l that Furetiere proclaimed and before
they had acquired the skill needed to make their readers accept
it. And there had also to be a slow development of our own ideas
concerning the relation of art to life. For one thing, art had been
expected to emphasize a moral; there was even a demand on the drama
to be overtly didactic. Less than a score of years after Furetiere's
preface, there was published an English translation of the Abbe
d'Aubignac's "Pratique du Theatre" which was entitled the "Whole Art
of the Stage" and in which the theory of "poetic justice" was
set forth formally. "One of the chiefest, and indeed the most
indispensable Rule of Drammatick Poems is that in them Virtues always
ought to be rewarded, or at least commended, in spight of all the
Injuries of Fortune; and that likewise Vices be always punished or at
least detested with Horrour, though they triumph upon the Stage for
that time."

Doctor Johnson was so completely a man of his own century that he
found fault with Shakspere because Shakspere did not preach, because
in the great tragedies virtue is not always rewarded and vice is not
always punished. Doctor Johnson and the Abbe d'Aubignac wanted
the dramatist to be false to life as we all know it. Beyond all
peradventure the wages of sin is death; and yet we have all seen the
evil-doer dying in the midst of his devoted family and surrounded by
all the external evidences of worldly success. To insist that virtue
shall be outwardly triumphant at the end of a play or of a novel is to
require the dramatist or the novelist to falsify. It is to
introduce an element of unreality into fiction. It is to require the
story-teller and the playmaker to prove a thesis that common sense
must reject.

Any attempt to require the artist to prove anything is necessarily
cramping. A true representation of life does not prove one thing only,
it proves many things. Life is large, unlimited, and incessant; and
the lessons of the finest art are those of life itself; they are
not single but multiple. Who can declare what is the single moral
contained in the "Oedipus" of Sophocles, the "Hamlet" of Shakspere,
the "Tartufe" of Moliere? No two spectators of these masterpieces
would agree on the special morals to be isolated; and yet none of them
would deny that the masterpieces are profoundly moral because of their
essential truth. Morality, a specific moral,--this is what the
artist cannot deliberately put into his work, wit