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+*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 10865 ***
+
+PLAY-MAKING
+
+_A Manual of Craftsmanship_
+
+by William Archer
+
+
+1912
+
+
+
+
+PREFATORY NOTE
+
+This book is, to all intents and purposes, entirely new. No considerable
+portion of it has already appeared, although here and there short
+passages and phrases from articles of bygone years are embedded
+--indistinguishably, I hope--in the text. I have tried, wherever
+it was possible, to select my examples from published plays, which the
+student may read for himself, and so check my observations. One reason,
+among others, which led me to go to Shakespeare and Ibsen for so many of
+my illustrations, was that they are the most generally accessible of
+playwrights.
+
+If the reader should feel that I have been over lavish in the use of
+footnotes, I have two excuses to allege. The first is that more than
+half of the following chapters were written on shipboard and in places
+where I had scarcely any books to refer to; so that a great deal had to
+be left to subsequent enquiry and revision. The second is that several
+of my friends, dramatists and others, have been kind enough to read my
+manuscript, and to suggest valuable afterthoughts.
+
+LONDON
+
+_January_, 1912
+
+
+To
+
+Brander Matthews
+
+Guide Philosopher and Friend
+
+
+
+CONTENTS
+
+  BOOK I
+
+  PROLOGUE
+
+  _CHAPTER I_ INTRODUCTORY
+  _CHAPTER II_ THE CHOICE OF A THEME
+  _CHAPTER III_ DRAMATIC AND UNDRAMATIC
+  _CHAPTER IV_ THE ROUTINE OF COMPOSITION
+  _CHAPTER V_ DRAMATIS PERSONAE
+
+
+  BOOK II
+
+  THE BEGINNING
+
+  _CHAPTER VI_ THE POINT OF ATTACK: SHAKESPEARE AND IBSEN
+  _CHAPTER VII_ EXPOSITION: ITS END AND ITS MEANS
+  _CHAPTER VIII_ THE FIRST ACT
+  _CHAPTER IX_ "CURIOSITY" AND "INTEREST"
+  _CHAPTER X_ FORESHADOWING, NOT FORESTALLING
+
+
+  BOOK III
+
+  THE MIDDLE
+
+  _CHAPTER XI_ TENSION AND ITS SUSPENSION
+  _CHAPTER XII_ PREPARATION: THE FINGER-POST
+  _CHAPTER XIII_ THE OBLIGATORY SCENE
+  _CHAPTER XIV_ THE PERIPETY
+  _CHAPTER XV_ PROBABILITY, CHANCE AND COINCIDENCE
+  _CHAPTER XVI_ LOGIC
+  _CHAPTER XVII_ KEEPING A SECRET
+
+
+  BOOK IV
+
+  THE END
+
+  _CHAPTER XVIII_ CLIMAX AND ANTICLIMAX
+  _CHAPTER XIX_ CONVERSION
+  _CHAPTER XX_ BLIND-ALLEY THEMES--AND OTHERS
+  _CHAPTER XXI_ THE FULL CLOSE
+
+
+  BOOK V
+
+  EPILOGUE
+
+  _CHAPTER XXII_ CHARACTER AND PSYCHOLOGY
+  _CHAPTER XXIII_ DIALOGUE AND DETAILS
+
+
+
+
+_BOOK I_
+
+PROLOGUE
+
+
+
+_CHAPTER I_
+
+INTRODUCTORY
+
+
+There are no rules for writing a play. It is easy, indeed, to lay down
+negative recommendations--to instruct the beginner how _not_ to do it.
+But most of these "don'ts" are rather obvious; and those which are not
+obvious are apt to be questionable. It is certain, for instance, that if
+you want your play to be acted, anywhere else than in China, you must
+not plan it in sixteen acts of an hour apiece; but where is the tyro who
+needs a text-book to tell him that? On the other hand, most theorists of
+to-day would make it an axiom that you must not let your characters
+narrate their circumstances, or expound their motives, in speeches
+addressed, either directly to the audience, or ostensibly to their
+solitary selves. But when we remember that, of all dramatic openings,
+there is none finer than that which shows Richard Plantagenet limping
+down the empty stage to say--
+
+  "Now is the winter of our discontent
+  Made glorious summer by this sun of York;
+  And all the clouds that lour'd upon our house
+  In the deep bosom of the ocean buried"--
+
+we feel that the axiom requires large qualifications. There are no
+absolute rules, in fact, except such as are dictated by the plainest
+common sense. Aristotle himself did not so much dogmatize as analyse,
+classify, and generalize from, the practices of the Attic dramatists. He
+said, "you had better" rather than "you must." It was Horace, in an age
+of deep dramatic decadence, who re-stated the pseudo-Aristotelian
+formulas of the Alexandrians as though they were unassailable dogmas
+of art.
+
+How comes it, then, that there is a constant demand for text-books of
+the art and craft of drama? How comes it that so many people--and I
+among the number--who could not write a play to save their lives, are
+eager to tell others how to do so? And, stranger still, how comes it
+that so many people are willing to sit at the feet of these instructors?
+It is not so with the novel. Popular as is that form of literature,
+guides to novel-writing, if they exist at all, are comparatively rare.
+Why are people possessed with the idea that the art of dramatic fiction
+differs from that of narrative fiction, in that it can and must
+be taught?
+
+The reason is clear, and is so far valid as to excuse, if not to
+justify, such works as the present. The novel, as soon as it is legibly
+written, exists, for what it is worth. The page of black and white is
+the sole intermediary between the creative and the perceptive brain.
+Even the act of printing merely widens the possible appeal: it does not
+alter its nature. But the drama, before it can make its proper appeal at
+all, must be run through a highly complex piece of mechanism--the
+theatre--the precise conditions of which are, to most beginners, a
+fascinating mystery. While they feel a strong inward conviction of their
+ability to master it, they are possessed with an idea, often exaggerated
+and superstitious, of its technical complexities. Having, as a rule,
+little or no opportunity of closely examining or experimenting with it,
+they are eager to "read it up," as they might any other machine. That is
+the case of the average aspirant, who has neither the instinct of the
+theatre fully developed in his blood, nor such a congenital lack of that
+instinct as to be wholly inapprehensive of any technical difficulties or
+problems. The intelligent novice, standing between these extremes,
+tends, as a rule, to overrate the efficacy of theoretical instruction,
+and to expect of analytic criticism more than it has to give.
+
+There is thus a fine opening for pedantry on the one side, and quackery
+on the other, to rush in. The pedant, in this context, is he who
+constructs a set of rules from metaphysical or psychological first
+principles, and professes to bring down a dramatic decalogue from the
+Sinai of some lecture-room in the University of Weissnichtwo. The quack,
+on the other hand, is he who generalizes from the worst practices of the
+most vulgar theatrical journeymen, and has no higher ambition than to
+interpret the oracles of the box-office. If he succeeded in so doing,
+his function would not be wholly despicable; but as he is generally
+devoid of insight, and as, moreover, the oracles of the box-office vary
+from season to season, if not from month to month, his lucubrations are
+about as valuable as those of Zadkiel or Old Moore.[1]
+
+What, then, is the excuse for such a discussion as is here attempted?
+Having admitted that there are no rules for dramatic composition, and
+that the quest of such rules is apt to result either in pedantry or
+quackery, why should I myself set forth upon so fruitless and foolhardy
+an enterprise? It is precisely because I am alive to its dangers that I
+have some hope of avoiding them. Rules there are none; but it does not
+follow that some of the thousands who are fascinated by the art of the
+playwright may not profit by having their attention called, in a plain
+and practical way, to some of its problems and possibilities. I have
+myself felt the need of some such handbook, when would-be dramatists
+have come to me for advice and guidance. It is easy to name excellent
+treatises on the drama; but the aim of such books is to guide the
+judgment of the critic rather than the creative impulse of the
+playwright. There are also valuable collections of dramatic criticisms;
+but any practical hints that they may contain are scattered and
+unsystematic. On the other hand, the advice one is apt to give to
+beginners--"Go to the theatre; study its conditions and mechanism for
+yourself"--is, in fact, of very doubtful value. It might, in many cases,
+be wiser to warn the aspirant to keep himself unspotted from the
+playhouse. To send him there is to imperil, on the one hand, his
+originality of vision, on the other, his individuality of method. He may
+fall under the influence of some great master, and see life only through
+his eyes; or he may become so habituated to the current tricks of the
+theatrical trade as to lose all sense of their conventionality and
+falsity, and find himself, in the end, better fitted to write what I
+have called a quack handbook than a living play. It would be ridiculous,
+of course, to urge an aspirant positively to avoid the theatre; but the
+common advice to steep himself in it is beset with dangers.
+
+It may be asked why, if I have any guidance and help to give, I do not
+take it myself, and write plays instead of instructing others in the
+art. This is a variant of an ancient and fallacious jibe against
+criticism in general. It is quite true that almost all critics who are
+worth their salt are "stickit" artists. Assuredly, if I had the power, I
+should write plays instead of writing about them; but one may have a
+great love for an art, and some insight into its principles and methods,
+without the innate faculty required for actual production. On the other
+hand, there is nothing to show that, if I were a creative artist, I
+should be a good mentor for beginners. An accomplished painter may be
+the best teacher of painters; but an accomplished dramatist is scarcely
+the best guide for dramatists. He cannot analyse his own practice, and
+discriminate between that in it which is of universal validity, and that
+which may be good for him, but would be bad for any one else. If he
+happened to be a great man, he would inevitably, even if unconsciously,
+seek to impose upon his disciples his individual attitude towards life;
+if he were a lesser man, he would teach them only his tricks. But
+dramatists do not, as a matter of fact, take pupils or write
+handbooks.[2] When they expound their principles of art, it is generally
+in answer to, or in anticipation of, criticism--with a view, in short,
+not to helping others, but to defending themselves. If beginners, then,
+are to find any systematic guidance, they must turn to the critics, not
+to the dramatists; and no person of common sense holds it a reproach to
+a critic to tell him that he is a "stickit" playwright.
+
+If questions are worth discussing at all, they are worth discussing
+gravely. When, in the following pages, I am found treating with all
+solemnity matters of apparently trivial detail, I beg the reader to
+believe that very possibly I do not in my heart overrate their
+importance. One thing is certain, and must be emphasized from the
+outset: namely, that if any part of the dramatist's art can be taught,
+it is only a comparatively mechanical and formal part--the art of
+structure. One may learn how to tell a story in good dramatic form: how
+to develop and marshal it in such a way as best to seize and retain the
+interest of a theatrical audience. But no teaching or study can enable a
+man to choose or invent a good story, and much less to do that which
+alone lends dignity to dramatic story-telling--to observe and portray
+human character. This is the aim and end of all serious drama; and it
+will be apt to appear as though, in the following pages, this aim and
+end were ignored. In reality it is not so. If I hold comparatively
+mechanical questions of pure craftsmanship to be worth discussing, it is
+because I believe that only by aid of competent craftsmanship can the
+greatest genius enable his creations to live and breathe upon the stage.
+The profoundest insight into human nature and destiny cannot find valid
+expression through the medium of the theatre without some understanding
+of the peculiar art of dramatic construction. Some people are born with
+such an instinct for this art, that a very little practice renders them
+masters of it. Some people are born with a hollow in their cranium where
+the bump of drama ought to be. But between these extremes, as I said
+before, there are many people with moderately developed and cultivable
+faculty; and it is these who, I trust, may find some profit in the
+following discussions.[3] Let them not forget, however, that the topics
+treated of are merely the indispensable rudiments of the art, and are
+not for a moment to be mistaken for its ultimate and incommunicable
+secrets. Beethoven could not have composed the Ninth Symphony without a
+mastery of harmony and counterpoint; but there are thousands of masters
+of harmony and counterpoint who could not compose the Ninth Symphony.
+
+The art of theatrical story-telling is necessarily relative to the
+audience to whom the story is to be told. One must assume an audience of
+a certain status and characteristics before one can rationally discuss
+the best methods of appealing to its intelligence and its sympathies.
+The audience I have throughout assumed is drawn from what may be called
+the ordinary educated public of London and New York. It is not an ideal
+or a specially selected audience; but it is somewhat above the average
+of the theatre-going public, that average being sadly pulled down by the
+myriad frequenters of musical farce and absolutely worthless melodrama.
+It is such an audience as assembles every night at, say, the half-dozen
+best theatres of each city. A peculiarly intellectual audience it
+certainly is not. I gladly admit that theatrical art owes much, in both
+countries, to voluntary organizations of intelligent or would-be
+intelligent[4] playgoers, who have combined to provide themselves with
+forms of drama which specially interest them, and do not attract the
+great public. But I am entirely convinced that the drama renounces its
+chief privilege and glory when it waives its claim to be a popular art,
+and is content to address itself to coteries, however "high-browed."
+Shakespeare did not write for a coterie: yet he produced some works of
+considerable subtlety and profundity. Molière was popular with the
+ordinary parterre of his day: yet his plays have endured for over two
+centuries, and the end of their vitality does not seem to be in sight.
+Ibsen did not write for a coterie, though special and regrettable
+circumstances have made him, in England, something of a coterie-poet. In
+Scandinavia, in Germany, even in America, he casts his spell over great
+audiences, if not through long runs (which are a vice of the merely
+commercial theatre), at any rate through frequently-repeated
+representations. So far as I know, history records no instance of a
+playwright failing to gain the ear of his contemporaries, and then being
+recognized and appreciated by posterity. Alfred de Musset might,
+perhaps, be cited as a case in point; but he did not write with a view
+to the stage, and made no bid for contemporary popularity. As soon as it
+occurred to people to produce his plays, they were found to be
+delightful. Let no playwright, then, make it his boast that he cannot
+disburden his soul within the three hours' limit, and cannot produce
+plays intelligible or endurable to any audience but a band of adepts. A
+popular audience, however, does not necessarily mean the mere riff-raff
+of the theatrical public. There is a large class of playgoers, both in
+England and America, which is capable of appreciating work of a high
+intellectual order, if only it does not ignore the fundamental
+conditions of theatrical presentation. It is an audience of this class
+that I have in mind throughout the following pages; and I believe that a
+playwright who despises such an audience will do so to the detriment,
+not only of his popularity and profits, but of the artistic quality
+of his work.
+
+Some people may exclaim: "Why should the dramatist concern himself about
+his audience? That may be all very well for the mere journeymen of the
+theatre, the hacks who write to an actor-manager's order--not for the
+true artist! He has a soul above all such petty considerations. Art, to
+him, is simply self-expression. He writes to please himself, and has no
+thought of currying favour with an audience, whether intellectual or
+idiotic." To this I reply simply that to an artist of this way of
+thinking I have nothing to say. He has a perfect right to express
+himself in a whole literature of so-called plays, which may possibly be
+studied, and even acted, by societies organized to that laudable end.
