of his personal poverty he was in the enjoyment of a social affluence beyond the magic of mere money. Sometimes he regarded it all as his due, and at all times he took it with simple ingratitude; but he had moments of passionate humility when he realized that he owed his good fortune to the caprice of a worldly old woman whom he did not respect very much. When he began to go into society, he did not forget his earlier friends; he rather prided himself on his constancy; he thought it was uncommon, and he found it a consolation when other things failed him. It was even an amusement full of literary suggestion for him to turn from his own dream of what the world was to Hughes's dream of what the world should be; and it flattered him that the old man should have taken the sort of fancy to him that he had. Hughes consulted him as a person with a different outlook on life, and valued him as a practical mind, akin to his own in quality if not in direction. First and last he read him his whole book; he stormily disputed with him about the passages which Ray criticised as to their basal facts; but he adopted some changes Ray suggested.

The young fellow was a whole gay world to Mrs. Denton in his reproduction of his society career for her. She pursued him to the smallest details of dress and table and manner; he lived his society events over again for her with greater consciousness than he had known in their actual experience; and he suffered patiently the little splenetic resentment in which her satiety was apt finally to express itself. He decided that he must not take Mrs. Denton in any wise seriously; and he could see that Peace was grateful to him for his complaisance and forbearance. She used to listen too when he described the dinners and dances for her sister, and their interest gave the material a fascination for Ray himself: it emphasized the curious duality of his life, and lent the glamour of unreality to the regions where they could no more have hoped to follow him than to tread the realms of air. Sometimes their father hung about him-getting points for his morals, as Ray once accused him of doing. "No, no!" Hughes protested. "I am interested to find how much better than their conditions men and women always are. The competitive conditions of our economic life characterize society as well

as business. Yet business men and society women are all better and kinder than you would believe they could be. The system implies that the weak must always go to the wall, but in actual operation it isn't so."

"From Mr. Ray's account there seem to be a good many wall-flowers," Mrs. Denton suggested.

Hughes ignored her frivolity. "It shows what glorious beings men and women would be if they were rightly conditioned. There is a whole heaven of mercy and loving-kindness in human nature waiting to open itself: we know a little of what it may be when a man or woman rises superior to circumstance and risks a generous word or deed in a selfish world. Then for a moment we have a glimpse of the true life of the race."

"Well, I wish I had a glimpse of the untrue life of the race, myself," said Mrs. Denton, as her father turned away. “I would give a whole year of the millennium for a week in society."

"You don't know what you're talking about," said her husband. He had been listening in gloomy silence to Ray's talk, and he now turned on his wife. I would rather see you dead than in such 'good society' as that."

"Oh, well," she answered, “you're much likelier to see me dead. If I understand Mr. Ray, it's a great deal easier to get into heaven than to get into good society." She dropped the cat out of her lap long enough to go up to her husband and push his hair back from his eyes. "If you wore it that way, people could see what a nice forehead you've got. You look twice as 'brainy' now, Ansel."

He caught her hand and flung it furiously away. She went back to her chair, and the cat jumped into her lap again. "Ansel," she said, "is beginning to feel the wear and tear of the job of setting the world right as much as I do. He never had as much faith in the millennium as father has; he thinks there's got to be some sort of sacrifice first; he hasn't made up his mind quite what it's to be, yet."

Denton left them abruptly, and after a while Ray heard him talking in the next room; he thought he must be talking to some one there, till his wife said, "Ansel doesn't say much in company, but he's pretty sociable when he gets by himself." [TO BE CONTINUED.]

characterizes nearly all the dramatic literature of which we are taking a summary survey, till the example of Shakespeare and the precepts of Ben Jonson wrought their natural effect. Teleology, or the argument from means to end, the argument of adaptation, is not so much in fashion in some spheres of thought and speculation as it once was, but here it applies admirably. We have a piece of work, and we know the maker of it. The next question that we ask ourselves is the very natural one-how far it shows marks of intelligent design. In a play we not only expect a succession of scenes, but that each scene should lead, by a logic more or less stringent, if not to the next, at any rate to something that is to follow, and that all should contribute their fraction of impulse towards the inevitable catastrophe. That is to say, the structure should be organic, with a necessary and harmonious connection and relation of parts, and not merely mechanical, with an arbitrary or haphazard join ing of one part to another. It is in the former sense alone that any production can be called a work of art.

