1

for its growth; comic humour, lyrical loveliness, the tragic earnestness and intense reality of English imagination, classical story and Italian romance, the phantasmagoric brilliancy of shows at Court, the gust of fresh life breathed into the spirit of a haughty and heroic nation by the conflicts and the triumphs of a recent past. The point about Shakspere's art is that it is Art, mature, self-conscious, working upon given methods to a single aim. Those methods, the external forms, of Shakspere's drama had been determined for him by his predecessors. That aim, the one aim of true dramatic art, the aim which he alone triumphantly achieved, was the presentation of human character in action. To this artistic end all elements, however various, however wonderfully blent, however used and scattered with the profuse prodigality of an unrivalled genius, are impartially subordinated. In order to illustrate the single-hearted sincerity of Shakspere as an artist, it is only needful to observe the exclusion of religious comment, of marked political intention, of deliberate moralising, from works so full of opportunities for their display, and in an age when the very foundations of opinion had been stirred, when Europe was convulsed with wars and schisms, when speculative philosophy was essaying fresh Icarian flights over the whole range of human experience. True to his vocation, Shakspere never permitted these ferments of the time to distract him from the poet's task, although he found in them a source of intellectual stimulus and moral insight, an atmosphere of mental energy, which makes his plays the school of human nature for all time.

Shakspere realised the previous efforts of the

THREE STAGES IN THE DRAMA.

7

English genius to form a Drama, and perfected the type in his imperishable masterpieces. With him, in the second period, but after a wide interval, we have to rank Ben Jonson, who adapted the classical bias of the earlier stage to England's now developed art, and Fletcher, through whom the romantic motives borrowed from Italian and Spanish sources found new and luminous expression. In the third period we meet a host of valiant playwrights, led by Webster, Ford, Massinger, Shirley: none of them mean men. Yet these are influenced and circumscribed by their commanding predecessors; limited in their resources by the exhaustion of more salient subjects; incapable of reforming the type upon a different conception of dramatic art; forced to affect novelty and to stimulate the jaded sensibilities of a sated audience by means of ingenious extravagances, by the invention of strained incidents, by curious combinations, far-sought fables, monstrosities, and tangled plots. After them the type dies down into inanities and laboured incoherent imitations.

III.

This evolution of our Drama through three broadly marked stages follows the law of growth which may be traced in all continuous products of the human spirit. A close parallel is afforded by the familiar periods of medieval architecture; which in all countries of Europe emerged from Romanesque into Pointed Gothic, the latter style passing through stages of early purity, decorative richness, and efflorescent decadence. Greek dramatic art, obeying the same rule of triple progres

sion, took its origin in religious mysteries and rites of Dionysus; assumed shape at the hands of Thespis and Susarion, Phrynichus and Cratinus; received accomplished form in the master-works of Eschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, and Aristophanes; broke up into the tragedy of Agathon, Chæremon, Moschion, the middle Comedy of Plato and Antiphanes, the new Comedy of Menander and Philemon. In dealing with the later stages of the Attic Drama, it is, however, more proper to speak of divergences from the primitive stock than of absolute decadence. While we have good reason to believe that Tragedy declined after the age of Agathon, owing to the same cause which led to its decline in England-inability to alter or to vary an established type; the Comedy of Menander indicated no such exhaustion of the soil, no diminution of creative vigour. It was a new form, corresponding to altered conditions of Greek life; and in this respect it might be compared to our own Comedy of the Restoration.

To multiply instances would be superfluous. Yet I am loth to omit the illustration of this law of artistic development, which is furnished by Italian painting. Emerging from Byzantine or Romanesque tradition, painting traverses the stage of Giotto and the Giottesque schools; produces almost simultaneously in several provinces of Italy the intermediate art of Ghirlandajo and Bellini, of Mantegna and Signorelli, of Lippi and Perugino; concentrates its force in Raphael, Da Vinci, Michelangelo, Correggio, Titian; then, as though its inner source of life had been exhausted, breaks off into extravagance, debility, and facile formalism in the works of Giulio Romano, Perino

LAW OF ARTISTIC EVOLUTION.

9

del Vaga, Giorgio Vasari, Pietro da Cortona, the younger Caliari and Robusti, and countless hosts of academical revivalists and imitators. The slovenly and empty performance of those epigoni to the true heroes of Italian painting, in which, however, the tradition. of a mighty style yet lingers, may not inaptly be paralleled by the loose and hasty plays of men like Davenant and Crowne, by their dislocated plots and conventional characters, by their blurred and sketchy treatment of old motives, and by the break-down of dramatic blank verse into a chaos of rhythmic incoherences.

Reverting once more to Gothic architecture, we notice precisely the same enervation and extravagance, the same facility of execution combined with the same formalism and fatuity, the same straining after novelty through an exhausted method, effects of over-ripeness and irresistible decay, in the flamboyance of French window-traceries, the sprawling casements and splayed ogees of expiring Perpendicular in England.

IV.

The critic, whether he be dealing with the English or the Attic Drama, with Gothic Architecture or Italian Painting, has to aim at seizing the essential nature of the product laid before him, at fixing on the culminating point in the development he traces, observing the gradual approaches toward maturity, and explaining the inevitable decadence by causes sought for in the matter of his theme. With this in view, the analogy between history and biography, between national genius in one

of its decisive epochs and individual genius in one of the world's heroes, is not to be contemned, provided we apply it with the freedom of a metaphor. There is nothing good, beautiful, or strong upon our planet, no religion and no empire, no phase of polity or form of art, however the idea of it may survive inviolable in the memory of ages, however its essential truth and spirit may abide beyond the reach of change and time, but in its actual historic manifestation is subject, like a human being, to birth, development, decay, and dissolution.

All the flowers of the spring

Meet to perfume our burying:

These have but their growing prime ;
And man does flourish but his time:
Survey our progress from our birth;
We are set, we grow, we turn to earth.

Such reflections seem trite enough. But they have a point which either the carelessness of the observer or the pride of man is apt to overlook. Why, it is often asked, should such a process of the arts as that displayed in Italy not have continued through further phases and a richer growth? Why should a State like Venice have decayed? Why should Ford and Massinger have only led to Davenant and Crowne? The answer is that each particular polity, each specific form of art, has, like a plant or like a man, its destined evolution from a germ, its given stock of energy, its limited supply of vital force. To unfold and to exhibit its potential faculties, is all that each can do. Granted favouring circumstances and no thwarting influence, it will pass through the phases of adolescence, maturity, and old age. But it cannot alter its type. It has no power at a certain