+But the dramatist who declares his end to be mere self-expression
+stultifies himself in that very phrase. The painter may paint, the
+sculptor model, the lyric poet sing, simply to please himself,[5] but
+the drama has no meaning except in relation to an audience. It is a
+portrayal of life by means of a mechanism so devised as to bring it home
+to a considerable number of people assembled in a given place. "The
+public," it has been well said, "constitutes the theatre." The moment a
+playwright confines his work within the two or three hours' limit
+prescribed by Western custom for a theatrical performance, he is
+currying favour with an audience. That limit is imposed simply by the
+physical endurance and power of sustained attention that can be demanded
+of Western human beings assembled in a theatre. Doubtless an author
+could express himself more fully and more subtly if he ignored these
+limitations; the moment he submits to them, he renounces the pretence
+that mere self-expression is his aim. I know that there are
+haughty-souls who make no such submission, and express themselves in
+dramas which, so far as their proportions are concerned, might as well
+be epic poems or historical romances.[6] To them, I repeat, I have
+nothing to say. The one and only subject of the following discussions is
+the best method of fitting a dramatic theme for representation before an
+audience assembled in a theatre. But this, be it noted, does not
+necessarily mean "writing down" to the audience in question. It is by
+obeying, not by ignoring, the fundamental conditions of his craft that
+the dramatist may hope to lead his audience upward to the highest
+intellectual level which he himself can attain.
+
+These pages, in short, are addressed to students of play-writing who
+sincerely desire to do sound, artistic work under the conditions and
+limitations of the actual, living playhouse. This does not mean, of
+course, that they ought always to be studying "what the public wants."
+The dramatist should give the public what he himself wants--but in such
+form as to make it comprehensible and interesting in a theatre.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+[Footnote 1: It is against "technic" in this sense of the term that the
+hero of Mr. Howells's admirable novel, _The Story of a Play_, protests
+in vigorous and memorable terms. "They talk," says Maxwell, "about a
+knowledge of the stage as if it were a difficult science, instead of a
+very simple piece of mechanism whose limitations and possibilities
+anyone may see at a glance. All that their knowledge of it comes to is
+claptrap, pure and simple.... They think that their exits and entrances
+are great matters and that they must come on with such a speech, and go
+off with another; but it is not of the least importance how they come or
+go, if they have something interesting to say or do." Maxwell, it must
+be remembered, is speaking of technic as expounded by the star actor,
+who is shilly-shallying--as star actors will--over the production of his
+play. He would not, in his calmer moments, deny that it is of little use
+to have something interesting to say, unless you know how to say it
+interestingly. Such a denial would simply be the negation of the very
+idea of art.]
+
+[Footnote 2: A dramatist of my acquaintance adds this footnote: "But, by
+the Lord! They have to give advice. I believe I write more plays of
+other people's than I do of my own."]
+
+[Footnote 3: It may be hoped, too, that even the accomplished dramatist
+may take some interest in considering the reasons for things which he
+does, or does not do, by instinct.]
+
+[Footnote 4: This is not a phrase of contempt. The would-be intelligent
+playgoer is vastly to be preferred to the playgoer who makes a boast of
+his unintelligence.]
+
+[Footnote 5: In all the arts, however, the very idea of craftsmanship
+implies some sort of external percipient, or, in other words, some sort
+of an audience. In point of sheer self-expression, a child's scrabblings
+with a box of crayons may deserve to rank with the most masterly canvas
+of Velasquez or Vermeer. The real difference between the dramatist and
+other artists, is that they can be _their own audience_, in a sense in
+which he cannot.]
+
+[Footnote 6: Let me guard against the possibility that this might be
+interpreted as a sneer at _The Dynasts_--a great work by a great poet.]
+
+
+
+
+_CHAPTER II_
+
+THE CHOICE OF A THEME
+
+
+The first step towards writing a play is manifestly to choose a theme.
+
+Even this simple statement, however, requires careful examination before
+we can grasp its full import. What, in the first place, do we mean by a
+"theme"? And, secondly, in what sense can we, or ought we to,
+"choose" one?
+
+"Theme" may mean either of two things: either the subject of a play, or
+its story. The former is, perhaps, its proper or more convenient sense.
+The theme of _Romeo and Juliet_ is youthful love crossed by ancestral
+hate; the theme of _Othello_ is jealousy; the theme of _Le Tartufe_ is
+hypocrisy; the theme of _Caste_ is fond hearts and coronets; the theme
+of _Getting Married_ is getting married; the theme of _Maternité_ is
+maternity. To every play it is possible, at a pinch, to assign a theme;
+but in many plays it is evident that no theme expressible in abstract
+terms was present to the author's mind. Nor are these always plays of a
+low class. It is only by a somewhat artificial process of abstraction
+that we can formulate a theme for _As You Like It_, for _The Way of the
+World_, or for _Hedda Gabler_.
+
+The question now arises: ought a theme, in its abstract form, to be the
+first germ of a play? Ought the dramatist to say, "Go to, I will write a
+play on temperance, or on woman's suffrage, or on capital and labour,"
+and then cast about for a story to illustrate his theme? This is a
+possible, but not a promising, method of procedure. A story made to the
+order of a moral concept is always apt to advertise its origin, to the
+detriment of its illusive quality. If a play is to be a moral apologue
+at all, it is well to say so frankly--probably in the title--and aim,
+not at verisimilitude, but at neatness and appositeness in the working
+out of the fable. The French _proverbe_ proceeds on this principle, and
+is often very witty and charming.[1] A good example in English is _A
+Pair of Spectacles_, by Mr. Sydney Grundy, founded on a play by Labiche.
+In this bright little comedy every incident and situation bears upon the
+general theme, and pleases us, not by its probability, but by its
+ingenious appropriateness. The dramatic fable, in fact, holds very much
+the same rank in drama as the narrative fable holds in literature at
+large. We take pleasure in them on condition that they be witty, and
+that they do not pretend to be what they are not.
+
+A play manifestly suggested by a theme of temporary interest will often
+have a great but no less temporary success. For instance, though there
+was a good deal of clever character-drawing in _An Englishman's Home_,
+by Major du Maurier, the theme was so evidently the source and
+inspiration of the play that it will scarcely bear revival. In America,
+where the theme was of no interest, the play failed.
+
+It is possible, no doubt, to name excellent plays in which the theme, in
+all probability, preceded both the story and the characters in the
+author's mind. Such plays are most of M. Brieux's; such plays are Mr.
+Galsworthy's _Strife_ and _Justice_. The French plays, in my judgment,
+suffer artistically from the obtrusive predominance of the theme--that
+is to say, the abstract element--over the human and concrete factors in
+the composition. Mr. Galsworthy's more delicate and unemphatic art
+eludes this danger, at any rate in _Strife_. We do not remember until
+all is over that his characters represent classes, and his action is,
+one might almost say, a sociological symbol. If, then, the theme does,
+as a matter of fact, come first in the author's conception, he will do
+well either to make it patently and confessedly dominant, as in the
+_proverbe_, or to take care that, as in _Strife_, it be not suffered to
+make its domination felt, except as an afterthought.[2] No outside force
+should appear to control the free rhythm of the action.
+
+The theme may sometimes be, not an idea, an abstraction or a principle,
+but rather an environment, a social phenomenon of one sort or another.
+The author's primary object in such a case is, not to portray any
+individual character or tell any definite story, but to transfer to the
+stage an animated picture of some broad aspect or phase of life, without
+concentrating the interest on any one figure or group. There are
+theorists who would, by definition, exclude from the domain of drama any
+such cinematograph-play, as they would probably call it; but we shall
+see cause, as we go on, to distrust definitions, especially when they
+seek to clothe themselves with the authority of laws. Tableau-plays of
+the type here in question may even claim classical precedent. What else
+is Ben Jonson's _Bartholomew Fair_? What else is Schiller's
+_Wallensteins Lager_? Amongst more recent plays, Hauptmann's _Die Weber_
+and Gorky's _Nachtasyl_ are perhaps the best examples of the type. The
+drawback of such themes is, not that they do not conform to this or that
+canon of art, but that it needs an exceptional amount of knowledge and
+dramaturgic skill to handle them successfully. It is far easier to tell
+a story on the stage than to paint a picture, and few playwrights can
+resist the temptation to foist a story upon their picture, thus marring
+it by an inharmonious intrusion of melodrama or farce. This has often
+been done upon deliberate theory, in the belief that no play can exist,
+or can attract playgoers, without a definite and more or less exciting
+plot. Thus the late James A. Herne inserted into a charming idyllic
+picture of rural life, entitled _Shore Acres_, a melodramatic scene in a
+lighthouse, which was hopelessly out of key with the rest of the play.
+The dramatist who knows any particular phase of life so thoroughly as to
+be able to transfer its characteristic incidents to the stage, may be
+advised to defy both critical and managerial prejudice, and give his
+tableau-play just so much of story as may naturally and inevitably fall
+within its limits.
+
+One of the most admirable and enthralling scenes I ever saw on any stage
+was that of the Trafalgar Square suffrage meeting in Miss Elizabeth
+Robins's _Votes for Women_. Throughout a whole act it held us
+spellbound, while the story of the play stood still, and we forgot its
+existence. It was only within a few minutes of the end, when the story
+was dragged in neck and crop, that the reality of the thing vanished,
+and the interest with it.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+If an abstract theme be not an advisable starting-point, what is? A
+character? A situation? Or a story? On this point it would be absurd to
+lay down any rule; the more so as, in many cases, a playwright is quite
+unable to say in what form the germ of a play first floated into his
+mind. The suggestion may come from a newspaper paragraph, from an
+incident seen in the street, from an emotional adventure or a comic
+misadventure, from a chance word dropped by an acquaintance, or from
+some flotsam or jetsam of phrase or fable that has drifted from the
+other end of history. Often, too, the original germ, whatever it may be,
+is transformed beyond recognition before a play is done.[3] In the mind
+of the playwright figs grow from thistles, and a silk purse--perhaps a
+Fortunatus' purse--may often be made from a sow's ear. The whole
+delicate texture of Ibsen's _Doll's House_ was woven from a commonplace
+story of a woman who forged a cheque in order to redecorate her
+drawing-room. Stevenson's romance of _Prince Otto_ (to take an example
+from fiction) grew out of a tragedy on the subject of Semiramis!
+
+One thing, however, we may say with tolerable confidence: whatever may
+be the germ of a play--whether it be an anecdote, a situation, or what
+not--the play will be of small account as a work of art unless
+character, at a very early point, enters into and conditions its
+development. The story which is independent of character--which can be
+carried through by a given number of ready-made puppets--is essentially
+a trivial thing. Unless, at an early stage of the organizing process,
+character begins to take the upper hand--unless the playwright finds
+himself thinking, "Oh, yes, George is just the man to do this," or,
+"That is quite foreign to Jane's temperament"--he may be pretty sure
+that it is a piece of mechanism he is putting together, not a drama with
+flesh and blood in it. The difference between a live play and a dead one
+is that in the former the characters control the plot, while in the
+latter the plot controls the characters. Which is not to say, of course,
+that there may not be clever and entertaining plays which are "dead" in
+this sense, and dull and unattractive plays which are "live."
+
+A great deal of ink has been wasted in controversy over a remark of
+Aristotle's that the action or _muthos_, not the character or _êthos_,
+is the essential element in drama. The statement is absolutely true and
+wholly unimportant. A play can exist without anything that can be called
+character, but not without some sort of action. This is implied in the
+very word "drama," which means a doing, not a mere saying or existing.
+It would be possible, no doubt, to place Don Quixote, or Falstaff, or
+Peer Gynt, on the stage, and let him develop his character in mere
+conversation, or even monologue, without ever moving from his chair. But
+it is a truism that deeds, not words, are the demonstration and test of
+character; wherefore, from time immemorial, it has been the recognized
+business of the theatre to exhibit character in action. Historically,
+too, we find that drama has everywhere originated in the portrayal of an
+action--some exploit or some calamity in the career of some demigod or
+hero. Thus story or plot is by definition, tradition, and practical
+reason, the fundamental element in drama; but does it therefore follow
+that it is the noblest element, or that by which its value should be
+measured? Assuredly not. The skeleton is, in a sense, the fundamental
+element in the human organism. It can exist, and, with a little
+assistance, retain its form, when stripped of muscle and blood and
+nerve; whereas a boneless man would be an amorphous heap, more helpless
+than a jelly-fish. But do we therefore account the skeleton man's
+noblest part? Scarcely. It is by his blood and nerve that he lives, not
+by his bones; and it is because his bones are, comparatively speaking,
+dead matter that they continue to exist when the flesh has fallen away
+from them. It is, therefore, if not a misreading of Aristotle,[4] at any
+rate a perversion of reason, to maintain that the drama lives by action,
+rather than by character. Action ought to exist for the sake of
+character: when the relation is reversed, the play may be an ingenious
+toy, but scarcely a vital work of art.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+It is time now to consider just what we mean when we say that the first
+step towards play-writing is the "choice" of a theme.
+
+In many cases, no doubt, it is the plain and literal fact that the
+impulse to write some play--any play--exists, so to speak, in the
+abstract, unassociated with any particular subject, and that the
+would-be playwright proceeds, as he thinks, to set his imagination to
+work, and invent a story. But this frame of mind is to be regarded with
+suspicion. Few plays of much value, one may guess, have resulted from
+such an abstract impulse. Invention, in these cases, is apt to be
+nothing but recollection in disguise, the shaking of a kaleidoscope
+formed of fragmentary reminiscences. I remember once, in some momentary
+access of ambition, trying to invent a play. I occupied several hours of
+a long country walk in, as I believed, creating out of nothing at all a
+dramatic story. When at last I had modelled it into some sort of
+coherency, I stepped back from it in my mind, as it were, and
+contemplated it as a whole. No sooner had I done so than it began to
+seem vaguely familiar. "Where have I seen this story before?" I asked
+myself; and it was only after cudgelling my brains for several minutes
+that I found I had re-invented Ibsen's _Hedda Gabler_. Thus, when we
+think we are choosing a plot out of the void, we are very apt to be, in
+fact, ransacking the store-house of memory. The plot which chooses us
+is much more to be depended upon--the idea which comes when we least
+expect it, perhaps from the most unlikely quarter, clamours at the gates
+of birth, and will not let us rest till it be clothed in dramatic flesh
+and blood.[5] It may very well happen, of course, that it has to
+wait--that it has to be pigeon-holed for a time, until its due turn
+comes.[6] Occasionally, perhaps, it may slip out of its pigeon-hole for
+an airing, only to be put back again in a slightly more developed form.
