Not only do such critics as the anonymous writer from whom quotation has been made, persist in thinking of the literary merit of the drama as “exquisite prose” and “splendid verse,”—­in other words as an added grace, applied externally,—­but they also seem to believe that all plays possessing what they would regard as “literary merit” stand in a class apart.  They are looking for a literary drama which shall be different from the popular drama.  Apparently they expect to be able to recognize a literary play at first sight—­and probably by its excess of applied ornament.  And this attitude is quite as absurd as the other.  In no one of the greater periods of the poetic drama have the plays which we now revere as masterpieces differed in form from the mass of the other plays of that epoch.  They were better, no doubt, excelling in power, in elevation, in insight, in skill.  But they bore a striking resemblance in structure and in intent to the host of contemporary plays which we now perceive to be hopelessly inferior to them.

So far as their outward appearance goes the great plays of Sophocles, of Shakspere, and of Moliere are closely akin to the plays of their undistinguished contemporaries.  It is in their content that they are immeasurably superior.  They differ in degree only, never in kind.  Shakspere early availed himself of the framework of the tragedy-of-blood that Kyd had made popular; and later he borrowed from Beaumont and Fletcher the flexible formula of the dramatic-romance.  His genius towered above theirs, but he was content to appropriate their patterns.  Moliere modeled many of his earlier plays upon the loosely-knit comedy-of-masks of the Italian comedians, and the difference between his work and theirs is not external but internal; it is the difference between adroitness and cleverness on their part, and supreme comic genius on his.  Probably it was this apparent similarity of Shakspere’s work and Moliere’s to the uninspired efforts of their competitors which prevented their contemporaries from discovering their preeminence—­the preeminence which is so obvious to us now that the plays of their fellow-craftsmen have fallen out of memory.

The blindness of the contemporary critic of Shakspere and of Moliere, inexplicable as it may appear nowadays, has its parallel in the blindness of the contemporary critic in regard to ‘Don Quixote’ and ’Gil Blas,’ ‘Robinson Crusoe’ and the ‘Pilgrim’s Progress.’  He had not the insight to see in these comparatively commonplace narratives the essential truth of the enduring masterpiece.  He was seeking an outward and visible sign; he saw nothing unusual, abnormal, eccentric, in these books, nothing novel, nothing that cried aloud for recognition; and so he past by on the other side.  These books seemed to him in nowise raised above the common; they were to be enjoyed in some measure, but they evoked no high commendation; and the contemporary critic never suspected that these unpretending volumes, unlike the most of their competitors in public favor, contained the vital spark which alone bestows enduring life.  He failed wholly to guess that these books had in them the elements of the universal and the permanent—­just as he was unable to perceive that the more obviously literary, rhetorical, academic works he was ready enough to commend highly, lacked these elements and therefore were doomed soon to sink into deserved oblivion.