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

174 Harley Granville-BarkerThe light of this new learning wanes and dies:The ghost of Luther and Zuinglius fadeInto the deathless hell which is their doomBefore my star!This is the real thing, and its feeling, as if spontaneously,moulds its form. The miserable forsaken figure of thelast act is, in itself, well pictured. The acclaimed gesture ofAliceMary(sitting onYour Grace hath a low voice.How dare you say it?Even for that he hates me. A low voiceLost in a wilderness where none can hear!A voice of shipwreck on a shoreless sea!A low voice from the dust and from the grave.There, am I low enough now?the ground)is legitimate and fine. But, as we see, these good momentsare reflective, analytic moments. And the action as awhole is too often irrelevant, loose-knit and slack. Itspulse beats feebly.Incidental virtues will not make a play. Tennysondevises characters, incidents, pretty effects by the dozenthat are significant and interesting in themselves; yetthey do not cohere into drama. He turned instinctivelyto Elizabethan form; its freedom invited him, but henever saw where its inner life lay. Emotional rhetoric,which is at the very heart of it, which sustains andsuffices it at its simplest, was, as we argued, alien to histemper. But, this apart, he was for an elaboration ofaction that it would have taxed Shakespeare's maturestskill to contrive, articulate, keep proportioned, each partof it seeming to go its own pace, diversity yet yieldingto the unity of the whole. The freedom of the form—once a plain tale is departed from—makes almost infinitevariation possible; so many combinations, contrasts ofscene with scene, this sort of character with that, thetragic, the comic, verse set against prose, this sort ofverse against that. A most delicate mechanism, which,