two of these doors with peculiar locks, so that, when once shut, they cannot be opened from inside except with a key!  What interest can we take in a situation turning on such contrivances?  Sane technic laughs at locksmiths.  And after all this preparation, the situation proves to be a familiar trick of theatrical thimble-rigging:  you lift the thimble, and instead of Pea A, behold Pea B!—­instead of Lady Saumarez it is Mrs. Trevelyan who is concealed in Isidore de Lorano’s bedroom.  Sir William Saumarez must be an exceedingly simple-minded person to accept the substitution, and exceedingly unfamiliar with the French drama of the ’seventies and ’eighties.  If he had his wits about him he would say:  “I know this dodge:  it comes from Sardou.  Lady Saumarez has just slipped out by that door, up R., and if I look about I shall certainly find her fan, or her glove, or her handkerchief somewhere on the premises.”  The author may object that such criticism would end in paralysing the playwright, and that, if men always profited by the lessons of the stage, the world would long ago have become so wise that there would be no more room in it for drama, which lives on human folly.  “You will tell me next,” he may say, “that I must not make groundless jealousy the theme of a play, because every one who has seen Othello would at once detect the machinations of an Iago!” The retort is logically specious, but it mistakes the point.  It would certainly be rash to put any limit to human gullibility, or to deny that Sir William Saumarez, in the given situation, might conceivably be hoodwinked.  The question is not one of psychology but of theatrical expediency:  and the point is that when a situation is at once highly improbable in real life and exceedingly familiar on the stage, we cannot help mentally caricaturing it as it proceeds, and are thus prevented from lending it the provisional credence on which interest and emotion depend.

An instructive contrast to The Degenerates may be found in a nearly contemporary play, Mrs. Dane’s Defence, by Mr. Henry Arthur Jones.  The first three acts of this play may be cited as an excellent example of dexterous preparation and development.  Our interest in the sequence of events is aroused, sustained, and worked up to a high tension with consummate skill.  There is no feverish overcrowding of incident, as is so often the case in the great French story-plays—­Adrienne Lecouvreur, for example, or Fedora.  The action moves onwards, unhasting, unresting, and the finger-posts are placed just where they are wanted.

The observance of a due proportion between preparation and result is a matter of great moment.  Even when the result achieved is in itself very remarkable, it may be dearly purchased by a too long and too elaborate process of preparation.  A famous play which is justly chargeable with this fault is The Gay Lord Quex.  The third act is certainly one of the most breathlessly absorbing scenes in modern drama;