the thirteenth century romance of King Horn, in which the heroine successfully woos the hero, to the twentieth century breach of promise farces, satirists and ingenuous romancers have pointed to woman as the sex of prey and to man as the happy or hapless victim. Nor has the romantic convention of our mock feudal society that man should chivalrously initiate all preliminaries to a matrimonial engagement-suppressed the striking revelation of the true condition of affairs exposed by the informal conversation of modern men and women. The unambiguous sneers which amiable girl friends utter at the expense of some spinster who has tried but failed to "make a catch;" the half-expressed or secret resentment most mothers feel towards the women who have "captured" their sons; the caution to which bachelors publicly exhort one another anent their intimacies with fair companions; and the overwhelming relief to which many an eligible man confesses on escaping from a particularly inevitable tête-atête - all furnish most eloquent testimony in confirmation of Shaw's position.

The poetic tragedy was the medium which Shakespeare selected for the conveyance of his thought; comedy, or rather the serious drama with some humorous situations and much witty. dialogue, is the vehicle chosen by Shaw. In the days when the "combats of kings," as Brieux calls them, held the centre of the world's arena, and death and destruction were the trustiest and busiest of royal henchmen, the tragedy in verse may well have seemed the most appropriate canvas for dramatic pictures. But in these days of tremendous economic conflicts, when the most stirring combat is waged for pecuniary equilibrium by the individual against the mass, the essence of poetry is too fragile and ethereal to prove a plastic material in the dramatist's hands. The language of prose, which is the language of king, of plutocrat, of demagogue and of artisan alike, will remain the language of the future drama. For prose enables the artist to move one step nearer the purpose of the play, "which was and is to hold the mirror up to nature." As to the form of the drama, it is to be noted that all of Shakespeare's greatest works, in accordance with Aristotelian tradition and with the custom of his own time were cast in the tragic mould. The idolatrous veneration in

which Aristotle's writings were held throughout the Dark Ages and the Renaissance led, it will be remembered, to a sort of axiomatic belief in many superstitions which the Greek philosopher had inadvertently or designedly sanctioned. Prominent among these credenda was one from the "Poetics" concerning tragedy. Tragedy, Aristotle had said, must represent men better than they are in actual life and must therefore take precedence as the noblest form of dramatic mimicry. Firmly engraven in critical phraseology by the force of twenty-two centuries of usage, this dictum has been regarded as so irrefragable a truth that until recently no playwright could hope for serious recognition from authoritative critics unless he had produced one successful tragedy, or at the very least had perpetrated that theatrical monstrosity termed in France a comédie lachrymose.

It is interesting to study how Aristotle's further definition of tragedy shaped the fortunes of the modern tragic play. The hero of a tragedy, according to the "Poetics," must be a good and distinguished man whose calamity or death must result from a struggle brought about by some personal frailty. In the practice of the Greek, French, English and Spanish theatres, and notably in Shakespeare's tragedies, this restricting theory was observed in so far as the hero was obviously predestined to be vanquished and was embroiled in a struggle of conflicting forces. But as the temptation to heighten scenic effects by spectacular catastrophes proved too strong for the tragedian, the thread connecting promiscuous casualties at the conclusion of the tragedy with the protagonist's frailty at the commencement grew extremely slender. The most cursory examination of "Hamlet," "Macbeth," "Julius Cæsar" and "King Lear" will serve to establish to any open-minded reader that in these dramas there is a subordination of all else to the process of involving the principal person and as many subsidiary persons as may be, in a mesh of circumstances from which death is the sole highway of escape. This easy invention of the tragic play has been subjected by all classic playwrights, including Shakespeare, to such abuse that in popular phraseology, a tragedy is a drama in which every one is killed in the dénouement, or as a wit has expressed it, in which people die of the painful fifth act.

