sufficient. It was a daring policy to dangle before our eyes an
explanation, which always receded as we advanced towards it, and proved
in the end to be wholly unexplanatory. The success of the play, however,
was sufficient to show that, in light comedy, at any rate, a secret may
with impunity be kept, even to the point of tantalization.[2]

Let us now look at a couple of cases in which the keeping of a secret
seems pretty clearly wrong, inasmuch as it diminishes tension, and
deprives the audience of that superior knowledge in which lies the irony
of drama. In a play named _Her Advocate_, by Mr. Walter Frith (founded
on one of Grenville Murray's _French Pictures in English Chalk_), a K.C.
has fallen madly in love with a woman whose defence he has undertaken.
He believes passionately in her innocence, and, never doubting that she
loves him in return, he is determined to secure for her a triumphant
acquittal. Just at the crucial moment, however, he learns that she loves
another man; and, overwhelmed by this disillusion, he has still to face
the ordeal and plead her cause. The conjuncture would be still more
dramatic if the revelation of this love were to put a different
complexion on the murder, and, by introducing a new motive, shake the
advocate's faith in his client's innocence. But that is another matter;
the question here to be considered is whether the author did right in
reserving the revelation to the last possible moment. In my opinion he
would have done better to have given us an earlier inkling of the true
state of affairs. To keep the secret, in this case, was to place the
audience as well as the advocate on a false trail, and to deprive it of
the sense of superiority it would have felt in seeing him marching
confidently towards a happiness which it knew to be illusory.

The second case is that of _La Douloureuse_, by M. Maurice Donnay.
Through two acts out of the four an important secret is so carefully
kept that there seems to be no obstacle between the lovers with whom
(from the author's point of view) we are supposed to sympathize. The
first act is devoted to an elaborate painting of a somewhat revolting
phase of parvenu society in Paris. Towards the end of the act we learn
that the sculptor, Philippe Lauberthie, is the lover of Helene Ardan, a
married woman; and at the very end her husband, Ardan, commits suicide.
This act, therefore, is devoted, not, as the orthodox formula goes, to
raising an obstacle