WARD'S HISTORY OF ENGLISH DRAMATIC LITERATURE.*
" Arduum res galas scribere," wrote the man whom Milton held to be the greatest of ancient historians, and " Ardnum res gestas scribere" is the motto which the greatest of living historians has taken for one of the books of his celebrated work. And, indeed, although Sallust and Mommsen have both shown how brilliantly this difficulty may be grappled with, yet the paucity of first-rate historians would seem to prove that history-writing is a far more difficult task than might have been conjectured a priori. Excel- lent dramas, excellent novels, excellent lyrics adorn in no scant numbers all the great literatures of Europe, but first-rate histories are almost as rare as first-rate epic poems. Thucydides has uo rival near his throne in Greek, nor, under leave of Milton be it said, has Tacitus in Roman literature. Germany can boast of no first- rate history, for, excellent as it in, we may not call Mounnsen's one ; nor can England, with the doubtful exception of Gibbon's Decline and Fall. In France, in Italy, and in Spain, the first-rate historian is conspicuous by his absence. But if it is difficult res gestas scribere, res scriplas scribere, if so queer a phrase may pass, is apparently still more difficult. Histories, indeed, of literature, voluminous, accurate, and invaluable as works of reference, are as plentiful as blackberries, but then how dull they are, how terribly and unutterably dull ! And yet at first sight it does not seem so very hard a task to write a vigorous and entertaining, as well as accu- rate, history of a literature so brilliant as that of ancient Greece, for instance, or as that of our own country. But where can we • A History of English Dramatic Literature, to the Death of Queen Anne. By Adolphus William Ward, WA., Professor of History and English Literature, Owens College, Ilanchop.ter. 2 vols. London: Macmillan and Co. find such a work ? Bernhardy's histories of Greek and Latin literature are, perhaps, on the whole, the best which have been written, and are, in many respects, exceedingly meritorious ; but they are so heavy, so heavy with a heaviness plus quam Teutonica, that no one has ventured to translate them for the English market. And if Teuffel, who is quite as heavy, has been translated, he has been translated by a brother German, and, like Bottom, has been translated indeed. On the other hand, M. Taine's history of English literature—and proh pudor ! we have no better—re- minds one too much of the famous story of the camel : le voila le Shakspere ! le voila is Milton ! Professor Ward has a great deal more of Bernhardy in him than of Taine. To him it has no doubt been a labour of love to write this History of English Dramatic Literature, and the labour we delight in physics pain ; but the reviewer lacks the author's talis- man, and if with difficulty and labour he does get through these portly volumes, he deserves the applause of conscience and a headache.
Careless as modern historians are about the fact, brevity is in one sense as much the soul of history as it is the soul of wit ; and Cicero hit the nail.upon the head and drove it home when he said of Cmsar's Commentaries, that although ostensibly written as materials for a history, they had effectually frightened all sane men from attempting it. For there is nothing, adds the great critic, more charming in history than simple and perspicuous brevity ; "nihil est vain in historia" (for we feel how poor our version is) "pura a llustri brevitate dulcius." It is this brevity which places Caesar as a writer so far above Napier, and Thucydides so far above King- lake. To know what to omit is a great, if not the greatest, merit in an historian, and it is a merit which, at least among ourselves, is of late years growing rarer and rarer. What masses of insig- nificant details, for instance, encumber and spoil Freeman's History of the Conquest and Masson's Life of Milton, and what masses of insignificant details encumber and spoil this work of Mr. Ward's ! As a book of reference, furnished as it is with an excellent index, this history may be cordially recommended to all professed students of our dramatic literature, but it may be fairly doubted whether a large proportion of these details might not have been properly left in the congenial obscurity of encyclo- pmdias and biographical dictionaries. At all events, a history which is so constantly assuming the appearance of a catalogue could not fail to be dull ; and the eternal analyses of plays which have quite ceased to interest any human being shed additional dullness over the dreary roll-call. But Mr. Ward is pitiless in this respect, and would probably urge that the lee operis compelled him to make this catalogue and these analyses as full and as complete as possible. Granting this, and granting also that in such a case no pen, however graphic, could put lifeinto these dry bones, it still seems that there were opportunities for making his book more lively which Mr. Ward has neglected, for even when he handles the loftier portions of his theme, and has to do with names which might render the tamest writer lively, he still retains a marvellous capacity for being dull. Perhaps, also, there is another reason which tends to make a work conceived and executed as this has been very uninteresting. This reason is the purely hypothetical nature of so many of the statements from which its inferences are drawn. It is difficult, of course, to prove a negative, but post hoc differs from propter hoc, for all that. An example will make this clear. " The character of Ancient Pistol," says Mr. Ward, " has been compared by Klein (viii. 916), [we should not like to have to read Klein !] to the Centurio in Rojas's Celestina, the first specimen on the Spanish stage of one of its favourite comic types, and ix. 979, [certainly not !] to the Soldado in Fer- nando's farsa of that name. The former was not translated into English till 1631 (Shakespeare died in 1616), but Klein thinks that Shakespeare might have seen the French or English trans- lation." Now is it too much to say that all this might have been fairly omitted in a history of English Dramatic Literature? Yet there are hundreds of similar passages to be found in these volumes, and their presence cannot fail to be annoying and wearisome, at least to an English reader. For we are by no means certain that this work will not meet with approval in Germany. In fact Mr. Ward is in his faults as well as in his merits eminently German. His industry is German, for he is as unwearied in collecting as he is careless about arranging his materials, while the clumsy and obscure language which he often uses is also unpleasantly suggestive of German influence. Nor is this strange, for Mr. Ward has translated a well-known, but rather over-rated history of Greece from the German, and his mind, like the dyer's hand, has taken the hue of that which it worked in. He is clearly a man of ability and culture, but the German element is
much too strong in him ; and it would have been betterfor him, per. haps, had his attention been turned to French, rather than to German literature,—so far, we mean, as style is concerned ; and indeed, it would be better for most Englishmen to addict themselves to French rather than to German authors, at least, if they intend to write, and to write prose. But we shall have something to say about Mr. Ward's English hereafter, for the present, we purpose to notice some points connected with the greater names which he has handled, for it would be quite impossible to follow him through his galaxy of lesser stars.
