ghost. It might not have been his father. The message might not have been true. He tried the experiment of the play. Even then he was irresolute. He knew the king to be guilty, but he would not act. When he found him praying he would not kill him, lest he should send him to Heaven. Johnson has on this scene an unusually stupid note. This diabolical malignity of Hamlet's, he says, is too painful to be represented, or even contemplated. It is not malignity at all, it is irresolution. If he had met the king drunk he would have spared him, lest he should destroy body and soul together. Othello, on the other hand, believes his wife's guilt on evidence that ought not to have hanged a dog. He accepts the witness of plausible villainy against spotless innocence. All this is Tò avayκaîov, and is plain enough. when we come to deal with τὸ εἰκός.

That is the tragedy.
The difficulty arises

It may seem a far cry from Aristotle to Sheridan. But there is a great deal of dramatic criticism in The Critic, and it is not all clever nonsense. A play,' says Mr. Puff (and, he might have added, a novel), 'a play is not to shew occurrences that happen every day, but things just so strange that, though they never did, they might happen.' This profound aphorism immediately follows the question how the governor of Tilbury Fort's daughter could be in love with the son of the admiral of the Spanish Fleet. The explanation accepted is that he was the last person in the world she ought to be in love with, and a very good feminine reason too. Mr. Puff expresses without knowing it the law of probability and necessity. She Stoops to Conquer, that classic comedy, was nearly failing altogether because the severe judges of the pit would not admit the probability or necessity of Mrs. Hardcastle being lost in her own garden. It is a farcical incident, no doubt. The justification of it is that the difficulty does not occur to one reader or one playgoer in ten. If it ever did, if it was generally felt, no amount of evidence that such a thing had actually happened would be a sufficient artistic defence. On the other hand, critics stray beyond their province, and get into trouble, when they observe dogmatically that this or that incident could not have occurred, unless indeed it be a physical impossibility. I remember reading a clever Australian novel into which was introduced a parliamentary scene. In the colony to which it referred it received general praise, but this particular episode was pronounced to be impossible. It had, as a matter of fact, been taken from the colonial Hansard.

I must recur once more to the Poetics, from which it is difficult to tear oneself away, so wonderfully clever, so intensely modern, are all the substantial and untechnical parts of it. Speaking of abnormal characters in fiction, Aristotle says that they must nevertheless obey certain rules, that they must be óμaros avóμaλot, regularly irregular, or, as Mr. Butcher translates the words, consistently inconsistent. I do not presume to question Mr. Butcher's rendering,

which is confirmed by the example of Iphigenia. But still I cannot help thinking that Aristotle meant something more than that, and that he had in his mind the permissible limits of the abnormal, if not of the supernatural, in literature. He was the tersest of writers, and seldom enlarged upon any topic. More often he wrote a kind of shorthand, which requires an interpreter as well as a translator. Lear in his awful madness, so much more awful than Hamlet's because it was real, is ὁμαλῶς ἀνώμαλος. He talks as no sane man would talk, and yet he never talks nonsense. No more does the Fool. Shakespeare knew so little, and cared so little, about Aristotle that he made Hector quote the Ethics at the siege of Troy. But all principles can be illustrated from Shakespeare if they are sound, and it is a proof of their soundness that they can be.

Shakespeare did not shrink from horrors. But in all his world of life and movement, of thought and action, so wide that it has been called universal, there is no room for the vulgar or the merely odd. Dr. Johnson made the unfortunate prediction that Tristram Shandy would not live because it was odd. It has lived, and will live, in spite of its oddity, because it is penetrated and inspired by profound knowledge of human nature. Its oddities are on the surface, like the euphuisms of Love's Labour's Lost. From Captain Shandy down to the fat, foolish scullion, every character is more real than living man.' In Ibsen's plays, on the other hand, many of the dramatis persona would be the better for silence and medical advice. In Ghosts, if I remember rightly, a mother makes her son drunk on the stage. That mothers have made their sons drunk cannot, I suppose, be denied. Everything not physically impossible must have happened before now in this most miscellaneous of all possible worlds. But the object of art is not to represent what has happened. It is to represent what may happen in accordance with the law of likelihood or necessity.

