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 TILAN'S WIFE. BEING NUMEER 
 i \/0 OF THE INDEPENDENT 
 
 , ,.i.nTRE SERIES OF PLAYS. 
 , , : . ■. BY ,). T. GREIN. 
 
 ;D0N : HENRY AND CO, 
 BOUYERIE STREET, E.G. 1893
 
 LIBRARY 
 
 UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA 
 RIVERSIDE
 
 7^. 7c^s,--^^^--^-^-^ ^^^^f^i^ 
 
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 ALAN'S WIFE.
 
 ALAN'S WIFE. A DRA- 
 MATIC STUDY IN 
 THREE SCENES. FIRST 
 ACTED AT THE INDE- 
 PENDENT THEATRE 
 IN LONDON. 
 
 With an Introduction by 
 WILLIAM AIICHE'B^. 
 
 LONDON: HENRY AND CO. 
 BOUVERIE STREET, E.G. 1893.
 
 
 Printed by Haull, IVatton, and Viney, Ld., London and Aylesbury.
 
 The 
 
 Editor's Preface. 
 
 r 
 
 IT may be interesting to recount here the history 
 of how I came to accept the play entitled 
 Alans Wife. Miss Robins, in the earlier days 
 of the Independent Theatre, promised me very 
 kindly that she would act for me some time or other; 
 and many months after, she incidentally mentioned 
 that she had a play with her which she would 
 like me to hear. She spoke with great enthusiasm 
 about it, and I, eager to obtain a play by an English 
 author, begged her to lose no time, and to appoint 
 at once a day for reading. I came, and Miss Robins 
 read Alans Wife to me. I shall never forget the 
 impression it made upon me. The first Act, with 
 its glorious sunshine, its idyllic picture of woman's 
 love and woman's admiration for the physical beauty 
 of her husband, charmed me ; and when Miss Robins, 
 in her exquisite delivery, came to the sad end of this 
 Act, which cast a gloom on the bright and joyful 
 atmosphere, I was so eager to hear the rest that I 
 would barely grant her time to pause. And the 
 deeper grew the gloom of the action the more did 
 it thrill me. Here was a drama, a slice of human 
 life, as Jean Jullien has it, put upon the stage with
 
 vi The Editor's Preface. 
 
 art, and yet so naturally that it made my heart 
 quiver within me. When it was over, and Miss 
 Robins had read the last speech, it seemed to me like 
 one immense outburst of an agonising soul; I was 
 speechless and overcome. I had not heard a play, — 
 I had lived it, and suffered with the wretched heroine. 
 All I could say was : " We shall do that play ; we 
 will produce it as soon as we can. It is a beautiful 
 tragedy." And then I rushed away, and finished 
 my evening in a Music Hall, for my head and 
 my heart were full, and unfit for serious work ; I 
 wanted something to divert my thoughts. It was 
 an unforgetable evening, and each time I was present 
 at the rehearsals, imperfect as they necessarily were 
 in the beginning, I experienced the same feeling. 
 Alans Wife never failed to draw a tear from me. 
 
 After the production, when war raged about the 
 play, when the pros and cons stood fiercely opposed 
 to one another, when in the judgment there was no 
 compromise, when it was either mercilessly con- 
 demned or highly praised, — afterwards, when I had 
 read every opinion, and was called upon to express 
 my own in l^he Westminster Review^ I wrote as 
 follows : — 
 
 " Undoubtedly, after A Woman of no Import ance^ 
 the production of Alans Wife was the most exciting 
 event in the theatrical world in April. For a long 
 time no play has elicited so much comment, such 
 high praise, and such virulent abuse, as this psycho- 
 logical and physical study of a woman's character. 
 This, in itself, proves, we think, that the work is 
 one of more than ordinary merit. We will not dive 
 into the question whether those who have condemned
 
 The Editor's Preface. vii 
 
 the play have done so rightly ; but this we cannot 
 refrain from stating, that it is a great shame that 
 in certain newspapers every play produced at the 
 Independent Theatre is howled down and stigmatised 
 as abominable. It is unworthy that men who rule 
 over large mouthpieces of public opinion should 
 allow such prejudice, such absolute dishonesty, for 
 the simple reason that the Independent Theatre 
 endeavours to cut new paths. 
 
 " What we admire so greatly in Alans Wife is 
 the utter simplicity, the wonderful mixture of light 
 and shade with which the author has brought his 
 picture on the canvas. In the first Act it is all light 
 and love and glory, and revelling in the expected 
 joy of Jean's approaching motherhood. A flood of 
 sunshine glides over the stage ; then clouds gather, 
 and suddenly all the brightness, all the happiness 
 disappear : Jean's husband, Alan, is brought home, 
 a victim to his duty. The child is born a cripple : 
 Alan's death fathered the misfortune of the unborn 
 child. Its mother, who adores strength and vigour 
 as a divinity, loudly accuses herself that she has 
 brought such a being into the world ; and then the 
 idea besieges her that one day she may be taken from 
 that poor crippled creature, which will never be able 
 to fight its battle with the world, and she thinks how 
 much happier it would be if it did not live. In a 
 scene which, for strength, is in our opinion unsur- 
 passed in any play we have seen in recent years, Jean 
 discusses with herself, plans, and executes the deed. 
 She kills her baby, not in an excess of madness, but 
 in the conviction that she does a good action by 
 taking the cripple from the miseries of this life, and 
 
 b
 
 viii The Editor's Preface. 
 
 uniting it with the man she loved above all men, 
 her dead husband. In the third Act the catastrophe 
 takes place. Jean pays the penalty of her crime 
 with her own life. She pays it cheerfully, not like 
 a criminal who walks to the scaffold unmoved, but 
 like a fanatic who dies for her cause. The parting 
 between Jean and her mother was so affecting that 
 old men, as we saw, cried, while women melted in 
 tears ; and whenever a play produces this effect, it, 
 we believe, represents a true phase of life. Artificial 
 scenes may interest, but they never make one's heart 
 ache. Alans Wife is not a cheerftd play, but in art 
 we have no right to ask whether a thing is cheerful 
 or pleasant, or painful or awe-inspiring : we have 
 but to ask, Is it art .? And to deny that Alans 
 JVifcy with its directness, its exquisite writing, its 
 soul-stirring power, is a work of art, is simply 
 anathematising tragedy altogether ; for if ever tragedy 
 has been written by a modern Englishman, Alan'' s 
 Wife has a right to claim that title. We know but 
 one more powerful, modern play, equally sad and 
 equally simple : Ibsen's Ghosts — that is all." 
 
 And now that I have read the play once more 
 in the proof-sheets, I do not retract one word 
 from what I have said. Alans Wife is, in my 
 humble opinion, one of the truest tragedies ever 
 written by a modern Englishman, and I cannot but 
 express my regret that I am not able to divulge the 
 name of the author, which, in deference to my solemn 
 promise to Miss Robins, I have not even endeavoured 
 to ascertain. 
 
 J. T. GREIN.
 
 Introduction. 
 
 BY WILLIAM ARCHER. 
 
 Le public n'est pas pessimiste : il ne saurait comprendre la fantaisie 
 singuliere de certains esprits qui voient le monde mauvais, et qui 
 s"en consolent par le plaisir tout intellectuel et aristocratique de 
 cette connaissance. ... II prefere les plus tragiques horreurs a 
 certaines cruautes d"observation. — Jules Leuiaitre : "Les Contem- 
 porains," 2iiie Sate, p. 236. 
 
 THE author of Alans Wife has deputed to 
 me the task of relating its history, and, 
 if need be, of pleading its cause. The 
 former duty I undertake all the more 
 readily as I am in great measure responsible for the 
 existence of the play, and it is only right that I 
 should put on record my complicity before the fact. 
 That very complicity, of course, debars me from 
 appearing in the character of an impartial critic. But 
 is there such a thing, one may ask in parenthesis, as 
 impartiality in criticism ? Are we not all mere advo- 
 cates, pleading the cause of our individual prejudices, 
 predilections, fads, and fancies, — if indeed, we are 
 fortunate enough to have any personal tastes to 
 champion, and do not merely hold a brief for some 
 party, or serve as mechanical mouthpieces for the 
 prejudices of the compact majority .'' Be this as it 
 may, in the present instance I lay no claim to im- 
 partiality. It is confessedly as an advocate that I 
 appear in court. Not simply, or specially, as an
 
 X Introduction. 
 
 advocate for this play : as will presently appear, I 
 am in some respects prejudiced against the manner 
 in which the author has treated the subject. It is 
 for the subject itself — in defence of its right to a place 
 within the sphere of art — that I address the court. 
 If the length of my address should appear dispropor- 
 tionate to its theme, the reader must be good enough 
 to bear in mind that the case of Alans Wife is in 
 some sense a test case. A principle — an important 
 principle — is at stake : the question of the artist's 
 right to " see life steadily and see it whole." It is 
 a question, I admit, on which I feel strongly. If, 
 as some say, it is a disadvantage to an advocate to 
 approach a case with any ardour of conviction, I 
 must at once beg the indulgence of the court ; for 
 I certainly labour under that disability. 
 
 It may be well to state clearly, at the outset, that 
 I am not " instructed " by the author, and do not 
 pretend to express his personal views, whether 
 artistic or philosophical. I do not even know what 
 his views are. Though I, indirectly, suggested the 
 theme to him, he wrote the play without consulting 
 me on a single point. It was finished, as it now 
 stands, before I knew that it was begun. Nor have 
 I since discussed the matter with him. Some corre- 
 spondence j)assed between us as to one or two points 
 of theatrical expediency, but we have had neither 
 occasion nor opportunity to go into the deeper 
 questions involved. His philosophic standpoint is, 
 in all probability, widely different from mine ; and 
 in any case, nothing that I say is either inspired or 
 endorsed by him. In fairness to the author, then, I 
 would suggest that the reader should, in the mean-
 
 Introduction. xi 
 
 time, skip the rest of this preface, and go straight to 
 the play. After reading it and forming his own 
 estimate of its merits, he may, if so minded, hark 
 back and compare notes with me. These pages are 
 designed to serve as a " reversible " commentary, a 
 prologue and epilogue in one ; and readers who have 
 not seen the play will do best to treat them as an 
 epilogue. 
 
 Now for the history of Alans Wife. Some time 
 in April 1891 — shortly before the production of 
 Hedda Gabler — Miss Elizabeth Robins lent me a 
 Swedish magazine, Ur Dagens Kronikaj of the 
 previous January, containing a story entitled Befrt'ad, 
 by an authoress, hitherto unknown to me, named 
 Elin Ameen. Miss Robins had read the story in a 
 German translation, and had been impressed by it, 
 though not as a subject for theatrical treatment. I 
 too was impressed by it, and kept it by me for some 
 time, with a vague intention of translating it. Then, 
 thinking over it one day, I suddenly " saw " it in the 
 form of a play. It shaped itself naturally, inevitably, 
 into three scenes, of absolute and, as it seemed to 
 me, beautiful simplicity and straightforwardness. A 
 fellow-student of the drama, with whom I had more 
 than once had some friendly controversy with regard 
 to the painful in art, happened to be living near me. 
 To him, by way of experiment, I told the story, 
 asking whether he would like to see it on the stage. 
 As I foresaw, he at once protested in the strongest 
 terms. The thing would be utterly, unspeakably 
 brutal and hideous. Humanity and Jules Lemaitre 
 would cry out against it with one voice. That made
 
 xii Introduction. 
 
 the temptation quite irresistible. There is nothing 
 in the world I love so much as hearing humanity cry- 
 out in the voice of Jules Lemaitre ; so I determined 
 that the deed should be done. Accordingly I jotted 
 down a rough scenario of the play as I saw it, and 
 sent it to Miss Robins, mentioning the names of two 
 young dramatists, to one or other of whom I advised 
 her to suggest the theme. Then, for a long time, I 
 heard and thought nothing more of the matter, until 
 one day Miss Robins informed me that she had acted 
 on my advice, that one of the dramatists had been 
 fired by the idea, and that the play was already 
 written. She also broke to me, as considerately as 
 possible, the news that, except as regards the division 
 into three scenes, my scheme had been entirely thrown 
 overboard. On the whole, I could not but admit 
 that the new form the thing had assumed possessed 
 many practical advantages. But I have still a 
 sneaking tenderness for my original conception ; and 
 as a comparison between the two will best convey my 
 technical criticism of the existing play, I will briefly 
 sketch the play as I saw it. 
 
 The scene was to remain in Sweden, and the action 
 was to be simple and condensed in the highest degree. 
 In the first scene there were to be only three characters 
 — the mother, the daughter, and a female neighbour — 
 not counting, of course, the mute personages passing 
 on the road, and the little group of workpeople at 
 the close. The minister, James Warren, is practi- 
 cally an invention of the English author. A rejected 
 suitor of Emma's is mentioned in the original, but 
 does not appear in person. The conversation with 
 Warren, however, is the only serious departure from
 
 Introduction. xiii 
 
 my conception in the first scene ; it is in the second 
 scene that the chief difference comes in. After an 
 opening passage between mother and daughter, the 
 district doctor was to have called on his rounds — 
 a burly, benevolent, somewhat coarse-grained man, 
 representing that medical optimism which is not 
 founded upon piety, or indeed upon any metaphysical 
 basis, but springs from a sort of instinctive feeling 
 that the great machine of nature must go on, and that 
 pain and misery are '' all in the day's work." The 
 conversation between him and Emma (Jean) was to 
 have been the crucial passage of the play. She was 
 to have questioned him, somewhat minutely, as to the 
 probable fliture of the child, and in her questions, 
 and her comments on his replies, the audience was 
 to have felt the resolution to end the crippled life 
 growing gradually in her mind, w^hile the burly 
 doctor was to have been placidly convinced that he 
 was pouring balm upon her wounded soul, and 
 leaving her reconciled and comforted. On the 
 doctor's departure, she was to have had a few words 
 — very few almost incoherent words — of soliloquy, 
 and then, in an inner room, seen but vaguely by the 
 audience, she was to have done the deed. As soon 
 as it was over, she was to have rushed out, panic- 
 stricken at the silence of death, called to her mother, 
 and motioned her to go into the inner room ; and 
 then, on the mother's outcry of horror, she was to 
 have said "Yes, I did it," or words to that effect — 
 whereupon, Curtain. The third scene was to have 
 consisted of a mere conversation between Emma and 
 the doctor in her prison cell, several years later. It 
 appears that there is no capital punishment in Sweden ,
 
 xiv Introduction. 
 
 — in Elin Ameen's story, at any rate, imprisonment 
 for life seems to be regarded as the inevitable conse- 
 quence of child-murder. Emma was, in the simplest 
 words, to have declared that she desired no commu- 
 tation of her sentence and had no wish to return to 
 the world from which she felt herself cut off by her 
 terrible act ; but at the same time she was to have 
 declined any expression of remorse or regret for that 
 act, declaring (as Jean actually does), that she had 
 shown the child the only true kindness. 
 
 This play would clearly have been more academic, 
 more of a mere experimental exercise, than the one 
 now before us. As regards the first and third scenes, 
 the author has, I gladly admit, improved upon my 
 scheme, humanised and dramatised it. My argu- 
 ments for keeping the scene in Sweden were based, 
 not upon any artistic advantage, but upon mere 
 cowardly expediency. I thought the episode would 
 be less likely to shock people beyond endurance if 
 the scene were removed from their own doors — for 
 impressions of horror are apt to vary inversely as 
 the square of the distance. But the incidents were 
 just as natural in England as anywhere else, and I 
 soon recognised that the author had taken the wiser 
 as well as the bolder part in placing the scene in 
 our own north country. The invention of the " little 
 minister," too, seems to me a happy one. He serves 
 to throw into relief an essential element in Jean's 
 character : her worship of physical strength and 
 beauty, her intolerance of all that is sickly and 
 stunted ; and, at the same time he makes, as it were, 
 an official mouthpiece for the consolatory common- 
 places of piety. But I own it is not without a pang
 
 Introduction. xv 
 
 of regret that I compare the existing second scene 
 with that which I had sketched. The interview 
 between Emma and the doctor would have been a 
 subtle piece of intellectual, as opposed to merely 
 emotional, drama. It would have taken a master 
 of dialogue to write it, but the thing would have 
 been worth doing. I think, too, that the end of the 
 scene as I conceived it would have been at once 
 more artistic and more effective from the acting 
 point of view. The transference of the locality to 
 England made the inner room somewhat improbable, 
 but that difficulty might have been got over. I had 
 devised an arrangement of lights during the actual 
 murder- scene which would, I think, have been im- 
 pressive ; and, altogether, the scene would have been 
 more finished, less hurried and huddled, than that 
 which the author has chosen to write. So far as 
 this whole passage is concerned, in a word, I am 
 disposed to agree with those critics who find the 
 drama too much simplified, and hold that thought is 
 sacrificed to emotion ; but, unlike them, I feel that 
 the fault is redeemed by a very genuine beauty and 
 poignancy of emotional expression.* 
 
 So much for the genesis of the little drama. Let 
 us now glance at some of the great questions which 
 it involves. What originally attracted me in the 
 
 * The author and I are at variance as to whether in my 
 scenario (which I have unfortunately destroyed) I had retained 
 the baptism-scene of the Swedish story. My recollection is 
 that I had suppressed it, feeling that a woman who was 
 capable of reasoning as I intended Emma to reason in the 
 scene with the doctor, would not be likely to concern herself 
 about infant baptism. The dramatist, on the other hand, 
 is strongly under the impression that I had retained the
 
 xvi Introduction. 
 
 theme, what now attracts me in the play, is precisely 
 its wealth of ethical and aesthetic suggestion. In 
 saying this, I do not beg the question of its merits. 
 It may be artistically feeble and morally repre- 
 hensible ; it may prove nothing, save that bunglers 
 rush in where artists fear to tread ; but how- 
 ever crudely, however rashly, however inade- 
 quately, it does undeniably confront us with some 
 of the most momentous problems of art and of 
 conduct. Ought not criticism to have recognised 
 this fact, instead of confining itself to almost in- 
 articulate outcries of horror, contempt, and repro- 
 bation ? My present purpose is to do for the critics 
 what they were too shocked and scandalised to 
 do for themselves : namely, discover what are the 
 essential differences between — I will not say this 
 tragedy, since the term may be held to beg the 
 question — between this painful play and other 
 painful plays, ancient and modern, which are, by 
 common consent, held beautiful and admirable. I 
 want (in all sincerity) to understand, and help the critics 
 to understand, their rejection of the play, and my 
 acceptance of it. No one can be argued into liking 
 a thing he dislikes ; but I am sanguine enough to 
 hope that some of the critics who most heartily 
 disliked Alans Wife may be brought to recognise 
 
 scene ; and he may be right. The matter is of no great 
 moment, one way or the other ; for a great deal of instinctive 
 superstition may undoubtedly survive even in a very keen 
 intelligence. As the play and the characters actually stand, 
 in any case, the baptism-scene is essential. Emma Olsen 
 might or might not have baptised the child ; Jean Creyke 
 certainly would have.
 
 Introduction. xvii 
 
 in it the manifestation of a tendency not altogether 
 contemptible. 
 
