cared. So the author tells us, and so we are willing enough to
believe--if he can devise any adequate method of making Thursfield
believe it. Mr. Sutro's handling of the difficulty seems to me fairly,
but not conspicuously, successful. I cite the case as a typical instance
of the problem, apart from the merits or demerits of the solution.

It may be said that the difficulty of bringing home to us the reality of
a revulsion of feeling, or a radical change of mental attitude, is only
a particular case of the playwright's general problem of convincingly
externalizing inward conditions and processes. That is true: but the
special importance of a conversion which unties the knot and brings the
curtain down seemed to render it worthy of special consideration.

* * * * *

[Footnote 1: _Of Dramatic Poesy_, ed. Arnold, 1903, p. 51.]

[Footnote 2: In Mr. Somerset Maugham's _Grace_ the heroine undergoes a
somewhat analogous change of heart, coming to love the husband whom she
has previously despised. But we have no difficulty in accepting her
conversion, partly because its reasons are clear and fairly adequate,
partly because there is no question of convincing the husband, who has
never realized her previous contempt for him.]

_CHAPTER XX_

BLIND-ALLEY THEMES--AND OTHERS

A blind-alley theme, as its name imports, is one from which there is no
exit. It is a problem incapable of solution, or, rather, of which all
possible solutions are equally unsatisfactory and undesirable. The
playwright cannot too soon make sure that he has not strayed into such a
no-thoroughfare. Whether an end be comic or tragic, romantic or ironic,
happy or disastrous, it should satisfy something within us--our sense of
truth, or of beauty, or of sublimity, or of justice, or of humour, or,
at the least or lowest, our cynical sense of the baseness of human
nature, and the vanity of human aspirations. But a play which satisfies
neither our higher nor our lower instincts, baffles our sympathies, and
leaves our desires at fault between equally inacceptable
alternatives--such a play, whatever beauties of detail it may possess,
is a weariness of the spirit, and an artistic blunder.

There are in literature two conspicuous examples of the blind-alley
theme--two famous plays, wherein two heroines are placed in somewhat
similar dilemmas, which merely paralyse our sympathies and inhibit our
moral judgment. The first of the