f drama: let him be exonerated.
Mr. Morton and Mr. Tree between them may have been the spoilers of M.
Bataille; but Tolstoi, might not the great name of Tolstoi have been
left well alone?

SOME PROBLEM PLAYS

I. "THE MARRYING OF ANN LEETE"

It was for the production of such plays as Mr. Granville Barker's that
the Stage Society was founded, and it is doing good service to the drama
in producing them. "The Marrying of Ann Leete" is the cleverest and most
promising new play that I have seen for a long time; but it cannot be
said to have succeeded even with the Stage Society audience, and no
ordinary theatrical manager is very likely to produce it. The author, it
is true, is an actor, but he is young; his play is immature, too crowded
with people, too knotted up with motives, too inconclusive in effect. He
knows the stage, and his knowledge has enabled him to use the stage for
his own purposes, inventing a kind of technique of his own, doing one or
two things which have never, or never so deftly, been done before. But
he is something besides all that; he can think, he can write, and he
can suggest real men and women. The play opens in the dark, and remains
for some time brilliantly ambiguous. People, late eighteenth-century
people, talk with bewildering abruptness, not less bewildering point;
they, their motives, their characters, swim slowly into daylight. Some
of the dialogue is, as the writer says of politics, "a game for clever
children, women, and fools"; it is a game demanding close attention. A
courtly indolence, an intellectual blackguardism, is in the air; people
walk, as it seems, aimlessly in and out, and the game goes on; it fills
one with excitement, the excitement of following a trail. It is a trail
of ideas, these people think, and they act because they have thought.
They know the words they use, they use them with deliberation, their
hearts are in their words. Their actions, indeed, are disconcerting; but
these people, and their disconcerting actions, are interesting, holding
one's mind in suspense.

Mr. Granville Barker has tried to tell the whole history of a family,
and he interests us in every member of that family. He plays them like
chessmen, and their moves excite us as chess excites the mind. They
express ideas; the writer has thought out their place in the scheme of
things, and he has put his own faculty of thinking into their heads.
They talk for effect, or rather for disguise; it is p