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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 December 2020
In discussing the important English dramatic critics during the first half of the nineteenth century (Leigh Hunt, Hazlitt, John Forster, and George Henry Lewes), William Archer concluded that “Lewes alone has anything of note to say upon the principles of dramatic composition, as a living art”, that “Lewes was probably the most highly-trained thinker who ever applied himself to the study of theatrical art in England.” He pointed out that Lewes not only had a “special and personal interest in the art of the playwright which his predecessors lacked” but also had “much more attractive matter for discussion” because the “modern drama, the drama as we know it to-day, was just coming into existence, or rather was just making its existence felt in England.” Consequently it was
a happy chance … that in the four years of Lewes's critical campaign [1850–54] such an unusual, and probably unprecedented, number of the greatest dramas in the world should have passed over the London stage. … Thus he gives us, as it were, an unsystematic survey of the drama of the world from Sophocles to Scribe.
1 Dramatic Essays by John Forster and George Henry Lewes, ed. William Archer and Robert W. Lowe (London, 1896), Introduction, pp. xli–xliv.
2 See my article, “George Henry Lewes and the Classical Tradition in English Criticism”, RES, xxiv (1948), 126–137.
3 Westminster Review, xxxiv (1840), 141–160.
4 “The State of Criticism in France”, British and Foreign Review, xvi (1844), 361.
5 “The Duchess of Main”, Archer, p. 119.
6 “The Old and Modern Dramatists”, Archer, p. 102.
7 Ibid., pp. 102–103.
8 “Augustus William Schlegel”, Foreign Quarterly Review, xxxii (1843), 95, 97.
9 “Strafford, and the Historical Drama”, Westminster Review, XLI (1844), 62.
10 The Life of Goethe (London, 1864), p. 262.
11 Ibid., p. 263. “Whatever action there might be in a Greek drama, it was never represented in its progress, but seized at certain culminating points and then presented to the audience … [The] thing was represented as done, never as being done”—Lewes, “Alfieri and the Italian Drama”, British and Foreign Review, xvii (1844), 381–382.
12 Ibid., pp. 262–264.
13 “Art or Amusement?” Archer, pp. 152–153.
14 “Shakespeare as Actor and Critic”, On Actors and the Art of Acting, p. 100.
15 “First Impressions of Salvini, 1875”, ibid., p. 272.
16 “Dramatic Reform: Classification of Theatres”, Edinburgh Review, ixxviii (1843), 385–386.
17 Life of Goethe, p. 110.
18 “Strafford, and the Historical Drama”, Westm., XLI, 62.
19 Life of Goethe, pp. 108–109.
20 “Strafford, and the Historical Drama”, p. 63.
21 “Shakespeare in France”, Cornhill Magazine, xi (1865), 35.
22 “Edmund Kean”, On Actors and the Art of Acting, p. 7.
23 “Authors and Managers: Regeneration of the Drama”, Westminster Review, xxxvii (1842), 43.
24 “Rachel and Racine”, Archer, p. 97.
25 “The Rise and Fall of the European Drama”, Foreign Quarterly Review, xxxv (1845), 157–158.
26 Ibid., p. 169.
27 Ibid., p. 166. Lewes's estimate of Marlowe as dramatist is incisive and just. Yet what is true of Marlowe's plays on the whole applies to Dr. Fauslus only in part. Lewes underestimated Marlowe's play because he was looking for the “metaphysical intention” which he found in Goethe's Faust. See his discussion of “The Three Fausts: Göthe, Marlowe, Calderon”, British and Foreign Review, xviii (1844), 51–92. During the forties Lewes was too close to Goethe to see these two plays in proper perspective, for by his own principles one may well argue that with all its limitations Dr. Fauslus is dramatically more powerful than Faust. It is worth noting that Lewes later considered the second part of Faust to be a dramatic failure largely because of the presence of too much metaphysical intention (Life of Goethe, pp. 541–549).
Lewes's estimate of Aeschylus, however, needs serious qualification: the critic yields too much to the rhetorician. To sharpen his historical outline and establish his case Lewes distorts both Aeschylus and his own view of Aeschylus's greatness.
28 Ibid., p. 167.
29 Ibid., pp. 168–169.
30 Ibid., pp. 169–170.
31 Ibid., p. 168. Lewes here shows a fine grasp of the difference between the tragedies of Aeschylus and those of Sophocles; yet in admitting Sophocles' supreme command of the passions and his subtlety of characterization, one need not accept the implication that Aeschylus in his failure to humanize Orestes and Clytemnestra is less than an artist. It is essential to Aeschylus's meaning that Orestes' acts be grounded in the “imposing command of the oracle, which he fears to disobey.” To humanize him (and the others) is to blur the whole problem of man's place in the scheme of things, of man's relation to the gods, which is after all the primary concern of Aeschylus. As Lewes observes elsewhere, Orestes is “the instrument of Nemesis, not of passion” (“Alfieri and the Italian Drama”, Brit, and For., xvii, 382).
32 Ibid., pp. 170–171. See also “The Antigone and Its Critics”, Foreign Quarterly Review, xxxv (1845), 31–40.
33 “French Drama”, Westm., xxxiv, 148.
34 “Rachel and Racine”, Archer, pp. 94, 97.
35 “The Rise and Fall of the European Drama”, pp. 173, 175.
36 Ibid., p. 176. This criticism of Beaumont and Fletcher sums up Lewes's attitude toward the drama of his own day.
37 Ibid., pp. 175–176.
38 See On Heroes, Hero Worship, and the Heroic in History, and Lectures on the History of Literature.
39 See “Augustus William Schlegel”, For. Quart., xxxii, 99.
40 See “L'Evolution d'un Genre: La Tragédie”, Etudes Critiques sur L'Histoire de la Littérature Française (Paris, 1896–1907), vii, 151–200.
41 See the Preface to Cromwell.
