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Most people are familiar with what Mr. Archer calls the blind alley theme of Monna Vanna's attempt to save a city; her visit to Prinzivalle, the chieftain of the opposing camp, where, clad only in her cloak, she spends the night in his tent to emerge from it with unscathed honour but tarnished reputation. For a dualist to illustrate the frailness of the flesh by an appeal to the senses smacks a trifle too much of the respectable moralist to be altogether agreeable to an audience of serious-minded artists; and the second act of Monna Vanna is very like the Broadway manager's production of a white slave play at which, in order to remain chaste, one enjoys a vicarious license. We are apparently engrossed in the details of a noble encounter but our underlying and most vital attention is constantly arrested by the precarious fastenings of the heroine's cloak. We tolerate the spectacle of loquacious virtue through an entire act, chained to our places by our anticipation of the moment which depends entirely on the lasting qualities of a pin or a button.

It was the author's preoccupation with plot that permitted the most arresting outcome of its complications to escape his foresight. The motif of a struggle which promises tragedy and certainly, demands a relentless solution is introduced with inferior emphasis in the last act. It is the struggle of Guido's sincerity between a former notion of his wife and the contradictoriness of her later action. Whether her virtue be untouched or not is of secondary interest, but she has sown in his mind ineradicable seeds of doubt which are bound to flourish. The psychological situation evolved for Guido is the same which confronts the husband of Strindberg's Laura when she permits him to doubt the paternity of her child. Laura we can frankly hate, and if Maeterlinck had a sharper vision of values he might have punctuated the double futility of Vanna's sacrifice with a grinding shriek of irony. As it was, it is probable that a dramatic impulse led him to a conclusion far from the goal he had anticipated. The Vanna who is so moved by the warm unreason of her sudden passion for her erstwhile captor that she will lie for him and save him by the betrayal of her husband's very comprehensible rage is certainly not to be reconciled with the inhuman creature of the first scene who, without one ray of understanding of what her act implies to those nearest her, stalks heroically off stage to fulfil an impossible role of self-abnegation. Maeterlinck was side-tracked by the insistence of reality, and the consequence is a