In the second act of The Devil’s Disciple, by Mr. Bernard Shaw, we have an instance of wholly inartistic secrecy, which would certainly be condemned in the work of any author who was not accepted in advance as a law unto himself.  Richard Dudgeon has been arrested by the British soldiers, who mistake him for the Reverend Anthony Anderson.  When Anderson comes home, it takes a very long time for his silly wife, Judith, to acquaint him with a situation that might have been explained in three words; and when, at last, he does understand it, he calls for a horse and his boots, and rushes off in mad haste, as though his one desire were to escape from the British and leave Dudgeon to his fate.  In reality his purpose is to bring up a body of Continental troops to the rescue of Dudgeon; and this also he might (and certainly would) have conveyed in three words.  But Mr. Shaw was so bent on letting Judith continue to conduct herself idiotically, that he made her sensible husband act no less idiotically, in order to throw dust in her eyes, and (incidentally) in the eyes of the audience.  In the work of any other man, we should call this not only an injudicious, but a purposeless and foolish, keeping of a secret.  Mr. Shaw may say that in order to develop the character of Judith as he had conceived it, he was forced to make her misunderstand her husband’s motives.  A development of character obtained by such artificial means cannot be of much worth; but even granting this plea, one cannot but point out that it would have been easy to keep Judith in the dark as to Anderson’s purpose, without keeping the audience also in the dark, and making him behave like a fool.  All that was required was to get Judith off the stage for a few moments, just before the true state of matters burst upon Anthony.  It would then have been perfectly natural and probable that, not foreseeing her misunderstanding, he should hurry off without waiting to explain matters to her.  But that he should deliberately leave her in her delusion, and even use phrases carefully calculated to deceive both her and the audience,[1] would be, in a writer who professed to place reason above caprice, a rather gross fault of art.

Mr. Henry Arthur Jones’s light comedy, Whitewashing Julia, proves that it is possible, without incurring disaster, to keep a secret throughout a play, and never reveal it at all.  More accurately, what Mr. Jones does is to pretend that there is some explanation of Mrs. Julia Wren’s relations with the Duke of Savona, other than the simple explanation that she was his mistress, and to keep us waiting for this “whitewashing” disclosure, when in fact he has nothing of the sort up his sleeve, and the plain truth is precisely what the gossips of Shanctonbury surmise.  Julia does not even explain or justify her conduct from her own point of view.  She gives out that “an explanation will be forthcoming at the right moment”; but the right moment never arrives.  All we are told is that she, Julia,