It is now a commonplace of criticism that the epoch of Charles II. was an epoch of decline and degradation for the British drama. The complacent self-felicitations of Dryden in his early days on the superior refinement of his own age, and the consequent superiority of his own plays to those of Elizabeth and James, dispose us to insist upon the contrary view with somewhat emphatic asperity. Yet later, Dryden did ample justice to "the giant race before the flood"—the pre-rebellion poets, by himself so named—expressly repudiating French influence moreover. Indeed, the great wave of dramatic energy had culminated, and was subsiding. The age so extolled by Dryden was, in many respects, unfavourable to dramatic poetry. The Puritan, with his grave, earnest tone, righteous indignation against evil living, and crude, sour, uncultivated other-worldliness, had dehumanized the people, frowning upon art, beauty, and secular knowledge, till they withered and dwindled, as under a blight; so that religious reverence became identified with blind intolerance, virtue and high principle with clownish ignorance and pharisaic cant.

Then, after the Restoration—(partly through that tendency to reaction from extremes which characterizes human nature, partly through the direction given to our stage by a dissolute and light king, who had lived an exile at a court where he and his courtiers, besides acquiring foreign tastes, might well learn disuse, and forget the habit of patriotism)—not only a wide-spread sexual license, but a very general social and political corruption prevailed in England. The troublous period of the civil wars, moreover, besides leaving little leisure for the graces of life and courtship of the Muses, had engendered a certain ferocity and violence of tone in political and social relations; the war thunders and commotions still growled and grumbled, heaved and seethed in the sullen subsiding swell of bitter and furious faction—religious fanaticism on the one hand, incredulity and moral indifference on the other. Our very patriotism was tainted with venality. And though some splendid naval victories adorned the reign, though a few names, for ever illustrious in our annals, shine like stars from among dark and turbulent clouds, it was a time when our buffoon king bartered the liberties of his country for gold of a foreign prince, invoking alien aid against his own subjects; when the Dutch admiral sailed by silent and dismantled forts up our chief river and burned our ships; when Clarendon, the historian, the Tory statesman of high reputation, grovelling at the Council board before the divine right of Stuarts, proclaimed eagerly his longing to embrace dishonour, and sacrifice his own daughter at the shrine of that terrible idol; when the shrewd and subtle Liberal statesman, Shaftesbury, emulating Machiavelli, deserved the scathing invective inflicted by Dryden upon Achitophel. Shall we compare such a middle age of declining manhood, though not shorn indeed of all glory, with that of Elizabeth in the generous splendour and faulty exuberance of adventurous youth? The purple glow of health and morning had well-nigh faded from this dim world.

Still we must not exaggerate the loss. Power and passion were yet with us. The spell and memory of great traditions, historical and literary, were yet upon us. I do think that our most recent writers have been unjust to the Restoration drama. The brightest glories of that period indeed are unquestionably of Puritan growth, the fruit of Humanism and Renascence grafted upon the sturdy stock of pious Puritan principle, Milton's Paradise, and Comus, arrayed in magnificent language, sumptuous like cloth of gold; austere Samson, our only great native recreation (no mere clever imitation) of an old-world tragedy, because the work of a genius, devout as Æschylus, alive, moreover, with the personal experience of an illustrious personality; and Bunyan's wonderful vision, clad in a lovely homespun of purest English, solace of devout souls for all time, delight of young and old, wise and simple, rich and poor—healing aromatic balsam these from the still Puritan garden. Yet without this pale too, in the confused common world, in the sphere of rich and gracious secular poetry, there are two names at least that we cannot afford to forget—the names of Dryden and Otway. Two great human tragedies, Don Sebastian, and All for Love, besides one fine, though inferior tragi-comedy, The Spanish Friar, and the rhymed heroic plays, abounding in true poetry and skilful characterisation, has Dryden written; while Otway, who lived so miserably and died so young, produced three dramas of high calibre, one of which, Venice Preserved, is surpassed in the modern world only by Shakespeare. If those were the days of Lauderdale and Jefferies, they were capable also of nourishing the religious life of Leighton, Fox and Penn; the philosophy of Cudworth and Henry More, of Hobbes, Locke, Boyle and Newton; the narrative of Defoe; the satire of Butler; the history, and memoirs of Clarendon, Burnet, Fuller and Evelyn; finally, the excellent poetry of Andrew Marvell—leaving aside that thinner, weaker, more popular vein of Waller and Cowley; while even though Herrick was gone, Rochester and Sedley could write a song. After all, the flood of national life still flowed strong, albeit turbid and troubled, still bursting through old worn barriers, irresistibly seeking, and with whatever delays securing health and freedom for all. Even the pulse of high Tories must have glowed when they remembered the European position of England under the Commonwealth; while Dryden was born a Puritan, though he died a Catholic, and had written an ode to Cromwell.

It is alleged, however, that the French drama had at this time (Scott says through the French taste of Charles II.) a baneful influence upon our own. But I cannot assent to this position. I believe rather that its influence was salutary, seeing that our drama never lost its own pronounced national character. On Dryden's earlier manner indeed, the fashionable French (or old Latin) declamation, casuistical debates about passion, and academic coldness may have been somewhat injurious. But this is a note rather of Dryden's idiosyncrasy than that of a school, like his neatly-turned, sense-isolating couplets—mannerisms shaken off by Dryden himself in his later plays.[1] Who can be less French than Lee? Otway also is perfectly free from these faults; nor, except in his earliest play, Alcibiades, is there any of Dryden's rant and bombast. His fable, indeed, is classical in its simplicity and skilful development; his concentration on some one motive of action, involving the utmost intensity of feeling, is unsurpassed; his movement fierce and rapid; and that without sacrificing underplot, or the grotesque element characteristic of the romantic drama, as written by Shakespeare and his contemporaries. Nor can I grant that such concentration and unity of interest, derived from classical examples, was otherwise than a reform much needed in our romantic tragedy—seeing it entailed no languor or frigidity borrowed from Seneca, or the courtly decorum of a French academy. On the extravagant Gothic fougue and fury of our native stage, characterised by its bad artistic form, and tumid, fantastic diction, classical influence of the right kind was purely salutary—granting, of course, the presence of original genius, lacking, for instance, in Addison's Cato—although I fully admit with Schlegel that in the most perfect Shakespearean examples of romantic drama the virtues of ancient and modern poetry are combined. Mr. J. A. Symonds is unquestionably justified in his strictures on Marlowe's learned predecessors, Norton, Hughes, Sackville and Daniel as "pseudo-classical" in Gorboduc, and elsewhere. But then they followed the bad example of Seneca and his Italian imitators. Dryden and Otway returned to more legitimate classical methods.