+Then at last its convenient season will arrive, and the play will be
+worked out, written, and launched into the struggle for life. In the
+sense of selecting from among a number of embryonic themes stored in his
+mind, the playwright has often to make a deliberate choice; but when,
+moved by a purely abstract impulse, he goes out of set purpose to look
+for a theme, it may be doubted whether he is likely to return with any
+very valuable treasure-trove.[7]
+
+The same principle holds good in the case of the ready-made poetic or
+historical themes, which are--rightly or wrongly--considered suitable
+for treatment in blank verse. Whether, and how far, the blank verse
+drama can nowadays be regarded as a vital and viable form is a question
+to be considered later. In the meantime it is sufficient to say that
+whatever principles of conception and construction apply to the modern
+prose drama, apply with equal cogency to the poetic drama. The
+verse-poet may perhaps take one or two licenses denied to the
+prose-poet. For instance, we may find reason to think the soliloquy more
+excusable in verse than in prose. But fundamentally, the two forms are
+ruled by the same set of conditions, which the verse-poet, no less than
+the prose-poet, can ignore only at his peril. Unless, indeed, he
+renounces from the outset all thought of the stage and chooses to
+produce that cumbrous nondescript, a "closet drama." Of such we do not
+speak, but glance and pass on. What laws, indeed, can apply to a form
+which has no proper element, but, like the amphibious animal described
+by the sailor, "cannot live on land and dies in the water"?
+
+To return to our immediate topic, the poet who essays dramatic
+composition on mere abstract impulse, because other poets have done so,
+or because he is told that it pays, is only too likely to produce
+willy-nilly a "closet drama." Let him beware of saying to himself, "I
+will gird up my loins and write a play. Shall it be a Phaedra, or a
+Semiramis, or a Sappho, or a Cleopatra? A Julian, or an Attila, or a
+Savanarola, or a Cromwell?" A drama conceived in this reach-me-down
+fashion will scarcely have the breath of life in it. If, on the other
+hand, in the course of his legendary, romantic, or historical reading,
+some character should take hold upon his imagination and demand to be
+interpreted, or some episode should, as it were, startle him by putting
+on vivid dramatic form before his mind's eye, then let him by all means
+yield to the inspiration, and try to mould the theme into a drama. The
+real labour of creation will still lie before him; but he may face it
+with the hope of producing a live play, not a long-drawn rhetorical
+anachronism, whether of the rotund or of the spasmodic type.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+[Footnote 1: For instance, _Il ne faut jurer de rien. Il faut qu'une
+porte soit ouverte ou fermée. Un bienfait n'est jamais perdu._ There is
+also a large class of pieces of which the title, though not itself a
+proverb, makes direct allusion to some fable or proverbial saying: for
+example, _Les Brebis de Panurge, La Chasse aux Corbeaux, La Cigale chez
+les Fourmis_.]
+
+[Footnote 2: I learn, on the best authority, that I am wrong, in point
+of fact, as to the origin of _Strife_. The play arose in Mr.
+Galsworthy's mind from his actually having seen in conflict the two men
+who were the prototypes of Anthony and Roberts, and thus noted the waste
+and inefficacy arising from the clash of strong characters unaccompanied
+by balance. It was accident that led him to place the two men in an
+environment of capital and labour. In reality, both of them were, if not
+capitalists, at any rate on the side of capital. This interesting
+correction of fact does not invalidate the theory above stated.]
+
+[Footnote 3: Mr. Henry Arthur Jones writes to me: "Sometimes I start
+with a scene only, sometimes with a complete idea. Sometimes a play
+splits into two plays, sometimes two or three ideas combine into a
+concrete whole. Always the final play is altered out of all knowledge
+from its first idea." An interesting account of the way in which two
+very different plays by M. de Curel: _L'Envers d'une Sainte_ and
+_L'Invitée_,--grew out of one and the same initial idea, may be found in
+_L'Année Psychologique_, 1894, p. 121.]
+
+[Footnote 4: In my discussion of this point, I have rather simplified
+Aristotle's position. He appears to make action the essential element in
+tragedy and not merely the necessary vehicle of character. "In a play,"
+he says, "they do not act in order to portray the characters, they
+include the characters for the sake of the action. So that it is the
+action in it, _i.e._ its Fable or Plot, that is the end and purpose of
+the tragedy, and the end is everywhere the chief thing. Besides this, a
+tragedy is impossible without action, but there may be one without
+character." (Bywater's Translation.) The last sentence is, in my view,
+the gist of the matter; the preceding sentences greatly overstate the
+case. There was a lively controversy on the subject in the _Times_
+Literary Supplement in May, 1902. It arose from a review of Mr.
+Phillips's _Paolo and Francesco_, and Mr. Andrew Lang, Mr. Churton
+Collins, and Mr. A.B. Walkley took part in it.]
+
+[Footnote 5: "Are the first beginnings of imaginative conception
+directed by the will? Are they, indeed, conscious at all? Do they not
+rather emerge unbidden from the vague limbo of sub-consciousness?" A.B.
+Walkley, _Drama and Life_, p. 85.]
+
+[Footnote 6: Sardou kept a file of about fifty _dossiers_, each bearing
+the name of an unwritten play, and containing notes and sketches for it.
+Dumas, on the other hand, always finished one play before he began to
+think of another. See _L'Année Psychologique_, 1894, pp. 67, 76.]
+
+[Footnote 7: "My experience is," a dramatist writes to me, "that you
+never deliberately choose a theme. You lie awake, or you go walking, and
+suddenly there flashes into your mind a contrast, a piece of spiritual
+irony, an old incident carrying some general significance. Round this
+your mind broods, and there is the germ of your play." Again be writes:
+"It is not advisable for a playwright to start out at all unless he has
+so felt or seen something, that he feels, as it matures in his mind,
+that he must express it, and in dramatic form."]
+
+
+
+
+_CHAPTER III_
+
+DRAMATIC AND UNDRAMATIC
+
+
+It may be well, at this point, to consider for a little what we mean
+when we use the term "dramatic." We shall probably not arrive at any
+definition which can be applied as an infallible touchstone to
+distinguish the dramatic from the undramatic. Perhaps, indeed, the
+upshot may rather be to place the student on his guard against troubling
+too much about the formal definitions of critical theorists.
+
+The orthodox opinion of the present time is that which is generally
+associated with the name of the late Ferdinand Brunetière. "The theatre
+in general," said that critic, "is nothing but the place for the
+development of the human will, attacking the obstacles opposed to it by
+destiny, fortune, or circumstances." And again: "Drama is a
+representation of the will of man in conflict with the mysterious powers
+or natural forces which limit and belittle us; it is one of us thrown
+living upon the stage, there to struggle against fatality, against
+social law, against one of his fellow-mortals, against himself, if need
+be, against the ambitions, the interests, the prejudices, the folly, the
+malevolence of those who surround him."[1]
+
+The difficulty about this definition is that, while it describes the
+matter of a good many dramas, it does not lay down any true
+differentia--any characteristic common to all drama, and possessed by no
+other form of fiction. Many of the greatest plays in the world can with
+difficulty be brought under the formula, while the majority of romances
+and other stories come under it with ease. Where, for instance, is the
+struggle in the _Agamemnon_? There is no more struggle between
+Clytemnestra and Agamemnon than there is between the spider and the fly
+who walks into his net. There is not even a struggle in Clytemnestra's
+mind. Agamemnon's doom is sealed from the outset, and she merely carries
+out a pre-arranged plot. There is contest indeed in the succeeding plays
+of the trilogy; but it will scarcely be argued that the _Agamemnon_,
+taken alone, is not a great drama. Even the _Oedipus_ of Sophocles,
+though it may at first sight seem a typical instance of a struggle
+against Destiny, does not really come under the definition. Oedipus, in
+fact, does not struggle at all. His struggles, in so far as that word
+can be applied to his misguided efforts to escape from the toils of
+fate, are all things of the past; in the actual course of the tragedy he
+simply writhes under one revelation after another of bygone error and
+unwitting crime. It would be a mere play upon words to recognize as a
+dramatic "struggle" the writhing of a worm on a hook. And does not this
+description apply very closely to the part played by another great
+protagonist--Othello to wit? There is no struggle, no conflict, between
+him and Iago. It is Iago alone who exerts any will; neither Othello nor
+Desdemona makes the smallest fight. From the moment when Iago sets his
+machination to work, they are like people sliding down an ice-slope to
+an inevitable abyss. Where is the conflict in _As You Like It_? No one,
+surely, will pretend that any part of the interest or charm of the play
+arises from the struggle between the banished Duke and the Usurper, or
+between Orlando and Oliver. There is not even the conflict, if so it can
+be called, which nominally brings so many hundreds of plays under the
+Brunetière canon--the conflict between an eager lover and a more or less
+reluctant maid. Or take, again, Ibsen's _Ghosts_--in what valid sense
+can it be said that that tragedy shows us will struggling against
+obstacles? Oswald, doubtless, wishes to live, and his mother desires
+that he should live; but this mere will for life cannot be the
+differentia that makes of _Ghosts_ a drama. If the reluctant descent of
+the "downward path to death" constituted drama, then Tolstoy's _Death of
+Ivan Ilytch_ would be one of the greatest dramas ever written--which it
+certainly is not. Yet again, if we want to see will struggling against
+obstacles, the classic to turn to is not _Hamlet_, not _Lear_, but
+_Robinson Crusoe_; yet no one, except a pantomime librettist, ever saw a
+drama in Defoe's narrative. In a Platonic dialogue, in _Paradise Lost_,
+in _John Gilpin_, there is a struggle of will against obstacles; there
+is none in _Hannele_, which, nevertheless, is a deeply-moving drama.
+Such a struggle is characteristic of all great fiction, from _Clarissa
+Harlowe_ to _The House with the Green Shutters_; whereas in many plays
+the struggle, if there be any at all, is the merest matter of form (for
+instance, a quite conventional love-story), while the real interest
+resides in something quite different.
+
+The plain truth seems to be that conflict is _one_ of the most dramatic
+elements in life, and that many dramas--perhaps most--do, as a matter
+of fact, turn upon strife of one sort or another. But it is clearly an
+error to make conflict indispensable to drama, and especially to
+insist--as do some of Brunetière's followers--that the conflict must be
+between will and will. A stand-up fight between will and will--such a
+fight as occurs in, say, the _Hippolytus_ of Euripides, or Racine's
+_Andromaque_, or Molière's _Tartufe_, or Ibsen's _Pretenders_, or
+Dumas's _Françillon_, or Sudermann's _Heimat_, or Sir Arthur Pinero's
+_Gay Lord Quex_, or Mr. Shaw's _Candida_, or Mr. Galsworthy's
+_Strife_--such a stand-up fight, I say, is no doubt one of the intensest
+forms of drama. But it is comparatively rare at any rate as the formula
+of a whole play. In individual scenes a conflict of will is frequent
+enough; but it is, after all, only one among a multitude of equally
+telling forms of drama. No one can say that the Balcony Scene in _Romeo
+and Juliet_ is undramatic, or the "Galeoto fú il libro" scene in Mr.
+Stephen Phillips's _Paolo and Francesca_; yet the point of these scenes
+is not a clash, but an ecstatic concordance, of wills. Is the
+death-scene of Cleopatra undramatic? Or the Banquet scene in _Macbeth_?
+Or the pastoral act in _The Winter's Tale_? Yet in none of these is
+there any conflict of wills. In the whole range of drama there is
+scarcely a passage which one would call more specifically dramatic than
+the Screen Scene in _The School for Scandal_; yet it would be the
+veriest quibbling to argue that any appreciable part of its effect
+arises from the clash of will against will. This whole comedy, indeed,
+suffices to show the emptiness of the theory. With a little strain it is
+possible to bring it within the letter of the formula; but who can
+pretend that any considerable part of the attraction or interest of the
+play is due to that possibility?
+
+The champions of the theory, moreover, place it on a metaphysical basis,
+finding in the will the essence of human personality, and therefore of
+the art which shows human personality raised to its highest power. It
+seems unnecessary, however, to apply to Schopenhauer for an explanation
+of whatever validity the theory may possess. For a sufficient account of
+the matter, we need go no further than the simple psychological
+observation that human nature loves a fight, whether it be with clubs or
+with swords, with tongues or with brains. One of the earliest forms of
+mediaeval drama was the "estrif" or "flyting"--the scolding-match
+between husband and wife, or between two rustic gossips. This motive is
+glorified in the quarrel between Brutus and Cassius, degraded in the
+patter of two "knockabout comedians." Certainly there is nothing more
+telling in drama than a piece of "cut-and-thrust" dialogue after the
+fashion of the ancient "stichomythia." When a whole theme involving
+conflict, or even a single scene of the nature described as a
+"passage-at-arms," comes naturally in the playwright's way, by all means
+let him seize the opportunity. But do not let him reject a theme or
+scene as undramatic merely because it has no room for a clash of
+warring wills.
+
+There is a variant of the "conflict" theory which underlines the word
+"obstacles" in the above-quoted dictum of Brunetière, and lays down the
+rule: "No obstacle, no drama." Though far from being universally valid,
+this form of the theory has a certain practical usefulness, and may well
+be borne in mind. Many a play would have remained unwritten if the
+author had asked himself, "Is there a sufficient obstacle between my two
+lovers?" or, in more general terms, "between my characters and the
+realization of their will?" There is nothing more futile than a play in
+which we feel that there is no real obstacle to the inevitable happy
+ending, and that the curtain might just as well fall in the middle of
+the first act as at the end of the third. Comedies abound (though they
+reach the stage only by accident) in which the obstacle between Corydon
+and Phyllis, between Lord Edwin and Lady Angelina, is not even a defect
+or peculiarity of character, but simply some trumpery
+misunderstanding[2] which can be kept afoot only so long as every one
+concerned holds his or her common sense in studious abeyance. "Pyramus
+and Thisbe without the wall" may be taken as the formula for the whole
+type of play. But even in plays of a much higher type, the author might
+often ask himself with advantage whether he could not strengthen his
+obstacle, and so accentuate the struggle which forms the matter of his
+play. Though conflict may not be essential to drama, yet, when you set
+forth to portray a struggle, you may as well make it as real and intense
+as possible.
+
+It seems to me that in the late William Vaughn Moody's drama, _The Great
+Divide_, the body of the play, after the stirring first act, is weakened
+by our sense that the happy ending is only being postponed by a violent
+effort. We have been assured from the very first--even before Ruth
+Jordan has set eyes on Stephen Ghent--that just such a rough diamond is
+the ideal of her dreams. It is true that, after their marriage, the
+rough diamond seriously misconducts himself towards her; and we have
+then to consider the rather unattractive question whether a single act
+of brutality on the part of a drunken husband ought to be held so
+unpardonable as to break up a union which otherwise promises to be quite
+satisfactory. But the author has taken such pains to emphasize the fact
+that these two people are really made for each other, that the answer to
+the question is not for a moment in doubt, and we become rather
+impatient of the obstinate sulkiness of Ruth's attitude. If there had
+been a real disharmony of character to be overcome, instead of, or in
+addition to, the sordid misadventure which is in fact the sole barrier
+between them, the play would certainly have been stronger, and perhaps
+more permanently popular.
