Now look for a moment at the play by the amateur and the woman.  It is not a satisfactory play as a whole, it is not very interesting in all its developments, some of the best opportunities are shirked, some of the characters (all the characters who are men) are poor.  But, in the first place, it is well written.  Those people speak a language which is nearer to the language of real life than that used by Mr. Pinero, and when they make jokes there is generally some humour in the joke and some intelligence in the humour.  They have ideas and they have feelings.  The ideas and the feelings are not always combined with faultless logic into a perfectly clear and coherent presentment of character, it is true.  But from time to time we get some of the illusion of life.  From time to time something is said or done which we know to be profoundly true.  A woman has put into words some delicate instinct of a woman’s soul.  Here and there is a cry of the flesh, here and there a cry of the mind, which is genuine, which is a part of life.  Miss Syrett has much to learn if she is to become a successful dramatist, and she has not as yet shown that she knows men as well as women; but at least she has begun at the right end.  She has begun with human nature and not with the artifices of the stage, she has thought of her characters as people before thinking of them as persons of the drama, she has something to say through them, they are not mere lines in a pattern.  I am not at all sure that she has the makings of a dramatist, or that if she writes another play it will be better than this one.  You do not necessarily get to your destination by taking the right turning at the beginning of the journey.  The one certain thing is that if you take the wrong turning at the beginning, and follow it persistently, you will not get to your destination at all.  The playwright who writes merely for the stage, who squeezes the breath out of life before he has suited it to his purpose, is at the best only playing a clever game with us.  He may amuse us, but he is only playing ping-pong with the emotions.  And that is why we should welcome, I think, any honest attempt to deal with life as it is, even if life as it is does not always come into the picture.

TOLSTOI AND OTHERS

There is little material for the stage in the novels of Tolstoi.  Those novels are full, it is true, of drama; but they cannot be condensed into dramas.  The method of Tolstoi is slow, deliberate, significantly unemphatic; he works by adding detail to detail, as a certain kind of painter adds touch to touch.  The result is, in a sense, monotonous, and it is meant to be monotonous.  Tolstoi endeavours to give us something more nearly resembling daily life than any one has yet given us; and in daily life the moment of spiritual crisis is rarely the moment in which external action takes part.  In the drama we can only properly realise the soul’s action through