THE ENGLISH DRAMATISTS.
go THE EDITOR OF THE "SPECTATOR."]
Sia,—The writer of a review of a book by Mr. Sturgis in your columns asks why there are no dramatists in England. Per- haps because a class of men so varied, that in the last few years it has included (to name the first who occur to me) Douglas Jerrold, Shirley Brooks, Tom Taylor, Charles Reade, Wilkie Collins, Boucicault, Wills, W. S. Gilbert, H. J. Byron, and Robert Buchanan, do not much care to be told so. I think it was Mr. Tom Taylor—Trinity Fellow, and a literary man of rarest culture—who said to me that one of the greatest diffi- culties (and they are many) under which English dramatists labour, is the difference of the tone in which newspaper critics of a certain class think themselves entitled to xviite about their work, without having read a word of it, from that assumed towards work of any other kind. People do not read acted plays, and take random assertions like your critic's for granted.
As to his second assertion—that the English Drama is all French—it is as baseless as the other, whatever might have- been the case twenty years ago. With two exceptions, the authors I have mentioned hardly meddled with French at all, and the best works of those two are their own. The Haymarket announces its very first French play, under a management of some years' standing, as now preparing, and will follow it with a revival of one of Mr. Taylor's most English comedies. The Lyceum lives on Shakespeare and Tennyson ; the St. James's has thriven on plays of purely English growth; Drury Lane, the Adelphi, and the Princess's, on popular melodramas equally home-made ; the Folly upon English comedies, and the Gaiety upon English extravaganza. Light opera bouffe and farcical comedy are the only exotics which have any present existence with us at all. It is to be regretted that a paper like the Spectator allows such mischievous and random charges to pass without revision.—I am, Sir, &c.,
HERMAN C. MERIVALE.
[We are fairly well acquainted with the plays to which Mr. Merivale alludes, and doubt if more than half a dozen of them have really added to the stores of English literature, properly so called. Mr. Herman Merivale has himself written two or three very clever pieces, Mr. Tom Taylor a very few which owe nothing to the French, and Mr. Boucicault one or two extremely clever melodramas ; but as for the mass of the Byronic school of burlesque or the Wilkie Collins school of melodrama, we doubt if any one would enjoy them at all, without first-rate actors to carry them off—En. Spectator.]
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