"Engineers and firemen on the western railways of the United States have threatened to strike unless their demands for increased wages and other reforms are not granted."
Illustration: Mr. H. B. IRVING (_Sir Hubert Lisle_).
"Pomfret will fall in another two seconds if I don't ride over and raise the siege. Still, my first duty is to Mr. STEPHEN PHILLIPS, and he wants me for a few dialogues and a brace of soliloquies before I start."
This is not, like the plays in which JOSEPH has recently figured, an adaptation from the Hebrew. Mr. STEPHEN PHILLIPS has given a seventeenth-century (A.D.) setting to the BATHSHEBA motive, transplanting it from the polygamous East into the England of one-man-one-wife. His object, no doubt, was to emphasize one aspect of his borrowed theme, which is further enforced by his choice of _milieu_--the camp of the Puritans.
Lest this fairly obvious note of irony should escape us, Mr. PHILLIPS accentuates it at the start by making his DAVID (_Sir Hubert Lisle_, Commander of the Parliamentary Forces in the fenland) condemn a young officer to be shot for a "carnal" offence. The delinquent's answer--
"Thou who so lightly dealest death to me Be thou then very sure of thine own soul;"
"And judge me, Thou that sittest in Thy Heaven, As I have shown no mercy, show me none!... If ever a woman's beauty shall ensnare My soul into such sin as he hath sinned"--
these passages, even if the title of the play had not prepared us, afford fair warning of the way in which things have got to go. In fact it is all very simple and straightforward, and (on the constructive side) Hellenic. Perhaps indeed the treatment is a little too direct, and the tragedy moves too quickly to its consummation (thirty or forty minutes suffice for the reading of it). It might serve its publisher (of the Bodley Head) as one of a series to be entitled: "Half-hours with the Best Sinners."
As a poem _The Sin of David_ cannot compare for beauty with _Paolo and Francesca_, though it contains isolated lines which recall Mr. PHILLIPS'S earliest drama, such as the plea of _Joyce_, the condemned officer--
"Her face was close to me, and dimmed the world."
"Thou hast unlocked the loveliness of earth."