ities of characterization and structure.

But the fact remains, hardly modified by the sporadic manifestations,
that the English stage was frankly separating itself from English
literature, and by 1860 the divorce was practically complete. There was
a woful lack of public consideration for its higher interests on the one
hand, and no definite artistic endeavor to produce worthy stage
literature on the other. Authors who wrote for the stage got no
encouragement to print their dramas and so make the literary appeal;
there was among them no esprit de corps, binding them together for a
self-conscious effort to make the theater a place where literature
throve and art maintained its sovereignty. No leading or representative
writers were dramatists first of all. If such wrote plays, they did it
half heartedly, and as an exercise rather than a practical aim. It is
curious to ask ourselves if this falling away of the stage might not
have been checked had Dickens given himself more definitely to dramatic
writing. His bias in that direction is well known. He wrote plays in his
younger days and was throughout his life a fine amateur actor: the
dramatic and often theatric character of his fiction is familiar. It was
his intention as a youth to go on the stage. But he chose the novel and
perhaps in so doing depleted dramatic history.

Literature and the stage, then, had at the best a mere bowing
acquaintance. Browning, who under right conditions of encouragement
might have trained himself to be a theater poet, was chagrined by his
experience with _The Blot on the 'Scutcheon_ and thereafter wrote closet
plays rather than acting drama. Swinburne, master of music and mage of
imagination, was in no sense a practical dramatist. Shelley's dramas are
also for book reading rather than stage presentation, in spite of the
fact that his _Cenci_ has theater possibilities to make one regret all
the more his lack of stage knowledge and aim. Bailey's _Festus_ is not
an acting play, though it was acted; the sporadic drama, in fact,
between 1850 and 1870, light or serious, was frankly literary in the
academic sense and not adapted to stage needs; or else consisted of book
dramatizations from Reade and Dickens; or simply represented the
journeymen work of prolific authors with little or no claim to literary
pretensions.

The practical proof of all this can be found in the absence of drama of
the period in book form, except for the acting versions, b