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A Defence of Poetry and Other Essays by Percy Bysshe Shelley
page 73 of 97 (75%)
and beauty, and multiplies all that it reflects, and endows it with
the power of propagating its like wherever it may fall.

But in periods of the decay of social life, the drama sympathizes
with that decay. Tragedy becomes a cold imitation of the form of
the great masterpieces of antiquity, divested of all harmonious
accompaniment of the kindred arts; and often the very form
misunderstood, or a weak attempt to teach certain doctrines, which
the writer considers as moral truths; and which are usually no
more than specious flatteries of some gross vice or weakness, with
which the author, in common with his auditors, are infected. 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
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