130 UNIVERSITY OF COLORADO STUDIES 



his fellow-men. If the final solution is to be in heaven rather than 

 on earth, if he is to find rest in the unfathomable grace of God, it 

 must be after he has wrought some little alleviation in the groping 

 misery of mankind. And this must be shown to us in the play, 

 not merely left for our credence or divination. 



IV 



Over the historic question of the relative importance of plot and 

 character we need delay only long enough to note that the great 

 dramatist will make the two interpenetrate and fuse until they 

 become one, and the question disappears. In this welding, I think, 

 we must concede that Mr. Phillips has not betrayed a weak hand. 

 As a matter of fact, it is a shade less difl&cult to bring about a satis- 

 fying union of plot and character if the author chooses to represent 

 the figure we call Fate ever hanging over the stage than if he chooses 

 to insist on the persistent but perishing distinction between trage- 

 dies of character and tragedies of Fate and endeavors to dispense 

 with the appearance of this ultimate force. 



Mr. Philhps has been true enough to his Greek training to elect 

 in all frankness the former course and has thereby incurred the charge 

 of putting only "wire-controlled" puppets upon the stage. To this 

 charge the obvious answer is that they are no more "wire-controlled" 

 than we are, who prate so soundingly about being masters of our 

 fate. In criticism, as in everyday life, one must adopt a common- 

 sense compromise between an academic freedom of the will and an 

 ironbound determinism. If Francesca, who had just spread out 

 her hands to the warm sun, could have wedded Paolo, they must 

 still have known sorrow, for that is the lot of mortals; but their 

 lives would have been different, to say the least, although they would 

 have been just as truly subject to environment. And in his treatment 

 of Herod Mr. Philhps seems deliberately to suggest his appreciation 

 of the truth that drama must not be a mere study of character, but 

 of the action of time and hap and place upon character fitted for 

 other deeds; for in the purest of Greek irony our author has placed 

 the following passage on the very verge of the catastrophe: 



