of translation, whether made by ourselves or others. The words of one language frequently arouse quite different sensations in the mind from those produced by the words of another, which strictly correspond in meaning. The associations that gather about them in two tongues are often essentially unlike. Only in the matter of our own speech can we feel justified in expressing positive opinion. Nothing, for illustration, can be more offensive than Fletcher's representation in The Sea-Voyage' of the suffering that goes on among those who are so reduced by the lack of food that they contemplate killing one of their own number to save themselves from starvation.1 Of all times, this would seem the last for the display of wit; yet it is the very time he selects. Everything which is said is, in consequence, wholly out of place. Nor is that the worst. We are not only struck by the inappropriateness of the conversation which goes on, we are also disgusted by the nauseousness of its details.

In the matter of tragi-comedy we have seen that it was Shakespeare's practice that had finally justified the romantic drama. Just so did his example justify the artistic liberty of the playwright to deal with representation of scenes of violence, subject not to conventional law, but to the capability he possessed of producing effects at once powerful and pleasing. That in this particular he himself occasionally went to an extreme, may be conceded. Still it is very rarely the case that he pushed the privilege of the stage too far, or put the feelings of the audience to any undue test. On that 1 Act iii. scene 1.

delicate border line which separates the more from the less, he in general trod not only unhesitatingly but safely. It was his conduct in the revolt that went on from this rule of the classicists, as well as in the deviations previously considered, which secured for the romantic drama, even in foreign lands, first toleration and then approval. For its adherents he vindicated their full right to deal in their own way with the materials upon which they labored. Had it not been for him, there was certainly danger, at one time, that the English race, in spite of its natural distaste for productions in which declamation and narrative usurp the place of action, might have taken up its home for a while within that narrow circle of ideas which looked upon such pieces as the only ones conforming to true art. Efforts were put forth at various periods to banish from the stage painful and cruel scenes. Examples of this disposition can be found in the very time in which Shakespeare flourished. In Daniel's never-acted play of Cleopatra' the death of the heroine was not to be witnessed; instead a messenger announces the circumstances attending it in a speech that takes up more than two hundred and fifty lines. It requires no great stretch of imagination to surmise the sort of reception which a long-winded oration of this sort would have had in the stormy English theatre of the Elizabethan period. The actor who persisted in repeating it would have run the risk of meeting at the hands of an indignant audience the fate he was trying to describe; and few would then have been found to deny that he deserved the death he had been made to suffer.

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Attempts of this same general nature met with more favor in the eighteenth century. It seemed for a time, indeed, that the effort to discard from stage representation scenes of violence with the circumstances attending them, might gain a temporary triumph: anything more than temporary it never could have been. The impropriety of such representations was preached from a hundred critical pulpits. Supported, too, as this view was by many who were regarded as authoritative leaders. of public opinion, it could not fail to make then a certain number of converts. Writers for the stage were disposed to comply with the requirement. The politer part of the audiences—the occupants of the boxes-frequently felt it their duty to admire works in which restraint of this sort, as well as other kinds of poetical decorum, had been faithfully observed. In their secret hearts they found such plays depressingly dull; but they were prepared to sacrifice their genuine feelings on the altar of art. Their state of mind is depicted in a lively afterpiece of Mrs. Clive's, first brought out in 1750, in which a female author gives her reasons for preparing a burletta for the stage. "My motive for writing," she is represented as saying, "was really compassion: the town has been so overwhelmed with tragedies lately that they are in one entire fit of the vapors. They think they love 'em, but it is no such thing. I was there one night this season at a tragedy, and there was such a universal yawn in the house, that had it not been for a great quantity of drums and trumpets, that most judiciously came in every now and then to their relief, the whole audience would have fallen asleep."1 1 The Rehearsal, or Bays in Petticoats, p. 15.

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In a similar strain Bentley's son, the friend of Walpole and Gray, deplored the general decadence which had overtaken creative work in the age which felicitated itself upon its lofty critical standards. In a poetical epistle to Lord Melcombe, he observed,

"With Milton epic drew its latest breath,

Since Shakespeare tragedy puts us to death." 1

It requires now the painful reading of the eighteenthcentury classical drama to appreciate the exact justice of these references to its character. Fortunately that portion of the audience which filled the pit and the galleries felt themselves under no obligation to pretend to like what they found unendurably tedious. It was they who all along had instinctively recognized that the course which Shakespeare had taken was the only one which ought to be taken. It can therefore be said justly that to him in this respect, as in others, the deliverance of the drama is due. Furthermore, he not only wrought it solely, he wrought it completely. Criticism, which once found no word too severe to arraign his methods, has at last toiled tardily after him to acknowledge them as being in accordance with the highest art. For Shakespeare himself it has therefore been a personal triumph as well as the triumph of a cause.

1 St. James's Magazine, vol. ii. p. 5 (1762).

CHAPTER VI

MINOR DRAMATIC CONVENTIONS

THE disregard of the unities, the intermingling of comic and tragic scenes in the same production, the representation of deeds of violence by action instead of narration, these are the three essential characteristics of the romantic drama as opposed to the classical. Other differences there are; but they are accidental and changing: these are distinctive and permanent. But in addition to them sprang up a body of conventions of another kind. Some of them were accepted only in limited circles, and served little other purpose than to give the critic who looked upon them as infallible an opportunity to chastise the author who failed to observe them. Others there were which for a certain period were very generally accepted. They have furthermore been treated occasionally as distinctions between the two dramatic schools. Such, however, they are not in reality. To a slight extent they became so, owing to the tendency of the one to grant to the writer the fullest liberty of action, and the corresponding tendency of the other to restrict it within the narrowest possible limits. But they pertain rather to the freedom of the stage itself than to the methods of any particular school.