MR. HOSKEN'S DRAMAS.*

MB. HosKEN's two dramas show just enough of real ability to command our respect, but rarely enough to compel admira-

tion or arouse emotion. We shall not pay him the poor compliment of treating his very considerable gifts with added favour or attention because of the accident of his social position. His avocation as a postman is in itself as compatible with literary genius as is any other occupation, humble or exalted, by which men earn their bread. Richard- son was a bookseller, Rogers a banker, Lamb a clerk, Sydney Dobell a retail wine-merchant, and Mr. Hosken's occupation is no more essentially anti-poetic than any of theirs. We therefore judge his volume solely upon its own merits, and do not perceive any greater necessity for flattering its author because he is a letter-carrier, than there would be for abusing him if he were the Postmaster-General.

He deserves the praise of having studied, at all events, under the best master. He does not, like some modern aspirants for dramatic fame, dwell with Webster in the charnel-house, or with Marlowe in the slaughter-house ; and if he reflects none of the grace of Fletcher, neither does he reproduce the morbidness of Ford. Shakespeare would seem to have taught him nearly all he has learned. But while Shakespeare's verse, though without Milton's fugal elaboration and symphonic structure, has a bounding pulse of melody peculiarly its own, that of his latest pupil is quite painfully lacking in any such instinctive music. Shakespeare's blank- verse, as we all know, is marked by three well-defined stages of development. Firstly, his practice was in great part the Marlowesque one of making the lines stand off from each other with little natural continuity, and with a sort of staccato effect,—which was also Milton's manner in the single passage of Paradise Lost which we know to have been written long before the epic itself was planned. Lastly, Shakespeare's late metrical style was an extreme, and indeed an immoderate, re- bound from his early one, the lines ending anyhow, with con- junctions or prepositions or indefinite articles, and running- on one into another in such fashion as to lose much of the distinctive character of verse ; while midway between these two sharply opposed styles stands the great period of the earlier romantic comedies and the historical dramas, when his metrical art was at its meridian,—free without license, dignified without stiffness, and entirely innocent of mannerism. It is of the first and crudest development of Shakespeare's verse- craft that Mr. Hosken's employment of our great English metre most reminds us.

The grand way in which some of Shakespeare's personages, especially his Romans, roll out their aphorisms and apothegms seems to haunt Mr. Hosken's mind perpetually, and sometimes, one cannot deny, he has succeeded in catching the great tone,— as when one of his characters says :—

" The gods take life

When they take from us things most worthy life ; " or again :— "The gods, When they intend their heaviest strokes for us,

Prelude them with some most imperial joy, Smiling us on to death."

But far oftener he wearies us beyond all patience by sententious deliverances of the tritest kind, distributed among his dramatis persona without any regard for individual propriety. Here are a few examples :— "Actions delayed tempt our malicious fates To make that difficult we could have had Easy without an effort."

"Things all unlike in nature, yet are subject To dispositions common, and some things Affect all dispositions equally."

"Our better qualities depend not on The estimation in which they are held For their existence."

• rhaon and Sappho, and Nimrod. By James Dryden Boiken. London : Macmillan and Co.

And so on for ever, platitude competing with platitude in dismal rivalry. In Nimrod, when Raphael, a philosophical young Prince, and his preceptor Apollon get together, their conversation is literally carried on in moral axioms,—we must in fairness add, of the most improving kind. Then, too,

although the broad anachronisms which Mr. Hosken is at somewhat needless pains to defend in his preface are harmless enough, his minor modernisms of phraseology are really rather irritating. His people talk far too much about their "motives." Peleon says :—

" I have a motive, not a personal one, In asking this."

Melanthus goes to " superintend " the lists at a combat.

