boast of the brittleness of his characters. He
seems always on the eve of knocking his puppets to pieces. When John
Oliver Hobbes wrote for the first time a comedy of serious emotions, she
named it, with a thinly-disguised contempt for her own work, "A
Sentimental Comedy." The ground of this conception of the artificiality
of comedy is a profound pessimism. Life in the eyes of these mournful
buffoons is itself an utterly tragic thing; comedy must be as hollow as
a grinning mask. It is a refuge from the world, and not even, properly
speaking, a part of it. Their wit is a thin sheet of shining ice over
the eternal waters of bitterness.

"Cyrano de Bergerac" came to us as the new decoration of an old truth,
that merriment was one of the world's natural flowers, and not one of
its exotics. The gigantesque levity, the flamboyant eloquence, the
Rabelaisian puns and digressions were seen to be once more what they had
been in Rabelais, the mere outbursts of a human sympathy and bravado as
old and solid as the stars. The human spirit demanded wit as headlong
and haughty as its will. All was expressed in the words of Cyrano at his
highest moment of happiness, _Il me faut des geants_. An essential
aspect of this question of heroic comedy is the question of drama in
rhyme. There is nothing that affords so easy a point of attack for the
dramatic realist as the conduct of a play in verse. According to his
canons, it is indeed absurd to represent a number of characters facing
some terrible crisis in their lives by capping rhymes like a party
playing _bouts rimes_. In his eyes it must appear somewhat ridiculous
that two enemies taunting each other with insupportable insults should
obligingly provide each other with metrical spacing and neat and
convenient rhymes. But the whole of this view rests finally upon the
fact that few persons, if any, to-day understand what is meant by a
poetical play. It is a singular thing that those poetical plays which
are now written in England by the most advanced students of the drama
follow exclusively the lines of Maeterlinck, and use verse and rhyme for
the adornment of a profoundly tragic theme. But rhyme has a supreme
appropriateness for the treatment of the higher comedy. The land of
heroic comedy is, as it were, a paradise of lovers, in which it is not
difficult to imagine that men could talk poetry all day long. It is far
more conceivable that men's speech should flower naturally into these
harmo