traced through its various stages. Almost immediately after the Restoration the proscenium, which had already existed before the Commonwealth, was freely employed, and helped to sever the audience from the front of the stage. The back stage grew in size, and the curtain, which in the Elizabethan theatre had shut off only a small corridor or alcove, was now thrust further forward. The front stage was correspondingly decreased, and was eventually seen from the side by certain boxholders only, instead of, as in the Elizabethan play-house, by a great number of the spectators standing in the yard'. While these developments were occurring, the stage scenery was becoming more various and elaborate, and was employed on the front part of the stage and at its sides, no less than at its back. In 1762 spectators were excluded from the stage, and the auditorium was enlarged to receive the resulting overflow. In many theatres a few boxes remained behind the proscenium till the nineteenth century, but this did not effect the general change of structure. For the great majority of the spectators, the stage was no longer a reciting-platform jutting into their midst, and supported in certain cases by a meagre back scene: it had assumed the form of a picture, of which the proscenium was the frame-a picture from which they were excluded, and at which they gazed from without. The growing elaboration of scenery made it possible, and indeed necessary, to accompany the action of the play by an elaborate illusion of reality, instead of by its mere suggestion. In his conceptions of place and setting the playwright was limited to developments suitable to the scene-painter, who first became his rival, and then his master and tyrant, overwhelming his descriptive poetry with his own more showy and tawdry devices. Although various kinds of romantic play still continued to Effect of hold the theatre, it was obvious that the new staging made the New rather for realism than for romance, for prose rather than for Staging. poetry, for quiet and life-like dialogue rather than for splendid declamation. For a considerable while many survivals of Elizabethan acting and setting continued to hold a stage to which they were no longer appropriate; and it is only in our own age that the actors have learnt, for the sake of increased realism, to abolish the aside, to restrict very rigorously the use of the soliloquy, and to act throughout as if unconscious of the spectators' presence. The modern picture stage is now regarded both by player, playwright, and spectator, as a room out of which one side has been knocked, and into which the audience are only allowed to peep by stealth. Obviously such a condition of things has favoured the realistic prose play, and has handicapped the romantic and poetic. In some countries it has been possible to overcome this handicap by the institution of theatres subsidized by the State, in which drama can be performed without regard to the box-office receipts, and the audience can be educated till it gets over the initial incongruity between the romantic play and the realistic stage. In Classic and Romantic Plays Lillo and others. continental countries possessing such theatres, the romantic drama still flourishes, and the tradition thus kept alive has affected and improved the repertory of privately-managed houses. But in England, where there is no national theatre, the private actor-manager is content to follow the line of least resistance, with the result that, for nearly two and a half centuries, little romantic drama of the first order has been written for the English stage, and none so written has held its place. This change in the structure of the stage, combined with the influence of the modern commercial actor-manager, must be held a main cause of the decay of English drama. A second cause must be sought in the general attitude of the eighteenth century toward literature and life. The greatness of Elizabethan drama had been largely due to the freedom and variety in which the national spirit had found expression. The growing tendency toward order and restriction, though it was favourable to some kinds of literature, was certainly not so to romantic drama, whether tragedy or comedy. The quickened moral sense of the period, which gave a certain impetus both to the essay and to satire, appears less acceptably in the 'moralized dramas' of Cibber, and in the sentimentalized comedies of Steele, and provokes, by a natural and significant reaction, such licentious drama as that of Mrs. Centlivre (1680-1722). The prevailing classicism of the age takes dramatic shape in many adaptations from Corneille and Racine, and in a series of original plays ranging from Addison's