Otway reminds us of the best Greek tragedies by the intense furnace-breath of his passion, and its headlong rush into the abyss of Fate, though his poetry may be more volcanic and perturbed. Modern romantic love is the Englishman's theme, while in the religious atmosphere, and stately ideal repose of Greek tragedy his work is entirely wanting. But is not irreligion a distinctive note of romantic Christian drama, even as religion is that of the Greek? True it is that Christianity has opened to us the Infinite, and made us dissatisfied with the visible world; true also that the ideal of individual character has been heightened and purified in the advance of civilisation under Christian auspices, and that this feeling after the Infinite, this dissatisfaction with life, this heightened ideal of manhood, together with a deeper and wider comprehension of humanity, may be found in the drama of Shakespeare. Yet what of religion is there in Hamlet, in Lear, in Othello? "The rest is silence"—that is the final word. What reconciliation, or attempt at vindication, of the ways of God to man? Perhaps the most religious of old English plays is the Faustus of Marlowe, who is reported to have been an atheist! For we can hardly count the mediÆval Miracles and Moralities. But in Racine and Calderon, on the other hand, you find again the religious atmosphere. However, Dekker, Heywood and Jonson are moralised in the best (and that no merely copy-book) sense, and Shakespeare sometimes, as in Macbeth. The Greeks took a familiar, majestic, semi-mythological history, in which Divine interference had ever been recognised, and the French tragedian took kindred themes. But in Otway's drama, while he adopted the classical unity of motive and harmony of artistic treatment, for moral order there is a dissonant clash, a confused shriek, a wail of pain. In Shakespeare, there are many noble axioms about living, many wise and religious meditations; but none here. Shakespeare is a broad beneficent river, life-giving, though lost in a boundless, bottomless deep; Otway is a turbid winter torrent, with the sob and moan of anguished, stifled human love in it, whirling us to a catastrophe without hope. Strange that this should be the outcome of Christian, and that of Pagan poetry! The truth is that the modern dramatic poets had largely shaken off their Christianity, just as Euripides had shaken off his Paganism.

At the same time, the best modern drama does make us feel the moral influence, for good or evil, of experience upon character, and the inevitable issues in experience of character reacting upon circumstance. Otway (in his more limited sphere) does this, I think, as well as Shakespeare. Both leave us with a warmer affection for goodness. Carlos and the queen are noble and generous in their unmerited suffering, and Philip suffers for his fault.

Otway is classical in that he discovers a few principal groups of vividly portrayed figures, while the rest are very dim and subordinate. But he is romantic in that his personages are domestic, only dignified by their emotion. Dryden's flow is broader and statelier, but not so irresistibly compelling. In Otway and Lee, again, the lyrical fountain is very dry; sadly to seek is it in Otway, for in him there is no relief, no pause from the war and clamour of passion. He has abundant tenderness indeed, far more than Dryden; but then that tenderness is always shown stretched on the rack of disappointment, or suffering. In such high-strung tragedy of classical form, we much need the chorus of Greek poetry, or the sweet lyrical ripple of Elizabethan song. Racine's exquisite instinct for noble style fills effectually the intervals between extreme crises. The comic scenes in Otway, therefore, though unfortunately gross and repulsive, are absolutely needed for relaxation of the tense strain. For he makes the impression of being almost all supreme crisis and desperate situation, like terrific peaks where the earth-cloud hangs in gloom, only soothed by the low warble of water among mosses, or casual song of little bird, only broken by flashes of livid lightning—and all the rest barren steep; whereas in Shakespeare the awful snow-summits are girdled and invested with leafy forest, undulating lawn, lovely lake.

In Otway development of character, moreover, is little found; indeed, if "the unities" be observed as much as possible, that is not easy to compass; yet for knowledge of character in its labyrinthine recesses, and unexpected, though intelligible developments under the moulding pressure of circumstance, or commerce with other natures, as for nervous and appropriate poetic diction, Dryden's Don Sebastian is one of our most remarkable tragedies. The scene between Dorax and Sebastian is unsurpassed in Shakespeare. It presents a credible, though marvellous transformation of a proud, injured, embittered man to love and loyalty. Every word tells, every word is right. Here in one wonderful epitome we have conversion in the line of vital growth. It is no mere incredible and arbitrary dislocation of character, as of some puppet manipulated by a conjurer, which so often arouses our surprise in the pre-rebellion drama—for instance, in Massinger's Duke of Milan, and (dare I add?) in the Richard III. of Shakespeare. All for Love, again, is a splendid picture of the absorbing and enervating power of one great sensual passion; while the interview between Ventidius and Antony rivals that between Dorax and Sebastian.

