WE

E are eminently a people of action; we are fond of shows, processions, and all organized spectacles; we are so much more imitative than our British cousins, that, without limiting its appeals to the mimetic files of fashion, the ungentlemanly theory of a Simian descent for man might find support in the features of our general life. To complete the large compound of qualities that are required, in order that an emulous people give birth to a drama, one is yet wanting; but that one is not merely the most important of all, but is the one which lifts the others into dramatic importance. Are we poetical? Ask any number of continental Europeans, whether the English are a poetical people. A loud, unanimous, derisive no would be the answer. And yet, there is Shakespeare! and around him, back to Chaucer and forward to Tennyson, a band of such poets, that this prosaic nation has the richest poetic literature in Christendom. Especially in this matter are appearances delusive, and hasty inferences liable to be illogical. From the prosers that one hears in pulpits, legislatures, lecture-rooms, at morning calls and well-appointed dinner-tables in Anglo-America, let no man infer against our poetic endowment. Shakespeare, and Milton, and Burns, and Wordsworth are of our stock; and what we have already done in poetry and the plastic arts, while yet, as a nation, hardly out of swaddlingclothes, is an earnest of a creative future. We are to have a national literature and a national drama. What is a national drama? Premising, that as little in their depth as in their length will our remarks be commensurate with the dimensions of this great theme, we will say a few words thereon.

A literature is the expression of what is warmest and deepest in the heart of a people. Good books are the crystallization of thoughts and feelings. To To have a literature-that is, a body of enduring books-implies vigor and depth. Such books are the measure of the mental vitality in a people. Those peoples that have the best books will be found to be at the top of the scale of humanity; those that have none, at the bottom. Good books, once brought forth, exhale ever after both fragrance and nourish

ment.

They educate while they delight many generations.

Good books are the best thoughts of the best men. They issue out of deep hearts and strong heads; and where there are deep hearts and strong heads such books are sure to come to life. The mind, like the body, will reproduce itself: the mind, too, is procreative, transmitting itself to a remote posterity.

The best books are the highest products of human effort. Themselves the evidence of creative power, they kindle and nourish power. Consider what a spring of life to the world have been the books of the Hebrews. What so precious treasure has England as Shakespeare?

To be good, books must be generie. They may be, in subject, in tone, and in color, national, but in substance they must be so universally human, that other cognate nations can imbibe and be nourished by them. Not that, in their fashioning, this fitness for foreign minds is to be a conscious aim; but to be thus attractive and assimilative, is a proof of their breadth and depth-of their high humanity.

The peoples who earliest reached the state of culture which is needed to bring forth books, each standing by itself, each necessarily sang and wrote merely of itself. Thus did the Hebrews and the Greeks. But already the Romans went out of themselves, and Virgil takes a Trojan for his hero. This appropriation of foreign material shows, that the aim of high books is, to ascend to the sphere of ideas and feelings that are independent of time and place. Thence, when, by multiplication of Christian nations, the world had become vastly enlarged, embracing in one bond of culture, not only all modern civilized peoples, but also the three great ancient ones, the poets-especially the dramatic, for reasons that will be presently stated

looked abroad and afar for the framework and corporeal stuff of their writings.

The most universal of all writers, ancient or modern, he who is most generic in his thought, Shakespeare, embodied his transcendent conceptions for the most part in foreign personages. Of Shakespeare's fourteen comedies, the scene of only one is laid in England;

comic. He was primarily a satirist, secondarily a poet. Such being his powers and his aims, helpful to him, nay needful, was a present Parisian actuality of story and agents. A poetic comedy ought to be, and will necessarily be, a chapter of very high life. Molière's comedies, dealing unctuously with vice and folly, are, philosophically speaking, low life. His are comedies not of character and sentiment, but of manners and morals, and therefore cannot be highly poetical; and thence he felt no want of a remote ground, clean of all local coloring and association, such as is essential to the dramatist whose inspiration is poetical, and who therefore must reconcile the ideal with the real, by which reconciliation only can be produced the purest truth. That, notwithstanding they belong not to the highest poetic sphere, his comedies continue to live and to be enjoyed, this testifies of the breadth and truthfulness of his humanity, the piercing insight of his rich mind, and his superlative comic genius.

Of Alfieri's twenty-two tragedies, three only are modern, and of these three the scene of one is in Spain.

Of the nine or ten tragedies of the foremost German dramatic poet, Schiller, three are German, the Robbers, Intrigue and Love, and Wallenstein.

Goethe's highest dramas, Iphigenia, Egmont, Torquato Tasso, are all foreign in clothing. The Natural Daughter has no local habitation, no dependence on time or place. Goetz von Berlichingen, written in Goethe's earliest days of authorship, is German and in prose. Faust-the greatest poem of these latter times, and rivaling the greatest poems of all time-Faust is not strictly a drama: its wonderful successive scenes are not bound together by dramatic necessity.

