Adolphus William Ward

“ When writing The Lover’s Melancholy, it would seem that Ford had not yet become fully aware of the bent of his own dramatic genius, although he was already master of his powers of poetic expression. He was attracted towards domestic tragedy by an irresistible desire to sound the depths of abnormal conflicts between passion and circumstances, to romantic comedy by a strong though not widely varied imaginative faculty, and by a delusion that he was possessed of abundant comic humour. ”

“ What wonder that under Philip and afterwards during Margaret's governorship all classes in the Netherlands should have been practically unanimous in their desire for peace, and that even the Gelders War, upon a successful termination of which the achievement of political unity depended, was held a burden? And what favour could the endeavours expect to find which, set on foot by Maximilian, were carried out by Charles V for establishing in a new form an organic connexion between the whole of the provinces and the Empire at large? ”

“ In return, though many princesses have been admired with equal ardour, none has ever been served with more unselfish fidelity than she; it was one thing to excite an enthusiasm such as that which on the morrow of the Bohemian catastrophe is said to have led thirty gentlemen of the Middle Temple to swear on their drawn swords to live or die in her service, and another to inspire a life-long devotion of deeds in champions so different from one another as Christian of Halberstadt and Lord Craven. ”

“ Curiously enough, the long-lived but cumbrous growth called pantomime in England owes its immediate origin to the beginnings of a dramatic species which has artistically furnished congenial delight to nearly two centuries of Frenchmen. Of the early history of vaudeville it must here suffice to say that the unprivileged actors, at the fairs, who had borrowed some of the favourite character-types of Italian popular comedy, after eluding prohibitions against the use by them of dialogue and song, were at last allowed to setup a comic opera of their own. ”

“ Perversity—or would-be originality—alone could declare Jonson’s tragedy preferable to his comedy. Even if the revolution which he created in the comic branch of the drama had been mistaken in its principles or unsatisfactory in its results, it would be clear that the strength of his dramatic genius lay in the power of depicting a great variety of characters, and that in comedy alone he succeeded in finding a wide field for the exercise of this power. ”

“ How far Hrosvitha’s comedies were an isolated phenomenon of their age in Germany must remain undecided; in the general history of the drama they form the visible bridge between the few earlier attempts at utilizing the forms of the classical drama for Christian purposes and the miracle plays. They are in any case the productions of genius; nor has Hrosvitha missed the usual tribute of the supposition that Shakespeare has borrowed from her writings. ”

“ In other countries, where the favourite types of Italian popular comedy had been less generally seen or were unknown, popular comic figures such as the English fools and clowns, the German Hanswurst, or the Dutch Pickelhering, were ready to renew themselves in any and every fashion which preserved to them the gross salt favoured by their patrons. Indeed, in Germany, where the term pantomime was not used, a rude form of dramatic buffoonery, corresponding to the coarser sides of the modern English species so-called, long flourished, and threw back for centuries the progress of the regular drama. ”

“ As early as the thirteenth century Bruges, practically a port by means of its control of Sluys, had become a world's fair, and Ghent in Eastern and Ypres in Western Flanders had grown with amazing rapidity into great industrial centres of population surrounded by many other flourishing towns of which the names are now in part forgotten. With their activity and wealth had grown a sense of power and an impatience of external control for which in the Middle Ages no complete parallel could have been found on the hither side of the Alps. ”

“ His satire against those everlasting victims of English comedy and farce, the Englishman in Paris and the Englishman returned from Paris, was doubtless well warranted; while at the same time he made fun of the fact that Englishmen are nowhere more addicted to the society of their countrymen than abroad. In general, the purposes of Foote’s social satire are excellent, and the abuses against which it is directed are those which it required courage to attack. The tone of his morality is healthy, and his language, though not aiming at refinement, is remarkably free from intentional grossness. ”

“ For the rest, patriotic sentiment liberally asserts itself by the side of general morality. If Cumberland’s dialogue lacks brilliance and his characters reality, the construction of the plots is as a rule, skilful, and the situations are contrived with what Cumberland indisputably possessed—a thorough insight into the secrets of theatrical effect. It should be added that, though Cumberland’s sentimentality is often wearisome, his morality is generally sound; that if he was without the genius requisite for elevating the national drama, he did his best to keep it pure and sweet ”

“ With regard to future volumes—since the history of a nation’s literature cannot be divorced from some consideration of its political, religious, and social life, including its manners as well as its phases of sentiment and fashion, its trivial thoughts no less than its serious moments—the editors have thought it well to make some provision for treating certain subjects more or less closely allied to literature pure or proper. ”

