he particular kind of success he was aiming at. His
failure may have been due to his lack of the native dramatic faculty; it
may have been due to his following of outworn models no longer adjusted
to the conditions of the modern theater; but whatever the reason, there
is no doubt as to the fact itself. He did not attain the goal he was
striving for any more than Browning was able to do so; and it is not for
their eulogists now to say that their goal was unworthy. The test of
"material prosperity" was the very test by which the poets wisht to be
tried, and by this test they both failed--and Mr. Henry Arthur Jones
more than once has succeeded. Tennyson and Mr. Jones were aiming at the
same target--popular success in the theater. Even if Mr. Jones has not
always made a bull's-eye, he has often put his bullet on the target--the
very target which Tennyson mist completely, even if his ball happened to
make a hit on another.

Tennyson desired to meet the conditions which all the great dramatists
have ever been willing to meet. He did not follow their example and
study carefully the circumstances of theatrical representation as they
had done, nor did he make himself master of the secrets of the
dramaturgic art. And this is a chief reason why he was unable to
produce any impression upon the drama of his day; while the dramatic
poets of the past, the masters whom he respected--Sophocles and
Shakspere and Moliere--each of them, accepting the formula of the
theater as this had been elaborated by his immediate predecessors,
enlarged this formula, modified it, made it over to suit his own ampler
outlook on life, and thus stamped his own individuality upon the drama
of succeeding generations.

Shakspere and Moliere are accepted by us now as the greatest of dramatic
poets; but to their own contemporaries they were known rather as
ingenious playwrights up to every trick of the trade, finding their
profit in every new device of their fellow-craftsmen, and emerging
triumphant from a judgment by "the standard of material prosperity." And
by this same standard, unworthy as it may seem to some, Lope de Vega and
Calderon were judged in their own day. Corneille and Racine also,
Beaumarchais and Sheridan, Hugo and Augier and Rostand. The standard of
material prosperity is not the only test,--indeed, it is not the final
test,--but it is the first and the most imperative, because a dramatist
who fails to please the play-going public of his own t