ly, I suppose, because he does
not understand them. His concern, one may say, is with the gross anatomy
of passion, not with its histology. He seeks to depict emotion, not in
its ultimate attenuation, but in its fundamental innocence and fury.
Inevitably, his materials are those of what we call melodrama; he is at
one, in the bare substance of his tales, with the manufacturers of the
baldest shockers. But with a difference!--a difference, to wit, of
approach and comprehension, a difference abysmal and revolutionary. He
lifts melodrama to the dignity of an important business, and makes it a
means to an end that the mere shock-monger never dreams of. In itself,
remember, all this up-roar and blood-letting is not incredible, nor even
improbable. The world, for all the pressure of order, is still full of
savage and stupendous conflicts, of murders and debaucheries, of crimes
indescribable and adventures almost unimaginable. One cannot reasonably
ask a novelist to deny them or to gloss over them; all one may demand of
him is that, if he make artistic use of them, he render them
understandable--that he logically account for them, that he give them
plausibility by showing their genesis in intelligible motives and
colourable events.

The objection to the conventional melodramatist is that he fails to do
this. It is not that his efforts are too florid, but that his causes are
too puny. For all his exuberance of fancy, he seldom shows us a
downright impossible event; what he does constantly show us is an
inadequate and hence unconvincing motive. In a cheap theatre we see a
bad actor, imperfectly disguised as a viscount, bind a shrieking young
woman to the railroad tracks, with an express train approaching. Why
does he do it? The melodramatist offers a double-headed reason, the
first part being that the viscount is an amalgam of Satan and Don Juan
and the second being that the young woman prefers death to dishonour.
Both parts are absurd. Our eyes show us at once that the fellow is far
more the floorwalker, the head barber, the Knight of Pythias than either
the Satan or the Don Juan, and our experience of life tells us that
young women in yellow wigs do not actually rate their virginity so
dearly. But women are undoubtedly done to death in this way--not every
day, perhaps, but now and then. Men bind them, trains run over them, the
newspapers discuss the crime, the pursuit of the felon, the ensuing
jousting of the jurisconsults. Wh