to the last years of
his stay in London, 'Cymbeline' and 'A Winter's Tale' are far inferior
to 'Hamlet' and to 'Macbeth'; and the cause is apparently little more
than a carelessness of technic, an unwillingness to take the trouble
needful to master his material and to present it in due proportion.

If Shakspere and Moliere ever meet in that other world which was so much
in the mind of the one and so little in the thought of the other, and if
they chance to fall into chat--Shakspere spoke French, pretty certainly,
even if Moliere knew no English--we may rest assured that they will not
surprize each other by idle questions about the meaning of this play or
that, its moral purpose or its symbolic significance. We may be
confident that their talk would turn promptly to technic; and, perhaps,
Shakspere would congratulate Moliere on his advantage in coming later,
when the half-open, semi-medieval playhouse, with which the English
dramatist had perforce to be contented, had been superseded by a more
modern theater, roofed and lighted and set with scenery. And, in his
turn, Moliere might be curious to inquire how the English playwright was
able to produce upon the spectators the effect of a change of scene
when, in fact, there was no actual scenery to change.

To suggest that these two masters of the dramatic art would probably
confine their conversation to matters of mere technic is not so vain or
adventurous as it may seem, since technic is the one theme the
dramatists from Lope de Vega to Legouve have always chosen to discuss,
whenever they have been emboldened to talk about their art in public.
Lope's 'New Art of Writing Plays' is in verse, and it has taken for its
remote model Horace's 'Art of Poetry,' but none the less does it contain
the practical counsels of a practical playwright, advising his
fellow-craftsmen how best to succeed on the stage; and it is just as
technical in its precepts as Mr. Pinero's acute lecture on the probable
success of Robert Louis Stevenson as a dramatist, if only the Scots
romancer had taken the trouble to learn the rules of the game, as it is
played in the theater of to-day.

In thus centering the interest of their public utterance upon the
necessities of craftsmanship, the dramatists are in accord with the
customs of the practitioners of all the other arts. Consider the
criticism of poetry by the poets themselves, for example,--how narrowly
it is limited to questions of vocabulary or of ve