that it is the singular absence from Mr. Phillips's tragedy of what may be called the ethical element that accounts, more than the actual incompleteness of the working out, for an effect of thinness and disappointment in the treatment of his theme. The play, so far as I have searched it, does not contain from end to end a single abstract thought or sentiment. No one character in it utters a single comment or reflection upon human life or character-their tendencies and their issues. And in consequence of this there is no sentence, phrase, or single line in the play that could by any possibility be separated from its context, and be made welcome as an addition to our stock of moral ideas in daily life. Once more, I am not forgetting that it is idle and worse to complain of any dramatist, ancient or modern, that he does not rank with the greatest name in literature, but that does not bar a critic from comparing the methods of two dramatists, however widely separated in excellence. And this difference of

method is, I am sure, in Mr. Phillips's case, not an accident, but the result of a deliberate intention. One of Mr. Phillips's critics has suggested that he apparently sought to blend the romantic touch of the Elizabethans with something of "Greek severity." But in the dramas of the Greek tragedians, even Greek severity is found to admit of an abundant commentary on life and frequent reflections on conduct. Mr. Phillips's notion of a tragedy dispenses wholly with a chorus, and the

lack is not supplied by any ethical element whatever in the dialogue.

The play does leave the impression of being 'severely bare" of something, and it is surely in the direction just noticed. As regards the conduct of his two principal characters, as regards the proportion of guilt to calamity, of overmastering Fate to personal responsibility, Mr. Phillips says no word, nor allows a word to be said, that might disclose his own thoughts. Nor, scattered through his often musical and eloquent dialogue, are there any such comments as abound in Shakspeare, sweetening and elevating the situation. When we turn again and again to his great tragedies and comedies we are struck and moved afresh by the ever-living thoughts that confront us:

Spirits are not finely touch'd

But to fine issues.

The gods are just, and of our pleasant vices
Make instruments to plague us.

How far that little candle throws his beams!
So shines a good deed in a naughty world.

In the continual occurrence of such thoughts consists the undying charm of the Shakspearian drama for the vast majority of readers who will never understand what is meant by "Art for art's sake." The occurrence in Paolo and Francesca of a single parenthesis such as, "One who loved. not wisely but too well," or, "A man more sinned against than sinning," would have at once lifted

the catastrophe to a level of the true pathetic, which at present, in my judgment, it never attains. The play seems always aiming at the pathetic, and never reaching it; and the lack of the ethical touch must surely be the reason for the failure. Nor, notwithstanding the deep human misery with which it deals, is it ever poignant. There is no such moment in the whole play, where the reader is struck dumb with pity, as in Dante's

Se fosse amico il Re dell' universo,

Noi pregheremmo lui per la tua pace;

for the very soul of pathos is in Dante, just because he never stands aloof from the moral aspect of suffering because he is never a disinterested spectator of human frailty.

In the concluding lines of Webster's Duchess of Malfi, Antonio's friend, Delio, when almost all the actors in that ghastly tragedy have passed from the scene, says:

Let us make noble use of this great ruin.

Now this is what Mr. Phillips does not achieve. Of the "great ruin" of two young lives, and of others bound up with theirs, Mr. Phillips makes poetic and dramatic use, but not such use as Delio meant by "noble." The noblest use of all seems mainly wanting. The characters in the play seem to move in a vacuum, the missing atmosphere being that of the poet's controlling sympathies. We turn to the dramatist for some clue to these sympathies

and find none. The nearest approach to the true pathetic is where, at last, pity is shown as breaking down a long-raised barrier of bitter personal chagrin, where Lucrezia is once more made human by her new-born love for Francesca. The incident shows that Mr. Phillips need not hesitate to allow fullest play to his own humanity, should he again essay a tragedy of love and guilt. If the present drama should attain success on the stage, it will be, I venture to predict, by virtue of this character of Lucrezia in the hands of a competent actress. But I still think that after the ordinary reader has fixed the plot and situations of the story in his memory, he will not find himself turning again and again to its pages to refresh himself with the stimulus of its "criticism of Life," or the solace of its moral beauty.

MR. DICKENS'S AMATEUR

THEATRICALS

A REMINISCENCE

1

IT is now some eighteen years since the present writer-then in his schooldays-took part in the earliest of those winter-evening festivities at the house of the late Charles Dickens, which continued annually for several years, terminating with the performance of Mr. Wilkie Collins's drama of The Frozen Deep. And when he remembers the number of notable men who either shared in or assisted (in the French sense) at those dramatic revels, who have passed away in the interval, he is filled with a desire to preserve some recollections of evenings so memorable. Private theatricals in one sense they were; but the size and the character of the audiences which they brought together placed them in a different category from the entertainments which commonly bear that name; and to preserve one's recollections of those days is scarcely to intrude upon the domain of 1 [Written in 1870.]