 Need I apologise for making Mr. A. B. Walkley 
 the spokesman of the opposition ? Surely not. If 
 Mr. Walkley objects to having this "bad eminence" 
 thrust upon him, he holds the remedy in his own 
 hands. He has only to write less piquantly, less 
 intelligently, less suggestively — in a word, less like 
 himself — and I, for one, shall never dream of singling 
 him out from the compact majority. While he 
 remains what he is — the most brilliant and enter- 
 taining of theatrical theorists — he must submit with 
 a good grace to the drawbacks, if drawbacks they 
 be, of such well-merited distinction. I do not even 
 apologise for applying the rude " teazles " of analysis 
 to the fairy fabric of his impressionism. If, or in so 
 far as, he is an impressionist, it is of set purpose, 
 and not for want of analytic, and even casuistic, 
 faculty. He may now and then affect a sort of 
 butterfly irresponsibility ; but there be butterflies 
 that are apter to break the wheel than to be broken 
 on it. 
 
 There is no denying that the effect produced upon 
 Mr. Walkley by the performance of Alayi s Wife was 
 a highly undesirable one. It jarred him out of his 
 natural urbanity, and it impaired his perception of 
 physical fact. This is the exordium of his criticism 
 in the Star for Saturday, April 29th : — 
 
 When the inevitable and tiresome cry of " author " was 
 raised, at the close of the Independent Theatre Societj'^ per- 
 formance at Terry's last night, Mr. Grein came forward to 
 declare that he did not know the author of Alan's Wife — if 
 he did, " he would shake him by the hand." Whereupon a
 
 xviii Introduction. 
 
 neighbour of mine in front muttered, " and I would shake him 
 b}^ the throat." I am by nature of a pacific disposition, but this 
 time, I am bound to say, I am almost of the same mind as my 
 neighbour. 
 
 It is not without a certain tremor that I even copy 
 these lines, at this distance of time : what wonder 
 that when I first read them, hot-and-hot from the 
 press, my heart was in my boots ? True, I was not 
 the person directly threatened ; but he, I knew, was 
 ensconced behind the bastion of anonymity ; and, 
 faihng his throat, I did not know but that the 
 furibund critic might be tempted to impress his 
 opinion upon the windpipe of a self-confessed 
 accessory before the fact. The " almost " somewhat 
 reassured me ; but for that comfortable adverb, 
 I should certainly have taken steps to have Mr. 
 Walkley bound over to keep the peace. And 
 you, gentle reader, now that the play is before you, 
 do you feel that such violent measures, or even 
 violent expressions, are really quite proportionate 
 to the occasion ? Is the poor little play such a base 
 and brutal and utterly abominable thing that, like 
 Mr. Walkley, you would apply to the author that 
 terrible line of Dante, 
 
 " E cortcsiafu lui esser villano ? " 
 
 Mr. Walkley, we know, is not easily " villano " to 
 any one. It must have been a shock indeed that 
 could thus hustle him out of his habitual courtesy. 
 
 And out of his habitual clearness of perception to 
 boot. After giving an account — a perfectly correct 
 account — of the end of the first scene, he philoso- 
 phises as follows : —
 
 Introduction. xix 
 
 Now, here this question I have already hinted at, the question 
 whether art has Hmitations of subject, at once occurs. If there 
 is no limitation, why is the playwright content with showing 
 us the woman's horror at the thing on the bier ? Why not 
 bring the bier down to the footlights and shock us all with it ? 
 It would be very easy : a pennyworth of red ochre would do 
 the trick. I leave you to ponder this aspect of the matter, and 
 pass on to Scene 2. 
 
 We will consider this argument presently ; what I 
 want to note here is that Mr. Walkley "pondered 
 the matter " so profoundly that by the middle of 
 the next week he had convinced himself that the 
 playwright was not " content with showing us the 
 woman's horror at the thing on the bier," but did 
 actually " do the trick " with " a pennyworth of red 
 ochre " or other pigment. In The Speaker for 
 May 6th, Mr. Walkley roundly asserted that the 
 " case " of Alans Wife was " presented with no 
 attenuation, but rather persistent aggravations of its 
 horrible circumstances. We are shown the stretcher^ 
 the mangled corpse^ the child." I wrote to the Editor 
 of The Speaker (the correspondence is reprinted in 
 the Appendix), pointing out that we were indeed 
 shown the stretcher, but that, as a simple matter of 
 fact, we were not shown the other two blood-curdling 
 objects ; whereupon Mr. Walkley retorted, that I, 
 not he, was ^' strangely mistaken," — that he saw with 
 his own eyes " the sheet lifted from the man's head 
 and shoulders, which were streaked with paint to 
 indicate some hideous disfigurement." The reader 
 will find in the letters from Miss Robins and 
 Mr. De Lange, reprinted in the Appendix, conclusive 
 proof that, though Mr. Walkley may possibly, by 
 mistake, have been allowed a glimpse of the man
 
 XX Introduction. 
 
 who played the corpse, he certainly saw no " hideous 
 disfigurement," because there was none to see. The 
 hallucination is curious in itself ; but it becomes 
 doubly so when we find, on comparing his assertions 
 in 'T'he Speaker of May 6th and May 20th with the 
 above-quoted passage from The Star of April 29th, 
 that it was not an optical but a purely mental 
 illusion from which Mr. Walkley suffered. Writing 
 immediately after the production, he asked why the 
 playwright did not do what, a few days later, he as- 
 serted and reasserted that that gory-minded miscreant 
 actually did do. It is perfectly certain that the play- 
 wright either was or was not '^ content with showing 
 us the woman's horror at the thing on the bier." 
 Why did Mr. Walkley begin by asserting the former 
 alternative, and end by staking his veracity on the 
 latter ? Mystere ! 
 
 The matter of fact, of course, is no longer in 
 dispute, and Mr. Walkley' s good faith never was 
 so for a moment. I advert to the discussion partly 
 because it involves what seems to me a curious psycho- 
 logical phenomenon, throwing a somewhat disquieting 
 light upon the value of evidence ; but mainly because 
 it proves beyond a doubt that Mr. Walkley was 
 actually " upset" by Alan'' s Wife to such a degree as 
 to be incapable of discriminating between what he 
 saw and what he imagined. This is, in a sense, a 
 testimony to the skill of the author and of the actress; 
 but it is certainly not the business of art to produce 
 hallucinations. A brief inquiry into the reasons for 
 his frenzy of reprobation may throw some light upon 
 the essential merits or demerits of the play. 
 
 Let us note, in the first place, that neither Mr.
 
 Introduction. xxi 
 
 Walkley nor any other critic has accused the play 
 of untruth, unnaturabiess, even exaggeration. The 
 writing is not impugned except on the score of too 
 great sobriety. According to Mr. Walkley, the 
 play is 
 
 a crude and bald statement of one of those exceptionally 
 horrible cases which make us wring our hands at the hideous 
 injustice of life, and cry aloud against the vaunted benevolence 
 of the Creator as a monstrous imposture. But as such cases 
 happen, why, you ask, may they not be stated on the stage ? 
 Well, it is a difficult question. At present I am not prepared 
 with a reasoned answer. You must give me time. I can only 
 say now that I feel such things to be outside the province of 
 art, my instincts revolt against them, they stretch me on the 
 rack. You think this, possibly, heated, exaggerated language; 
 but I am quite sincere. I was quite miserable while the 
 curtain was up last night, and when it was down I had the 
 relief of waking from some ghastly nightmare. Now, I am for 
 extending the boundaries of dramatic art, but I object to seeing 
 it attempting what could be done much more cheaply and 
 expeditiously by a surfeit of pork chops. 
 
 It is only fair to remember that these lines must have 
 been written in the small hours of the morning, before 
 the critic had had time to reflect and clarify his 
 thoughts. If a surfeit of pork chops evokes in 
 Mr. Walkley's brain " a crude and bald statement of 
 one of those horrible cases which make us wring our 
 hands at the injustice of life," then Mr. Walkley is 
 an even more interesting dreamer than Mr. R. L. 
 Stevenson, and ought at once to communicate his 
 " case " to the Psychical Society. The note of the 
 nightmare is precisely that it is not " crude and bald," 
 but that its horror is worked up with all sorts of 
 fantastic and impossible circumstance. There are 
 plenty of nightmares in dramatic literature — for
 
 xxii Introduction. 
 
 instance, Webster's Duchess of Malfi and White 
 T>evil^ many other Elizabethan plays, by Tourneur, 
 Marston, and others, and the German and English 
 ghost-plays which made our grandfathers' flesh creep, 
 such as Alonk Lewis's Castle Spectre. If Mr. Walkley 
 even chose to denounce the second and third acts of 
 Gengangere as a nightmare, it would be hard to say 
 him nay; for there the horror is sedulously elaborated, 
 and it may even be doubted whether the precise form 
 of the catastrophe is physically possible. But in 
 Alans Wife the case is stated " crudely and baldly," 
 says Mr. Walkley — I prefer to say simply and soberly. 
 The horrors of the theme are neither physically ex- 
 hibited (we may take it, I think, that Mr. Walkley 
 is dislodged from that position), nor insisted on in 
 words. The reader may search the text in vain for 
 a single crudely descriptive expression. There is 
 not a word in which the author essays (in Lamb's 
 phrase) to " touch a horror skilfully," as Ibsen does 
 in that terrible speech of Oswald's : " It always sets 
 me thinking of cherry-coloured velvet — something 
 soft and delicate to stroke." I think, then, that 
 Mr. Walkley must allow his pork chops to follow 
 Alan's mangled remains to that museum of mistakes 
 which every man, and especially every critic, keeps 
 somewhere in the background of his memory. Alan s 
 Wife does not belong to the nightmare category of 
 plays. It is excluded from it by the very simplicity 
 on which the critic insists so strongly — unless, indeed, 
 Mr. Walkley chooses to class every painful experience 
 as a nightmare, in which case the illustration loses 
 all literary value, and becomes a mere piece of bad 
 style.
 
 Introduction. xxiii 
 
 "The piece is in three scenes," Mr. Walkley 
 continues, " They are not called acts, and they are not 
 acts, for there is no arrangement or development in 
 them ; they are raw, not cooked .... My criticism 
 can be condensed into a single syllable — Ugh ! I 
 declare that there is no art in this thing, no design, 
 no fusing of the parts in the alembic of the intellect." 
 This criticism would be a great deal more instructive 
 if Mr. Walkley had been good enough to indicate 
 what sort of " cookery " ought to have been applied 
 to the play. Would he have had the author invent 
 an intrigue, make the villain (a rejected suitor of 
 Jean's) set the machinery in motion at the moment 
 when Alan was under the circular saw, and then 
 chloroform Jean, smother her baby, and persuade her, 
 when she regained her senses, that she herself had 
 done the deed in delirium .'' Would this have been 
 putting the thing through " the alembic of the 
 intellect " ? Of course not ; Mr. Walkley intends 
 no such imbecility ; but what then iioes he intend ? I 
 am at a total loss to conceive any further arrangement 
 of the theme that would not have denaturalised it, 
 or any " development " that would not have meant 
 a needless prolongation of the agony. Does Mr. 
 Walkley complain that he does not know enough of 
 the characters ^ What more does he want to know.? 
 It is true that in the two old women there is no great 
 depth or subtlety ; but Mr. Walkley has been a 
 villager himself, — has he observed any great depth or 
 subtlety in the characters of the cottage matrons, his 
 neighbours ? They are touched-in with a pleasant 
 humour which is not, perhaps, so devoid of "art" 
 as Mr. Walkley imagines. Let him try to draw,
 
 xxiv Introduction. 
 
 dramatically, two of his aforesaid village neighbours, 
 and he may find it no such child's play. The 
 minister, too, is a very simple character ; but what 
 else should he be ? An Arthur Dimmesdale or 
 Robert Elsmere would be utterly out of place in 
 these surroundings. James Warren is an earnest, 
 God-fearing, primitive Christian, drawn without irony 
 or bitterness, and quite fairly representing, to my 
 mind, the pious point of view. Would Mr. Walkley 
 have preferred an abler man, who should state the 
 case for Providence with more emphasis and in- 
 sistence ? It would have been easy to make the 
 argument wordy and undramatic ; but alas ! I fear 
 Mr. Walkley m.ust agree with me that even the most 
 skilful sophistry would not have mended matters, and 
 would only have prolonged his personal torments. 
 Remains, then, Jean, — do we want more light upon 
 her character ^ Unless, like Artemus Ward, we are 
 anxious to know whether she has had measles, and if 
 so how many, I fail to see what more we have to 
 learn about her. She is a fresh and sturdy young 
 woman, come of the sound peasant stock which we 
 recognise in her mother, but inheriting a somewhat 
 superior intelligence from her schoolmaster father. 
 She has always been the brightest, cleverest girl of 
 her " set," as we should say, and has thus developed 
 a sort of physical and spiritual pride. Without 
 snobbery, without any desire to "rise in the world," 
 she will not be content with less than the best of 
 what life has to give her. She selects as her mate the 
 handsomest, most capable man of her class that comes 
 in her way ; she makes her home the brightest in the 
 village ; her child is to be the sturdiest, bonniest
 
 Introduction. xxv 
 
 bairn in the world. Is not this " character " enough 
 to satisfy Mr. Walkley ? Character, in the artistic 
 sense, I take to mean natural, probable, justified 
 differentiation : an individualisation which is neither 
 fantastic nor arbitrary, but explicable, and, by artistic 
 methods, explained. Is not Jean, in this sense, a 
 clearly-drawn character ? She is neither a featureless, 
 conventional puppet, nor an eccentric, bewildering 
 monstrosity. When calamity falls upon her with a 
 reduplicated blow, her action is the logical outcome 
 of the pride and courage — the impatient, intolerant 
 egoism, if you choose to put it so — which we have 
 clearly recognised in her beforehand. 
 
 Under the bludgeonings of chance 
 Her head is bloody, but unbowed. 
 
 You are by no means bound to admire her action, 
 but, if criticism is in any sense an exercise of the 
 reason, you are bound to admit or to deny that its 
 premises are sufficient, and that it is consistent with 
 its premises. I do not understand Mr. Walkley to 
 dispute either of these propositions. What, then, does 
 he mean by the " development " for which he calls 
 out so loudly ? 
 
 " Any man who chooses," he goes on, " can take 
 the bare horrors of life and fling them, pell-mell, 
 on the stage ; but until we have revised our 
 dictionaries we cannot call that man a dramatist." 
 Again I can only appeal to the reader to say whether 
 the man who has drawn the characters of the two 
 old women and Jean, who has written the exquisitely 
 tender scene between Jean and her mother in the
 
 xxvi Introduction. 
 
 first act (see p. i6), * and has portrayed Jean's 
 despairing rebellion in the second act, can be said to 
 have '• flung horrors pell-mell upon the stage." 
 Could " an V man who chooses " have conceived the 
 tragic simplicity of Jean's outcr\", *' Oh, don't tell 
 me about it — don't tell me about any other woman's 
 child ! "" or the heartrending pathos of her prayer, 
 "... He's so little, dear God, so helpless — and he 
 never did anv wrong. He hasn't been drunk with 
 life, and strength, and love — he hasn't walked through 
 the world exulting and fearless and forgetting You. 
 That was I, O Father in heaven ! Punish me — and 
 take the baby away." Come now, ISlr. Walkley, is 
 there absolutely " no art in this thing " ^. 
 
 The fact is that in all this about " arrangement " 
 and "development" and "art," and "fusing of 
 parts" and "the alembic of the intellect," Mr. 
 Walklev is unwisely issuing^ from his entrenchments 
 
 * " With some lack of delicacy,^' saj'S the critic oiThe Standard, 
 writing of this scene, " she reveals a strictly domestic secret to her 
 mother^ Let me urge the reader to turn forthwith to the 
 passage in question ; for until he has the text beneath his ej-es 
 he cannot admire, as it ought to be admired, the ineffable, the 
 more than seraphic, purity of soul which could prompt such a 
 remark. From what nunnery, I v/onder, does The Standard 
 recruit its staff? But no I I will not do the Catholic Church 
 the injustice of supposing that in its most secluded cloister 
 there could be found a mind capable of discovering " some lack 
 of delicacy " in the scene between mother and daughter. Is it 
 not strange and lamentable that the Vivien of Party Spirit 
 should thus be sufiered \>y men (presumably) of intelligence 
 and culture, to raise her voice in a purely literary' discussion, 
 
 "Polluting, and imputing her whole self. 
 Defaming and defacing, till she left 
 Not even Lancelot brave, nor Galahad clean."
 
 Introduction. xxvii 
 
 and exposing himself to fire. He is trying to give 
 reasons for what he admits to be an unreasoning, 
 unreasonable instinct. In su^sesting; that the theme 
 ought to have been treated otherwise, he implicitly 
 admits that it ought to have been treated at all ; 
 whereas the whole strength and validiD,- of his 
 position lies in denying this. The fact is, he does 
 not beg-in to know how it has been treated. " The 
 drama of infanticide,'' as he himselt puts it, " has 
 knocked all the critical spirit out of him." He fell 
 from the first into a deliquium of nervous horror, 
 which obscured his perception, or at any rate his 
 realisation, of the plainest physical facts ; how, then, 
 could he be expected to estimate justly, or even 
 rationallv, the artistic merits of the production ? 
 In criticising details of workmanship, he was at- 
 tempting what was unnecessary, and (to one in his 
 state of mind) essentially impossible. He ought 
 simply to have entrenched himself in the syllogism, 
 " What is intolerably painful cannot be artistic ; to 
 me Alan's Wife is intolerably painful ; therefore to 
 me Alayfs Wife is inartistic." He ought to have 
 said, " I neither know nor care how the play is written 
 — I simply assert that it ought not to have been 
 written at all. My dentist may exhibit consummate 
 skill in drawing my teeth, but I own myself incapable 
 of criticising or appreciating his pertormance : I take 
 laughing-g-as that I mav not have to do so. The 
 author of Alayis Wife ought, in common humanit)^, 
 to have administered an anaesthetic." 
 
 This position would have been unassailable from 
 the logical side, but still open to criticism from the 
 point of view (i) oi fact, (2) of v.-hat may be called
 
 xxviii Introduction. 
 
 critical morals. In the first place it is a mere figure 
 of speech to call the pain inflicted by Alan's Wife 
 " intolerable." It is not unendurable, because we 
 see that it is endured by a theatre-full of men and 
 women, including Mr. Walkley, and that, except 
 perhaps in temper, nobody is a halfpenny the worse. 
 I have even my own doubts as to whether, if the 
 author had been forthcoming, Mr. Walkley would 
 have taken him by the throat. That, too, has 
 somewhat the air of a figure of speech. The fact 
 is, there is a touch of sophistry, and even of 
 affectation, in the attempt to class these imaginary 
 sufferings with the real pains of life, whether physical 
 or mental. It would certainly conduce to lucidity 
 if we had a separate set of terms for them. And, 
 this being so, may we not question whether the 
 critic has a moral right to let his nerves get the 
 better of his intelligence to such an extent as to make 
 him incapable of accurate assertion and coherent 
 reasoning with regard to any work of art, however 
 humble ? Is he not, in some sense, deserting his 
 post when he can find nothing better to say than 
 " Ugh ! " (with variations) about such a play as 
 Alans Wife ? Mr. Walkley must excuse me if I 
 cannot accept the theory that volition has nothing 
 to do with the matter, and that he simply cannot 
 keep his head before even (to accept his own 
 description) " a crude and bald statement " of one 
 of the injustices of life. To a very great degree, we 
 i^t\ what we lay ourselves out to feel. It would 
 have needed but a slight effort on Mr. Walkley's part 
 to have remained " resolute and calm " even at sight 
 of those horrific objects, the stretcher and the cradle.
 
