uicidal outcasts,
whose moral backs are broken, and who are soaked with sincere
self-contempt, I can imagine that this might be quite the right way.
I should not deliver this message to authors or members of Parliament,
because they would so heartily agree with it.

Still, it is not altogether here that I differ from the moral of Mr.
Jerome's play. I differ vitally from his story because it is not a
detective story. There is in it none of this great Christian idea of
tearing their evil out of men; it lacks the realism of the saints.
Redemption should bring truth as well as peace; and truth is a fine
thing, though the materialists did go mad about it. Things must be
faced, even in order to be forgiven; the great objection to "letting
sleeping dogs lie" is that they lie in more senses than one. But in Mr.
Jerome's Passing of the Third Floor Back the redeemer is not a divine
detective, pitiless in his resolve to know and pardon. Rather he is a
sort of divine dupe, who does not pardon at all, because he does not
see anything that is going on. It may, or may not, be true to say, "Tout
comprendre est tout pardonner." But it is much more evidently true to
say, "Rien comprendre est rien Pardonner," and the "Third Floor Back"
does not seem to comprehend anything. He might, after all, be a quite
selfish sentimentalist, who found it comforting to think well of his
neighbours. There is nothing very heroic in loving after you have been
deceived. The heroic business is to love after you have been undeceived.

When I saw this play it was natural to compare it with another play
which I had not seen, but which I have read in its printed version.
I mean Mr. Rann Kennedy's Servant in the House, the success of which
sprawls over so many of the American newspapers. This also is concerned
with a dim, yet evidently divine, figure changing the destinies of a
whole group of persons. It is a better play structurally than the other;
in fact, it is a very fine play indeed; but there is nothing
aesthetic or fastidious about it. It is as much or more than the other
sensational, democratic, and (I use the word in a sound and good sense)
Salvationist.

But the difference lies precisely in this—that the Christ of Mr.
Kennedy's play insists on really knowing all the souls that he loves;
he declines to conquer by a kind of supernatural stupidity. He pardons
evil, but he will not ignore it. In other words, he is a Christian, and
not a Christian S