e plot; in melodrama the plot determines and
controls the characters. The writer of melodrama initially imagines a
stirring train of incidents, interesting and exciting in themselves, and
afterward invents such characters as will readily accept the destiny that
he has foreordained for them. The writer of tragedy, on the other hand,
initially imagines certain characters inherently predestined to destruction
because of what they are, and afterward invents such incidents as will
reasonably result from what is wrong within them.

It must be recognised at once that each of these is a legitimate method
for planning a serious play, and that by following either the one or the
other, it is possible to make a truthful representation of life. For the
ruinous events of life itself divide themselves into two classes--the
melodramatic and the tragic--according as the element of chance or the
element of character shows the upper hand in them. It would be melodramatic
for a man to slip by accident into the Whirlpool Rapids and be drowned; but
the drowning of Captain Webb in that tossing torrent was tragic, because
his ambition for preeminence as a swimmer bore evermore within itself the
latent possibility of his failing in an uttermost stupendous effort.

As Stevenson has said, in his _Gossip on Romance_, "The pleasure that we
take in life is of two sorts,--the active and the passive. Now we are
conscious of a great command over our destiny; anon we are lifted up by
circumstance, as by a breaking wave, and dashed we know not how into the
future." A good deal of what happens to us is brought upon us by the fact
of what we are; the rest is drifted to us, uninvited, undeserved, upon the
tides of chance. When disasters overwhelm us, the fault is sometimes in
ourselves, but at other times is merely in our stars. Because so much of
life is casual rather than causal, the theatre (whose purpose is to
represent life truly) must always rely on melodrama as the most natural and
effective type of art for exhibiting some of its most interesting phases.
There is therefore no logical reason whatsoever that melodrama should be
held in disrepute, even by the most fastidious of critics.

But, on the other hand, it is evident that tragedy is inherently a higher
type of art. The melodramatist exhibits merely what may happen; the
tragedist exhibits what must happen. All that we ask of the author of
melodrama is a momentary plausibility. Provided that his p