His present interest was here wholly concentrated on the
single figure of Richard; and when that for the time was absent, the
subordinate figures became to him but heavy and vexatious encumbrances,
to be shifted on and off the stage with as much of haste and as little of
labour as might be possible to an impatient and uncertain hand. Now all
tragic poets, I presume, from AEschylus the godlike father of them all to
the last aspirant who may struggle after the traces of his steps, have
been poets before they were tragedians; their lips have had power to sing
before their feet had strength to tread the stage, before their hands had
skill to paint or carve figures from the life. With Shakespeare it was
so as certainly as with Shelley, as evidently as with Hugo. It is in the
great comic poets, in Moliere and in Congreve, {42} our own lesser
Moliere, so far inferior in breadth and depth, in tenderness and
strength, to the greatest writer of the "great age," yet so near him in
science and in skill, so like him in brilliance and in force;--it is in
these that we find theatrical instinct twin-born with imaginative
impulse, dramatic power with inventive perception.
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