In his later comedies the names are admirably chosen: they are
characteristic without eccentricity or punning. One feels that Eccles in
_Caste_ could not possibly have borne any other name. How much less
living would he be had he been called Mr. Soaker or Mr. Tosspot!

Characteristic without eccentricity--that is what a name ought to be. As
the characteristic quality depends upon a hundred indefinable,
subconscious associations, it is clearly impossible to suggest any
principle of choice. The only general rule that can be laid down is that
the key of the nomenclature, so to speak, may rightly vary with the key
of the play--that farcical names are, within limits, admissible in
farce, eccentric names in eccentric comedy, while soberly appropriate
names are alone in place in serious plays. Some dramatists are
habitually happy in their nomenclature, others much less so. Ibsen would
often change a name three or four times in the course of writing a play,
until at last he arrived at one which seemed absolutely to fit the
character; but the appropriateness of his names is naturally lost upon
foreign audiences.

One word may perhaps be said on the recent fashion--not to say fad--of
suppressing in the printed play the traditional list of "Dramatis
Personae." Björnson, in some of his later plays, was, so far as I am
aware, the first of the moderns to adopt this plan. I do not know
whether his example has influenced certain English playwrights, or
whether they arrived independently at the same austere principle, by
sheer force of individual genius. The matter is a trifling one--so
trifling that the departure from established practice has something of
the air of a pedantry. It is not, on the whole, to be approved. It adds
perceptibly to the difficulty which some readers experience in picking
up the threads of a play; and it deprives other readers of a real and