MR. STEPHEN PHILLIPS AS A WRITER OF TRAGEDY 1 27 



this modest requirement. We are not through with Nero when he 

 apostrophizes burning Rome. In the play of the same name by 

 Mr. Robert Bridges these words are spoken by Seneca: 



If any were to make a tragedy 

 Of these events, how would it pass or please 

 If Nero lived on at the end unpunished, 

 Triumphing still o'er good ? 



And despite Thrasea's rejoinder that "the god that mends all comes 

 not in pat at his cue, as a machine," we feel that Seneca was right. 

 Pagans or Puritans, we will have Nemesis or the avenging God; we 

 do not ask that virtue be happy, or even that natural evil be chas- 

 tised; but withal those of us least poetical in our justice do demand 

 that abnormal vice shall not be flaringly triumphant at the end. 

 Moreover, in the case of Nero history has recorded his punishment; 

 and in fact the punishment of such a character in such an environ- 

 ment is inevitable. It would seem that a great tragedy on the pic- 

 turesque actor-emperor could be written as a sort of Greek play in 

 which all the overweening pride of the Ahenobarbi should be punished 

 in Nero by his fantastic madness and abject death; or that a success- 

 ful tragedy could be constructed on the lines of a modern drama, 

 half-way between Mr. Phillips' Nero and a French study of pathology, 

 terminating on the wild, avenging night that brings death to the 

 tyrant madman, with the truly tragic figure of Acte by his side. 



Of the plot of Faust we need speak only in so far as Mr. Phillips 

 and his collaborator have modified their original. Much of Goethe's 

 text has long been discarded on the ordinary stage, nor can we make 

 serious complaint about many of the omissions. The manifest 

 striving of our present adapters is toward simpHcity and unity. 



In the Prologue, on a range of mountains between heaven and 

 earth, Mephistopheles obtains permission to win the soul of Faust 

 if he can. Into the first act are condensed the appearance of the 

 Earth-Spirit, the conversation with Wagner, the phial scene, the in- 

 vocation of the Spirit of Evil, the compact with Mephistopheles, the 

 latter's conference with the earnest student and the visit to the 

 witches' cavern. In the first scene of Act II the foolery in Auerbach's 



