Of that other "failure," "The Madras House," Mr. Archer admits that he found a good deal in the play to interest him, and it is difficult to believe that the author of "The Voysey Inheritance" had not something fresh and inspiring to tell his audience. There are some subjects which do not admit of being treated in drama in a way to enlist general favour. No thinker would argue that "Troilus and Cressida" was written by Shakespeare with a view to its surpassing the popularity of "Hamlet." It is sufficient if the author has treated his subject in a way consistent with the laws of nature and probability. For the critics to assume, as they do, that the author is not conscious of the dramatic limitations imposed upon him by the choice of his subject is an impertinence. As Voltaire once said in defence of a play: "We cannot do all that our friends advise. There are such things as necessary faults. To cure a humpbacked man of his hump we should have to take his life. My child is humpbacked, but otherwise it is quite well." Indeed, Mr. Barker's time will be better employed in educating his critics than in re-writing his play. Nor must it be forgotten that Mr. Barker was hardly out of his teens when he wrote "The Marrying of Ann Leete," a comedy that has not yet received the attention it deserves. Fortunately it has been printed and published, and will undoubtedly again be seen on the stage; for the play has unusual possibilities for a stage-manager with constructive imagination and poetic sensibility, and there is not now wanting in London an audience capable of appreciating a work of the kind in the spirit in which it is conceived. This comedy was undoubtedly inspired by the art of Maeterlinck at the time when the Belgian dramatist was writing such plays as "The Interlude." But where Maeterlinck fails Mr. Barker succeeds. With the poet the disjointed dialogue and constant repetition of the monosyllable becomes a mannerism, and is never convincing. Mr. Barker's method is a nearer approach to reality. He has chosen his characters with more care to give point to their abrupt method of speech, and with no little art. In a country house remote from the world, among people who are well bred if not well read, who give more time to sport and cards than to books, and who have little power to express themselves except in unfinished sentences, is unfolded a domestic tragedy of wonderful power and sadness. And in this lies the weirdness and fascination of the play--that no word of the story is related by the characters, and only from fragments of conversation, apparently trivial and unimportant, does the spectator gradually bit by bit piece together and arrange for himself the puzzle of these people's existence. This comedy, then, is an experiment to try and show the inner life of a family exactly as it might be learnt by a neighbour who was not personally known to any of its members, and it is a very remarkable achievement.