If _Thérèse Raquin_ were simply the melodrama some of its opponents have pronounced it to be, the murder, which is the cause of the two lovers’ remorse and collapse, would have been done, not in the interval between two acts--the first of which ends and the second of which begins with a quiet game of dominoes in a Parisian parlour--but in sight of the audience, with an abundance of water in the middle of the stage, and at the back a panorama of the Seine by Asnières or Meudon. As it is, with the material circumstances of the murder we are not for one moment invited to be concerned. We are shown in one act the state of mind and feeling in which, to two people who were perhaps not born to be villains, such a solution as murder becomes possible; we are shown in another the state of mind and feeling which, in two such people, may presumably succeed to that deed of violence of which they have been guilty. The interest of these acts--different slightly from the interest of the later ones--is the interest of mental analysis; and, if these acts are melodrama, _The Ring and the Book_ is a ‘shocker.’ The intelligent, unprejudiced person who goes to see _Thérèse Raquin_, comes away with the knowledge that he has witnessed an exposition of several bitter truths--an exposition made by M. Zola with power and with singleness of aim, but here and there accompanied by a purposeless, or at the least an unsuccessful, diffuseness, which is one of the most characteristic and abiding defects of this important writer’s method. This diffuseness, this fulness of detail which is not actually illustrative and explanatory, Balzac, who was Zola’s master, had in a measure; but he had it far less than Zola. A profuse employment of the commonplace, in order that one may be ‘natural’--this avoidance of selection and rejection, when selection and rejection are of the very essence of Art--commends itself, as I understand, to a little school of criticism, or of dogmatism, which has now found voice among us; and that it does so is an entertaining evidence of the capacity of its professors for critical preachment. (_Academy_, 24th October 1891.) ‘MACBETH’ AND IRVING