ney is first
brought from New Bond Street to Fauncey Court, and then substituted for
the Duchess's maid, is at no point actually improbable; and yet we feel
that a vast effort has been made to attain an end which, owing to the
very length of the sequence of chances, at last assumes an air of
improbability. There is little doubt that the substructure of the great
scene might have been very much simpler. I imagine that Sir Arthur
Pinero was betrayed into complexity and over-elaboration by his desire
to use, as a background for his action, a study of that "curious phase
of modern life," the manicurist's parlour. To those who find this study
interesting, the disproportion between preliminaries and result may be
less apparent. It certainly did not interfere with the success of the
play in its novelty; but it may very probably curtail its lease of life.
What should we know of _The School for Scandal_ to-day, if it consisted
of nothing but the Screen Scene and two laborious acts of preparation?

A too obvious preparation is very apt to defeat its end by begetting a
perversely quizzical frame of mind in the audience. The desired effect
is discounted, like a conjuring trick in which the mechanism is too
transparent. Let me recall a trivial but instructive instance of this
error. The occasion was the first performance of _Pillars of Society_ at
the Gaiety Theatre, London--the first Ibsen performance ever given in
England. At the end of the third act, Krap, Consul Bernick's clerk,
knocks at the door of his master's office and says, "It is blowing up to
a stiff gale. Is the _Indian Girl_ to sail in spite of it?" Whereupon
Bernick, though he knows that the _Indian Girl_ is hopelessly
unseaworthy, replies, "The _Indian Girl_ is to sail in spite of it." It
had occurred to someone that the effect of this incident would be
heightened if Krap, before knocking at the Consul's door, were to
consult the barometer, and show by his demeanour that it was falling
rapidly. A barometer had accordingly been hung, up stage, near the
veranda entrance; and, as the scenic apparatus of a Gaiety matinee was
in those days always of the scantiest, it was practically the one
decoration of a room otherwise bare almost to indecency. It had stared
the audience full in the face through three long acts; and when, at the
end of the third, Krap went up to it and tapped it, a sigh of relief ran
through the house, as much as to say, "At last! so _that_ was what it