Man is the result of cause and effect, and the causes are to a degree in our hands.  Life is a fluid, and well has it been called the stream of life—­we are going, flowing somewhere.  Strip Ivan of his robes and crown, and he might be an old farmer and live in Ebenezer.  Every town and village has its Ivan.  To be an Ivan, just turn your temper loose and practise cruelty on any person or thing within your reach, and the result will be a sure preparation for a querulous, quarrelsome, pickety, snipity, fussy and foolish old age, accented with many outbursts of wrath that are terrible in their futility and ineffectiveness.

Babyhood has no monopoly on the tantrum.  The characters of King Lear and Ivan the Terrible have much in common.  One might almost believe that the writer of Ivan had felt the incompleteness of Lear, and had seen the absurdity of making a melodramatic bid for sympathy in behalf of this old man thrust out by his daughters.

Lear, the troublesome, Lear to whose limber tongue there was constantly leaping words unprintable and names of tar, deserves no soft pity at our hands.  All his life he had been training his three daughters for exactly the treatment he was to receive.  All his life Lear had been lubricating the chute that was to give him a quick ride out into that black midnight storm.

“Oh, how sharper than a serpent’s tooth it is to have a thankless child,” he cries.

There is something quite as bad as a thankless child, and that is a thankless parent—­an irate, irascible parent who possesses an underground vocabulary and a disposition to use it.

The false note in Lear lies in giving to him a daughter like Cordelia.  Tolstoy and Mansfield ring true, and Ivan the Terrible is what he is without apology, excuse or explanation.  Take it or leave it—­if you do not like plays of this kind, go to see Vaudeville.

Mansfield’s Ivan is terrible.  The Czar is not old in years—­not over seventy—­but you can see that Death is sniffing close upon his track. Ivan has lost the power of repose.  He cannot listen, weigh and decide—­he has no thought or consideration for any man or thing—­this is his habit of life.  His bony hands are never still—­the fingers open and shut, and pick at things eternally.  He fumbles the cross on his breast, adjusts his jewels, scratches his cosmos, plays the devil’s tattoo, gets up nervously and looks behind the throne, holds his breath to listen.  When people address him, he damns them savagely if they kneel, and if they stand upright he accuses them of lack of respect.  He asks that he be relieved from the cares of state, and then trembles for fear his people will take him at his word.  When asked to remain ruler of Russia he proceeds to curse his councilors and accuses them of loading him with burdens that they themselves would not endeavor to bear.