A play by Mr. Haddon Chambers, The Awakening, turned on a sudden conversion—­the “awakening,” in fact, referred to in the title.  A professional lady-killer, a noted Don Juan, has been idly making love to a country maiden, whose heart is full of innocent idealisms.  She discovers his true character, or, at any rate, his reputation, and is horror-stricken, while practically at the same moment, he “awakens” to the error of his ways, and is seized with a passion for her as single minded and idealistic as hers for him.  But how are the heroine and the audience to be assured of the fact?  That is just the difficulty; and the author takes no effectual measures to overcome it.  The heroine, of course, is ultimately convinced; but the audience remains sceptical, to the detriment of the desired effect.  “Sceptical,” perhaps, is not quite the right word.  The state of mind of a fictitious character is not a subject for actual belief or disbelief.  We are bound to accept theoretically what the author tells us; but in this case he has failed to make us intimately feel and know that it is true.[2]

In Mr. Alfred Sutro’s play The Builder of Bridges, Dorothy Faringay, in her devotion to her forger brother, has conceived the rather disgraceful scheme of making one of his official superiors fall in love with her, in order to induce him to become practically an accomplice in her brother’s crime.  She succeeds beyond her hopes.  Edward Thursfield does fall in love with her, and, at a great sacrifice, replaces the money the brother has stolen.  But, in a very powerful peripety-scene in the third act, Thursfield learns that Dorothy has been deliberately beguiling him, while in fact she was engaged to another man.  The truth is, however, that she has really come to love Thursfield passionately, and has broken her engagement with the other, for whom she never truly cared.  So the author tells us, and so we are willing enough to believe—­if he can devise any adequate method of making Thursfield believe it.  Mr. Sutro’s handling of the difficulty seems to me fairly, but not conspicuously, successful.  I cite the case as a typical instance of the problem, apart from the merits or demerits of the solution.

It may be said that the difficulty of bringing home to us the reality of a revulsion of feeling, or a radical change of mental attitude, is only a particular case of the playwright’s general problem of convincingly externalizing inward conditions and processes.  That is true:  but the special importance of a conversion which unties the knot and brings the curtain down seemed to render it worthy of special consideration.

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[Footnote 1:  Of Dramatic Poesy, ed.  Arnold, 1903, p. 51.]

[Footnote 2:  In Mr. Somerset Maugham’s Grace the heroine undergoes a somewhat analogous change of heart, coming to love the husband whom she has previously despised.  But we have no difficulty in accepting her conversion, partly because its reasons are clear and fairly adequate, partly because there is no question of convincing the husband, who has never realized her previous contempt for him.]