Almost any novelist, sooner or later in his career, dabbles in drama, and Mr. Moore no doubt would have attempted drama in the natural course of things, even if he had not been interested in "The Independent Theatre" and thus led to a situation in which consistency demanded that he write a play. It was his articles on the drama, gathered into "Impressions and Opinions" (1891), that provoked Mr. G.R. Sims to taunt him into "The Strike at Arlingford" (1893). In "Our Dramatists and their Literature," one of these papers, Mr. Moore, in hitting all the heads of all the contemporaneous dramatists, so stung Mr. Sims that he said he would give a hundred pounds for a stall from which to witness a performance of "an unconventional play" written by Mr. Moore. Mr. Moore accepted the challenge, and "The Strike at Arlingford," as I have said, was the result, Mr. Sims having agreed to withdraw the word "unconventional" on Mr. Moore's objection that he would be at the mercy of Mr. Sims' judgment if the word was retained. "The Independent Theatre" played the play and Mr. Sims paid the money. It was perhaps just as well for Mr. Moore that the adjective was withdrawn, for the play was little less conventional than "The Second Mrs. Tanqueray" or "Sowing the Wind," to mention two successes of that year by play-makers that took their art a little more seriously than Mr. Sims. In a way, too, "The Strike at Arlingford" is unoriginal. Lady Ann Travers is only a more fortunate Hedda Gabler who in the end accepts the protection of her Chancellor Brack, the capitalist Baron Steinbach, after her Lövberg turned labor agitator, John Reid has, like his prototype, made a wreck of his life. "The Strike at Arlingford" has its excellences: its plot is logically unfolded; it is believable; it is true to human nature; it has moments of intensity. Had Mr. Moore power of dialogue it might have been a fine play, for the characterization is what one would expect from so conscientious a depicter of life as Mr. Moore, and the problem, a man's choice between his love and his duty, one that has never failed to appeal to men. Mr. Moore is careful to tell us that, in his own conception of the play, "the labor dispute is an externality to which I attach little importance."