ABSTRACT
There seems to be a great barrenness of invention and dearth of conception among our modern dramatists. We have had nothing either very touching or bold in the shape of native English tragedy for fifty years. The pathos of Otway, the deep and heart-rending distress of Southerne, 1 are not likely to be soon imitated, and, at all events, the reproduction of them has been so long suspended, as to mark a sensible variation of capacity, though, even under a more depraved state of morals, it does not strike us that this would mark a change of national taste. To enjoy the strong sensation which flows from a sympathy with theatrical woe, or tenderness, or passion, it is not necessary that we should be most virtuous. It is not unusual for men to spare a tear for fictitious distress, or illustrious misery, at the very moment, perhaps, when they are wilfully and knowingly in the habitual neglect of some essential and obvious duty. Be that as it may, the pathos and the deep distress are, now, hardly ever seen on our stage. Thomson tried something which was a mixture of both these; 2 but it was a great deal too pure, too raised from active human nature, and had too much to do with the passive excellencies which shine like a winter-moon, cold, powerless, and only bright. He took not pains enough to catch hold on any lurking traits of prejudice in favour of peculiar privileges, or admiration of vigorous villany. Home tried the same track; 3 and, as men of mediocrity and of chastised tastes never fail to do, fairly ran it down. Since that time we have been diluting the highly flavoured 414strong drink of the Germans—or giving servile and spiritless versions from the romantic and poetical among our old English playwrights. We have gone on this way, one man writing his six epics of chivalry, and another his six epics of pure romance, while, in lyric and impassioned poetry, chords which had not been touched before, have not only been struck, but sounded in all their pitch and compass. The tragic and poetical drama alone is left as it were in despair. That author who must be strictly said to have by far the happiest genius—not of his country merely, but of his age—and who possesses greater fecundity of invention, and versatility of exertion, than any human being that ever wrote to please a fashion, or to gratify an appetite which he himself had created; even Scott has hitherto abstained from that species of composition, in which to excel, would be the summit of his fame. All the world knows the merits of Miss Baillie. But none of her plays could ever bear long to be represented on the stage; and her compositions are too philosophically constructed and connected ever to please as dramas. Mr. Coleridge himself has tried the bold, vigorous, and sinewy style of tragedy which prevailed from the Elizabethan age down to Dryden’s time, when it was corrupted by the Gallicisms, and, to use his own phrase, ‘dashed and brewed’ by the spurious transplantations with which he deformed his inventions, and wasted down the vigour of his ‘mighty line’. But Remorse, though it had many beauties, both of thought and expression, and though its interest rested on nothing strained in incident, or monstrous in the conception of character—nothing in the style of Lewis’s Castle Spectre, 1 nor like some late tragedies, yet it possessed too little adaptation, and only a very scanty interest in its plot or scene. It was a classical composition of its kind, however. Its first run was considerable, it procured for its author a greater honour than has been bestowed on any dramatic poet by an audience since the time of Voltaire;★ and though it seems now to be laid by, not to remain as a stock acting play, yet it will always please in the closet. It has several passages which attest the powerful bard that struck the chord of the lyric ode with a wilder tone, and a more prevailing sway, with a more raised, enthusiastic, and commanding 415spirit, than any English poet, with the exceptions only of Dryden and of Gray.★
