But, in actual fact, almost every detail went to confound the new morality. The passionate woman was the hero's wife, whom he had just divorced—to achieve domesticity. She did not exclusively depend upon the physical appeal; though it was used to bring him back. They had a thousand other, more subtle, points of sympathy and mutual attraction, despite the exasperating petty irritations
of life, which she would not allow to wreck their love. On the other hand, it was not any fixed aversion to marriage, any weakness in the bond itself, that caused her rival's failure. She simply was not, when—as it were—put to the test, his spiritual mate. For him, she was the wrong woman.
Most certainly this play was not inspired by any conscious theories on life or art. A straightforward, workmanlike picture of everyday people; its very lack of intention made it the more convincing. The author had no axe to grind.
As in life, we saw that the best feelings of an ordinary decent sort of man are expressed, as his ultimate happiness is secured, by 'putting up with his wife's tantrums for love of her dear self.' That is, by some kind of self-control about the small things of life for the sake of the big; an instinctive knowledge of values or sense of proportion; mutual accommodation, and self-expression in self-sacrifice. He would not rush away from her for a change or new experience, to that placid domesticity which, because he had missed it, he—for a moment—supposed would prove ideal.
Nevertheless, it is absolutely clear that his
decision does not establish the superiority of passion-storms over carpet slippers. He chose between two women, not between two modes of life: a matter of temperament, and the man's individual, permanent feeling. Though married, he had not—as he too hastily imagined—fallen "out of" love.
Life is distorted to-day by the orgy of crude passion in most second-rate fiction, of which Mr. Evan Morgan's Trial by Ordeal is an extreme case. Unfortunately such novelists have the smart air of being absolutely at home all over the world, without really knowing their way about anywhere.
The leading lady of this brightly variegated human manure-heap is a "vampire, like a sea-breeze, like the noise of a waterfall at night"; her familiar ally is a discreet "sort of lady dressmaker, whose sons, numbering almost equally with her lovers, had forced her to take to a genteel trade." It is a picture of life among "bolsters with the temperaments of wood-lice; . . . among talented women, gifted women, immoral women."
Here Miss Hazell O'Neill "netted a half-blind poet, whom she took out and dusted on bright days and holidays." Him she ultimately left, as part of her luggage, to a landlady
in Jersey; and proceeded to "smash a sculptor with his own statue."