in the Grand Central Station without paying
anything? Why, indeed!--unless the dramatist contrives to reveal an
imaginable human mystery throbbing in the palpitant heart--no, not of the
locomotive, but of the locomotive-engineer. That is something that we could
not see at all in the Grand Central Station, unless we were endowed with
eyes as penetrant as those of the dramatist himself.

But not only must the drama render life more comprehensible by discarding
the irrelevant, and attracting attention to the essential; it must also
render us the service of bringing to a focus that phase of life it
represents. The mirror which the dramatist holds up to nature should be a
concave mirror, which concentrates the rays impinging on it to a luminous
focal image. Hamlet was too much a metaphysician to busy his mind about the
simpler science of physics; but surely this figure of the concave mirror,
with its phenomenon of concentration, represents most suggestively his
belief concerning the purpose of playing and of plays. The trouble with
most of our dramas is that they render scattered and incoherent images of
life; they tell us many unimportant things, instead of telling us one
important thing in many ways. They reveal but little, because they
reproduce too much. But it is only by bringing all life to a focus in a
single luminous idea that it is possible, in the two hours' traffic of the
stage, "to show virtue her own feature, scorn her own image, and the very
age and body of the time his form and pressure."

An interesting instance of how a dramatist, by holding, as it were, a
concave mirror up to nature, may concentrate all life to a focus in a
single luminous idea is afforded by that justly celebrated drama entitled
_El Gran Galeoto_, by Don Jose Echegaray. This play was first produced at
the Teatro Espanol on March 19, 1881, and achieved a triumph that soon
diffused the fame of its author, which till then had been but local, beyond
the Pyrenees. It is now generally recognised as one of the standard
monuments of the modern social drama. It owes its eminence mainly to the
unflinching emphasis which it casts upon a single great idea. This idea is
suggested in its title.

In the old French romance of Launcelot of the Lake, it was Gallehault who
first prevailed on Queen Guinevere to give a kiss to Launcelot: he was thus
the means of making actual their potential guilty love. His name
thereafter, like that of Pandarus of Troy, be