“ The comic element is not absent, being supplied in abundance by Adam, the clown of the piece, who belongs to the family of Slipper, and of Friar Bacon’s servant, Miles.
Greene’s dramatic genius has nothing in it of the intensity of Marlowe’s tragic muse; nor perhaps does he ever equal Peele at his best. On the other hand, his dramatic poetry is occasionally animated with the breezy freshness which no artifice can simulate. ”

“ Gaskell disputed her companion's sad view of human life: ‘I thought that human lots were more equal than she imagined; that to some happiness and sorrow came in strong patches of light and shadow (so to speak) , while in the lives of others they were pretty equally blended throughout.’ To perceive this was to understand a lesson of the book of life which few modern imaginative writers have so powerfully and yet so unaffectedly impressed upon their readers. ”

“ After reaching the highest form at Westminster, Jonson is stated, but on unsatisfactory evidence, to have proceeded to the university of Cambridge; but at the utmost he can only have made a transitory appearance in a scene of which as a painter of men and manners he nowhere reproduces a single feature. And doubtless he felt that neither his crop of learning and experience nor his wild oats were yet fully sown, when, goose quill or other implement in hand, he had to apply himself to the family business. ”

“ He was content to stand by himself-herein a true representative of the Renaissance, whose supreme purpose it was after all to vindicate to every man the right of remaining true to his individuality by means of self-education and self-development. Whether or not, from this point of view also, he was in some respects a typical product of his native land, the Reformation as it presented itself to the Netherlands, and as they gave admittance to it with consequences so vital for their future history, was not the Reformation of Erasmus. ”

“ In an enquiry embracing the history of motives, causes, and ends, it is often far less important to dwell on “leading” personalities and on the main tendencies of literary production, than to consider subsidiary movements and writers below the highest rank, and to trace, in apparently arid periods, processes which were often carried on, as it were, underground, or seemed to be such as could safely be ignored. It cannot be too often urged that there are few, if any, isolated phenomena; the voices may be voices crying in the wilderness, but they belong to those who prepare the way. ”

“ Though Ben Jonson never altogether recognized the truth of the maxim that the dramatic art has properly speaking no didactic purpose, his long and laborious life was not wasted upon a barren endeavour. In tragedy he added two works of uncommon merit to our dramatic literature. In comedy his aim was higher, his effort more sustained, and his success more solid than were those of any of his fellows. In the subsidiary and hybrid species of the masque, he helped to open a new and attractive though undoubtedly devious path in the field of dramatic literature. ”

“ Mr Swinburne, in his eloquent essay on Ford, has rightly shown what is the meaning of this tragedy, and has at the same time indicated wherein consists its poison. He dwells with great force upon the different treatment applied by Ford to the characters of the two miserable lovers—brother and sister. “The sin once committed, there is no more wavering or flinching possible to him, who has fought so hard against the demoniac possession; while she who resigned body and soul to the tempter, almost at a word, remains liable to the influences of religion and remorse.” ”

“ The triple and quadruple alliances made that peace a reality, and the ambition of Spain, even when, linked with the dynastic interests of Austria, broke helplessly on the rock of a firm alliance between Great Britain and France. The interests of Hanover were, it is true, paramount in the eyes of George I, but with the exception of the ill-judged designs against the czar in 1716, the interests of Hanover were in substance those of England, and when they seemed to conflict in 1725, the king was found ready to postpone the less to the greater. ”

“ Pantomime carried everything before it when there were several theatres in London, and a dearth of high dramatic talent prevailed in all; and, allowing for occasional counter attractions of a not very dissimilar nature, pantomime continued to flourish after the Licensing Act of 1737 had restricted the number of London play-houses, and after Garrick's star had risen on the theatrical horizon. He was himself obliged to satisfy the public appetite, and to disoblige the admirers of his art, in deference to the drama's most imperious patrons—the public at large. ”

“ Furthermore, in those centres of civic life, whose mercantile and industrial prosperity had in the Europe of the later Middle Ages been the real source of the importance of the Netherlands and of the Burgundian monarchy, that prosperity was except in certain specially favoured seaports helplessly and hopelessly on the wane; and the great communes which had of old been its most favoured seats, were, in the truthful words of a modern historian, smitten to the heart. ”