Peleon is spoken of as having gone to " Timoleon's." Sestris, Making love to Sappho, tells her: "I am utterly at your disposal." Sappho herself says : "I have heard of your arts of

Egypt, how with a glance you mesmerise another." Phaon threatens to " horsewhip " the potentate whom, in true Shake- spearian style, he calls "Egypt." The very last lines of Nimrod,— " And we with full experience will prevent Recurrence of such untoward accident,"

are terribly modern and prosaic ; while perhaps the most

grotesquely incongruous touch of all is where—the scene being laid in ancient Babylon—we read, "Enter two waiters," and

straightway Babylon is fallen, so far as we are concerned.

There are, however, fine things in both of these plays. That is an impressive moment, in Pluton and Sappho, when Peleon,

being suddenly made to believe the falsity of the woman he loves, says to his friend Memnon :—

" Give me your hand,

That I may feel in this great blank and darkness, That comes as suddenly as the dreaded end, When all things fade in gloom, something that's human, With pity in its soul."

The scene where the question of Hera's chastity is to be decided by the test of arms, and where she is championed by her own lover, who fights for her cause while yet believing her guilty, is well managed; and in the same play, Sappho before her judges reaches a height of really noble emotion. But too often, in situations of an acutely tragic kind, Mr.

Hosken's _characters lose themselves in sound and fury, with no genuine dramatic heart-beat audible in it. In the other drama, the transient madness of Nitocris is good, and some

powerful speeches are put into the mouth of the priest Names, while the death of Arta,ban has a glimpse of pathos ; but Mr.

Hosken needs to be more on his guard against producing a ludicrous effect where such an effect is peculiarly unfortunate, —as where Raphael asks the dying Apollon, "Are you much hurt ?" He is also capable of stretching a dramatic con- vention beyond reasonable limits : witness the preposterously long " aside " of Nimrod, when seated at a banquet where he is of necessity the focus of general observation. In the same scene, Mr. Hosken shows himself otherwise somewhat un.- fertile of resource. Nitocris receives her guests thus :—

"We bid you all a welcome to this feast ; Our one regret that what we offer you Is insufficient worthily to grace

Your honour-giving presence."

To which Polimar replies :— " Lady, no !

We are unworthy of your present pains, Expressed in all we see."

This is rather mechanical compliment-making, but might pass for once ; three or four pages further on, however, we find it substantially made to do duty a second time. Nimrod enters to the feast, and greets his hostess in these words :— " If you will pardon me as we first meet, I'll say you are the richest ornament That ever sat to do me honour yet. Your presence is a piece of flattery Equal to making the gold orb of day Do reverence to this muddy underworld."

Whereupon :—

"Nitocris.—'Tis we are honoured, my most potent lord,

By this great condescension on your part. Nimrod.—Well, courtesy bids me agree with you, Contrary to my thinking,—let it pass."

It is to an indiscriminate reverence for his great model that we are disposed to attribute some of Mr. Hosken's worst faults, and we think he does not sufficiently realise that many

blemishes and crudities which in the master-poets of past ages we respectfully tolerate, cannot be viewed with the same leniency in contemporary writers who have reaped all the advantages of modern criticism. Thus, Shakespeare has plenty of sentences quite as awkwardly and unnecessarily inverted as these of Mr. Hosken's :— " And you, Melanthus, never shall regret Unto our union this your kind consent ; " "This halting messenger to its extreme My little patience drives."

But if Shakespeare himself were a living writer, we should exact from him (and justly)a more equably good manner of writing than is consistent with such clumsy modes of speech. Of course a really artful inversion is often a fine incident of style. Who does not feel this when he reads :—

" On evil days though fall'n, and evil tongues ; "

"For what can war but endless war still breed ?"

"With dreadful faces thronged, and fiery arms."

But even Milton fails in such a line as :— " For eloquence the soul, song charms the sense."

And Milton was the greatest master of the art of inversion we have ever had. In unskilful hands, an inversion means merely a dislocated sentence. In the hands of an artist, its effectiveness, where it is effective, seems usually to lie in some subtle suspension, whereby the dominant word or phrase is kept back until the last, so that there shall be no falling away from the highest point of impressiveness.

Mr. Hosken has no little ability, and considerable motive- power. What he needs is more catholic literary culture, and less pious devotion to a particular ideal of excellence.

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