It is this separation from the theatre that seems to have been the main cause for the failure of the romantic movement in tragedy. We may, to be sure, find other causes in plenty. The genius of its great poets was lyrical rather than dramatic. Lyrical and narrative poetry and, above all, the novel absorbed both public interest and imaginative genius. Again, there was no free play for a revolution in tragedy, because there had been no tyranny. Classicism had never dominated the drama as in other European nations. In English tragedy of the eighteenth century, blank verse, however tainted by affectation, had kept the Elizabethan fondness for figure; structure, though following after French models, had maintained the traditions of English freedom; the subjects had kept open a wide range and had not neglected the medieval field; and sentiment, if not passion, had reigned. While the German and French romanticists found in Shakespeare an incentive to something new, the English romanticists could only elevate to omnipotence one who had long been the idol of the theatres. He was for them no innovator, but rather the unrecognized tyrant who held them back from real innovation. As Beddoes recognized in theory though not in practice, "the man who is to awaken the drama must be a bold tramping fellow,--no reviver, even however good." But if we still ask why Coleridge or Beddoes should not have written tragedy as well as Schiller or Victor Hugo, why the tragedy of passion, revolt, and idealism, applied to history or legend, did not flourish in the time of the French Revolution and Napoleon, of Kemble and Kean, of Byron and Browning, the best answer must be found in the fact that theatrical conditions offered no encouragement to tragic drama, but almost forbade a serious attempt to learn the ways of the theatre or to deal in its debased wares.