matter, no interlinking or
dovetailing of chances. The catastrophe results from the hot-headed
impetuosity of all the characters, which so hurries events that there is
no time for the elimination of the results of chance. Letters do
constantly go astray, even under our highly-organized system of
conveyance; but their delay or disappearance seldom leads to tragic
results, because most of us have learnt to take things calmly and wait
for the next post. Yet if we could survey the world at large, it is
highly probable that every day or every hour we should somewhere or
other find some Romeo on the verge of committing suicide because of a
chance misunderstanding with regard to his Juliet; and in a certain
percentage of cases the explanatory letter or telegram would doubtless
arrive too late.

We all remember how, in Mr. Hardy's _Tess_, the main trouble arises from
the fact that the letter pushed under Angel Clare's door slips also
under the carpet of his room, and so is never discovered. This is an
entirely probable chance; and the sternest criticism would hardly call
it a flaw in the structure of the fable. But take another case: Madame X
has had a child, of whom she has lost sight for more than twenty years,
during which she has lived abroad. She returns to France, and
immediately on landing at Bordeaux she kills a man who accompanies her.
The court assigns her defence to a young advocate, and this young
advocate happens to be her son. We have here a piling of chance upon
chance, in which the long arm of coincidence[3] is very apparent. The
coincidence would have been less startling had she returned to the place
where she left her son and where she believed him to be. But no! she
left him in Paris, and it is only by a series of pure chances that he
happens to be in Bordeaux, where she happens to land, and happens to
shoot a man. For the sake of a certain order of emotional effect, a
certain order of audience is willing to accept this piling up of
chances; but it relegates the play to a low and childish plane of art.
The _Oedipus Rex_, indeed--which meets us at every turn--is founded on
an absolutely astounding series of coincidences; but here the conception
of fate comes in, and we vaguely figure to ourselves some malignant
power deliberately pulling the strings which guide its puppets into such
abhorrent tangles. On the modern view that "character is destiny," the
conception of supernatural wire-pulling is excluded. It is