SWINBURNE S TRAGEDIES. 199 



events and personages, would keep the stage as it is kept 

 by &quot;The Rivals,&quot; for example, immeasurably inferior as 

 that is in every element of genius except the prime one of 

 liveliness. Something similar in purpose to the parabasis 

 was essayed in one, at least, of the comedies of Beaumont 

 and Fletcher, and in our time by Tieck ; but it took, of 

 necessity, a different form of expression, and does not seem 

 to have been successful. Indeed, the fact that what is 

 called the legitimate drama of modern times in England, 

 Spain, and France has been strictly a growth, and not a 

 manufacture, that in each country it took a different form, 

 and that, in all, the period of its culminating and beginning 

 to decline might be measured by a generation, seems to 

 point us toward some natural and inevitable law of human 

 nature, and to show that, while the principles of art are 

 immutable, their application must accommodate itself to 

 the material supplied them by the time and by the national 

 character and traditions. The Spanish tragedy inclines 

 more toward the lyrical, the French toward the epical, the 

 English toward the historical, in the representation of real 

 life ; the Spanish and English agree in the Teutonic 

 peculiarity of admitting the humorous offset of the clown, 

 though in the one case he parodies the leading motive of 

 the drama, and represents the self-consciousness of the 

 dramatist, while in the other he heightens the tragic effect 

 by contrast (as in the grave-digging scene of &quot; Hamlet &quot;), 

 and suggests that stolid but wholesome indifference of the 

 general life of what, for want of a better term, we call 

 Nature to the sin and suffering, the weakness and mis 

 fortunes of the individual man. All these nations had the 

 same ancient examples before them, had the same reverence 

 for antiquity, yet they involuntarily deviated, more or less 

 happily, into originality, success, and the freedom of a 

 living creativeness. The higher kinds of literature, the 

 only kinds that live on because they had life at the start, 

 are not, then, it should seem, the fabric of scholarship, of 

 criticism, diligently studying and as diligently copying the 

 best models, but are much rather born of some genetic 



