ic faith in
the plenary verbal inspiration of every one of Shakespeare's clowns.
Like some melodiously contending anthem of Handle's, I said, of
Richard's meek "undoing" of himself in the mirror-scene; and, in fact,
the play of Richard the Second does, like a musical composition,
possess a certain concentration of all its parts, a simple continuity,
an evenness in execution, which are rare in the great dramatist. With
Romeo and Juliet, that perfect symphony (symphony of three independent
poetic forms set in a grander one* which it is the merit of German
[203] criticism to have detected) it belongs to a small group of plays,
where, by happy birth and consistent evolution, dramatic form
approaches to something like the unity of a lyrical ballad, a lyric, a
song, a single strain of music. Which sort of poetry we are to account
the highest, is perhaps a barren question. Yet if, in art generally,
unity of impression is a note of what is perfect, then lyric poetry,
which in spite of complex structure often preserves the unity of a
single passionate ejaculation, would rank higher than dramatic poetry,
where, especially to the reader, as distinguished from the spectator
assisting at a theatrical performance, there must always be a sense of
the effort necessary to keep the various parts from flying asunder, a
sense of imperfect continuity, such as the older criticism vainly
sought to obviate by the rule of the dramatic "unities." It follows
that a play attains artistic perfection just in proportion as it
approaches that unity of lyrical effect, as if a song or ballad were
still lying at the root of it, all the various expression of the
conflict of character and circumstance falling at last into the compass
of a single melody, or musical theme. As, historically, the earliest
classic drama arose out of the chorus, from which this or that person,
this or that episode, detached itself, so, into the unity of a choric
song the perfect drama ever tends to return, its intellectual scope
deepened, complicated, enlarged, but still with an unmistakable [204]
singleness, or identity, in its impression on the mind. Just there, in
that vivid single impression left on the mind when all is over, not in
any mechanical limitation of time and place, is the secret of the
"unities"--the true imaginative unity--of the drama.

1889.

NOTES

188. *Elinor. Do you not read some tokens of my son (Coeur-de-Lion)
In the large composition of t