The Saints Tragedy | Page 3

fervently that ideal of the female
character which God has established, and not man--which she
imperfectly realised--which often exhibited itself in her in spite of her
own more confused, though apparently more lofty, ideal; which may be
manifested more simply, and therefore more perfectly, in the England
of the nineteenth century, than in the Germany of the thirteenth. To
enter into the meaning of self-sacrifice--to sympathise with any one
who aims at it--not to be misled by counterfeits of it--not to be unjust to
the truth which may be mixed with those counterfeits--is a difficult task,
but a necessary one for any one who takes this work in hand. How far
our author 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.
These remarks do not concern poetical literature alone, or chiefly.
Those habits of mind, of which I have spoken, ought to make us the
best historians. If Germany has a right to claim the whole realm of the
abstract, if Frenchmen understand the framework of society better than
we do, there is in the national dramas of Shakespeare an historical
secret, which neither the philosophy of the one nor the acute
observation of the other can discover. Yet these dramas are almost the
only satisfactory expression of that historical faculty which I believe is
latent in us. The zeal of our factions, a result of our national activity,
has made earnest history