Page:Littell's Living Age - Volume 133.djvu/801

Rh most of it as a boisterous approximation to truth; but it presents itself as a hypocritical tyranny to simpler, perhaps finer, natures, who ask only to lead their own lives, do their own duty, and take their own pleasure.

At the time we are speaking of public opinion was divided against itself, it was the opinion of a party, and for this reason Mr. Procter feared it the more; he had a sort of feeling that unless he kept clear of party warfare, party spirit would crush him as he believed it had crushed Hazlitt, whose clearness and precision and robust sincerity were very attractive to him. He was fond in his old age of dwelling on his own freedom from party connection (though Blackwood and the Quarterly long insisted on abusing him as a Whig), and believed that it was to this that he owed his free intercourse with all the literary men of his day; which was really the reward of his talent for exquisite hospitality and his entire freedom from self-assertion.

But though he saw the whole literary movement of his day and sympathized with it, his own place in it is very definite. He belongs to the group of Leigh Hunt and Lamb and Keats: Leigh Hunt influenced him as an example; Lamb influenced him as a guide in the wide field of Elizabethan drama. One cannot say that either he or Keats influenced each other; but there is a real analogy in their method, and in their dependence upon the literature which they studied. Keats, of course, is incomparably the most fertile and splendid of the two; but, except in his odes and sonnets and the ballad of "La Belle Dame sans Merci," Keats never mastered his materials, while Mr. Procter, who did not begin to write till he was eight-and-twenty, is always thoroughly workmanlike, and the union of purity and delicacy, with masculine sanity and vigor, is always attractive. Like Keats Mr. Procter sometimes touches Shelley, as in the "Journal of the Sun" which the editor has printed, on the side where Shelley touches Greece, and Byron on the side where Byron touches Ariosto, and one might add this is not the most valuable side of Keats or Barry Cornwall. And with all his manliness there is an element of unreality in Barry Cornwall which there is not in Keats. Keats wrote of what he imagined, though his imagination was colored by his reading. Barry Cornwall's imagination was not so rich. He wrote of what he read and felt, without having seen or known. So far as his reading fed feeling which found itself a musical expression, he was justified in the gentle contempt he entertained for the tendencies of a later school, with whom reading sometimes serves to feed nothing better than a cold, fanciful precision of detail; but after all he stops short of real insight. It is not that by choice or by defect of power he has to subordinate force and truth of detail to general harmony and richness of effect: it is that in the narrative poems, at any rate, he has no firsthand grasp upon nature and fact at all. He gets his effects, which are really rich and harmonious, by combination and reflection out of the second-hand impressions which he has retained from reading.

His dramatic works are of a higher order. Lamb said of the "Dramatic Scenes" that there was not one of them that he would not have placed in his collection if he had found it in one of the Garrick plays at the British Museum. And though this praise has its limits, it is not at all too high. The scenes Lamb extracted from the ancient drama are commonly much better than the plays they are taken from. The plays are alive, but as wholes they are not for the most part delightful. Barry Cornwall's "Dramatic Scenes" are delightful if we will take them for what they are; without asking if they too might, not have been enshrined in live coherent plays. There is one sort of romanticism which finds the fresher air and brighter light it longs for in old books, as another finds it in old life; and for romanticists of the first sort Barry Cornwall seized and reproduced the charm of the gracious pathos and nobility of the Elizabethan, or rather Jacobean, drama, with as much mastery as Scott, on a larger scale, seized and reproduced the charm of the picturesqueness and generosity of Border and Highland life. Every nation which is fortunate enough to possess a classical drama, inherits from it a school of. classical acting, and this school in turn propagates a longer or shorter succession of acting plays, with classical pretentions, which perhaps in a period of literary revival may possess genuine literary merit. "Mirandola" was so good and succeeded so well that, as late as 1844, Mr. Carlyle, among others, was still pressing the author to persist in the career of dramatist, which he had long abandoned. According to the author's own account it was a very hurried and imperfect production. "Had I taken pains I could have made a much more sterling thing; but I wished for its representation, and there were so many authors struggling for the same object that I had not firmness to resist the opportunity that was 