 Introduction. xxix 
 
 Was he not bound, for the honour of his craft, to 
 make that effort ? He could then have deprecated 
 the play, if he still felt so disposed, rationally and 
 effectively, doing justice to such merit as it possesses, 
 while arguing, in temperate fashion, that the form of 
 art to which it belongs is, on the whole, undesirable. 
 Is not the critic who refuses calm and courteous 
 consideration to any seriously intended work of art, 
 however mistaken, guilty of infringing the just 
 liberty of artistic experiment ? By all means let 
 us fight for our preferences, according to the rules 
 of the game ; but do not let us claim a suspension 
 of the rules, on the plea of personal disablement, and 
 then shut our eyes and slash around at random. 
 
 " But soft ! " cries Mr. Walkley, " you are all this 
 time assuming the very point which I deny — namely, 
 that Alan's Wife deserves to be classed or treated as 
 a work of art at all." Pardon me : I am not pre- 
 cisely assuming it ; I have tried, as well as I could, to 
 convince the reader that there is " art in this thing." 
 But I have not yet quoted the passage in which 
 Mr. Walkley finally excludes the play from the 
 sphere of art. Here it is : — 
 
 Drama, like any other art, deals with ideas ; bj' ideas it lives 
 and moves and has its being. But there are hateful, intolerable, 
 damnable facts in life which convey no ideas : the mind cannot 
 deal with them, because the force with which they strike us 
 benumbs all thought. They do not interest the spectator ; 
 they stun him. The odious, brutal, cruel malignity of nature, 
 of which Alan's Wife gives us an instance, is outside — whether 
 above or beneath I know not — but it is outside the region of art. 
 
 One might, perhaps, demand some slight definition 
 of the term " idea " before giving unqualified assent
 
 XXX Introduction. 
 
 even to the general proposition that art cannot exist 
 apart from ideas. But, admitting that it cannot, 
 what has that to do with Alan' s Wife ? How is it 
 possible to assert that the play " conveys no ideas " ? 
 By Mr. Walkley's own showing, it conveys at least 
 one very momentous idea — the idea that life, and all 
 that makes life worth living, is for ever at the mercy 
 of brute chance, cruel, capricious, immoral — 
 
 " As flies to wanton boys are we to the gods : 
 They kill us for their sport." 
 
 Is not that a definite enough idea for Mr. Walkley } 
 It may be very false — all the theologies and most of 
 the philosophies of the world have been occupied 
 from time immemorial in proving it so — but 
 an idea it certainly is. It is even the idea which 
 underlies almost all tragedy ; for the notion of 
 tragische Schuld^ the attempt to moralise tragedy, and 
 make suffering correlative with sinning, is a sophistry 
 which I am sure does not deceive so acute a mind as 
 Mr. Walkley's. And not only does the play convey 
 this idea ; it also opens up one of the most solemn 
 and fateful questions of conduct that human life can 
 possibly present. Mr. Walkley himself admits as 
 much, even while appearing to deny it. Read this 
 curious passage from The Speaker of May 6th: — 
 
 There is no intellectual quality in this play. It presents 
 no ethical thesis, no crux, not even any development of 
 character. A poor wretch, maddened by horrible misfortune, 
 her brain still dizzy with the pangs of childbirth, kills her 
 child. Well, this spectacle shocks me, it tears my very 
 heartstrings ; but it gives me nothing to break my mind upon. 
 There is no problem in the case, no outlet for speculation; it 
 is a hopeless impasse. " Not so fast," cries a friend, "you are
 
 Introduction. xxxi 
 
 wrong in calling this woman mad. She is as sane as j'^ou or 
 I, and a little more unflinching in her logic. She kills the 
 child deliberately, out of kindness, to save it from the certainty 
 of worse misfortune than death ; and she goes as deliberately 
 to her own death, feeling that she, like her child, is better out 
 of the world. This is not madness, it is reasoned conviction. 
 And as for intellectual problems, what problem could there 
 be more profound than that of the value of human life ? Are 
 there not, admittedly, cases of hopeless mania or incurable 
 disease — cancer, say, or rapid consumption — in which it would 
 be " a mercy " to put sufferers out of their misery at once ? 
 Ask any physician, and he will tell you of manj' instances 
 in his own experience where the question of " killing — no 
 murder " is at least arguable. This play presents such a case, 
 and, so appeals to the intellect, I can only reply that, even 
 if Alan's Wife raises this question, it does not thereby stand 
 excused. Such a question is one of the gravest which the 
 human mind can consider ; it is only to be solemnly meditated 
 upon in the privacy of the stud}^ A play is a public act 
 performed under conditions the reverse of solemn. The idea 
 of a number of men and women, in lazy after-dinner mood, 
 sitting at ease in their stalls, extracting a new sensation for 
 their jaded nerves out of such a question as this, treating it as 
 a chasse to their coffee or a whet for their supper, is positively 
 nauseous. But, of course, Alan's Wife does not raise this 
 question. The most determined advocates for a revision of 
 the popular views on the sacro-sanctity of human life would 
 shrink from arguing that the — possibly beneficent — task of 
 putting a crippled child out of its misery should be confided to 
 the child's own mother. Look at it how you may, I submit 
 that this play ought never to have been written. 
 
 Is not this a curious feat of logic? Because Mr. 
 Walkley chooses, in an off-hand sentence, to decide 
 the question, it follows that " of course " the play 
 does not open it up ! Could there be a more delicious 
 contradiction in terms.'' Imagine a judge who should 
 say, " Because I deliver such and such a judgment in 
 this case, therefore the case has never been brought
 
 xxxii Introduction. 
 
 before the court " ! That is exactly Mr. Walkley's 
 position. Even supposing his ruling to be beyond 
 appeal, is it not precisely Alans Wife which has raised 
 the question and thus secured its final settlement ? 
 But I am afraid there are stifFnecked casuists who 
 will not accept Mr. Walkley's judgment as final, and 
 will not " shrink from arguing " that Jean did right. 
 Whether such a task " should be confided to the 
 child's own mother " is a further question for con- 
 sideration : there is not the least doubt that under 
 existing conditions it is thrust upon her. If the 
 child is to be " set free " at all, it is clearly she ^ho 
 must do it. She cannot send for the Sanitary 
 Inspector or move the Court of Chancery for an 
 order. Is it not clear, then, that the play does raise 
 two questions : (i) Did Jean do right under the 
 circumstances ? (2) Ought the circumstances, and 
 especially the legal circumstances, to be as they are '^. 
 Is there nothing here for Mr. Walkley " to break 
 his mind upon " } You can always avoid breaking 
 your mind upon a question by the simple process of 
 begging it ; and that is precisely what Mr. Walkley 
 has done. 
 
 Still more curious, however, is his attempt to show 
 that if Alans Wife does raise these questions, it 
 has no business to. If any one else were to argue 
 that the " lazy after-dinner mood '' of the average 
 sensual man was to be the ultimate measure of the 
 intellectual possibilities of drama, I can imagine the 
 delicate but none the less scornful ironv with which 
 Mr. Walkley would treat him. If any one else were 
 to assume that the drama could not, or at any rate 
 should not in decency, be anything more than a chasse
 
 Introduction. xxxiii 
 
 to the world's coffee, Mr. WaJkley would be the 
 very man to make him feel sorry he spoke. But I 
 do not rely upon the mere general tendency of Mr. 
 Walkley's writings to prove that, had he been quite 
 himself, he would never have dreamt of thus de- 
 grading an art which, with all its drawbacks and 
 limitations, he loves as well as any of us. It so 
 happens that another play raises precisely the question 
 which is raised in Alan s Wife^ and that of that play, 
 when the majority of the critics were shrieking 
 themselves black in the face in declaring it " outside 
 the region of art," Mr. Walkley was one of the 
 foremost champions. I refer, of course, to Ibsen's 
 Gengangere. If it be " positively nauseous " for " a 
 number of men and women, in lazy after-dinner 
 mood " to consider the question whether a mother 
 is justified in taking the life of her hopelessly afflicted 
 son, why did Mr. Walkley omit to be nauseated 
 when Ghosts was produced ? And why did he not 
 tell us then that " of course Ghosts does not raise 
 this question at all," because he (Mr. Walkley) is of 
 opinion that " the task of putting a brain-sick child 
 out of its misery should not be confided to the child's 
 own mother " ? He cannot even reply that when 
 he saw Ghosts he was not in a lazy after-dinner, but 
 in an alert before-dinner, mood ; for the first per- 
 formance of Ghosts took place in the evening. One 
 can only conjecture that, for that occasion only, Mr. 
 Walkley, like the Hunters of the Snark, must have 
 breakfasted at afternoon tea and dined on the 
 following day. For the sake of the realistic, and 
 indeed the serious drama of all sorts, it were much 
 to be desired that the critic's mealtimes might be
 
 xxxiv Introduction. 
 
 permanently so arranged, and that, in dealing with 
 any form of art higher than Gaiety burlesque, he 
 should be in a position, like Johnson, to subscribe 
 himself "A. B. W., impransus." 
 
 One last instance of the disarray into which 
 Mr. Walkiey's intelligence is thrown by Alan* s Wife. 
 In 'The Speaker of July 8 th, writing of the production 
 of CEdipe Roi^ by the Comedie Fran^aise, he thus 
 expresses himself : 
 
 The playful critic who has rallied me this week for not 
 shrinking in sympathy at the sight of (Edipus and his agony, 
 as I shrank in horror from the brutalities of Alan's Wife, is too 
 clear-minded, surely, not to perceive the essential difference 
 between the two cases. The modern play was a piece of crude 
 and ignoble realism : its whole impact was centred in the 
 display of ph3'sical suffering. One had the same shock, 
 because one had the same feeling of every-day actuality, in the 
 theatre, as though one had seen a man run over by an omnibus 
 in the Strand outside. But the whole atmosphere of Sophocles' 
 tragedy is too lofty, too remote from modern life, for the 
 spectator ever to be illuded. When (Edipus puts out his eyes 
 I am not in the least pained, because I do not for an instant 
 forget that I am looking at an actor playing a part. The 
 whole thing is as artificial to me as an opera. Moreover, this 
 spectacle of physical suflTering is a mere incident in the play, 
 not its be-all and end-all. There is no loss of human dignity ; 
 so that my " pity and terror " have been " purged " in the true 
 Aristotelian sense. 
 
 The " playful critic " was I, though I don't know 
 what I have done to merit the epithet ; and I am 
 certainly "clear-minded enough to perceive an essential 
 difference between the two cases," though not that 
 which Mr. Walkley perceives. The difference is — 
 and here again the question is not one of opinion but 
 of fact — that in Alan* s Wife no *' physical suffering" 
 is " displayed " for so much as a single moment, while
 
 Introduction. xxxv 
 
 in CEdipe Roi acute and intolerable physical suffering 
 is displayed for something like half an hour, with 
 a lavish employment of that red-ochre which to Mr. 
 Walkley's mind seems to represent" a horror's crown 
 of horror." In Alan's JVife^ Alan is dead before we 
 even hear of the accident — " After life's fitful fever 
 he sleeps well " — and the baby is supposed to sleep 
 almost as well up to the moment when the curtain 
 falls upon the mother approaching the cradle. Where 
 in all this is that " display of physical suffering " upon 
 which the " whole impact" of the play " was centred " ? 
 Who would not gather from Mr. Walkley's words 
 that Alan was brought on shrieking with anguish, 
 that his ghastly mutilations were displayed to the 
 public, that he died in visible torment, perhaps under 
 the surgeon's knife, that the baby was represented as 
 wailing in illness all through the second act, and that 
 finally we assisted at a long and painful smothering- 
 scene on the open stage ? That is how the play 
 would have been arranged had its " impact centred 
 on the display of physical suffering." Sophocles, 
 again, or rather his interpreters in the first theatre in 
 the world, showed us CEdipus with the blood streaming 
 down his face from the empty sockets out of which the 
 eyes had been torn only a moment before. Can you 
 imagine any more ghastly, more appalling, " display of 
 physical suffering " ? And observe that it is not at all 
 necessary for the purposes of the drama. The idea of 
 CEdipus's self-mutilation would be quite sufficiently 
 conveyed if he appeared with a bandage over his eyes, 
 the wounds having been hastily staunched. The 
 truth is that in the Greek tragedy the horror was 
 deliberately heightened by means of the physical
 
 xxxvi Introduction. 
 
 display of physical suffering, while the author of the 
 English play, concerned only with the idea and not 
 with the physical facts, kept all actual suffering 
 sedulously out of sight. I am not arguing that 
 Sophocles and Mounet Sully were guilty of transgress- 
 ing the limits of art, and ought to be taken by the 
 throat and " Ugh'd " into penitence. I am only 
 insisting on the stubborn facts of the two cases, as 
 against Mr. Walkley's misrepresentation, not to say 
 inversion, of them. In the interests of the lucidity he 
 so justly prizes, Mr. Walkley ought to remember that 
 it is neither fair nor rational to dwell upon a fantastic 
 reductio ad absurdum until it assumes the stability of 
 an actual fact. He began by asking " Why is the 
 playwright content with showing us the woman's 
 horror at the thing on the bier.f^ Why not bring the 
 bier down to the footlights and shock us all with it }" 
 — and then he proceeded to aver that the playwright 
 had actually done what the critic chose to consider 
 that he might as well have done, and has ever since 
 written of the play on that assumption. Mr. Walkley 
 — though this is almost incredible — may perceive no 
 essential difference between a thing presented to the 
 senses and a thing suggested to the imagination ; but 
 he ought not to write as though his inability to 
 grasp the distinction between an actual and a sup- 
 posititious fact were sufficient of itself to make the 
 supposititious fact actual. 
 
 If Mr. Walkley really requires to be told why the 
 playwright "was content" to show the bier without 
 showing the mangled body, I will try to satisfy his 
 curiosity. There were clearly three courses open : 
 (i) What would have been called in Greek tragedy
 
 Introduction. xxxvii 
 
 a ''messenger scene," a " recit de Theramene," a 
 verbal account of the accident. (2) The bnnging 
 on of the body, so that Jean should see it, but the 
 audience should not. (3) The open display of the 
 mangled corpse both to Jean and to the audience. 
 These are totally distinct alternatives, and it is folly 
 to pretend that 1 and 3 are practically identical, 
 any more than i and 2, or i and 3. But what was 
 the object to be gained ? What was the function 
 of the scene in the economy of the play ? Surely 
 to show Jean's terrible "peripeteia" from exultant 
 happiness to abject misery, and at the same time 
 to make us realise the shock to her system which 
 resulted in the second " bludgeoning of chance," 
 the deformity of her child. Now how was this end 
 to be compassed at once effectually and (to the 
 audience) humanely, or, in other words, in the most 
 artistic fashion } Method 3 was at once out of 
 the question ; there was no reason in the world 
 why the audience should see the mangled corpse. 
 Method I would either have been totally ineffective 
 and unconvincing, or else far more painful than the 
 method actually chosen. Mr. Walkley himself 
 would scarcely have been satisfied if some one had 
 simply come in and announced "Your husband has 
 been killed at the works," and the curtain had 
 fallen on that unvarnished statement ; and, on the 
 other hand, a lengthened breaking of the news and 
 description of the accident would have been agonising 
 if well done, tedious if ill done, and in either case 
 very imperfectly premonitory of Jean's second disaster. 
 I submit, then, that in selecting Method 2, in subject- 
 ing Jean and the audience to a " short, sharp shock,"
 
 xxxviii Introduction. 
 
 the author chose precisely the right, the artistic, 
 comproniise between feebleness and brutality. 
 
 All . this argument, however, leaves untouched 
 the one essential fact that Alan'' s Wife aroused 
 nothing but violent antipathy in a very able and 
 usually very candid critic, who has again and again 
 shown keen discrimination, delicate sympathy, and 
 unimpeachable openness of mind, in dealing with 
 plays of far greater intellectual calibre than this. 
 I have tried to show that the reasons he himself 
 alleges for this antipathy are untenable, inconsistent, 
 and founded, in great measure, on misapprehensions 
 of fact. But the antipathy remains undeniable, 
 though Mr. Walkley may have failed to provide an 
 adequate explanation of it. That very failure is a 
 testimony to its uncontrollable vehemence. We 
 have clearly not got at the root of the matter until 
 we have discovered the real reasons why Alans Wife 
 has managed to throw such a critic into such a 
 state of mind. In these real reasons, if we can 
 only find them, must lie the vindication or con- 
 demnation of the play. Let us set about the search. 
 
 There are two clearly recognised and accepted 
 (though not always clearly distinguishable) orders 
 of tragedy : the tragedy of Fate, and the tragedy of 
 Free-Will, or in other words of Character. Antique 
 tragedy, broadly speaking, belongs to the former 
 order, modern tragedy to the latter. Now, in both 
 of these forms of tragedy, our instinct provides us 
 with a palliative or palliatives for the pain they 
 inflict upon us. Out of these presentations of the 
 evil of life, the alchymy of our "will to live"
 
 Introduction. xxxix 
 
 extracts, by irrational and illusory but none the 
 less effectual methods, a certain sense of comfort 
 and reassurance. The feelings which induce us not 
 only to endure but to delight in pictures of the 
 night side of life are so complex that it would need 
 a volume rather than a paragraph to unravel them ; 
 but some of the main threads of the tangle may be 
 picked out with comparative ease. 
 
 Antique tragedy had of course a religious and 
 and patriotic attraction for its original audiences ; 
 and even in its purely-human aspect, its terrors 
 were mitigated by the remoteness and dignity of 
 its themes. Even to the Athenians, the mythic past 
 of their race seemed indefinitely far off. ^' There 
 were giants in those days," thought the burgess of 
 Athens, as he saw the cothurnate figures of demigods, 
 heroes and kings stalking across the empurpled scene. 
 He contrasted his own gay, commonplace, civilised 
 life with the fate-haunted existences of these " mighty 
 monarchs in their misery dead," and he felt a new 
 sense of security in the humbleness of his lot. 
 Great crimes, awful retributions, tragic destinies as 
 a whole, seemed the exclusive appanage of a long- 
 extinct generation of superhuman beings.* And 
 
 * This is in apparent conflict, I am aware, with Aristotle's 
 theory of pity and terror as expounded by Lessing; but if 
 Lessing's exposition be as just as it is ingenious, it is evident 
 that Aristotle must have been speculating on the effect of 
 ideal tragedy upon an ideal hearer rather than examining 
 into the psychology of an actual audience. Moreover, it might 
 not be impossible, though it would certainly be tedious, to 
 reconcile the Lessing-Aristotle theory with that above stated. 
 It is all a matter, no doubt, of the different planes of con- 
 sciousness or sub-consciousness.
 
