s
refined, with the cheerful fortitude that takes adversity with a smile,
and with that final fortunate triumph of good over evil which is neither
ensanguined with gore nor saddened with tears, nor made acrid with
bitterness. The play is pastoral comedy, written partly in blank verse
and partly in prose, and cast almost wholly out of doors--in the open
air and under the greenwood tree--and, in order to stamp its character
beyond doubt or question, one scene of it is frankly devoted to a
convocation of fairies around Titania, their queen.

The impulse that underlies this piece is the old, incessant, undying
aspiration, that men and women of the best order feel, for some avenue
of escape, some relief, some refuge, from the sickening tyranny of
convention and the commonplace, and from the overwhelming mystery with
which all human life is haunted and oppressed. A man who walks about in
a forest is not necessarily free. He may be as great a slave as anybody.
But the exalted imagination dwells upon his way of life as emancipated,
breezy, natural, and right. That way, to the tired thinker, lie peace
and joy. There, if anywhere--as he fancies--he might escape from all the
wrongs of the world, all the problems of society, all the dull business
of recording, and analysing, and ticketing mankind, all the clash of
selfish systems that people call history, and all the babble that they
call literature. In that retreat he would feel the rain upon his face,
and smell the grass and the flowers, and hear the sighing and whispering
of the wind in the green boughs; and there would be no need to trouble
himself any more, whether about the past or the future. Every great
intellect of the world has felt that wild longing, and has recorded
it--the impulse to revert to the vast heart of Nature, that knows no
doubt, and harbours no fear, and keeps no regret, and feels no sorrow,
and troubles itself not at all. Matthew Arnold dreamily and perhaps
austerely expressed it in _The Scholar Gypsy_. Byron more humanly
uttered it in four well-remembered lines, of _Childe Harold_:

"Oh, that the desert were my dwelling-place,
With one fair spirit for my minister,
That I might all forget the human race,
And, hating nothing, love but only her."

_Robin Hood_, as technical drama, is frail. Its movement, indeed, is not
more indolent than that of its lovely prototypes in Shakespeare, _As You
Like It_ and _A Midsummer Night's Dream_. With