hose face has not blanched as he took in its
import, almost without reading the words? Why, I would fain know, should
our stage-picture of life be falsified by the banishment of the postman?
Even the revelation brought about by the discovery of a forgotten letter
or bundle of letters is not an infrequent incident of daily life. Why
should it be tabu on the stage? Because the French dramatist, forty
years ago, would sometimes construct a Chinese-puzzle play around some
stolen letter or hidden document, are we to suffer no "scrap of paper"
to play any part whatever in English drama? Even the Hebrew sense of
justice would recoil from such a conclusion. It would be a case of "The
fathers have eaten sour grapes, and other people's children must pay the
penalty." Against such whimsies of reactionary purism, the playwright's
sole and sufficient safeguard is a moderate exercise of common sense.

* * * * *

[Footnote 1: So, too, with the style of Congreve. It is much, and
justly, admired; but who does not feel more than a touch of mannerism in
such a passage as this?--

MILLAMANT: "... Let us never visit together, nor go to a play
together; but let us be very strange and well-bred: let us be as
strange as if we had been married a great while; and as well-bred as
if we were not married at all."

MIRABELL: "Have you any more conditions to offer? Hitherto your
demands are pretty reasonable."

MILLAMANT: "Trifles!--as liberty to pay and receive visits to and
from whom I please; to write and receive letters, without
interrogatories or wry faces on your part; to wear what I please;
and choose conversation with regard only to my own taste; to have no
obligation upon me to converse with wits that I don't like because
they are your acquaintances; or to be intimate with fools because
they may be your relatives.... These articles subscribed, if I
continue to endure you a little longer, I may by degrees dwindle
into a wife."

This is very pretty prose, granted; but it is the prose of literature,
not of life.]

[Footnote 2: From the fact that I do not make an exception in favour of
_The Blot in the Scutcheon_ or _Stratford_, I must leave the reader to
draw what inference he pleases. On the other hand, I believe that a
reconstruction of Tennyson's _Queen Mary_, with a few connecting links
written in, might take a permanent place in the theatre.]

[Footnote 3: Mr. Israel Za