" We
wish now to suggest that, by the engrafting of Reason upon Feeling and
Taste, we shall be able, and thus alone shall be able, to force the
modern drama into the production of any profitable fruit.
At present, what is it we do? We are content if, with Feeling and
Taste, a dramatist does as other dramatists have done. The most
successful of the more immediately modern playwrights has been
Sheridan Knowles, and to play Sheridan Knowles seems to be the highest
ambition of our writers for the stage. Now the author of "The
Hunchback" possesses what we are weak enough to term the true
"dramatic feeling," and this true dramatic feeling he has manifested
in the most preposterous series of imitations of the Elizabethan drama
by which ever mankind were insulted and begulled. Not only did he
adhere to the old plots, the old characters, the old stage
conventionalities throughout; but he went even so far as to persist in
the obsolete phraseologies of the Elizabethan period- and, just in
proportion to his obstinacy and absurdity at all points, did we
pretend to like him the better, and pretend to consider him a great
dramatist.
Pretend- for every particle of it was pretence. Never was enthusiasm
more utterly false than that which so many "respectable audiences"
endeavoured to get up for these plays- endeavoured to get up, first,
because there was a general desire to see the drama revive, and
secondly, because we had been all along entertaining the fancy that
"the decline of the drama" meant little, if anything, else than its
deviation from the Elizabethan routine- and that, consequently, the
return to the Elizabethan routine was, and of necessity must be, the
revival of the drama.
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