must be rigidly excluded when the issue is joined and we are in the thick of things.  Coincidences, in fact, become the more improbable in the direct ratio of their importance.  We have all, in our own experience, met with amazing coincidences; but how few of us have ever gained or lost, been made happy or unhappy, by a coincidence, as distinct from a chance!  It is not precisely probable that three brothers, who have separated in early life, and have not heard of one another for twenty years, should find themselves seated side by side at an Italian table-d’hote; yet such coincidences have occurred, and are creditable enough so long as nothing particular comes of them.  But if a dramatist were to make these three brothers meet in Messina on the eve of the earthquake, in order that they might all be killed, and thus enable his hero (their cousin) to succeed to a peerage and marry the heroine, we should say that his use of coincidence was not strictly artistic.  A coincidence, in short, which coincides with a crisis is thereby raised to the nth power, and is wholly inacceptable in serious art.  Mr. Bernard Shaw has based the action of You Never Can Tell on the amazing coincidence that Mrs. Clandon and her children, coming to England after eighteen years’ absence, should by pure chance run straight into the arms, or rather into the teeth, of the husband and father whom the mother, at any rate, only wishes to avoid.  This is no bad starting-point for an extravaganza; but even Mr. Shaw, though a despiser of niceties of craftsmanship, introduces no coincidences into serious plays such as Candida or The Doctor’s Dilemma.

* * * * *

[Footnote 1:  The malignant caricature of Cromwell in W.G.  Wills’ Charles I did not, indeed, prevent the acceptance of the play by the mid-Victorian public; but it will certainly shorten the life of the one play which might have secured for its author a lasting place in dramatic literature.  It is unimaginable that future generations should accept a representation of Cromwell as

  “A mouthing patriot, with an itching palm,
  In one hand menace, in the other greed.”]

[Footnote 2:  It is only fair to say that Sarcey drew a distinction between antecedent events and what he calls “postulates of character.”  He did not maintain that an audience ought to accept a psychological impossibility, merely because it was placed outside the frame of the picture.  See Quarante Ans de Theatre, vii, p. 395.]

[Footnote 3:  This phrase, which occurs in Mr. Haddon Chambers’s romantic melodrama, Captain Swift, was greeted with a burst of laughter by the first-night audience; but little did we then think that Mr. Chambers was enriching the English language.  It is not, on examination, a particularly luminous phrase:  “the three or four arms of coincidence” would really be more to the point.  But it is not always the most accurate expression that is fittest to survive.]