Dec, 6.
Just as the word "education" in a headline frightens off most readers, 80 to describe a play as "instructive" or "calculated to make one think" is enough warning for the majority of theatre-goers to book seats for something else. We are all schoolboys in our instinctive aversion to having our minds improved. To entrap a man into the theatre under promise of entertainment and then to drop the insidious poison of mental or ethical "uplift" into his ear, is really mean, And yet it must be confessed that "Mil stones," now playing at the Lyceum, is both "calculated to make one think" and, if one be at all disposed to wear befitting caps, instructive. But as it is also one of the most attractive and interesting comedies that we can imagine, and as the thinking provoked is of the sort that fills our correspondence columns from time to time with donate discussion of the foibles of the day, it is to be hoped that no one will be put off going to see the play by thia admission, The high gods must derive infinite amusement from watching the changes that mankind endures, themselves unchanged. We mortals have all but nihilated space, but time is beyond our control. We may endeavour to watch our neigh-hour's career, with detachment as from a philosopher's eyrie. But the unperceived transformation at work within oursd blinds us to the full extent" that going on in him. Mereifully 80, the cynic may say, or how many marriages would endure for ten years! And here come in Mr. Bennett and Mr. Knoblock to lend us the removed perspective of Olympus. All the life of John Rhead is spread out for our reflexion, and the panorama of the three-score years is compressed into the sweep of an opera glass. How skilfully the different phases and surroundings of that life are chosen to show us just what sort of man he was and became The dogmatic self-assertive youth, the complacent middle age, the hoary domestic tyrant. In 1860 he is astounded that his. elders can be so blind; in 1885 he is already suffering from the same myopia that he denounced in them; in 1912 he remembers only that he has always had his own way and has always been successful. How much in either course he owed to other people, he is beyond the power of analysing But it is the position of womenfolk in the story which may, perhaps, interest us most. In 1860 woman was, frankly, slave... In 1912 (still more "in 1924) she throws not merely her. bonnet, but her entire wardrobe" over the windmills and stands, forth (on the top'of the omnibus which Gertfade Rhead pro:, phegied'; she. would. one, "day. mount), metaphorically... naked, and unashamed: Possibly she.
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.