greatness and worth; whereas Charolais—

The case of Charolais is peculiar. A priori we should expect him to be just such a personage, yet his conduct throughout is best explainable as that of a man dominated, not by noble impulses, but by an extreme egoism—a man acutely responsive alike to his sense-impressions and his feverish imagination, and possessed of an exaggerated squeamishness towards the ugly and the unpleasant. When, in the First Act, he bursts into tears, he confesses it is not for his father that he weeps, but for his own hard lot; he suffers from his repugnance to the idea of his father’s corpse rotting above ground—a repugnance so intolerable to him that he will yield his liberty to escape it. He purposes to cashier the innkeeper because the sight of the lecherous patrons of his hostelry has disgusted him, and he alters his resolve and forgives the fellow, not from any considerations of mercy, but because the mental picture of the man’s distress tortures him. And by similar personal repugnances reacting on egoism is his behavior in the denouement to be accounted for, and in this light becomes logically credible and clearly understood. Few practices are more hazardous or unjust than judging an artist by his objective creations; but an ignoble protagonist, as Charolais is represented, is in such ill accord with any conceivable purpose on the part of Beer-Hofmann, and so unlikely to have been intended by him, that one cannot help strongly suspecting that the author unconsciously projected himself into the character and thus revealed his own nature and point of view. In any case he has presented for his hero a whimperer who can command neither our sympathy nor our respect when he cries above the bodies of his benefactor and her who is that benefactor’s daughter, his own wife, and the mother of his child:

We have come a long way from Massinger and Field and the early seventeenth century. The shadow of the old dramatists reaches far, even to our own time; we have seen their play redeveloped, but never improved upon, by pseudo-classicist, and popularizer, and Decadent hyper-aesthete. That which was the vulnerable point in the original production—its two-fold plot—has been still for every imitator a stone of stumbling. Rowe tried to escape it by the suppression of the antecedent half, and the fraction which remained in his hand was an artificial thing without the breath of life, that had to be attenuated and padded out with speechifying to fill the compass of its five Acts. Beer-Hofmann tried to escape it by superimposing an idea not proper to the story, and beneath the weight of this his tragedy collapsed in the middle, for its addition 

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