that there can be no
doubt; but it has not the smallest influence on the course of the play,
except to bring on the hurry-scurry and alarm a few minutes earlier than
might otherwise have been the case. Now, if the spirit, instead of
merely announcing the accident, had informed M. d'Aubenas that his wife
was not in it--if, for example, it had rapped out "Gilberte chez
Stoudza"--it would have been an honest ghost (though indiscreet), and we
should not have felt that our credulity had been taxed to no purpose. As
it is, the logical deduction from M. Sardou's fable is that, though
spirit communications are genuine enough, they are never of the
slightest use; but we can scarcely suppose that that was what he
intended to convey.

It may be said, and perhaps with truth, that what Sardou lacked in this
instance was not logic, but courage: he felt that an audience would
accept episodic miracles, but would reject supernatural interference at
a determining crisis in the play. In that case he would have done better
to let the theme alone: for the manifest failure of logic leaves the
play neither good drama nor good argument. This is a totally different
matter from Ibsen's treatment of the supernatural in such plays as _The
Lady from the Sea_, _The Master Builder_ and _Little Eyolf_. Ibsen, like
Hawthorne, suggests without affirming the action of occult powers. He
shows us nothing that is not capable of a perfectly natural explanation;
but he leaves us to imagine, if we are so disposed, that there may be
influences at work that are not yet formally recognized in physics and
psychology. In this there is nothing illogical. The poet is merely
appealing to a mood, familiar to all of us, in which we wonder whether
there may not be more things in heaven and earth than are crystallized
in our scientific formulas.

It is a grave defect of logic to state, or hint at, a problem, and then
illustrate it in such terms of character that it is solved in advance.
In _The Liars_, by Mr. Henry Arthur Jones, there is an evident
suggestion of the problem whether a man is ever justified in rescuing a
woman, by means of the Divorce Court, from marital bondage which her
soul abhors. The sententious Sir Christopher Deering argues the matter
at great length: but all the time we are hungering for him to say the
one thing demanded by the logic of the situation: to wit: "Whatever the
abstract rights and wrongs of the case, this man would be an imbecile to
e