[In the following review, the critic makes a plea for the production of Exiles.]

Many men have written interesting books about their childhood and youth, and never succeeded again in the same degree. Not only was esteem for Mr. James Joyce's Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man subject to this discount, but it unfortunately raised both friends and enemies whose excitement about it was unconnected with its merits: here brilliant, there tedious, the book itself rendered the stream of opinion yet more turbid. An unacted problem play is not the book to clear the public mind. Yet this work does prove the author's imagination independent of stimulus from self-preoccupation; and, though a first play, roughly straining its means, it reveals resources of spiritual passion and constructive power which should greatly cheer the friends of his talent.

Richard Rowan, like so many gifted young men, has early rebelled against current compromises. He will not stoop either to seduce or to marry Bertha, yet of her own impulse she accompanies him to Rome, where they live in voluntary exile for nine years and bring up their little son. Meanwhile scholarly and brilliant work has won him the first fruits of renown, and by absorbing him has oppressed Bertha with the loneliness of the unequally mated. Her man is one who clings to the soul's absolute integrity as feverishly as others cling to material existence. He suffers agonies of shame and remorse when he finds himself less faithful to her than she has been to him; he confesses everything to her, and insists that she is equally free. When the play opens they are back in Dublin. Robert Hand, the great friend of his youth, a journalist, zealously prepares the University and the Press to ignore the fact that Richard and Bertha's happy union owes nothing to the law, but at the same time he undermines their domestic quietude by covertly courting Bertha. She, jealous of Richard's relations with an intellectual lady who is able to discuss his ideas in a way she cannot, and constantly indoctrinated as to her absolute freedom, receives Robert's addresses, yet relates every advance as it is made to Richard, partly in hopes of rousing his jealousy, which her own prescribes as its proper antidote, partly because, like himself, she has never hidden anything. He perceives that his old friend is acting like “a common thief” and precedes Bertha to the first assignation. But Robert, cynic and rake though he is, genuinely loves and admires his friend. His humility touches Richard, in whom, as he listens, dread wakes lest, like the ghost of his own passion, he may stand between Bertha and experiences which are her due. Like another Shelley, he decides that their rivalry must be open and unprejudiced by the past. Does he any longer really possess Bertha's heart? She arrives; he explains to her again her absolute freedom, and leaves her to meet his friend. The second curtain falls before that interview has ended. In the third act both Bertha and Robert, equally admiring and loving Richard, assure him that nothing has happened between them; but he has doubted both and cannot recover his faith—the torture of a night of susponse has been too great.

I have wounded my soul for you—a deep wound of doubt which can never he healed. … I do not wish to know or to believe. … It is not in the darkness of belief that I desire you, but in restless living, wounding doubt.

and she can only answer:—

Forget me and love me. … I want my lover. … You Dick. O, my strange, wild lover, come back to me again!

So the play ends—a situation after Browning's own heart, and seen more distinctly, less as a case put, than he would probably have seen it; only the machinery used is Ibsen's.

The second act transcends this machinery and is in outline and effect a poetical creation; the other two acts, in which minor characters figure, are less happy. On the stage custom shows people in such situations, light-heartedly, sentimentally, or cynically; to show them seriously and sympathetically alarms some folk as Jesus did when he persisted in dining with harlots and publicans. Intellectual charity is to-day as rare a virtue as human compassion was then. Those for whom certain themes and certain words constitute either a “taboo” or a “hall mark” are debarred from exercising it. Sympathy opens both the heart and the eye that discerns beauty; prejudice closes both. In the last act a doubt arises in the reader's mind whether Bertha and Robert are not lying to Richard; probably this is due to inadvertence on the author's part. Their falsehood by increasing their inferiority would deepen the grounds of his lonely suffering, but by proving their response to his lead superficial it would diminish the poignancy of his tragic doubt. Thus an outline is doubled, one intention cancelling the other: such ambiguity is merely distracting, and might easily be removed. But this is a detail, an accident; the whole is lifted and throbs, like King Lear, with a capacity for suffering more startling even than the situations in which it is manifested. Of course, work so young and in some ways crude is no match for the varied enchantments of King Lear. The woodenness of realism is made painfully apparent by the passion that contrasts to it the bone-structure and blood of a creation—of Exiles. Experience in the use of words and the management of scenes may supply what Mr. James Joyce lacks, though, of course, they may not, and a world that crushes and pampers authors with equal blindness may be trusted to make the finest success the most difficult and least likely. Will not the Stage Society or the Pioneers let us and the author see this play, so that its shortcomings may become apparent to him and its virtues be brought home to us with their full force?