One of the finest plays of our time—­Sir Arthur Pinero’s Iris—­lacks, in my judgment, an obligatory scene.  The character of Iris is admirably true, so far as it goes; but it is incomplete.  The author seems to have evaded the crucial point of his play—­the scene of her installation in Maldonado’s flat.  To perfect his psychological study, he was bound to bridge the chasm between the Iris of the third act and the Iris of the fourth.  He builds two ends of the bridge, in the incident of the cheque-book at the close of the one act, and in the state of hebetude in which we find her at the opening of the other; but there remains a great gap at which the imagination boggles.  The author has tried to throw a retrospective footway across it in Iris’s confession to Trenwith in the fifth act; but I do not find that it quite meets the case.  It would no doubt have been very difficult to keep the action within reasonable limits had a new act taken the place of the existing fourth; but Sir Arthur Pinero would probably have produced a completer work of art had he faced this difficulty, and contrived to compress into a single last act something like the matter of the existing fourth and fifth.  It may be that he deliberately preferred that Iris should give in narrative the history of her decline; but I do not consider this a case in support of that slight plea for impassioned narrative which I ventured to put forth a few pages back.  Her confession to Trenwith would have been far more dramatic and moving had it been about one-fourth part as long and one-fourth part as articulate.

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Of the scene imposed by history or legend it is unnecessary to say very much.  We saw in Chapter IX that the theatre is not the place for expounding the results of original research, which cast a new light on historic character.  It is not the place for whitewashing Richard III, or representing him as a man of erect and graceful figure.  It is not the place for proving that Guy Fawkes was an earnest Presbyterian, that Nell Gwynn was a lady of the strictest morals, or that George Washington was incapable of telling the truth.  The playwright who deals with Henry VIII is bound to present him, in the schoolboy’s phrase, as “a great widower.”  William the Silent must not be a chatterbox, Torquemada a humanitarian, Ivan the Terrible a conscientious opponent of capital punishment.  And legend has its fixed points no less than history.  In the theatre, indeed, there is little distinction between them:  history is legend, and legend history.  A dramatist may, if he pleases (though it is a difficult task), break wholly unfamiliar ground in the past; but where a historic legend exists he must respect it at his peril.