but by what long, and serpentine, and gritty paths do we not approach it!  The elaborate series of trifling incidents by means of which Sophy Fullgarney is first brought from New Bond Street to Fauncey Court, and then substituted for the Duchess’s maid, is at no point actually improbable; and yet we feel that a vast effort has been made to attain an end which, owing to the very length of the sequence of chances, at last assumes an air of improbability.  There is little doubt that the substructure of the great scene might have been very much simpler.  I imagine that Sir Arthur Pinero was betrayed into complexity and over-elaboration by his desire to use, as a background for his action, a study of that “curious phase of modern life,” the manicurist’s parlour.  To those who find this study interesting, the disproportion between preliminaries and result may be less apparent.  It certainly did not interfere with the success of the play in its novelty; but it may very probably curtail its lease of life.  What should we know of The School for Scandal to-day, if it consisted of nothing but the Screen Scene and two laborious acts of preparation?

A too obvious preparation is very apt to defeat its end by begetting a perversely quizzical frame of mind in the audience.  The desired effect is discounted, like a conjuring trick in which the mechanism is too transparent.  Let me recall a trivial but instructive instance of this error.  The occasion was the first performance of Pillars of Society at the Gaiety Theatre, London—­the first Ibsen performance ever given in England.  At the end of the third act, Krap, Consul Bernick’s clerk, knocks at the door of his master’s office and says, “It is blowing up to a stiff gale.  Is the Indian Girl to sail in spite of it?” Whereupon Bernick, though he knows that the Indian Girl is hopelessly unseaworthy, replies, “The Indian Girl is to sail in spite of it.”  It had occurred to someone that the effect of this incident would be heightened if Krap, before knocking at the Consul’s door, were to consult the barometer, and show by his demeanour that it was falling rapidly.  A barometer had accordingly been hung, up stage, near the veranda entrance; and, as the scenic apparatus of a Gaiety matinee was in those days always of the scantiest, it was practically the one decoration of a room otherwise bare almost to indecency.  It had stared the audience full in the face through three long acts; and when, at the end of the third, Krap went up to it and tapped it, a sigh of relief ran through the house, as much as to say, “At last! so that was what it was for!”—­to the no small detriment of the situation.  Here the fault lay in the obtrusiveness of the preparation.  Had the barometer passed practically unnoticed among the other details of a well-furnished hall, it would at any rate have been innocent, and perhaps helpful.  As it was, it seemed to challenge the curiosity of the audience, saying, “I am evidently here with some intention; guess, now, what the intention can be!” The producer had failed in the art which conceals art.