Ab Jove principium, Shakespeare first of course; and at once another difficulty, which must have troubled Mr. Ward sorely, presents itself. "L'Etat c'est moi," said Louis XIV., and for all practical purposes, the Elizabethan, and in a certain sense the English, drama is Shakespeare. But Shakespeare and his works are themes so hackneyed, that no one but a writer of great origi- nality could hope to treat them with liveliness. On the other band, any little fact, philological or otherwise, if connected with Shakespeare, is interesting ; while anything of a similar char- acter, if reported about an inferior writer, would be treated as an impertinence. Of Mr. Ward's general estimate of Shakespeare, we have but little to say. It is as far from being the worst, perhaps, as it is from being the best in our language, and its con- clusion is the orthodox one,—" Eclipse first, and all the rest nowhere." But there are some minor particulars in it which challenge contradiction. For if in one sense "Marlowe's Hero and Leander is more real than Shakespeare's Venus and Adonis," the compliment, to say the least, is a very German one ; and to assert of the former poem, that it is "far superior to the latter as an epical attempt of the erotic kind " is simple nonsense. Whatever this "vile phrase" may mean, if Marlowe's poem is "an epic attempt of the erotic kind," then certainly Shakespeare's is not. For in spite of its occasional warmth of colouring, Venus and Adonis is a noble poem, and to the pure, we must insist, a pure one. Can that be said of Marlowe's Hero and Leander ? Again, we are pleased to find that Mr. Ward likes Ben Jonson's verses on Shakespeare, which are, on the whole, he says, "as just as they are beautiful ;" but we differ from him in his estimate of Milton's famous eulogy,— "If sweetest Shakspeare, Fancy's child, Warble his native wood-notes wild."
"This," says Mr. Ward, "means, in other words, that Shakespeare was an irresistible but irregular singer." By no means ; rather let us call it, when we reflect that Milton was speaking of the Comedies only, the most charming compliment which one great poet ever paid to another. Neither can we agree with the Professor in lamenting that for some (not over intelligible) reasons " Shakespeare's countrymen are and will continue to be debarred from studying him where he is, after all, best studied, because studied in the conditions for which he de- signed his works, on the stage." This is flat heresy, in our opinion, and luckily for us, in the opinion of so competent a judge as Charles Lamb, with whom we must leave Mr. Ward to fight it out. Again, without denying the latter's right to " cut" the difficult questions raised by the Sonnets, yet, since he does such things, we must demur to his devoting two pages to the spelling of Shake- speare's name, when two lines would have been sufficient. The account of the poet's father, too, seems out of place, if the Sonnets are to be shunted ; and when we are told of his mother that she was the seventh and youngest daughter of Robert Arden, of 1Vllmecote, and that " there seems no doubt that this Arden was a lineal descendant of the ancient family of that name which traced its descent to Aelwyn, Vice-Comes of Warwickshire, under his uncle Leofric, in the time of Edward the Confessor, and through him seems further traceable to Guy of Warwick, with a possible female descent from Alfred the Great himself," we are reminded of a scene in one of her son's plays, where, in answer to the query, " And is not my hostess a most sweet wench ?" another possible descendant of Alfred the Great's, retorts, " And is not a buff-jerkin a most sweet robe of durance?" Following what appears to be the natural bent of his genius, Mr. Ward has bestowed an inordinate amount of labour upon the chronology of Shake- speare's plays,—" One of the most difficult, as it is beyond all doubt one of the most important subjects of Shakesperean inquiry." The difficulty is more indubitable than the importance. At all events, the tests which the Professor insists upon, especially the versification tests of " rhyme," " stopped and unstopped lines," and "feminine endings," seem very inconclusive. In fact, he appears to think so himself, for his great test is " that highest and most comprehensive kind of criticism which takes into account the entire mental growth of the poet, and may arrive at conclusions of a more or less certain character respecting the order of the Plays." Cautious man, Sir Christopher ! but it is obvious that this test must be purely a subjective test, always shifting and changing, and always in need of some one to test the tester. Coleridge's classifications of the Plays in 1802, 1810, and 1812, respectively, are curious illustrations of the uncertainty of this kind of test ; but indeed none are needed, and we have not the slightest doubt that if Mr. Ward were to revise his chronology some ten years hence, lie would make great alterations in it, and after the lapse of another ten years perhaps come back to his original view. "'1'o take into account the entire mental growth of a poet" like Shakespeare is more easily said than done, and many changes are likely to occur in the critic's mind before he has completed his investigation. How far differences of taste will affect arrangements of this kind may be judged from the fact that Mr. Ward quotes almost with approval the conclusion to which a German named Viehoff came, namely, " that no other of Shake- speare's plays can be ranked above Coriolanus, and hardly any beside it, as to perfection in every point of artistic composition." Comment is needless. Again, what different opinions might be formed of Shakespeare's authorship of Edward III., from the view which the reader took of such lines as these !