+
+In a play by Mr. James Bernard Fagan, _The Prayer of the Sword_, we have
+a much clearer example of an inadequate obstacle. A youth named Andrea
+has been brought up in a monastery, and destined for the priesthood; but
+his tastes and aptitudes are all for a military career. He is, however,
+on the verge of taking his priestly vows, when accident calls him forth
+into the world, and he has the good fortune to quell a threatened
+revolution in a romantic Duchy, ruled over by a duchess of surpassing
+loveliness. With her he naturally falls in love; and the tragedy lies,
+or ought to lie, in the conflict between this earthly passion and his
+heavenly calling and election. But the author has taken pains to make
+the obstacle between Andrea and Ilaria absolutely unreal. The fact that
+Andrea has as yet taken no irrevocable vow is not the essence of the
+matter. Vow or no vow, there would have been a tragic conflict if Andrea
+had felt absolutely certain of his calling to the priesthood, and had
+defied Heaven, and imperilled his immortal soul, because of his
+overwhelming passion. That would have been a tragic situation; but the
+author had carefully avoided it. From the very first--before Andrea had
+ever seen Ilaria--it had been impressed upon us that he had no priestly
+vocation. There was no struggle in his soul between passion and duty;
+there was no struggle at all in his soul. His struggles are all with
+external forces and influences; wherefore the play, which a real
+obstacle might have converted into a tragedy, remained a sentimental
+romance--and is forgotten.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+What, then, is the essence of drama, if conflict be not it? What is the
+common quality of themes, scenes, and incidents, which we recognize as
+specifically dramatic? Perhaps we shall scarcely come nearer to a
+helpful definition than if we say that the essence of drama is _crisis_.
+A play is a more or less rapidly-developing crisis in destiny or
+circumstance, and a dramatic scene is a crisis within a crisis, clearly
+furthering the ultimate event. The drama may be called the art of
+crises, as fiction is the art of gradual developments. It is the
+slowness of its processes which differentiates the typical novel from
+the typical play. If the novelist does not take advantage of the
+facilities offered by his form for portraying gradual change, whether in
+the way of growth or of decay, he renounces his own birthright, in order
+to trespass on the domain of the dramatist. Most great novels embrace
+considerable segments of many lives; whereas the drama gives us only the
+culminating points--or shall we say the intersecting culminations?--two
+or three destinies. Some novelists have excelled precisely in the art
+with which they have made the gradations of change in character or
+circumstance so delicate as to be imperceptible from page to page, and
+measurable, as in real life, only when we look back over a considerable
+period. The dramatist, on the other hand, deals in rapid and startling
+changes, the "peripeties," as the Greeks called them, which may be the
+outcome of long, slow processes, but which actually occur in very brief
+spaces of time. Nor is this a merely mechanical consequence of the
+narrow limits of stage presentation. The crisis is as real, though not
+as inevitable, a part of human experience as the gradual development.
+Even if the material conditions of the theatre permitted the
+presentation of a whole _Middlemarch_ or _Anna Karénine_--as the
+conditions of the Chinese theatre actually do--some dramatists, we
+cannot doubt, would voluntarily renounce that license of prolixity, in
+order to cultivate an art of concentration and crisis. The Greek drama
+"subjected to the faithful eyes," as Horace phrases it, the culminating
+points of the Greek epic; the modern drama places under the lens of
+theatrical presentment the culminating points of modern experience.
+
+But, manifestly, it is not every crisis that is dramatic. A serious
+illness, a law-suit, a bankruptcy, even an ordinary prosaic marriage,
+may be a crisis in a man's life, without being necessarily, or even
+probably, material for drama. How, then, do we distinguish a dramatic
+from a non-dramatic crisis? Generally, I think, by the fact that it
+develops, or can be made naturally to develop, through a series of minor
+crises, involving more or less emotional excitement, and, if possible,
+the vivid manifestation of character. Take, for instance, the case of a
+bankruptcy. Most people, probably, who figure in the _Gazette_ do not go
+through any one, or two, or three critical moments of special tension,
+special humiliation, special agony. They gradually drift to leeward in
+their affairs, undergoing a series of small discouragements, small
+vicissitudes of hope and fear, small unpleasantnesses, which they take
+lightly or hardly according to their temperament, or the momentary state
+of their liver. In this average process of financial decline, there may
+be--there has been--matter for many excellent novels, but scarcely for a
+drama. That admirable chapter in _Little Dorrit,_ wherein Dickens
+describes the gradual degradation of the Father of the Marshalsea, shows
+how a master of fiction deals with such a subject; but it would be quite
+impossible to transfer this chapter to the stage. So, too, with the
+bankruptcy of Colonel Newcome--certain emotional crises arising from it
+have, indeed, been placed on the stage, but only after all Thackeray's
+knowledge of the world and fine gradations of art had been eliminated.
+Mr. Hardy's _Mayor of Casterbridge_ has, I think, been dramatized, but
+not, I think, with success. A somewhat similar story of financial ruin,
+the grimly powerful _House with the Green Shutters_, has not even
+tempted the dramatiser. There are, in this novel, indeed, many
+potentially dramatic crises; the trouble is that they are too numerous
+and individually too small to be suitable for theatrical presentment.
+Moreover, they are crises affecting a taciturn and inarticulate race,[3]
+a fact which places further difficulties in the way of the playwright.
+In all these cases, in short, the bankruptcy portrayed is a matter of
+slow development, with no great outstanding moments, and is consequently
+suited for treatment in fiction rather than in drama.
+
+But bankruptcy sometimes occurs in the form of one or more sudden, sharp
+crises, and has, therefore, been utilized again and again as a dramatic
+motive. In a hundred domestic dramas or melodramas, we have seen the
+head of a happy household open a newspaper or a telegram announcing the
+failure of some enterprise in which all his fortune is embarked. So
+obviously dramatic is this incident that it has become sadly hackneyed.
+Again, we have bankruptcy following upon a course of gambling, generally
+in stocks. Here there is evident opportunity, which has been frequently
+utilized, for a series of crises of somewhat violent and commonplace
+emotion. In American drama especially, the duels of Wall Street, the
+combats of bull and bear, form a very popular theme, which clearly falls
+under the Brunetière formula. Few American dramatists can resist the
+temptation of showing some masterful financier feverishly watching the
+"ticker" which proclaims him a millionaire or a beggar. The "ticker" had
+not been invented in the days when Ibsen wrote _The League of Youth_,
+otherwise he would doubtless have made use of it in the fourth act of
+that play. The most popular of all Björnson's plays is specifically
+entitled _A Bankruptcy_. Here the poet has had the art to select a
+typical phase of business life, which naturally presents itself in the
+form of an ascending curve, so to speak, of emotional crises. We see the
+energetic, active business man, with a number of irons in the fire,
+aware in his heart that he is insolvent, but not absolutely clear as to
+his position, and hoping against hope to retrieve it. We see him give a
+great dinner-party, in order to throw dust in the eyes of the world, and
+to secure the support of a financial magnate, who is the guest of
+honour. The financial magnate is inclined to "bite," and goes off,
+leaving the merchant under the impression that he is saved. This is an
+interesting and natural, but scarcely a thrilling, crisis. It does not,
+therefore, discount the supreme crisis of the play, in which a cold,
+clear-headed business man, who has been deputed by the banks to look
+into the merchant's affairs, proves to him, point by point, that it
+would be dishonest of him to flounder any longer in the swamp of
+insolvency, into which he can only sink deeper and drag more people down
+with him. Then the bankrupt produces a pistol and threatens murder and
+suicide if the arbiter of his fate will not consent to give him one more
+chance; but his frenzy breaks innocuous against the other's calm,
+relentless reason. Here we have, I repeat, a typically dramatic theme: a
+great crisis, bringing out vivid manifestations of character, not only
+in the bankrupt himself, but in those around him, and naturally
+unfolding itself through a series of those lesser crises, which we call
+interesting and moving scenes. The play is scarcely a great one, partly
+because its ending is perfunctory, partly because Björnson, poet though
+he was, had not Ibsen's art of "throwing in a little poetry" into his
+modern dramas. I have summarized it up to its culminating point, because
+it happened to illustrate the difference between a bankruptcy, dramatic
+in its nature and treatment, and those undramatic bankruptcies to which
+reference has been made. In _La Douloureuse_, by Maurice Donnay,
+bankruptcy is incidentally employed to bring about a crisis of a
+different order. A ball is proceeding at the house of a Parisian
+financier, when the whisper spreads that the host is ruined, and has
+committed suicide in a room above; whereupon the guests, after a moment
+of flustered consternation, go on supping and dancing![4] We are not at
+all deeply interested in the host or his fortunes. The author's purpose
+is to illustrate, rather crudely, the heartlessness of plutocratic
+Bohemia; and by means of the bankruptcy and suicide he brings about what
+may be called a crisis of collective character.[5]
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+As regards individual incidents, it may be said in general that the
+dramatic way of treating them is the crisp and staccato, as opposed to
+the smooth or legato, method. It may be thought a point of inferiority
+in dramatic art that it should deal so largely in shocks to the nerves,
+and should appeal by preference, wherever it is reasonably possible, to
+the cheap emotions of curiosity and surprise. But this is a criticism,
+not of dramatic art, but of human nature. We may wish that mankind took
+more pleasure in pure apprehension than in emotion; but so long as the
+fact is otherwise, that way of handling an incident by which the
+greatest variety of poignancy of emotion can be extracted from it will
+remain the specifically dramatic way.
+
+We shall have to consider later the relation between what may be called
+primary and secondary suspense or surprise--that is to say between
+suspense or surprise actually experienced by the spectator to whom the
+drama is new, and suspense or surprise experienced only sympathetically,
+on behalf of the characters, by a spectator who knows perfectly what is
+to follow. The two forms of emotion are so far similar that we need not
+distinguish between them in considering the general content of the term
+"dramatic." It is plain that the latter or secondary form of emotion
+must be by far the commoner, and the one to which the dramatist of any
+ambition must make his main appeal; for the longer his play endures, the
+larger will be the proportion of any given audience which knows it
+beforehand, in outline, if not in detail.
+
+As a typical example of a dramatic way of handling an incident, so as to
+make a supreme effect of what might else have been an anti-climax, one
+may cite the death of Othello. Shakespeare was faced by no easy problem.
+Desdemona was dead, Emilia dead, Iago wounded and doomed to the torture;
+how was Othello to die without merely satiating the audience with a glut
+of blood? How was his death to be made, not a foregone conclusion, a
+mere conventional suicide, but the culminating moment of the tragedy? In
+no single detail, perhaps, did Shakespeare ever show his dramatic genius
+more unmistakably than in his solution of this problem. We all remember
+how, as he is being led away, Othello stays his captors with a gesture,
+and thus addresses them:
+
+  "Soft you; a word or two, before you go.
+  I have done the state some service, and they know 't;
+  No more of that. I pray you, in your letters,
+  When you shall these unlucky deeds relate,
+  Speak of me as I am; nothing extenuate,
+  Nor set down aught in malice, then must you speak
+  Of one that loved not wisely but too well;
+  Of one not easily jealous, but, being wrought,
+  Perplex'd in the extreme; of one whose hand,
+  Like the base Indian, threw a pearl away
+  Richer than all his tribe; of one whose subdued eyes,
+  Albeit unused to the melting mood,
+  Drop tears as fast as the Arabian trees
+  Their medicinal gum. Set you down this;
+  And say besides, that in Aleppo once,
+  Where a malignant and a turban'd Turk
+  Beat a Venetian and traduced the state,
+  I took by the throat the circumcised dog,
+  And smote him--thus!"
+
+What is the essence of Shakespeare's achievement in this marvellous
+passage? What is it that he has done? He has thrown his audience, just
+as Othello has thrown his captors, off their guard, and substituted a
+sudden shock of surprise for a tedious fulfilment of expectation. In
+other words, he has handled the incident crisply instead of flaccidly,
+and so given it what we may call the specific accent of drama.
+
+Another consummate example of the dramatic handling of detail may be
+found in the first act of Ibsen's _Little Eyolf_. The lame boy, Eyolf,
+has followed the Rat-wife down to the wharf, has fallen into the water,
+and been drowned. This is the bare fact: how is it to be conveyed to the
+child's parents and to the audience?
+
+A Greek dramatist would probably have had recourse to a long and
+elaborately worked-up "messenger-speech," a pathetic recitation. That
+was the method best suited to the conditions, and to what may be called
+the prevailing tempo, of the Greek theatre. I am far from saying that it
+was a bad method: no method is bad which holds and moves an audience.
+But in this case it would have had the disadvantage of concentrating
+attention on the narrator instead of on the child's parents, on the mere
+event instead of on the emotions it engendered. In the modern theatre,
+with greater facilities for reproducing the actual movement of life, the
+dramatist naturally aims at conveying to the audience the growing
+anxiety, the suspense and the final horror, of the father and mother.
+The most commonplace playwright would have seen this opportunity and
+tried to make the most of it. Every one can think of a dozen commonplace
+ways in which the scene could be arranged and written; and some of them
+might be quite effective. The great invention by which Ibsen snatches
+the scene out of the domain of the commonplace, and raises it to the
+height of dramatic poetry, consists in leaving it doubtful to the father
+and mother what is the meaning of the excitement on the beach and the
+confused cries which reach their ears, until one cry comes home to them
+with terrible distinctness, "The crutch is floating!" It would be hard
+to name any single phrase in literature in which more dramatic effect is
+concentrated than in these four words--they are only two words in the
+original. However dissimilar in its nature and circumstances, this
+incident is comparable with the death of Othello, inasmuch as in each
+case the poet, by a supreme felicity of invention, has succeeded in
+doing a given thing in absolutely the most dramatic method conceivable.
+Here we recognize in a consummate degree what has been called the
+"fingering of the dramatist"; and I know not how better to express the
+common quality of the two incidents than in saying that each is touched
+with extraordinary crispness, so as to give to what in both cases has
+for some time been expected and foreseen a sudden thrill of novelty and
+unexpectedness. That is how to do a thing dramatically.[6]
+
+And now, after all this discussion of the "dramatic" in theme and
+incident, it remains to be said that the tendency of recent theory, and
+of some recent practice, has been to widen the meaning of the word,
+until it bursts the bonds of all definition. Plays have been written,
+and have found some acceptance, in which the endeavour of the dramatist
+has been to depict life, not in moments of crisis, but in its most level
+and humdrum phases, and to avoid any crispness of touch in the
+presentation of individual incidents. "Dramatic," in the eyes of writers
+of this school, has become a term of reproach, synonymous with
+"theatrical." They take their cue from Maeterlinck's famous essay on
+"The Tragic in Daily Life," in which he lays it down that: "An old man,
+seated in his armchair, waiting patiently, with his lamp beside
+him--submitting with bent head to the presence of his soul and his
+destiny--motionless as he is, does yet live in reality a deeper, more
+human, and more universal life than the lover who strangles his
+mistress, the captain who conquers in battle, or the husband who
+'avenges his honour.'" They do not observe that Maeterlinck, in his own
+practice, constantly deals with crises, and often with violent and
+startling ones.
