those of life; and he must not disrupt his design by
an illogical intervention of the long arm of coincidence. Stevenson has
stated this point in a letter to Mr. Sidney Colvin: "Make another end to
it? Ah, yes, but that's not the way I write; the whole tale is implied; I
never use an effect when I can help it, unless it prepares the effects that
are to follow; that's what a story consists in. To make another end, that
is to make the beginning all wrong." In this passage the whole question is
considered _merely_ from the point of view of art. It is the only point of
view which is valid for the novelist; for him the question is comparatively
simple, and Stevenson's answer, emphatic as it is, may be accepted as
final. But the dramatist has yet another factor to consider,--the factor
of his audience.

The drama is a more popular art than the novel, in the sense that it makes
its appeal not to the individual but to the populace. It sets a contest of
human wills before a multitude gathered together for the purpose of
witnessing the struggle; and it must rely for its interest largely upon the
crowd's instinctive sense of partisanship. As Marlowe said, in _Hero and
Leander_,--

When two are stripped, long e'er the course begin,
We wish that one should lose, the other win.

The audience takes sides with certain characters against certain others;
and in most cases it is better pleased if the play ends in a victory for
the characters it favors. The question therefore arises whether the
dramatist is not justified in cogging the dice of chance and intervening
arbitrarily to insure a happy outcome to the action, even though that
outcome violate the rigid logic of the art of narrative. This is a very
important question; and it must not be answered dogmatically. It is safest,
without arguing _ex cathedra_, to accept the answer of the very greatest
dramatists. Their practice goes to show that such a violation of the strict
logic of art is justifiable in comedy, but is not justifiable in what we
may broadly call the serious drama. Moliere, for instance, nearly always
gave an arbitrary happy ending to his comedies. Frequently, in the last
act, he introduced a long lost uncle, who arrived upon the scene just in
time to endow the hero and heroine with a fortune and to say "Bless you, my
children!" as the curtain fell. Moliere evidently took the attitude that
since any ending whatsoever must be in the nature of an artifice, and
co