o escape from the British and leave Dudgeon to his fate. In
reality his purpose is to bring up a body of Continental troops to the
rescue of Dudgeon; and this also he might (and certainly would) have
conveyed in three words. But Mr. Shaw was so bent on letting Judith
continue to conduct herself idiotically, that he made her sensible
husband act no less idiotically, in order to throw dust in her eyes, and
(incidentally) in the eyes of the audience. In the work of any other
man, we should call this not only an injudicious, but a purposeless and
foolish, keeping of a secret. Mr. Shaw may say that in order to develop
the character of Judith as he had conceived it, he was forced to make
her misunderstand her husband's motives. A development of character
obtained by such artificial means cannot be of much worth; but even
granting this plea, one cannot but point out that it would have been
easy to keep Judith in the dark as to Anderson's purpose, without
keeping the audience also in the dark, and making him behave like a
fool. All that was required was to get Judith off the stage for a few
moments, just before the true state of matters burst upon Anthony. It
would then have been perfectly natural and probable that, not foreseeing
her misunderstanding, he should hurry off without waiting to explain
matters to her. But that he should deliberately leave her in her
delusion, and even use phrases carefully calculated to deceive both her
and the audience,[1] would be, in a writer who professed to place reason
above caprice, a rather gross fault of art.

Mr. Henry Arthur Jones's light comedy, _Whitewashing Julia_, proves that
it is possible, without incurring disaster, to keep a secret throughout
a play, and never reveal it at all. More accurately, what Mr. Jones does
is to pretend that there is some explanation of Mrs. Julia Wren's
relations with the Duke of Savona, other than the simple explanation
that she was his mistress, and to keep us waiting for this
"whitewashing" disclosure, when in fact he has nothing of the sort up
his sleeve, and the plain truth is precisely what the gossips of
Shanctonbury surmise. Julia does not even explain or justify her conduct
from her own point of view. She gives out that "an explanation will be
forthcoming at the right moment"; but the right moment never arrives.
All we are told is that she, Julia, considers that there was never
anything degrading in her conduct; and this we are asked to accept as