But the converse question, how far love is “beholding” to the stage—what treatment it has received there, what justice the stage has done to it—is certainly not without interest. Life is not long enough to deal with the whole question, ranging through the ages, but it may be worth while to consider for a moment what our contemporary English stage is doing with the theme. Are our playwrights addressing themselves to it with sincerity, with veracity, with real insight? Or are they just “muddling through” with it, repeating familiar commonplaces about it, not troubling themselves “to see the thing as it really is”? These questions have occurred to me in thinking over Mr. Arnold Bennett’s _Sacred and Profane Love_. Thinking it over! interrupts the ingenuous reader; but have you not already reviewed it? So it may be well to explain that one “notices” a play and then thinks it over. True, one’s “notice”—the virtually instantaneous record of one’s first impressions—sometimes wears a specious appearance of thought. But that is one of the wicked deceptions of journalism, mainly designed to appease eager people of the sort who rush up to you the moment the curtain is down on the First Act to ask: “Well, what do you think of it?” In reality, as the wily reader knows, it is at best only thought in the making, a casting about for thought. Not until you have read it yourself next morning can you begin (if you ever do begin) to think. So, as I say, I have been thinking over Mr. Bennett’s _Sacred and Profane Love_. It is not what used to be called a “well-made” play. Its main interest is not cumulative, but is suspended for a whole act and, at its most critical point, relegated to an inter-act. In Act I. the young Carlotta gives herself to Diaz. In Act II. (seven years later) Diaz has dropped clean out. Carlotta, now a famous novelist, is in love with somebody else and shows herself strong enough to renounce her love. Act III. resumes the Carlotta-Diaz story. He has become an abject morphinomaniac; she heroically devotes herself, body and soul, to the terrible task of reclaiming him. _Between_ Acts III. and IV. (fourteen months) this terrible task is accomplished. We have to take it on trust, a rather “large order.” Act IV. ends the Carlotta-Diaz story in marriage. Obviously it is not a well-told story. It has a long digression, and the spectator’s attention is misled; it assumes a miracle behind the scenes, and the spectator’s credulity is over-taxed. Act II. is a play within a play; how Carlotta nearly ran away with her publisher. In Act IV. you cannot accept the alleged recovery of the morphinomaniac, you expect him to “break out” again at any moment. Of course, the story being what it is, there was no help for it. Years of rising to fame as a novelist, months of struggling with a drug victim, cannot be shown on the stage. Only, writers of well-made plays do not choose such stories.