By the side of the British ‘Silver King’ of Henry Arthur Jones may be set the American ‘Secret Service’ of William Gillette, which also relies for its main effect on an outer drama of sensational incidents; and yet the sensational incidents are so fitly chosen and so artfully interwoven that they serve to set off the very human hero, an accusable character, a Union spy, with a divided duty before him. Toward the end of the play it becomes evident that this brave and resourceful man is doomed to death; and to this fatality he is himself resigned, wilfully throwing away a chance to escape and welcoming a speedy exit from his impossible position. Yet, once more, just before the curtain falls, the dramatist intervenes, like a god from the machine, sparing his hero’s life, and even permitting the spectators to foresee that hero and heroine will live happily ever after, thus consoling and reassuring the audience before eleven o’clock. I make bold to say that this happy ending is not inartistic and that it does not outrage our intellectual honesty, for the obvious reason that ‘Secret Service’ is not essentially a tragedy; it is a serio-comic story which never uplifts us to the serene atmosphere of the irresistible and the inevitable in which tragedy lives. It is too brisk in its humor, too lively in its representation of the externalities of life, to justify a fatal conclusion. A true tragedy must not only end sadly, it has also to begin sadly; it has to impress us subtly with a sense of impending disaster, inherent in its theme. What Stevenson said of the short-story, when that is as dramatic as it can be, is applicable to the drama itself. “Make another end to it?” he wrote in answer to a suggestion to that effect. “Ah, yes, but that is not the way I write; the whole tale is unified. To make another end, that is to make the beginning all wrong.... The body and end of a short-story is bone of the bone and blood of the blood of the beginning.” In other words the beginning of a melodrama never demands a tragic ending, and rarely even permits it. III