of revealing her mother’s trespass.  This is not, in itself, a very strong situation, for we feel the barrier between the lovers to be unreal.  Colonel Ford is a man of sense.  The secret of Agatha’s parentage can make no real difference to him.  Nothing material—­no point of law or of honour—­depends on it.  He will learn the truth, and all will come right between them.  The only point on which our interest can centre is the question how he is to learn the truth; and here the authors go very far astray.  There are two, and only two, really dramatic ways in which Colonel Ford can be enlightened.  Lady Fancourt must realize that Agatha is wrecking her life to keep her mother’s secret, and must either herself reveal it to Colonel Ford, or must encourage and enjoin Agatha to do so.  Now, the authors choose neither of these ways:  the secret slips out, through a chance misunderstanding in a conversation between Sir Richard Fancourt and the Colonel.  This is a typical instance of an error of construction; and why?—­because it leaves to chance what should be an act of will.  Drama means a thing done, not merely a thing that happens; and the playwright who lets accident effect what might naturally and probably be a result of volition, or, in other words, of character, sins against the fundamental law of his craft.  In the case before us, Lady Fancourt and Agatha—­the two characters on whom our interest is centred—­are deprived of all share in one of the crucial moments of the action.  Whether the actual disclosure was made by the mother or by the daughter, there ought to have been a great scene between the two, in which the mother should have insisted that, by one or other, the truth must be told.  It would have been a painful, a delicate, a difficult scene, but it was the obligatory scene of the play; and had we been allowed clearly to foresee it at the end of the second act, our interest would have been decisively carried forward.  The scene, too, might have given the play a moral relevance which in fact it lacks.  The readjustment of Agatha’s scheme of things, so as to make room for her mother’s history, might have been made explicit and partly intellectual, instead of implicit, inarticulate and wholly emotional.

This case, then, clearly falls under our second heading.  We cannot say that it is the logic of the theme which demands the scene, for no thesis or abstract idea is enunciated.  Nor can we say that the course of events is unnatural or improbable; our complaint is that, without being at all less natural, they might have been highly dramatic, and that in fact they are not so.