Woe, in the esthetic line, to any example that requires the escort of precept. It is like a guest arriving to dine accompanied by constables. Our author’s prefaces and treatises show a mistrust of disinterested art. He would have declared probably that his art was not disinterested; to which our reply would be that it had then no right to put us off the scent and prepare deceptions for us by coming within an ace of being as good as if it were. The merits of the play—that is of the picture, in these hands—are sometimes singularly independent of the lesson conveyed. The merits of the lesson conveyed are in other cases much more incontestable than those of the picture, than the production of the air of life or the happiest observance of the conditions of the drama. The conclusion, the prescription, of “Denise” strikes me (to give an instance) as singularly fine, but the subject belongs none the less to the hapless order of those that fail to profit by the dramatic form though they have sacrificed the highest advantages of the literary. A play—even the best—pays so tremendously by what it essentially can not do for the comparatively little it practically can, that a mistake in the arithmetic of this positive side speedily produces a wide deviation. In other words the spectator, and still more the reader, sees such a theme as that of “Denise,” which may be described as the evolution of a view, presented most in accordance with its nature when the attempt is not made to present it in accordance with the nature of the theatre. It is the nature of the theatre to give its victims, in exchange for melancholy concessions, a vision of the immediate not to be enjoyed in any other way; and consequently when the material offered it to deal with is not the immediate, but the contingent, the derived, the hypothetic, our melancholy concessions have been made in vain and the inadequacy of the form comes out. In “Francillon,” partly perhaps because the thing has nothing to do with anybody’s duty—least of all with the heroine’s, which would be surely to keep off the streets—the form happens to be remarkably adequate. The question is of the liberty of the protagonist, the right of a wronged and indignant wife to work out her husband’s chastisement in the same material as his sin, work it out moreover on the spot, as a blow is repaid by a blow, exacting an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth. The play has all the kinds of life that the theatre can achieve, because in the first place Dumas, though acting as the wife’s advocate, has had the intelligence to give us a solution which is only a scenic sequence and not a real, still less a “philosophic,” one; and because in the second it deals with emotions and impulses, which can be shown by the short measure, and not with reflections and aspirations, which can be shown but by the long.