is skipped over, in the interval between
the Prologue and the first act.

One of the finest plays of our time--Sir Arthur Pinero's _Iris_--lacks,
in my judgment, an obligatory scene. The character of Iris is admirably
true, so far as it goes; but it is incomplete. The author seems to have
evaded the crucial point of his play--the scene of her installation in
Maldonado's flat. To perfect his psychological study, he was bound to
bridge the chasm between the Iris of the third act and the Iris of the
fourth. He builds two ends of the bridge, in the incident of the
cheque-book at the close of the one act, and in the state of hebetude in
which we find her at the opening of the other; but there remains a great
gap at which the imagination boggles. The author has tried to throw a
retrospective footway across it in Iris's confession to Trenwith in the
fifth act; but I do not find that it quite meets the case. It would no
doubt have been very difficult to keep the action within reasonable
limits had a new act taken the place of the existing fourth; but Sir
Arthur Pinero would probably have produced a completer work of art had
he faced this difficulty, and contrived to compress into a single last
act something like the matter of the existing fourth and fifth. It may
be that he deliberately preferred that Iris should give in narrative the
history of her decline; but I do not consider this a case in support of
that slight plea for impassioned narrative which I ventured to put forth
a few pages back. Her confession to Trenwith would have been far more
dramatic and moving had it been about one-fourth part as long and
one-fourth part as articulate.

* * * * *

Of the scene imposed by history or legend it is unnecessary to say very
much. We saw in Chapter IX that the theatre is not the place for
expounding the results of original research, which cast a new light on
historic character. It is not the place for whitewashing Richard III, or
representing him as a man of erect and graceful figure. It is not the
place for proving that Guy Fawkes was an earnest Presbyterian, that Nell
Gwynn was a lady of the strictest morals, or that George Washington was
incapable of telling the truth. The playwright who deals with Henry VIII
is bound to present him, in the schoolboy's phrase, as "a great
widower." William the Silent must not be a chatterbox, Torquemada a
humanitarian, Ivan the Terrible a conscientious opponen