AT THE PLAY.

"THE UNKNOWN."

Mr. SOMERSET MAUGHAM, who recently intrigued and perhaps just a little
scandalised the town with a most engagingly flippant and piquant farce all
about an accidentally bigamous beauty, certainly shows courage in launching
so serious a discussion as _The Unknown_. And in the silly season too. I
see that in a quite unlikely interview (but then all modern interviews are
unlikely) he defends his right to discuss religion quite openly on the
stage. Of course. Why should anybody deny that religion is to the normally
constituted mind, whatever its doxy, an absorbingly interesting subject; or
that the War hasn't made a breach in the barriers of British reticence?
Whether to the point of making a perfectly good married Vicar (anxious to
convict a doubting D.S.O. of sin) ask in a full drawing-room containing the
Vicaress, the Doctor and the D.S.O.'s fiancée, mother and father, "For
instance, have you always been perfectly chaste?"--I am not so sure. Nor
whether the War has really added to bereaved _Mrs. Littlewood's_ bitter
"And who is going to forgive God?" any added force. If that kind of
question is to be asked at all it might have been asked, and with perhaps
more justice, at any time within the historical period. For the War might
reasonably be attributed by the Unknown Defendant thus starkly put upon
trial to man's deliberate folly, whereas....

No doubt, however, Mr. MAUGHAM would say the shock of war has (like any
other great catastrophe) tested the faith of many who are personally deeply
stricken and found it wanting, while the whisper of doubt has swelled the
more readily as there are many to echo it. So _Major John Wharton, D.S.O.,
M.C._, having found war, contrary to his expectation of it as the most