pil
not of Moliere but of the full, the rich, the excessive, the pedantic
Jonson; his Legends, his Wishforts, his Foresights are the lawful
heirs--refined and sublimated but still of direct descent--of the Tuccas
and the Bobadils and the Epicure Mammons of the great Elizabethan; they
are (that is) more literary than theatrical--they are excellent reading,
but they have long since fled the stage and vanished into the night of
mere scholarship. To compare an author of this type and descent to
Shakespeare is a trifle unfair; to compare him to Moliere is to
misapprehend the differences between pure literature and literature that
is also drama. Congreve, as I have said, has disappeared from the
boards, and is only tolerable or even intelligible to the true reader;
while Shakespeare worked on so imperfect a convention that, though he
keeps the stage and is known indeed for the poet of the most popular play
ever written--(for that, I take it, _Hamlet_ is)--he is yet the prey of
every twopenny actor, or actor-manager, or actor-manager-editor, who is
driven to deal with him. Now, Moliere wrote as one that was first of all
a great actor; who dealt not so much with what is transient in human life
as with what is eternal in human nature; who addressed himself much more
to an audience--(Fenelon who found fault with his style is witness to the
fact)--than to a circle of readers. And the result is that Moliere not
only remains better reading than Congreve, but is played at this time in
the Rue de Richelieu line for line and word for word as he was played at
the Palais-Bourbon over two hundred years ago.

ARABIAN NIGHTS ENTERTAINMENTS

Its Romance.

He that has the book of the _Thousand Nights and a Night_ has Hachisch-
made-words for life. Gallant, subtle, refined, intense, humourous,
obscene, here is the Arab intelligence drunk with conception. It is a
vast extravaganza of passion in action and picarooning farce and material
splendour run mad. The amorous instinct and the instinct of enjoyment,
not tempered but heightened greatly by the strict ordinances of dogma,
have leave to riot uncontrolled. It is the old immortal story of Youth
and Beauty and their coming together, but it is coloured with the hard
and brilliant hues of an imagination as sensuous in type and as gorgeous
in ambition as humanity has known. The lovers must suffer, for suffering
intensifies the joy of fruition; so they are subjected to all such