pleased,
concentrated as much as even Mr Pinero desires, but he would not have
made a successful drama, because he was Robert Louis Stevenson, and not
Mr Pinero, and too long, as he himself confessed, had a tendency to think
bad-heartedness was strength; while the only true and enduring joy
attainable in this world--whether by deduction from life itself, or from
_impressions_ of art or of the drama, is simply the steady, unassailable,
and triumphant consciousness that it is not so, but the reverse, that
goodness and self-sacrifice and self-surrender are the only strength in
the universe. Just as Byron had it with patriotism:--

"Freedom's battle once begun,
Bequeathed from bleeding sire to son,
Tho' baffled oft is ever won."

To go consciously either in fiction or in the drama for bad-heartedness
as strength, is to court failure--the broad, healthy, human heart, thank
Heaven, is so made as to resent the doctrine; and if a fiction or a play
based on this idea for the moment succeeds, it can only be because of
strength in other elements, or because of partial blindness and partially
paralysed moral sense in the case of those who accept it and joy in it.
If Mr Pinero directly disputes this, then he and I have no common
standing-ground, and I need not follow the matter any further. Of
course, the dramatist may, under mistaken sympathy and in the midst of
complex and bewildering concatenations, give wrong readings to his
audience, but he must not be always doing even that, or doing it on
principle or system, else his work, however careful and concentrated,
will before long share the fate of the Stevenson-Henley dramas
confessedly wrought when the authors all too definitely held
bad-heartedness was strength.

CHAPTER XV--THEORY OF GOOD AND EVIL

We have not hitherto concerned ourselves, in any express sense, with the
ethical elements involved in the tendency now dwelt on, though they are,
of necessity, of a very vital character. We have shown only as yet the
effect of this mood of mind on dramatic intention and effort. The
position is simply that there is, broadly speaking, the endeavour to
eliminate an element which is essential to successful dramatic
presentation. That element is the eternal distinction, speaking broadly,
between good and evil--between right and wrong--between the secret
consciousness of having done right, and the consciousness of mere
strength and force in certain other ways.