Page:Hutcheson Macaulay Posnett - Comparative Literature (1886).djvu/394

 Cain "Mysteries;" but not only is his intense individualism, reflected in that of Cain as of Manfred, utterly at variance with the impersonal character of the early spectacles, and even fatal to any dramatic capacity by its inability to project sympathy beyond self, but the descriptions of Nature in these so-called "Mysteries" distinguish them alike from the rude drama of allegory and the mature drama of personal character. In the old impersonal drama of England, France, Germany, we have few touches of Nature even so slight as the Gossip's Song—"the flood comes flitting in full fast"—in the Chester Plays. In the personal drama, that of Shakspere himself, for example, we have only splendid glimpses of Nature—the "oak whose antique root peeps out upon the brook that brawls along this wood," or "yon gray lines that fret the clouds are messengers of day"—as if Shakspere felt the open introduction of Nature to be as unsuited to his drama as that of the impersonal "many-headed monster." Byron's lone Japhet among the rocky wilds of the Caucasus lamenting the wave that shall engulf the rugged majesty that looks eternal, Byron's painfully individualised Cain watching with Lucifer the myriad lights of worlds sweep by in the blue wilderness of space as "leaves along the limped streams of Eden," are almost equally removed from the Mysteries and the mature drama. How is it that we find Nature socialised on a vast scale in Faust? How is it that we find the individual and Nature thus darkly face to face in Byron? It is to these questions that we now propose to turn.