At the moment when these lines are written, the London playgoer, not perhaps of the most fashionable class, receives with delight a scene in which a hero swims to the rescue of injured innocence, which a generation ago established the fortunes of a dramatist and a theatre. I refer, of course, to the Colleen Bawn of Dion Boucicault, which has once more been revived. The rescue scene in this hit exactly the sense of the English public and fulfilled its ideal. For a year or two afterwards the intellect of our dramatists was exercised as to the means by which virtue imperilled could be rescued, whether by climbing a tower or swinging by a tree, or by any other contrivance involving the risk of a broken neck. Those days, happily, are past. We have not, however, made great progress in our education, and seem yet to have to learn that the most telling drama is the psychological, and that dialogue moves us, or should move us, more than incident. Othello, in some respects the most poignant of tragedies, is nearly all duologue, the gradual poisoning of the Moor's mind by Iago being one of the most tremendous scenes ever attempted. The Greeks, the great art-loving people of antiquity, banished in tragedy all incident from the stage, and in this respect have been copied by the great school of French classicists.
So far, without any very direct purpose or intention, I have been posing, apparently, as the apologist for Mr. Jones's play. Underneath this, perhaps, some few may have traced a design still less definite of apologising for the English public. Nothing is further from my intention than to proffer an excuse for what I regard as a fine and most moving drama. For myself, I can only say that rarely indeed have my entrails been stirred by more forcible pathos, my attention been rapt by more inspiriting a theme, and my intellect been satisfied by dialogue more natural, appropriate, and, in the highest sense, dramatic. In one respect, I am disposed at times to agree with some of Mr. Jones's censors. The logic of events which brings about the scene in the island is, perhaps, not sufficiently inexorable. That Mrs. Lesden is, in the eyes of the world, hopelessly compromised when she spends a night alone on the island with her lover, I will concede. I can conceive, however, Michael treating her with the more delicacy therefor, abandoning to her his house, and spending a summer night, no enormous penalty, in the open air, on the seashore. This, however, only means that the overmastering influence of passion over Michael has not been fully exhibited in action.