 X 
 
 1 Introduction. 
 
 this feeling is naturally even stronger in us moderns 
 than in the ancients. The tragedy of Fate is, to us, 
 entirely unreal. As Mr. Walkley very truly says 
 of the CEdipus 'Tyrannus, " its whole atmosphere is 
 too lofty, too remote from modern life, for the 
 spectator ever to be illuded." We are willing to 
 conceive that at Thebes or Mycenae, at Dunsinane 
 or even at Ravenswood, men may have been the 
 playthings of a blind fore-ordinance, essentially 
 immoral, though sometimes masking its caprices 
 under a hypocritical show of retributive justice ; but 
 we instinctively relegate the operation of such a 
 power to bygone, and generally to mythic, ages, 
 and conceive it as affecting only a very limited class 
 of persons of exalted and even semi-divine lineage. 
 With modern and middle-class mankind, Destiny has 
 nothing to do. It would be the very extravagance 
 of burlesque to represent the House of Smith, like 
 the House of Pelops, blindly working out the 
 decrees of Fate. We trace these legends back to 
 their source in primitive folk-lore, and regard them 
 as mere glorified nursery-tales. Their bearing upon 
 actual life is symbolic, not direct and practical. 
 They have literally " no terrors for us." 
 
 To this class of tragedies AlarC s Wife clearly does 
 not belong. It does not deal with a mythic past 
 or with a race of demigods. It does not postulate 
 a malevolent personal Power, as fabulous as the 
 chima^-ra to our reason, and even to our superstition 
 as extinct as the megalosaurus. All the alchymy of 
 our inborn optimism can extract from it no illusion 
 of security, no gleam of reassurance. It inverts the 
 Horatian warning, and reminds us that not Fate,
 
 Introduction. xli 
 
 but Fatality, visits the cabins of the poor no less 
 than the towers of kings. It allows us none of the 
 Lucretian " suavity " of watching from the shore 
 the struggles of doomed seafarers in the jaws of the 
 deep. We feel that we are all in the same boat, and 
 that is the very feeling which some of us, most of 
 us, resent, and would like to strangle. Then, when 
 it eludes our clutches, we propose, as the next best 
 form of protest, to throttle the wretch who inflicted 
 it upon us. 
 
 Where, now, lies the solace, the palliative in 
 modern tragedy, the tragedy of Free-will or of 
 Character ? Why, simply in the feeling which the 
 poet has thus artlessly expressed : "Be warned in 
 time by others' harms, and you shall do full well." 
 There is always a moral to the tragedy of free-will, 
 and poor humanity has a touching faith in morals. 
 Othello waves like a red flag over the pitfall of 
 iealousv, Lear flashes like a lurid danger-signal on 
 the down gradient of doting confidence and senile 
 thirst for lip-homage. In most cases, too, we can 
 relieve our overwrought feeling-s by execrating the 
 villain or villains — lago, Claudius, Edmund, Goneril, 
 Regan, lachimo. No one who has frequented our 
 melodramatic theatres — and melodrama is only bas- 
 tard tragedy — can doubt the reality and acuteness 
 of this childish satisfaction. Here is a visible, 
 tangible object on which to wreak our vengeance 
 for the discomfort inflicted on our sensibilities. We 
 are even spared the personal trouble of taking 
 him by the throat. We sit quietly by and see him 
 hoist with his own petard — stabbed, poisoned or 
 handcufl^ed as the case may be — and we go on our
 
 xlii Introduction. 
 
 way with the comfortable assurance that " though 
 the mills of God grind slowly, yet they grind 
 exceeding small." Even where, as in The Second 
 Mrs. Tanqueray y there is no out-and-out villain, and 
 the moral is an indefinite one, we feel that we have 
 been shown faults of character to be avoided, and have 
 received a lesson which is none the less useful and 
 important because it eludes formulation in a single 
 phrase. The tragedy of character, in short, appeals 
 to our utilitarian instincts. It makes for righteous- 
 ness or for worldly wisdom. It gives us a sense of 
 reassurance which is not always or altogether illusory. 
 If our heart-strings have been wrung, they have not 
 been wrung in vain. 
 
 But Alan's Wife is not a tragedy of character. 
 Jean does not suffer either because she is virtuous or 
 because she is vicious. There is no warning for us 
 in her calamity, for nothing she could have done 
 or left undone would have averted it. There is no 
 villain for us to take by the throat, for we cannot 
 wreak vengeance upon intangible, impersonal Fatality. 
 It has us in its clutches, not we it ; and, very 
 naturally, we do not relish the predicament. 
 
 This, then, is the upshot of the matter : Alans 
 Wife belongs to a third tragic category, not yet 
 recognised by official criticism — we may call it the 
 tragedy of Fatality. It is quite open to Mr. Walkley 
 to say, " I decline to accept tragedy without its 
 consolations and palliations, real or illusory. I 
 protest against having my heart-strings wrung to no 
 practical end. Your tragedy of Fatality depresses and 
 irritates me. I will have none of it ! Take it away ! " 
 If he had thus decreed la mort sans 'phrase ^ without
 
 Introduction. xliii 
 
 venturing upon a further, and, as I have tried to 
 show, a mistaken analysis of his sensations, his logical 
 position would, as aforesaid, have been inexpugnable, 
 and he would certainly have had the vast majority 
 on his side. But I am, as he was in his time, an 
 advocate of " minority representation " in art, I 
 claim the right of the minority to look at and re- 
 produce life in its own fashion. By all means let 
 the majority lodge its protest ; but why should it 
 take the form of inarticulate noises, misrepresenta- 
 tions of fact, and threats of personal violence ? 
 
 Is it, after all, so utterly inconceivable to a mind 
 like Mr. Walkley's, that there should be a plaisir 
 tout intellectuel et aristocratique in the mere con- 
 statation and realisation, from time to time, of the 
 clumsy and blundering cruelties of life ? He may 
 perhaps suspect me of affecting this feeling because 
 I believe it to be " intellectual and aristocratic " ; 
 but the suspicion is quite unjust. The pleasure is 
 to me as natural and unfactitious as a child's delight 
 in sugar-candy. It is true that there is no con- 
 solation, no encouragement in Alans V/ife^ save only 
 the supreme consolation that " The rest is silence." 
 I should be sorry even to assert that the study of 
 fatality in art will help us to bear it rationally and 
 manfully should it come upon us in real life. It is 
 not impossible ; but I do not pin my faith to any 
 such utilitarian plea. I appeal direct to the absolute 
 experience of a small, but not numerically negligable 
 or intellectually despicable, minority. Do we not 
 find a peculiar and instinctive satisfaction in now and 
 again facing fairly and squarely the very grimmest 
 facts of life } Have we not a certain sense — an
 
 xliv Introduction. 
 
 illusion, if you will — of added human dignity when, 
 renouncing the "consolations" of stereotyped sophis- 
 try, we have recognised and made up our minds 
 to the immitigable cruelty of " the bludgeonings of 
 chance " ? In witnessing such a play as Alans Wife^ 
 do we not seem to be looking life straight in the eyes 
 and saying, " There, you great bully ! We know 
 you ! We are not taken in by your cajoleries ! 
 Now go ahead and do your worst ! " That this is 
 a rational or admirable attitude of mind, I am far 
 from asserting ; it may even be called a sort of cheap 
 posturing, as of Ajax defying a stage thunderbolt; 
 but I own to taking a certain foolish pleasure in it. 
 And, however childish this attitude of mine may be, 
 it behoves even the wisest of us to adopt some attitude 
 towards the sheer horrors of life. Philosophy cannot 
 simply ignore them ; and art, to my thinking, is 
 conterminous with philosophy — in other words, 
 nothing human is alien to it. Why, then, should 
 we despise and reject a play which brings us face 
 to face with one of the darkest problems of existence 
 — the problem of undeserved, fortuitous, purposeless 
 suffering — and treats it delicately, tenderly, humanely, 
 without any of that savage and cynical pessimism 
 which pervades the works of the Theatre-Libre play- 
 wrights ? It will of course be represented that because 
 I praise Alans Wife I want to see the drama entirely 
 given over to gloom and horror. That is mere 
 nonsense. Such works should be exceptional in art, 
 as such miseries are exceptional in life. Only I 
 decline to exclude from the province of art any work 
 which speaks from heart and brain to heart and 
 brain, in however agonising accents.
 
 Introduction. xlv 
 
 Before bringing this long discussion to a close, I 
 must qualify my admission that Alans Wife is not 
 k tragedy of character, Jean, in the second act, 
 becomes a moral, or immoral, agent ; her conduct 
 compels us to reflect upon one of the most moment- 
 ous of ethical problems ; our heart-strings have not 
 been wrung to no purpose. It is the very awfulness 
 of the problem that leads many critics, and Mr. 
 Walkley among the number, to ignore or elude it. 
 Mr. Walkley, as we have seen above, simply begs 
 the question and goes on his way rejoicing ; other 
 critics assume that a mother who can possibly kill 
 her child must be out of her mind, and talk about 
 "puerperal mania," studies in insanity, and so forth. 
 Of course this is partly their fun ; but some of them 
 appear seriously to believe that we are intended to 
 regard Jean Creyke as insane. Nothing, I am sure, 
 could be further from the intention of either Swedish 
 authoress or English author. Every stage in the 
 process of thought and feeling that leads Jean up to 
 her terrible deed is as clear daylight. This facile 
 verdict of insanity is worthy only of a coroner's jury, 
 not of a critical College of Justice. Immediately a 
 cry of horror is raised : " What ! she is not insane ! 
 Then we are asked to applaud her action, and to 
 admit that all deformed children ought to be 
 smothered ! " Surely not. Since when have we been 
 expected to approve every sane action that is presented 
 on the stage ? There is a vast space of intermediate 
 ground between a criminal lunatic and an ideal 
 heroine held up for imitation ; and to cover that 
 space at one leap is surely to beat the record in ratio- 
 cinative athletics. Jean Creyke, certainly, is neither
 
 xlvi Introduction. 
 
 lunatic nor heroine. She is a terribly afflicted woman, 
 that is all, who acts as, somewhere or other in the 
 world, some similarly tortured creature is doubtless 
 acting at the very moment when I write these words. 
 Doubtless, too, there are thousands of other women 
 bearing even greater burdens with stupid resignation 
 or with cheerful fortitude. All three phases — the 
 rebellious, the callous, and the stoical — are in them- 
 selves equally interesting, but the rebellious phase 
 happens to be by far the most dramatic. It is not 
 in the least necessary that we should either approve 
 or condemn Jean's action. To my thinking the great 
 tragic value of the theme lies in the fact that we 
 can do neither with a whole heart. If you want to 
 know my own private sentiment on the subject 
 (though that is quite beside the artistic question), I 
 think with Jean that she must die, that life is im- 
 possible to her after such an act, but that hers is a 
 case for the lethal chamber which Mr. George R. Sims 
 was commending the other day rather than for the 
 common gallows. But there is not the slightest 
 reason why one's own particular judgment of the case 
 of conscience should aifect one's estimate of the work 
 of art. Our appreciation of the Choephori does not 
 depend (does it ^) upon our approval or disapproval 
 of Orestes' matricide. Some may applaud it, some 
 condemn ; the majority, probably, {ttl with me that 
 the situation stands on the highest tragic plane 
 precisely because we can neither freely applaud nor 
 condemn utterly ; but all three parties are at one in 
 recognising the greatness of the tragedy. Well, 
 Alans Wife is a little tragedy, not a great one ; 
 but Jean Creyke has this in common with Orestes,
 
 Introduction. xlvii 
 
 that she is placed in one of those agonising 
 dilemmas where it seems equally impossible, equally 
 inhuman, to act or to refrain. If she were insane, 
 the ethical problem would vanish, and we should 
 have nothing but a study in mental pathology. 
 I don't say that that might not have its interest, 
 but it is not the interest at which the author has 
 aimed. 
 
 Another friend of mine, whose opinion of the play 
 is but little higher than Mr. Walkley's, takes very 
 different ground against it. So far from thinking 
 the theme too horrible for artistic treatment, he 
 objects that far too much fuss is made about it. 
 He writes as follows : 
 
 I believe the real difference between us is caused by the 
 play being real to me in a way that it is not to you, or to 
 the author. To you the incident is imaginary ; now to me it 
 is comparatively common. Women do, as a matter of fact, 
 polish off invalids and children on the ground that it is the 
 most sensible and humane thing to do. Infanticide on that 
 and other grounds is not a thing that women confess to ; but 
 every coroner knows how frequent it is. And the women are 
 not at all uncommon who, if they don't exactly give Oswald 
 the morphia, nevertheless deliberately and affectionately read 
 the doctor's instructions backwards. Such women are not in 
 the least like Jean, and never do it in Jean's way. They don't 
 get hung ; and they don't repent : on the contrary, they are 
 invariably proud of having done the right thing. The tragedy, 
 if there is a tragedy, lies in the thing itself, and not in the 
 fuss that is made about it. To represent a woman killing 
 her child in such a way as to convince nine-tenths of the 
 audience that she is suffering from puerperal mania, and 
 then getting hung for it, is to my mind shirking the problem 
 as completely as it can be shirked without ignoring it 
 altogether. 
 
 If I were to treat the subject, I should represent Jean as a
 
 xlviii Introduction. 
 
 rational being in society as it exists at present ; and I should 
 show her killing the child with cool and successful precautions 
 against being found out. I should then represent her mother 
 and the parson and all the neighbours as being morally certain 
 that she had done it, and herself as keeping up no greater 
 pretence to the contrary than might be needed to save her neck. 
 And I should represent their theories as to their own horror 
 and her remorse as breaking down signally in practice, leaving 
 her, when she had recovered from the natural grief produced 
 by the sawing episode and so forth, the happiest and most 
 sincerely respected woman in the parish. 
 
 I wish Mr. would write his play, or rather 
 
 his novel, for I defy him to construct a possible play 
 on the lines he indicates ; but I cannot see why, 
 because one author would treat a theme in one 
 way, another author must not treat it in another. 
 
 Mr. , like Mr. Walkley, though in the opposite 
 
 sense, is simply begging the question. *' Jean clearly 
 ought not to have killed the child," says the one 
 critic, " therefore the question has not been raised." 
 " She ought to have killed the child in cold blood, 
 and ought not to have been hung for it," cries the 
 other critic, "therefore the question is completely 
 shirked." What is this but the good old British 
 habit of treating a drama as though it were a political 
 oration, and applauding or hissing it, without any- 
 thought of its dramatic value, according as one 
 happens to agree or disagree with its practical con- 
 clusions ? It may be quite true that some women 
 are capable of performing a compassionate murder 
 with calm deliberation, and, like the princess in the 
 fairy tale, living happily ever afterwards ; but it is 
 at least equally certain that many women have not 
 attained that pitch of philosophy. Why blame the
 
 Introduction. xlix 
 
 author of Alans Wife for having chosen to depict 
 one of the latter class ? Jean Creyke's case is of 
 everyday occurrence^, only that, as a rule, the mother 
 takes or tries to take her own life as well. It happens 
 
 that purely intellectual action interests Mr. 
 
 more than emotional action ; but that is surely no 
 adequate reason for demanding that art shall confine 
 its attention to " strong-minded women," and decline 
 to take any account of the weaklings who shrink 
 in anguish from killing a kitten, much more from 
 killing a child. Observe, too, that the women who, 
 
 according to Mr. , are "not in the least like 
 
 Jean/' are not so very unlike her after all. " They 
 don't repent," he says ; "on the contrary they are 
 invariably proud of having done the right thing." 
 This " invariably " is delicious, and throws a flood 
 of light upon the critic's method of conceiving human 
 nature. But we need not go into that at present, 
 for, as it happens, Jean faithfully follows the " in- 
 variable " rule. She does not repent ; she is proud 
 of having done the right thing ; she says so as 
 emphatically as any human being can. Therefore 
 
 Mr. 's only real quarrel with her is that she 
 
 consents to be hung, instead of living happily ever 
 afterwards. No doubt that is weak of her ; but we 
 read in every newspaper of people who elaborately, 
 and at great personal inconvenience, take their own 
 lives for comparatively trifling reasons : why should 
 
 Mr. feel outraged because Jean, after her 
 
 double calamity, welcomes the legal means of exit 
 from a scene on which her part has been so painful ? 
 The fact that she is .willing to die has nothing to 
 do with the question whether the law does right to
 
 1 Introduction. 
 
 kill her. That is one of the questions which the 
 
 play calls upon us to consider, and Mr. has 
 
 every right to express his opinion on the point. 
 But an author cannot justly be accused of "shirking" 
 a problem because he does not argue it out in all 
 its aspects and lay down a definite theory on every 
 point that arises. A play, after all, is a play, not 
 a discussion-forum. It is the author's business, by 
 means of a picture of hfe, to set us thinking, 
 not to do all our thinking for us. This is what 
 Mr. is too apt to forget. 
 
 And now, as I look at the pile of manuscript 
 before me, I feel that some apology is due to the 
 reader, for the glaring disproportion between the 
 prologue and the play. To tell the whole truth, it 
 is the shortness of the play that is chiefly to blame 
 for the length of this introduction. I knew that the 
 publishers were desirous of making the book more 
 or less uniform in point of bulk with the first volume 
 of the series — Mr. Shaw's Widowers^ Houses — and 
 consequently let my pen run on, at its own discretion 
 or indiscretion, in the unwonted enjoyment of in- 
 definite space. At the same time, I have not, like 
 Dogberry, bestowed " all my tediousness " upon the 
 reader. The foregoing brief discussion of the two, 
 or three, orders of tragedy embodies the essence of 
 some fifty folios of manuscript which I cut out as 
 soon as I realised that they did not contain one single 
 mention of Alans Wife, and formed, in fact, a 
 separate essay on " The Paradox of Tragedy." For 
 this heroic excision I claim the reader's gratitude ; 
 but I am myself none the less grateful to the authors
 
 Introduction. li 
 
 — Swedish and English — o^ Alans Wife, for having 
 stimulated me to think out the paradox in question. 
 Like Mr. Walkley, I am all for lucidity ; there is no 
 greater delight in life, it seems to me, than (adapting 
 a hne of Davenant's) "to follow truth through 
 labyrinths of the mind." And is not this Paradox 
 of Tragedy one of the very strangest in life ? But 
 that habit has blunted the wonder of the thing, who 
 would not hold it incredible that mankind — poor 
 purblind humanity, stumbling, along a path beset 
 with pitfalls, from the night to the night — should 
 choose, in its brief rests by the way, to recreate itself 
 with gazing into imaginary abysses ? Strange it is 
 indeed — strange and pathetic. The galley-slave may 
 be doomed, in his dreams, to tug a still heavier oar 
 than that to which his body is chained ; but why do 
 we wilfully and deliberately (or so it seems) conjure 
 up again and again those dreams of ours which we 
 call Agamemnon^ and Antigone, and Othello, and Lear, 
 and Phedre, and 'Tristan und Isolde y and -Geng anger e ? 
 If you think of it for a moment, is it not much more 
 astonishing that any of us should find King Lear 
 endurable than that some of us should find Alans 
 Wife unendurable ? No candid reader, I hope, will 
 accuse me of any such absurdity as ranking this poor 
 little play among the tragic masterpieces of literature. 
 Its *' total cerebration," in the jargjn of the day, is 
 trivial beside that which goes to a serious play 
 by Dumas or Pinero, to say nothing of Wagner or 
 Shakespeare. Moreover, what credit we can allow 
 to the actual brain-work of the play, has to be 
 divided between the Swedish novelist and the English 
 playwright. But a very small voice, with courage,
 
 Hi Introduction. 
 
 insight, and sincerity behind it, may ask a very great 
 question. Alans Wife^ to my thinking, asks two 
 great questions, one ethical the other aesthetic. 
 That is why I am so vehement, and perhaps I should 
 add so prolixj in its defence.
 
