to it, and _St Ives_ did, in my idea, yet more."

The one essential of a _dramatic_ piece is that, by the interaction of
character and incident (one or other may be preponderating, according to
the type and intention of the writer) all naturally leads up to a crisis
in which the moral motives, appealed to or awakened by the presentation
of the play, are justified. Where this is wanting the true leading and
the definite justification are wanting. Goethe failed in this in his
_Faust_, resourceful and far-seeing though he was--he failed because a
certain sympathy is awakened for Mephistopheles in being, so to say,
chivied out of his bargain, when he had complied with the terms of the
contract by Faust; and Gounod in his opera does exactly for "immediate
dramatic effect," what we hold it would be necessary to do for R. L.
Stevenson. Goethe, with his casuistries which led him to allegory and
all manner of overdone symbolisms and perversions in the Second Part, is
set aside and a true crisis and close is found by Gounod through simply
sending Marguerite above and Faust below, as, indeed, Faust had agreed by
solemn compact with Mephistopheles that it should be. And to come to
another illustration from our own times, Mr Bernard Shaw's very clever
and all too ingenious and over-subtle _Man and Superman_ would, in my
idea, and for much the same reason, be an utterly ineffective and weak
piece on the stage, however carefully handled and however clever the
setting--the reason lying in the egotistic upsetting of the "personal
equation" and the theory of life that lies behind all--tinting it with
strange and even _outre_ colours. Much the same has to be said of most
of what are problem-plays--several of Ibsen's among the rest.

Those who remember the Fairy opera of _Hansel and Gretel_ on the stage in
London, will not have forgotten in the witching memory of all the charms
of scenery and setting, how the scene where the witch of the wood, who
was planning out the baking of the little hero and heroine in her oven,
having "fatted" them up well, to make sweet her eating of them, was by
the coolness and cleverness of the heroine locked in her own oven and
baked there, literally brought down the house. She received exactly what
she had planned to give those children, whom their own cruel parents had
unwittingly, by losing the children in the wood, put into her hands.
Quaint, naive, half-grotesque it was in conception, yet the truth o