+
+At the same time, I am far from suggesting that the reaction against the
+traditional "dramatic" is a wholly mistaken movement. It is a valuable
+corrective of conventional theatricalism; and it has, at some points,
+positively enlarged the domain of dramatic art. Any movement is good
+which helps to free art from the tyranny of a code of rules and
+definitions. The only really valid definition of the dramatic is: Any
+representation of imaginary personages which is capable of interesting
+an average audience assembled in a theatre. We must say "representation
+of imaginary personages" in order to exclude a lecture or a prize-fight;
+and we must say "an average audience" (or something to that effect) in
+order to exclude a dialogue of Plato or of Landor, the recitation of
+which might interest a specially selected public. Any further attempt to
+limit the content of the term "dramatic" is simply the expression of an
+opinion that such-and-such forms of representation will not be found to
+interest an audience; and this opinion may always be rebutted by
+experiment. In all that I have said, then, as to the dramatic and the
+non-dramatic, I must be taken as meaning: "Such-and-such forms and
+methods have been found to please, and will probably please again. They
+are, so to speak, safer and easier than other forms and methods. But it
+is the part of original genius to override the dictates of experience,
+and nothing in these pages is designed to discourage original genius
+from making the attempt." We have already seen, indeed, that in a
+certain type of play--the broad picture of a social phenomenon or
+environment--it is preferable that no attempt should be made to depict a
+marked crisis. There should be just enough story to afford a plausible
+excuse for raising and for lowering the curtain.[7]
+
+Let us not, however, seem to grant too much to the innovators and the
+quietists. To say that a drama should be, or tends to be, the
+presentation of a crisis in the life of certain characters, is by no
+means to insist on a mere arbitrary convention. It is to make at once an
+induction from the overwhelming majority of existing dramas, and a
+deduction from the nature and inherent conditions of theatrical
+presentation. The fact that theatrical conditions often encourage a
+violent exaggeration of the characteristically dramatic elements in life
+does not make these elements any the less real or any the less
+characteristically dramatic. It is true that crispness of handling may
+easily degenerate into the pursuit of mere picture-poster situation; but
+that is no reason why the artist should not seek to achieve crispness
+within the bounds prescribed by nature and common sense. There is a
+drama--I have myself seen it--in which the heroine, fleeing from the
+villain, is stopped by a yawning chasm. The pursuer is at her heels, and
+it seems as though she has no resource but to hurl herself into the
+abyss. But she is accompanied by three Indian servants, who happen, by
+the mercy of Providence, to be accomplished acrobats. The second climbs
+on the shoulders of the first, the third on the shoulders of the second;
+and then the whole trio falls forward across the chasm, the top one
+grasping some bush or creeper on the other side; so that a living bridge
+is formed, on which the heroine (herself, it would seem, something of an
+acrobat) can cross the dizzy gulf and bid defiance to the baffled
+villain. This is clearly a dramatic crisis within our definition; but,
+no less clearly, it is not a piece of rational or commendable drama. To
+say that such-and-such a factor is necessary, or highly desirable, in a
+dramatic scene, is by no means to imply that every scene which contains
+this factor is good drama. Let us take the case of another heroine--Nina
+in Sir Arthur Pinero's _His House in Order_. The second wife of Filmer
+Jesson, she is continually being offered up as a sacrifice on the altar
+dedicated to the memory of his adored first wife. Not only her husband,
+but the relatives of the sainted Annabel, make her life a burden to her.
+Then it comes to her knowledge--she obtains absolute proof--that
+Annabel was anything but the saint she was believed to be. By a single
+word she can overturn the altar of her martyrdom, and shatter the
+dearest illusion of her persecutors. Shall she speak that word, or shall
+she not? Here is a crisis which comes within our definition just as
+clearly as the other;[8] only it happens to be entirely natural and
+probable, and eminently illustrative of character. Ought we, then, to
+despise it because of the element it has in common with the
+picture-poster situation of preposterous melodrama? Surely not. Let
+those who have the art--the extremely delicate and difficult art--of
+making drama without the characteristically dramatic ingredients, do so
+by all means; but let them not seek to lay an embargo on the judicious
+use of these ingredients as they present themselves in life.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+[Footnote 1: _Etudes Critiques_, vol. vii, pp. 153 and 207.]
+
+[Footnote 2: In the most aggravated cases, the misunderstanding is
+maintained by a persevering use of pronouns in place of proper names:
+"he" and "she" being taken by the hearer to mean A. and B., when the
+speaker is in fact referring to X. and Y. This ancient trick becomes the
+more irritating the longer the _quiproquo_ is dragged out.]
+
+[Footnote 3: The Lowland Scottish villager. It is noteworthy that Mr.
+J.M. Barrie, who himself belongs to this race, has an almost unique gift
+of extracting dramatic effect out of taciturnity, and even out
+of silence.]
+
+[Footnote 4: There is a somewhat similar incident in Clyde Fitch's play,
+_The Moth and the Flame_.]
+
+[Footnote 5: _Les Corbeaux_, by Henri Becque, might perhaps be classed
+as a bankruptcy play, though the point of it is that the Vigneron family
+is not really bankrupt at all, but is unblushingly fleeced by the
+partner and the lawyer of the deceased Vigneron, who play into each
+other's hands.]
+
+[Footnote 6: "Dramatic" has recently become one of the most overworked
+words in the vocabulary of journalism. It constantly appears, not only
+in the text of the picturesque reporter, but in head-lines and on
+bulletin-boards. When, on July 20, 1911, Mr. Asquith wrote to Mr.
+Balfour to inform him that the King had guaranteed the creation of
+peers, should it prove necessary for the passing of the Parliament Bill,
+one paper published the news under this head-line: "DRAMATIC ANNOUNCEMENT
+BY THE PRIME MINISTER," and the parliamentary correspondent of another
+paper wrote: "With dramatic suddenness and swiftness, the Prime Minister
+hurled his thunderbolt at the wavering Tory party yesterday." As a
+matter of fact, the letter was probably not "hurled" more suddenly or
+swiftly than the most ordinary invitation to dinner: nor can its
+contents have been particularly surprising to any one. It was probably
+the conclusiveness, the finality, of the announcement that struck these
+writers as "dramatic." The letter put an end to all dubiety with a
+"short, sharp shock." It was, in fact, crisp. As a rule, however,
+"dramatic" is employed by the modern journalist simply as a rather
+pretentious synonym for the still more hackneyed "startling."]
+
+[Footnote 7: As a specimen, and a successful specimen, of this new
+technic, I may cite Miss Elizabeth Baker's very interesting play,
+_Chains_. There is absolutely no "story" in it, no complication of
+incidents, not even any emotional tension worth speaking of. Another
+recent play of something the same type, _The Way the Money Goes_, by
+Lady Bell, was quite thrilling by comparison. There we saw a workman's
+wife bowed down by a terrible secret which threatened to wreck her whole
+life--the secret that she had actually run into debt to the amount of
+£30. Her situation was dramatic in the ordinary sense of the word, very
+much as Nora's situation is dramatic when she knows that Krogstad's
+letter is in Helmer's hands. But in _Chains_ there is not even this
+simple form of excitement and suspense. A city clerk, oppressed by the
+deadly monotony and narrowness of his life, thinks of going to
+Australia--and doesn't go: that is the sum and substance of the action.
+Also, by way of underplot, a shopgirl, oppressed by the deadly monotony
+and narrowness of her life, thinks of escaping from it by marrying a
+middle-aged widower--and doesn't do it. If any one had told the late
+Francisque Sarcey, or the late Clement Scott, that a play could be made
+out of this slender material, which should hold an audience absorbed
+through four acts, and stir them to real enthusiasm, these eminent
+critics would have thought him a madman. Yet Miss Baker has achieved
+this feat, by the simple process of supplementing competent observation
+with a fair share of dramatic instinct.]
+
+[Footnote 8: If the essence of drama is crisis, it follows that nothing
+can be more dramatic than a momentous choice which may make or mar both
+the character and the fortune of the chooser and of others. There is an
+element of choice in all action which is, or seems to be, the product of
+free will; but there is a peculiar crispness of effect when two
+alternatives are clearly formulated, and the choice is made after a
+mental struggle, accentuated, perhaps, by impassioned advocacy of the
+conflicting interests. Such scenes are _Coriolanus_, v. 3, the scene
+between Ellida, Wangel, and the Stranger in the last act of _The Lady
+from the Sea_, and the concluding scene of _Candida_.]
+
+
+
+
+_CHAPTER IV_
+
+THE ROUTINE OF COMPOSITION
+
+
+As no two people, probably, ever did, or ever will, pursue the same
+routine in play-making, it is manifestly impossible to lay down any
+general rules on the subject. There are one or two considerations,
+however, which it may not be wholly superfluous to suggest to beginners.
+
+An invaluable insight into the methods of a master is provided by the
+scenarios and drafts of plays published in Henrik Ibsen's _Efterladte
+Skrifter_. The most important of these "fore-works," as he used to call
+them, have now been translated under the title of _From Ibsen's
+Workshop_ (Scribner), and may be studied with the greatest profit. Not
+that the student should mechanically imitate even Ibsen's routine of
+composition, which, indeed, varied considerably from play to play. The
+great lesson to be learnt from Ibsen's practice is that the play should
+be kept fluid or plastic as long as possible, and not suffered to become
+immutably fixed, either in the author's mind or on paper, before it has
+had time to grow and ripen. Many, if not most, of Ibsen's greatest
+individual inspirations came to him as afterthoughts, after the play had
+reached a point of development at which many authors would have held the
+process of gestation ended, and the work of art ripe for birth. Among
+these inspired afterthoughts may be reckoned Nora's great line,
+"Millions of women have done that"--the most crushing repartee in
+literature--Hedvig's threatened blindness, with all that ensues from it,
+and Little Eyolf's crutch, used to such purpose as we have already seen.
+
+This is not to say that the drawing-up of a tentative scenario ought not
+to be one of the playwright's first proceedings. Indeed, if he is able
+to dispense with a scenario on paper, it can only be because his mind is
+so clear, and so retentive of its own ideas, as to enable him to carry
+in his head, always ready for reference, a more or less detailed scheme.
+Go-as-you-please composition may be possible for the novelist, perhaps
+even for the writer of a one-act play, a mere piece of dialogue; but in
+a dramatic structure of any considerable extent, proportion, balance,
+and the interconnection of parts are so essential that a scenario is
+almost as indispensable to a dramatist as a set of plans to an
+architect. There is one dramatist of note whom one suspects of sometimes
+working without any definite scenario, and inventing as he goes along.
+That dramatist, I need scarcely say, is Mr. Bernard Shaw. I have no
+absolute knowledge of his method; but if he schemed out any scenario for
+_Getting Married_ or _Misalliance_, he has sedulously concealed the
+fact--to the detriment of the plays.[1]
+
+The scenario or skeleton is so manifestly the natural ground-work of a
+dramatic performance that the playwrights of the Italian _commedia dell'
+arte_ wrote nothing more than a scheme of scenes, and left the actors to
+do the rest. The same practice prevailed in early Elizabethan days, as
+one or two MS. "Plats," designed to be hung up in the wings, are extant
+to testify. The transition from extempore acting regulated by a scenario
+to the formal learning of parts falls within the historical period of
+the German stage. It seems probable that the romantic playwrights of the
+sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, both in England and in Spain, may
+have adopted a method not unlike that of the drama of improvisation,
+that is to say, they may have drawn out a scheme of entrances and exits,
+and then let their characters discourse (on paper) as their fancy
+prompted. So, at least, the copious fluency of their dialogue seems to
+suggest. But the typical modern play is a much more close-knit organism,
+in which every word has to be weighed far more carefully than it was by
+playwrights who stood near to the days of improvisation, and could
+indulge in "the large utterance of the early gods." Consequently it
+would seem that, until a play has been thought out very clearly and in
+great detail, any scheme of entrances and exits ought to be merely
+provisional and subject to indefinite modification. A modern play is not
+a framework of story loosely draped in a more or less gorgeous robe of
+language. There is, or ought to be, a close interdependence between
+action, character and dialogue, which forbids a playwright to tie his
+hands very far in advance.
+
+As a rule, then, it would seem to be an unfavourable sign when a drama
+presents itself at an early stage with a fixed and unalterable outline.
+The result may be a powerful, logical, well-knit piece of work; but the
+breath of life will scarcely be in it. Room should be left as long as
+possible for unexpected developments of character. If your characters
+are innocent of unexpected developments, the less characters they.[2]
+Not that I, personally, have any faith in those writers of fiction, be
+they playwrights or novelists, who contend that they do not speak
+through the mouths of their personages, but rather let their personages
+speak through them. "I do not invent or create" I have heard an eminent
+novelist say: "I simply record; my characters speak and act, and I write
+down their sayings and doings." This author may be a fine psychologist
+for purposes of fiction, but I question his insight into his own mental
+processes. The apparent spontaneity of a character's proceedings is a
+pure illusion. It means no more than that the imagination, once set in
+motion along a given line, moves along that line with an ease and
+freedom which seems to its possessor preternatural and almost
+uncanny.[3]
+
+Most authors, however, who have any real gift for character-creation
+probably fall more or less under this illusion, though they are sane
+enough and modest enough to realize that an illusion it is.[4] A
+character will every now and then seem to take the bit between his teeth
+and say and do things for which his creator feels himself hardly
+responsible. The playwright's scheme should not, then, until the latest
+possible moment, become so hard and fast as to allow his characters no
+elbow room for such manifestations of spontaneity. And this is only one
+of several forms of afterthought which may arise as the play develops.
+The playwright may all of a sudden see that a certain character is
+superfluous, or that a new character is needed, or that a new
+relationship between two characters would simplify matters, or that a
+scene that he has placed in the first act ought to be in the second, or
+that he can dispense with it altogether, or that it reveals too much to
+the audience and must be wholly recast.[5]
+
+These are only a few of the re-adjustments which have constantly to be
+made if a play is shaping itself by a process of vital growth; and that
+is why the playwright may be advised to keep his material fluid as long
+as he can. Ibsen had written large portions of the play now known to us
+as _Rosmersholm_ before he decided that Rebecca should not be married to
+Rosmer. He also, at a comparatively late stage, did away with two
+daughters whom he had at first given to Rosmer, and decided to make her
+childlessness the main cause of Beata's tragedy.
