character of modern intercourse, and by those arbitrary distinctions which break up society into cliques and sets. It is before the principle of division and mechanical arrangement has supplanted the essential ties by the conventional modes of life, and weakened the tone of the individual mind even while increasing its stores and multiplying its implements, that the poet possesses that many-handed versatility of resource combined with that fiery and yet majestic intensity of mind, which is necessary to awaken his dramatic faculty and endow its creations with life and reality. Life, however, is life in every age, and there can never be a time in which dramatic art will not find its resources if the impulse of the poet be strong enough to bear him up against circumstances. Of this we have proof in such a work as Edwin the Fair. The subject of this Saxon drama abounds in variety of interests, political, ecclesiastical, personal, and romantic; and not less various are the modes of treatment. It is the privilege of the mixed drama to reconcile many different styles. In the following extract the songs of the two fortune-tellers foreshow the fortunes of the Earls Athulf and Leolf A Thane. Hark ye! are we blind? The Princess was led in by brave Earl Athulf; And didst thou mark the manner of it, ha? Scholar. Methought she leaned upon him and toward him With a most graceful timid earnestness; A leaning more of instinct than of purpose, And yet not undesigned. But think you then.. [They pass. Heida (sings to a harp). She was fresh and she was fair, He was true and he was bold, Love ye wisely, love ye well; Love and truth can ride it out, Come bridal song or battle shout. First Priest. Our gallant Heretoch, the good Earl Leolf, Should have been there methought. Second Priest. He should have been; [They pass. But there are reasons, look ye,-reasons-mum— Most excellent reasons-softly-in your ear And two hands that divided As the foam in the moonlight He knew the pale forehead A spell to his ear Was the voice that repeated, "I come, Love," he answered. A fisherman wakened The Priest in the Bay : "For the soul of a sinner The sin shall be nameless, And nameless the dead." 1 These are good songs, and there are few things which it is so difficult to write. The moment we endeavour to give completeness or wholeness to a song the true lyrical spirit is lost. It is a vain labour to balance part against part; to elaborate some central thought, and illustrate it with metaphors. A song is essentially fragmentary. It is a mass of closely charged feeling suddenly finding vent, catching in its passage a stream of imaginative thought-melting into it, and scattering itself abroad in harmonious words. One characteristic of a good song, and a reason why in modern poetry we have so few, is its objectivity. The passion expressed is unconscious of itself: it is borne by a happy instinct at once to its object: it 1 Pp. 87-91. sinks into that object and loses itself. There exists a remarkable analogy between the lyrical and the dramatic faculties. The mind of a dramatic poet must, like the island of Prospero, be full of noises, Sounds, and sweet airs, that give delights and hurt not. The ground should be firm and strong, but the air which hangs above it must swell and undulate with music ever ready to shoot a sweet note through the discords of the world below, to sustain courage in the midst of mischance, and to promise better things for the future. The characters of a drama are not mere individual men: they belong at least to a generic, if not to a moral ideal. Nor is nature in poetry mere nature: it borders more closely than common life on an archetypal region of justice and of glory. Throughout the whole drama there must thus be infused a certain lyrical spirit—that is, a spirit of elevation, buoyancy, and vitality. Songs are this spirit condensed and made visible: they are the sudden and electric flashes of this poetical element concentrated, mating itself to new forms, and restoring the equilibrium of imagination and passion. The Greek Tragedy, as is well known, originated in the choral ode, and retained to the end of its nobler period a predominance of the lyrical character. This circumstance is alone sufficient to account for the ideal structure of that drama, as well as its elevated spirit, and in part for the impassioned rapidity of its action, in which event followed event with a turbulent precipitance like the successive notes of a triumphal song. In England the species of poetry which, before the period of the drama, had most found its way to the hearts of the people was the narrative ballad; and if we suppose the ballad to have had something of the same influence in suggesting our Historical Drama as was exerted by the ode on the Greek Tragedy, the conception will facilitate our understanding the great difference between those two species of composition. We shall thus observe the necessary superiority of the classic Tragedy in poetic loftiness, and its inferiority in variety, in detail, in familiar pathos, in local associations, and in picturesque effect. In some of these latter qualities the Historic Drama has an advantage over our own Tragedy also. One remarkable difference between our romantic Tragedy and Historic Drama is forcibly recalled to our recollection by the work before us. In pure Tragedy there is, or there ought to be, more of intensity, of concentrated energy, and consequently of elevation, than in the Historic; but in the latter species of composition the deficiency may be atoned for by a greater breadth of effect and more of philosophical thought. Hence too the historic drama presents us with a calmer and more widely instructive picture of human life. In Tragedy the problem of life is pressed upon our attention: in the Historic Play it is solved. The former, from its very superiority in compactness, does not leave, as it were, room for light the different characters stand so close together : |