mother's history, might have been made
explicit and partly intellectual, instead of implicit, inarticulate and
wholly emotional.

This case, then, clearly falls under our second heading. We cannot say
that it is the logic of the theme which demands the scene, for no thesis
or abstract idea is enunciated. Nor can we say that the course of events
is unnatural or improbable; our complaint is that, without being at all
less natural, they might have been highly dramatic, and that in fact
they are not so.

In a very different type of play, we find another example of the
ignoring of a dramatically obligatory scene. The author of that charming
fantasy, _The Passing of the Third Floor Back_, was long ago guilty of a
play named _The Rise of Dick Halward_, chiefly memorable for having
elicited from Mr. Bernard Shaw one of the most brilliant pages in
English dramatic criticism. The hero of this play, after an adventurous
youth in Mexico, has gone to the bar, but gets no briefs, and is
therefore unable to marry a lady who announces that no suitor need apply
who has less than L5000 a year. One fine day Dick receives from Mexico
the will of an old comrade, which purports to leave to him, absolutely,
half a million dollars, gold; but the will is accompanied by a letter,
in which the old comrade states that the property is really left to him
only in trust for the testator's long-lost son, whom Dick is enjoined to
search out and endow with a capital which, at 5 per cent, represents
accurately the desiderated L5000 a year. As a matter of fact (but this
is not to our present purpose), the long-lost son is actually, at that
moment, sharing Dick's chambers in the Temple. Dick, however, does not
know this, and cannot resist the temptation to destroy the old miner's
letter, and grab the property. We know, of course, that retribution is
bound to descend upon him; but does not dramatic effect imperatively
require that, for a brief space at any rate, he should be seen--with
whatever qualms of conscience his nature might dictate--enjoying his
ill-gotten wealth? Mr. Jerome, however, baulks us of this just
expectation. In the very first scene of the second act we find that the
game is up. The deceased miner wrote his letter to Dick seated in the
doorway of a hut; a chance photographer took a snap-shot at him; and on
returning to England, the chance photographer has nothing more pressing
to do than to chance upon the one man who knows the long-lost