The criticism on Tennyson as a playwright seems to me equally admirable with the criticism on Bulwer Lytton, and all the more admirable when the two are read in conjunction. Doubtless Tennyson will never be so successful on the boards as Lytton has been. _Becket_ is a loose and ill-made play in many respects, and succeeded with the public only because Irving was able to pull it into some kind of unity by buckling it round his great impersonation of the archbishop. But _Becket_ contains great things, and is a real addition to our dramatic literature. It would have been a thousand pities if it had failed. On the other hand, the success of Lytton's plays has been a real misfortune to our drama. You cannot have two standards of taste in dramatic poetry. Just as surely as the circulation of bad money in a country drives out all the good, so surely does a base and counterfeit currency in art drive out all finer and higher things that contend with it. In his measurement of those two ancient enemies, Tennyson and Lytton, M. Filon has shown a rare power of understanding us and of entering into the spirit of our nineteenth-century poetic drama.
If I may be allowed a word of partial dissent from M. Filon, I would say that he assigns too much space and influence to Robertson. Robertson did one great thing: he drew the great and vital tragi-comic figure of Eccles. He drew many other pleasing characters and scenes, most of them as essentially false as the falsities and theatricalities he supposed himself to be superseding. I shall be reminded that in the volume before us M. Filon says that all reforms of the drama pretend to be a return to nature and to truth. I have elsewhere shown that there is no such thing as being consistently and realistically "true to nature" on the stage. _Hamlet_ in many respects is farther away from real life than the shallowest and emptiest farce. It is in the seizure and presentation of the essential and distinguishing marks of a character, of a scene, of a passion, of a society, of a phase of life, of a movement of national thought--it is in the seizure and vivid treatment of some of these, to the exclusion or falsification of non-essentials, that the dramatist must lay his claim to sincerity and being "true to nature." And it seems to me that one has only to compare _Caste_, the typical comedy of an English _mésalliance_, with _Le Gendre de M. Poirier_, the typical comedy of a French _mésalliance_, to come to the conclusion that in the foundation and conduct of his story Robertson was false and theatrical--theatrical, that is, in the employment of a social contrast that was effective on the stage, but well-nigh, if not quite, impossible in life.