varying degrees, if the action is examined, it will be found to omit the essentially moral element, and to bring before us a personified passion rather than a character overcome by passion. I have taken one of Shakespeare's plays as an example, and rightly, I think; but it is also true that in his greater tragedies Shakespeare stands quite apart from his age, rising above it by the very strength in him of this moral sense which was so generally weak in his rivals. In Macbeth he belongs with Æschylus and Euripides, and the audience which was moved by the passion and woe of Agamemnon would have understood and applauded the evil doom of the Scottish usurper. Though romantic in detail and in complexity of form, and though, it must be admitted, sometimes barbarous in the handling, the greater plays of Shakespeare are in their substance profoundly classic.

In the earlier Elizabethan drama the employment, for the most part, of a single passion as the tragic motive, even where the sense of character was weak or wanting, lent a superficial consistency to the acts and words of the protagonist which gave to him at least the semblance of character. With the romantic drama, in which the action shifts unaccountably from one passion to another, even this illusive consistency is lost, and the play appears no longer as merely non-moral, but too often as simply wanton. The punishment

came heavily and publicly. From the first there had been preachers of the Puritan stamp to denounce the "flexanimous enticements" of the stage, and with the growth of Puritanism and the degeneracy of the drama these denunciations became more violent and more voluminous, reaching their maximum of both in the huge and clamorous Histriomastix (1632) of William Prynne.

I doubt if anybody in this generation has been able to read through that leviathan of objurgation, and for imposing such a monster on the world Prynne well deserved to have his ears cropped and to be branded on the cheeks as Seditious Libeller (among other amenities he called Queen Henrietta Maria a "notorious whore"): the punishment did the cause of righteousness no harm, and it wrung from a sour pedant one of the best puns ever made in England, when he interpreted the letters S. L. as Stigmata Laudis. In the vigorous language of the Histriomastix (p. 41) these plays, which we are criticising so mildly, "had their Alpha, and Omega; their beginning, and end: their birth, and use from Hell; being not only invented by the Devill himselfe: but likewise by his owne speciall command, and his greatest minions advice"- the devil, if I understand Mr. Prynne, being the Dionysus of the Athenians in whose honour plays were first performed and whose lewdness still presides over the stage. As for the comedies of his age, the Puritanical critic

thought (p. 62) that "the stile, and matter of most popular, (especially Comical,) Stage-Playes, is Amorous, Scurrilous, and Obscene" - and he might have proved his point without a page and a half of references to the Fathers. "The stile, and subject Matter of our Tragedies," he adds (p. 73), "are Bloody, and Tyrannical” — whereupon follows a list of all the passions, beginning with envy and ending with revenge, which formed the substance of the romantic drama. He comes closer to a philosophic criticism when he complains (p. 177) that "men in Theatres, are so farre from sinne-lamenting sorrow, that they even delight themselves with the representations of those wickednesses, which the originall Authors of them now deplore in Hell." After the charitable fashion of his tribe, Prynne saw only the evil and nothing of the good of what displeased him, and his palpable ignorance of the stage, together with his assurance that any page of Latin from one of the Fathers is a better argument than the actual comprehension of what he was writing about, deprives his book and others of its kind of any critical value.

Nevertheless, Prynne does, in the last charge quoted, approach the real evil of the late Elizabethan drama. In saying that the audiences took delight in the representation of wickednesses without sin-lamenting sorrow, he has merely changed into what we may be pleased to call re

ligious cant, the fundamental literary criticism that these plays deal with the expression and interaction of passions in themselves with little sense of character. For it must be observed that moral judgement and literary criticism here go hand in hand. There is no doubt much to condemn in Beaumont and Fletcher from the direct standpoint of public decency; but, on the other hand, they are full also of moral sentiments magnificently expressed. The real moral indictment under which they lie is rather the more central charge that in ignoring that element of our being which stands apart from the passions as a governing power, they loosed the bond of character, removing from conduct the law of cause and effect and leaving human nature as a mere bundle of unrelated instincts.

That is the moral judgement, and the æsthetic criticism is but the same thing in different words. There is much in these plays that offends any canon of taste, but, again, they are replete with passages and whole scenes of exquisite beauty and superlative wit; if any balance of this kind be drawn, they must be rated very high as literary productions. The real criticism comes when we begin to reflect, and, reflecting, feel the want of that profounder pleasure of the imagination which springs from the intimate marriage of the emotions and the understanding. We understand a thing as we see a principle of unity at work

within or behind a changing group of appearances. We understand human nature in the same way: we may in a manner respond in feeling to emotions, we understand only character. We respond deeply to the emotions of the Hippolytus, and at the same time we understand the background, so to speak, of character upon which they are thrown, and from this union of feeling and understanding springs the highest æsthetic delight. We feel as keenly the long emotional beauty of Romeo and Juliet, and the impression of that pleasure remains clearly and firmly implanted in memory, though the deeper joy of the imagination has been lost from the play with the disappearance of character. Our heart is still touched by the exquisite painting of the emotions in The Maid's Tragedy, but it must be admitted also that its incomprehensible tangle of the passions weakens to a certain extent the sympathetic echo of each within us, and in the end leaves an indistinct and blurred impression in memory. So clearly do intellectual comprehension and moral judgement flow together, and so at the last do the censures of the Puritan theologian, Prynne, and the Restoration critic, Rymer, though each is unjust and even foolish in its excess, clasp hands in a curious way and justify each other. But from the standard of the latter, perhaps, rather than of the former, we shall be able to arrive more directly at the source of what from