Joanna Baillie by Alice Meynell

Would Joanna Baillie's _Plays on the Passions_ have been so shunned by later generations and then so forgotten, if the writers of Literary Histories had remembered to mention the ‘Comedies on the Passions' as well as the ‘Tragedies'? For every tragedy Joanna Baillie, whose plan of dramatic labours was drawn up with a singular completeness, wrote also a comedy; and one at least of these sprightlier plays is so buoyant, so busy, so apt in speech, and so pleasant, within the limits of eighteenth-century wit, that a modern manager might surely do worse than try his luck with it.

If any man should desire to possess the full intention of Joanna Baillie in her undertaking, in her dealing with the Passions, he may have it in a great many pages of most explicit introduction, with her own decisions on all such controversies as those touching the individual and the type, in tragedy. Joanna Baillie had thought out all such matters. But her few readers are, perhaps, content to take as read this treatise, with its good sense and its very small charm. She knows well what she is about, this at any rate is certain: and when she addresses herself with a most simple sense of responsibility to the tragic presentation of Hatred, Remorse, Jealousy, and Fear, her good faith and gravity, and the admirable manner in which she puts the murderer to school, nearly quiet the reader's natural resentment and inclination to revolt.