ith
the persons; for they are out of keeping with the sentiments of the
occasion, and jar on the feelings which the surrounding matter
inspires; that is, they are sins against dramatic propriety, as well
as against honest manliness of style: so that, however the pressure of
the age may account for them, it must not be taken as excusing them;
and the best we can say on this point is, that in his faults of style
the Poet went with the custom and fashion of his time, while in his
virtues he went quite above and beyond the time.

Near akin to these are other faults of still graver import. In his
earlier plays, the Poet's style is often, not to say generally, at
least in the more serious parts, rather rhetorical than rightly
dramatic. The persons often lay themselves out in what may not
unfairly be called speech-making. Their use of language is highly
self-conscious, and abounds in marks of elaborateness, as if their
mind were more intent on the figure they are making than on what they
are talking about: so that the right colloquial tone is lost in a
certain ambitious, oratorical, got-up manner of speech; and we feel a
want of that plain, native, spontaneous talk wherein heart and tongue
keep touch and time together: in short, they speak rather as authors
having an audience in view than as men and women moved by the real
passions and interests of life.

The reason of all this I take to be, that the Poet himself was at that
time highly self-conscious in his use of language. His art was then
too young to lose itself in the enthusiasm of Truth and Nature; and,
as remarked before, he seems to have felt no little pleasure in the
tokens of his own skill. Thus, in his earlier plays, written before he
had fully found himself, the arts and motives of authorship are but
too apparent: he was then, I should say, somewhat in the humour of
flirting with the Muses and Graces; which, because it lacks the
modesty and delicacy of genuine passion, therefore naturally runs into
that excess of manner and style which is commonly called "fine
writing." And it is a very note-worthy point, that when he studies
most for effect, then it is that we find him least effective. But here
too, as in the matter mentioned before, his fault was clearly the
result of imitation, not of character. Accordingly, in the earnestness
of his work, he gradually outgrew it. In the plays of his later
period, the fault disappears entirely; there is not a vestige of it
le