his having been "drawn." His apparent triumph--if it be even apparent--
still leaves, it will be noted, convenient cover for retort in the
riddled face of the opposite stronghold. The last word in these cases is
for nobody who can't pretend to an ABSOLUTE test. The terms here used,
obviously, are matters of appreciation, and there is no short cut to
proof (luckily for us all round) either that "Monsieur Alphonse"
develops itself on the highest plane of irony or that "Ghosts"
simplifies almost to excruciation. If "John Gabriel Borkmann" is but a
pennyworth of effect as to a character we can imagine much more amply
presented, and if "Hedda Gabler" makes an appeal enfeebled by remarkable
vagueness, there is by the nature of the case no catching the convinced,
or call him the deluded, spectator or reader in the act of a mistake. He
is to be caught at the worst in the act of attention, of the very
greatest attention, and that is all, as a precious preliminary at least,
that the playwright asks of him, besides being all the very divinest
poet can get. I remember rejoicing as much to remark this, after getting
launched in "The Awkward Age," as if I were in fact constructing a play
--just as I may doubtless appear now not less anxious to keep the
philosophy of the dramatist's course before me than if I belonged to his
order. I felt, certainly, the support he feels, I participated in his
technical amusement, I tasted to the full the bitter-sweetness of his
draught--the beauty and the difficulty (to harp again on that string) of
escaping poverty EVEN THOUGH the references in one's action can only be,
with intensity, to each other, to things exactly on the same plane of
exhibition with themselves. Exhibition may mean in a "story" twenty
different ways, fifty excursions, alternatives, excrescences, and the
novel, as largely practised in English, is the perfect paradise of the
loose end. The play consents to the logic of but one way, mathematically
right, and with the loose end as gross an impertinence on its surface,
and as grave a dishonour, as the dangle of a snippet of silk or wool on