Lee is an inferior Otway, but a man of true dramatic genius, with flashes of real poetry. His Rival Queens is one of our excellent tragedies. Southerne has produced at least one genuinely affecting act in his well-constructed drama, The Fatal Marriage, akin to Otway, though distinctly inferior. Crowne too was a poet, as is evident from Thyestes, in spite of repulsiveness and rant. Thyestes seems to me finer than the Œdipus of Dryden and Lee, which indeed appears to have been written to show how much worse a play than that of Sophocles could be written on the same tremendous theme. But the Fair Penitent and Mourning Bride, tragedies by Rowe and Congreve, are surely merely creditable academic exercises, destitute of fire and inspiration. In a lighter vein, Otway could only write some bustling, occasionally funny, dirty, rollicking farces. To call them comedies would be to insult the shades of Shakespeare, Jonson, Fletcher, Congreve, and Sheridan.

On the whole, then, while there is less inexhaustible prodigality, and force of unfettered genius in the Restoration than in the Elizabethan drama, we have still left dramatic energy of high enduring quality, which became, however, nearly extinct in the reigns immediately succeeding. Under Charles, what was good in the romantic movement was still retained; the shifting, many-coloured sheen of vigorous life is yet there, the sun-and-shadow chequer of grave and gay; but classic exemplars have moderated, and moulded the work to finer, more regular form. There is less of exceptional extravagance in the story, less of inconceivable and sudden metamorphosis or distortion in the characters, the unpleasant and bewildering effect in earlier plays being almost as when an acrobat proceeds to walk with long, lithe, serpentine body round his own head; less also of the over-elaborated, misplaced, unveracious ingenuity of so-called poetic diction. One may generously attribute all this to the extravagance of national and literary youth, but the drama of Spain and Italy ought possibly to bear some of the responsibility. At any rate, these are grave defects.

I will illustrate what I mean. It is surely with a shudder of incredulous aversion that we find an apparently kind and cordial king, in Fletcher's Maid's Tragedy, insisting upon a pure-hearted, generous, young courtier, Amintor, who adored him with superstitious reverence, breaking off his engagement to Aspatia, a noble maiden, and marrying the king's mistress, Evadne, in order the better to conceal, and carry on with more security his own guilty intrigue with her, and father his own bastards upon this loyal friend. Our incredulous aversion is, if possible, intensified when Amintor assents to his own dishonour, because it is the king who has compassed it. Not all the poetry put into the mouth of "lost Aspatia," nor all the knowledge of human nature displayed by the poet in the seeming inconsistency of this evil woman's mongrel repentance at the bidding of her brother, and conversion from cruel looseness to equally cruel respectability, and base desire to vindicate her own damaged reputation even by the treacherous murder of her royal lover, can condone for this initial, radical vice of unnatural motive. No lovely tropes and phrases, nor harmonies of verbal measure may condone this. It is with equally incredulous aversion that we find Massinger's Duke of Milan bidding his creature Francisco kill the Duchess, who is devoted to him, and to whom he is devoted, should she happen to survive him—which, as Hazlitt says, seems a start of frenzy rather than a dictate of passion—then veering idiotically from love to murderous hatred upon the mere assertion of this same creature, Francisco, that his long proved and virtuous wife has solicited him, Francisco, dishonourably, he in fact having solicited her unsuccessfully. With some difficulty we accept the mercurial and hotheaded gullibility of Othello, played upon by so cunning a devil as Iago; but we revolt from so poor and pinchbeck a copy as this.

The early drama, in its poetic beauty of individual passages, and frequent verisimilitude in the working out of given motives, now and again reminds me of the character attributed to madmen, that they are persons who reason logically, but on absurd or mistaken premises. And surely Hazlitt, not Lamb, is right about that celebrated scene in Ford's Broken Heart, where Calantha dances on, apparently indifferent, while messengers come successively to tell her of misfortune upon misfortune, death upon death; then, when the revel is over, dies suddenly from pent-up emotion. "This appears to me to be tragedy in masquerade, the true false gallop of sentiment; anything more artificial or mechanical I cannot conceive." That a woman should thus silence the voice of humanity, not from necessity, or for some great purpose, but out of regard to mere outward decorum of behaviour, for the mere effect and Éclat of the thing, is not fortitude but affectation. It often seems as if the Elizabethan and Caroline poets wrote their plays for the sake of working up to some striking and effective situation, and as if it were of little consequence to them how difficult or impossible the way that led thither might be, so long as they could hew their path there. Even the splendid scenes in Cyril Tourneur's Revenger's Tragedy, where the brothers assume a disguise in order to tempt their sister to unchastity, and procure their mother's consent to it, then threaten to kill their mother for consenting, appear to be open to the same objection.[2]

But I wish to emphasize the fact that the drama of Otway, whatever its shortcomings, is, in this respect of sobriety and truth to nature, superior on the whole to that of his illustrious forerunners. And surely a good deal of cant is now uttered about the academic insipidity and coldness of Corneille and Racine, who influenced our later drama, and who powerfully moved the men of their own day. What can be nobler than Athalie, Britannicus, or The Cid? Academic coldness is hardly the phrase that rises to one's lips when one is watching Sarah Bernhardt in PhÈdre; while no comedy is superior to MoliÈre's. If these men moved in golden fetters, they were strong enough to wear them as ornaments, rather than sink under them as impediments. Under the kid glove you feel the iron thews.

