emember) guessed right, mainly because the name Giselle seemed to me
more suggestive of flightiness than the staid and sober Leonore,
wherefore I suspected that M. Hervieu, in order to throw dust in our
eyes, had given it to the virtuous lady. But whether we guess right or
wrong, this clue-hunting is an intellectual sport, not an artistic
enjoyment. If there is any aesthetic quality in the play, it can only
come home to us when we know the secret. And the same dilemma will
present itself to any playwright who seeks to imitate M. Hervieu.

The actual keeping of a secret, then--the appeal to the primary
curiosity of actual ignorance--may be ruled out as practically
impossible, and, when possible, unworthy of serious art. But there is
also, as we have seen, the secondary curiosity of the audience which,
though more or less cognizant of the essential facts, instinctively
assumes ignorance, and judges the development of a play from that point
of view. We all realize that a dramatist has no right to trust to our
previous knowledge, acquired from outside sources. We know that a play,
like every other work of art, ought to be self-sufficient, and even if,
at any given moment, we have, as a matter of fact, knowledge which
supplements what the playwright has told us, we feel that he ought not
to have taken for granted our possession of any such external and
fortuitous information. To put it briefly, the dramatist must formally
_assume_ ignorance in his audience, though he must not practically _rely
upon_ it. Therefore it becomes a point of real importance to determine
how long a secret may be kept from an audience, assumed to have no
outside knowledge, and at what point it ought to be revealed.

When _Lady Windermere's Fan_ was first produced, no hint was given in
the first act of the fact that Mrs. Erlynne was Lady Windermere's
mother; so that Lord Windermere's insistence on inviting her to his
wife's birthday reception remained wholly unexplained. But after a few
nights the author made Lord Windermere exclaim, just as the curtain
fell, "My God! What shall I do? I dare not tell her who this woman
really is. The shame would kill her." It was, of course, said that this
change had been made in deference to newspaper criticism; and Oscar
Wilde, in a characteristic letter to the _St. James's Gazette_, promptly
repelled this calumny. At a first-night supper-party, he said--

"All of my friends without exception were of the opinion