hat was not of their own making. There was a criticism written
of the play at the time by Mr. Justin Huntly Macarthy which, quoted,
will give us the history of the "boom." It was his good fortune to be in
the United States "when," he says, "the taste for _Trilby_ became a
passion, when the passion grew into a mania and the mania deepened into
a madness," and he noted that in England the play and not the novel
kindled the passion; though in the criticism of the novel, classed as it
had been even in this country with the work of Thackeray, he could only
recall one note of dispraise, "so earnest and scornful that, in its
loneliness, it seemed to fall like the clatter of a steel glove in a
house of prayer." He recalled a friend of his goaded to ferocity by
another's exuberance of rapture for some latter-day singers, crying out
"Hang your Decadents! Humpty-Dumpty is worth all they ever wrote."
"This," he continued, "is a variety of the mood which accepts _Trilby_.
In _Trilby_ we get back, as it were, to Humpty-Dumpty--to its simplicity
at least, if not to its pitch of art. The strong man and the odd man and
the boy man, brothers in Bohemianism, brothers in art, brothers
in love for youth and beauty; the girl, the fair, the kind, the
for-ever-desirable, pure in impurity, and sacred even in shame; the dingy
evil genius who gibbers in Yiddish to the God he denies; the hopeless,
devoted musician, whose spirit in a previous existence answered to the
name of Bowes; the mother who makes the appeal that so many parents have
made on behalf of their sons to fair sinners since the days when Duval
the elder interviewed Marguerite Gauthier; all this company of puppets
please in their familiarity, their straightforwardness, their undefeated
obviousness, very much as a game of bowls on a village green with decent
rustics, or a game of romps in a rose-garden with laughing children,
might please after a supper with Nana or an evening with the
Theosophists."

This seems to us to diagnose the case as far as the success of the play
was concerned. But as regards the book at which it was partly aimed, it
is wide of the mark. There is something in a work of fiction when it is
of sufficient power to make a success simply as fiction which cannot be
carried over the footlights. If we only knew Shakespeare through seeing
him acted we should rate him much lower than we do. The success of
Shakespeare upon the stage rests with certain qualities that can o