pathetically studied. Hugo had also a gift for oratory and a talent
for fine speeches; but when he yearned for theatrical success he went to
the most popular playhouses where the plain people gathered, and he
adopted as his own the formula of play-making which was proving its
value in these boulevard theaters. This was not in itself much better
than the formula Stevenson borrowed and did not trouble to
understand--indeed, the two are not unlike. But Hugo had made his
choice half a century before Stevenson; and when he made it he was
taking possession of the very latest fashion.

Hugo's formula is now fallen out of mode, yet his plays have
accomplished their threescore years and ten. It was Hugo who declared
that there are three classes of theater-goers whom the playwright must
please: the crowd that demands action, the women who wish for emotion,
and the thinkers who seek for character. And it was Hugo's early rival
as a play-maker, the elder Dumas, who asserted that the only rules he
knew for success upon the stage were to make the first act clear, the
last act short, and all the acts interesting. A dramatist who shall
accept the formula which has been found satisfactory by his immediate
contemporaries, and who shall succeed in making all the acts of his play
interesting alike to the crowd, to the women, and to the thinkers, will
be very likely to achieve literary merit without striving for it
specifically.

For we cannot repeat too often that in the drama "literary merit" is a
by-product,--as it is in oratory also. And we cannot assert too
emphatically that the drama has an independent existence--that it does
not lie wholly within the domain of literature. "The art of the drama,"
so M. Emile Faguet has assured us, "touches all the other arts and
includes them." The drama is not intended primarily to be read in the
study; it is devised to be performed on the stage by actors before
spectators. It has a right, therefore, to avail itself of the aid of all
other arts and to enlist them all in its service. This is one of the
reasons why those who have studied the secrets of this art are inclined
to esteem it as the noblest and most powerful of them all. As M. Faguet
has declared, with that sympathetic understanding of the essential
principles of the drama which is common enough in France and only too
rare elsewhere--"it is not contradictory to the definition of dramatic
art that it can synthesize in space like painting, th