"I confess I should have liked immensely to have seen [? to see] this piece on the boards; for only then could one be quite sure whether it could be made convincing to an audience and carry their sympathies in the way the author intended. Yet the fact that BEAU AUSTIN, in spite of being 'put on' by so eminent an actor-manager as Mr Beerbohm Tree, was no great success on the stage, is a fair proof that the piece lacked some of the essentials, good or bad, of dramatic success. Now a drama, like a picture or a musical composition, must have a certain unity of key and tone. You can, indeed, mingle comedy with tragedy as an interlude or relief from the strain and stress of the serious interest of the piece. But you cannot reverse the process and mingle tragedy with comedy. Once touch the fine spun-silk of the pretty fire-balloon of comedy with the tragic dagger, and it falls to earth a shrivelled nothing. And the reason that no melodrama can be great art is just that it is a compromise between tragedy and comedy, a mixture of tragedy with comedy and not comedy with tragedy. So in drama, the middle course, proverbially the safest, is in reality the most dangerous. Now I maintain that in BEAU AUSTIN we have an element of tragedy. The betrayal of a beautiful, pure and noble-minded woman is surely at once the basest act a man can be capable of, and a more tragic event than death itself to the woman. Richardson, in CLARISSA HARLOWE, is well aware of this, and is perfectly right in making his DENOUEMENT tragic. Stevenson, on the other hand, patches up the matter into a rather tame comedy. It is even much tamer than it would have been in the case of Lovelace and Clarissa Harlowe; for Lovelace is a strong character, a man who could have been put through some crucial atonement, and come out purged and ennobled. But Beau Austin we feel is but a frip. He endures a few minutes of sharp humiliation, it is true, but to the spectator this cannot but seem a very insufficient expiation, not only of the wrong he had done one woman, but of the indefinite number of wrongs he had done others. He is at once the villain and the hero of the piece, and in the narrow limits of a brief comedy this transformation cannot be convincingly effected. Wrongly or rightly, a theatrical audience, like the spectators of a trial, demand a definite verdict and sentence, and no play can satisfy which does not reasonably meet this demand. And this arises not from any merely Christian prudery or Puritanism, for it is as true for Greek tragedy and other high forms of dramatic art."

The transformation of villain into hero, if possible at all, could only be convincingly effected in a piece of wide scope, where there was room for working out the effect of some great shock, upheaval of the nature, change due to deep and unprecedented experiences - religious conversion, witnessing of sudden death, providential rescue from great peril of death, or circumstance of that kind; but to be effective and convincing it needs to be marked and FULLY JUSTIFIED in some such way; and no cleverness in the writer will absolve him from deference to this great law in serious work for presentation on the stage; if mere farces or little comedies may seem sometimes to contravene it, yet this - even this - is only in appearance.