None of this incredulous aversion of which I spoke do we feel in reading Otway's Venice Preserved. Dryden averred that he could not move the feelings as could Otway, who, while inferior in reflection, poetic expression, and versification, was a greater master of pathos and passion. On the latter acts of Venice Preserved we are hurried breathlessly, as by the impetus of a mighty wave, shaken to the very depths—yet not, I think, unendurably, as by the hideous and gratuitous cruelty of Ferdinand exercised upon a little-offending sister in Webster's Duchess of Malfi, where horror upon horror is accumulated upon her head, to thrill and harrow us; and so powerful is the poet that only those can experience the pleasure which art should extract from pain, who enjoy the sight of an execution, or sniff gladly in a torture-chamber the fumes of spilt blood. We begin to breathe freely only when the monster, having filled up the measure of his unnatural malice, utters the fine line that first shows a faint relenting toward humanity:

The Elizabethans were superior to their successors in isolated passages, and for the most part incomparably so in their lyrics. Therefore, they are well represented in the "Dramatic specimens" of Charles Lamb. Otway could not be so represented; his excellence lies in the noble organic harmony and sanity of his whole creation, as in its emotional intensity, from which little can be detached that shall be admirable out of its own vital relation. I do not say that Dryden and Otway never attempt to enlist interest illegitimately in their tragedies by relying upon strained situations, and abnormal traits of character; but I believe they do so less than their predecessors. And I hardly think Mr. Symonds' excuse for the Elizabethans a valid one, when he urges that the men and women of that time were really as inconsistent as the playwrights represent them. I do not know that we have any historical instance of just that queer kind of inconsistency which we find in their pages, though I admit that not only history, but our own experience also, furnishes very strange examples of self-contradiction. Yet one can only say that the examples of it in the older drama are not, for the most part, rendered credible and probable to us. And, so far, therefore, this is not a drama which can be always and universally interesting, except in the supreme examples. In the same way Otway's and Wycherley's indecencies would hardly (one supposes) interest a Victorian audience. The intellectual, or ethical, atmosphere must not be too unfamiliar and alien.

We are not incredulous when Jaffier, the weak, affectionate, impulsive hero of Venice Preserved, maddened by the persecution of his adored bride, Belvidera, on the part of her implacable father, who is also a senator, suddenly, and without counting the cost, from motives of revenge and hope of better fortune, consents to take part in a conspiracy against the State, persuaded by his dearest friend, Pierre, a man of sterner and more homogeneous fibre. Nor are we incredulous when, realising with his tender heart what hideous consequences are likely to ensue in the disturbance of domestic peace, and the slaughter of so many innocent people, he allows himself, however reluctantly, to be over-persuaded by Belvidera, who comprehends that the murder of her father, with all the other senators, is intended; or when, thus over-persuaded, he renounces his purpose, and betrays his fellow-conspirators, including even his well-beloved friend, to the Doge and Senate. We are not incredulous when we see Jaffier, on his way to the Senate, walking as in a dream under spell of his adored Belvidera's more powerful will, and hear him say in some of the most beautiful lines the poet wrote:

The catastrophe we feel inevitably to follow from the given elements in their fusion and entanglement, the cruel injustice of the father, the weak and foolish impulsiveness of the hero, together with his ardent affection both to bride and friend, and the co-existent corruption in the State, which made that sinister intrigue against the Republic possible.

I cannot agree with Dr. Garnett that the interest of Otway's plays arises from the situation only, not from the characters. It appears to me that the humanity of the characters is strongly realised, and that we are made to sympathise with them profoundly. As to Addison's remark that the characters are mostly wicked, I hardly know what to say. The heroines are ideally good, and the others are neither better nor worse than average men and women. If Shakespeare has given us types—though these are also individuals—of ambition, jealousy, revengeful avarice, unpractical genius, showing us the natural issues and eventuations of these, Otway has given us one type, equally individual, of weak, but absorbing, and passionate affection, showing us the natural issues of this. As Johnson says, he "consulted nature in his own breast."

Having then revealed the intended treason, after extorting an oath from the Senate to spare the lives of his coadjutors, Jaffier is confronted with Pierre and the rest. Then follows a tremendous scene, in which Jaffier almost abjectly implores Pierre for pardon, and the latter spurns him as one proved unworthy the friendship of an honest man, finally striking and hurling Jaffier from him. The words he uses to his former friend are worse even than the blow; their venom can never cease to rankle. The blunt, open and magnanimous, though reckless and desperate character of Pierre is finely contrasted with that of Jaffier, luxuriously feminine in its sensibility. Jaffier urges that he has at least saved Pierre's life, to which his old friend makes the terrible reply:

When Belvidera was delivered by Jaffier, in pledge of his own good faith, into the hands of the conspirators, he gave them a dagger, charging them to despatch her, should he prove traitor, The Senate, false to their oath, condemned the rebels to death with torture; indeed the latter had refused to accept their lives with bondage at the hands of the Republic. Belvidera tells Jaffier this, and then he feels tempted to slay with that dagger her who has incited him to compass the ruin of his beloved friend. This is another tremendous scene. Prevented by the returning and overwhelming tide of love from executing his purpose, Jaffier bids her go to her father, and from him as senator beg the life of Pierre. She does so, and the old man, relenting at the sight of his yet beloved child kneeling in agony before him, grants her prayer. This part also is very beautiful. But his attempt to save Pierre comes too late. In their final most moving interview Jaffier tells Belvidera that he will not survive his friend. He commends his beloved to Heaven, calling down every blessing upon her. But when she understands that they are to part for ever she exclaims:

Then her mind gives way, and in the fearful soliloquy that follows, Otway reminds us of the power shown by Shakespeare in dealing with minds unhinged. Jaffier being allowed to take leave of Pierre on the scaffold, Pierre forgives him, but requests, as a last favour, that his friend will save him from the dishonour of public torture by killing him at the last moment. Jaffier promises, and does so, stabbing himself immediately after. In the last scene, Belvidera enters distracted:

The apparitions of Jaffier and Pierre rise again bleeding. When they sink, she vows passionately that she will dig for them till she find them; and, imagining that they are drawing her downward, she dies.

