posed by his brother, has taken refuge, with his followers, in a neighboring forest, where he lives, apparently highly contented, in the open air. His daughter and heir, left behind at the usurper's court, excites the suspicion of her uncle, the usurper, and is consequently banished. She proceeds to dress herself in men's clothes and to run away with the daughter and heir of the usurper, the two accompanied by the court jester. Meanwhile, at a wrestling-match, she has fallen in love with an unknown youth, whose elder brother has driven him out of the house; and the youth has fallen in love with her. Both youth and lady stray into the same forest where the exiled duke is enjoying himself. There, in due time, they meet each other; but the youth, deceived by the disguise of the lady, does not recognize her. The fun of the ensuing flirtation, then, is mostly hers. After various adventures the lady reveals herself to the youth, who has meanwhile become reconciled with his wicked brother; this revelation takes place in the presence of the exiled duke, who has just been restored to his sovereignty by an abrupt change of heart on the part of the usurper; and everybody is happy.

Thus stated, briefly but not unfairly, the plot of "As You Like It," like the older plots from which it has grown, can hardly seem to any sane modern mind other than childish and absurd. Though such a plot might amuse us in the nursery, it is hard to see how we can accept it in mature years as tolerable. Yet not only do we so accept it, but as a matter of fact it has been, as we have seen, for three hundred years, the groundwork of perhaps the most constantly delightful and popular comedy in the English language. By what art did Shakspere make it so? ✓ Surely the merit of "As You Like It" does not lie in its innocently absurd story.

VI.

So to the characters of "As You Like It." The characters in any play, we remember, are the persons who do the acts or who experience the incidents which form the plot. In any play, or any narrative of whatever form, there must be characters; and the distinction between a lastingly good. narrative and one of little merit is apt to show itself nowhere more distinctly than in the way in which characters are conceived and presented. In such cheap, trivial tales as flood modern magazines, or such plays as generally flit across the stage to be forgotten in a year or two, and indeed in such clumsy, rambling old stories as the very "Rosalynde" of Lodge, from which "As You Like It" is taken, characters are little more than names. In thoroughly good work the characters prove, on study, to be almost as individual as living people.

This

Quite to appreciate this fact, perhaps the best way is to read by themselves in any good story or play the passages and the speeches which refer to a given character. process, of course, is exactly what an actor or a reader would do who was called on to render the part in public. At first, these speeches and passages seem independent things, much as do the speeches and the acts of living people whom we observe in actual life. The acts and utterances of any individual, however, whether in life or in literature, inevitably have one fact in common, which separates them from all others on earth: they all proceed from the same person, they all express in outward form the inner workings of the same mind.

In some cases, both in life and in literature, a character thus considered will seem simple; that is, when we understand what the person in question has done and said, we instinctively understand at the same time, once for all, just what sort of person we are dealing with. In other cases, a

character thus considered will seem complicated, contradictory, obscure. If such a character exist in life, we are face to face with a distinct problem: what, after all, does the person in question amount to, for good or bad? Whatever our answer, the person, contradictory as he may seem, actually exists. If the puzzling character appear in literature, however, our problem in considering it is not quite so simple: the trouble may be either that the character in question is of the baffling kind, which would puzzle us in real life, or, on the other hand, that the writer in whose work the character appears did not really imagine any definite individuality behind the speeches and the acts in question. In literature of small power the latter is generally the case; the power of lasting and great literature is nowhere more evident than in the distinctness with which characters, in themselves complex, reveal themselves to thoughtful study.

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In As You Like It," as we have seen, the plot is so trivial and impossible as fairly to be called absurd. Offhand, then, we might fairly expect the characters, like those of Lodge's "Rosalynde," to be mere puppets, named and dressed each in its own way, but otherwise as like as a regiment of tin soldiers. Turning to the play, however, and studying each character by itself, we find a far different state of things.

Some of the characters, to be sure,-particularly the usurping duke and the wicked elder brother,—are pretty vague. What they do and say in the beginning seems so inconsistent with what they do and say in the end that most of us take comfortable refuge from our problem in the conclusion that they are not real characters at all, but only names of people whose acts are required to make clear the absurd plot. With most of the characters, however, and perhaps most notably with the characters named Rosalind and Jaques, the case proves thoroughly different.

Instead of finding them, as in view of the plot we might have expected, mere names and puppets, we find them, in spite of much complexity, as definitely and consistently individual as people in real life.

This does not mean, of course, that we can at once define them in set terms. The very difficulty, indeed, which careful critics find in expounding the finer traits of characters which they begin to apprehend is to some extent a proof of the real vitality of these literary creations. As in life it is one thing to know a person and quite another to explain that friend's traits to a stranger, or even to define them minutely for ourselves, so in literature sympathetic readers may grow to know thoroughly well character after character which they will be much troubled to set forth. Herein lies a difficulty rather baffling to teachers of literature: on the one hand they are apt to feel as if a pupil who cannot explain a character cannot understand it; on the other they are tempted to assume that a glib repetition of some old analysis of character indicates that a pupil really understands it. After all, however, every good teacher desires first of all that the pupil shall understand; and the way for pupils and teachers alike to make sure of this point is to study characters with some little care, and to discuss them, just as they might study and discuss friends.

In the case of "As You Like It," perhaps the best consideration of character to begin with is a double one. Throughout the play the heroine Rosalind is a charming young girl; throughout she is generally accompanied by another charming young girl, her cousin Celia. Like two charming young girls in real life, they have in common their charm and their youth and doubtless numerous other traits it were needless to touch on here. Like two charming young girls in real life, however, they are different people; their common traits, when we once grow to know

the possessors well, serve only to emphasize the subtle little differences which make each herself. Whoever will consider them together for a while, cannot help feeling this distinction, a distinction of the kind which in real life makes you fall in love with one pretty girl, and not with another to all outward appearance equally attractive. When you can thus feel the distinction between Rosalind and Celia, whether you can clearly explain it or not, you have begun to understand what character in literature really is.

Thus considered, as we have seen, the characters of "As You Like It" are generally so strongly individual and so consistently human that as we grow to know them better and better we instinctively begin to think of them as if they were alive. All we really know of them, to be sure, comes from the words assigned to them on the printed page; yet, as we consider them, we find ourselves instinctively thinking of them as people with real independent life of their own, existing as truly as the lives of our friends exist. This shows itself to us, indeed, only through the accidental acts and words which happen to come to our notice; yet, as with our friends, these acts and words prove sufficient to indicate all the unspoken, unwritten vitality of individual thought and feeling which makes human nature. In a word, the characters of "As You Like It" are almost all plausibly human.

Here, then, we find in "As You Like It" a merit of the highest order. In no literature does one often find more excellent presentation of character. A little while ago, however, we saw that the plot presented by this group of plausibly human characters is innocently absurd. Absurdity and plausibility seem inconsistent traits, yet no sympathetic reader of "As You Like It" is aware in his total impression of any marked inconsistency. Our next question, then, is how these seemingly inconsistent traits are so cunningly blended.