The full measure of his ignorance it would be a waste of time to point out, but it can be estimated by his two remarks, that it was better to fail with Tennyson than to succeed with Mr. Henry Arthur Jones, and that there is likely to be no change for the better so long as the merits of a drama are judged by “the standard of material prosperity.”  Taking these assertions in turn, we may note, first, that Tennyson ardently longed to write a play which should please the playgoers of his own time; second, that he desired to be judged by these very standards of material prosperity,—­just as Mr. Jones does.  Mr. Jones has more than once succeeded in pleasing the playgoers of his own time, and Tennyson failed to achieve the particular kind of success he was aiming at.  His failure may have been due to his lack of the native dramatic faculty; it may have been due to his following of outworn models no longer adjusted to the conditions of the modern theater; but whatever the reason, there is no doubt as to the fact itself.  He did not attain the goal he was striving for any more than Browning was able to do so; and it is not for their eulogists now to say that their goal was unworthy.  The test of “material prosperity” was the very test by which the poets wisht to be tried, and by this test they both failed—­and Mr. Henry Arthur Jones more than once has succeeded.  Tennyson and Mr. Jones were aiming at the same target—­popular success in the theater.  Even if Mr. Jones has not always made a bull’s-eye, he has often put his bullet on the target—­the very target which Tennyson mist completely, even if his ball happened to make a hit on another.

Tennyson desired to meet the conditions which all the great dramatists have ever been willing to meet.  He did not follow their example and study carefully the circumstances of theatrical representation as they had done, nor did he make himself master of the secrets of the dramaturgic art.  And this is a chief reason why he was unable to produce any impression upon the drama of his day; while the dramatic poets of the past, the masters whom he respected—­Sophocles and Shakspere and Moliere—­each of them, accepting the formula of the theater as this had been elaborated by his immediate predecessors, enlarged this formula, modified it, made it over to suit his own ampler outlook on life, and thus stamped his own individuality upon the drama of succeeding generations.

Shakspere and Moliere are accepted by us now as the greatest of dramatic poets; but to their own contemporaries they were known rather as ingenious playwrights up to every trick of the trade, finding their profit in every new device of their fellow-craftsmen, and emerging triumphant from a judgment by “the standard of material prosperity.”  And by this same standard, unworthy as it may seem to some, Lope de Vega and Calderon were judged in their own day.  Corneille and Racine also, Beaumarchais and Sheridan, Hugo and Augier and Rostand.  The