gave me time to scramble up the bank to the level ground above, before he began his down-stream run. I had a good start with him, but he got at once into some most alarming waves, and we covered one hundred yards in no time. Then he pulled up right under me close to the bank and showed himself to be something like 15 lb. The gaffer scrambled down the bank after him, but the fish saw his danger, and, sailing out again into the stream, gave a most extraordinary exhibition of strength. He cut through the waves, which were running at a terrific pace, and ploughed his way up against them along the further bank, foot by foot, for fifty yards.

The line made that peculiar hissing sound as it cut through the waves up-stream, and I put all the strain I dared upon it. At last his strength failed him and he stopped. I got his head round, and in a moment he was swept towards me with the stream. I reeled up as fast as I could, and he came level with me. I started running again, and never stopped till I and the fish reached a pool 150 yards below. Here he lay beaten and on his side, and I began to haul him slowly in towards the bank. Just before he reached the gaff, I suppose because I was too anxious and hurried, the hold gave and the hook came back to me with two scales upon it. I think he must have been hooked in the back. It seemed to me that this was so, as he passed below me, and it is not likely that any fish hooked in the mouth could have fought his way so far against such a stream. It was a very bitter moment, but I had enjoyed the best fight I have ever had with a sea trout, and the memory of it is pleasant, although it ended in the wrong way. I hooked and killed a bigger fish than this. It took a Wickham's Fancy near the top of a quiet pool, and, though not so violent in its movements, went down through several pools and the rapids between them-some 300 yards in all-before being landed. It was a hen fish of 17 lb. and quite fresh-run. I succeeded in rising two salmon to a dry fly, but through my fault, or theirs, they did not touch it.

My actual bag for the month, not counting fish under 3 lb., was 77 sea trout, and 1 grilse; of these, 69 sea trout were caught on a dry fly. The reader should not, however, infer from this that the wet fly was of little or no use. The dry fly was so fascinating that I do not

think I gave the wet a fair chance. There were undoubtedly times when the wet fly, even in the daytime, was more killing than the dry; and a change from the one method to the other gave a delightful variation to the fishing and a much-needed rest to some of the muscles of the wrist and arm. To fish any river for ten hours a day for a month without a break is a hard test of the sport. That river stood the test. I never took, or wished to take, a day off, except Sunday mornings. Fishing began at 6 p.m. on Sundays, and we went by the first watch we could find to reach that hour.

The fishing I have described is that of a river where the fish attain weights which I find many anglers disbelieve in, so far as sea trout are concerned. Luckily, however, there are plenty of rivers in our islands of a similar character where these fish take a wet fly; and I see no reason why they should not take the dry fly as well as or better than the wet. The weight of the fish is not the only attraction in this form of angling. The fascination of it lies, too, in the delicacy of the fishing, and the intense excitement of seeing the beautiful rise of a sea trout of whatever size to a dry fly. The smaller fish of lb. to 2 lb. took it savagely on some days; and a fight with a 2 lb. sea trout on a small rod in rapid water is not a thing to be despised. So long as one can catch the biggest fish in the river, it does not seem to me to matter very much what size the biggest fish are.

A. BUXTON.

Art. 5.-DRAMATIC CONSTRUCTION AND THE NEED FOR A NEW TECHNIQUE.

1. Shakespearean Tragedy. By Andrew Bradley. London: Macmillan, 1904.

2. Play-making; a manual of Craftmanship. By William Archer. London: Chapman and Hall, 1912.

3. A Study of the Drama. By Brander Matthews. London: Longmans, 1910.

4. Plays. By G. Bernard Shaw.

1903-11.

London: Constable,

London:

5. Plays. By John Galsworthy. Two vols. Duckworth, 1909, 1912.

6. Two Plays by Tchekhof.

Translated by George

Calderon. London: Grant Richards, 1912.

