girl, Florence St. Vincent,
afterward Mrs. Browne, represents, here, with dramatic exaggeration, of
course, a type of young girl more or less familiar to all of us. In
England she is not a type, but an eccentric personality, with which the
audience must be made acquainted by easy stages. It was necessary,
therefore, to introduce a number of preliminary speeches for her, before
she came to the lines of the original version. After that, she ran on
without any further change, except a few excisions. Mrs. Browne is
married to a very old man, who afterward dies, and in the last act she
illustrates the various grades of affliction endured by every young
widow, from the darkness of despair to the becoming twilight of
sentimental sadness. This was delicate ground in England. They have not
that utter horror of marriage between a very old man and a very young
woman which, in this country, justifies all the satire which a dramatist
can heap upon the man who commits this crime, even after he is in the
grave. And the English people do not share with us--I say it to their
credit--our universal irreverence for what is solemn and sacred. One
must not, either in social life or on the stage, speak too lightly there
of any serious subject; of course, they can laugh, however, at an old
man that makes a fool of himself. So we merely toned down the levity by
leaving old Mr. Browne out of the cast entirely. There is a great
difference, as in the case of Routledge left out of the first act,
between what the audience sees and what it only hears talked about; and
none of the laws of dramatic construction are more important than those
which concern the questions whether you shall appeal to the ear of an
audience, to its eye, or both. Old Mr. Browne was only talked about
then, and as long as the English audience did not know him personally,
it was perfectly willing to laugh at him after Mrs. Browne was a widow.
Another change made for the London version will interest American
business men. In our own version, Lilian's father and his partner close
up their affairs in the last act and retire from their business as
private bankers. "That will never do in England," said Mr. Alberry. "An
old established business like that might be worth L100,000. We must sell
it to some one, not close it." So we sold it to Mr. George Washington
Phipps. This last character illustrates, again, the stubbornness of
dramatic law. Mr. Alberry and I tried to make him an Irishma