Now the great struggles and crises of our lives, or of the lives of men and women in the everyday world about us, do not commonly terminate in death, nor yet do they end with everything "right side up at last." We live in an age where compromising has become conventional. The dire conflicts from which few of us escape participation are rarely marked by fatal endings. A patched-up peace with mutual concessions, causes the suspension of hostilities, and the crisis over, the adversaries disarm, while life resumes its uneven tenor. To depict these genuine struggles from the lives of actual people, Shaw has chosen neither the tragedy nor the comedy. The comédie, in the broad sense in which the French use the word, has been the medium more appropriately selected. Combining comic with serious effects in skillful alternation, this form has left its author wider discretion with respect to the unravelment of plot and the nature of dénouement than the classical "tragoedia" or "comoedia" could possibly have done. In "You Never Can Tell," "The Philanderer," "Arms and the Man," "Mrs. Warren's Profession," "Candida" and "John Bull's Other Island" the curtain descends upon the concluding act with no prodigious catastrophe occurring or foreshadowed, with no perpetual good fortune or desolation predicted, and with no "lived happily ever afterwards" formula as a parting benediction. Those strivings and stresses in the existence of an individual or of a community which could be dramatized by the man of genius do not usually terminate with certain good fortune or definite calamity; they end much more frequently, as the plays of Shaw end, with the future undetermined, with hell or heaven still in the mind of each participant in the drama, and with happiness or misfortune pendent in uneven scales.

For the most part, the detractive criticisms directed against Shaw can be parallelled with identical criticisms which, at one time or another, have been thrust at Shakespeare, or indeed at any author of supremely great achievement. That the most formidable intellectual playwright of the present age could have been termed superficial by self-styled authorities is simply an indication that the world has moved slowly since the days when Voltaire pronounced his celebrated dictum on Shakespeare. Popular logic has decided that Shaw must not be considered seri

ously, because he has manifested a lack of seriousness in the treatment of his own philosophy. This contention has gained substance from the laughter with which Shaw himself goodnaturedly greets his profound sincerity and zeal in the pursuance of his dearest purposes. Is it not an extreme of wanton misjudgment that a man should be denounced as cynical and shallow because a full-fledged sense of humor permits him, on occasion, to view his own desperate earnestness from a whimsical perspective? Again, we are informed that Shaw oversteps the bounds which limit modern theatrical representations and that he fails in a mastery of stage technique. For one hundred years the eighteenth century wiseacres were accustomed to iterate this statement of Shakespeare, whose extravagant imagination and "native woodnotes wild” were declared to have burst the timesanctioned trammels of a classic art. If Shakespeare and Shaw have indeed transcended the restrictions with which the mere technicians of that epoch and this have circumscribed the dramatic art, the least one can say is, So much the worse for the restrictions and for the technicians.

Few now venture to discover in the writings of Shakespeare an immoral tendency, and the expurgated Shakespeare for popular consumption has had its day. With revivals of Shakespearean plays performed exactly as published in the original quartos and folios, language now politely termed indelicate is freely bandied on the stage, while in unabridged and much advertised editions, courtesans of the most revolting type are represented as Shakespeare painted them in the very prosecution of their illicit business. Yet, despite the wide circulation of these books in "hearths and homes" and among "wives and daughters," not a murmur of expostulation arises even from the professionally sanctimonious. But the fool's clamor of immorality has just been raised in full blast against Shaw; and the exposure in "Mrs. Warren's Profession" of the unctuous respectability that feeds parasitically on prostitution, is met with scurrilous outcry and foul vituperation by the self-established censors of national morality.

Such are the sentiments suggested by a simultaneous consideration of the two most formidable intellectual forces the Eng

lish drama can boast of. Shakespeare, the typical Englishman, the culminating glory in the Elizabethan galaxy, has summed up in his creations the virtues and the imperfections of that semibarbaric epoch,' and with the enkindling sweep of a fabulous imagination has for three hundred years enshrined in the hearts of many non-English nationalities the Anglo-Saxon doctrines of duty, of patriotism, of material splendor and of imperial possession. Shaw, the self-expatriated Irishman, the first virile exponent in English literature of coming, independent Cosmopolitanism is not of the present but of the future. His masterpieces are not so much to be regarded as the crowning achievements of this generation; in them resides rather the potential power of eons to come. The apostle not of duty, but of self-respect; not . of national patriotism, but of world-wide liberality; not of material progress, but of mental advancement; not of temporal aggression, but of spiritual conquest; the lessons which he endeavors to drive home to contemporary men seem destined for the understanding of generations yet unborn.

New York City.

FELIX GRENDON.

"Not a bit more barbaric than a New England country town. Why insult barbarism?-G. B. S.