“ To force an account of literary, educational, or scientific movements into chronological shackles, and make it keep step year by year with the progress of external events, or to present it as an orderly development when its edges are, in truth, woefully ragged, is not always either possible or desirable. From time to time, buried treasure comes to light; things seemingly of a day suddenly reveal the strength that is in them and become things for all time ”

“ The gift which both in his art and in his life Jonson lacked was that of exercising the influence or creating the effects which he wished to exercise or create without the appearance of consciousness. ”

“ In his earlier plays Foote constantly resorts to the most hackneyed device of farce—a disguise. Of course Foote must have been well aware of the shortcomings of his rapidly manufactured productions; he knew that if he might sneer at “genteel comedy” as suited to the dramatists of the servants’ hall, and pronounce the arts of the drama at the great houses to be “directed by the genius of insipidity,” he, like the little theatre where he held sway, was looked upon as “an eccentric, a mere summer fly.” ”

“ William III's chief title to fame consists in his lucid perception, from first to last, of the political task of his life, and in the single-minded consistency with which he devoted himself to its accomplishment. This task was, in a word, to save the united provinces from being overwhelmed by France. The military leadership in the crisis of the French invasion he assumed as belonging to him by inheritance. But, the extremity of peril past, he recognised that the peril itself remained. To avert it he made himself indispensable as the leader of the European coalition against Louis XIV ”

“ The lasciviousness, that pervaded the Court of Charles VII of France and made that of Edward IV a seminary of pleasant vice, readily found its way into the surroundings of Philip the Good, who had a large family of bastards, and mistresses by the score. The extravagant delights in which the nobles might share when not engaged in warlike service impoverished many and ruined some; and Charles the Bold's relations with his nobility were strained to the utmost by the military burdens which he imposed on them. ”

“ The rumour of his intention to bring upon the stage, in the character of Lady Kitty Crocodile in The Trip to Calais, the notorious duchess of Kingston, whose trial for bigamy was then (1775) impending, roused his intended victim to the utmost fury; and the means and influence she had at her disposal enabled her, not only to prevail upon the lord chamberlain to prohibit the performance of the piece (in which there is no hint as to the charge of bigamy itself) , but to hire agents to vilify Foote’s character in every way that hatred and malice could suggest. ”

“ Gaskell, gratefully acknowledging her ‘sweet encouraging words,’ has been printed in the ‘British Weekly.’ George Sand, only a few months before Mrs. Gaskell's death, observed to Lord Houghton: ‘Mrs. Gaskell has done what neither I nor other female writers in France can accomplish; she has written novels which excite the deepest interest in men of the world, and yet which every girl will be the better for reading.’ None of our novelists has shown a more extraordinary power of self-development. ”

“ Nor did Jonson (happily) attempt to work out this idea with any excessive scientific consistency as a comic dramatist. But, by refusing to apply the term “humour” (q.v.) to a mere peculiarity or affectation of manners, and restricting its use to actual or implied differences or distinctions of character, he broadened the whole basis of English comedy after his fashion, as Molière at a later date, keeping in closer touch with the common experience of human life, with a lighter hand broadened the basis of French and of modern Western comedy at large. ”

“ It has frequently been assumed that the progress of art and literature in the Netherlands must have benefited by the patronage of an open-handed dynasty and a sumptuous Court. But, although the Renaissance owed not a little to the goodwill of Philip the Good and his family, they either used its culture as a political expedient or (in Voltaire's phrase) treated it as a passe-temps. ”

“ Neither Kneller's brush nor Bird's less fortunate chisel, nor the flattery, often equally robust, of her poets and prose writers, has succeeded in persuading posterity that good Queen Anne was either an attractive woman or—though she appropriated to herself Queen Elizabeth's motto (semper eadem) —a great queen. On the other hand, spared though she was by neither foe nor friend, yet even in her own libellous age it was chiefly left to foreign pens to libel a genuinely national queen. ”

“ It is a very futile criticism to condemn Jonson’s characters as a mere series of types of general ideas; on the other hand, it is a very sound criticism to object, with Barry Cornwall, to the “multitude of characters who throw no light upon the story, and lend no interest to it, occupying space that had better have been bestowed upon the principal agents of the plot.” ”

“ In the early days of Charles II's reign his firmness was favourably contrasted with the fickleness of the king; but Clarendon concluded that it was due to obstinacy of will rather than to intellectual conviction (Clarendon, Life, iii. 64) . ‘The king,’ said Buckingham, ‘could see things if he would; the duke would see things if he could’ (Burnet, i. 304) . His fidelity to old servants might be amply illustrated. His confidence once gained was estranged with even too much difficulty. ”