 TERRYS THEATRE, 
 
 STRAND, W.C. 
 
 THE INDEPENDENT THEATRE. 
 
 Founder and Sole Director, J. T. GREIN. 
 
 SECOND SEASON, TENTH PERFORMANCE. 
 
 rUESDAT, 2nd May, 1893, 
 
 A Study in Three Scenes, Founded on a Story by 
 
 ELIN AMEEN. 
 
 DRAMATIS PERSONS. 
 
 Jean Creyke .... Miss Elizabeth Robins. 
 Mrs. Holroyd (Jean's Mother) Mrs. E. H. Brooke. 
 
 Mrs. Ridley . 
 J si Woman . 
 2nd Woman . 
 Jamie Warren 
 Colonel Steiaaii 
 Roberts (Chief Warder) 
 1st Warder 
 2nd Warder . 
 
 Mrs. Edmund Phelps. 
 Miss Mabel Hardy. 
 Miss Annie Saker. 
 Mr. James Welch. 
 Mr. Mervyn Herapath. 
 Mr. Waller. 
 Mr. Charles Greeven. 
 Mr. E. G. Waller. 
 
 The Tlay produced under the direction of 
 Mr. H. de Lance.
 
 The Action of the Play takes place in a Village in 
 the North of England, at the Present Day.
 
 Alan's Wife. 
 
 5^ 
 
 SCENE I. 
 
 A village street runs transversely from front 
 corner, r, to back, l. At right angles to it, 
 starting from front corner, l, the outside of a 
 workman's cottage. Door leading to passage : 
 a window on each side of it, through which 
 glimpses can be obtained of cottage interior. The 
 central portion of the stage, in the angle between 
 the street and the cottage, represents the cottage 
 garden, shut off from the street by a low fence 
 with a gate in it. A bench runs along the cottage 
 wall: by it a table, on which are piled up plates, 
 knives, etc., ready for the table to be laid. 
 
 {Mrs. Holroyd discovered sitting on bench outside 
 house to the right of door, knitting. People 
 passing along the street. Two men pass 
 with a little child between them, then a little 
 girl^ then a woman carrying a child.) 
 
 Woman. 
 {as she passes to Mrs. Holroyd) A fine day !
 
 2 Alan's Wife. [sc. i. 
 
 Mrs. Holroyd. 
 {nodding) Ay, it's a fine day ! (The woman passes 
 on.) 
 
 Mrs. Ridley. 
 [comes alojig with a basket on her arm — she stops) 
 Good morning, Mrs. Holroyd ! 
 
 Mrs. Holroyd. 
 Good morning to you, Mrs. Ridley : it's a warm 
 day! 
 
 Mrs. Ridley. 
 And you look very comfortable there. 
 
 Mrs. Holroyd. 
 Yes, it's nice out here — sit you down and rest a 
 bit ; you'll be tired after your marketing. 
 
 Mrs. Ridley. 
 {sitting down by her on the seat) Well, I don't say I 
 won't be glad of a rest. It's fine to see you settled 
 in your daughter's house for a bit, like this. 
 
 Mrs. Holroyd. 
 It's the only place I do feel settled in, now she's 
 married. I just feel lost in my own house without 
 her. 
 
 Mrs. Ridley. 
 Ay, you will that, [t's bad when lassies take up 
 with their husbands and leave their mothers alone. 
 
 Mrs. Holroyd. 
 Ay, you may well say so ! And Jean is all I have. 
 I never had a lad of my own, or another lass either, 
 and it's hard to be left when one is getting into 
 years.
 
 sc. I.] Alan's Wife. 3 
 
 Mrs. Ridley. 
 
 Still, you must be glad she has got a good hus- 
 band, that can work hard and give her all she wants. 
 
 Mrs. Holroyd. 
 
 Ay, Alan Creyke's a fine fellow, no doubt, and 
 they' say he'll soon be foreman. But I did think my 
 Jean would have looked higher. I always thought 
 she would marry a schoolmaster, as I did, or even a 
 minister, — seeing all the book-learnhig she got from 
 her poor father. She knows as much as any lady, I 
 do believe. 
 
 Mrs. Ridley. 
 
 Ay, it's wonderful what the books '11 do. They 
 say young Mr. Warren, that's just come to the 
 chapel here, has got more book-learning than the 
 schoolmaster himself, and can talk about it so as no 
 one can understand him. Eh, but it's fine to know 
 as much as that ! 
 
 Mrs. Holroyd. 
 {with a sigh) It is indeed ! And, Mrs. Ridley, as 
 sure as you see me sitting here beside you, there was 
 a time when that young man was after our Jean, and 
 she might have been the mistress of yon pretty house 
 near the chapel, instead of living in a cottage like 
 •this. 
 
 Mrs. Ridley. 
 
 Dear, dear ! To think of that ! Ah well, it's no 
 wonder you're put about at the way she chose. 
 
 Mrs. Holroyd. 
 I don't say that Alan isn't a good husband, mind 
 you, and a good worker too — only I did hope to see 
 my girl a bit grander than she is, as mothers will.
 
 4 Alan's Wife. [sc. i. 
 
 Mrs. Ridley. 
 Ah well, young people will do their own way. 
 You must just make up your mind to it, Mrs. Hol- 
 royd. I fear the book-learning doesn't go for much 
 with the lassies, where a fine fellow like Creyke is 
 concerned — and after all, as to the cottage, it's a nice 
 little place, and she keeps it beautiful ! 
 
 Mrs. Holroyd. 
 She does that — and she wouldn't be her mother's 
 daughter if she didn't. And the pleasure she takes 
 in it, too ! keeping it as bright and shining as if 
 there were five or six pair of hands to do it ! She 
 and Allan are nobbut two children about it, and their 
 house is just like a new toy. 
 
 Mrs. Ridley. 
 Well, that's right ! let them be happy now, poor 
 things ; they'll leave it off soon enough. 
 
 Mrs. Holroyd. 
 Eh, yes, I doubt they will, like other folk. 
 
 Mrs. Ridley. 
 Where is Jean ? I should like to wish her good 
 morning. Is she in ? 
 
 Mrs. Holroyd. 
 Yes, she's in the kitchen, I believe. {Calls) Jean, 
 Jean ! What are you doing, honey ? Here's a 
 neighbour come to see you. 
 
 Jean. ^ 
 {from within room to the l) I'll come directly. I'm 
 getting Alan's dinner ready. I can't leave the sauce- 
 pan.
 
 sc. I.] Alan's Wife. 5 
 
 Mrs. Ridley. 
 {smiling) Ay, getting Alan's dinner ready ! That's 
 the way of it. 
 
 Mrs. Holroyd. 
 Yes, it's always Alan's dinner, or Alan's tea, or 
 Alan's supper, or Alan's pipe. There isn't another 
 man in the North gets waited on as he does. 
 
 Mrs. Ridley. 
 Eh, but that's what he'll want to keep him in his 
 home ; they're bad to please, is tKe men, unless you 
 spoil them. [Bell begins to ring outside.) There's 
 the mid- day bell from the works. Creyke '11 soon be 
 here now — I must be getting home too. 
 
 Mrs. Holroyd. 
 Eh, now, but Jean would have liked to shake 
 hands with ye. {Calls) Jean ! Jean ! Be quick, 
 child ! 
 
 Jean. 
 {fro7n within) Just ready, mother — I'm lifting it off 
 the fire. 
 
 Mrs. Ridley. 
 {looking along the street) And in the nick of time 
 too, for here are the men. {T^wo or three men 'Lualk 
 past.) Yes, hurry up, Jean, or your man will be 
 here before his dinner's ready. 
 
 Jean. 
 (^from within) No, no, he won't. {Appears in door- 
 way of cottage.) Here it is ! {Comes out carrying 
 a large smoking dish in her hand^ which she puts on 
 the table) There ! How are you, Mrs. Ridley 
 {Shakes hands with her.) 
 
 3
 
 6 Alan's Wife. [sc. i. 
 
 Mrs. Ridley. 
 Nicely, thank you. And are you going to get 
 your dinner outside then ? 
 
 Jean. 
 Yes, indeed ; let's be in the air while we can — 
 it's not often we have it as fine as this. 
 
 Mrs. Holroyd. 
 I never saw such a lass for fresh air ! and Alan is 
 just as bad. 
 
 Mrs. Ridley. 
 Well, they'll take no harm with it, I daresay ; 
 fresh air is bad for nowt but cobwebs, as the 
 saying is. 
 
 Jean. 
 {laughs) Ah, that's true enough ! (arranging table) 
 Now then, if that isn't a dinner fit for a king ! 
 
 Mrs. Ridley. 
 i\nd I'll be bound, if it is, you won't be thinking 
 it too good for your husband. 
 
 Jean. 
 Too good ! I should think not ! Is anything too 
 good for him ^ Is anything good enough } 
 
 Mrs. Holroyd. 
 (smiling) Ah, Jean, Jean ! 
 
 Jean. 
 Well, mother, you know quite well it's true ! 
 Isn't he the best husband a girl ever had } And the 
 handsomest, and the strongest ? 
 
 Mrs. Holroyd. 
 Ah, yes, he's all that, I daresay.
 
 sc. I.] Alan's Wife. 7 
 
 Jean. 
 {vigorously wiping tumblers) Well, what more do 
 you want ? 
 
 Mrs. Holroyd. 
 Ah, my dear, as I've often told you, I should like 
 you to have looked higher. 
 
 Jean. 
 Looked higher ! How could I have looked 
 higher than Alan ? 
 
 Mrs. Holroyd. 
 I wanted to see you marry a scholar. 
 
 Jean. 
 We can't all marry scholars, mother dear — some of 
 us prefer marrying men instead. {Qoes into house.) 
 
 Mrs. Ridley. 
 The lass is right — there must be some of that sort 
 that there may be some of all sorts, as the saying is ; 
 and, neighbour, you must just make the best of it, 
 and be pleased with the man that's made her look so 
 happy. {^Getting up.) 
 
 Mrs. Holroyd. 
 {stniling) Ay, she looks bright enough, in all 
 conscience. {Jean comes back with cheese and butter 
 on a dish.) 
 
 Mrs. Ridley. 
 {smiling at Jean) She does that, indeed ! Well, 
 you won't have to wait long for him now, honey. 
 Here they come down the road, and I must get back 
 to my two lads. Good day to you both. {Exit 
 through garden gate and up street y to the l, exchanging 
 greetings with passiiig workmen.)
 
 8 Alan's Wife. [sc. i. 
 
 Jean. 
 {cutting bread) Scholar, indeed ! Mother, how can 
 you say such things before folks ? I know what 
 you mean when you say scholar — yon minister, poor 
 little Jamie Warren. 
 
 Mrs. Holrovd. 
 Ah, Jean, how can you speak so ! He's a man 
 
 who is looked up to by everybody. Didn't he go 
 up to the big house last Christmastide, to dinner 
 with the gentry, just like one of themselves ? 
 
 Jean. 
 
 Well, that's right enough if it pleased him, but 
 I shouldn't care to go among folk who thought 
 themselves my betters, (look from Mrs. Holroyd) 
 No, I shouldn't. I like Jamie, and have done ever 
 since we were boy and girl together ; but it's a 
 far cry to think of taking him for my master ! no, 
 mother, that's not my kind. {Goes to tub under the 
 window^ wrings out tea cloths and hangs them on 
 picket fence.) 
 
 Mrs. Holroyd. 
 
 Ah, Jean, what would your poor father have said ! 
 When you and Jamie used to play together on the 
 village green and go to school together, and Jamie 
 was minding his books and getting all the prizes, 
 your father used to say, " When that lad grows up, 
 he'll be the husband for Jean — he's a good lad, he 
 never gets into mischief; he's never without a book 
 in his hand." 
 
 Jean. 
 
 Ah, poor father ! but what would / have done 
 with a good boy who never got into mischief !
 
 sc. I.] Alan's Wife. 9 
 
 (laughs) No, I always knew it wasn't to be Jamie. 
 Why, I remember as far back as when Jamie and I 
 used to come from school, and I'd rush on before 
 and go flying up on the moors, to find the stags- 
 horn moss, with the heathery wind in my face, and 
 hear the whirring summer sounds around us, I used 
 to want to shout aloud, just for the pleasure of being 
 alive — and Jamie, poor little creature, used to come 
 toiling up after me, and call out, " Not so fast, Jean, 
 I'm out of breath, wait for me ! " And / used to 
 have to help him up ! 
 
 Mrs. Holroyd. 
 
 Well, perhaps he couldn't run and jump as well 
 as you, but he had read all about the flowers and 
 plants in his book, and could tell you the names of 
 every one of them. 
 
 Jean. 
 
 Ay, their names, perhaps; but he couldn't swing 
 himself up to the steep places where they grew to 
 pull them for me. He was afraid — afraid ! while I, 
 a girl, didn't know what it was like to be afraid. I 
 don't know now. 
 
 Mrs. Holroyd. 
 
 Maybe — but he would have been a good husband 
 for all that ! 
 
 Jean. 
 
 Not for me. I want a husband who is brave and 
 strong, a man who is my master as well as other 
 folks' ; who loves the hills and the heather, and 
 loves to feel the strong wind blowing in his face 
 and the blood rushing through his veins ! Ah ! 
 to be happy — to be alive !
 
 lo Alan's Wife. [sc. i. 
 
 Mrs. Holroyd. 
 
 Oh, Jean, you always were a strange girl ! [Two 
 men pass.) 
 
 Jean. 
 
 Ahy mother, can't you see how fine it is to have 
 life, and health, and strength ! Jamie Warren, 
 indeed ! Think of the way he comes along, poor 
 fellow, as though he were scared of coming into 
 bits if he moved faster ! And the way Alan comes 
 striding and swinging down the street, with his head 
 up, looking as if the world belonged to him ! Ah ! 
 it's good to be as happy as I am ! 
 
 Mrs. Holroyd. 
 Well, you silly fondy ! In the meantime, I 
 wonder what Alan is doing this morning .? Yon 
 fine dinner of his will be getting cold. 
 
 Jean. 
 
 Indeed it will, I wonder where he is ! (t5l/<?« 
 
 pass.) All the men seem to have passed. (^Stands 
 
 just outside the door and looks down the street to the r, 
 
 sheltering her eyes from the sun. Hutton^ a workman^ 
 
 passes^ and stops to speak to her.) 
 
 Hutton. 
 Good morning, Mrs. Creyke : a fine day again ! 
 
 Jean. 
 It is indeed, Mr. Hutton. What's got my hus- 
 band this morning, do you know } Why is he so 
 long after the rest ^ 
 
 Hutton. 
 He's stayed behind to see about something that's 
 gone wrong with the machinery. It's the new saw.
 
 sc. I.] Alan's Wife. ii 
 
 I believe — that's what happens when folks try to 
 improve on the old ways. I don't believe in im- 
 provements myself, and in trying these new-fangled 
 things no one can understand. 
 
 Jean. 
 No one ? I'll be bound Alan understands them 
 well enough. 
 
 Hutton. 
 Well, happen he does, more than most, and that's 
 why the manager called him back to fettle it up — 
 but I doubt he won't be much longer now. 
 
 Jean. 
 
 Ah, well, that's all right, as long as I know what 
 keeps him. Good morning. {Hutton moves on.) 
 You see, mother, how they turn to Alan before all 
 the rest ! 
 
 Mrs. Holroyd. 
 
 Ah, well, when a lass is in love she must needs 
 know better than her mother, I suppose. 
 
 Jean. 
 Ah, mother dear, wasn't there a time when you 
 were a girl — when you knew better too ? 
 
 Mrs. Holroyd. 
 (shaking her head) Eh, but that's a long time ago. 
 
 Jean. 
 But you remember it, I'll be bound ! I think I'd 
 best be setting that dish in the oven again ; it will be 
 getting cold. [Exit with dish.) 
 
 Mrs. Holroyd. 
 (alone) Well — {shakes her head with a little smile as
 
 12 Alan's Wife. [sc. i. 
 
 she goes on knitting) — there's nowt so queer as folk 1 
 {Shakes her head again.) 
 
 Jean. 
 {coming back) I wonder what makes him bide so 
 long ? 
 
 Mrs. Holroyd. 
 You had far better give over tewing, and sit 
 quietly down with a bit of work in your] hands till 
 he comes. 
 
 Jean. 
 No, mother, I can't ! {smiling). I'm too busy — 
 watching for him ! {Leans over railing and looks 
 along road to the r.) 
 
 Mrs. Holroyd. 
 That'll be Jamie coming along. {Looking off to 
 the L.) 
 
 Jean. 
 {looking round) So it is. {Indifferently) Well, 
 Jamie, good morning. {Warren^ a small delicate 
 man^ wearing a wide-awake hat and carrying a stick 
 in his hand, comes along the road from the l.) 
 
 Warren. 
 Good morning, Jean. Well, Mrs. Holroyd, how 
 are you ? 
 
 Jean. 
 
 {Stands and leans against the railing to the r, looking 
 down the road and listening to what the others are 
 saying.) 
 
 Mrs. Holroyd. 
 Good morning, my lad : sit down a bit. And what 
 have you been doing the day ? You look tired.
 
 sc. I.] Alan's Wife. 1 3 
 
 Warren. 
 
 {takes off his hat wearily^ passing his hand over his 
 brow) I've been doing my work — giving the Word 
 to those who can hear it. 
 
 Mrs. Holroyd. 
 And yon will have been edifying, that it will ! 
 And ye'll have done them good with it, for ye 
 always were a beautiful speaker, Jamie ! 
 
 Jean. 
 
 {from the back) Mother, I doubt you should call 
 him Mr. Warren now he's a minister. 
 
 Mrs. Holroyd. 
 Eh, not I ! I mind him since he was a bit of a lad 
 running barefoot about the village at home. 
 
 Jean. 
 
 And do you mind, Jamie, that when you had a 
 book in your hand I'd snatch it from you and throw 
 it over the hedge ? {Laughs.) 
 
 Warren. 
 Yes, you always pretended you didn't like books, 
 Jean — but you used to learn quicker than anybody 
 else when you chose. 
 
 Mrs. Holroyd. 
 And so she does still, I'm sure. She likes her 
 bock as well as any one, though she will have it that 
 she doesn't. She'll sit and read to Alan, when he's 
 smoking his pipe, for half an hour at a time. 
 
 Warren. 
 And what does he think of it ^
 
 14 Alan's Wife. [sc. i. 
 
 Mrs. Holroyd. 
 {smiling) Between you and me, Jamie, I don't think, 
 he minds much for what she reads. 
 
 Jean. 
 
 (hotly) Indeed, but he does ! Alan can understand 
 what I read just as well as me. 
 
 Mrs. Holroyd. 
 Eh, lass, it isn't the strongest in the arm that's the 
 best at the books ! 
 
 Warren. 
 Yes, it's rather hard upon the rest of us poor 
 fellows if a fellow Hke Creyke is to have every- 
 thing — if we m.ayn't have a little more book- 
 learning to make up for not being a Hercules, like 
 him. 
 
 Jean. 
 Why, Jamie, you wouldn't care to be a Hercules, 
 as you call it — you never did. 
 
 Warren. 
 That's what you say. 
 
