I have said that dramatic peripeties are not infrequent in real life; and their scene, as is natural, is often laid in the law courts.  It is unnecessary to recall the awful “reversal of fortune” that overtook one of the most brilliant of modern dramatists.  About the same period, another drama of the English courts ended in a startling and terrible peripety.  A young lady was staying as a guest with a half-pay officer and his wife.  A valuable pearl belonging to the hostess disappeared; and the hostess accused her guest of having stolen it.  The young lady, who had meanwhile married, brought an action for slander against her quondam friend.  For several days the case continued, and everything seemed to be going in the plaintiff’s favour.  Major Blank, the defendant’s husband, was ruthlessly cross-examined by Sir Charles Russell, afterwards Lord Chief Justice of England, with a view to showing that he was the real thief.  He made a very bad witness, and things looked black against him.  The end was nearing, and every one anticipated a verdict in the plaintiff’s favour, when there came a sudden change of scene.  The stolen pearl had been sold to a firm of jewellers, who had recorded the numbers of the Bank of England notes with which they paid for it.  One of these notes was produced in court, and lo! it was endorsed with the name of the plaintiff.[3] In a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, the whole edifice of mendacity and perjury fell to pieces.  The thief was arrested and imprisoned; but the peripety for her was less terrible than for her husband, who had married her in chivalrous faith in her innocence.

Would it have been—­or may it some day prove to be—­possible to transfer this “well-made” drama of real life bodily to the stage?  I am inclined to think not.  It looks to me very much like one of those “blind alley” themes of which mention has been made.  There is matter, indeed, for most painful drama in the relations of the husband and wife, both before and after the trial; but, from the psychological point of view, one can see nothing in the case but a distressing and inexplicable anomaly.[4] At the same time, the bare fact of the sudden and tremendous peripety is irresistibly dramatic; and Mr. Henry Arthur Jones has admitted that it suggested to him the great scene of the unmasking of Felicia Hindemarsh in Mrs. Dane’s Defence.

It is instructive to note the delicate adjustment which Mr. Jones found necessary in order to adapt the theme to dramatic uses.  In the first place, not wishing to plunge into the depths of tragedy, he left the heroine unmarried, though on the point of marriage.  In the second place, he made the blot on her past, not a theft followed by an attempt to shift the guilt on to other shoulders, but an error of conduct, due to youth and inexperience, serious in itself, but rendered disastrous by tragic consequences over which she, Felicia, had no control.  Thus Mr. Jones raised a real and fairly sufficient obstacle