Still, if the play had been an experiment, I might have further experimented with it, and rehandled its ending.  But it was not in its main lines an experiment.  It was a thing seen and felt; and so it must remain, in its printed form, at least—­“a poor thing,” it may be, “but mine own!”

After the performance, came the managers, wanting to see the play, and asking why I had not shown it to them before.  Well, it never occurred to me that any of them would seriously have considered the production of a piece so far off the ordinary lines.  They had not, like the enterprising Director of the Independent Theatre, undertaken the dreadful trade of educating the public.  As a matter of fact, they fought shy of a piece in which “the new hysteria” was studied, and which ended badly, or at least sadly.

A Comedy of Sighs, produced at the Avenue last spring, was really an experiment on the taste of the British public.  I wished to ascertain whether a play depending for its interest rather upon character and dialogue than upon plot and sensational situations, would be at first tolerated and afterwards enjoyed by an average audience.  Perhaps the experiment was too audaciously conceived, and too carelessly conducted, by both author and management.  It was unfortunately vitiated by the presence of a prevalent bacillus, the British bugbear, in the test-tubes.

The new play was received with inarticulate cries of horror by the critics.  The Telegraph and the World, which had presided in auspicious opposition over the birth of the black cat, now hung terrific in unnatural conjunction in the horoscope of A Comedy of Sighs.  Here was Ibsenism again—­nay, worse than Ibsenism, Dodoism, Sarah-Grandism, Keynotism, rampant on the English stage!  For had I not most impudently exhibited The Modern Woman upon it?  And although there was no tragedy this time, but beautiful reconciliation, and return to her Duty at the fall of the curtain, was she not there, the Abomination of Desolation?

Now we know that the Modern Woman ought not to exist anywhere, therefore she does not exist, therefore she must be stamped out.  Mrs. Grundy and others have already begun the good work, and have been diligently stamping her out ever since; with such success that we may hope she will disappear, with infidelity, Ibsenism, the struggle for existence, and other such objectionable things.  Meanwhile she has made her debut, and may cry:  J’y suis, j’y reste!

The Comedy of Sighs was slain, waving its tiny flag in the van of a forlorn hope; and over its dead body “Arms and the Man,” its machine-guns volleying pellets of satire, marched to victory.

I do not solace myself with that belief, so comforting to the unsuccessful, that a play fails merely because of its goodness, or succeeds merely because it is bad; yet it is evident, I think, that other things besides its merits or demerits as a piece of dramatic writing may turn the scale for or against it. A Comedy of Sighs, with its somewhat “impressionist” sketches of character, and aberrations from the ordinary type of a “well-made play,” proved to be “too lightly tempered for so loud a wind” as blows upon British bugbears—­“Modern Women,” and the like.