The grisly terror

The most hackneyed of Greek tragedies, Edipus the King, has a plot compared with which the enormities of modern drama dwindle into insignificance. But the story which Sophocles dramatised was well known, and belief in it, or acquiescence in it, was part of a Greek's religion as illustrating the power of fate. The delicacy with which Sophocles treats it could not be surpassed. is always in the background, but it never appears. The House of Laius was under a curse, which the tragedian did not impose, and could not remove. And yet, with all that, the Edipus at Colonus, the play of the poet's old age, in which the blind man, blinded by his own hands on the discovery of his unconscious crime, passes away in thunder and lightning, is a greater favourite with the modern reader, just because the worst is at an end. The exquisite calm and peace of Edipus after his atonement are beyond the power of any one except Sophocles to describe. The most beautiful of all Greek choruses has been admirably paraphrased (it cannot be trans

lated) by Mr. Edward Stone, of Eton, in a poem beginning 'Stranger, rest, thy toil is o'er.' To a Greek, these strange and sinister complications of blood and marriage were the theme of high tragedy, and nothing else. He would have been shocked, as even the London playgoers of two hundred years ago were shocked, at Maskwell's saying to Lady Touchwood in The Double Dealer, 'You know you loved your nephew when I first sighed for you.' Except in these two characters Congreve kept only too close to the social life of his day, and, indeed, if there were many Millamants, it had its redeeming features.

Physical and mental disease in itself, and apart from its consequences, is not a proper subject for artistic treatment. Who does not feel that it is a blemish even in Jane Eyre to bring Rochester's wife actually upon the scene? Lear stands alone. It is presumptuous to wield the thunderbolts of Jove. Euripides depicted the madness of Hercules. But Hercules was a mythical figure, and his madness was superhuman. Heroes should have the usual assortment of limbs, and brains not too conspicuously below the average. It will soon, perhaps, be required of them that they should never play games, nor shoot anything except their fellow-creatures. For the married hero Millamant's rules in The Way of the World are excellent. 'Let us never visit together, nor go to a play together, but let us be very strange and well-bred let us be as strange as if we had been married a great while; and as well-bred as if we were not married at all.' No English dramatist, not even Shakespeare, has come closer than Congreve to the language of ordinary life. It is, of course, a highly artificial life that for the most part he describes, and a society which was anything rather than simple. But, such as it was, it lives in his pages, with nothing added except the superior quality of the author's own wit. There is less eccentricity in these delicious comedies than even in his imitator Sheridan's. Congreve was as true to his world as Miss Austen was to hers. When Macaulay said that, in general, tragedy was corrupted by eloquence and comedy by wit, he came as near talking nonsense as he ever came in his life. Although he was writing about Machiavelli, he was echoing the old scholastic tradition that Euripides 'corrupted' the Athenian drama. When Sophocles said, as we are told on very good authority that he did say, 'I show men as they ought to be, Euripides shows them as they are,' he was not describing a process of corruption, but two equally legitimate forms of art. If there is more literary perfection in one, there is more human interest in the other. The Greeks regarded eccentricity as an evil thing, either in art or in nature. And yet their great eccentric genius, whom, because he was eccentric, they put to death, has been immortalised by the first of Greek thinkers in the most exquisite prose ever written by man. But the fact is that Socrates, paradoxical in many things, was most

paradoxical of all in this, that his eccentricity was concentric, that it led his hearers back to a higher life and a simpler practice than that which it destroyed. If he taught the beauty of truthfulness rather than the beauty of holiness, at least he had nothing to do with the beauty of ugliness, which can claim no more respectable origin than the refuse of the Roman Empire.

