has attained these ends, others must decide.
I am sure that he will not have failed from forgetting
them. He has, I believe, faithfully studied all
the documents of the period within his reach, making
little use of modern narratives; he has meditated
upon the past in its connection with the present;
has never allowed his reading to become dry by disconnecting
it with what he has seen and felt, or made his partial
experiences a measure for the acts which they help
him to understand. He has entered upon his work
at least in a true and faithful spirit, not regarding
it as an amusement for leisure hours, but as something
to be done seriously, if done at all; as if he was
as much ’under the Great Taskmaster’s
eye’ in this as in any other duty of his calling.
In certain passages and scenes he seemed to me to
have been a little too bold for the taste and temper
of this age. But having written them deliberately,
from a conviction that morality is in peril from fastidiousness,
and that it is not safe to look at questions which
are really agitating people’s hearts merely from
the outside—he has, and I believe rightly,
retained what I should from cowardice have wished
him to exclude. I have no doubt, that any one
who wins a victory over the fear of opinion, and especially
over the opinion of the religious world, strengthens
his own moral character, and acquires a greater fitness
for his high service.
Whether Poetry is again to revive among us, or whether
the power is to be wholly stifled by our accurate
notions about the laws and conditions under which
it is to be exercised, is a question upon which there
is room for great differences of opinion. Judging
from the past, I should suppose that till Poetry becomes
less self-conscious, less self-concentrated, more
dramatical in spirit, if not in form, it will
not have the qualities which can powerfully affect
Englishmen. Not only were the Poets of our most
national age dramatists, but there seems an evident
dramatical tendency in those who wrote what we are
wont to call narrative, or epic, poems. Take
away the dramatic faculty from Chaucer, and the Canterbury
Tales become indeed, what they have been most untruly
called, mere versions of French or Italian Fables.
Milton may have been right in changing the form of
the Paradise Lost,—we are bound to believe
that he was right; for what appeal can there be against
his genius? But he could not destroy the essentially
dramatic character of a work which sets forth the
battle between good and evil, and the Will of Man
at once the Theatre and the Prize of the conflict.
Is it not true, that there is in the very substance
of the English mind, that which naturally predisposes
us to sympathy with the Drama, and this though we
are perhaps the most untheatrical of all people?
The love of action, the impatience of abstraction,
the equity which leads us to desire that every one
may have a fair hearing, the reserve which had rather
detect personal experience than have it announced—
tendencies all easily perverted to evil, often leading
to results the most contradictory, yet capable of
the noblest cultivation—seem to explain
the fact, that writers of this kind should have flourished
so greatly among us, and that scarcely any others should
permanently interest us.
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