Cato to Johnson's Irene. Toward the middle of the century, classical drama was given a fresh impetus through adaptations of Voltaire's plays, and the production of many plays written on the Voltairean model by Arthur Murphy and others. Yet the romantic element was kept alive in constant revivals of Shakespeare, and in such tragedies as The Revenge and Busiris of Edward Young (1681-1765), which show signs of Elizabethan influence. Romantic after a somewhat different fashion was the Douglas (1756) of John Home (1722-1808), a play very famous in its time, yet now little read, and chiefly familiar through the serio-comic suggestion of the quotation My name is Norval'. Some years later Hannah More attempted, in Percy, to fit the spirit of romantic tragedy to the fashionable taste for moral casuistry. The Different in spirit and technique, and embodying a conscious reaction against both the classical and the romantic play, are the domestic tragedies of George Lillo (1693-1739). London Merchant, or the History of George Barnwell (1731), is written in prose, and is based upon an Elizabethan ballad narrating the fall of a prentice who had taken to evil courses. The Fatal Curiosity (1736), written in uninspired blank verse, follows the model of Arden of Feversham and The Yorkshire Tragedy, and tells the story of a Cornish murder case. Lillo also adapted Shakespeare, and attempted romantic tragedy; but his chief importance is due to the plays just named, which, though far from intrinsically great, had a notable effect on the Though comedy reaches no very high level throughout the Comedy earlier part of the eighteenth century, on the whole it suffered and Burless than tragedy from the effects just indicated. It was lesque. occasionally, indeed, stimulated by both the classical and the romantic tendencies of contemporary drama to a certain vigour of reaction, finding outlet in such free burlesques as Fielding's Tom Thumb the Great (1731) and Henry Carey's Chrononhotonthologos (1734). These plays proclaim their satiric intent by their respective sub-titles, The Tragedy of Tragedies and The Most Tragical Tragedy ever Tragediz'd by any Company of Tragedians. The sentimental pitfall is avoided in such spirited comedies as The Fair Quaker of Deal, by Charles Shadwell-a nephew of Dryden's Og'-and The Suspicious Husband (1747), by Joseph Hoadly, son of a famous ecclesiastic. Similar freedom and robustness characterize many plays by George Colman the elder (1732-1794), a prolific writer whose best work is to be found in The Jealous Wife (1761) and The Clandestine Marriage (1766), a comedy written in collaboration with David Garrick. Pantomime had early established itself upon the eighteenth-century stage farce also was in continual favour, being regularly produced by Garrick during his managership of Drury Lane (1747-76), and receiving a racy topical turn from Samuel Foote1 (1720-1777). The satirical and topical element was also strong in the ballad opera, which reached its triumph in Gay's Beggar's Opera (1728), and received a fresh lease of popularity in Isaac Bickerstaff's Padlock (1768). : It is significant of the national instinct in dramatic matters, that the two leading English playwrights of the eighteenth century achieved their triumphs through the more robust and elemental effects of comedy, rather than by recourse to the comédie larmoyante. Goldsmith's plays, and their relation to the spirit of their time, will be discussed separately. The first play of Sheridan (1751-1816), The Rivals (1775), depends Sheridan in large measure for its success on its ingenious plot, which its -The author took over from tradition, and refashioned with fresh Rivals. and brilliant skill. But the rollicking interest of situation is heightened by the sure and spirited drawing of the main 1 Author of The Minor, The Mayor of Garratt, The Maid of Bath. The Duenna, &c. The School for The Critic. Lesser Dramatists. characters, Sir Anthony Absolute, Mrs. Malaprop, Sir Lucius O'Trigger, and Bob Acres, all of whom rank among the great comic figures of our literature. The dialogue of this superb farce is quick and sparkling, and its structure and colouring are in nearly all ways admirable. A concession to the prevailing taste of the day is evident in the sentimental underplot between Falkland and Julia. The Rivals, though not written in the highest style of English comedy, nor of Sheridan, is a masterpiece in a delightful kind. Sheridan's next play, St. Patrick's Day (1775), is a farce, hastily written and startlingly inferior to its predecessor. The Duenna contains flashes of wit,1 but owes what interest it commands rather to its ingenious, if not wholly original, situations than to any