Though nearly all authorities have objected vehemently to the gross quasi-comic scenes with which Otway has lightened the intense gloom of his tragedy, I am not sure that the illustrious French critic, Taine, is not right in his approval of them. However ghastly, they give some relief. Though coarse and disgusting, they do stand out distinctly in the memory. The conspirators met at the house of one Aquilina, a Greek courtesan, who had private motives for favouring their cause. The old senator, Antonio (intended for a[Pg xxviii] caricature of the debauched Shaftesbury), had robbed Pierre of this mistress, which was one of his main incentives to plotting against the State. Taine's comment on the picture is striking: "Comme l'homme est prompt À s'avilir, quand, ÉchappÉ de son rÔle, il revient À lui-mÊme!" He thinks that Otway alone in that epoch reproduced the tragedy of Shakespeare: "Il ne lui manque que de naÎtre cent ans plus tÔt." Perhaps; only his form might then have suffered.

And now as to Otway's diction. There is nothing convulsive about it; in him, to borrow a simile from Lowell, "every word does not seem to be underlined, like those of a school girl's letter." In the eyes of those to whom expression is good in proportion as it foregoes its function of expressing, in favour of a bedizenment, as of some window so prettily daubed that it lets in no light, the diction of Dryden, Otway, Goldsmith, Byron may appear poor. Otway speaks the language of nature and passion. Still, I admit that Otway's diction often does want distinction, and his metre rhythmical quality. He has not always the right word ready. But his language has certainly the merit of doing more justice to his subject than that of his euphuistic predecessors. Take, for instance, an example from that portion of the fine play, entitled The Two Noble Kinsmen, on good grounds attributed to Shakespeare. A queen, the body of whose slain lord remains unburied by order of a cruel king, implores redress from one able to grant it in these terms:

Another queen, making a similar request, assures Theseus that they are—

Can these ladies, whose sorrow must have been much mitigated by their successful invention of such "precious" hyperboles, stand in need of much commiseration from us? Otway's expression at its best is simple, germane to the situation, vigorous, pregnant with the speaker's emotion, and therefore well calculated to impregnate us with it.

In the swift impetuous parts of a play such a diction is certainly best. Only Heywood, so far as I know, among the older dramatists, is equally pure. But I admit that where the action pauses, where it demands reflective soliloquy, Otway and Lee are inferior to their great predecessors. In Venice Preserved, and The Orphan, the pace is so tremendous, however, that we have hardly leisure to perceive their poverty in that respect. But there are occasions, in Don Carlos especially, where we do feel this inferiority, although the play is one of Otway's finest. Thus, at the beginning of the fifth act, when the king soliloquises on his misery in having lost the love of his bride, there was scope and verge for poetry of reflection, which Beaumont and Fletcher would have given, as well as Shakespeare. Dryden also would have given it, though perhaps of a somewhat coarser grain. This passage in Otway is poor, unworthy the occasion. His versification, moreover, though very good sometimes, is inferior on the whole to that of Dryden. Yet there are some passages of true reflective poetry in Otway, though certainly few and far between. In Southerne they are almost entirely wanting.

In Don Carlos we note the same want of political and historic sense which we had also to note in Venice Preserved, especially when we compare both plays with the narratives of Saint-RÉal, from which they are taken, and which have high merit; or when we compare Otway's with Schiller's Don Carlos, and even with Alfieri's tragedy, Filippo, though the extraordinary concentration of the latter admits of little historic detail. Still Alfieri's Philip is as life-like and graphic a study of individuality as that of Saint-RÉal, or Schiller; whereas the Philip of Otway makes no pretence to being other than a mere conventional stage-tyrant, violent, and ever in extremes; yet is he a man capable of much tenderness also; for he actually loves the Queen and his son, feelings of which the real Philip was incapable. Philip's jealousy in real life, as in the other two plays, only arises from a fierce sensual greed of personal possession, and from wounded pride. In Otway the king repents, although too late, and becomes reconciled to his wife and son, when he discovers that his jealousy has made him a blind tool in the hands of the enemies of Carlos and the Queen, and that they have not sinned in act. But the real Philip could not have repented. He did not believe them guilty in act. Otway's range is limited, his types are few. He could not draw a cold deliberate villain. As for his politics, they are simply those of an ordinary country clergyman's son. But he died very young, with little experience. The Philip of Schiller and Alfieri is a cold, cruel, ambitious bigot, only capable of simulating natural affection. But in each of the three tragedies the Queen and Don Carlos are powerfully presented. The German play has all the Elizabethan lack of unity. Schiller's own intense and catholic sympathy with human progress and popular aspirations dominates throughout; and while unity of motive—for instance, in the important place given to Posa, friend of Carlos, a magnificent humane ideal—is somewhat lacking, there is more human verisimilitude in his play than in that of Otway, because men and women are usually swayed by complex and manifold impulses. The political part taken by the Queen and Prince in favour of the Flemish rebels had indeed a great deal to do with the King's anger against them. The splendid interview of Posa with the tyrant, and also the Grand Inquisitor's are quite beyond Otway. Philip had wickedly married Elisabeth, who was originally betrothed to his son Carlos, and the conflict of conjugal duty with love is admirably rendered in all the tragedies, although the passion and pathos are perhaps warmest in Otway. This is the sole motive in the English and Italian plays. In Schiller there is a whole era, "the very form and pressure" of a time.

