Page:The nature and elements of poetry, Stedman, 1892.djvu/167

Rh But are there, then, no dramatic works in recent literature? Yes; more than in any former time, if you do not insist upon poetic form and rhythm. While the restriction adopted for these The modern creative spirit and its chief mode of activity. lectures excludes that which is merely inventive composition, you know that prose fiction is now the principal result of our dramatic impulse. The great modern novels are '''Our prose fiction. Cp. "Poets of America": p. 463.''' more significant than much of our best poetry. What recent impersonal poem or drama, if you except "Faust," excels in force and characterization "Guy Mannering" and the "Bride of Lammermoor," "Notre Dame de Paris," "Les Trois Mousquetaires," "Père Goriot," "On the Heights," "Dimitri Rudini," "Anna Karénina," "With Fire and Sword," "Vanity Fair," "Henry Esmond," "The Newcomes," "Bleak House," "The Tale of Two Cities," "The Cloister and the Hearth," "Westward Ho!" "Adam Bede," "Romola," "Lorna Doone," "Wuthering Heights," "The Pilot," "The Scarlet Letter," "The Deluge," and other prose masterpieces with which you are as familiar as were the Athenians with the plays of Euripides? More than one of them, it is true, reflects the author's inner life (but so does "Faust"), and is all the more intense for it. The free nature of the novel seems to make subjectivity itself dramatic. Certainly, the individuality of a Bronté, a Thackeray, a Hawthorne, or a Meredith does not lead us to prefer G. P. R. James, or put them on a lower plane than the strictly