+
+Perhaps I insist too strongly on the advisability of treating a dramatic
+theme as clay to be modelled and remodelled, rather than as wood or
+marble to be carved unalterably and once for all. If so, it is because
+of a personal reminiscence. In my early youth, I had, like everybody
+else, ambitions in the direction of play-writing; and it was my
+inability to keep a theme plastic that convinced me of my lack of
+talent. It pleased me greatly to draw out a detailed scenario, working
+up duly to a situation at the end of each act; and, once made, that
+scenario was like a cast-iron mould into which the dialogue had simply
+to be poured. The result was that the play had all the merits of a
+logical, well-ordered essay. My situations worked out like the Q.E.D.'s
+of Euclid. My characters obstinately refused to come to life, or to take
+the bit between their teeth. They were simply cog-wheels in a
+pre-arranged mechanism. In one respect, my two or three plays were
+models--in respect of brevity and conciseness. I was never troubled by
+the necessity of cutting down--so cruel a necessity to many
+playwrights.[6] My difficulty was rather to find enough for my
+characters to say--for they never wanted to say anything that was not
+strictly germane to the plot. It was this that made me despair of
+play-writing, and realize that my mission was to teach other people how
+to write plays. And, similarly, the aspirant who finds that his people
+never want to say more than he can allow them to say--that they never
+rush headlong into blind alleys, or do things that upset the balance of
+the play and have to be resolutely undone--that aspirant will do well
+not to be over-confident of his dramatic calling and election. There may
+be authors who can write vital plays, as Shakespeare is said (on rather
+poor evidence)[7] to have done, without blotting a line; but I believe
+them to be rare. In our day, the great playwright is more likely to be
+he who does not shrink, on occasion, from blotting an act or two.
+
+There is a modern French dramatist who writes, with success, such plays
+as I might have written had I combined a strong philosophical faculty
+with great rhetorical force and fluency. The dramas of M. Paul Hervieu
+have all the neatness and cogency of a geometrical demonstration. One
+imagines that, for M. Hervieu, the act of composition means merely the
+careful filling in of a scenario as neat and complete as a schedule.[8]
+But for that very reason, despite their undoubted intellectual power, M.
+Hervieu's dramas command our respect rather than our enthusiasm. The
+dramatist should aim at _being_ logical without _seeming_ so.[9]
+
+It is sometimes said that a playwright ought to construct his play
+backwards, and even to write his last act first.[10] This doctrine
+belongs to the period of the well-made play, when climax was regarded as
+the one thing needful in dramatic art, and anticlimax as the
+unforgivable sin. Nowadays, we do not insist that every play should end
+with a tableau, or with an emphatic _mot de la fin_. We are more willing
+to accept a quiet, even an indecisive, ending.[11] Nevertheless it is
+and must ever be true that, at a very early period in the scheming of
+his play, the playwright ought to assure himself that his theme is
+capable of a satisfactory ending. Of course this phrase does not imply a
+"happy ending," but one which satisfies the author as being artistic,
+effective, inevitable (in the case of a serious play), or, in one word,
+"right." An obviously makeshift ending can never be desirable, either
+from the ideal or from the practical point of view. Many excellent plays
+have been wrecked on this rock. The very frequent complaint that "the
+last act is weak" is not always or necessarily a just reproach; but it
+is so when the author has clearly been at a loss for an ending, and has
+simply huddled his play up in a conventional and perfunctory fashion. It
+may even be said that some apparently promising themes are deceptive in
+their promise, since they are inherently incapable of a satisfactory
+ending. The playwright should by all means make sure that he has not run
+up against one of these blind-alley themes.[12] He should, at an early
+point, see clearly the end for which he is making, and be sure that it
+is an end which he actively desires, not merely one which satisfies
+convention, or which "will have to do."
+
+Some dramatists, when a play is provisionally mapped out, do not attempt
+to begin at the beginning and write it as a coherent whole, but make a
+dash first at the more salient and critical scenes, or those which
+specially attract their imagination. On such a point every author must
+obviously be a law unto himself. From the theoretical point of view, one
+can only approve the practice, since it certainly makes for plasticity.
+It is evident that a detached scene, written while those that lead up to
+it are as yet but vaguely conceived, must be subject to indefinite
+modification.[13] In several of Ibsen's very roughest drafts, we find
+short passages of dialogue sketched out even before the names have been
+assigned to the characters, showing that some of his earliest ideas came
+to him, as it were, ready dramatized. One would be tempted to hope much
+of an author who habitually and unaffectedly thus "lisped in dialogue
+for the dialogue came."
+
+Ought the playwright, at an early stage in the process of each act, to
+have the details of its scene clearly before him? Ought he to draw out a
+scene-plot, and know, from moment to moment, just where each character
+is, whether He is standing on the hearthrug and She sitting on the
+settee, or _vice versa_? There is no doubt that furniture, properties,
+accidents of environment, play a much larger part in modern drama than
+they did on the Elizabethan, the eighteenth century, or even the
+early-Victorian stage. Some of us, who are not yet centenarians, can
+remember to have seen rooms on the stage with no furniture at all except
+two or three chairs "painted on the flat." Under such conditions, it was
+clearly useless for the playwright to trouble his head about furniture,
+and even "positions" might well be left for arrangement at rehearsal.
+This carelessness of the environment, however, is no longer possible.
+Whether we like it or no (and some theorists do not like it at all),
+scenery has ceased to be a merely suggestive background against which
+the figures stand out in high relief. The stage now aims at presenting a
+complete picture, with the figures, not "a little out of the picture,"
+but completely in it. This being so, the playwright must evidently, at
+some point in the working out of his theme, visualize the stage-picture
+in considerable detail; and we find that almost all modern dramatists
+do, as a matter of fact, pay great attention to what may be called the
+topography of their scenes, and the shifting "positions" of their
+characters. The question is: at what stage of the process of composition
+ought this visualization to occur? Here, again, it would be absurd to
+lay down a general rule; but I am inclined to think, both theoretically
+and from what can be gathered of the practice of the best dramatists,
+that it is wisest to reserve it for a comparatively late stage. A
+playwright of my acquaintance, and a very remarkable playwright too,
+used to scribble the first drafts of his play in little notebooks, which
+he produced from his pocket whenever he had a moment to spare--often on
+the top of an omnibus. Only when the first draft was complete did he
+proceed to set the scenes, as it were, and map out the stage-management.
+On the other hand, one has heard of playwrights whose first step in
+setting to work upon a particular act was to construct a complete model
+of the scene, and people it with manikins to represent the characters.
+As a general practice, this is scarcely to be commended. It is wiser,
+one fancies, to have the matter of the scene pretty fully roughed-out
+before details of furniture, properties, and position are arranged.[14]
+It may happen, indeed, that some natural phenomenon, some property or
+piece of furniture, is the very pivot of the scene; in which case it
+must, of course, be posited from the first. From the very moment of his
+conceiving the fourth act of _Le Tartufe_, Molière must have had clearly
+in view the table under which Orgon hides; and Sheridan cannot have got
+very far with the Screen Scene before he had mentally placed the screen.
+But even where a great deal turns on some individual object, the
+detailed arrangements of the scene may in most cases be taken for
+granted until a late stage in its working out.
+
+One proviso, however, must be made; where any important effect depends
+upon a given object, or a particular arrangement of the scene, the
+playwright cannot too soon assure himself that the object comes well
+within the physical possibilities of the stage, and that the arrangement
+is optically[15] possible and effective. Few things, indeed, are quite
+impossible to the modern stage; but there are many that had much better
+not be attempted. It need scarcely be added that the more serious a play
+is, or aspires to be, the more carefully should the author avoid any
+such effects as call for the active collaboration of the
+stage-carpenter, machinist, or electrician. Even when a mechanical
+effect can be produced to perfection, the very fact that the audience
+cannot but admire the ingenuity displayed, and wonder "how it is done,"
+implies a failure of that single-minded attention to the essence of the
+matter in hand which the dramatist would strive to beget and maintain. A
+small but instructive example of a difficult effect, such as the prudent
+playwright will do well to avoid, occurs in the third act of Ibsen's
+_Little Eyolf_. During the greater part of the act, the flag in
+Allmers's garden is hoisted to half-mast in token of mourning; until at
+the end, when he and Rita attain a serener frame of mind, he runs it up
+to the truck. Now, from the poetic and symbolic point of view, this flag
+is all that can be desired; but from the practical point of view it
+presents grave difficulties. Nothing is so pitifully ineffective as a
+flag in a dead calm, drooping nervelessly against the mast; and though,
+no doubt, by an ingenious arrangement of electric fans, it might be
+possible to make this flag flutter in the breeze, the very fact of its
+doing so would tend to set the audience wondering by what mechanism the
+effect was produced, instead of attending to the soul-struggles of Rita
+and Allmers. It would be absurd to blame Ibsen for overriding theatrical
+prudence in such a case; I merely point out to beginners that it is
+wise, before relying on an effect of this order, to make sure that it
+is, not only possible, but convenient from the practical point of view.
+In one or two other cases Ibsen strained the resources of the stage. The
+illumination in the last act of _Pillars of Society_ cannot be carried
+out as he describes it; or rather, if it were carried out on some
+exceptionally large and well-equipped stage, the feat of the mechanician
+would eclipse the invention of the poet. On the other hand, the abode of
+the Wild Duck in the play of that name is a conception entirely
+consonant with the optics of the theatre; for no detail at all need be,
+or ought to be, visible, and a vague effect of light is all that is
+required. Only in his last melancholy effort did Ibsen, in a play
+designed for representation, demand scenic effects entirely beyond the
+resources of any theatre not specially fitted for spectacular drama, and
+possible, even in such a theatre, only in some ridiculously
+makeshift form.
+
+There are two points of routine on which I am compelled to speak in no
+uncertain voice--two practices which I hold to be almost equally
+condemnable. In the first place, no playwright who understands the
+evolution of the modern theatre can nowadays use in his stage-directions
+the abhorrent jargon of the early nineteenth century. When one comes
+across a manuscript bespattered with such cabalistic signs as "R.2.E.,"
+"R.C.," "L.C.," "L.U.E.," and so forth, one sees at a glance that the
+writer has neither studied dramatic literature nor thought out for
+himself the conditions of the modern theatre, but has found his dramatic
+education between the buff covers of _French's Acting Edition_. Some
+beginners imagine that a plentiful use of such abbreviations will be
+taken as a proof of their familiarity with the stage; whereas, in fact,
+it only shows their unfamiliarity with theatrical history. They might as
+well set forth to describe a modern battleship in the nautical
+terminology of Captain Marryat. "Right First Entrance," "Left Upper
+Entrance," and so forth, are terms belonging to the period when there
+were no "box" rooms or "set" exteriors on the stage, when the sides of
+each scene were composed of "wings" shoved on in grooves, and entrances
+could be made between each pair of wings. Thus, "R. 1 E." meant the
+entrance between the proscenium and the first "wing" on the right, "R. 2
+E." meant the entrance between the first pair of "wings," and so forth.
+"L.U.E." meant the entrance at the left between the last "wing" and the
+back cloth. Now grooves and "wings" have disappeared from the stage. The
+"box" room is entered, like any room in real life, by doors or French
+windows; and the only rational course is to state the position of your
+doors in your opening stage-direction, and thereafter to say in plain
+language by which door an entrance or an exit is to be made. In exterior
+scenes where, for example, trees or clumps of shrubbery answer in a
+measure to the old "wings," the old terminology may not be quite
+meaningless; but it is far better eschewed. It is a good general rule to
+avoid, so far as possible, expressions which show that the author has a
+stage scene, and not an episode of real life, before his eyes. Men of
+the theatre are the last to be impressed by theatrical jargon; and when
+the play comes to be printed, the general reader is merely bewildered
+and annoyed by technicalities, which tend, moreover, to disturb
+his illusion.
+
+A still more emphatic warning must be given against another and more
+recent abuse in the matter of stage-directions. The "L.U.E.'s," indeed,
+are bound very soon to die a natural death. The people who require to be
+warned against them are, as a rule, scarcely worth warning. But it is
+precisely the cleverest people (to use clever in a somewhat narrow
+sense) who are apt to be led astray by Mr. Bernard Shaw's practice of
+expanding his stage-directions into essays, disquisitions, monologues,
+pamphlets. This is a practice which goes far to justify the belief of
+some foreign critics that the English, or, since Mr. Shaw is in
+question, let us say the inhabitants of the British Islands, are
+congenitally incapable of producing a work of pure art. Our
+novelists--Fielding, Thackeray, George Eliot--have been sufficiently,
+though perhaps not unjustly, called over the coals for their habit of
+coming in front of their canvas, and either gossiping with the reader or
+preaching at him. But, if it be a sound maxim that the novelist should
+not obtrude his personality on his reader, how much more is this true of
+the dramatist! When the dramatist steps to the footlights and begins to
+lecture, all illusion is gone. It may be said that, as a matter of fact,
+this does not occur: that on the stage we hear no more of the
+disquisitions of Mr. Shaw and his imitators than we do of the curt, and
+often non-existent, stage-directions of Shakespeare and his
+contemporaries. To this the reply is twofold. First, the very fact that
+these disquisitions are written proves that the play is designed to be
+printed and read, and that we are, therefore, justified in applying to
+it the standard of what may be called literary illusion. Second, when a
+playwright gets into the habit of talking around his characters, he
+inevitably, even if unconsciously, slackens his endeavour to make them
+express themselves as completely as may be in their own proper medium of
+dramatic action and dialogue. You cannot with impunity mix up two
+distinct forms of art--the drama and the sociological essay or lecture.
+To Mr. Shaw, of course, much may, and must, be forgiven. His
+stage-directions are so brilliant that some one, some day, will
+assuredly have them spoken by a lecturer in the orchestra while the
+action stands still on the stage. Thus, he will have begotten a bastard,
+but highly entertaining, form of art. My protest has no practical
+application to him, for he is a standing exception to all rules. It is
+to the younger generation that I appeal not to be misled by his
+seductive example. They have little chance of rivalling him as
+sociological essayists; but if they treat their art seriously, and as a
+pure art, they may easily surpass him as dramatists. By adopting his
+practice they will tend to produce, not fine works of art, but inferior
+sociological documents. They will impair their originality and spoil
+their plays in order to do comparatively badly what Mr. Shaw has done
+incomparably well.
+
+The common-sense rule as to stage directions is absolutely plain; be
+they short, or be they long, they ought always to be _impersonal_. The
+playwright who cracks jokes in his stage-directions, or indulges in
+graces of style, is intruding himself between the spectator and the work
+of art, to the inevitable detriment of the illusion. In preparing a play
+for the press, the author should make his stage-directions as brief as
+is consistent with clearness. Few readers will burden their memory with
+long and detailed descriptions. When a new character of importance
+appears, a short description of his or her personal appearance and dress
+may be helpful to the reader; but even this should be kept impersonal.
