Mr. Bennett, to begin with, could not resist making his Napoleon of the Press a native of the “Five Towns,” and exhibiting him at large in provincial middle-class surroundings.  All this is sheer irrelevance; for the type of journalism in question is not characteristically an outcome of any phase of provincial life.  Mr. Bennett may allege that Sir Charles Worgan had to be born somewhere, and might as well be born in Bursley as anywhere else.  I reply that, for the purposes of the play, he need not have been born anywhere.  His birthplace and the surroundings of his boyhood have nothing to do with what may be called his journalistic psychology, which is, or ought to be, the theme of the play.  Then, again, Mr. Bennett shows him dabbling in theatrical management and falling in love—­irrelevances both.  As a manager, no doubt, he insists on doing “what the public wants” (it is nothing worse than a revival of The Merchant of Venice) and thus offers another illustration of the results of obeying that principle.  But all this is beside the real issue.  The true gravamen of the charge against a Napoleon of the Press is not that he gives the public what it wants, but that he can make the public want what he wants, think what he thinks, believe what he wants them to believe, and do what he wants them to do.  By dint of assertion, innuendo, and iteration in a hundred papers, he can create an apparent public opinion, or public emotion, which may be directed towards the most dangerous ends.  This point Mr. Bennett entirely missed.  What he gave us was in reality a comedy of middle-class life with a number of incidental allusions to “yellow” journalism and kindred topics.  Mr. Fagan, working in broader outlines, and, it must be owned, in cruder colours, never strayed from the logical line of development, and took us much nearer the heart of his subject.

A somewhat different, and very common, fault of logic was exemplified in Mr. Clyde Fitch’s last play, The City.  His theme, as announced in his title and indicated in his exposition, was the influence of New York upon a family which migrates thither from a provincial town.  But the action is not really shaped by the influence of “the city.”  It might have taken practically the same course if the family had remained at home.  The author had failed to establish a logical connection between his theme and the incidents supposed to illustrate it.[1]

Fantastic plays, which assume an order of things more or less exempt from the limitations of physical reality, ought, nevertheless, to be logically faithful to their own assumptions.  Some fantasies, indeed, which sinned against this principle, have had no small success.  In Pygmalion and Galatea, for example, there is a conspicuous lack of logic.  The following passage from a criticism of thirty years ago puts my point so clearly that I am tempted to copy it: