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tending to kill a rat, and the heroine throws herself into the river. They dig her grave on the stage; the gravediggers jest in a way worthy of them, with skulls in their hands; the hero answers their odious grossness by extravagances no less disgusting. Meanwhile, one of the characters conquers Poland. The hero, his father, and mother drink together on the stage; they sing at table, . they wrangle, they fight, they kill; one might suppose such a work to be the fruit of the imagination of a drunken savage. But in the midst of all these rude irregularities, which to this day make the English theatre so absurd and so barbarous, there are to be found in ‘Hamlet,’ by a yet greater incongruity, sublime strokes worthy of the loftiest geniuses. It seems as if nature had taken a delight in collecting within the brain of Shakspere all that we can imagine of what is greatest and most powerful, with all that rudeness without wit can contain of what is lowest and most detestable."

*

One is tempted here to go on to a comparison between English and French tragedy; but this would take us wholly away from our path. It concerns us now to consider simply the fate of these laws. In France, they survived the general wreck of the Revolution; Sundays were banished, and the week brought into the decimal system; religion was abolished; kings and aristocrats were murdered-but, as Brandes pointed out, "While in all external matters France is inclined to change, and in following this inclination knows no limits or moderation, it is yet in all literary matters exceedingly conservative, recognizing authority, maintaining an academy, and observing moderation. The French had overthrown their

It will be remembered that this demolition of the Sabbath is sometimes brought up in all seriousness as an argument against substituting the metre and the gramme for the yardstick and ounce.

government, hanged or banished the odious aristocrats, established a republic, carried on war with Europe, done away with Christianity, decreed the worship of a Supreme Being, deposed and set up a dozen rulers, before it occurred to any one to declare war against the Alexandrine verse, before any one ventured to question the authority of Corneille or Boileau, or to feel any doubt that the observance of the three unities was absolutely essential to the preservation of good taste. Voltaire, who had but little respect for anything in the heaven above or in the earth beneath, yet respected the Alexandrine. He turned tradition topsyturvy; made his tragedies attacks upon the powers they had hitherto supported, namely, the right of kings and of the church; from many of them he excluded love, which previously had formed the main interest in real tragedy; he tried to follow in Shakspere's footsteps: but he did not venture to shorten his line by a single foot, to make the least alteration in the conventional method of rhyming, or to make the action last more than twenty-four hours, or to lay it in two different places in one play. He did not hesitate to wrench the sceptre from the hand of kings, or to tear the mask from the face of priests, but he respected the traditional dagger in Melpomene's hand and the traditional mask before her face."

Voltaire, it must be remembered, had a very sincere detestation of wilfulness and obscurity, and great love of neat workmanship and literary polish. In good part through his authority, the unities survived in France until Victor Hugo began to write plays. The preface to "Cromwell"

*

*It must not be forgotten how often the rules were questioned, and with ever-growing force, by successive dramatists in the last century. It was probably Voltaire's influence that maintained them so long, for there were many able men, less authoritative than he, however, who were attacking them by precept and example. The full history of the pro

(1827) was a violent attack upon them, but it was over his "Hernani" that the fight was really fought and the victory won. Of course there had been men who objected to the rigid rules, such as La Motte (1672-1731), but his objections were without influence; it was Victor Hugo who fairly broke these chains. Feb. 25, 1830, this play was first acted, amid wild confusion. Théophile Gautier, in his "Histoire du Romantisme," says:

"How can any one imagine that this line,

"Est-il minuit?-Minuit bientôt,"

should have called forth a tempest, and that the fight lasted three days? The phrase seemed trivial, familiar, indecorous: a king asks what's o'clock, like a private citizen, and they tell him, as if he were a ploughboy, midnight."

The rules fell with a crash into unrecognizable ruin. In Italy, a play of Manzoni's, "Il Conte di Carmagnola" (1820), was the first to break the charmed regulations, but Victor Hugo destroyed the citadel after the outposts had

tracted discussion concerning them belongs rather to the study of French than of English literature. (Vide Charles Formentin's "Essai sur les Origines du Drame Moderne en France." Paris, 1879.) The most important of these writers were Diderot, Beaumarchais, Mercier, Sedaine, etc. It yet remains true that, while these men skirmished bravely, Victor Hugo routed the enemy and won the victory.

In his "Bijoux Indiscrets," chap. xxxviii., Diderot said, speaking of the classic stage: "En admirez-vous la conduite? Elle est ordinairement si compliquée que ce serait un miracle qu'il se fût passé tant de choses en si peu de temps. La ruine ou la conservation d'un empire, le mariage d'une princesse, la perte d'un prince, tout cela s'exécute d'un tour de main. S'agit-il d'une conspiration, on l'ébauche au premier acte, elle est liée, affermie au second; toutes les mesures sout prises, les obstacles levés, les conspirateurs disposés au troisième; il y aura incessament une revolte, un combat, peut-être une bataille rangée, et vous appelez cela: conduite, intérêt, chaleur, vraisemblance."

'surrendered. The length of the struggle between reason and reasonableness shows how hard it is to expel bigotry, pedantry, obstinacy, and all the respectable vices.

To return to Addison's "Cato," which was published in 1713: its only interest is, so to speak, an archæological one, as an example of a rare phenomenon, and as a proof of the spread of waves of thought. We see that it took about two hundred years for the form devised by Trissino to reach London, it having reached Paris in one hundred and twenty years; and the wave that overwhelmed France made but a slight disturbance in England,* for, at the most, less than a dozen plays can be counted among those written after this model, and Otway's "Venice Preserved" and Congreve's "Mourning Bride" may well be counted out. The only other at all well known, excepting Lillo's “Fatal Curiosity," is Johnson's "Irene" (1749), and if Johnson's fame depended on that play his name would have been lost long since.t

* Vide "Lectures on Poetry," delivered 1711, at Oxford, by Dr. Trapp, of whom Dr. Young wrote, "Satire I., Works," iii. 106:

"If at his title Trapp had dropp'd his quill

Trapp might have passed for a great genius still.

But Trapp, alas! (excuse him if you can)

Is now a scribbler, who was once a man."

This, however, probably refers to his political pamphlets. He warmly defended the unities.

Yet it is curious to observe that two thirds of Browning's plays observe the unity of time-viz., "Pippa Passes," "The Return of the Druses,' ," "A Blot on the Scutcheon," "Colombe's Birthday," " Luria," and "In a Balcony." The "Blot on the Scutcheon" was written in five days, as was also "The Return of the Druses" (vide Academy, Dec. 24, 1881). It would be hard to say that Browning deliberately sought this unity. It doubtless came from what we may call the instantaneousness of his intellectual processes. He almost always chooses for his subject a single mood or passion.

What you will have noticed here, as I trust elsewhere, is the close connection between the literary tenets of the time and the general condition of thought. To be sure, these do not always precisely coincide. We find the regular drama existing throughout the French Revolution, only giving way later before the attacks of the Romanticists, yet, in general, the widespread views of a period affect immediately the literary methods; in this case, too, the first leisure was devoted to making the drama over again. The task of our ancestors was establishing civilization and driving out barbarism, and what seemed to them one of their first duties was expelling barbarism from literature. What they thought barbarous, the Gothic architecture, mountains, and certain forms of poetry, we have learned to enjoy. If we bear these things in mind, and watch the growth of modern feelings during the last century, we shall get to understand the present better. There is, too, an advantage in studying a period of unbrilliant performance, that it gives an opportunity to see how opinions grow.

As to the play itself, and the excitement it produced, it was enormously admired. The political condition only added to the excitement; party feeling ran high, and, as Macaulay said, it was hoped that "the public would discover some analogy between the followers of Cæsar and the Tories, between Sempronius and the apostate Whigs, and between Cato, struggling to the last for the liberties of Rome, and the band of patriots who still stood firm round Halifax and Wharton." The Tories, however, were not to be outdone; each side determined to find nothing but compliments for itself in the political setting. Pope wrote that the applause "of the Whig party, on the one side, was echoed back by the Tories on the other, and after all the applauses of the opposite faction, Lord Boling

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