of three.

A young man has been killed in a factory, and his body was so mangled
by the fatal wheels that even his father was not allowed to see it. Late
at night the father, by means of a diabolical talisman--the Monkey's
Paw--succeeds in recalling his son to life, and the audience hears a
knocking at the door. What is knocking? The mother is making frantic
efforts to pull back the bolts. Her son is there, returned from the
grave. The father, aware that the talisman, which promised the
fulfilment of three wishes, is of a fiendish malignity, guesses that if
the door be opened his son will stand before them alive, but fearfully
mangled and mutilated, so he is groping upon the floor for the Monkey's
Paw, and the audience feels that on the other side of the door is an
obscene horror fresh from the grave. There was a sigh of relief in the
theatre when the father found the talisman, and, using the last wish,
prayed successfully that his son might be dead and at peace.

The knock, knock, was decidedly impressive, like the knocking at the
door in _Macbeth_, which greatly affected Charles Lamb. Is this matter
too horrible for the stage? One may compare it with another horror given
not long ago, _The Soothing System_, which Mr Bourchier adapted cleverly
from a story by Edgar Poe and produced at the Garrick, showing the
terrible adventures of two visitors to a lunatic asylum, the inmates of
which had overpowered their keepers. This was very powerful and
horrible, and perhaps would have given a shiver to the hero of a famous
tale in the collection of goblin stories by the Brothers Grimm.

Nevertheless it was not legitimate, partly because the circumstances are
rare when it is permissible to present madness on the stage, partly
because some of the mad people were repulsive to the eye, and partly
because horror was the sole means and end of the piece. Many condemned
_The Monkey's Paw_, yet a line can be drawn between it and _The Soothing
System_--not a nice sharp line, but one of those blurred lines so faint
and so uncertain, that even if their existence be admitted, there is
always room for a fight on the question whether a work lies on this or
that side of it.

Speaking roughly, one may say that _The Monkey's Paw_ is legitimate
because there is nothing in it repulsive to the eye, and for the reason
that horror is not the sole means and end of it: the story, like its
prototype folk-lore tale, "The Three Wishes," has an obvious m