f the dramatic and the histrionic arts do
not run parallel; it does not contradict the fact that their conjunction
is, on the one side as well as on the other, indispensable. No drama is
more than potentially such till it is acted.

Laws and rules of the drama.

To essay, whether in a brief summary or in more or less elaborate
detail, a statement of the main laws of the drama, has often been
regarded as a superfluous, not to say, futile effort. But the laws of
which it is proposed to give some indication here are not so much those
which any particular literature or period has chosen to set up and
follow, as those abstracted by criticism, in pursuit of its own free
comparative method, from the process that repeats itself in every drama
adequately meeting the demands upon it. Aristotle, whom we still justly
revere as the originator of the theory of the drama, and thus its great
[Greek: nomothetes], was, no doubt, in his practical knowledge of it,
confined to its Greek examples, yet his object was not to produce
another generation of great Attic tragedians, but rather to show how it
was by following the necessary laws of their art that the great masters,
true to themselves and to their artistic ends, had achieved what they
had achieved. Still more distinctly was such the aim of the greatest
modern critical writer on the drama, Lessing, whose chief design was to
combat false dramatic theories and to overthrow laws demonstrated by him
to be artificial inventions, unreal figments. He proved, what before him
had only been suspected, that Shakespeare, though in hopeless conflict
with certain rules dating from the _siecle de Louis XIV_, was not in
conflict with those laws of the drama which are of its very essence, and
that, accordingly, if Shakespeare and the rules in question could not be
harmonized, it was only so much the worse for the rules. To illustrate
from great works, and expound with their aid, the organic processes of
the art to which they belong, is not only among the highest, it is also
one of the most useful functions of literary and artistic criticism. Nor
is there, in one sense at least, any finality about it. Neither the
great authorities on dramatic theory nor the resolute and acute
apologists of more or less transitory phases of the drama--Corneille,
Dryden and many later successors--have exhausted the statement of the
means which the drama has proved, or may prove, capable of employing.
The multitude of