The drama is a more popular art than the novel, in the sense that it makes its appeal not to the individual but to the populace. It sets a contest of human wills before a multitude gathered together for the purpose of witnessing the struggle; and it must rely for its interest largely upon the crowd's instinctive sense of partisanship. As Marlowe said, in _Hero and Leander_,-- When two are stripped, long e'er the course begin, We wish that one should lose, the other win. The audience takes sides with certain characters against certain others; and in most cases it is better pleased if the play ends in a victory for the characters it favors. The question therefore arises whether the dramatist is not justified in cogging the dice of chance and intervening arbitrarily to insure a happy outcome to the action, even though that outcome violate the rigid logic of the art of narrative. This is a very important question; and it must not be answered dogmatically. It is safest, without arguing _ex cathedra_, to accept the answer of the very greatest dramatists. Their practice goes to show that such a violation of the strict logic of art is justifiable in comedy, but is not justifiable in what we may broadly call the serious drama. Molière, for instance, nearly always gave an arbitrary happy ending to his comedies. Frequently, in the last act, he introduced a long lost uncle, who arrived upon the scene just in time to endow the hero and heroine with a fortune and to say "Bless you, my children!" as the curtain fell. Molière evidently took the attitude that since any ending whatsoever must be in the nature of an artifice, and contrary to the laws of life, he might as well falsify upon the pleasant side and send his auditors happy to their homes. Shakespeare took the same attitude in many comedies, of which _As You Like It_ may be chosen as an illustration. The sudden reform of Oliver and the tardy repentance of the usurping duke are both untrue to life and illogical as art; but Shakespeare decided to throw probability and logic to the winds in order to close his comedy with a general feeling of good-will. But this easy answer to the question cannot be accepted in the case of the serious drama; for--and this is a point that is very often missed--in proportion as the dramatic struggle becomes more vital and momentous, the audience demands more and more that it shall be fought out fairly, and that even the characters it favors shall receive no undeserved assistance from the dramatist. This instinct of the crowd--the instinct by which its demand for fairness is proportioned to the importance of the struggle--may be studied by any follower of professional base-ball. The spectators at a ball-game are violently partisan and always want the home team to win. In any unimportant game--if the opposing teams, for instance, have no chance to win the pennant--the crowd is glad of any questionable decision by the umpires that favors the home team.