tains. If, now, we had been told that Janet's
engagement by the Stonehays had resulted from her visit to Mr. Cheal,
and that the Stonehays had come to Florence knowing Leslie to be there,
and eager to find her, several links would have been struck off the
chain of coincidence; or, to put it more exactly, a fairly coherent
sequence of events would have been substituted for a series of
incoherent chances. The same result might no doubt have been achieved in
many other and neater ways. I merely indicate, by way of illustration, a
quite obvious method of reducing the element of coincidence in the case.

The coincidence in _The Second Mrs. Tanqueray_, by which Ellean meets
and falls in love with one of Paula's ex-lovers, has been very severely
criticized. It is certainly not one of the strong points of the play;
but, unlike the series of chances we have just been examining, it places
no excessive strain on our credulity. Such coincidences do occur in real
life; we have all of us seen or heard of them; the worst we can say of
this one is that it is neither positively good nor positively bad--a
piece of indifferent craftsmanship. On the other hand, if we turn to
_Letty_, the chance which, in the third act, leads Letchmere's party and
Mandeville's party to choose the same restaurant, seems to me entirely
justified. It is not really a coincidence at all, but one of those
everyday happenings which are not only admissible in drama, but
positively desirable, as part of the ordinary surface-texture of life.
Entirely to eliminate chance from our representation of life would be a
very unreasonable austerity. Strictly speaking, indeed, it is
impossible; for even when we have worked out an unbroken chain of
rational and commensurate causes and effects, it remains a chance, and
an unlikely chance, that chance should not have interfered with it.

All the plays touched upon in the last four paragraphs are in intention
realistic. They aim, that is to say, at a literal and sober
representation of life. In the other class of plays, which seek their
effect, not in plodding probability, but in delightful improbability,
the long arm of coincidence has its legitimate functions. Yet even here
it is not quite unfettered. One of the most agreeable coincidences in
fiction, I take it, is the simultaneous arrival in Bagdad, from
different quarters of the globe, of three one-eyed calenders, all blind
of the right eye, and all, in reality, the sons of ki