ing itself on our vision, and yet withstanding verbal
criticism when we take time afterward to subject it to that test also.

Just as the Elizabethan critics thought little of Shakespeare because he
failed to follow in the footsteps of the great Greeks, so some modern
critics care naught for the best work of the dramatists of our own time,
because this is not cast in the Shakespearean mold. The Elizabethan
critics could not know the difference between the theater of Dionysius
in Athens and the bare cockpit of the Globe in London; and there are
their kin to-day who cannot perceive the difference between the
half-roofed playhouse for which Shakespeare wrote and the
electric-lighted place of amusement to which we are now accustomed.
These latter-day critics do not see why the haphazard structure which
was good enough for Tudor times is not good enough for us; and they have
so little sense of form that they are unaware how the change in the
circumstances of performance has forced a more compact presentation of
the theme than was necessary in the days of "Eliza and our James."

As Mr. John Morley has pointed out, "the prodigy of such amazing results
from such glorious carelessness as Shakespeare's has plunged hundreds of
men of talent into a carelessness most inglorious." The history of
English literature is strewed with wrecked tragedies, lofty enough in
aspiration, but pitifully lacking in inspiration. The same tragedies,
slovenly as they might be in structure and empty of dramatic energy,
were cased in the traditional trappings; they were divided into five
acts and they were bedecked with blank verse; and contemporary critics
made haste to credit them with the literary merit these same critics do
not even look for in 'Iris' and in the 'Second Mrs. Tanqueray,'
tragedies, both of them, of a purifying pathos that Aristotle would have
understood. In fact, there would be no great difficulty in showing how
near Aristotle came to an explicit assertion that in the drama "literary
merit" is almost a by-product--valuable, no doubt, like many another
by-product, but not the chief thing to be sought.

Mr. Pinero has discust Robert Louis Stevenson as a dramatist, and his
lecture contained passages which every man of letters should ponder. He
showed that Stevenson had in him the true dramatic stuff, but that he
refused to serve the severe apprenticeship to play-making that he gladly
gave to novel-writing. Mr. Pinero made plain the fur