ABSTRACT
For the staleness of the incidents one has only to refer to half a dozen familiar French plays. As to the stage laws which are broken, they are two: one invented by Sarcey, the other by Diderot and promulgated by Lessing, while-but perhaps it will be better to tell the story and make my comments as I go along. Lady Windermere is a guileless young bride who, like M.Dumas’ Françillon, believes in an equal law of fidelity for both husband and wife. She has perfect confidence in her husband, but if ever that confidence is betrayed it is pretty clear that she will act on Françillon’s principle of reprisals-an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth. The time comes when she has reason to suspect that her confidence is betrayed. An unprincipled man of the world-unprincipled, for he divides mankind not into the good and the bad, but ‘the charming and the tedious,’ and ‘can resist everything, except temtation’—with designs of his own upon Lady Windermere, hints to her-only hints, for he holds that ‘to be intelligible is to be found out’—that her husband is too intimate with a certain Mrs. Erlynne. Who is Mrs. Erlynne? She is a demi-mondaine in the original Dumasian sense of that much-abused term:1 or, as a certain gossiping Duchess puts it, one of those
people ‘who form the basis of other people’s marriages.’ The suspicions thus aroused are confirmed when the wife tears open her husband’s bankbook: the creature is in his pay! More than that, he insists upon her being admitted as a guest to one of his wife’s receptions. ‘If she comes, I will strike her in the face with my fan,’ says the indignant wife. ‘How hard you good women are!’ ‘How weak you wicked men are!’ ‘If she only knew!’ sighs Lord Windermere.