And when we apply the word Form in this sense to some creation of the mind, we imply that there is a life, or, what is still better, a soul in it. That there is an intimate relation, or, at any rate, a close analogy, between Form in this its highest attribute and Imagination, is evident if we remember that the Imagination is the shaping faculty. This is, in deed, its pre-eminent function, to which all others are subsidiary. Shakespeare, with his usual depth of insight and the precision that comes of it, tells us that "imagination bodies forth the forms of things unknown." In his maturer creations there is generally some central thought about which the action revolves like a moon, carried along with it in its appointed orbit, and permitted the gambol of a Ptolemaic epicycle now and then. But the word Form has also more limited applications, as, for example, when we use it to imply that nice sense of proportion and adaptation which results in * Copyright, 1892, by

a

which every advantage has been taken of the material employed, as in Keats's "Ode to a Grecian Urn," which seems as perfect in its outline as the thing it so lovingly celebrates. In all these cases there often seems also to be something intuitive or instinctive in the working of certain faculties of the poet, and to this we unconsciously testify when we call it genius. But in the technic of this art, perfection can be reached only by long training, as was evident in the case of Coleridge. Of course without the genius all the training in the world will produce only a mechanical and lifeless result; but even if the genius is there, there is nothing too seemingly trifling to deserve its study. The "Elegy in a Country Church-yard" owes much of the charm that makes it precious, even with those who perhaps undervalue its sentiment, to Gray's exquisite sense of the value of vowel sounds.

Let us, however, come down to what is within the reach and under the control of talent and of a natural or acquired dexterity. And such a thing is the plot or arrangement of a play. In this part of their business our older playwrights are especially unskilled or negligent. They seem perfectly content if they have a story which they can divide at proper intervals by acts and scenes, and bring at last to a satisfactory end by marriage or murder, as the case may be. A certain variety of characters is necessary, but the motives that compel and control them are almost never sufficiently apparent. And this is especially true of the dramatic motives, as distinguished from the moral. The personages are brought in to do certain things and perform certain purposes of the author, but too often there seems to be no special reason why one of them should do this or that more than another. They are servants of all work, ready to be villains or fools at a moment's notice if required. The obliging simplicity with which they walk into traps which everybody can see but themselves, is sometimes almost delightful in its absurdity. Ben Jonson was

Charles Eliot Norton.

perfectly familiar with the traditional principles of construction. He tells us that the fable of a drama (by which he means the plot or action) should have a beginning, a middle, and an end; and that "as a body without proportion cannot be goodly, no more can the action, either in comedy or tragedy, without his fit bounds." But he goes on to say that as every bound, for the nature of the subject, is esteemed the best that is largest, till it can increase no more; so it behoves the action in tragedy or comedy to be let grow till the necessity ask a conclusion; wherein two things are to be considered first, that it exceed not the compass of one day; next, that there be place left for digression and art." The weakness of our earlier playwrights is that they esteemed those bounds best that were largest, and let their action grow till they had to stop it.

Many of Shakespeare's contemporary poets must have had every advantage that he had in practical experience of the stage, and all of them had probably as familiar an intercourse with the theatre as he. But what a difference between their manner of constructing a play and his! In all his dramatic works his skill in this is more or less apparent. In the best of them it is unrivalled. From the first scene of them he seems to have beheld as from a tower the end of all. In Romeo and Juliet, for example, he had his story before him, and he follows it closely enough; but how naturally one scene is linked to the next, and one event leads to another! If this play were meant to illustrate anything, it would seem to be that our lives were ruled by chance. Yet there is nothing left to chance in the action of the play, which advances with the unvacillating foot of destiny. And the characters are made to subordinate them selves to the interests of the play as to something in which they have all a common concern. With the greater part of the secondary dramatists, the characters seem like unpractised people trying to walk the deck of a ship in rough weather, who start for everywhere to bring up anywhere, and are hustled against each other in the most inconvenient way. It is only when the plot is very simple and straightforward that there is any chance of smooth water and of things going on without falling foul of each other. Was it only that Shakespeare, in choos

ing his themes, had a keener perception of the dramatic possibilities of a story? This is very likely, and it is certain that he preferred to take a story ready to his hand rather than invent one. All the good stories, indeed, seem to have invented themselves in the most obliging manner somewhere in the morning of the world, and to have been camp-followers when the famous march of mind set out from the farthest East. But where he invented his plot, as in the Midsummer Night's Dream and the Tempest, he is careful to have it as little complicated with needless incident as possible.