+Moreover, as a play has always to be read before it can be rehearsed or
+acted, it is no bad plan to make the stage-directions, from the first,
+such as tend to bring the play home clearly to the reader's mental
+vision. And here I may mention a principle, based on more than mere
+convenience, which some playwrights observe with excellent results. Not
+merely in writing stage-directions, but in visualizing a scene, the idea
+of the stage should, as far as possible, be banished from the author's
+mind. He should see and describe the room, the garden, the sea-shore, or
+whatever the place of his action may be, not as a stage-scene, but as a
+room, garden, or sea-shore in the real world. The cultivation of this
+habit ought to be, and I believe is in some cases, a safeguard against
+theatricality.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+[Footnote 1: Sardou wrote careful and detailed scenarios, Dumas _fils_
+held it a waste of time to do so. Pailleron wrote "enormous" scenarios,
+Meilhac very brief ones, or none at all. Mr. Galsworthy, rather to my
+surprise, disdains, and even condemns, the scenario, holding that a
+theme becomes lifeless when you put down its skeleton on paper. Sir
+Arthur Pinero says: "Before beginning to write a play, I always make
+sure, by means of a definite scheme, that there is _a_ way of doing it;
+but whether I ultimately follow that way is a totally different matter."
+Mr. Alfred Sutro practically confesses to a scenario. He says: "Before I
+start writing the dialogue of a play, I make sure that I shall have an
+absolutely free hand over the entrances and exits: in other words, that
+there is ample and legitimate reason for each character appearing in any
+particular scene, and ample motive for his leaving it." Mr. Granville
+Barker does not put on paper a detailed scenario. He says: "I plan the
+general scheme, and particularly the balance of the play, in my head;
+but this, of course, does not depend entirely on entrances and exits."
+Mr. Henry Arthur Jones says: "I know the leading scenes, and the general
+course of action in each act, before I write a line. When I have got the
+whole story clear, and divided into acts, I very carefully construct the
+first act, as a series of scenes between such and such of the
+characters. When the first act is written I carefully construct the
+second act in the same way--and so on. I sometimes draw up twenty
+scenarios for an act before I can get it to go straight."]
+
+[Footnote 2: A friend of the late Clyde Fitch writes to me: "Fitch was
+often astonished at the way in which his characters developed. He tried
+to make them do certain things: they did others."]
+
+[Footnote 3: This account of the matter seems to find support in a
+statement, by M. François de Curel, an accomplished psychologist, to the
+effect that during the first few days of work at a play he is "clearly
+conscious of creating," but that gradually he gets "into the skin" of
+his characters, and appears to work by instinct. No doubt some artists
+are actually subject to a sort of hallucination, during which they seem
+rather to record than to invent the doings of their characters. But this
+somewhat morbid condition should scarcely be cultivated by the
+dramatist, whose intelligence should always keep a light rein on his
+more instinctive mental processes. See _L'Année Psychologique_, 1894.
+p. 120.]
+
+[Footnote 4: Sir Arthur Pinero says: "The beginning of a play to me is a
+little world of people. I live with them, get familiar with them, and
+_they_ tell me the story." This may sound not unlike the remark of the
+novelist above quoted; but the intention was quite different. Sir Arthur
+simply meant that the story came to him as the characters took on life
+in his imagination. Mr. H.A. Jones writes: "When you have a character or
+several characters you haven't a play. You may keep these in your mind
+and nurse them till they combine in a piece of action; but you haven't
+got your play till you have theme, characters, and action all fused. The
+process with me is as purely automatic and spontaneous as dreaming; in
+fact it is really dreaming while you are awake."]
+
+[Footnote 5: "Here," says a well-known playwright, "is a common
+experience. You are struck by an idea with which you fall in love. 'Ha!'
+you say. 'What a superb scene where the man shall find the missing will
+under the sofa! If that doesn't make them sit up, what will?' You begin
+the play. The first act goes all right, and the second act goes all
+right. You come to the third act, and somehow it won't go at all. You
+battle with it for weeks in vain; and then it suddenly occurs to you,
+'Why, I see what's wrong! It's that confounded scene where the man finds
+the will under the sofa! Out it must come!' You cut it out, and at once
+all goes smooth again. But you have thrown overboard the great effect
+that first tempted you."]
+
+[Footnote 6: The manuscripts of Dumas _fils_ are said to contain, as a
+rule, about four times as much matter as the printed play! (Parigot:
+_Génie et Métier_, p. 243). This probably means, however, that he
+preserved tentative and ultimately rejected scenes, which most
+playwrights destroy as they go along.]
+
+[Footnote 7: Lowell points out that this assertion of Heminge and
+Condell merely shows them to have been unfamiliar with the simple
+phenomenon known as a fair copy.]
+
+[Footnote 8: Since writing this I have learnt that my conjecture is
+correct, at any rate as regards some of M. Hervieu's plays.]
+
+[Footnote 9: See Chapters XIII and XVI.]
+
+[Footnote 10: This view is expressed with great emphasis by Dumas _fils_
+in the preface to _La Princesse Georges_. "You should not begin your
+work," he says, "until you have your concluding scene, movement and
+speech clear in your mind. How can you tell what road you ought to take
+until you know where you are going?" It is perhaps a more apparent than
+real contradiction of this rule that, until _Iris_ was three parts
+finished, Sir Arthur Pinero intended the play to end with the throttling
+of Iris by Maldonado. The actual end is tantamount to a murder, though
+Iris is not actually killed.]
+
+[Footnote 11: See Chapter XVIII.]
+
+[Footnote 12: See Chapter XX.]
+
+[Footnote 13: Most of the dramatists whom I have consulted are opposed
+to the principle of "roughing out" the big scenes first, and then
+imbedding them, as it were, in their context. Sir Arthur Pinero goes the
+length of saying: "I can never go on to page 2 until I am sure that page
+1 is as right as I can make it. Indeed, when an act is finished, I send
+it at once to the printers, confident that I shall not have to go back
+upon it." Mr. Alfred Sutro says: "I write a play straight ahead from
+beginning to end, taking practically as long over the first act as over
+the last three." And Mr. Granville Barker: "I always write the beginning
+of a play first and the end last: but as to writing 'straight ahead'--it
+sounds like what one may be able to do in Heaven." But almost all
+dramatists, I take it, jot down brief passages of dialogue which they
+may or may not eventually work into the texture of their play.]
+
+[Footnote 14: One is not surprised to learn that Sardou "did his
+stage-management as he went along," and always knew exactly the position
+of his characters from moment to moment.]
+
+[Footnote 15: And aurally, it may be added. Sarcey comments on the
+impossibility of a scene in Zola's _Pot Bouille_ in which the so-called
+"lovers," Octave Mouret and Blanche, throw open the window of the garret
+in which they are quarrelling, and hear the servants in the courtyard
+outside discussing their intrigue. In order that the comments of the
+servants might reach the ears of the audience, they had to be shouted in
+a way (says M. Sarcey) that was fatal to the desired illusion.]
+
+
+
+
+_CHAPTER V_
+
+DRAMATIS PERSONAE
+
+
+The theme being chosen, the next step will probably be to determine what
+characters shall be employed in developing it. Most playwrights, I take
+it, draw up a provisional Dramatis Personae before beginning the serious
+work of construction. Ibsen seems always to have done so; but, in some
+of his plays, the list of persons was at first considerably larger than
+it ultimately became. The frugal poet sometimes saved up the characters
+rejected from one play, and used them in another. Thus Boletta and Hilda
+Wangel were originally intended to have been the daughters of Rosmer and
+Beata; and the delightful Foldal of _John Gabriel Borkman_ was a
+character left over from _The Lady from the Sea_.
+
+The playwright cannot proceed far in planning out his work without
+determining, roughly at any rate, what auxiliary characters he means to
+employ. There are in every play essential characters, without whom the
+theme is unthinkable, and auxiliary characters, not indispensable to the
+theme, but simply convenient for filling in the canvas and carrying on
+the action. It is not always possible to decide whether a character is
+essential or auxiliary--it depends upon how we define the theme. In
+_Hamlet_, for example, Hamlet, Claudius, and Gertrude are manifestly
+essential: for the theme is the hesitancy of a young man of a certain
+temperament in taking vengeance upon the seducer of his mother and
+murderer of his father. But is Ophelia essential, or merely auxiliary?
+Essential, if we consider Hamlet's pessimistic feeling as to woman and
+the "breeding of sinners" a necessary part of his character; auxiliary,
+if we take the view that without this feeling he would still have been
+Hamlet, and the action, to all intents and purposes, the same. The
+remaining characters, on the other hand, are clearly auxiliary. This is
+true even of the Ghost: for Hamlet might have learnt of his father's
+murder in fifty other ways.
+
+Polonius, Laertes, Horatio, and the rest might all have been utterly
+different, or might never have existed at all, and yet the essence of
+the play might have remained intact.
+
+It would be perfectly possible to write a _Hamlet_ after the manner of
+Racine, in which there should be only six personages instead of
+Shakespeare's six-and-twenty: and in this estimate I assume Ophelia to
+be an essential character. The dramatis personae would be: Hamlet, his
+confidant; Ophelia, her confidant; and the King and Queen, who would
+serve as confidants to each other. Indeed, an economy of one person
+might be affected by making the Queen (as she naturally might) play the
+part of confidant to Ophelia.
+
+Shakespeare, to be sure, did not deliberately choose between his own
+method and that of Racine. Classic concentration was wholly unsuited to
+the physical conditions of the Elizabethan stage, on which external
+movement and bustle were imperatively demanded. But the modern
+playwright has a wide latitude of choice in this purely technical
+matter. He may work out his plot with the smallest possible number of
+characters, or he may introduce a crowd of auxiliary personages. The
+good craftsman will be guided by the nature of his theme. In a broad
+social study or a picturesque romance, you may have as many auxiliary
+figures as you please. In a subtle comedy, or a psychological tragedy,
+the essential characters should have the stage as much as possible to
+themselves. In Becque's _La Parisienne_ there are only four characters
+and a servant; in Rostand's _Cyrano de Bergerac_ there are fifty-four
+personages named in the playbill, to say nothing of supernumeraries. In
+_Peer Gynt_, a satiric phantasmagory, Ibsen introduces some fifty
+individual characters, with numberless supernumeraries; in _An Enemy of
+the People_, a social comedy, he has eleven characters and a crowd; for
+_Ghosts_ and _Rosmersholm_, psychological tragedies, six persons apiece
+are sufficient.
+
+It can scarcely be necessary, at this time of day, to say much on the
+subject of nomenclature. One does occasionally, in manuscripts of a
+quite hopeless type, find the millionaire's daughter figuring as "Miss
+Aurea Golden," and her poor but sprightly cousin as "Miss Lalage Gay";
+but the veriest tyro realizes, as a rule, that this sort of punning
+characterization went out with the eighteenth century, or survived into
+the nineteenth century only as a flagrant anachronism, like
+knee-breeches and hair-powder.
+
+A curious essay might be written on the reasons why such names as Sir
+John Brute, Sir Tunbelly Clumsy, Sir Peter Teazle, Sir Anthony Absolute,
+Sir Lucius O'Trigger, Lord Foppington, Lord Rake, Colonel Bully,
+Lovewell, Heartfree, Gripe, Shark and the rest were regarded as a matter
+of course in "the comedy of manners," but have become offensive to-day,
+except in deliberate imitations of the eighteenth-century style. The
+explanation does not lie merely in the contrast between "conventional"
+comedy and "realistic" drama. Our forefathers (whatever Lamb may say)
+did not consciously place their comedy in a realm of convention, but
+generally considered themselves, and sometimes were, realists. The
+fashion of label-names, if we may call them so, came down from the
+Elizabethans, who, again, borrowed it from the Mediaeval Moralities.[1]
+Shakespeare himself gave us Master Slender and Justice Shallow; but it
+was in the Jonsonian comedy of types that the practice of advertising a
+"humour" or "passion" in a name (English or Italian) established itself
+most firmly. Hence such strange appellatives as Sir Epicure Mammon, Sir
+Amorous La Foole, Morose, Wellbred, Downright, Fastidius Brisk, Volpone,
+Corbaccio, Sordido, and Fallace. After the Restoration, Jonson, Beaumont
+and Fletcher, and Massinger were, for a time, more popular than
+Shakespeare; so that the label-names seemed to have the sanction of the
+giants that were before the Flood. Even when comedy began to deal with
+individuals rather than mere incarnations of a single "humour," the
+practice of giving them obvious pseudonyms held its ground. Probably it
+was reinforced by the analogous practice which obtained in journalism,
+in which real persons were constantly alluded to (and libelled) under
+fictitious designations, more or less transparent to the initiated. Thus
+a label-name did not carry with it a sense of unreality, but rather,
+perhaps, a vague suggestion of covert reference to a real person. I must
+not here attempt to trace the stages by which the fashion went out. It
+could doubtless be shown that the process of change ran parallel to the
+shrinkage of the "apron" and the transformation of the platform-stage
+into the picture-stage. That transformation was completed about the
+middle of the nineteenth century; and it was about that time that
+label-names made their latest appearances in works of any artistic
+pretension--witness the Lady Gay Spanker of _London Assurance_, and the
+Captain Dudley (or "Deadly") Smooth of _Money_. Faint traces of the
+practice survive in T.W. Robertson, as in his master, Thackeray. But it
+was in his earliest play of any note that he called a journalist Stylus.
+In his later comedies the names are admirably chosen: they are
+characteristic without eccentricity or punning. One feels that Eccles in
+_Caste_ could not possibly have borne any other name. How much less
+living would he be had he been called Mr. Soaker or Mr. Tosspot!
+
+Characteristic without eccentricity--that is what a name ought to be. As
+the characteristic quality depends upon a hundred indefinable,
+subconscious associations, it is clearly impossible to suggest any
+principle of choice. The only general rule that can be laid down is that
+the key of the nomenclature, so to speak, may rightly vary with the key
+of the play--that farcical names are, within limits, admissible in
+farce, eccentric names in eccentric comedy, while soberly appropriate
+names are alone in place in serious plays. Some dramatists are
+habitually happy in their nomenclature, others much less so. Ibsen would
+often change a name three or four times in the course of writing a play,
+until at last he arrived at one which seemed absolutely to fit the
+character; but the appropriateness of his names is naturally lost upon
+foreign audiences.
