outskirts of the action, but do not really or effectually intervene in it.  The hero’s belief in them, indeed, helps to bring about the conclusion; but the apparition which so potently works upon him is an admitted imposture, a pious fraud.  Earlier in the play, two or three trivial and unnecessary miracles are introduced—­just enough to hint at the author’s faith without decisively affirming it.  For instance:  towards the close of Act I Madame d’Aubenas has gone off, nominally to take the night train for Poitiers, in reality to pay a visit to her lover, M. de Stoudza.  When she has gone, her husband and his guests arrange a seance and evoke a spirit.  No sooner have preliminaries been settled than the spirit spells out the word “O-u-v-r-e-z.”  They open the window, and behold! the sky is red with a glare which proves to proceed from the burning of the train in which Madame d’Aubenas is supposed to have started.  The incident is effective enough, and a little creepy; but its effect is quite incommensurate with the strain upon our powers of belief.  The thing is supposed to be a miracle, of that there can be no doubt; but it has not the smallest influence on the course of the play, except to bring on the hurry-scurry and alarm a few minutes earlier than might otherwise have been the case.  Now, if the spirit, instead of merely announcing the accident, had informed M. d’Aubenas that his wife was not in it—­if, for example, it had rapped out “Gilberte chez Stoudza”—­it would have been an honest ghost (though indiscreet), and we should not have felt that our credulity had been taxed to no purpose.  As it is, the logical deduction from M. Sardou’s fable is that, though spirit communications are genuine enough, they are never of the slightest use; but we can scarcely suppose that that was what he intended to convey.

It may be said, and perhaps with truth, that what Sardou lacked in this instance was not logic, but courage:  he felt that an audience would accept episodic miracles, but would reject supernatural interference at a determining crisis in the play.  In that case he would have done better to let the theme alone:  for the manifest failure of logic leaves the play neither good drama nor good argument.  This is a totally different matter from Ibsen’s treatment of the supernatural in such plays as The Lady from the Sea, The Master Builder and Little Eyolf.  Ibsen, like Hawthorne, suggests without affirming the action of occult powers.  He shows us nothing that is not capable of a perfectly natural explanation; but he leaves us to imagine, if we are so disposed, that there may be influences at work that are not yet formally recognized in physics and psychology.  In this there is nothing illogical.  The poet is merely appealing to a mood, familiar to all of us, in which we wonder whether there may not be more things in heaven and earth than are crystallized in our scientific formulas.