These thoughts were suggested to me by the gratuitous miscellaneousness of plot (if I may so call it) in some of the plays of John Webster, concerning whose works I am to say something this evening, a complication made still more puzzling by the motiveless conduct of many of the characters. When he invented a plot of his own, as in his comedy of The Devil's Law Case, the improbabilities become insuperable, by which I mean that they are such as not merely the understanding but the imagination cannot get over. For mere common-sense has little to do with the affair. Shakespeare cared little for anachronisms, or whether there were seaports in Bohemia or not, any more than Calderon cared that gunpowder had not been invented centuries before the Christian era when he wanted an arquebus to be fired, because the noise of a shot would do for him what a silent arrow would not do. But, if possible, the understanding should have as few difficulties put in its way as possible. Shakespeare is careful to place his Ariel in the not yet wholly disenchanted Bermudas, near which Sir John Hawkins had seen a mermaid not many years before, and lays the scene for his Oberon and Titania in the dim remoteness of legendary Athens, though his clowns are unmistakably English, and though he knew as well as we do that Puck was a British goblin. In estimating material improbability as distinguished from moral, however, we should give our old dramatists the benefit of the fact that all the world was a great deal farther away in those days than in ours, when the electric telegraph puts our button into the grip of whatever commonplace our planet is capable of producing.

Moreover, in respect of Webster as of

his fellows, we must, in order to understand them, first naturalize our minds in their world. Chapman makes Byron say to Queen Elizabeth:

"These stars,

Whose influences for this latitude

Distilled, and wrought in with this temperate air, And this division of the elements,

Have with your reign brought forth more worthy spirits

For counsel, valour, height of wit, and art,
Than any other region of the earth,

Or were brought forth to all your ancestors."

And this is apt to be the only view we take of that Golden Age, as we call it fairly enough in one, and that, perhaps, the most superficial, sense. But it was in many ways rude and savage, an age of great crimes and of the ever- brooding suspicion of great crimes. Queen Elizabeth herself was the daughter of a king as savagely cruel and irresponsible as the Grand Turk. It was an age that in Italy could breed a Cenci, and in France could tolerate the massacre of St. Bartholomew as a legitimate stroke of statecraft. But when we consider whether crime be a fit subject for tragedy, we must distinguish. Merely as crime, it is vulgar, as are the waxen images of murderers with the very rope round their necks with which they were hanged. Crime becomes, then, really tragic when it merely furnishes the theme for a profound psychological study of motive and character. The weakness of Webster's two greatest plays lies in this-that crime is presented as a spectacle, and not as a means of looking into our own hearts and fathoming our own consciousness.

The scene of The Devil's Law Case is Naples, then a viceroyalty of Spain, and our ancestors thought anything possible in Italy. Leonora, a widow, has a son and daughter, Romelio and Jolenta. Romelio is a rich and prosperous merchant. Jolenta is secretly betrothed to Contarino, an apparently rather spendthrift young nobleman, who has already borrowed large sums of money of Romelio on the security of his estates. Romelio is bitterly opposed to his marrying Jolenta, for reasons known only to himself, at least no reason appears for it, except that the play could not have gone on without it. The reason he assigns is that he has a grudge against the nobility, though it appears afterwards that he himself is of noble birth, and asserts his equality with

them. When Contarino, at the opening of the play, comes to urge his suit, and asks him how he looks upon it, Romelio

answers:

"Believe me, sir, as on the principal column To advance our house; why, you bring honor with you,

Which is the soul of wealth. I shall be proud To live to see my little nephews ride

O'the upper hand of their uncles, and the daughters

Be ranked by heralds at solemnities
Before the mother; and all this derived
From your nobility. Do not blame me, sir,
If I be taken with't exceedingly;

For this same honor with us citizens

Is a thing we are mainly fond of, especially When it comes without money, which is very

seldom.

But as you do perceive my present temper,
Be sure I'm yours."

And of this Contarino was sure, the irony of Romelio's speech having been so delicately conveyed that he was unable to perceive it.

A little earlier in this scene a speech is put into the mouth of Romelio so characteristic of Webster's more sententious style that I will read it:

"O, my lord, lie not idle: The chiefest action for a man of great spirit Is never to be out of action. We should think The soul was never put into the body, Which has so many rare and curious pieces Of mathematical motion, to stand still.

Virtue is ever sowing of her seeds;

th' trenches for the soldiers, i'th' wakeful study For the scholar, in the furrows of the sea For men of our profession, of all which Arise and spring up honour."

