Transcribed , email ccx074@coventry.ac.uk
The writer of this play does not differ with his countrymen generally,as to the nature and requirements of a Drama. He has learnt fromour Great Masters that it should exhibit human beings engaged in someearnest struggle, certain outward aspects of which may possibly be aspectacle for the amusement of idlers, but which in itself is for thestudy and the sympathy of those who are struggling themselves. A Drama, he feels, should not aim at the inculcation of any definitemaxim; the moral of it lies in the action and the character. Itmust be drawn out of them by the heart and experience of the reader,not forced upon him by the author. The men and women whom he presentsare not to be his spokesmen; they are to utter themselves freely insuch language, grave or mirthful, as best expresses what they feel andwhat they are. The age to which they belong is not to be contemplatedas if it were apart from us; neither is it to be measured by our rules;to be held up as a model; to be condemned for its strangeness. The passions which worked in it must be those which are working in ourselves. To the same eternal laws and principles are we, and it, amenable. By beholding these a poet is to raise himself, and may hope to raisehis readers, above antiquarian tastes and modern conventions. The unity of the play cannot be conferred upon it by any artificialarrangements; it must depend upon the relation of the different personsand events to the central subject. No nice adjustments of successand failure to right and wrong must constitute its poetical justice;the conscience of the readers must be satisfied in some deeper way thanthis, that there is an order in the universe, and that the poet hasperceived and asserted it.
Long before these principles were reduced into formal canons of orthodoxy,even while they encountered the strong opposition of critics, they wereunconsciously recognised by Englishmen as sound and national. Yet I question whether a clergyman writing in conformity with them mightnot have incurred censure in former times, and may not incur it now. The privilege of expressing his own thoughts, sufferings, sympathies,in any form of verse is easily conceded to him; if he liked to use adialogue instead of a monologue, for the purpose of enforcing a duty,or illustrating a doctrine, no one would find fault with him; if heproduced an actual Drama for the purpose of defending or denouncinga particular character, or period, or system of opinions, the complimentsof one party might console him for the abuse or contempt of another.
But it seems to be supposed that he is bound to keep in view oneor other of these ends: to divest himself of his own individuality thathe may enter into the working of other spirits; to lay aside the authoritywhich pronounces one opinion, or one habit of mind, to be right andanother wrong, that he may exhibit them in their actual strife; to dealwith questions, not in an abstract shape, but mixed up with the affections,passions, relations of human creatures, is a course which must leadhim, it is thought, into a great forgetfulness of his office, and ofall that is involved in it.
No one can have less interest than I have in claiming poetical privilegesfor the clergy; and no one, I believe, is more thoroughly convincedthat the standard which society prescribes for us, and to which we ordinarilyconform ourselves, instead of being too severe and lofty, is far toosecular and grovelling. But I apprehend the limitations of thiskind which are imposed upon us are themselve