R,CHARD MONCKTON MILNES was born in the year - OUDL Home

§8Tennyson, Swinburne, Meredith—and the TheatreBy HARLEY GRANVILLE-BARKERX HE 'seventies saw Tennyson's first play acted andSwinburne's Boihwell published, and they heard Meredithlecture—a selected gathering at the London Institutionheard him—upon Comedy and the Comic Spirit. Dramais a strong lure to creative minds; the theatre—outlandishlittle world that it must seem, perverse, selfconscious!—as often finally repels them, and is, for its ownpart, content with easier company. Throughout thenineteenth century such alliance as there was betweenthe English theatre and English letters, was spasmodic,uneasy, unprofitable. Neither, it seemed, had much tobring the other. Keats tried his juvenile hand at a play;Shelley completed one, but he could hardly have lookedfor its acting. Byron wrote tremendous dramas, sublimatedblood-and-thunder; his name's magic rather thantheir own gave them a short, galvanic life. Scott's influencebore dramatic fruit abroad, but our Victor Hugoswere Bulwer Lytton and Sheridan Knowles. There werefaults on both sides. Macready's diaries are instructivereading. He was passionate for the credit of his calling.Shakespeare was his stand-by, but he received newauthors gladly and wrestled with them for their salvation—a painful process, for both parties, it would seem tohave been. Nor did he need a reputation to set him on thetrack of talent; he saluted Browning as a poet of great