— " Ah ! bo more mild unto these yielding men : It is a glorious thing to 'stablish peace : And kings approach the nearest unto God, By giving life and safety unto MOIL"
Mr. Ward is unwilling to dissociate such passages as this alto- gether from Shakespeare's name ; there must be many readers of Shakespeare who, if these lines were found in any of his acknow- ledged dramas, would be very grateful to any one who should prove them to be interpolated.
In summing up his general view of Shakespeare, Mr. Ward says :—" But it was neither in diction and versification nor in construction that the progress of the English drama owed most to Shakespeare. A single word must express its greatest debt and his greatest gift as a dramatist. This word is characterisation. His power of characterisation was to him a gift like the gift of Hephaestus to Achilles,—it made him not only the foremost of the Dunaj, but the one Invincible among them." We cannot stay to object to the word " characterisation " itself, but Achilles was the foremost of the Greeks before Thetis gave him his impenetrable armour ; and it is somewhat startling to find that characterisation is Ben Jonson's strong point as well as Shakespeare's. For certainly if "Falstaff and his crew," as Mr. Ward irreverently calls them, are good specimens of characterisation, then " Captain Bobadil and Captain Tucca, Macilente and Fungoso, Volpone and Mosca, Sir John Daw and Sir Amorous la Foole " are not. It is a little sur- prising, too, that Mr. Ward should say that the above names have become household words, and are remembered with Falstaff and his crew, with Parson Adams and Trulliber, with Micawber and Pecksniff." Surely the reverse is nearer the truth.
We have no space left to follow Mr. Ward through his second volume, except at a gallop, and we do not regret it. On entering it, we pass through lines of gaping ghosts, Chapman's, Marston's, Dekker's, Middleton's, Heywood's, from lower depth to lower depth, till the well-known names of Beaumont and Fletcher arrest us. We deny not for one moment their command of poetical language, but we are pleased to believe that they will never emerge from the oblivion into which they have deservedly fallen. They with their love-worship, (their love !) Webster with his horrors, and Ford and Shirley with their beastliness and .rubbish, lie withered and shrunken, like lifeless mushrooms, beneath the shade of the mighty oak of Arden. Of course, there is much that is untrue in such a trenchant statement as this. Be it so. We are not careful about "throwing away the child with the bath" when dealing with these men. They were false to their better natures, or perhaps it would be truer and fairer to say they were not strong enough to resist the evil influences of their age. Let them be forgotten ! As we leave them, we pass out through other crowds of gaping ghosts, among whom loom the forms of Dryden, Wycherley, and Congreve. With the final verdict passed upon these by Mr. Ward we entirely agree :—" What was de- signed to attract has ended by repelling, and works of talent, and even of genius, are all but consigned to oblivion by the judgment of posterity, on account of the very features which were intended to ensure an immediate success. Of all forms of literary art, the drama can least reckon without its responsibilities." We had intended to have said something about Mr. Ward's English ; upon such curious phrases as the last, for instance ; upon his use of such words as "Italianate," "transnormal," and " humourously ;" upon the queer taste which lets him describe Spain as "the Pyrenean peninsula," and say that "the Earl of Pembroke must have approached intimacy with Shakespeare," and speak of the epithet "Elizabethan" as "comprehensive in its very vagueness, and opportune in its very inaccuracy." We had formed several theories to explain these vagaries in a professor of English litera- ture, and a hope that the Lord Chief Justice might cone to do at Manchester what he has done at Liverpool. But in the latter part of the second volume we came across a sketch of Moliere, so tersely, so vigorously, and so excellently written, that we are convinced that it is haste, and haste alone, which prevents the Professor from doing himself justice as a writer. If he will give a little more thought and a little more time to the composition of his sentences, we can confidently prophesy for him a high and honourable place among the di ntinores of English literature.
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