Let me illustrate my meaning by an example.  In Bella Donna, by Messrs. Robert Hichens and James B. Fagan, we have a murder-story of a not uncommon or improbable type.  A woman of very shady reputation marries an amiable idealist who is infatuated with her.  She naturally finds his idealism incomprehensible and his amiability tedious.  His position as heir-presumptive to a peerage is shattered by the birth of an heir-apparent.  She becomes passionately enamoured of an Egyptian millionaire; and she sets to work to poison her husband with sugar-of-lead, provided by her oriental lover.  How her criminal purpose is thwarted by a wise Jewish physician is nothing to the present purpose.  In intent she is a murderess, no less than Lucrezia Borgia or the Marquise de Brinvilliers.  And the authors have drawn her character cleverly enough.  They have shown her in the first act as a shallow-souled materialist, and in the later acts as a vain, irritable, sensual, unscrupulous creature.  But have they given us any insight into her psychology?  No, that is just what they have not done.  They have assigned to her certain characteristics without which cruel and cold-blooded murder would be inconceivable; but they have afforded us no insight into the moral conditions and, mental processes which make it, not only conceivable, but almost an everyday occurrence.  For the average human mind, I suppose, the psychology of crime, and especially of fiendish, hypocritical murder-by-inches, has an undeniable fascination.  To most of us it seems an abhorrent miracle; and it would interest us greatly to have it brought more or less within the range of our comprehension, and co-ordinated with other mental phenomena which we can and do understand.  But of such illumination we find nothing in Bella Donna.  It leaves the working of a poisoner’s mind as dark to us as ever.  So far as that goes, we might just as well have read the report of a murder-trial, wherein the facts are stated with, perhaps, some superficial speculation as to motive, but no attempt is made to penetrate to underlying soul-states.  Yet this is surely the highest privilege of art—­to take us behind and beneath those surfaces of things which are apparent to the detective and the reporter, the juryman and the judge.

Have we not here, then, the distinction between character-drawing and psychology?  Character-drawing is the presentment of human nature in its commonly-recognized, understood, and accepted aspects; psychology is, as it were, the exploration of character, the bringing of hitherto unsurveyed tracts within the circle of our knowledge and comprehension.  In other words, character-drawing is synthetic, psychology analytic.  This does not mean that the one is necessarily inferior to the other.  Some of the greatest masterpieces of creative art have been achieved by the synthesis of known elements.  Falstaff, for example—­there is no more brilliant or more living character in all fiction;