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THE LATER DRAMAS OF SHERIDAN KNOWLES.
Enthusiastic in his lore of poetry and his homage to woman, it must have been with delight that Mr. Sheridan Knowles once heard himself thus addressed by a living poetess:
Master of feeling and of thought!
Poet, who still hast truly wrought!
Rich in the power our hearts to move
With sudden touch of Nature's love;
With thrill of passionate distress,
Or gush of gentlest tenderness,
Or burst of free unconquer'd scorn,
Or pride of noble instinct born—
Who, of this present age, shall claim,
In Shakspeare^s art, an equal name?
None! Thine should be a double wreath—
Success in life—fame after death.[1]
Those there are, or have been, to whose sanguine judgment "Virginius" and the "Hunchback" promised a revival of the Elizabethan drama, in its richness, fulness, and popularity. Mr. Knowles pleased rather than discouraged them by his direct imitation of the Elizabethan style—or rather, perhaps, the style of Massinger and his contemporaries. This imitation was unfortunately suggestive of uncomplimentary comparisons among critics of a school clearer to discern and harder to please.[2] Yet there is much to be said on behalf of those modern playwrights who mould their style on that of the old Titans in question. In fact, it is almost an insuperable difficulty to write a successful tragedy, or poetical melodrama, that is not so moulded. "It is hard," says an eloquent writer, "not to chime with the voice of our Eldern Stage poets ever sounding in our ears; to them, as to divinities, we feel the origin of dramatic language is due, and none save the inexperienced or the vain will think discovery of another possible. … Each new play adds a proof that there is one style of our mother-tongue peculiar to dramatic composition, and that every other is unsuitable; if the author has adopted the modern style, his play infallibly turns out feeble and commonplace; if it evince any dramatic power, its style will as surely be artificial and antiquated." And the critic points to Mr. Knowles's tragedies as furnishing most conclusive examples of this doctrine—they being the nearest approaches to legitimate drama this age can vaunt, and their style declaring itself manifestly—mimic Elizabethan. Right or wrong, Mr. Knowles managed to win the public to his side. He had but to address them with his vos plaudite, and the plaudits made the welkin ring—if with an evanescent, yet with a hearty uproar." "Few men," says Mr. R. H. Horne, "ever had the sympathy of the public more completely in their power than Sheridan Knowles. Scarcely any imprudence or deficiency that he could be guilty of, in a new play, would cause
- ↑ Mrs. Norton.
- ↑ Mr. Carlyle, for instance, had a passing rap at our author, where he said, in contrasting (more suo) our own times with those of Queen Elizabeth, that "the people were then governed, not by a Castlereagh, but by a Burleigh; they had their Shakspeare and Philip Sidney, where we have our Sheridan Knowles and Beau Brummel."—Edinburgh Review, July, 1829.
