it, it is against it; it is never merely
indifferent. The poetry of these men is the denial, passionately made,
of everything the world prizes. While such a denial is sincere, as in
the best of them, then the verses they make are true and fine. But when
it is assumed, as in some of their imitators, then the work they did is
not true poetry.

But the literary characteristic of the present age--the one which is
most likely to differentiate it from its predecessor, is the revival of
the drama. When we left it before the Commonwealth the great English
literary school of playwriting--the romantic drama--was already dead. It
has had since no second birth. There followed after it the heroic
tragedy of Dryden and Shadwell--a turgid, declamatory form of art
without importance--and two brilliant comic periods, the earlier and
greater that of Congreve and Wycherley, the later more sentimental with
less art and vivacity, that of Goldsmith and Sheridan. With Sheridan the
drama as a literary force died a second time. It has been born again
only in our own day. It is, of course, unnecessary to point out that the
writing of plays did not cease in the interval; it never does cease. The
production of dramatic journey-work has been continuous since the
re-opening of the theatres in 1660, and it is carried on as plentifully
as ever at this present time. Only side by side with it there has grown
up a new literary drama, and gradually the main stream of artistic
endeavour which for nearly a century has preoccupied itself with the
novel almost to the exclusion of other forms of art, has turned back to
the stage as its channel to articulation and an audience. An influence
from abroad set it in motion. The plays of Ibsen--produced, the best of
them, in the eighties of last century--came to England in the nineties.
In a way, perhaps, they were misunderstood by their worshippers hardly
less than by their enemies, but all excrescences of enthusiasm apart
they taught men a new and freer approach to moral questions, and a new
and freer dramatic technique. Where plays had been constructed on a
journeyman plan evolved by Labiche and Sardou--mid-nineteenth century
writers in France--a plan delighting in symmetry, close-jointedness,
false correspondences, an impossible use of coincidence, and a quite
unreal complexity and elaboration, they become bolder and less
artificial, more close to the likelihoods of real life. The gravity of
the problems with whi