ere, because death was
better than broken love, and at the side of the open grave that had been
dug for one and would serve for both, quarrelled, losing all they had
given their life to keep. 'Is it not a hard thing that we should miss
the safety of the grave and we trampling its edge?' That is Deirdre's
cry at the outset of a reverie of passion that mounts and mounts till
grief itself has carried her beyond grief into pure contemplation. Up to
this the play has been a Master's unfinished work, monotonous and
melancholy, ill-arranged, little more than a sketch of what it would
have grown to, but now I listened breathless to sentences that may never
pass away, and as they filled or dwindled in their civility of sorrow,
the player, whose art had seemed clumsy and incomplete, like the writing
itself, ascended into that tragic ecstasy which is the best that
art--perhaps that life--can give. And at last when Deirdre, in the
paroxysm before she took her life, touched with compassionate fingers
him that had killed her lover, we knew that the player had become, if
but for a moment, the creature of that noble mind which had gathered its
art in waste islands, and we too were carried beyond time and persons to
where passion, living through its thousand purgatorial years, as in the
wink of an eye, becomes wisdom; and it was as though we too had touched
and felt and seen a disembodied thing.

One dogma of the printed criticism is that if a play does not contain
definite character, its constitution is not strong enough for the stage,
and that the dramatic moment is always the contest of character with
character.

In poetical drama there is, it is held, an antithesis between character
and lyric poetry, for lyric poetry--however much it move you when read
out of a book--can, as these critics think, but encumber the action. Yet
when we go back a few centuries and enter the great periods of drama,
character grows less and sometimes disappears, and there is much lyric
feeling, and at times a lyric measure will be wrought into the dialogue,
a flowing measure that had well-befitted music, or that more lumbering
one of the sonnet. Suddenly it strikes us that character is continuously
present in comedy alone, and that there is much tragedy, that of
Corneille, that of Racine, that of Greece and Rome, where its place is
taken by passions and motives, one person being jealous, another full of
love or remorse or pride or anger. In writers of tra