 Jean. 
 (lightly^ still watching road to the r) Well, I say 
 what I think, as honest folk do ! {Sheltering her 
 eyes with her hand.) Where can he be ? His dinner 
 will be burnt to a cinder directly. 
 
 Mrs. Holroyd. 
 I wish he'd come and be done with it. She can't 
 mind for anything else but yon dinner while she's 
 waiting for him. 
 
 Warren. 
 Well, well, that's how it should be, I daresay.
 
 sc. I.] Alan's Wife. 15 
 
 Mrs. Holrovd. 
 And have you got settled in your new house 
 against the chapel ? 
 
 Warren. 
 Pretty well, yes, 
 
 Mrs. Holrovd. 
 Ah, I doubt you find it hard. A man's a poor 
 creature at siding up, and getting things straight. 
 
 Warren. 
 He is indeed ! 
 
 Mrs. Holrovd. 
 {sympathetically^ You'll be lonesome at times, my 
 lad, isn't it so ? 
 
 Warren. 
 {shakes his head) Indeed I am ! 
 
 Mrs. Holroyd. 
 Come, you must get yourself a little wife, and 
 she'll make it nice and homely for you. 
 
 Warren. 
 {shakes his head) No, I don't think I shall be taking 
 a wife yet a bit, somehow. {Gets up.) Well, I must 
 be going. {Looks at his watch.) I said I would 
 look in at the school for a bit after dinner, and the 
 children go in again at half-past one. 
 
 Jean. 
 Yes, I always see them bustling past — some of 
 them so little that if they didn't take hold of each 
 other's hands they'd be tumbling down ! {She 
 laughs.)
 
 1 6 Alan's Wife. [sc. i. 
 
 Warren. 
 Yes, there are some very weeny ones in the infant 
 school. Canny little bairns ! Good-bye, Jean — 
 good-bye, Mrs. Creyke. 
 
 Jean. 
 Good-bye, Jamie ! {Exit Warren to the r.) 
 
 Mrs. Holroyd. 
 Eh, but he has a tender heart. I like a man that 
 can speak about the little ones that way. 
 
 Jean. 
 So do I. Oh, mother, I like to watch Alan with a 
 child — the way he looks at it and the way he speaks to 
 it ! Do you know, with those strong arms of his he 
 can hold a baby as well as you, mother? He picked 
 up a little mite that was sobbing on the road the 
 other day, and carried it home, and before a minute 
 was over the bairn had left ofF crying, and nestled 
 itself to sleep on his shoulder. 
 
 Mrs. Holroyd. 
 Ah, yes, he'll make a good father some day ! 
 
 Jean. 
 A good father and a happy one, too ! Yes, we 
 shall be happier then than we are now even. Oh, 
 mother, is that possible ? — shall I be happier when 
 I have my baby in my arms ? 
 
 Mrs. Holroyd. 
 Ah, my child, yes, you will that, in truth. People 
 talk of happiness and the things that bring it, and 
 the young people talk about it and dream of it — but 
 there's one happiness in the world that's better 
 and bigger when it comes than one ever thinks for
 
 sc. I.] Alan's Wife. 17 
 
 beforehand — and that is the moment when a woman's 
 first child lies in her arms. 
 
 Jean. 
 Is it, is it really ? Oh, mother, to think that this 
 is coming to me ! I shall have that too, besides all 
 the rest ! Isn't it wonderful ? 
 
 Mrs. Holroyd. 
 
 (moved) God keep you, honey ! 
 
 Jean. 
 Yes, when I think of the moment when my 
 child will lie in my arms, how he will look at me 
 
 Mrs. Holroyd. 
 (smiling) He ! It's going to be a boy then, is it ? 
 
 Jean. 
 Of course it is ! Like his father. He shall be 
 called Alan, too, and he will be just like him. He 
 will have the same honest blue eyes, that make you 
 beheve in them, and the same yellow hair and a 
 straight nose, and a firm, sweet mouth. But that's 
 what he'll be like when he grows up a little ; at first 
 he'll be nothing but a pink, soft, round, little baby, 
 and we will sit before the fire — it will be the winter, 
 you know, when he comes — and he'll lie across my 
 knee, and stretch out his little pink feet to the blaze, 
 and all the neighbours will come in and see his 
 sturdy little limbs, and say, " My word, what a fine 
 boy ! " He'll be just such another as his father. 
 Oh, mother, it's too good to be true ! 
 
 Mrs. Holroyd. 
 No, no, honey, it isn't ! It will all come true some 
 day.
 
 1 8 Alan's Wife. [sc. i. 
 
 Jean. 
 Oh, mother, mother, what a good world it is ! 
 {kisses her) Ah, I see some more people coming — 
 he'll soon be here now ! {Goes in to r.) 
 
 Mrs. Holroyd. 
 (looking along road) Yes, there they come. [Gets 
 tcp^ puts her knitting down, begins straightening table, 
 then goes in as though to fetch something.) 
 
 {Gradual signs of commotion, two boys rush along 
 stage from r to l, then return with two more, and go 
 off, R. Two children rush past ; then two women enter 
 at back, L, and stand a little to the r of cottage, shading 
 their eyes. Mrs. Holroyd comes out of door with a 
 brown jug in her hand.) 
 
 Mrs. Holroyd. 
 What is it ? Anything happened .'* 
 
 I St Woman. 
 Ay, it's an accident, they say, at the works. 
 
 Mrs. Holroyd. 
 {alarmed) An accident ? 
 
 2nd Woman. 
 Yes, yes, look there ! {She points off to the r.) 
 
 Jean. 
 {leaning out of room to the l, with her arms crossed on 
 window sill) And, mother, I've been thinking we 
 shall have to call him wee Alan, to tell him from his 
 father, you know. Mother ! {looks) Mother, what 
 has happened ? 
 
 Mrs. Holroyd. 
 {hurriedly) Nothing, honey, nothing. {Jean comes 
 hurriedly out of room and down passage.)
 
 sc. I.] Alan's Wife. 19 
 
 Jean. 
 No, mother, I am sure there is something ! 
 What is it. {To woman) Do you know ? 
 
 I St Woman. 
 It will be an accident, they say, at the works. 
 
 Jean. 
 
 At the works ! Any one hurt } 
 
 2nd Woman. 
 Eh, with yon machines, ye never know but there'll 
 be something. 
 
 Jean. 
 With the machines ? {Sees Warren coming hur- 
 riedly past, R.) Jamie, Jamie, what is^ it ^ What 
 has happened .? 
 
 Warren. 
 Jean, dear Jean, you must be prepared. 
 
 Jean. 
 Prepared ? For what ? 
 
 Warren. 
 There has been an accident. 
 
 Jean. 
 
 Not to Alan ? Ah, do you mean he has been 
 hurt ? {JVarren is silent.) But he's so strong it 
 will be nothing ! I'll make him well again. Where 
 is he ? We must bring him back ! 
 
 Warren. 
 No, no ! {He looks back at something approaching.) 
 
 Jean. 
 
 What is that ? {Pause.)
 
 2 Alan's Wife. [sc. i. 
 
 Warren. 
 God's will be done, Jean ; His hand is heavy on 
 ye. (^A moment of silence. Jean is seen to look 
 aghast at something coming. Hutton and two morey 
 carrying a covered litter., come to the gate, followed by 
 a little crowd of men., zvomen and children.) 
 
 Jean. 
 
 Oh, they're coming here ! [Rushes to them.) 
 Hutton, tell me what has happened ? 
 
 Hutton. 
 Best not look, missis — it's a sore sight ! [Mrs. 
 Holroyd holds Jean back.) 
 
 Jean. 
 Let me be, mother — I 'must go to him ! 
 
 I St Woman. 
 Na, na, my lass — best keep back ! 
 
 Mrs. Holroyd. 
 Keep back, honey ! you're not the one to bear the 
 sight ! 
 
 Jean. 
 I must — let me go ! [Struggles ^ breaks away, and 
 rushes forward — lifts up cover) Alan ! [She falls 
 back with a cry into Mrs. Holroyd's arms.) 
 
 CURTAIN,
 
 SCENE II. 
 
 A room in "Jeans cottage. Fireplace to the 
 R, with chimney piece on which are candlesticks, 
 tapers, etc. ; door at hack, l c. Window to l 
 with curtains ; kitchen dresser to l with plates, 
 jugs, and a bowl with green spray in it. A 
 mahogany bookcase on back wall, a table back c, 
 chairs, etc. ; a cradle half way down the stage to 
 the i.ofc. 
 
 {Jean discovered sitting listlessly by the fire. She 
 is in a white gown with a black shawl over 
 it. Mrs. Holroyd and Mrs. Ridley are 
 standing one on each side of the cradle, 
 Mrs. Holroyd bending over it, smoothing 
 the clothes, etc., Mrs. Ridley standing by 
 admiringly .) 
 
 Mrs. Holroyd. 
 {h of cradle, finishing tucking it up) There now, he 
 looks the picture of comfort, the dear ! and so sound 
 asleep, it's a pleasure to see him. 
 
 Mrs. Ridley. 
 {right of cradle, looking at him) It is indeed ; but I 
 doubt you've got him too hot, Mrs. Holroyd.
 
 2 2 Alan's Wife. [sc. 2. 
 
 Mrs. Holroyd. 
 (doubtfully') Too hot, do you think so ? Well, 
 perhaps we might put off this quilt. (Takes it off 
 and stands with it in her hand) And yet, I don't 
 know, I am all for weeny babies being kept warm 
 enough. (^Puts the quilt on again.) 
 
 Mrs. Ridley. 
 Warm enough ! Yes, but not stifled — ye'll fair 
 smother the bairn with all yon clothes ! {Takes off 
 quilt.) 
 
 Mrs. Holroyd. 
 Ay, now, it's difficult to know what one should do 
 for the best ! {Stands looking doubtfully at cradle.) 
 
 Mrs. Ridley. 
 Well, I always say with a baby, you can't do 
 better than take a neighbour's advice, and one that's 
 had eleven too. My bairns used just to lie in the 
 cot with a patchwork counterpane over them — it's a 
 grand thing for a baby is the patchwork — and they 
 grew up fine, sturdy lads as you'd wish to see. 
 
 Mrs. Holroyd. 
 Ah, fine and sturdy — that's just it ! But it's very 
 different with this poor little mite. 
 
 Mrs. Ridley. 
 {her arms folded as she holds the quilt ^ shaking her 
 head and looking compassionately at the baby) Ay, 
 poor wee thing, indeed ! well, the Lord's will be 
 done ! He must have His own way with the bairns, 
 as with everything else. 
 
 Mrs. Holroyd. 
 Do you know, I think I'll leave the quilt on.
 
 sc. 2.] Alan's Wife. 23 
 
 {takes it) I am fearful of the draughts down the 
 chimney coming to him. 
 
 Mrs. Ridley. 
 Eh, yes — every chimney '11 blow both hot and 
 cold, as the saying is. I'm all for keeping the fresh 
 air from a baby till he's turned the twelvemonth. 
 Eh, but his mother should see him now, looking so 
 fine and comfortable ! {looking round at Jean. Jean 
 pays no attention) Jean, he's looking as happy as a 
 prince, the dear ! {jfean is absorbed in thought.^ 
 
 Mrs. Holroyd. 
 {shakes her head. Half aside to Mrs. Ridley^ Ah, 
 it's not much his mother wants to see him, I'm 
 afraid. Jean ! 
 
 Jean. 
 {as though waking out of a reverie') Yes, mother, 
 what is it } {Sits up.) 
 
 Mrs. Holrovd. 
 The baby has gone to sleep — he's quite comfortable 
 now. 
 
 Jean. 
 Asleep, is he } Yes. {Leans forward, her head on 
 her right hand, her elbow on her knee. Mrs. Holroyd 
 puts her hand down to the ground near the cradle^ 
 
 Mrs. Holroyd. 
 I thought I felt a bit of a draught here, near the 
 cradle head. 
 
 Mrs. Ridley. 
 {putting her hand to the ground with an anxious look) 
 No, no ! There's no draught ; it's just yourself 
 that's made it, whisking round with your petticoats.
 
 24 Alan's Wife. [sc. 2. 
 
 Mrs. Holroyd. 
 Well, happen you're right. [Holds her skirts care- 
 fully together, then feels for the draught again) Na, 
 na, there's no draught here. He'll sleep now, right 
 enough. 
 
 Mrs. Ridley. 
 If he does it'll be more by good luck than good 
 management, with all yon clothes on the top of him ! 
 
 Mrs. Holroyd. 
 He should — he's not had much sleep this day, nor 
 last night either. 
 
 Mrs. Ridley. 
 And you look tired with it, Mrs. Holroyd. 
 
 Mrs. Holrovd. 
 We've had a restless day with him, haven't we, 
 Jean ^ 
 
 Jean. 
 {indifferently) Yes, he's cried. 
 
 Mrs. Ridley. 
 It's too much for you, Mrs. Holroyd, to have been 
 after that bairn ever since daylight. 
 
 Mrs. Holrovd. 
 Eh well ! It's my Jean's bairn, you know. 
 
 Mrs. Ridley. 
 Yes, that's just it ! It's Jean's bairn, and it's Jean 
 ought to be tewing with it — it would do her good, 
 Mrs. Holroyd. 
 
 Mrs. Holroyd. 
 Eh, I doubt she's not strong enough yet ! But you 
 are right : she should take an interest in it, all the
 
 sc. 2.] Alan's Wife. 25 
 
 same. I can't get her to seem as though she minded 
 for it, do what I will. 
 
 Mrs. Ridley. 
 You should rouse her a bit, and not let her sit 
 mounging that way. {Cheerily) Come, Jean, do 
 you think the cradle is out of the draught there, or 
 shall we get it moved a bit ? 
 
 Jean. 
 {half looking round, then subsides again) Oh, I think 
 it will do very well where it is. 
 
 Mrs. Holroyd. 
 Ah, honey, I don't like to see you sitting there as 
 though you had nothing to do with the bairn. 
 
 Jean. 
 Nay, mother, I know it's well cared for with you 
 looking after it — and Mrs. Ridley. 
 
 Mrs. Holroyd. 
 Ah, but that's not enough. Ah, Jean, how little I 
 thought when you used to talk of your baby, and 
 long to have it in your arms, that you would be so 
 hard to the little fatherless child when it came, and 
 not bear to look at it, just because it isn't the fine 
 lusty lad you wanted ! {Jeayi shudders as she sits and 
 looks into the fire. Mrs. Holroyd is bustling about, 
 arranging the room as she talks.) 
 
 Mrs. Ridley. 
 Yes, poor wee thing ! He can't help being a 
 cripple ; you should care for him all the more because 
 he won't walk and run like other boys. What's a 
 mother for, if it's not to care for the bairn that needs 
 it most ^
 
 26 Alan's Wife. [sc. 2. 
 
 Jean. 
 {looks into the fire) Yes, yes, I suppose so ! that is 
 what's left — there'll be nothing else in my life. 
 
 Mrs. Holroyd. 
 Nothing else ! You ought to be thankful for 
 having the child ! 
 
 Jean. 
 {bitterly) Thankful ! 
 
 Mrs. Ridley. 
 Ah, Jean, I doubt you have a hard heart ! You 
 don't know the blessings you have. 
 
 Jean. 
 {covers her face^ then goes on after a 'minute) No, 
 maybe I don't. Do you remember, mother, that last 
 afternoon that we talked about the child that was 
 to come ? You told me how beautiful everything 
 would be, and that I should be happier than ever I'd 
 been before. Happier — ah ! 
 
 Mrs. Holroyd. 
 It's not ours to tell the future, and it's very wicked 
 to repine when things are not as we hoped. 
 
 Jean. 
 
 {half to herself — looking into the fire) I used to 
 hope, all those happy weeks before that day, and 
 then afterwards, when my only hope was in the 
 bairn — and now I have no hope left . . . only horrible 
 certainty ! 
 
 Mrs. Holrovd. 
 Eh, Jean, yours is sinful talk — you must just be 
 a good mother to the bairn now that it is here 
 {arranging room).
 
 sc. 2,] Alan's Wife. 27 
 
 Mrs. Ridley. 
 {Kneeling in front of fire ^ takes up fire-irons in her 
 hand J and sweeps hearth.) Ay, there's many a mother 
 with a family of fine boys and girls has thought 
 more of her one deformed child than all the rest ! 
 
 Jean. 
 {covering her face) Deformed ! Yes, that's what 
 they'll call him. {Pause.) 
 
 Mrs. Ridley. 
 
 Why, there's Meg Dowden who used to live be- 
 side the Green at home — how she used to go about 
 with that little Tommy of hers, who could only 
 sling along the road instead of walking ! and she was 
 as proud of him as you please. Then there's Kate 
 Lockerby, when one of her bairns wasn't right in 
 
 her head 
 
 Jean. 
 
 Don't ! Don't ! I can't bear it ! 
 
 Mrs. Ridley. 
 Ah well, child, you must try to bear it, and to put 
 up with things that can't be mended. 
 
 Mrs. Holroyd. 
 Yes, honey, you must put off that hard, rebellious 
 spirit, and put on a meek and submissive one, else 
 you will be punished for your pride some day. 
 {Goes on dusting and arranging room^ etc.) 
 
 Mrs. Ridley. 
 Ah, but a young thing like that will feel it ! I 
 mind when my Johnnie was born, that only lived a 
 week
 
 2 8 Alan's Wife. [sc. 2. 
 
 Jean. 
 Don't tell me about it, I say, don't tell me about 
 any other woman's child ! 
 
 Mrs. Ridley. 
 My word, Jean, but you've got your saucy 
 tongue in your head still ! I'll tell you what, Mrs. 
 Holroyd, you ought to have the minister to her 
 when she speaks that way ; he would bring her to 
 a better way of thinking. 
 
 Mrs. Holroyd. 
 
 (^aside to Mrs. Ridley) I've told him to-day just to 
 step in and see her. Ye see, Mrs. Ridley, when the 
 lass has been about a bit longer, she'll be better ; she 
 hasn't got her strength yet. 
 
 Mrs. Ridley. 
 Ay, that's true — any one can see that to look at 
 her. She's as white as a sheet to-night. 
 
 Mrs. Holroyd. 
 Indeed, she is that ! Come, dearie, get to bed 
 with you, and you'll feel better in the morning. 
 
 Jean. 
 {wearily) To bed — very well ! 
 
 Mrs. Holroyd. 
 Everything is ready for you in the next room — 
 and Mrs. Ridley will sit here and be a bit of 
 company for you while I go back home to see 
 how things are going on. 
 
 Mrs. Ridley. 
 Eh, that I will. I'll sit here as long as you please. 
 {Sits by table to the l Gets out her knitting.)
 
 sc. 2.] Alan's Wife. 29 
 
 Jean. 
 
 No, no ! I don't want any one to stay with me. 
 
 Mrs. Ridley. 
 Eh, I can knit just as well here as at home. My 
 boys are on the night shift this week, and won't be in 
 for supper. 
 
 Mrs. Holroyd. 
 {to Mrs. Ridley) And if the baby cries you can just 
 put it over again. 
 
 Mrs. Ridley. 
 No need to tell me what to do with a baby, that's 
 had eleven to look after ; and I can do for Jean too, 
 if she wants anything. 
 
 Jean. 
 No, no ; I can quite well fend for myself. I sha'n't 
 want anything. 
 
