has collapsed in practice.  It is probable enough that she might not succeed in dragging her lover forth from what she regards as the prison-house of a superstition; but the logic of the theme absolutely demands that she should make the attempt.  Mr. Jones has preferred to go astray after some comparatively irrelevant and commonplace matter, and has thus left his play incomplete.  So, too, in The Triumph of the Philistines, Mr. Jones makes the mistake of expecting us to take a tender interest in a pair of lovers who have had never a love-scene to set our interest agoing.  They are introduced to each other in the first act, and we shrewdly suspect (for in the theatre we are all inveterate match-makers) that they are going to fall in love; but we have not the smallest positive evidence of the fact before we find, in the second act, that misunderstandings have arisen, and the lady declines to look at the gentleman.  The actress who played the part at the St. James’s Theatre was blamed for failing to enlist our sympathies in this romance; but what actress can make much of a love part which, up to the very last moment, is all suspicion and jealousy?  Fancy Romeo and Juliet with the love-scenes omitted, “by special request!”

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In a second class, according to our analysis, we place the obligatory scene which is imposed by “the manifest exigencies of specifically dramatic effect.”  Here it must of course be noted that the conception of “specifically dramatic effect” varies in some degree, from age to age, from generation to generation, and even, one may almost say, from theatre to theatre.  Scenes of violence and slaughter were banished from the Greek theatre, mainly, no doubt, because rapid movement was rendered difficult by the hieratic trappings of the actors, and was altogether foreign to the spirit of tragedy; but it can scarcely be doubted that the tragic poets were the less inclined to rebel against this convention, because they extracted “specifically dramatic effects” of a very high order out of their “messenger-scenes.”  Even in the modern theatre we are thrilled by the description of Hippolytus dragged at his own chariot wheel, or Creusa and Creon devoured by Medea’s veil of fire.[2] On the Elizabethan stage, the murder of Agamemnon would no doubt have been “subjected to our faithful eyes” like the blinding of Gloucester or the suffocation of Edward II; but who shall say that there is less “specifically dramatic effect” in Aeschylus’s method of mirroring the scene in the clairvoyant ecstasy of Cassandra?  I am much inclined to think that the dramatic effect of highly emotional narrative is underrated in the modern theatre.