It does not come within my province here to discuss the several points of controversy, the various critical objections urged against the play, but merely to recall them as a matter of theatrical history. So be it remembered that the central motive of the story was condemned as being fantastically strained, for the simple reason that at this end of the nineteenth century the mental condition of Leslie Brudenell was inconceivable, the position therefore being untenable from the point of view of real life. It was further urged that any right-minded young wife would have submissively accepted the situation in the true wisdom of modern cynicism, or that Dunstan Renshaw would have turned round upon her and with brutal frankness revealed to her that her disillusioning was only the common experience of all wives, and that she must bow to the inevitable and make no fuss. It was laid down as law moreover that, as a leopard cannot change its spots, so can no man who has once lived evilly be influenced to a better, a purer life; that profligate once, profligate he must remain for evermore. Then Hugh Murray, the serious-minded, lofty-natured lawyer, who can never restrain his tongue when he sees wrong-doing, but can be nobly, piteously silent when he must bury his love deep down in his lonely life until it nearly breaks the heart of him--he was found by certain critics to be impossibly unreal and even comic. It was discovered, too, that the office of Messrs. Cheal and Murray was in Furnival’s Inn, Fairyland--that such proceedings as were witnessed in that office could never have been possible in Holborn. Those who made all these discoveries charged “The Profligate” on this score or that with being untrue to nature or false to art. Yet Mr. Pinero, in essaying to deal dramatically with a moral problem in a manner which, while neither cynical nor commonplace, should still be in touch with human sympathy and possible experience, appears to have deliberately set himself to conceive a group of characters, natural yet not ordinary, which should embody his ideals, and with a sufficient sense of actuality evolve the tragic recoil of sin, the dramatic pathos of innocence in contact with the irony of life, the exquisite influence of purity. Whether Mr. Pinero succeeded in carrying out his idea or not, even the severest of his critics could not deny this play respectful consideration. “A real play at last,” cried one; “a faulty play with one faultless act,” was another’s summing-up after his first enthusiasm had cooled in the refrigerator of time; while yet a third recorded that “no original English play produced on our stage for many a day has stirred its audience so deeply at the time of its representation, or has sent them home with so much to think over, to discuss and to remember.”