particular brilliancy of dialogue or character drawing. In 1777 Sheridan produced A Trip to Scarborough, a skilful rehandling of Vanbrugh's Relapse; and in the same year appeared his greatest play, The School for Scandal, which has justly been described as the last great English comedy'. Though here, as generally, he drew upon conventional types, he has shaped these into such living and unforgettable figures as Charles Surface, fine-souled beneath his libertinism, Joseph Surface, the scoundrelly sentiment', and Lady Teazle, the flighty, wavering, and, in the end, repentant woman of fashion. In the main plot of the play Sheridan reaches his highest flight of comedy: more obvious humours are embodied in the grotesques', Sir Benjamin Backbite, Crabtree, Mrs. Candour, and the rest of the School', who by no means equal the grotesques' of The Rivals. The dialogue has not only wit, but the peculiar ease and fling distinctive of all Sheridan's best work. The School for Scandal has not quite the elemental quality of Molière's highest comedy, but it is a masterly portrayal of the manners of its time, and of the psychology of fashionable society in all times. 6 man of In The Critic (1779), Sheridan has his merry fling at the dramatic affectations of his day. The first act introduces certain hangers-on of the stage, drawn with malicious and brilliant satire-the vicious criticaster Sneer, the stage-struck Dangle, Sir Fretful Plagiary, and Puff, that inimitably-drawn dramatic factotum. Puff is at once author and producer of the fantastic historic drama, The Spanish Armada, which supplies the roaring fun of the last two acts, and is the most brilliant dramatic caricature in the language. The loves of Whiskerandos and Tilburina are a joy for ever, and The Critic, though not the greatest, is surely the most laughable of Sheridan's plays. The remaining dramatists of the period may be briefly 1 As when Donna Louisa remarks to her lover, who has given up the Jewish religion for an estate, but has not yet become Christian, that he 'stands like a dead wall between Church and Synagogue, or like the blank leaves between the Old and New Testament'. dismissed. Mrs. Hannah Cowley wrote a series of comedies-including The Runaway (1776) and The Belle's Stratagem (1780)-obsequiously adapted to the successive demands of popular taste. General Burgoyne, in The Heiress (1786), has left a comedy of higher, though not of the finest, quality. The drama of social purpose is represented by The Road to Ruin (1792) and The Deserted Daughter of Thomas Holcroft, and, to a certain extent, by the domestic comedies of Mrs. Inchbald. But by the end of the eighteenth century the stage drama, mainly for the causes above specified, had almost ceased to rank as one of the higher kinds of literature; and this estrangement remains all but absolute till the death of the nineteenth century and the birth of the Repertory Theatre and the modern literary play. CHAPTER XXIV THE AGE OF JOHNSON: PROSE The Spirit of Augustan literature - Johnson, Boswell, Goldsmith, THE period of Addison, Pope, and Swift, even more than The Spirit most literary periods, had been affected by concomitant of political and social conditions. The order and restraint which Augustan had been imposed after the Revolution on a country wellnigh Literadistraught by civil war and Stuart misrule, had had its ture. parallel in the literary reaction against the licence of the 'metaphysical' school and against the imaginative excesses which Dryden had not hesitated to attribute even to Shakespeare. The particular form of the heroic couplet which reached its perfection in Pope was an admirable antidote to the metrical laxity which had been growing in blank verse from the day of Fletcher to that of Nicholas Rowe. The towering imagination of the Elizabethans had been trashed for overtopping', and their widely differing attempts, for the most part unconscious, to realize the Absolute and Unconditioned, had been replaced by a school of 'philosophical' poetry devoted to speculations mainly ethical, which was content, for the most part, to take God for granted, and was little concerned with any attempt, whether wistful or passionate, to bridge the gulf between Him and man. The metaphysical quiverings' which have been described by a great French critic as the chief glory of Romanticism, had died away with Donne, and were not to quicken into a fresh blaze till the day of Wordsworth's immediate forerunners. 6 The age was, indeed, not one of imagination and idealism in the transcendental, yet possibly too exclusive sense, which our own age has attached to these terms, but one of sense and sanity, of breadth rather than of profundity, of virile and |