economist might study that phenomenon conceivably with profit and without rancor, so may we in the right spirit learn from low tragedy-not in the spirit of Goldsmith's bear-leader denouncing "everything as is low," but in the spirit of Leigh Hunt who quotes him, "Remember, then, gentle reader, that talents are not to be despised in the humblest walks of life; we will add, nor in the muddiest."

High tragedy we approach reluctantly but inevitably. Sometimes we approach it as we might the surgeon, nerving ourselves to it as best we can, and with the conviction that we shall be the better for it. It is a capital operation, requiring a surgeon to whom we may give ourselves over in the abandonment of absolute faith, consciously surrendering our lives to the skill of his hand. He too must have faith in his skill and knowledge, courage to cut firmly and deep, close to vital nerves and ganglia. Low tragedy is the attempt of the surgeon of less skill to get the same result with less risk. He is neither firm enough of hand nor courageous enough of purpose to dare to cut deep. He is like the “painless dentist" who takes no pains and gives no pains; the pains come later when his work turns out to be worthless. Low tragedy is usually the work of the lesser artist; sometimes it is the lesser work of the great artist. It seeks to exercise the tragic emotions, but dares no more than trot them out for an exhibition. It seeks to persuade you that you can reduce your spiritual obesity without starvation, without exercise, without effort of body or will, merely by eating medicated candy which is really quite as sweet as the kind which makes you fat.

Low tragedy is tragedy for the unthinking; it is tragedy which when you think about it becomes something it was not intended to be. It is true, of course, that the fact that it is not intended to stand intellectual analysis does not seem at first to differentiate it from other types, or seems to point to a difference in degree rather than in kind, but it is a difference which on some parts of the scale differentiates such kinds as romantic and classic, and art and no art. Every art has its intellectual element; when "there is

no sense in it" it isn't art; when there is a preponderance of imagination, it is romantic art. If there is no imagination, no amount of "sense" will make it art. The artist's task is to feed our intellects just enough to keep them satisfied so that they won't interfere with the operation of our imaginations on our emotions; to produce "poetic faith" by hypnotizing us into the necessary "willing suspension of disbelief." Theseus, Duke of Athens, was, I believe, the first dramatic critic to recognize this important fact. The Amazon Hyppolita, having been married two or three hours, has become the complete British matron at the play. Her comment on the irrationality of love, the theme which the audience has been following for three and a half acts, is, "This is the silliest stuff that ever I heard." This is the moment of Theseus' disillusionment, in which he realizes that he has married a mindless, soulless, athlete, that "withinsides she was quite dead, and she smiled as a clock ticks and knew not wherefore." His reply is Wordsworth's lesson in poetic faith: "The best in this kind are but shadows, and the worst are no worse if imagination amend them." Of course we must meet the artist halfway. It isn't fair to examine the back of a painting and judge the painter by the quality of the canva.. It isn't fair to subject a work of art to tests it was never meant to withstand. High tragedy withstands the low tests quite as well as does low tragedy; the difference is that it withstands the high tests too. Hamlet is a better melodrama than No Mother to Guide Her: it begins with a ghost, and goes on by way of assassination, adultery, incest, suicide, and poisoned liquor, to a stage strewn with corpses and swimming in blood. What more could any moron ask? Obviously nothing except a happy ending. It is no less successful for the highbrow and for all grades between except for the moron posing as a scholar. Hamlet is not fool-proof, but it is proof against almost anything except misapplied intelligence.

Low tragedy is like farce in the nature of its adaptation to the elementary mind; neither will stand the first degree of analysis. Both belong in the realm in which acts have no

consequences that are emotionally real. They are like romance in their disregard of details which would be essential to actuality. In low tragedy and low comedy, the omitted details are for the most part consequences of acts. In the comic strip, which is low comedy in its lowest terms, when Willy attacks with an ax the fly which has settled on grandpa's bald head, the consequence which in life would be a fracture or a severe scalp wound is a negligible contusion. If your mind or your imagination leans a hair's breadth too far toward actuality, it is impossible to take the situation lightly, just as in low tragedy it is impossible to take seriously the idea of using a folding bed as a villaintrap. That is the sort of thing which the highbrow loves to burlesque. He chants,

Little Willy killed his sister;

'Twas a week before they missed her.

