Hence
what has been called the classical and domestic drama. Addison's
CATO is a specimen of the one; and would it were not superfluous
to cite examples of the other! To such purposes poetry cannot be
made subservient. Poetry is a sword of lightning, ever unsheathed,
which consumes the scabbard that would contain it. And thus we
observe that all dramatic writings of this nature are unimaginative
in a singular degree; they affect sentiment and passion, which,
divested of imagination, are other names for caprice and appetite.
The period in our own history of the grossest degradation of the
drama is the reign of Charles II, when all forms in which poetry
had been accustomed to be expressed became hymns to the triumph of
kingly power over liberty and virtue. Milton stood alone illuminating
an age unworthy of him. At such periods the calculating principle
pervades all the forms of dramatic exhibition, and poetry ceases
to be expressed upon them. Comedy loses its ideal universality:
wit succeeds to humour; we laugh from self-complacency and triumph,
instead of pleasure; malignity, sarcasm, and contempt, succeed to
sympathetic merriment; we hardly laugh, but we Obscenity, which
is ever blasphemy against the divine beauty in life, becomes, from
the very veil which it assumes, more active if less disgusting: it
is a monster for which the corruption of society for ever brings
forth new food, which it devours in secret.
The drama being that form under which a greater number of modes
of expression of poetry are susceptible of being combined than any
other, the connexion of poetry and social good is more observable
in the drama than in whatever other form.
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