The drama of Spain, like the comedies of Molière, is an exception to the rule we deduce from the practice of other dramatists; but it is an exception which, like that of Molière, confirms the rule. Unlike the ancient Greek and the French tragic poets, unlike Schiller, Shakespeare, Goethe, Alfieri, the Spanish dramatists do not aim at ideal humanity. The best of them, Calderon, is so intensely Spanish and Romish, as to be, in comparison with the breadth and universality of his eminent compeers above-named, almost

ex

provincial. His personages are not large and deep enough to be representative. The manifold recesses of great minds he does not unveil; he gets no deeper than the semi-barbarous aggerations of selfish passionate love, of revenge, honor, and jealousy. His characterization is weak. His highest characters lack intellectual calibre, and are exhibited in lyrical one-sidedness rather than dramatic many-sidedness. He is mostly content with Spanish cavaliers of the seventeenth century, ruled by the conventionalisms in manners, morals, and superstition, which have already passed away even in Spain. He is a marvelously fertile, skillful, poetic play-wright.

Thus we perceive that, with poetic dramatists, the prevailing practice is, to look abroad for fables. Moreover, in the cases where these were drawn from the bosom of the poet's own people, he shuns the present, and hies as far as he can into the dark back abysms of time, as Shakespeare does in Macbeth and Lear. The Greek tragic poets, having no outward resource, took possession of the fabulous era of Greece. The poetic dramatist seeks mostly a double remoteness, that of place as well as that of time; and he must have one or the other.

The law lying behind this phenomenon is transparent. The higher poetry is, the more generic it is. Its universality is a chief constituent of its excellence. The drama is the most generically human, and, therefore, the highest of the great forms of poetry. The epic deals with the material, the outward-humanity concreted into events; the lyric with the inward, when that is so individual and intense as to gush out in ode or song. The dramatic is the union of the epic and lyric-the inward moulding the outward, predominant over the outward while co-working with it. In the dramatic, the action is more made by the personality; in the epic, the personality is more merged in the strong, full stream of events. The lyric is the utterance of one-sided, partial (however deep and earnest) feeling, the which must be linked to other feelings to give wholeness to the man and his actions. The dramatic combines several lyrics with the epic. Out of humanity and human action it extracts the essence. It presents men in their completest form, in warm activity, impelled

thereto by strongest feelings. Hence it must be condensed and compact, and must, for its highest display, get rid of local coloring, personal associations, and all prosaic circumscriptions. The poetic dramatist needs the highest poetic freedom, and only through this can he attain to that breadth and largeness whereof the superiority of his form admits, and which are such in Shakespeare, that in his greatest plays the whole world seems to be present as spectators and listeners.

Observe that the highest dramatic literatures belong to the two freest peoples-the Greeks and the English. A people, possessing already a large political freedom, must be capable of, and must be in the act of, vigorous, rich development, through deep inward passion and faculty, in order that its spirit shall issue in the perennial flowers of the poetic drama. The dramatic especially implies and demands variety and fullness and elevation of personality; and this is only possible through freedom, the attainment of which freedom implies on its side the innate fertility of nature which results in fullness and elevation.

Now in the subjective elevation of the individual, and therewith the unprecedented relative number of individuals thus elevated, herein do we exceed all other peoples. By subjective elevation I mean, liberation from the outward downward pressure of dogmatic prescription, of imperious custom, of blindfolded tradition, of irresponsible authority. The despotic objectivity of Asia-where religion is submissiveness, and manhood is crushed by obedience--has been partially withstood in Europe. The emancipation therefrom of the Indo-Germanic race is completed in AngloAmerica. Through this manifold emancipation, we are to be, in all the high departments of human achievement, preeminently creative, because, while equipped with the best of the past, we are at the same time preeminently subjective; and, therefore, high literature will, with us, necessarily take the lyrical, and especially the dramatic, form.

More than our European ancestors, we mould, each one of us, our own destiny; we have a stronger inward

sense of power to unfold and elevate ourselves; we are more ready and mc re capable to withstand the assaults of circumstance. Here is more thoroughly embodied the true Christian principle, that out of himself is to come every man's redemption; that the favor and help of God are only to be obtained through resolute self-help and honest, earnest struggle. In Christendom we stand alone as having above us neither the objectivity of politics nor that of the church. The light of the past we have, without its darkness. We carry little weight from the exacting past. Hence, our unexampled freedom and ease of movement, which, wanting the old conventional ballast, to Europeans seems lawless and reckless. Even among ourselves, many tremble for our future, because they have little faith in humanity, and because they cannot grasp the new grand historic phenomenon of a people possessing all the principles, practices, and trophies of civilization without its paralyzing encumbrances.

But think not, because we are less passive to destiny, we are rebellious against Deity; because we are boldly self-reliant, we are, therefore, irreligiously defiant. The freer a people is, the nearer it is to God. The more subjective it is, through acquired selfrule, the more will it harmonize with the high objectivity of absolute truth and justice. For, having thrown off the capricious secondary rule of man, we shall not be the less, but the more, under the steadfast, primary rule of God; for, having broken the force of human fallible prescription, we shall the more feel and acknowledge the supremacy of flawless divine law; for, having rejected the tyranny of man's willfulness, we shall submit the more fully to the beneficent power of principle.

Our birth, growth, and continued weal, depending on large, deep principles-principles deliberately elaborated and adopted by reason, and generously embracing the whole--our life must be interpenetrated by principle, and thence, our literature must embrace the widest and most human wants and aspirations of man. And thus, it will be our privilege and our glory to be then the most national in our books when we are the most universal.