n some semi-barbarous regions, and
Grangerfords and Shepherdsons (as in Mark Twain's immortal romance) may
still be shooting each other at sight. But these things are relics of
the past; they do not belong to the normal, typical life of our time. It
is useless to say that human nature is the same in all ages. That is one
of the facile axioms of psychological incompetence. Far be it from me to
deny that malice, hatred, spite, and the spirit of retaliation are, and
will be until the millennium, among the most active forces in human
nature. But most people are coming to recognize that life is too short
for deliberate, elaborate, cold-drawn revenge. They will hit back when
they conveniently can; they will cherish for half a lifetime a passive,
an obstructive, ill-will; they will even await for years an opportunity
of "getting their knife into" an enemy. But they have grown chary of
"cutting off their nose to spite their face"; they will very rarely
sacrifice their own comfort in life to the mere joy of protracted,
elaborate reprisals. Vitriol and the revolver--an outburst of rage,
culminating in a "short, sharp shock"--these belong, if you will, to
modern life. But long-drawn, unhasting, unresting machination, with no
end in view beyond an ultimate unmasking, a turn of the tables--in a
word, a strong situation--this, I take it, belongs to a phase of
existence more leisurely than ours. There is no room in our crowded
century for such large and sustained passions. One could mention
plays--but they are happily forgotten--in which retribution was delayed
for some thirty or forty years, during which the unconscious object of
it enjoyed a happy and prosperous existence. These, no doubt, are
extreme instances; but cold-storage revenge, as a whole, ought to be as
rare on the stage as it is in real life. The serious playwright will do
well to leave it to the melodramatists.

A third theme to be handled with the greatest caution, if at all, is
that of heroic self-sacrifice. Not that self-sacrifice, like revenge, is
an outworn passion. It still rages in daily life; but no audience of
average intelligence will to-day accept it with the uncritical
admiration which it used to excite in the sentimental dramas of last
century. Even then--even in 1869--Meilhac and Halevy, in their
ever-memorable _Froufrou_, showed what disasters often result from it;
but it retained its prestige with the average playwright--and with some
who were above the