suit it to the boards of a London theatre. The rule would land one in the curious paradox that Sophocles was not a writer of good plays. He wrote plays that were adapted for scenic representation before an Athenian audience, and which can still fill a small theatre for nearly a week at Oxford or Cambridge; but the stage manager who tried to put a translation, say of the 'Electra,' before a London audience would make a considerable loss out of his venture. A story may be told in the form of dialogue, with the paraphernalia of acts and scenes, and very well told too; if you choose to say that it is not a good play because it won't 'act,' you may; but it is a good something; and if the term 'play' is forbidden, what are you to do? What are you to call it ?

Three of our poets have written plays, for Wordsworth's 'Borderers' hardly claims serious consideration. As stage performances-Arnold's 'Merope' is obviously impossible, as it is simply an imitation of the Greek Play, utterly unadapted to modern arrangements; Browning's would, in all probability, be absolute failures; Tennyson's alone are perhaps capable of really holding the stage as acting plays; and they need to be put on as elaborately as Shakspeare's. Yet in the strength of the characters drawn, in moral and emotional interest, the Cup' will not for a moment stand comparison with, say, 'Strafford,' while such a piece as 'Robin Hood' is a piece of prettiness, a pastoral, a masque; it is not a drama, for it has neither story nor characters. Superficial emotions are readily caught and sympathised with; vehemence carries one away much more readily than concentration; it is much more effective, at sight, to be touching than to be heart-breaking. If you know your Shakspeare intimately, a noble interpretation by a great actor will appeal to you throughout; if you do not know him well-if you go to the theatre just to get an idea of the play it is the superficial effects that will appeal to you. Shakspeare's range of sympathies is so wide that the superficialities are as skilfully presented as the rest, and you can feel as if you had seen a good play, when to some one who knows it the effective rendering of the minor points may have altogether failed to compensate for the hopelessly inadequate treatment of the greater parts. A clever actor may make Shakspeare popular, even when his impersonation makes the critic feel most vividly that Shakspeare on the stage is spoilt ; and a great actor, whose energies are concentrated on the nobler parts, may fail because the significance to an uncritical audience of the slighter

parts is overlooked. That is to say, that Shakspeare was a great stage-play writer, but his real greatest greatness is not recognisable in the hurry of a stage performance. In Tennyson's plays, the chances are that the best there is in them will be shown on the stage. In Browning's, the minor interests are. insufficient for stage popularity, the greater interests are on that higher level of intensity with which intimacy alone can place you in real sympathy. To an audience already intimate with 'Strafford,' an artistic stage rendering of it would be delightful: to anyone else it would be-a bore.

For the central figure in Browning's 'Strafford,' which may conveniently be regarded as a typical drama of his, belongs to a class which he is fond of treating, and with which it requires a certain effort to bring oneself in sympathy; a character essentially noble, but which has suffered a wrench, and is driven to the adoption of naturally alien methods in consequence. Wentworth, endowed with strength, courage, and intense loyalty, with every quality befitting a leader, and devoted to the cause of liberty, becomes a sudden apostate, the champion of the very king who is endeavouring to abolish liberty altogether. Whether the picture Browning has given is one which can be reconciled with the approved facts is a question which does not concern us, any more than whether Richard III. was a hunch-back. The facts for the playwright may be fictions. The problem is to reconcile Strafford the Apostate with Wentworth the Patriot. The key to the situation lies in Wentworth's overwhelming personal devotion to the king; its supreme tragedy in his knowledge of that king's utter baseness.

'What, the face was masked?

I had the heart to see, Sir! Face of flesh,

But heart of stone-of smooth, cold, frightful stone!'

Terrible words to have hurled at you, when every word is blazing with truth. Yet they are hardly. out of Strafford's mouth when he turns on the Common's deputation, and claims for himself the responsibility for the very measures he had loathed, which the king had adopted in his absence by the advice of his worst enemies. To save this man from his own folly and the intrigues of the self-seeking courtiers, Wentworth attempted the impossible; desperately striving to win him to act reasonably and wisely; and-his advice accepted time after time only to be flung aside and trampled on by the Saviles and Vanes

desperately drawing on himself the odium for the acts he hated, and plunging into a new hopeless effort to retrieve the disaster which his own policy would have averted. Never, be it noted, is it Strafford's aim to carry out the policy of the Queen and the Court party which is the establishment of an absolute monarchy ; he seeks only to save Charles from the destruction which must be the only possible termination of that policy. Very pathetic too is the irony which keeps Strafford all unconscious of the love that lives for him in one human heart; that blindness, born of his love for the king, which allows him to be deceived into taking Lady Carlisle's superficial court-beauty-manners for the true expression of her.

'That voice of hers-

You'd think she had a heart, sometimes. His voice

Is soft too!