'Thou art a blessed fellow,' says Prince Hal to Poins, thou art a blessed fellow to think as every man thinks: never a man's thought in the world keeps the roadway better than thine.' The irony is crushing, though Poins probably did not see it. But Prince Hal knew well enough that Poins had his uses, and that the opinions of Poins, though they were no more his own than the air he breathed, could not safely be neglected. There are many Poinses and few Prince Hals. But the supreme genius who created them both (I do not mean the author of the Novum Organum) was not ashamed to keep the roadway, the common highway of reason, with Poins. Even the supernatural in Shakespeare, in Macbeth for example, is the shadow of evil thoughts or the presage of impending doom. Nothing happens in Hamlet which might not have happened without the ghost. Shakespeare's object certainly was not, as Dr. Verrall thinks that the object of Euripides was, to discredit the supernatural. But it equally, we may be sure, was not to get out of the ordinary run, to be eccentric. Men and women were to him a topic of inexhaustible interest, a stream that could never run dry. Eccentricity is the first refuge of the mentally exhausted. Just as authors who are always using French words show without meaning it the smallness of their English vocabulary, so the eccentric novelist proves that he has little or nothing to say about the world he lives in. A man may shoot a pheasant, and nothing may come of it. But if he shoots an angel, there are the materials for a sensation, if not for a story. The incident may be a little out of the common, but it contains that mixture of the slightly revolting with the extremely absurd which has so strange a fascination for some minds. In these matters it is useless to complain of the authors. The public is the great sophist. Apparently, when people are tired of reading what might be true about the war, they want to read what cannot be true about something else. Other popular forms of fiction deal with what cannot possibly be known, such as the social condition of the planet Mars, or the development of physical science in the twenty-first century. How poor and tame after such entrancing theories are mere love-stories, or tales of adventure, or cleverly constructed plots, or humorous and natural dialogue, or the comedy of human nature, or the tragedy of human fate. The best in this kind are but shadows, and the worst are no worse if imagination amend them. Ay, there's the rub. It is not the plethora of imagination, but the lack of it, that drives the successors

of Dickens and Thackeray into the twenty-first century and the planet Mars.

Aristotle, whom I now mention for the last time, says in a rather obscure sentence that what is probable but impossible should by the poet be preferred to what is possible but will not be believed. The latter class is intelligible enough. It is possible for the Archbishop of Canterbury to forge a cheque in payment of his debts at cards, or for the Lord Chancellor to treat all his friends unkindly when he has patronage to distribute, and yet nobody would treat these incidents as credible if they were incorporated in a work of fiction. But how can what is impossible be probable? Legal impossibilities are perhaps not always improbable. When the village attorney told the man in the stocks that it was impossible he could have been put there for swearing, and the man replied that he had been, the attorney cursed him for an ignorant fool, and, like the Lady Baussière, rode on. That, however, was not an instance of physical impossibility. It is said to have been physically impossible for the moon to have been seen at Corunna when Sir John Moore was buried, and yet it seems so probable that it spoils no one's enjoyment of Wolfe's perfect poem. It was quite possible that one of Moore's officers

should have delivered a short address. But if Wolfe had introduced that improbable episode, he would have spoiled everything. Truth is the object of the physicist, and, so far as it is attainable, of the historian. Verisimilitude should be the aim of the novelist. That is not the same thing as probability, for 'it is probable that some improbable things will happen.' But there must not be too many for the digestion of Poins, the blessed fellow to think as every man thinks." And we must leave angels, or at least angels with wings, in the skies. Wingless angels are admissible, and are preferred by the judicious to legless men.

Everybody knows Ruskin's reference to the 'head—large, inhuman, and monstrous, leering in bestial degradation, too foul to be either pictured or described' on the base of the tower still dedicated to St. Mary the Beautiful,' the church of Santa Maria Formosa at Venice. This and similar monstrosities are, says Ruskin, 'evidences of a delight in the contemplation of bestial vice, and the expression of low sarcasm, which is, I believe, the most hopeless state into which the human mind can fall.' 'Idiotic mockery,' he calls it, and the phrase sticks. Ruskin, as Mr. Cook reminds us in the excellent article which he has contributed to the Dictionary of National Biography, was made by his mother to read the Bible through with her continually, from the first chapter of Genesis to the last of the Revelation. She would not allow the omission of a single passage, because, as she said, one function of the Bible was to disgust people with disgusting things. Whatever may be thought of the argument, the fact is incontestable. Nobody