7. Dramatic Works. By St John Hankin. Three vols. London: Martin Secker, 1912.

It is as well to begin with a general principle. Dramatic construction is a wide and general term, which includes various processes by means of which playwrights have been enabled to seize and retain the attention of their audiences; or, let us rather say, have been able to create those works of art which are inspired by high ideals. Our subject is, in other words, the grammar of the dramatic art. If it be true, as it is, that grammar follows language, that the literature is first created and that it is then dissected by the skill of competent critics, it is equally true that the drama must precede that kind of analysis of its methods and procedure which is involved in an enquiry about dramatic construction. Even in the case of that consummate critic of drama, Aristotle, the whole enquiry in the Poetics' is based on such drama as Aristotle was aware of, namely, the dramatic efforts of the great tragedians, Eschylus, Sophocles and Euripides. Unless these had exhibited their plays to the quick-witted Athenian audiences, and had received their meed of encouragement, or suffered their censure, there would have been no Aristotle's Poetics'; and if there had been no Aristotle's 'Poetics,' there would assuredly not have been Horace's Ars Poetica,' still less the critical dogmas of Boileau and the whole apparatus of French classicism. This, therefore, is the first principle that must be laid

down. Art is what the great artists have created. Or, to state the principle together with a damaging deduction: Art is created by great people and subsequently is-dissected by small ones. Put in the second form, the maxim, of course, is not scientifically demonstrable; for there have been critics, as, for instance, Aristotle, as great as the artists whom they criticised. Nevertheless, it remains and must remain true that all the various forms which art assumes, and which the drama also assumes as one of the arts, are due to the inventive skill and to the experiments of great artists, who, for the most part, know nothing of rules, who carry out their experiments without any conscious regard for the laws of the art they are practising, who learn in the actual school of experience what is or is not effective on the stage; and—which is an important point-have the best possible right to try any and every experiment which, in their opinion, comes within the limits of their art.

The consequences of a principle like this can be drawn out to any length. I will confine myself to only one. The professors who reduce art to rules are, over and over again in the course of history, put to confusion by some fresh and original artist, who attacks the problem in creative fashion, and wins his success in his own way, Take the history of the celebrated 'three unities' of the stage the unity of time, the unity of place, and the unity of action. These were the inventions of the grammarians, so to speak, and Corneille felt that he had to square his dramatic procedure with them, because for years they had been accepted as unavoidable signs and guideposts. But Shakespeare did not care at all about unities. He was very careful in his own dramatic construction, at all events in the best and highest of his dramas; but he invented his technique as he went along. To him the professorial dogmas were so much waste paper. He may or may not have known what was written down as the necessary axioms of the dramatic art. But he had his own business to do in the theatrical world of England in the 16th and 17th centuries, and he did it in his own way.

If we apply the same moral to our existing drama, we shall see the importance of the principle with which I started. For years past the well-written, well-constructed Vol. 219.-No. 436.

G

play, 'la pièce bien faite,' has been an object of theatrical reverence, ever since Scribe wrote plays and Sarcey wrote criticisms. The necessity for dramatic construction, acknowledged by all practisers of the art, has sometimes been pursued even to the exclusion or supersession of real and constructive ideas. We have had an admirable framework, but often we have not had anything to put into it. Our most modern dramatists, on the other hand, do not seem to care very much about dramatic construction. They desire, above all, a drama of ideas; and in the second place they desire a psychological drama, a study of character, in order to illustrate or carry out ideas. But the form in which these things are to be put does not intimately or exclusively concern them. So that, if you contrast the extremes, you can have this kind of antithesis in the existing drama of the day: on the one hand, wellmade plays, often without ideas; and, on the other hand, ideas often without dramatic construction.

In the present study I have to ask in what sense dramatic construction is valuable and necessary, and whether there is a necessity for a new technique. But, throughout, our guiding principle must be that, as Art is made by the great artists, so Drama is made by the great dramatists, and that we, who come after the dramas have been made, as critical grammarians, so to speak, must perforce wait, suspend our judgment, be content to take a lower place, because dramatic wisdom, like other forms of sophia, is justified of all her children. Art, being organic and vital, never pauses, any more than life does. Having matured and organised one form, it fertilises another. It is always pushing on, feeling its way to new forms, in virtue of its original impulse of growth.

Definitions are dull things, and it does not much matter, at the present stage, how we define Drama. Prof. Brander Matthews defined it, I believe, as 'Life presented in action.' Perhaps that is hardly wide enough, if we use the word 'action' in the ordinary sense; for, if we are to cover some modern specimens, we must find room within our definition for some such conception as 'the representation and discussion of ideas,' and 'the interaction of characters by means of talk.' Our immediate object, however, is not to define Drama, but to