a mirror up to vice,' and 'showing the age its own deformity,' as
mere cant, which the men themselves must have spoken tongue in cheek.
It was as much an insincere cant in those days as it was when, two
generations later, Jeremy Collier exposed its falsehood in the mouth
of Congreve. If the poets had really intended to show vice its own
deformity, they would have represented it (as Shakspeare always does)
as punished, and not as triumphant. It is ridiculous to talk of
moral purpose in works in which there is no moral justice. The only
condition which can excuse the representation of evil is omitted.
The simple fact is that the poets wanted to draw a house; that this
could most easily be done by the coarsest and most violent means; and
that not being often able to find stories exciting enough in the past
records of sober English society, they went to Italy and Spain for
the violent passions and wild crimes of southern temperaments,
excited, and yet left lawless, by a superstition believed in enough
to darken and brutalise, but not enough to control, its victims.
Those were the countries which just then furnished that strange
mixture of inward savagery with outward civilisation, which is the
immoral playwright's fittest material; because, while the inward
savagery moves the passions of the audience, the outward civilisation
brings the character near enough to them to give them a likeness of
themselves in their worst moments, such as no 'Mystery of Cain' or
'Tragedy of Prometheus' can give.

Does this seem too severe in the eyes of those who value the drama
for its lessons in human nature? On that special point something
must be said hereafter. Meanwhile, hear one of the sixteenth century
poets; one who cannot be suspected of any leaning toward Puritanism;
one who had as high notions of his vocation as any man; and one who
so far fulfilled those notions as to become a dramatist inferior only