At the same time, it is easy enough to see that such a play as this could hardly be popular: hardly find even any very large number of interested readers. There is no relief, no relaxation of the emotional tension. Unless one is familiar with the whole history of Charles's reign, it is not easy to follow the conversation of the Parliamentarian leaders. Unless you have already grasped Strafford's character very thoroughly, the sudden changes of passion, e.g. in Act II., scene 2, are bewildering. I have quoted from that scene above; let me quote another passage from it before we leave the play. Strafford, about to undertake the new task that the king's last, worst, blunder has forced upon him, is alone with Lady Carlisle, 'the slight graceful girl, tall for a flowering lily.'

'Straf.

Ah! you know?

Well. I shall make a sorry soldier, Lucy!
All knights begin their enterprise, we read,
Under the best of auspices: 'tis morn,

The Lady girds his sword upon the Youth

(He's always very young)—the trumpets sound,

Cups pledge him and, why, the king blesses him-
You need not turn a page of the romance
To learn the Dreadful Giant's fate. Indeed,
We've the fair Lady here: but she apart,—
A poor man rarely having handled lance,
And rather old, weary, and far from sure

His squires are not the Giant's friends. All's one.
Let us go forth.

The king stood there, 'tis not so long ago,
-There; and the whisper, Lucy, "Be my friend
Of friends!"—My king! I would have .
Lady C.

...

Died for him?

Straf. Sworn him true, Lucy. I can-die for him.'.

That last line seems to me to sum the whole tragedy. The entire play is sombre, terrible: but for the heroic heart in the chief character, it would be almost dreary; as it is, the pain of it is less than the grandeur.

The main characteristics of Strafford mark most of Browning's plays: notably the continuous strain of emotions at a high pitch of intensity, and with very little relief; and the complexity of motive in the principal personages. Luria, by the way, differs from the rest in this respect, most of the characters being actuated almost entirely by some one dominating purpose; but even there, except in the case of the Moor himself, the purpose -different with each one-has by each one to be carefully concealed, so that the difficulty of finding out the point of view, and so following the working of the different minds, remains. In fact, the chances are that no actors could make a Browning play fully intelligible to an audience who had not studied the text first.

It is curious to turn from these plays, with their freedom from convention, their formal roughnesses, their sturm und drang, to Matthew Arnold's Merope,' with its statuesque figures, its conventional emotions, its clear, musical, regulated expression. The beauty shows so differently that one is almost tempted to say that if present in one it cannot be present in the other. There is in fact no comparison, as presentations of living human beings, between the strong passionate souls of Browning's dramas and the graceful carefully draped forms of 'Merope,' with their neatly turned proverbs in the Greek manner. Indeed, one would have little difficulty in believing that 'Merope' really was a translation, so skilful is the imitation; but, for whatever reason, it fails to produce the effect of an original. The characters all talk very like the people in a Greek play-but in the real thing they are alive; and in Matthew Arnold they are not. All the same you cannot read without recognising that the work has a beauty of its own apart from the mere metrical and verbal

craftsmanship it displays; but it is the beauty, not of flesh and blood, but of marble.

'Merope,' however, is a solitary experiment. Arnold's strong point did not lie in his character drawing—which is pretty nearly the same as saying, in the strength and range of his human sympathies. But the Laureate, within certain limits, is a master in this respect. The limits are not very wide, but that does not affect the perfection of the workmanship within them. The "Northern Farmer,' for instance-old style.

'But Parson a comes an' a goos, an' a says it easy an' freeä. "The amoighty's a taäkin' o' you to 'issén, my friend," says 'eä. I weänt saay men be loiars, thaw summun said it in 'aäste: But 'e reäds wonn sarmin a weeäk, an' I'a stubb'd Thurnaby waäste. 'Do Godamoighty know what a's doing ataäkin' o' meä?

I beänt wonn as saws 'ere a beän an' yonder a peä;

An' Squiore 'ull be sa mad an' all-a' dear a' dear!

An' I 'a managed for Squoire coom Michaelmas thutty year.'

That northern farmer is as thoroughly alive as anyone could be, and his portrait has been painted without a superfluous stroke of the brush. His New Style' successor is equally finished, equally real, and his philosophy is undoubtedly practical.

'Luvv? what's luvv? thou can luvv thy lass an' 'er munny too,
Maakin' 'em grä togither as they've good right to do.
Couldn't I luvv thy muther by cause o' 'er munny laäid by?
Naäy-for I luvv'd 'er a vast sight moor fur it: reason why!'

The same type of work appears in all the Laureate's dialect poems-sketches of characters rough, homely, simple, sturdy, with narrow horizons and limited ideas, but exceedingly shrewd and genuine, and generally with a touch of tenderness which sweetens them very pleasantly. I incline to think that the nearest artistic parallel to them is to be found in Miss Wilkins' New England stories. One can fancy the 'Spinster's Sweet Arts' transformed into one of those tales without much difficulty.

Of certain feminine types of a quite different class, Tennyson has also given admirable portraits; rather the tender clinging type of soft womanhood which is very charming and to some minds constitutes the true ideal; though with an occasional spice of wilfulness which is no doubt reprehensible, but not without its own attraction; the character summed up in the Lilia' of the Princess.

'A rose-bud set with little wilful thorns,

And sweet as English air could make her, she.'