its subject. He appeals to a thousand hearts at the same moment; he has
no choice in the matter; he must do this. And it is only when he deals
with the love of the sexes that his work is most interesting to that
aggregation of human hearts we call the audience. This very play was
successful in Chicago; but, as soon as that part of the public had been
exhausted which could weep with pleasure, if I may use the expression,
over the tenderness of a mother's love, its success would have been at
an end. Furthermore--and here comes in another law of dramatic
construction--a play must be, in one way or another, "satisfactory" to
the audience. This word has a meaning which varies in different
countries, and even in different parts of the same country; but,
whatever audience you are writing for, your work must be "satisfactory"
to it. In England and America, the death of a pure woman on the stage is
not "satisfactory," except when the play rises to the dignity of
tragedy. The death, in an ordinary play, of a woman who is not pure, as
in the case of 'Frou-Frou,' is perfectly satisfactory, for the reason
that it is inevitable. Human nature always bows gracefully to the
inevitable. The only griefs in our own lives to which we could never
reconcile ourselves are those which might have been averted. The wife
who has once taken the step from purity to impurity can never reinstate
herself in the world of art on this side of the grave; and so an
audience looks with complacent tears on the death of an erring woman.
But Lilian had not taken the one fatal step which would have reconciled
an audience to her death. She was still pure, and every one left the
theatre wishing she had lived. I yielded, therefore, to the sound logic,
based on sound dramatic principle, of my New York manager, Mr. A. M.
Palmer, and the piece was altered.

I have called the play, as produced in New York and afterward in London,
the "same play" as the one produced in Chicago. That one doubt, which