a state of society in which reading is not a general accomplishment of the people. It demands brevity of expression and concentration of parts, as among its first requisites; it trusts much to the aid of apparatus; and much more to the ready imaginations of persons excited during a brief space by external stimulants; and, although it has been fortunate enough to be the vehicle of the very highest genius, and also of the very highest art that the annals of poetry have to display, it seems impossible not to admit, that it hopes in vain to advance in power and popularity along with the growing intelligence of the people at large. The dramatic masterpieces of Greece herself were all produced within the limits of almost a single age; and that by no means the age in which there was the greatest number of Greek readers in the world.

The truth is, that reading is a source of entertainment which, out of the actual business of individual life, has no rival to fear. No one, that has formed any intellectual habits at all, can dance, or sing, or look on dancers, or listen to singing for many hours on end-nor is there any cultivated audience in the world that would not, if the matter were put to a fair and honest vote, acknowledge that three hours of the best acted play are enough. But how rare a thing must a well acted play have at all times been? We much doubt if there ever was a theatrical performance to which really intelligent persons could attend throughout, without deriving from the exhibition almost as much of pain as of pleasure; most assuredly we have witnessed none such in our own times. Highly educated minds, thoroughly acquainted with the masterpieces of dramatic art by means of reading, do indeed acquire the tact of conducting themselves at the play very much as they do at the opera; that is, of attending to the Kemble, Young, or Kean, who happens to have a part in the piece--for how seldom does it occur that more than one really good performer figures on the same occasion?-and thinking of any thing rather than the stage before them, when the solitary star happens not to illuminate its boards. But this compromise is only for those who have leisure to be luxurious; and luxury is, we fear, seldom indulged in long without the approaches of indifference. Those, on the other hand, who do not see plays continually, are, however well educated, unable to withdraw themselves without a strong effort from the exhibition which tortures while it fascinates. They are the slaves of the eye and the ear; the glare and the noise compel attention;

z 2

[ocr errors]

attention; and the unhappy spectator, so far from being able to admire the Othello without thinking at all of the dowdy Desdemona or dismal Iago who holds colloquy with him, must be disgusted with a fixed observation of these subordinates, even when they have the stage to themselves and their wooden kindred. Of the numberless intelligent admirers of Shakspeare now in England, how small a proportion have ever seen a single play of his even tolerably performed! But what must be said as to the classes for whose use the press teems, year after year, with myriads of copies of his works, collected and singly-so cheap, that Macbeth costs less than the Babes in the Wood would have done half a century ago, and yet executed with an accuracy and even an elegance that might satisfy the most critical eye! We are now a nation of readers-much more so than any other people in Europe-and that, we strongly suspect, is the principal reason why the theatre is more neglected among us than any where else. We read Shakspeare; we stare at Aladdin, or laugh at Paul Pry, but we have no new dramas—and every year a whole library of new novels and romances.

They

The business of painting our manners and lashing our vices has been truly in the hands of our novelists ever since Fielding, Smollett, and Sterne produced their strong and graphic delineations. These men were to their own times what Jonson and his brother moralists had been to a preceding age, and what the Wycherleys and Vanburghs had not been to another. have been succeeded by a long line of writers in the same walk, vastly inferior for the most part to them in genius, but exerting infinitely greater power each over his own day, than any dramatist that has appeared among us within the period, if we except the brilliant usurpation of Foote, the hundred days of the dramatized lampoon. Even when the same writer has tried both walks with success, it is easy to see in which success has been best rewarded. What is the Good-natured Man to the Vicar of Wakefield?Not very much more than Tom Thumb is to Tom Jones.

From the appearance of Gil Blas downwards, in like manner, though the spectacle has always been a favourite amusement in Paris, the manners and the mind of the French people through all their various changes, their intrigues, their enthusiasm, their profligacy, their devotion, their infidelity, and their reviving fanaticism, all have been depicted by their novelists to infinitely more purpose and effect than by their dramatists. The imaginative works that have most powerfully reflected, most powerfully influenced the national mind, have been of this class. The Nouvelle Héloïse alone is better and worse than a myriad of their dramas.

« PreviousContinue »