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And fetch me lightning, I will swallow it!

Snatch from the Cyclops balls of Etnean fire

And I will eat them! Steal thunder from the clouds
And dart it at me! Quaff Stygian Nonocris,
And I will pledge thee."

It was this want of sobriety, of propriety, of common sense, which prepared the way for a prosaic reaction. The dramatists were primarily to blame for this, and especially the tragic dramatists; and early in the reign of Charles I. almost everybody essayed to be a tragic dramatist. The playwrights of the great generation had pitched their note high; no one can deny that Shakespeare himself is often only saved from the charge of extravagance by the rush of his intellect, by his unparalleled tact and persuasiveness of style, and by his fortunate genius. He says things which might be monstrous, if the human race did not immediately consent to break records, as athletic people say, and to begin experience again from Shakespeare's point of view. But if the greatest of the poets of the world ran a risk from the turbulent instincts of the age he lived in, the lesser men, the immeasurably lesser men, that followed him, had no chance of keeping their heels on solid ground.

In estimating this quality of sobriety, of common sense, in poetry, we are somewhat at a discount in this age, and a critic who holds it healthy to be calm and discreet in poetic writing may still find himself brought face to face with a fiery indignation. The reaction against the bondage of the eighteenth century still gives us a tender partiality towards what is exaggerated, violent, and bombastic. Still, even in this matter, I think our general taste is progressing in a salutary direction. Fifteen years ago it used to be all the fashion among young men of poetic aspirations to affect the tragedies of Cyril Tourneur. The name was an agreeable one, the plays were very rare and difficult to meet with, and accordingly Cyril Tourneur became a kind of watchword of the higher culture, like Botticelli. Now Cyril Tourneur has been reprinted, with admirable care, by a very distinguished scholar, and I notice that his name becomes rarer and rarer on the lips and pens of the enthusiastic.

Without expressing the least disrespect towards a writer in whom a variety of critics have found much to praise, I am bound to say that the existence of Cyril Tourneur appears to me to be one little reason more, by the way, why the classical

reaction should be regarded as absolutely inevitable. Cyril Tourneur is a regular raw-head and bloody-bones, a vampire of literature, a purveyor of yells and dead-men's bodies and churchyard curses. The passages which attracted the admiration of Charles Lamb are sudden felicities, such as I have just said can be discovered, though, I allow, in fewer numbers and in less sustained brilliance, in a vast number of examples. But the general tenour of his writings is so monstrous, so confused, so obscure, that there are whole pages which might have been written by a Dyak of Borneo who had strayed into the school of Lycophron.

I would desire to recommend to anyone who holds that English poetry at the beginning of the seventeenth century was in a quiet, healthy condition, and needed merely to be allowed to go on its course, a chef-d'œuvre of Cyril Tourneur's called The Transformed Metamorphosis. I remember the shouts of joy among the elect when this masterpiece was first discovered in a unique copy some twelve years ago. Well, the editor and fondest admirer of Cyril Tourneur admits that the excessive obscurity of The Transformed Metamorphosis "arises as much from the abnormal and grotesque mould in which the whole poem is cast as from the

which their imaginative literature gave of any germ of realism, in the modern sense, was afforded by the domestic tragedies, on crimes of passing interest, which were now and then played, with startling crudities of effect, in the smaller theatres.

But in the next generation a complete change came over the national mind. In the great period, a friend of Shakespeare, Michael Drayton, had written a serene and lovely poem, in his leisurely way, on a period of English history. If I mention The Barons' Wars here, it is not with any notion of comparing it with the crude epics of the next generation, with the Purple Island and the Levite's Revenge, but merely to show how totally distinct the notion which so elegant and accomplished a poet as Drayton had of the function of history was from what appealed to the conscience of the men who fought against ship-money. To do so, I will quote one stanza out of The Barons' Wars, a stanza taken almost at random, a brick out of that stately building. The Earl of March is dying and he writes a letter to the Queen :—

"Most mighty Empress, sdaign not to peruse
The swan-like dirges of a dying man,

Unlike those raptures of the fluent Muse

In that sweet season when our joys began,

That did my youth with glorious fire infuse, When for thy glove at tilt I proudly ran; Whereas my startling courser strongly set Made fire to fly from Hartford's burgonet." • This is the first of seven stanzas, all in the same style, of which the letter is composed. We are given ten more, in which the agitation of the Queen on receiving it is described. It is all charming poetry, full of lovely and chivalrous images, and a passionate music runs through it. But the reader observes that it is not history, that it would be equally interesting as a letter of any dying soldier to any lady he had loved, and that it is obviously written to please readers who took a great deal more interest in hearing about a handsome earl who died for love of a fair queen, than in the effect that earl's insurrection may have had in improving the condition of the House of Commons, or than in the political results of that Queen's partiality for her fatherland. In point of fact, Drayton's poem would have been almost as charming and almost as popular if Mortimer had been named Amandus and the Queen Amanda.

To comprehend the mental condition which made the classical reaction possible, we must endeavour to realize this complete alteration in the temper of the readers of poetry. And one

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