We get as little philosophy or theology, as political and historic sympathy from Otway. In this respect he is inferior not only to Shakespeare, but to Dryden, who is able to afford more food for the intellect, if less for the heart. The terse and nervous expression of ripe and mellow life-wisdom in Dryden's Spanish Friar, for instance, is very remarkable. The greater poets indeed are usually men of great general intellectual power. Chaucer, Shakespeare, Spenser, Goethe, Dante, Milton, Byron, Coleridge, Browning, occur at once to memory. Otway is perhaps exceptional in this respect. Possibly the free-thinking sentiments so fiercely hurled in the teeth of the priest by Pierre on the scaffold afford a clue to Otway's own attitude toward religion. In The Orphan we find the same ardour of friendship and attachment between the sexes, the same raging despair and revolted denial, when those fierce[Pg xxxiii] affections are disappointed—no faith. Castalio's last words are—

And Chamfort's, the last in the play:

The scenes in Don Carlos, where Carlos and the Queen meet, are admirably right in their abrupt, interrupted utterance, and must have been most effective on the stage. On the whole, no better opportunity exists for comparing the classical and romantic manners than in the examples afforded by these three plays on the reign of Philip. Don John's soliloquy about bastardy and free love is exceptionally good as a purple patch of poetry in Otway, though not without a reminiscence of Shakespeare's Edmund. There are likewise two splendid lines uttered by the King when Gomez is tempting him to suspect his son and queen. Gomez says:

The Orphan I do not myself like so much as Don Carlos, but it is full of Otway's peculiar power, and has a greater reputation. The plot is repulsive, with a flavour of Elizabethan unsoundness. All the mischief and misery arise from a want of moral courage shown by Castalio, the passionate, but weak and irresolute hero, in concealing—partly from a kind of dastardly, rakish, bravado, and partly from fear of his father's disapproval, as well as a certain misplaced deference to fraternal affection—his own ardent and honourable affection for the orphan girl to whom he is secretly married. The character of Castalio is similar to that of Jaffier, Carlos, and of Otway himself, judging from what we know of his relations with Mrs. Barry. Monimia is another Belvidera, though less powerfully conceived. They are exquisite types of womanhood, own sisters to Cordelia, Imogen, Desdemona. There is no local colour in the play, but we miss that in Don Carlos and Venice Preserved more particularly. Otway's scenes might be in abstract space. The poetry of the period of Charles II., William, and Anne, was singularly blind to the face of external nature, a very serious defect; not even Greek or Latin poetry was thus blind.

I have drawn a distinction between two kinds of poetry in drama—that of movement or crisis, and that of repose or contemplation. The poetry appropriate to the one condition must necessarily be different from that appropriate to the other, and he is so far a bad poet who confounds the species. It will be the second kind that can be transplanted to books of beautiful extracts, and lends itself to quotation, because that is more germane to many similar circumstances; whereas the former belongs especially to the particular event or crisis. In the former species I have allowed that Otway is not rich. We look in vain for the poetry of Hamlet, of brooding, irresolute, melancholy; for the poetry of Lorenzo, that of music; or Portia, which is that of mercy; for any lovely words like those of Perdita, the very breath and symphony of flowers; for any accents like those of heart-stricken Aspatia, in her swan-song of desertion; or visionary anthem of Helen's ideal beauty, as in Marlowe. No Claudio out of Shakespeare has uttered a final word concerning physical death equal to this: "To lie in cold obstruction, and to rot"; no CÆsar has fixed for us the visible tokens of a born conspirator; no Jaques summed for us the seasons of human life. Nor are these mere "purple patches"; far from it, they are of the seamless garment's very warp and woof.

But, if we consider, we shall find that much of the poetry we love best in that earlier drama is the poetry of movement or supreme event; and this we do find in Otway, as the passages which I have already quoted, or mentioned, are sufficient to prove. We do find in him poetry parallel to that of mad Lear's heart-quaking utterance in presence of Cordelia, which commences—

and ends—

or to her answer—

She has some cause to be angry with him, but her sisters none, he says; and she answers "No cause! no cause!" That, which is, perhaps, the finest passage in all literature, has not one metaphor, one trope, one "precious" phrase; but any old injured madman might speak just so. When poor, laughable, dissolute old Falstaff, dying, "babbles o' green fields"; when Lear at the last apostrophises his dead Cordelia—

we can hardly bear to hear them. It is so much finer, because so much truer to nature than when those ingeniously poetical ladies, entreating the sepulture of their best beloved, urge that they are "rinsing their holy begging in their eyes." But Tourneur's Castiza takes our breath away when she adjures the trusted and reverenced mother, who has suffered her own better nature to be warped and darkened, and invites her daughter to suffer moral degradation, in the words—

It is a gleam of heavenly light blinding us out of the gloom. And when the Duchess of Malfi in her last struggle entreats—

[Pg xxxvii]

we are reminded of the equally touching words of Belvidera about her child, and the last words of dying Monimia:

It is true that the poet, since he takes the liberty to translate into verse men's ordinary language, may also interpret and mould his story, together with the speech it may involve, artistically, according to his own genius. But then the turn of thought, of feeling and of phraseology must have verisimilitude, that is to say, must seem related, not only to the event as it might appear to the poet personally, but as it ought to appear to him when he has imagined himself into the character and circumstances represented. Thus the strange figure made use of by Jaffier in addressing Pierre, who is about to be tortured on the rack, is felt to be absolutely fitting. For anger, despair, remorse, will sometimes burst forth in hyperbole. Wisdom is justified of her children.

And now perhaps we may hardly be surprised to hear the consenting voice of great authorities place Otway very high among the masters of English tragedy. Dryden, though, when "fearing a rival near the throne," he had called Otway "a barren illiterate man," said afterwards: "The motions which are studied are never so natural as[Pg xxxviii] those which break out in the height of a real passion. Mr. Otway possessed this part as thoroughly as any of the ancients or moderns." And again:

Addison says: "Otway has followed nature in the language of his tragedy, and therefore shines in the passionate parts more than any of our English poets." Goldsmith again: "The English language owes very little to Otway, though next to Shakespeare the greatest genius England has ever produced in tragedy." Then let us remember the beautiful lines of Collins:

And Coleridge, musing upon "mighty poets in their misery dead," in his "Monody on the death of Chatterton" sang:

Respecting Otway's scenes of passionate affection, Sir Walter Scott says that they "rival and sometimes excel those of Shakespeare; more tears have been shed probably for the sorrows of Belvidera and Monimia than for those of Juliet and Desdemona."

