grossnesses are of no further use to him. Don Giovanni and
Zerlina are not gross: Tristan and Isolde are not extravagant or
sentimental. They say and do nothing that you cannot bear to hear
and see; and yet they give you, the one pair briefly and
slightly, and the other fully and deeply, what passes in the
minds of lovers. The love depicted may be that of a philosophic
adventurer tempting an ignorant country girl, or of a tragically
serious poet entangled with a woman of noble capacity in a
passion which has become for them the reality of the whole
universe. No matter: the thing is dramatized and dramatized
directly, not talked about as something that happened before the
curtain rose, or that will happen after it falls.


FARCICAL COMEDY SHIRKING ITS SUBJECT.

Now if all this can be done in the key of tragedy and philosophic
comedy, it can, I have always contended, be done in the key of
farcical comedy; and Overruled is a trifling experiment in that
manner. Conventional farcical comedies are always finally tedious
because the heart of them, the inevitable conjugal infidelity, is
always evaded. Even its consequences are evaded. Mr. Granville
Barker has pointed out rightly that if the third acts of our
farcical comedies dared to describe the consequences that would
follow from the first and second in real life, they would end as
squalid tragedies; and in my opinion they would be greatly
improved thereby even as entertainments; for I have never seen a
three-act farcical comedy without being bored and tired by the
third act, and observing that the rest of the audience were in
the same condition, though they were not vigilantly introspective