The shrewd remark of M. Jules Lemaitre must ever be borne in mind,—­that criticism of our contemporaries is not criticism, it is only conversation.  Yet there is sufficient self-revelation in the fact that those who have been ready enough to praise the ‘Lady of Lyons,’ with its tawdry rhetoric and its shabby morality, have not seen the superiority of Mr. Pinero over Lord Lytton even as a stylist, as a master of English, tense, nervous, and flexible, adjusting itself to the thought, never protruding itself on our vision, and yet withstanding verbal criticism when we take time afterward to subject it to that test also.

Just as the Elizabethan critics thought little of Shakespeare because he failed to follow in the footsteps of the great Greeks, so some modern critics care naught for the best work of the dramatists of our own time, because this is not cast in the Shakespearean mold.  The Elizabethan critics could not know the difference between the theater of Dionysius in Athens and the bare cockpit of the Globe in London; and there are their kin to-day who cannot perceive the difference between the half-roofed playhouse for which Shakespeare wrote and the electric-lighted place of amusement to which we are now accustomed.  These latter-day critics do not see why the haphazard structure which was good enough for Tudor times is not good enough for us; and they have so little sense of form that they are unaware how the change in the circumstances of performance has forced a more compact presentation of the theme than was necessary in the days of “Eliza and our James.”

As Mr. John Morley has pointed out, “the prodigy of such amazing results from such glorious carelessness as Shakespeare’s has plunged hundreds of men of talent into a carelessness most inglorious.”  The history of English literature is strewed with wrecked tragedies, lofty enough in aspiration, but pitifully lacking in inspiration.  The same tragedies, slovenly as they might be in structure and empty of dramatic energy, were cased in the traditional trappings; they were divided into five acts and they were bedecked with blank verse; and contemporary critics made haste to credit them with the literary merit these same critics do not even look for in ‘Iris’ and in the ‘Second Mrs. Tanqueray,’ tragedies, both of them, of a purifying pathos that Aristotle would have understood.  In fact, there would be no great difficulty in showing how near Aristotle came to an explicit assertion that in the drama “literary merit” is almost a by-product—­valuable, no doubt, like many another by-product, but not the chief thing to be sought.