properties. What is permissible to Blake, painting
Adam and Eve among embowering roses and lilies, while the sun, moon, and
stars simultaneously shine, is impermissible to the portrait-painter or
the landscapist, who has to idealise actuality to the point only of
artistic realism, and not to transmute it at the outset from
happily-perceived concrete facts to a glorified abstract concept.

In this opening monologue the much-admired song, "All service ranks the
same with God," is no song at all, properly, but simply a beautiful
short poem. From the dramatist's point of view, could anything be more
shaped for disaster than the second of the two stanzas?--

"Say not 'a small event!' Why 'small'?
Costs it more pain than this, ye call
A 'great event,' should come to pass,
Than that? Untwine me from the mass
Of deeds which make up life, one deed
Power shall fall short in or exceed!"

The whole of this lovely prologue is the production of a dramatic poet,
not of a poet writing a drama. On the other hand, I cannot agree with
what I read somewhere recently--that Sebald's song, at the opening of
the most superb dramatic writing in the whole range of Victorian
literature, is, in the circumstances, wholly inappropriate. It seems to
me entirely consistent with the character of Ottima's reckless lover. He
is akin to the gallant in one of Dumas' romances, who lingered atop of
the wall of the prison whence he was escaping in order to whistle the
concluding bar of a blithe chanson of freedom. What is, dramatically,
disastrous in the instance of Mertoun singing "There's a woman like a
dewdrop," when he ought to be seeking Mildred's presence in profound
stealth and silence, is, dramatically, electrically startling in the
mouth of Sebald, among the geraniums of the shuttered shrub-house, where
he has passed the night with Ottima, while her murdered husband lies
stark in the adjoining room.

It must, however, be borne in mind that this thrilling dramatic effect
is fully experienced only in retrospection, or when there is knowledge
of what is to follow.

A conclusive objection to the drama as an actable play is that three of
the four main episodes are fragmentary. We know nothing of the fate of
Luigi: we can but surmise the future of Jules and Phene: we know not how
or when Monsignor will see Pippa righted. Ottima and Sebald reach a
higher level in voluntary death than they ever could have done in life