 Mrs. Holroyd. 
 {anxiously) But what about the baby ? I doubt 
 you won't be able to manage him, Jean ^ 
 
 Jean. 
 Yes, yes, I shall ! Didn't you say that's what a 
 mother's for.? (Mrj. Ridley gets up.) 
 
 Mrs. Ridley. 
 (/(9 Mrs. Holroyd) Well, neighbour, I believe the 
 lass is right ; and if you take my advice, you'll do 
 as she says, and leave her to tew with the baby ; 
 she'll soonest get to care for him that way. 
 
 Mrs. Holroyd. 
 Maybe you are right after all. 
 
 Mrs. Ridley. 
 Well, if I'm not wanted then, I'd best be getting
 
 30 Alan's Wife. [sc. 2. 
 
 home. Good night to you ! {Shakes her head to 
 herself as she goes out) Eh, but some folks are bad 
 to do with when they're in trouble ! [Exit.) 
 
 Jean. 
 You go too, mother ; I shall be all right. 
 
 Mrs. Holroyd. 
 Suppose you wanted anything, or the baby wasn't 
 well? 
 
 Jean. 
 Well, if the worst came to the worst, I could step 
 up so far and fetch you : it's only a few doors off. 
 
 Mrs. Holroyd. 
 
 Yes ; you could do that after all. Good night, 
 then, honey ! Go to bed, say your prayers, and 
 wake up stronger and better in the morning. All 
 that comes to us is for the best, you know, if we 
 can but see it. 
 
 Jean. 
 
 Good night ! {Her mother kisses her. Mrs. Hol- 
 royd goes out, after giving a last look at the baby, and 
 a general straightening touch to things as she passes.) 
 At last ! Oh, if they would only give over telling 
 me it's for the best ! {Looks at cradle) For the 
 best ! 'That for the best ! {Bends over cradle) But 
 he has got a darling little face all the same ! Poor 
 little bairn — my poor little bairn ! They say I 
 don't love you — I don't care for you at all ! Yes, 
 yes, I do, dear, yes, I do ! {Buries her face and sobs. 
 Knock heard at the door. Gets up, drying her eyes, 
 and stands at foot of cradle, looking at child. Jean 
 looks round, crosses to fire — another knock.) Yes .'' 
 who is it .'' {Warren on the threshold.)
 
 sc. 2.] Alan's Wife. 31 
 
 Warren. 
 Good evening, Jean ! {Pause — Jean still looking 
 into fire — Warren stands hesitating^ and a little em- 
 barrassed at her inhospitality) Your mother asked 
 
 me to look in, and 
 
 Jean. 
 And tell me of my sinful ways — yes, I know ! 
 Come in, Jamie ! 
 
 Warren. 
 (comes forward) Jean, how ill you look! You're 
 fretting ; you mustn't rebel so against the visitation 
 
 o' God ! His laws are 
 
 Jean. 
 Good and merciful. Yes, I've heard that ! 
 
 Warren. 
 Eh ! I hope you're not doubting His loving- 
 kindness, Jean ! 
 
 Jean. 
 I'm not thinking about God, nor about loving- 
 kindness. 
 
 Warren. 
 But you must, child. It'll steady and strengthen 
 ye. Ye' 11 find His mercy everywhere. 
 
 Jean. 
 
 Do you think I'll find it in the cradle, yon .? 
 
 Warren. 
 
 Eh } {shaking his head) Yes, I know what you 
 
 mean. I've heard 
 
 Jean. 
 
 [with smothered anguish, breaking in) Then you 
 
 forgot, Jamie Warren, or you wouldn't talk of loving-
 
 32 Alan's Wife. [sc. 2. 
 
 kindness. You forgot God couldn't even take 
 
 Alan away without — without (covers her face 
 
 and shudders^ 
 
 Warren. 
 Jean ! You're tempting the Almighty ! 
 
 Jean. 
 Ye hadn't heard, maybe, that a little child was 
 sent, hideous and maimed, to stumble through this 
 terrible world — eh ? 
 
 Warren. 
 Hush, hush, my girl ! You're ill, or you wouldn't 
 talk that wild and wicked way ! (^As Jean is about to 
 break in) When you're stronger you'll see how the 
 child'll comfort you. 
 
 Jean. 
 {slowly) But how shall I comfort the child ^ 
 
 Warren. 
 He'll grow up to be a scholar and a God-fearing 
 man yet, Jean. It's no ill fate. 
 
 Jean. 
 He'll grow up, you think? 
 
 Warren. 
 {cheerily) Aye, why not .? He may quite well live 
 to be old. 
 
 Jean. 
 You don't think that .'' {seizes Warren by the arm.) 
 
 Warren. 
 Of course. Why not .^ He's not rightly formed, 
 poor bairn, else he's sturdy enough, they say. He 
 may outlive us all, yet 1
 
 sc. 2.] Alan's Wife. 33 
 
 Jean. 
 You think he'll live longer than any of us ? 
 (Jioarsely). 
 
 Warren. 
 Well, in the course of nature and if God wills it ; 
 i^ean turns away) but if it's the will of God that the 
 child should be taken, Jean, you must bow to His 
 will. 
 
 Jean. 
 You're sure the bairn would go to heaven, Jamie ? 
 
 Warren. 
 How can you doubt it: Ye'll be having him 
 baptised ? 
 
 Jean. 
 Baptised ! {listlessly) Yes, I suppose so. 
 
 Warren. 
 Ah, Jean, take care lest it be too late ! I The 
 innocent bairn mustn't suffer for the sinful neglect^'of 
 
 o 
 
 others. Unless he be baptised, who can be sure? 
 Jean, see to it that the child is saved. 
 
 Jean. 
 Saved ! Why was he not saved from that ? 
 
 Warren. 
 We are not here to ask that. It is enough for us 
 to know that it is the will of God. 
 
 Jean. 
 (passionately) The will of God ! I won't believe it ! 
 
 Warren. 
 Jean ! 
 
 Jean. 
 Or if you're right, so much the worse, then ! If 
 
 3
 
 34 Alan's Wife, [sc. 2. 
 
 God were full of mercy and loving-kindness as you 
 say, how could He be so cruel to a little harmless 
 child ? (crosses to cradle^ and drops on her knees 
 beside it). 
 
 Warren. 
 Jean, Jean, ye tempt the Almighty by your wicked 
 words. But I doubt you're sore at heart. His mercy 
 endureth for ever ; He will forgive you, and Hell 
 have pity on you. 
 
 Jean. 
 {yuith a hurst of agony) Pity on me, man ! It's the 
 child ! It's the child ! Don't you think I'd be glad 
 to give up my health and strength to my baby } If 
 God was angry at me, why didn't He strike me 
 down } If I'd been doing wrong, He should have 
 cursed me, and not hurt Alan's little bairn ! / could 
 have borne it. This minute I could stand up and 
 let them hack me all to pieces if they'd make my 
 baby straight and strong. i^ean walks unsteadily 
 back towards fireplace.') 
 
 Warren. 
 Hush ! hush ! You'll come to better reason as the 
 time goes on, {^ean absorbed in her grief) if you'll 
 but strive in prayer to be given a meek spirit, and 
 strength to bear your burden bravely, Jean. There's 
 many a one has had to go through the world before 
 bearing a cross as heavy as yours. 
 
 Jean. 
 And does it make it any better for me to think of 
 those other wretched women } 
 
 Warren. 
 Ah, Jean, seek for strength where alone it can be
 
 sc. 2.] Alan's Wife. 35 
 
 found — pray for it, only pray, and it shall be given 
 you ! {Jean stands looking at the fire trying to control 
 herself.^ {Moved') Jean, my poor Jean, good-bye ! 
 I'll pray for you and for the bairn — I'll pray that God 
 may bring you peace. {Exit.) 
 
 Jean. 
 
 {alone — wildly) Pray for the bairn — pray, pray ! 
 {she falls on her knees) Oh God ! If I've been 
 wicked, don't make it worse for the child — punish 
 me some other way — don't hurt him any more — he's 
 so little, dear God — so helpless, and he never did any 
 wrong ! He hasn't been drunk with life and strength 
 and love — he hasn't walked through the world exult- 
 ing and fearless and forgetting You. That was I, oh, 
 Father in heaven ! Punish jne — and take the baby 
 away. This is a hard place — this world down here. 
 Take him away ! Take him away ! {She staggers 
 to her feet — listens) He is stirring. {Goes and 
 looks in cradle — leans over it) Ah, how little you 
 must know to be smiling in your sleep ! {Drops 
 on her knees by the cradle) Dear little face ! Ah ! 
 It's brave of you to smile when God has laid such 
 heavy burdens on you ! Do you think you will be 
 able to smile later on when you see other boys running 
 and leaping and being glad — when you're a man, 
 dear, and see how good it is to be strong and fair.? 
 Can you bear it, little one } {She rocks the cradle as 
 if to hush him^ though the child sleeps on — she croons 
 drearily) Never mind, never mind ! Mother'll 
 be always at your side — always — always. {She stops^ 
 horror-stricken) Always.? Who can say so.? I 
 might die ! It's natural I should go first and leave
 
 36 Alan's Wife. [sc. 2. 
 
 him to the mercy of Oh, I cannot, I cannot ! I 
 
 dare not ! {Bows her head over the cradle's edge — 
 then half recovering^ and yet with suppressed wildness^ 
 whispers) Baby, I'm frightened ! Listen, I don't 
 know what to do. Do you want to live ? Tell me, 
 shall you ever hate me for this horrible gift of life ? 
 {JVith wide vacant eyes) Oh, I seem to see you in 
 some far-off time, your face distorted like your body, 
 but with bitterness and loathing, saying, " Mother, 
 how could you be so cruel as to let me live and suffer? 
 You could have eased my pain; you could have saved 
 me this long martyrdom ; when I was little and lay 
 in your arms. Why didn't you save me. You were 
 a coward — a coward ! " {She bows her head over the 
 cradle again^ overcome — then she lifts a drawn white 
 face) It would be quite easy — only to cover the 
 dear face a little while — only to shut out the air and 
 light for a little while, and remember Im fighting for 
 his release. Yes, it would be quite easy — if only 
 one's heart didn't sink and one's brain grow numb ! 
 {Leans against the cradle^ faint — her eyes fall on the 
 child) Are your lips moving, dear } {Pause) Are 
 you asking for life .? No, you don't want to live, do 
 you ^ No, no, you cannot ! Darling, it will be so 
 easy — you'll never know — it will only be that you'll 
 go on sleeping — sleeping, until you wake up in 
 heaven ! {Clutches quilt together quickly, then stops) 
 In heaven! No — what did Jamie say? " Unless he 
 be baptised " — {stands a minute — repeats to herself) 
 He said, " See to it that the child is saved." Yes, 
 darling, that's what I'm trying to do to save you ! 
 {hets quilt fall — stands staring into space — moves like 
 a zvoman in a dream ; brings two candles ; returns.
 
 sc. 2.] Alan's Wife. 37 
 
 brings a howl of water ^ and a big book with silver 
 clasps ; puts all on table by cradle — lights candles — 
 lifts the great book^ and goes to the cradle and looks at 
 the child — turns away zvith a sob, and, standing by 
 the candle-light^ opens the book and tries to find the 
 place — passes her hand across her eyes.) Where is the 
 place ? I can't find it ! I can't find it ! {Tries again 
 — then falls on her knees between the table and the 
 cradle — she closes the great book and whispers) Have 
 pity on us, Lord — show us the way ! {Still on her 
 knees^ she lets the book fall to the floor ^ dips her hand 
 in the water and sprinkles the child) I baptise thee, 
 Alan ! {Prays a moment — then stands looking yearn- 
 ingly at him) Alan, my little Alan ! Rises — looks 
 anxiously over her shoulder to door and window, blows 
 out the candles one by one, and goes stealthily towards 
 cradle with a long wailitig cry, the eider quilt hugged 
 to her breast as the 
 
 CURTAIN FALLS.
 
 SCENE III. 
 
 Room in the prison. 
 
 {Colonel Stuart sitting at writing-table with 
 papers to the r. Chief warder standing 
 by him. Door c. Door to the l.) 
 
 Col. Stuart. 
 You have nothing more to report, Roberts? 
 
 Roberts. 
 
 No, sir ; nothing. 
 
 Col. Stuart. 
 And Jean Creyke ? 
 
 Roberts. 
 Just the same, sir. Can get nothing out of her. 
 
 Col. Stuart. 
 {shaking his head) Ah ! Well, you can take these. 
 {^Gives him papers. Roberts gathers up papers and is 
 turning away. Enter a Warder at c.) 
 
 Warder. 
 Please, sir, there is some one to see the woman 
 Creyke. 
 
 Col. Stuart. 
 
 Who is it ?
 
 sc. 3.] Alan's Wife. 39 
 
 Warder. 
 An old woman, sir, of the name of Holroyd. She 
 is Creyke's mother, I beheve. 
 
 Col. Stuart. 
 Her mother ? Bring her in here. {^Exit Warder) 
 I can't help feeling that there must be some extenu- 
 ating circumstance if only we could get at it. 
 
 Roberts. 
 Well, sir, maybe there is. It's a bad business, 
 anyway ! {Salutes^ and goes out with 'papers at door l. 
 Enter Mrs. Holroyd with Warder. Exit Warder^ 
 
 Col. Stuart. 
 Mrs. Holroyd ? 
 
 Mrs. Holroyd. 
 {with her handkerchief to her eyes) Ay, yes, your 
 worship, my name is Holroyd. 
 
 Col. Stuart. 
 (kindly) I am very sorry for you ; it must be a hard 
 trial. 
 
 Mrs. Holroyd. 
 Ah, it's hard indeed to think that a girl of mine 
 should have taken her own child's life. 
 
 Col. Stuart. 
 Yes, it's a very terrible story. (Pause.) 
 
 Mrs. Holroyd. 
 (anxiously) What will they do to her, your worship ? 
 (Col. Stuart is silent.) They won't take her life, will 
 they ? There must be a chance for her yet. 
 
 Col. Stuart. 
 I fear not much ; a reprieve has been asked for, 
 but
 
 40 Alan's Wife. [sc. 3. 
 
 Mrs. Holrovd. 
 Yes, I know — Jamie Warren said he would bring 
 the news this morning, the moment it was known. 
 
 Col. Stuart. 
 Jamie Warren ? 
 
 Mrs. Holroyd. 
 Yes ; he's the minister down at our place ; he's 
 always been a good friend to our Jean, and if she 
 would have listened to him, and not taken up with 
 Creyke, things would have been very different. 
 
 Col. Stuart. 
 
 Well, there seems to be very little here to found 
 an appeal for mercy on. We know so little of the 
 whole thing. What could have made her kill the 
 child ^ Do you think her mind was at all affected 
 at the time ? 
 
 Mrs. Holroyd. 
 
 Her mind ! My Jean's ? No, indeed ! Why 
 did she kill the little baby ? Well, it was a poor 
 wreckling, the lamb, and it well-nigh broke her 
 heart that it wasn't fine and sturdy like the father, 
 — she wanted a boy like the husband she lost — she 
 never seemed to take to the baby, never from the 
 first, and she never would tew with it as mothers do. 
 
 Col. Stuart. 
 Do you mean that that's why she killed the poor 
 little helpless child — that she could find it in her 
 heart to kill it because it wasn't strong and sturdy ? 
 
 Mrs. Holroyd. 
 Ah, yes, your worship, it's hard my Jean should have 
 done it. I well-nigh can't believe it of my own bairn.
 
 sc. 3.] Alan's Wife. 41 
 
 Col. Stuart. 
 It's hard to believe of any mother. 
 
 Mrs. Holroyd. 
 And if they spare her life what will become of 
 her ? Can I have her back with me to her home 
 again ? 
 
 Col. Stuart. 
 No, my poor woman, she can't go back to you 
 again. The best will be that her sentence will be 
 commuted to penal servitude for life. 
 
 Mrs. Holroyd. 
 (crying out) For life ! My Jean ? Oh Lord, oh 
 Lord, Your hand is heavy on us ! 
 
 Col. Stuart. 
 
 You shall see her. (Rings bell.) (A Warder comes 
 
 in) Jean Creyke is to come here. (Exit JVarder.) 
 
 (To Mrs. Holroyd) Perhaps you can bring her to a 
 
 better frame of mind. She seems strangely hardened. 
 
 Mrs. Holroyd. 
 
 Ah, your worship, I am afraid she won't mind for 
 me ; she always knew I hadn't the wits to be up to 
 her, or find the words to say to her. Oh, my poor 
 girl, she always was too proud, I always told her she 
 was. The Lord has punished her. (Enter Jean with 
 two Warders^ 
 
 Mrs. Holroyd. 
 
 Oh, Jean, Jean ! (Jeans sentences are given as a 
 stage direction of what she is silently to convey ^ but 
 she does not speak until nearly the end of the Act.) 
 
 Jean. 
 
 (silent) Mother 1
 
 42 Alan's Wife. [sc. 3. 
 
 Mrs. Holroyd. 
 Honey, tell his worship how you came to do it. 
 Tell him you hadn't your wits right ; that you didn't 
 know what you were doing to the little bairn ! 
 
 Jean. 
 {silent) I knew well enough. 
 
 Mrs. Holroyd. 
 Oh, my dear, if you could tell him something that 
 would make them let you off — now think, Jean, 
 think, honey ! it may be you could tell them some- 
 thing that would save you. 
 
 Jean. 
 {silent — stares vacantly into space) I can tell him 
 nothing. 
 
 Col. Stuart. 
 Nothing 3'ou can say, of course, will clear you 
 now ; but, for the sake of the memory you will leave 
 behind you, can you give no sort of reason, no 
 explanation of the impulse that led to your terrible 
 crime ? {yean shakes her head.) 
 
 Mrs. Holroyd. 
 Oh, your worship, your worship ! 
 
 Col. Stuart. 
 {to Mrs. Holroyd) No, it is no use, I'm afraid ; she 
 hasn't opened her lips from the beginning. {Looks at 
 watch) You have twenty minutes together. {Exit.) 
 {The two Warders stand at the back, apparently not 
 listening.) 
 
 Mrs. Holroyd. 
 {in tears) Oh, my Jean, my bonny Jean ! That it 
 should have come to this ! {Jean stands motionless.
 
 sc. 3.] Alan's Wife. 43 
 
 Mrs. Holroyd turns away^ distractedly wringing her 
 hands.) 
 
 Mrs. Holroyd. 
 {coming back to the girl) Jean, Jean, do you know 
 they will have the life of ye ? 
 
 Jean. 
 {silent. Makes motion of assent) Yes, I know. 
 
 Mrs. Holroyd. 
 How could you do it, my lass ? Can't you re- 
 member ? If you could have told them all about it 
 and asked for m^ercy you could have got it. 
 
 Jean. 
 {silent — seniles strangely) I don't want mercy. 
 
 Mrs. Holroyd. 
 You're not afraid to die with your sins about ye.^ 
 
 Jean. 
 {silent — shakes her head) No, I am not afraid. 
 
 Mrs. Holroyd. 
 Ah, Jean, but I am afraid for ye. No, I cannot 
 bear it. Jean ! {with a fresh outburst) Are ye 
 not thinking of your mother at all? 
 
 Jean. 
 {silent — puts out her hand to her mother) Poor 
 mother! 
 
