Page:Mr. Bunt.pdf/144

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tive music from wind - instruments and strings, and above all the naive and spontaneous joy which children (of all ages) take in their own make -believe, and it is easy to tell why we sat, a hushed and enchanted audience, with the lump of sheer delight gulping in our throats for two unbroken hours. In the best sense of the word, it was an amateur performance: love lay in every moment of it; and it was an articulate and expres sive love with singularly few traces of that other quality so abhorrent to the artist, amateurishness.

To that evening of magic, only a heart dulled by worldliness to all the tender and brooding charm of wistfulness and naive beauty could have remained insensible. Maybe there is overmuch sentimentalism, maybe overmuch preaching, in MR. BUNT; I dare say; but unhappy are they who have not eyes to see the ripeness of threshed grain, nor ears to hear the moral order of the stars in heaven.

This footnote is written hurriedly, with the printing presses waiting for the final “signature”; that inevitably precludes any considered criticism of the play as such, and I have to content myself with half-evasive statements, philosophical rather than aesthetic. As a man of the theater, I would like to weigh this and to balance that, to discussfor instance-whether the play is, or