mentioned for it is clear enough that the character of Shakespeare, his real personality must be a matter of conjecture, and if there is an historic character that the controversies of historians have left more open to individual opinion than that of the Scottish Queen we would be glad to know who it is.

The biographic play as presented to us in its latest aspect does not suggest a new turn of the drama, a new type; it really helps to show the superior value of the older form, the play that is fluid in its form, free as to its facts, and attempts to give only the essential quality of the man or woman who is its central figure. But we can also be grateful for Mr. Drinkwater's plays and for Dr. Johnson. They have a unique form and flavor, and a niche not out of sight of the temple of the great gods of tragedy.

THE CYNIC UTOPIAS

There, is a tradition, found perhaps in the Talmud, that one of the first things done by Adam, after the gates of the Garden of Eden closed behind him, was to sit down and write a Utopian romance, and that the land described was startlingly unlike the country he had just left. From that day to this young and old, saint and sinner, the most sophisticated and the most naïve, have framed their golden dreams in Utopian forms; though it has, I think, been left to a writer of today to make their manufacture at first a profession, and at last a trade. We all dream of a golden world, remote but glorious; we all strive, however fitfully and often unhopefully, to realize that dream; and it takes more self-control, more cynicism, if you will, than we can all muster all of the time, to prevent that dream from challenging the actual world in the established Utopian form. If we are thoughtful enough to put our ideal in verse form we are comparatively safe for it has been very long indeed since the poet was taken seriously. It is also true that the convinced Utopian has always ventured a greater amount of material and supposedly practical detail than could easily be put into verse form. For this

reason many of our greatest dreamers, its Shelleys, its Brownings, and its Blakes will not come within our view.

The forms taken by Utopias can all be grouped rather easily under a few heads. One fairly common type emphasizes a contrast with the life we see around us. Driven by a natural, though false, logic it assumes that if the present is bad and unsatisfactory its opposite must be good and wholly blessed. Cabet's Voyage En Icarie appears to be, in part at least, the outcome of such an impulse. A more logical and scientific, as well as a more difficult type, is the one that portrays a state of society Utopian indeed, in that it is very different from any ever seen to date, but in essentials an apparently natural development of society as at present organized. This is the largest, the most persuasive, and sometimes the most interesting type of all. Anatol France, Howells, and Bellamy may be allowed to represent this group. A small and comparatively modern type is that which pictures the world as returning to a golden age which lies in the remote past, though never, so far as I remember, to that quite distant period when our ancestors were "arboreal in habits." Another small group is composed of mere exercises of the human fancy. The City of the Sun is an example.

Most of these peddlers of dreams have been blandly

ignored by a world that lumps dreams of all kinds together and connects them with the vagaries of dyspepsia. But the rather profuse flowering of this particular type of literature this last hundred years, since the French Revolution stimulated so many new growths of various kinds, has raised a spirit of skepticism which has taken various forms but has politely, or, in one instance at least, almost profanely, doubted whether the dreams of the Utopians were either practical or beautiful. There are some definite reasons for this fact; one of them is that certain conditions almost universally demanded by the Utopians persistently fail to appear. One of these conditions is an immense and universal serenity and quietude of mind and body, an almost complete cessation of worry and fret concerning one's means of sustenance, one's job, one's position in life. If we take time from the hurry and worry of our days to glance at the placid and unhurried, carefully ordered lives pictured in the Utopias we may be attracted by them, but we certainly do not feel that we have attained to them or are even approaching them. We may even doubt that we seriously want to pay the price, and life has taught us that each great attainment exacts its price, of such a condition.

Another reason for skepticism is to be found in the fact that some of the demands of the Utopians have

been in large measure realized, as, for example the length of the working day, and yet the results expected by the Utopians from such realization have not followed. In view of this fact, and similar facts, there is a tendency to follow the rules of the courts and say, "False in one; false in all."

The increasing power and authority of physical science with its tendency to demand proof and to subject all things to the cold light of analytic reason has tended to discredit the more fantastic of the Utopias.

This skeptical attitude has resulted in the writing of a small group of books which may be called counter or cynic Utopias. These books, unlike in many respects, all have a distinct tendency, which may be unintentional on the part of the authors, to cast an ironic light on some essential element of the Utopian creed. They seem at times to parody certain elements of the Utopias. But while this is true it is also true that they often touch ironically on phases of the life or philosophy today called orthodox. In each of them the method of entrance to the Utopian world is imitated. In every case the scene is laid in a different age, or a different land than this.

The stories considered appeared almost in pairs; in 1871 appeared Bulwer-Lytton's The Coming Race and the next year Samuel Butler's Erewhon. In 1887 W. H. Hudson published A Crystal Age and in 1888 Wal