But little by little the close connection between the stage and the national life was severed; and cut off from its sources of deepest impulse and inspiration, the drama fell gradually into a condition of decrepitude and decay. For many years before the Revolution the breach between theatre and people had been a slowly widening one; and by the time the Restoration once more gave free rein to dramatic art, the separation had become complete. No longer making catholic appeal to the whole community, no longer absorbing into itself, by way of nourishment and stimulation, the broad and generous interests of a varied social life, the drama now became the mouthpiece and the mirror of one class only—of the aristocratic class, which had brought foreign fashions, tastes, morality, with it from abroad. The theatre of Shakspere and his contemporaries had been, as it were, the flower and fruitage of a period of intense national vigor and excitement; the theatre of Congreve and Wycherley was little more than the passing amusement of the idle and demoralized fashionable world. Harassed by Puritan austerity on the one hand, and more seriously perverted by Royalist profligacy upon the other, the drama was forced into a relationship with the larger mass of the people at once unnatural and most disastrous; and thus the plays of the time, in spite of all their pungency of wit and glitter of dialogue, lack that breadth of horizon, earnestness of purpose, and firm grasp of life, without which no body of literature—and no body of dramatic literature especially—can lay claim to permanent value and significance.
Meanwhile a new taste was growing up, and with it a fresh channel was opened for imaginative activity. While the drama, sapped at its foundations, was sinking deeper and deeper into corruption, and before as yet any effort had been put forth to save it from its fate, the first noteworthy experiments were being made towards the development of a class of literature which has since acquired unrivalled popularity, and every year continues to fill a larger and larger place in public estimation, as well as upon our library shelves. The causes which combined to bring about the decline of the drama and the rise of the modern novel were so varied in character and intricate in their outworkings, that even the briefest discussion of them here would commit us to an unwarrantable digression; though it should be said, and said emphatically, that the change is not to be regarded as a mere matter of shifting literary taste, since it was unquestionably related, in the most direct and intimate way, with some of the largest and deepest movements of the time in society, manners, and general thought.[5] Suffice it for us now to remark the simple fact that, while the dramatists of the Restoration were engaged upon works which, fortunately for English society and letters, left but little permanent mark upon the history of the theatre, the foundations were being slowly but firmly laid upon which the vast superstructure of modern fiction was presently to be reared.