That the _situations_, with one exception, are not new is known to all persons of experience, whether of life or art. The situation, invented by Belasco, of the death of _Fawn Afraid_, in the moment when _General Kennion_ warns her father, _Scar-Brow_, that her life and safety depend upon those of the women and the garrison, is new; the others, in form, are old: the ball on the eve of battle has never been more imaginatively used than by Byron, in “Childe Harold”; the representation of the father who is to kill his daughter to save her from outrage is, in substance, _Virginius_ and _Virginia_; the rescue of the beleagured garrison is the climax scene of Boucicault’s “Jessie Brown; or, The Relief of Lucknow” over again, with a difference. But what of it? The dramatic situations possible in human life are limited in number. In “The Girl I Left Behind Me” the treatment of the situations is fresh, vivid, vital. I have read that those situations are made to order and “merely theatrical.” That is untrue. There is not an essential situation in this play that is improbable, for there is not an essential situation or experience in it that might not happen, nor one that has not happened in the region and period designated. The play, of course, has faults, and they are as obvious as need be, to please even the most captious disciple of detraction. There is a story of a Mormon preacher who deemed it desirable to convince his auditors that “the Lord was but a man, as other men,” and who undertook to do so by citations from Holy Writ. “The Lord _saw_” he quoted--therefore the Lord had eyes; “the Lord _heard_“--therefore he had ears; “the Lord _spake_“--therefore he had a mouth and vocal organs; “the Lord _sat_“--therefore the Lord had hinder parts, and so following. That is very much the method of criticasters: they clamber and crawl about upon a work of art with a foot-rule and a plumb-bob of censure, and seem to find delight and to suppose they have fulfilled the duty of criticism when they have ascertained and enumerated the defects or faults of the work under consideration. The impartial critic, on the other hand, who studies “The Girl I Left Behind Me” will, I think, most strongly feel a mingled regret and wonder that, when a play of such exceptional merit had been created, the comparatively small and easy amount of additional labor required to relieve it of every considerable defect should have been withheld. The necessity of completing it in a definite time and Belasco’s anxious and harassed situation may, no doubt, explain the lack of needfully scrupulous revision, though they make it no less deplorable. The “comedy” elements, the passages between young _Dr. Penwick_ and _Wilber’s Ann_, are juvenile, thin, and weak, and (the most serious fault in the play, which easily could have been obviated) there is no adequate reason provided why _Kate Kennion_, loving _Lieutenant Hawksworth_, to whom eventually she is united, _Parlow_ being slain,