d reading of human nature in its deepest demands and laws. Herein lies
the false strain that has spoiled much of his earlier work, which renders
really superficial and confusing and undramatic his professedly dramatic
work--which never will and never can commend the hearty suffrages of a
mixed and various theatrical audience in violating the very first rule of
the theatre, and of dramatic creation.

From another point of view this is my answer to Mr Pinero in regard to
the failure of Stevenson to command theatrical success. He confuses and
so far misdirects the sympathies in issues which strictly are at once
moral and dramatic.

I am absolutely at one with Mr Baildon, though I reach my results from
somewhat different grounds from what he does, when he says this about
_Beau Austin_, and the reason of its failure--complete failure--on the
stage:

"I confess I should have liked immensely to have seen [? to see] this
piece on the boards; for only then could one be quite sure whether it
could be made convincing to an audience and carry their sympathies in
the way the author intended. Yet the fact that _Beau Austin_, in
spite of being 'put on' by so eminent an actor-manager as Mr Beerbohm
Tree, was no great success on the stage, is a fair proof that the
piece lacked some of the essentials, good or bad, of dramatic success.
Now a drama, like a picture or a musical composition, must have a
certain unity of key and tone. You can, indeed, mingle comedy with
tragedy as an interlude or relief from the strain and stress of the
serious interest of the piece. But you cannot reverse the process and
mingle tragedy with comedy. Once touch the fine spun-silk of the
pretty fire-balloon of comedy with the tragic dagger, and it falls to
earth a shrivelled nothing. And the reason that no melodrama can be
great art is just that it is a compromise between tragedy and comedy,
a mixture of tragedy with comedy and not comedy with tragedy. So in
drama, the middle course, proverbially the safest, is in reality the
most dangerous. Now I maintain that in _Beau Austin_ we have an
element of tragedy. The betrayal of a beautiful, pure and
noble-minded woman is surely at once the basest act a man can be
capable of, and a more tragic event than death itself to the woman.
Richardson, in _Clarissa Harlowe_, is well aware of this, and is
perfectly right in making his _denouement_