Thomas Otway[3] was born March 3rd, 1651, at Trotton near Midhurst in Sussex, and was the only son of the Rev. Humphrey Otway, Rector of Wolbeding in the same county. He was educated at Wickeham School, Winchester, and at eighteen was entered a commoner of Christ Church College, Oxford, early in 1669. He does not display much learning, and probably did not study very hard, but preferred amusing himself with his friends, among whom was young Lord Falkland. He had been intended for the Church; but the death of his father, who, as he tells us, "left him no other patrimony than his faith and loyalty," probably obliged him to leave Oxford without taking a degree. In 1671 he went to London to seek his fortune there. At the theatre in Dorset Garden, Salisbury Court, all Otway's plays, except the last, were performed by the Duke of York's company; and here Otway himself made his first and only appearance as an actor, taking the part of the King in Mrs. Behn's Forced Marriage. This attempt was eminently unsuccessful. He seems now to have cultivated the society of men of rank and fashion, who tolerated him as a boon companion for the sake of his agreeable social qualities, but who, while they helped him to get rid of his money in many foolish ways, left him in the lurch when he needed them most. The young Earl of Plymouth, however, a natural son of the king, and a college friend, did befriend him. His premature death at Tangier, aged twenty-two, was a serious loss to Otway.

The dramatist's earliest play was Alcibiades, first printed in 1675. It is a poor production, though there are scenes in it of distinct promise. Don Carlos appeared in the year after, and won extraordinary favour, partly owing to the patronage of Rochester, who dropped an author as soon as he acquired, by merit or popularity, some independent standing, fancying that his own literary dictatorship might be thereby imperilled. Thus he had dropped Dryden, taken up Elkanah Settle, the "City poet," dropped him, and elevated Crowne. But Crowne's Calisto becoming too popular for the malignant wit, he transferred his patronage to Otway. In 1677 Otway produced two translations from the French, Titus and Berenice, from Racine, and The Cheats of Scapin, from MoliÈre. All these were rhyming, so-called "heroic" plays, our playwrights herein following the French example. But Dryden, in the Prologue to Aurungzebe, having announced that he would henceforth abandon the use of rhyme in tragedy, other writers soon followed his lead. The success of Don Carlos was the occasion of a coolness between Otway and Dryden, who, with the proverbial amiability of literary rivals, said some sharp things about one another; but we have seen how generously Dryden afterwards gave Otway his due meed of praise. To this period, says Thornton, we may probably assign a duel between Otway and Settle ("Doeg"), in which Settle is said to have misbehaved.

With the fine actress, Mrs. Barry, a daughter of Colonel Barry, who had sacrificed his fortune in the service of Charles I., Otway fell desperately in love. She had taken a part in his Alcibiades, and became famous by her representations of Belvidera and Monimia. To this affection, with all the depth of his character, Otway remained constant; but Mrs. Barry did not return it; at any rate, she deemed the attractions of Lord Rochester superior. Possibly Mr. Gosse may be right in thinking that she was a cold and calculating woman, who would reject a penniless lover, yet keep him dangling attendance upon her if he wrote parts that suited her as an actress. In this case, however, it seems odd that such parts should have suited her; and it would be touching to note how Otway must have idealized his lady in writing them for her. But she may honestly have preferred the witty and 5 peer to the tragic and penniless poet—though Otway was a goodlooking man with very fine eyes, and Rochester, according to Otway (a prejudiced witness), looked like an owl. Yet, judging by Rochester's portraits, he was distinguished, though rather feminine in appearance. However, Rochester was as sincerely attached to Mrs. Barry as such a rake could be, and she really owed him much, for he personally educated her in the duties of her profession. Otway loved "not wisely, but too well," as we know from the remarkable love letters, reprinted in the appendix to the present volume. With characteristic hotheadedness and weakness combined he could not resolve to renounce her, even though he knew she was Rochester's mistress. Hence the insolent bitterness of Rochester's attack upon him in his "Session of the Poets," in which he alludes to Otway's pitiable condition on his return from Flanders.[4] For even Otway's human nature had to yield at last, and he could no longer bear to hang about the Duke's Theatre, as had been his wont, in order to get a glimpse of his lady. He therefore obtained from the Earl of Plymouth a cornet's commission in a new regiment of horse, which was sent out at this time (1678) to join the army under Monmouth in Flanders—not, surely, as Mr. Gosse says, in the service of France, but, on the contrary, to relieve Mons in the Dutch interest. Very shortly after, however, the troops were disbanded and recalled, while the money voted by the Commons for their payment was shamefully misappropriated, they being paid only by debentures, the credit of which was so low that they were hardly saleable. This is why the poet came home in so miserable a plight, and not on account of any want of courage.

It was like Rochester to reproach him on this score—the man who showed the white feather to Lord Mulgrave, and made lackeys cudgel Dryden in Rose Alley. But Otway gave him as good as he got in the "Poet's Complaint." The matter is explained in the Epilogue to Caius Marius, which he produced in 1680, having written most of it in camp abroad. It is a barefaced, and indeed avowed plagiarism from Romeo and Juliet, though one or two scenes are his own, and have some merit. Marius, at all events, was a rather more dignified representative of Shaftesbury than old Antonio in Venice Preserved. This play occupied the place of Romeo and Juliet on our stage for seventy years. With a more avowed party motive he likewise published in the same year "The Poet's Complaint of his Muse." When we think of "Absalom and Achitophel," the contrast is woeful indeed. All Otway's poems are bad, except the Epistle to Duke, his friend. The blunted insipidity of his conventional diction is worthy of Pope's followers. Before leaving England he had written his first comedy, Friendship in Fashion, which appeared in 1678.

