her.  The court assigns her defence to a young advocate, and this young advocate happens to be her son.  We have here a piling of chance upon chance, in which the long arm of coincidence[3] is very apparent.  The coincidence would have been less startling had she returned to the place where she left her son and where she believed him to be.  But no! she left him in Paris, and it is only by a series of pure chances that he happens to be in Bordeaux, where she happens to land, and happens to shoot a man.  For the sake of a certain order of emotional effect, a certain order of audience is willing to accept this piling up of chances; but it relegates the play to a low and childish plane of art.  The Oedipus Rex, indeed—­which meets us at every turn—­is founded on an absolutely astounding series of coincidences; but here the conception of fate comes in, and we vaguely figure to ourselves some malignant power deliberately pulling the strings which guide its puppets into such abhorrent tangles.  On the modern view that “character is destiny,” the conception of supernatural wire-pulling is excluded.  It is true that amazing coincidences do occur in life; but when they are invented to serve an artist’s purposes, we feel that he is simplifying his task altogether beyond reason, and substituting for normal and probable development an irrelevant plunge into the merely marvellous.

Of the abuse of coincidence, I have already given a specimen in speaking of The Rise of Dick Halward (Chapter XII).  One or two more examples may not be out of place.  I need not dwell on the significance of the fact that most of them occur in forgotten plays.

In The Man of Forty, by Mr. Walter Frith, we find the following conjuncture of circumstances:  Mr. Lewis Dunster has a long-lost wife and a long-lost brother.  He has been for years in South Africa; they have meanwhile lived in London, but they do not know each other, and have held no communication.  Lewis, returning from Africa, arrives in London.  He does not know where to find either wife or brother, and has not the slightest wish to look for them; yet in the first house he goes to, the home of a lady whose acquaintance he chanced to make on the voyage, he encounters both his wife and his brother!  Not quite so startling is the coincidence on which Mrs. Willoughby’s Kiss, by Mr. Frank Stayton, is founded.  An upper and lower flat in West Kensington are inhabited, respectively, by Mrs. Brandram and Mrs. Willoughby, whose husbands have both been many years absent in India.  By pure chance the two husbands come home in the same ship; the two wives go to Plymouth to meet them, and by pure chance, for they are totally unacquainted with each other, they go to the same hotel; whence it happens that Mrs. Willoughby, meeting Mr. Brandram in a half-lighted room, takes him for her husband, flies to his arms and kisses him.  More elaborate than either of these is the tangle of coincidences in Mr. Stuart Ogilvie’s play, The White Knight—­