Near akin to these are other faults of still graver import. In his earlier plays, the Poet's style is often, not to say generally, at least in the more serious parts, rather rhetorical than rightly dramatic. The persons often lay themselves out in what may not unfairly be called speech-making. Their use of language is highly self-conscious, and abounds in marks of elaborateness, as if their mind were more intent on the figure they are making than on what they are talking about: so that the right colloquial tone is lost in a certain ambitious, oratorical, got-up manner of speech; and we feel a want of that plain, native, spontaneous talk wherein heart and tongue keep touch and time together: in short, they speak rather as authors having an audience in view than as men and women moved by the real passions and interests of life.
The reason of all this I take to be, that the Poet himself was at that time highly self-conscious in his use of language. His art was then too young to lose itself in the enthusiasm of Truth and Nature; and, as remarked before, he seems to have felt no little pleasure in the tokens of his own skill. Thus, in his earlier plays, written before he had fully found himself, the arts and motives of authorship are but too apparent: he was then, I should say, somewhat in the humour of flirting with the Muses and Graces; which, because it lacks the modesty and delicacy of genuine passion, therefore naturally runs into that excess of manner and style which is commonly called "fine writing." And it is a very note-worthy point, that when he studies most for effect, then it is that we find him least effective. But here too, as in the matter mentioned before, his fault was clearly the result of imitation, not of character. Accordingly, in the earnestness of his work, he gradually outgrew it. In the plays of his later period, the fault disappears entirely; there is not a vestige of it left: in fact, this fault is mainly revealed to us by the higher standard of judgment which his later plays supply. Here all is straightforward, genuine, natural, with no rhetorical trickeries or fineries whatever; and among all modern writers his style stands quite alone in the solid purity, directness, and inward virtue of that perfect art which not only conceals itself from others, but is even a secret unto itself; or at least is too intent on something else to be listening to the music of its own voice. For so his highest style was when, in the maturity of his power, he left the style to take care of itself, and therefore had it perfectly subordinated to his matter and thought: in other words, he always writes best when most unconscious of it, being so possessed with his theme as to take no thought of himself.