In the year 1680 Otway's second great play, The Orphan, appeared. Voltaire attacked it furiously, and will allow no merit to le tendre Otway. Tenderness anywhere was not likely to find favour with the tigre-singe, whose fascinating wit was of an icy brilliance. But Jeremy Collier also attacked the play on other grounds, in his "Short View of the Immorality and Profaneness of the English Stage." Mrs. Barry has recorded that in the character of Monimia she could never pronounce the words "Poor Castalio!" without tears. May she not have been thinking of another Castalio? Let us believe it! Ah! if only Mrs. Barry had been the Belvidera of her poet's dream, she might have saved him from his evil genius, from his selfish patrons, and from himself.

In 1681 Otway produced The Soldier's Fortune, a comedy which contains allusions to his own adventures abroad, and is the only contemporary play not dedicated to a person of quality, being dedicated to Bentley, the publisher. Depressed by his hopeless passion, "alternately elevated with promises and dejected by scorn and neglect, caressed for his wit, despised for his poverty, and exposed to all those attendant ills, which a generous spirit feels more acutely than actual privation, neglect, wrongs real and imaginary, the altered eye of friends," we can hardly wonder at the gloomy tone which he assumed in the Epilogue to this play. Can we not picture him with those large, limpid, wistful eyes looking for the face he most wanted among the crowds, preoccupied or listless, that passed in the gathering twilight of that afternoon, which he mentions in the last of those letters to Mrs. Barry, lingering among strange faces of promenaders under the trees of the gay Mall, looking long for her who never came, never fulfilled her promise to meet him? This seems to have been the turning point in Otway's career. Failing in this last attempt to win his lady's love, and sinking under accumulated debt, he, like how many others, surrendered himself to those habits of inebriety, which insidiously promised him consolation. And yet his creative powers were maturing daily, for his greatest work, Venice Preserved, was brought upon the stage in 1682.

Since Otway's plays were well received, it may seem strange that he should have remained so poor. But, in the first place, he was evidently one of those generous, reckless good fellows like "Goldy," and Sheridan, who spend all they have, and more too. And, in the second place, the profits of the playhouse were very small. Theatrical amusements were not the general resort of the people—a serious disadvantage, as Scott observes, to the art, as well as to the purse, of the playwright. Religious scruples still withheld many, as in Commonwealth days; and others were kept away by the indecency then in vogue. The most popular play did not remain long on the boards. In Otway's time, moreover, an author had only one benefit from the representation, which was on the third night. Southerne was the first to have two benefits, and it was not until 1729 that the profits of three representations became the right of the author. Gildon says that Otway got a hundred pounds a piece for The Orphan and Venice Preserved, while old Jacob Tonson bought the copyright of Venice Preserved for fifteen pounds. The poet was sometimes in such straits that he had to pawn his third day for fifty pounds. He could not have made much by his few prologues and occasional poems.

Otway's last play was a comedy called The Atheist, a continuation of The Soldier's Fortune, represented in 1683, or the following year, at the Theatre Royal by the united companies, who had amalgamated in 1682, and removed to Drury Lane. Charles II. died in February, 1685, and Otway thereupon published a poem called "Windsor Castle," in which he praised the late king, and exulted over the accession of James. His praises of Charles were probably not much more sincere than those which he, and other writers of the day, lavished upon people of rank in their dedications for the sake of a few guineas. More guineas are to be had now-a-days by flattering the whims and tastes of that "many-headed" monarch, under whose reign we have the honour to live. In the so-called Augustan age, literary merit was systematically neglected. Witness Butler and Cowley. Yet Otway was the son of a loyalist, and ever faithful to the Court. Nor was Charles incapable of appreciating talent. But Otway, to use his own words, only got the "pension of a prince's praise"; and a gracious command to lampoon the greatest statesman of the time, which he did accordingly. Praise of one who cannot be a rival is an inexpensive form of present. It appears, however, that two of the royal mistresses were more generous—Nell Gwynne and the Duchess of Portsmouth, whose bounty, "extended to him in his last extremity," he extols in the dedication of Venice Preserved.

Otway had withdrawn from the importunate clamour of creditors to an obscure public-house, the sign of the Bull, on Tower Hill; and here, on the 14th of April, 1685, at the premature age of thirty-four, he died. His body was conveyed thence to the Church of St. Clement Danes, and there deposited in a vault. About the circumstances of his death there is a conflict of evidence. The story that has gained currency is probably not the true one; only one early biographer is our authority for it. He states that, having long been insufficiently fed, Otway one day sallied forth in a starving state, and begged a shilling from a gentleman in a coffee house, saying, "I am the[Pg xlviii] poet Otway." This person, surprised and distressed, gave him a guinea. With it he bought a roll of bread, and began to devour it with the rage of hunger; but, incapable of swallowing from long abstinence, he was choked with the first mouthful. Other writers make no mention of this incident, and Wood is not only silent on the subject, but states that in his "sickness" (implying gradual decay) he composed a congratulatory poem on the inauguration of James II. Spence, moreover, who had the anecdote from Dennis the critic, tells quite a different story. He relates that Otway had an intimate friend named Blakiston, who was murdered in the street, and that, to revenge the deed, Otway pursued the assassin on foot as far as Dover, where he was seized with a fever, occasioned by fatigue, privation, and excitement. On his return to London, being heated, he drank water, which was the immediate occasion of his death. Yet undoubtedly insufficient nourishment must have accelerated his end. It is quite possible, therefore, that the anecdote about the guinea and the roll may be substantially true, although this circumstance may not have been the actual cause of death.

The ardour and constancy of Otway's personal attachments are very notable all through his career—witness his friendship with Shadwell (though Mr. Gosse strangely calls Shadwell his enemy), with an unknown person whom he names Senander, and especially with Duke, whose expressions of fondness for him were very warm. And it now appears that he fell a victim to this devoted comradeship, which he has so forcibly delineated in his tragedy. "Whom the gods love die young." Otway is with Shelley, Keats and Byron, with Marlowe and with Chatterton.

Roden Noel.