432 ENGLISH LITERATURE 



tions as there was, e. g., in the eighteenth century. The astounding 

 development of sport, moreover, since the beginning of the eight- 

 eenth century, absorbs the entire interest of wide circles of the people 

 in the hours of leisure and dulls the capacity for amusements of a 

 more refined sort. The public that does attend theatrical perform- 

 ances wants to be amused rather than educated ; hence the preference 

 for corned} 7 , farce, pantomime, operetta, and melodrama. Various 

 attempts to raise the level of the stage have been without result. 

 To-day it is an undeniable fact that most good book-dramas do not 

 succeed on the stage, while those pieces that attract the public are 

 generally poor poetry. 



Creditable work, to be sure, has been done by the late Oscar Wilde, 

 or by living authors like Stephen Phillips arid Bernard Shaw, but 

 they could not be called first-class dramatists. Paolo and Francesca 

 no doubt is full of dramatic vigor, but it is a single scene stretched 

 out into a drama. Candida and one or two other pieces of Shaw's 

 have been successful on the stage, but his work on the whole is ham- 

 pered by a tendency to doctrinairianism. The fact remains that since 

 Sheridan England has not had a dramatic writer of first rank. 



Lyric and epic poetry suffer from the same misfortunes. Epic 

 poetry indeed has never occupied an important place in English 

 literature. But at present lyric poetry is unpopular in England, as, 

 for that matter, it is in Germany, where the drama is a favorite with 

 the public. 



All literary interests of the English public to-day are absorbed 

 by the novel and the magazines and newspapers. They furnish the 

 intellectual daily food of thousands of people. Reading, like stage 

 performances, must be light and amusing to insure the relish of the 

 public. But the English novel seems to have passed its culminating 

 point, and there is reason to hope that we may witness sooner or later 

 a revival of the other kinds of poetry like that which followed the great 

 age of English novelists in the eighteenth century. 



Those would seem to me to be some of the burning questions that 

 claim the interest of the historian of English literature. A vast 

 amount of work has still to be done before all these 1 problems will bo 

 adequately treated, and there is a wide field of work for scholars both 

 on this side and the other side of the Atlantic. A considerable part 

 of this work will fall to the share of American scholarship, which is 

 progressing with such astounding rapidity. 