This recalls to mind the speech of Ulysses to Achilles in Troilus and Cressida, a piece of eloquence which, for the impetuous charge of serried argument and poetic beauty of illustration, grows more marvellous with every reading. But it is hardly fair to any other poet to let him remind us of Shakespeare. Contarino, on leaving Romelio, goes to Leonora, the mother, who immediately conceives a violent passion for him. He, by way of a pretty compliment, tells her that he has a suit to her, and that it is for her picture. By this he meant her daughter, but with the flattering implication that you would not know the parent from the child. Leonora, of course, takes him literally, is gracious accordingly, and Contarino is satisfied that he has won her consent also. This scene gives occasion for a good example of Webster's more playful style, which is perhaps worth

Leonora says:

"You will enjoin me to a strange punishment.
With what a compelled face a woman sits
While she is drawing! I have noted divers
Either to feign smiles, or suck in the lips
To have a little mouth; ruffle the cheeks
To have the dimple seen; and so disorder
The face with affectation, at next sitting
It has not been the same; I have known others
Have lost the entire fashion of their face
In half an hour's sitting....

But indeed

If ever I would have mine drawn to th' life,
I'd have a painter steal it at such a time
I were devoutly kneeling at my prayers;
There's then a heavenly beauty in't; the soul
Moves in the superficies."

The poet shows one of his habitual weaknesses here in being so far tempted by the chance of saying a pretty thing as to make somebody say it who naturally would not. There is really a worse waste than had it been thrown away. I am inclined to think men as vain about their portraits as Leonora makes women to be, or else the story of Cromwell's wart would not be so famous. However, Contarino goes away satisfied with the result of his embassy, saying to himself: "She has got some intelligence how I intend to

marry

Her daughter, and ingeniously perceived
That by her picture, which I begged of her,
I meant the fair Jolenta."

There is no possible reason why he should not have conveyed this intelligence to her himself, and Leonora must have been ingenious indeed to divine it, except that the plot would not allow it. Presently another match is found for Jolenta in Ercole, which Romelio favors for reasons again known only to himself, though he is a noble quite as much as Contarino. Ercole is the pattern of a chivalrous gentleman. Though he at once falls in love with Jolenta, according to Marlowe's rule that "he never loved that loved not at first sight," and though Romelio and the mother both urge the immediate signing of the contract, he refuses.

"Lady, I will do

A manly office for you; I will leave you To th' freedom of your own soul; may Whither Heaven and you please!

move

I'll leave you, excellent lady, and withal
Leave a heart with you so entirely yours
That I protest, had I the least of hope
To enjoy you, though I were to wait the time
That scholars do in taking their degree
In the noble arts, 'twere nothing; howsoe'er,

Never, I think, was more delicate compliment paid to a woman than in that fine touch which puts the service of her on a level with the "noble arts." On this ground of sentiment idealized by devotion, Webster always moves with the assured ease and dignified familiarity of a thorough gentleman.

Ercole's pretension to the hand of Jolenta leads, of course, to a duel with Contarino. They had been fellow - students together at Padua, and the scene in which the preliminaries of the duel are arranged is pitched on as nobly grave a key as can be conceived. Lamb very justly calls it "the model of a well-arranged and gentlemanlike difference." There is no swagger and no bravado in it, as is too commonly apt to be the case in the plays of that age. There is something Spanish in its dignity. To show what its tone is, I quote the opening. It is Contarino who first speaks.

Sir, my love to you has proclaimed you one
Whose word was still led by a noble thought,
And that thought followed by as fair a deed.
Deceive not that opinion. We were students
At Padua together, and have long

To th' world's eye shown like friends. Was it hearty

On your part to me? Erc. Unfeigned.

Con. You are false

To the good thought I held of you, and now
Join the worst part of man to you, your malice,
To uphold that falsehood; sacred innocence
Is fled your bosom. Signior, I must tell you
To draw the picture of unkindness truly,
Is to express two that have dearly loved
And fall'n at variance; 'tis a wonder to me,
Knowing my interest in the fair Jolenta,

That you should love her.

Erc. Compare her beauty and my youth together And you will find the fair effects of love

No miracle at all.

They fight, and both fall mortally wounded, as it is supposed. Ercole is reported dead, and Contarino dying, having first made a will in favor of Jolenta. Romelio, disguised as a Jew, to avenge the injury to himself in the death of Ercole, and to make sure that Contarino shall not survive to alter his will, gets admission to him by bribing his surgeons, and stabs him. This saves his life by reopening the old wound and letting forth its virus. Of course both he and Ercole recover, and both conceal themselves, though why, it is hard to say, except