 Mrs. Holroyd. 
 Oh, Jean, you're very hard. You don't think of 
 those who are left when you won't ask for mercy. 
 And Jamie Warren, poor lad — his heart is broken as 
 well as mine. {Pause — Jean stands erect seeming not 
 to hear.) But there is still a chance, Jean — honey
 
 44 Alan's Wife. [sc. 3. 
 
 — there is indeed. Maybe Jamie '11 come back here 
 this morning with the blessed news. He should be 
 here soon, very soon. [In an agony) Jean, Jean, if 
 only I could get you to speak ! His worship's been 
 asking me about you. What can I tell him .? Try 
 to recollect, lassie — try to think on that night, when I 
 left ye with the baby — try to think just how it all 
 was. I left ye sitting by the fire, just after Mrs. 
 Ridley had gone out ; ye'll mind she was a bit vexed, 
 poor body, at the way ye'd spoken — and the baby 
 was asleep in the cradle, I'd just covered him up 
 warm with the quilt. {Jean gives a sharp cry^ and 
 makes a motion to stop her mother.) 
 
 Jean. 
 
 {silent) Ah ! {l^he door opens y and James JVarren 
 comes in hastily with a Warder^ who points to Jean 
 and goes out again.) 
 
 Mrs. Holroyd. 
 Jamie ! Well, Jamie — what news do you bring '^. 
 Speak, lad, tell us ! 
 
 Warren. 
 {looks at Mrs. Holroyd and shakes his head, and then 
 looks at yean.) The news I bring is — bad. 
 
 Jean. 
 
 [silent — unmoved) 
 
 Warren. 
 No, Jean, they won't grant it ; they say the sen- 
 tence must be carried out. {yean clasps her hands 
 with a look of relief ^ almost of gladness.) 
 
 Mrs. Holroyd. 
 Oh, Jean, honey, it will kill me too ! {Jean seems
 
 sc. 3.] Alan's Wife. 45 
 
 not to hear.) Jamie, Jamie, she doesn't seem to mind 
 for me one little bit ! Speak to her, my lad, try to 
 soften her hard heart ! (^Re-enter Col. Stuart.) 
 
 Col. Stuart. 
 (/o yean) You have heard the result of the appeal ? 
 
 Jean. 
 
 {silent — bows.) Yes. 
 
 Mrs. Holroyd. 
 Oh, your worship, is there no hope ? 
 
 Col. Stuart. 
 None — absolutely none. 
 
 Warren. 
 Jean, your only hope is in Him who alone can 
 pardon your sin : turn to Him before it is too late. 
 Do not die unforgiven. 
 
 Jean. 
 {silent) I shall not die unforgiven. 
 
 Col. Stuart. 
 Take care, Jean Creyke ; remember your time is 
 running short — the end is very near. 
 
 Jean. 
 {aloud) When ? 
 
 Col. Stuart. 
 To-morrow morning at eight. 
 
 Jean. 
 To-morrow ! {Her lips form the word.) 
 
 Mrs. Holroyd. 
 {crying out) To-morrow morning !
 
 46 Alan's Wife. [sc. 3. 
 
 Warren. 
 
 Yes, the time is short, indeed ! Jean, confess ! 
 Confess, and turn you to the Lord your God. 
 
 Mrs. Holroyd. 
 
 To-morrow ! To-morrow ! Ah, but it's too 
 soon for her to die ! Jean, Jean, my honey, my 
 little lass ! Oh, my Jean ! {Jean, as if in a dream^ 
 turns to go.) 
 
 Col. Stuart. 
 
 My poor woman, all you can do for her now is 
 to pray for her, and say good-bye. You won't see 
 her again. 
 
 Mrs. Holroyd. 
 
 {horror-stricken and bewildered') Not see her again ! 
 
 What do you mean ? You'll let me come to-night, 
 
 and to-morrow ? {Looks round — reads answer in 
 
 faces of bystanders.) 
 
 Col. Stuart. 
 No, this is the last time. 
 
 Mrs. Holroyd. 
 
 The last time ! No, no ! You can't take her 
 from me like that ! Your worship, she's the only 
 child I've ever had — the only thing I have in the 
 world ! Eh, but ye' 11 let me bide with her the day, 
 till to-night, only till to-night ! Just these few hours 
 longer! Think, your worship — I must do without 
 her all the rest of my life ! 
 
 Col. Stuart. 
 {^compassionately) My poor woman ! {He makes a 
 sign to the warders.)
 
 sc. 3.] Alan's Wife. 47 
 
 Mrs. Holroyd. 
 {rushing forward as Warders are going to take Jean 
 out) Oh, wait, only wait ! Jamie, don't let her go ! 
 Tell them they mustn't take her to die yet. She 
 isn't ready to die, ye know she isn't ready. {To Jean) 
 Oh, my honey ! Speak, speak, before it is too late. 
 Tell them why you did it. Put away your rebellious 
 heart! {To Stuart) You think she's bad and 
 wicked, but she's not wicked — she's not indeed ! 
 Jean, Jean, why did ye kill the poor little bairn ? 
 
 Warren. 
 Jean, listen to me — to-morrow you are to appear 
 before your Maker. Confess your crime, and lay 
 down your burden before the throne of God. 
 
 Jean. 
 
 {aloud) Crime ! 
 
 Col. Stuart. 
 Not a crime, that you in cold blood took the life 
 of a poor, helpless, little baby, because you hadn't 
 the courage to bear the sight of its misfortunes } 
 
 Jean. 
 I hadn't courage .? I've had courage just once 
 in my life — -just once in my life I've been strong and 
 kind — and it was the night I killed my child ! {She 
 turns aivay to door.) 
 
 Warren. 
 Jean ! {Mrs. Holroyd cries something inarticulate 
 as she tries in despair to hold Jean back.) 
 
 Jean. 
 Don't, mother, don't ! You don't think I could 
 live after this, do you.? I had to do what I did,
 
 48 Alan's Wife. [sc. 3. 
 
 and they have to take my hfe for it. I showed him 
 the only true mercy, and that is what the law shows 
 me ! Maybe I shall find him up yonder made 
 straight and fair and happy — find him in Alan's 
 arms. Good-bye — mother — goodbye ! i 
 
 [She goes out as) 
 
 CURTAIN FALLS.
 
 Appendix I. 
 
 (a) Extract from article signed " A. B. W," in 
 The Speaker J May 6th, 1893 : — 
 
 " It is a philosophical commonplace that nature is, in some 
 aspects, unjust, immoral, malignant, ferocious, ' red in tooth 
 and claw.' Life presents us occasionally with cases of un- 
 speakable calamity for which there can be no compensation ; 
 wrongs that can never be righted ; hopeless, heartless, odious 
 things which put the glib commonplaces of the pulpit and 
 the cop3'book to the rout, and leave poor, mocked mankind 
 shaking their fists in impotent rage at the sky. I read the 
 other day in a newspaper of two women whom a recent ship- 
 wreck had not only made widows but driven — through the 
 prolonged agon}' of hoping for tidings of the lost vessel which 
 were never to arrive — raving mad. Are there not scores of 
 instances on record of people done to death by the law whose 
 innocence has been clearly established — too late ? Take 
 another case. A young bride, idolising her husband, glorj'ing 
 in his strength and shapeliness, has him brought home to her 
 on a stretcher, an unrecognisable mass of mangled flesh and 
 crushed bones. That, you admit, is an awful calamity, but 
 time, j'ou hasten to add, will bring its anodyne; the woman 
 is herself 3'oung and strong, she will outlive her trouble, there 
 is yet a reasonable prospect of a decent, happy life in store for 
 her. But, suppose, further, that a baby is born to her, a baby 
 which will for its whole life bear perpetual witness to the 
 shock its mother had undergone — weak, deformed to hideous- 
 ness. Here you have, I think, one of those terrible cases 
 which seem to be absolutely without consolation or redress. 
 It is the case which has been presented at the Independent
 
 50 Alan's Wife. 
 
 Theatre by the anon3'mous author of Alan's Wife, and 
 presented with no attenuation but rather persistent aggra- 
 vations of its horrible circumstances. We are shown the 
 stretcher, the mangled corpse, the child," 
 
 {b) Portion of letter addressed to the Editor of 
 '^he Speaker, and published May 13th, 1893. 
 
 "Sir, — In remonstrating with 'A. B. W.' upon his attitude 
 towards Alan's Wife, I am anxious to make it clear from the 
 outset that it is not his method of criticism that I call in 
 question. His method, if not the only right one, is at least 
 perfectly legitimate. A work of art — or, if that begs the 
 question, a theatrical production — causes in him a certain 
 overplus of disagreeable sensation ; whereupon he calls all his 
 aesthetic gods to witness that he was bound by the eternal 
 laws of art to feel as he did, and that whoever feels otherwise 
 must be a person of inferior sensibilit}'^ and brutish taste. 
 This, I repeat, is legitimate enough. Mr. Walkley is abso- 
 lutely justified in trying to mould aesthetic law into harmony 
 with his feeling, instead of trjang, like the hodmen of criticism, 
 to bring his feeling, or lack of feeling, into harmony with a 
 half-understood hard-and-fast aesthetic law. I have not even 
 any hope of modifying Mr. Walkley's instinctive impression. 
 All I would suggest is that those who feel otherwise may take 
 heart of grace, and cherish a tremulous hope that the law and 
 the prophets are not quite so solid on Mr. Walkley's side as 
 he has argued himself into believing. 
 
 "There is one very curious point in his article of last week 
 which shows how chary we should be of attributing bad faith 
 to opponents in controversy. Of course, there cannot be the 
 remotest doubt of Mr, Walkley's good faith, of his desire to 
 write fairly and truthfully ; yet he makes one statement of fact 
 which, in a critic less obviously above suspicion, one would be 
 apt to call deliberately misleading. ' We are shown,' he says, 
 ' the stretcher, the mangled corpse, the child.' Who can fail 
 to understand from this that the mangled corpse and the 
 hideously deformed baby are actually presented to the physical 
 eyes of the audience ? Note, please, that Mr. Walkley cannot 
 declare the whole sentence to be figurative. The stretcher is 
 not figurative — we do see the harmless, necessary stretcher.
 
 Alan's Wife. 51 
 
 Moreover we see the cradle — a solid oak cradle, transparent, 
 like the solid earth itself, to the eye of the imagination, but 
 certainly not to the physical vision. If Mr. Walkley, with the 
 ' red and roUing eye of imagination,' saw the mangled corpse 
 under the plaid which covered the stretcher, and descried the 
 deformed baby through the half-inch boards of the cradle, he 
 thereby rendered conclusive, though involuntary, testimony to 
 the art of |the author, which he declares in the same breath 
 to be non-existent. For, as a matter of fact, there were no 
 mangled remains, there was no crippled child. I believe 
 there was a man on the stretcher, simply because a man is 
 a more convenient * property ' than a lay figure ; but as no 
 square inch of his anatomy was for a moment visible to the 
 audience, any bundle of clothes would practically have done 
 just as well. What was in the cradle I do not know — very 
 probably nothing but bedclothes, for no soul among the 
 audience could possibly see into it. I think Mr. Walkley will 
 admit, on reflection, that he showed less than his usual lucidity 
 in mixing up physical fact (the stretcher) with hallucination 
 (the body and the baby) and treating them, so to speak, on the 
 same plane. 
 
 '' ' But the impression was just as horrible,' Mr. Walkley 
 objects, 'as if the gory body and the distorted child had 
 actually been visible ; so that it really mattered nothing 
 whether they were or not.' Excuse me, it mattered every- 
 thing. It meant all the difference between imaginative art 
 and brainless brutality. In the first place, Mr. Walkley must 
 know in his heart that the impression was not so horrible as 
 if the reality, or a mechanical imitation of the reality, had 
 been presented to the eye. The author might have borrowed 
 mangled limbs from a dissecting-room, a crooked baby from 
 Seven Dials, and exhibited them on the stage. This would 
 not have been art, and would have merited the hisses of the 
 audience, if not the interference of the police. The author 
 did nothing of the sort. By the exercise of his imagination, 
 excellently seconded by that of the actors, he worked upon 
 Mr. Walkley's imagination until that sanest of critics 
 apparently did not know what he saw and what he did not 
 see. There was no obtruding of physical horror upon the 
 physical senses ; there was simply an appeal of mind to 
 mind — in other words, there was art. We cannot all of us
 
 52 Alan's Wife. 
 
 love all forms of art, and no one can think the worse of Mr. 
 
 Walkley for disliking and deprecating this particular form. 
 
 But when he tries to make out that there is no difference 
 
 between the brutal physical obtrusion and the skilful mental 
 
 suggestion of horror, he does so at the risk of his reputation 
 
 as a thinker. 
 
 ***** 
 
 "William Archer," 
 
 (c) Extract from an article signed ''A. B. W." 
 in The Speaker of May 20th, 1893. 
 
 *'As regards the letter of friendly remonstrance in last 
 week's Speaker, which my attitude towards Alan's Wife has 
 provoked from Mr. William Archer, he must excuse me if I 
 decline to let him lure me into the arena of critical controversy 
 over this painful work. To him a play which shows us a 
 mother murdering (before our eyes) her child, which has been 
 born deformed, because her husband has been seen by her 
 (and us) brought in on a stretcher, crushed to death, is a work 
 of art ; to me it is not, and there — Sarceyism or no Sarceyism 
 — I must leave it. But there is a question of fact to which 
 I am bound to refer. 1 said that the play showed us 'the 
 stretcher, the mangled corpse, the child.' Mr. Archer denies 
 the mangled corpse, and the child. Of the man on the 
 stretcher, he says that ' no square inch of his anatomy was for 
 a moment visible to the audience.' Here it is he who is 
 strangely mistaken, not I. The sheet was lifted by the wife 
 from the man's head and shoulders, which were streaked with 
 paint to indicate some hideous disfigurement. This I saw — 
 ' ce qiion appclle vu, de mes yeux vu ' — and so did my neighbour 
 in the stalls. As to the child, Mr. Archer contends that we 
 were not ' shown ' it, because it was in a cradle, which con- 
 tained ' very probably nothing but bedclothes.' This is, 
 surely, a quibble. My meaning was plain : something that 
 purported to be a child (I learn that it was actually a doll), 
 something which the mother went through the performance 
 of smothering as the curtain descended, was brought on the 
 stage. The statement which Mr. Archer thinks misleading 
 was, I submit, absolutely truthful."
 
 Alan's Wife. 53 
 
 {d) Letter, with enclosures, addressed to the 
 Editor of The Speaker, and published, May 27th, 
 1893 :— 
 
 " Sir, — The last paragraph of ' A. B. W.'s ' last article does 
 more to justify his horror of horrors than whole columns of 
 argument. I have sometimes suspected his attitude on this 
 question of being, in part, a harmless and unconscious affecta- 
 tion ; but I see I was quite wrong. No wonder Mr. Walkley 
 finds such a play as Alan's Wife intolerable, for horror, 
 however delicately handled, evidently begets in him a state of 
 positive hallucination and makes him ' see red.' ' The sheet,' 
 he avers, 'was lifted from the man's head and shoulders, 
 which were streaked with paint to indicate some hideous 
 disfigurement. This I saw — " ce qvion appelle vu, de mes 
 yeux vu" ' That Mr. Walkley is telling the truth as to his 
 subjective impression I don't for a moment doubt ; but the 
 subjoined letters will, I think, make it abundantly clear that Mr. 
 Walkley's impression does not correspond with the objective 
 reality. He may possibly have caught a momentary glimpse 
 of the man's head, though it was not the intention of either 
 author or actress that any portion of the ' corpse ' should be 
 visible ; but he certainly did not ' see ' (except in the sub- 
 jective sense) any ' streaks of paint,' or other indications of 
 ' hideous disfigurement,' for the very sufficient reason that 
 there were none to see. I submit, then, that his statement is a 
 curious and valuable document in the psychology of aesthetics, 
 proving that artistic ' suggestion ' may, in certain cases, go the 
 length of producing mesmeric or hypnotic illusion. Mr. 
 Walkley suggests that I ' quibbled ' on the question of the 
 child. He stated that he ' was shown ' a baby, and that baby, 
 by direct implication, hideously deformed. It now appears 
 that he saw no baby, straight or crooked, but only a cradle in 
 which he was asked to imagine that a baby lay. It actually 
 contained a doll ; but as Mr. Walkley does not profess that he 
 saw the doll, and as I can positively affirm that no member of 
 the audience could possibly see it, that fact is neither here nor 
 there. My point is that Mr. Walkley's statement was calcu- 
 lated to convey to the mind of the reader that he actually 
 saw a deformed baby, or something representing one, whereas
 
 54 Alan's Wife. 
 
 there was nothing of the sort to be seen. Is it a quibble to 
 maintain that sane criticism should draw a sharp distinction 
 between what is presented to the eye and what is merely 
 suggested to the imagination ? Your obedient servant, 
 
 "William Archer." 
 
 [e^xlosures.] 
 
 " Dear Mr. Archer, — It is possible that, in the excitement 
 of the moment, I may have raised the covering so far as to 
 show the head of the figure on the stretcher to a few of the 
 audience at one side of the theatre, though neither the author 
 nor I had any intention of allowing any portion of the sup- 
 posed corpse to be visible. I am quite certain, however, that 
 the man's * head and shoulders ' were not ' streaked with 
 paint,' and that no attempt of any sort was made to indicate 
 
 * hideous disfigurement.' 
 
 " Yours sincerely, 
 
 "Elizabeth Robins." 
 "May 2T,rd, 1S93." 
 
 " My dear Archer, — As the producer of Alan's Wife, I can 
 unhesitatingly assure you that the ' head and shoulders ' of 
 the man who figured as the corpse on the stretcher were not 
 
 * streaked with paint to indicate some hideous disfigurement.' 
 As it was not intended that he should be visible to the 
 audience, I was under no temptation to commit any such 
 hideous crudity. " Always yours, 
 
 "H. De Lange." 
 "May 22nd, 1893."
 
 Appendix II. 
 
 A Question of Priority. 
 
 To the Editor of 'The Westminster Gazette. 
 
 " Sir, — In Mr. Archer's letter to you apropos of a play 
 called Alan's Wife, he states that the story on which that 
 play is founded, and which describes a baptism scene as 
 in 'Tess of the D'Urbevilles/ was published in a Swedish 
 magazine before the English novel. 
 
 "I learn from Mr. Archer that the actual date of the 
 Swedish magazine was January, 1891. This bears out his 
 printed assertion, my baptism scene having appeared in the 
 Fortnightly Review about May or June of the same year. 
 
 "The coincidence being somewhat an odd one, will you 
 allow me to say that the chapters of 'Tess' containing this 
 incident were in the hands of Messrs. Tillotson and Sons, the 
 syndicate-publishers of Bolton, so early as September, 1889, 
 and were partly put into type by their printers at that date, 
 though (for reasons that had nothing to do with the subject of 
 the story) I asked the firm to allow me to withdraw the MS., 
 which they consented to do. Later on in the same year it 
 was read by some London editors. 
 
 "Messrs. Tillotson would, I have no doubt, testify to these 
 facts if required, as would also the London editors ; thus 
 carrying us back to a date a year and a quarter before the 
 publication of the Swedish tale — whatever that priority may 
 be worth in a resemblance presumably accidental. 
 
 "Yours faithfully, 
 "Thomas Hardy." 
 
 "May% 1893."
 
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