o
be judged only by the compelling melody of the words he has chosen to
set in array, then is Poe the foremost of lyrists. Even the essay, the
most narrowly literary of all prose-forms, is valued for its wisdom
rather than for its phrasing. The essays of Stevenson, for example, will
survive not because of their style alone, polished as that is and
unexpectedly happy in its phrasing, but because the man who wrote them,
artist as he was in words, had something to say--something which was his
own, the result of his own observation of life from his own angle of
vision. Style is the great antiseptic, no doubt; but style cannot bestow
life on the still-born.

Not only do such critics as the anonymous writer from whom quotation has
been made, persist in thinking of the literary merit of the drama as
"exquisite prose" and "splendid verse,"--in other words as an added
grace, applied externally,--but they also seem to believe that all plays
possessing what they would regard as "literary merit" stand in a class
apart. They are looking for a literary drama which shall be different
from the popular drama. Apparently they expect to be able to recognize a
literary play at first sight--and probably by its excess of applied
ornament. And this attitude is quite as absurd as the other. In no one
of the greater periods of the poetic drama have the plays which we now
revere as masterpieces differed in form from the mass of the other plays
of that epoch. They were better, no doubt, excelling in power, in
elevation, in insight, in skill. But they bore a striking resemblance in
structure and in intent to the host of contemporary plays which we now
perceive to be hopelessly inferior to them.

So far as their outward appearance goes the great plays of Sophocles, of
Shakspere, and of Moliere are closely akin to the plays of their
undistinguished contemporaries. It is in their content that they are
immeasurably superior. They differ in degree only, never in kind.
Shakspere early availed himself of the framework of the tragedy-of-blood
that Kyd had made popular; and later he borrowed from Beaumont and
Fletcher the flexible formula of the dramatic-romance. His genius
towered above theirs, but he was content to appropriate their patterns.
Moliere modeled many of his earlier plays upon the loosely-knit
comedy-of-masks of the Italian comedians, and the difference between his
work and theirs is not external but internal; it is the difference
between a