Willy's always up to tricks;

Ain't he cute? He's only six.

and denounces as deficient in humor anyone so unfortunate as to image too vividly the consequences of the act. Such a one is in a stage like that between romance and life at the edge of a dream, when reason struggling back to her judicial seat gives the first intimation of the terrible consequence of an imagined act before she tells you that you have not committed it. In both low tragedy and low comedy, the dramatist is working for a limited audience whose inertia of reason he gauges to a hair. His work is like that of the prestidigitator who with his right hand and his hypnotic patter keeps our eyes on some glittering trifle while his left hand safely does the essential motions of the trick. So Shakespeare launches the monstrous accusation against the innocent Hero, and, lest we stop to think how she might feel about it, knocks her down with the weight of it and drags her out before she can speak a word, leaving the audience like children able to think of nothing but what is before their eyes. He knows that if we consider Hero's feelings the situation is tragedy; witness the parallel scene

in Othello which is confirmed as high tragedy by the one which follows to display the feelings of the victim. In low tragedy, the assumption seems to be that the audience has not imagination enough to feel any emotion unless it be one from which a figure on the stage is visibly suffering. If the dramatist can trust us to feel nothing that he does not show us, he can play on us with low tragedy and low comedy at will, working our feelings by symbols as the pianist works on the taut wires by means of the ivory keys. "The best in this kind are but shadows," says Duke Theseus, “and the worst are no worse if imagination amend them." True enough, but imagination must know just where to stop; the dramatist must know not only when but how to stop it.

In the ten-cent stores of literature, low comedy and low tragedy, gaudy colors are more important than sound goods; the customer is supposed to be blind to all else. Just as the rabbit assumes that the human eye, like its own, can see nothing that is not moving, so the dramatist stakes his all on action, assuming that events are tragic or comic in themselves regardless of whether they happen to anybody or not. For the most part they happen to no one—that is, to a set of nobodies-and the dramatist has saved on his greatest item of expense, character. For his purpose, immediate returns, and to do for posterity no more than posterity is doing for him, he is right. He symbolizes character crudely and obviously, and realizes action. This means that low tragedy merely trots out the tragic emotions, but does not run them to a finish; it is hardly so much as a formal exercise to those of us who feel tragic effect only when something disastrous happens to someone we care about, someone to us emotionally real. Then only is action emotionally real, when we think of them as us. In high tragedy the symbol that spells character must be even more effective than the symbol that spells action-the merest hint of harm to one we love is instantly dramatized, but if the villain sticks a real sword into the hero and nothing comes out but sawdust, the episode is of no more concern than the upset of a tailor's dummy.

Thus it is that character generalized is the unchanging mood of low comedy and low tragedy alike. The type character with the type name is the beginning of comedy, its mainstay, and its end. In the melodrama, a villain is a villain in whatever play you find him; you could detect him at a glance by his costume and makeup-in the days aforementioned, for example, anyone who smoked on the stage was a villain. Generalized character is the attempt to dramatize proverbs, platitudes, and other generalizations such as the moron delights to repeat and the highbrow delights to challenge. Bacon tells us as if it were a universal law that bastards and deformed persons are envious, and when Shakespeare attempts to dramatize this dangerous assertion in such figures as Richard of Gloucester, Don John, and Edmund, he gives us his most melodramatic passages. Dickens' comedy, be it high or low, is that of the generalized character with the type name. When he assaults the tragic emotions with the same set of characters, the result is melodrama pure and simple, which is what you always get when you attempt heavy drama with dramatis personae whose characters are pure and whose minds are simple.

Though action is abundant in low tragedy, it never gets anywhere. It happens, as I have said, to a set of nobodies, and comes to an end before it comes to a head. The plot of low tragedy is that of a bunch of firecrackers, a paper fuse leading from one pop to another; it is not necessary to remember the first explosion in order to understand the las.. A typical plot is that of Tracked Across the Continent, in which the villain gets the girl aboard the lugger at New York, almost loses her at Buffalo, Chicago, St. Louis, and Denver, but is completely foiled only in the very jaws of the Golden Gate. If this had not been enough, the author had only to introduce similar skirmishes at Albany; Detroit; Tipton, Indiana; Fort Dodge, Iowa; Enid, Oklahoma, and way stations, till his measure was full. It is an agglomeration of five-minute plots because it is intended for the mind which is conscious of nothing but what is before the eyes,