His personages
are not large and deep enough to be representative. The manifold
recesses of great minds he does not unveil; he gets no deeper than the
semi-barbarous exaggerations of selfish, passionate love; of revenge,
honor, and jealousy. His characterization is weak. His highest
characters lack intellectual calibre, and are exhibited in lyrical
one-sidedness rather than dramatic many-sidedness. He is mostly
content with Spanish cavaliers of the seventeenth century, ruled by
the conventionalisms in manners, morals, and superstition, which have
already passed away even in Spain. He is a marvelously fertile,
skillful, poetic playwright.
Thus we perceive that, with poetic dramatists, the prevailing
practice is, to look abroad for fables. Moreover, in the cases where
these were drawn from the bosom of the poet's own people, he shuns the
present, and hies as far back as he can into the dark abysms of time,
as Shakespeare does in Macbeth and Lear. The Greek tragic poets,
having no outward resource, took possession of the fabulous era of
Greece. The poetic dramatist seeks mostly a double remoteness, that of
place as well as that of time; and he must have one or the other.
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