and they happen to visit the villa in order to see a fresco which it contains.  If, now, we had been told that Janet’s engagement by the Stonehays had resulted from her visit to Mr. Cheal, and that the Stonehays had come to Florence knowing Leslie to be there, and eager to find her, several links would have been struck off the chain of coincidence; or, to put it more exactly, a fairly coherent sequence of events would have been substituted for a series of incoherent chances.  The same result might no doubt have been achieved in many other and neater ways.  I merely indicate, by way of illustration, a quite obvious method of reducing the element of coincidence in the case.

The coincidence in The Second Mrs. Tanqueray, by which Ellean meets and falls in love with one of Paula’s ex-lovers, has been very severely criticized.  It is certainly not one of the strong points of the play; but, unlike the series of chances we have just been examining, it places no excessive strain on our credulity.  Such coincidences do occur in real life; we have all of us seen or heard of them; the worst we can say of this one is that it is neither positively good nor positively bad—­a piece of indifferent craftsmanship.  On the other hand, if we turn to Letty, the chance which, in the third act, leads Letchmere’s party and Mandeville’s party to choose the same restaurant, seems to me entirely justified.  It is not really a coincidence at all, but one of those everyday happenings which are not only admissible in drama, but positively desirable, as part of the ordinary surface-texture of life.  Entirely to eliminate chance from our representation of life would be a very unreasonable austerity.  Strictly speaking, indeed, it is impossible; for even when we have worked out an unbroken chain of rational and commensurate causes and effects, it remains a chance, and an unlikely chance, that chance should not have interfered with it.

All the plays touched upon in the last four paragraphs are in intention realistic.  They aim, that is to say, at a literal and sober representation of life.  In the other class of plays, which seek their effect, not in plodding probability, but in delightful improbability, the long arm of coincidence has its legitimate functions.  Yet even here it is not quite unfettered.  One of the most agreeable coincidences in fiction, I take it, is the simultaneous arrival in Bagdad, from different quarters of the globe, of three one-eyed calenders, all blind of the right eye, and all, in reality, the sons of kings.  But it is to be noted that this coincidence is not a crucial occurrence in a story, but only a part of the story-teller’s framework or mechanism—­a device for introducing fresh series of adventures.  This illustrates the Sarceyan principle above referred to, which Professor Brander Matthews has re-stated in what seems to me an entirely acceptable form—­namely, that improbabilities which may be admitted on the outskirts of an action,