. 'There comes a moment,' said
this caustic writer, 'in the affairs of men when the new is not only
eagerly accepted, but when it is confounded with the original. Wearied by
the old stereotyped form of drama, the critics had been astonished by a
novelty of subject, more apparent than real, and by certain surface
qualities in the execution; they had hailed the work as being original both
in form and in matter, whereas all that was good in the play had been
borrowed from France and Scandinavia. _Divorce_ was the inevitable product
of the time. It had been written by Mr. Price, but it might have been
written by a dozen other young men--granting intelligence, youth, leisure,
a university education, and three or four years of London life--any one of
a dozen clever young men who frequent West End drawing-rooms and dabble in
literature might have written it. All that could be said was that the play
was, or rather had been, _dans le mouvement_; and original work never is
_dans le mouvement_. _Divorce_ was nothing more than the product of certain
surroundings, and remembering Mr. Price's other plays, there seemed to be
no reason to believe that he would do better. Mr. Price had tried his hand
at criticism, and that was a sure sign that the creative faculty had begun
to wither. His critical essays were not rich nor abundant in thought, they
were not the skirmishing of a man fighting for his ideas, they were not
preliminary to a great battle; they were at once vague and pedantic,
somewhat futile, _les