on the one side, and Madame Dupont on the other, develop amiable impulses, and protest, at a given moment, against the infamies committed and countenanced by their respective spouses.  And in the second and third acts, the edifice of deception symmetrically built up in the first act is no less symmetrically demolished.  The parents expose and denounce each other’s villainies; Julie and Antonin, in a great scene of conjugal recrimination, lay bare the hypocrisies of allurement that have brought them together.  Julie then determines to escape from the loathsome prison-house of her marriage; and this brings us to the second part of the theorem.  The title shows that Julie has two sisters; but hitherto they have remained in the background.  Why do they exist at all?  Why has Providence blessed M. Dupont with “three fair daughters and no more”?  Because Providence foresaw exactly the number M. Brieux would require for his demonstration.  Are there not three courses open to a penniless woman in our social system—­marriage, wage-earning industry, and wage-earning profligacy?  Well, M. Dupont must have one daughter to represent each of these contingencies.  Julie has illustrated the miseries of marriage; Caroline and Angele shall illustrate respectively the still greater miseries of unmarried virtue and unmarried vice.  When Julie declares her intention of breaking away from the house of bondage, her sisters rise up symmetrically, one on either hand, and implore her rather to bear the ills she has than to fly to others that she knows not of.  “Symmetry of symmetries, all is symmetry” in the poetics of M. Brieux.  But life does not fall into such obvious patterns.  The obligatory scene which is imposed upon us, not by the logic of life, but by the logic of demonstration, is not a scene a faire, but a scene a fuir.

Mr. Bernard Shaw, in some sense the Brieux of the English theatre, is not a man to be dominated by logic, or by anything else under the sun.  He has, however, given us one or two excellent examples of the obligatory scene in the true and really artistic sense of the term.  The scene of Candida’s choice between Eugene and Morell crowns the edifice of Candida as nothing else could.  Given the characters and their respective attitudes towards life, this sententious thrashing-out of the situation was inevitable.  So, too, in Mrs. Warren’s Profession, the great scene of the second act between Vivie and her mother is a superb example of a scene imposed by the logic of the theme.  On the other hand, in Mr. Henry Arthur Jones’s finely conceived, though unequal, play, Michael and his Lost Angel, we miss what was surely an obligatory scene.  The play is in fact a contest between the paganism of Audrie Lesden and the ascetic, sacerdotal idealism of Michael Feversham.  In the second act, paganism snatches a momentary victory; and we confidently expect, in the third act, a set and strenuous effort on Audrie’s part to break down in theory the ascetic ideal which