'
inability to trace out a story, clearly and forcibly, to an appointed
end. The succeeding acts are crowded with beautiful passages, with vivid
situations, with surprising developments, but the central plot vanishes
away into nothing, like a great river dissipating itself among a
thousand streams. It is, indeed, clear enough that Beddoes was
embarrassed with his riches, that his fertile mind conceived too easily,
and that he could never resist the temptation of giving life to his
imaginations, even at the cost of killing his play. His conception of
Orazio, for instance, began by being that of a young Bacchus, as he
appears in the opening scene. But Beddoes could not leave him there; he
must have a romantic wife, whom he has deserted; and the wife, once
brought into being, must have an interview with her husband. The
interview is an exquisitely beautiful one, but it shatters Orazio's
character, for, in the course of it, he falls desperately in love with
his wife; and meanwhile the wife herself has become so important and
interesting a figure that she must be given a father, who in his turn
becomes the central character in more than one exciting scene. But, by
this time, what has happened to the second brother? It is easy to
believe that Beddoes was always ready to begin a new play rather than
finish an old one. But it is not so certain that his method was quite as
inexcusable as his critics assert. To the reader, doubtless, his faulty
construction is glaring enough; but Beddoes wrote his plays to be acted,
as a passage in one of his letters very clearly shows. 'You are, I
think,' he writes to Kelsall, 'disinclined to the stage: now I confess
that I think this is the highest aim of the dramatist, and should be
very desirous to get on it. To look down on it is a piece of
impertinence, as long as one chooses to write in the form of a play,
and is generally the result of one's own inability to produce anything
striking and affecting in that way.' And it is precisely upon the stage
that such faults of construction as those which disfigure Beddoes'
tragedies matter least. An audience, whose attention is held and
delighted by a succession of striking incidents clothed in splendid
speech, neither cares nor knows whether the effect of the whole, as a
whole, is worthy of the separate parts. It would be foolish, in the
present melancholy condition of the art of dramatic declamation, to wish
for the public performance of _Death's Je