+
+One word may perhaps be said on the recent fashion--not to say fad--of
+suppressing in the printed play the traditional list of "Dramatis
+Personae." Björnson, in some of his later plays, was, so far as I am
+aware, the first of the moderns to adopt this plan. I do not know
+whether his example has influenced certain English playwrights, or
+whether they arrived independently at the same austere principle, by
+sheer force of individual genius. The matter is a trifling one--so
+trifling that the departure from established practice has something of
+the air of a pedantry. It is not, on the whole, to be approved. It adds
+perceptibly to the difficulty which some readers experience in picking
+up the threads of a play; and it deprives other readers of a real and
+appreciable pleasure of anticipation. There is a peculiar and not
+irrational charm in looking down a list of quite unknown names, and
+thinking: "In the course of three hours, I shall know these people: I
+shall have read their hearts: I shall have lived with them through a
+great crisis in their lives: some of them may be my friends for ever."
+It is one of the glories and privileges of the dramatist's calling that
+he can arouse in us this eager and poignant expectation; and I cannot
+commend his wisdom in deliberately taking the edge off it, and making us
+feel as though we were not sitting down to a play, but to a sort of
+conversational novel. A list of characters, it is true, may also affect
+one with acute anticipations of boredom; but I have never yet found a
+play less tedious by reason of the suppression of the "Dramatis
+Personae."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+[Footnote 1: Partially, too, they were under the influence of antiquity;
+but the ancients were very discreet in their use of significant names.
+Only in satyr-plays, in the comic epics, and for a few extravagant
+characters in comedy (such as the boastful soldier) were grotesque
+appellations employed. For the rest, the Greek habit of nomenclature
+made it possible to use significant names which were at the same time
+probable enough in daily life. For example, a slave might be called
+Onesimus, "useful," or a soldier Polemon, to imply his warlike function;
+but both names would be familiar to the audience in actual use.]
+
+
+
+
+_BOOK II_
+
+THE BEGINNING
+
+
+
+
+_CHAPTER VI_
+
+THE POINT OF ATTACK: SHAKESPEARE AND IBSEN
+
+
+Though, as we have already noted, the writing of plays does not always
+follow the chronological sequence of events, in discussing the process
+of their evolution we are bound to assume that the playwright begins at
+the beginning, and proceeds in orderly fashion, by way of the middle, to
+the end. It was one of Aristotle's requirements that a play should have
+a beginning, middle and end; and though it may seem that it scarcely
+needed an Aristotle to lay down so self-evident a proposition, the fact
+is that playwrights are more than sufficiently apt to ignore or despise
+the rule.[1] Especially is there a tendency to rebel against the
+requirement that a play should have an end. We have seen a good many
+plays of late which do not end, but simply leave off: at their head we
+might perhaps place Ibsen's _Ghosts_. But let us not anticipate. For the
+moment, what we have to inquire is where, and how, a play ought
+to begin.
+
+In life there are no such things as beginnings. Even a man's birth is a
+quite arbitrary point at which to launch his biography; for the
+determining factors in his career are to be found in persons, events,
+and conditions that existed before he was ever thought of. For the
+biographer, however, and for the novelist as a writer of fictitious
+biography, birth forms a good conventional starting-point. He can give a
+chapter or so to "Ancestry," and then relate the adventures of his hero
+from the cradle onwards. But the dramatist, as we have seen, deals, not
+with protracted sequences of events, but with short, sharp crises. The
+question for him, therefore, is: at what moment of the crisis, or of its
+antecedents, he had better ring up his curtain? At this point he is like
+the photographer studying his "finder" in order to determine how much of
+a given prospect he can "get in."
+
+The answer to the question depends on many things, but chiefly on the
+nature of the crisis and the nature of the impression which the
+playwright desires to make upon his audience. If his play be a comedy,
+and if his object be gently and quietly to interest and entertain, the
+chances are that he begins by showing us his personages in their normal
+state, concisely indicates their characters, circumstances and
+relations, and then lets the crisis develop from the outset before our
+eyes. If, on the other hand, his play be of a more stirring description,
+and he wants to seize the spectator's attention firmly from the start,
+he will probably go straight at his crisis, plunging, perhaps, into the
+very middle of it, even at the cost of having afterwards to go back in
+order to put the audience in possession of the antecedent circumstances.
+In a third type of play, common of late years, and especially affected
+by Ibsen, the curtain rises on a surface aspect of profound peace, which
+is presently found to be but a thin crust over an absolutely volcanic
+condition of affairs, the origin of which has to be traced backwards, it
+may be for many years.
+
+Let us glance at a few of Shakespeare's openings, and consider at what
+points he attacks his various themes. Of his comedies, all except one
+begin with a simple conversation, showing a state of affairs from which
+the crisis develops with more or less rapidity, but in which it is as
+yet imperceptibly latent. In no case does he plunge into the middle of
+his subject, leaving its antecedents to be stated in what is technically
+called an "exposition." Neither in tragedy nor in comedy, indeed, was
+this Shakespeare's method. In his historical plays he relied to some
+extent on his hearers' knowledge of history, whether gathered from books
+or from previous plays of the historical series; and where such
+knowledge was not to be looked for, he would expound the situation in
+good set terms, like those of a Euripidean Prologue. But the
+chronicle-play is a species apart, and practically an extinct species:
+we need not pause to study its methods. In his fictitious plays, with
+two notable exceptions, it was Shakespeare's constant practice to bring
+the whole action within the frame of the picture, opening at such a
+point that no retrospect should be necessary, beyond what could be
+conveyed in a few casual words. The exceptions are _The Tempest_ and
+_Hamlet_, to which we shall return in due course.
+
+How does _The Merchant of Venice_ open? With a long conversation
+exhibiting the character of Antonio, the friendship between him and
+Bassanio, the latter's financial straits, and his purpose of wooing
+Portia. The second scene displays the character of Portia, and informs
+us of her father's device with regard to her marriage; but this
+information is conveyed in three or four lines. Not till the third scene
+do we see or hear of Shylock, and not until very near the end of the act
+is there any foreshadowing of what is to be the main crisis of the play.
+Not a single antecedent event has to be narrated to us; for the mere
+fact that Antonio has been uncivil to Shylock, and shown disapproval of
+his business methods, can scarcely be regarded as a preliminary outside
+the frame of the picture.
+
+In _As You Like It_ there are no preliminaries to be stated beyond the
+facts that Orlando is at enmity with his elder brother, and that Duke
+Frederick has usurped the coronet and dukedom of Rosalind's father.
+These facts being made apparent without any sort of formal exposition,
+the crisis of the play rapidly announces itself in the wrestling-match
+and its sequels. In _Much Ado About Nothing_ there is even less of
+antecedent circumstance to be imparted. We learn in the first scene,
+indeed, that Beatrice and Benedick have already met and crossed swords;
+but this is not in the least essential to the action; the play might
+have been to all intents and purposes the same had they never heard of
+each other until after the rise of the curtain. In _Twelfth Night_ there
+is a semblance of a retrospective exposition in the scene between Viola
+and the Captain; but it is of the simplest nature, and conveys no
+information beyond what, at a later period, would have been imparted on
+the playbill, thus--
+
+  "Orsino, Duke of Illyria, in love with Olivia.
+  Olivia, an heiress, in mourning for her brother,"
+
+and so forth. In _The Taming of the Shrew_ there are no antecedents
+whatever to be stated. It is true that Lucentio, in the opening speech,
+is good enough to inform Tranio who he is and what he is doing
+there--facts with which Tranio is already perfectly acquainted. But this
+was merely a conventional opening, excused by the fashion of the time;
+it was in no sense a necessary exposition. For the rest, the crisis of
+the play--the battle between Katherine and Petruchio--begins, develops,
+and ends before our very eyes. In _The Winter's Tale_, a brief
+conversation between Camillo and Archidamus informs us that the King of
+Bohemia is paying a visit to the King of Sicilia; and that is absolutely
+all we need to know. It was not even necessary that it should be
+conveyed to us in this way. The situation would be entirely
+comprehensible if the scene between Camillo and Archidamus were omitted.
+
+It is needless to go through the whole list of comedies. The broad fact
+is that in all the plays commonly so described, excepting only _The
+Tempest_, the whole action comes within the frame of the picture. In
+_The Tempest_ the poet employs a form of opening which otherwise he
+reserves for tragedies. The first scene is simply an animated tableau,
+calculated to arrest the spectator's attention, without conveying to him
+any knowledge either of situation or character. Such gleams of character
+as do, in fact, appear in the dialogue, are scarcely perceived in the
+hurly-burly of the storm. Then, in the calm which ensues, Prospero
+expounds to Miranda in great detail the antecedents of the crisis now
+developing. It might almost seem, indeed, that the poet, in this, his
+poetic last-will-and-testament, intended to warn his successors against
+the dangers of a long narrative exposition; for Prospero's story sends
+Miranda to sleep. Be this as it may, we have here a case in which
+Shakespeare deliberately adopted the plan of placing on the stage, not
+the whole crisis, but only its culmination, leaving its earlier stages
+to be conveyed in narrative.[2] It would have been very easy for him to
+have begun at the beginning and shown us in action the events narrated
+by Prospero. This course would have involved no greater leap, either in
+time or space, than he had perpetrated in the almost contemporary
+_Winter's Tale_; and it cannot be said that there would have been any
+difficulty in compressing into three acts, or even two, the essentials
+of the action of the play as we know it. His reasons for departing from
+his usual practice were probably connected with the particular occasion
+for which the play was written. He wanted to produce a masque rather
+than a drama. We must not, therefore, attach too much significance to
+the fact that in almost the only play in which Shakespeare seems to have
+built entirely out of his own head, with no previous play or novel to
+influence him, he adopted the plan of going straight to the catastrophe,
+in which he had been anticipated by Sophocles (_Oedipus Rex_), and was
+to be followed by Ibsen (_Ghosts_, _Rosmersholm_, etc.).
+
+Coming now to the five great tragedies, we find that in four of them
+Shakespeare began, as in _The Tempest_, with a picturesque and stirring
+episode calculated to arrest the spectator's attention and awaken his
+interest, while conveying to him little or no information. The opening
+scene of _Romeo and Juliet_ is simply a brawl, bringing home to us
+vividly the family feud which is the root of the tragedy, but informing
+us of nothing beyond the fact that such a feud exists. This is, indeed,
+absolutely all that we require to know. There is not a single
+preliminary circumstance, outside the limits of the play, that has to be
+explained to us. The whole tragedy germinates and culminates within what
+the prologue calls "the two hours' traffick of the stage." The opening
+colloquy of the Witches in _Macbeth_, strikes the eerie keynote, but
+does nothing more. Then, in the second scene, we learn that there has
+been a great battle and that a nobleman named Macbeth has won a victory
+which covers him with laurels. This can in no sense be called an
+exposition. It is the account of a single event, not of a sequence; and
+that event is contemporary, not antecedent. In the third scene, the
+meeting of Macbeth and Banquo with the Witches, we have what may be
+called an exposition reversed; not a narrative of the past, but a
+foreshadowing of the future. Here we touch on one of the subtlest of the
+playwright's problems--the art of arousing anticipation in just the
+right measure. But that is not the matter at present in hand.[3]
+
+In the opening scene of _Othello_ it is true that some talk passes
+between Iago and Roderigo before they raise the alarm and awaken
+Brabantio; but it is carefully non-expository talk; it expounds nothing
+but Iago's character. Far from being a real exception to the rule that
+Shakespeare liked to open his tragedies with a very crisply dramatic
+episode, _Othello_ may rather be called its most conspicuous example.
+The rousing of Brabantio is immediately followed by the encounter
+between his men and Othello's, which so finely brings out the lofty
+character of the Moor; and only in the third scene, that of the Doge's
+Council, do we pass from shouts and swords to quiet discussion and, in a
+sense, exposition. Othello's great speech, while a vital portion of the
+drama, is in so far an exposition that it refers to events which do not
+come absolutely within the frame of the picture. But they are very
+recent, very simple, events. If Othello's speech were omitted, or cut
+down to half a dozen lines, we should know much less of his character
+and Desdemona's, but the mere action of the play would remain perfectly
+comprehensible.
+
+_King Lear_ necessarily opens with a great act of state, the partition
+of the kingdom. A few words between Kent and Gloucester show us what is
+afoot, and then, at one plunge, we are in the thick of the drama. There
+was no opportunity here for one of those picturesque tableaux, exciting
+rather than informative, which initiate the other tragedies. It would
+have had to be artificially dragged in; and it was the less necessary,
+as the partition scene took on, in a very few lines, just that
+arresting, stimulating quality which the poet seems to have desired in
+the opening of a play of this class.
+
+Finally, when we turn to _Hamlet_, we find a consummate example of the
+crisply-touched opening tableau, making a nervous rather than an
+intellectual appeal, informing us of nothing, but exciting a vivid,
+though quite vague, anticipation. The silent transit of the Ghost,
+desiring to speak, yet tongue-tied, is certainly one of Shakespeare's
+unrivalled masterpieces of dramatic craftsmanship. One could pretty
+safely wager that if the _Ur-Hamlet_, on which Shakespeare worked, were
+to come to light to-morrow, this particular trait would not be found in
+it. But, oddly enough, into the middle of this admirable opening
+tableau, Shakespeare inserts a formal exposition, introduced in the most
+conventional way. Marcellus, for some unexplained reason, is ignorant of
+what is evidently common knowledge as to the affairs of the realm, and
+asks to be informed; whereupon Horatio, in a speech of some twenty-five
+lines, sets forth the past relations between Norway and Denmark, and
+prepares us for the appearance of Fortinbras in the fourth act. In
+modern stage versions all this falls away, and nobody who has not
+studied the printed text is conscious of its absence. The commentators,
+indeed, have proved that Fortinbras is an immensely valuable element in
+the moral scheme of the play; but from the point of view of pure drama,
+there is not the slightest necessity for this Norwegian-Danish
+embroilment or its consequences.[4] The real exposition--for _Hamlet_
+differs from the other tragedies in requiring an exposition--comes in
+the great speech of the Ghost in Scene V. The contrast between this
+speech and Horatio's lecture in the first scene, exemplifies the
+difference between a dramatized and an undramatized exposition. The
+crisis, as we now learn, began months or years before the rise of the
+curtain. It began when Claudius inveigled the affections of Gertrude;
+and it would have been possible for the poet to have started from this
+point, and shown us in action all that he in fact conveys to us by way
+of narration. His reason for choosing the latter course is abundantly
+obvious.[5] Hamlet the Younger was to be the protagonist: the interest
+of the play was to centre in his mental processes. To have awakened our
+interest in Hamlet the Elder would, therefore, have been a superfluity
+and an irrelevance. Moreover (to say nothing of the fact that the Ghost
+was doubtless a popular figure in the old play, and demanded by the
+public) it was highly desirable that Hamlet's knowledge of the usurper's
+crime should come to him from a supernatural witness, who could not be
+cross-questioned or called upon to give material proof. This was the
+readiest as well as the most picturesque method of begetting in him that
+condition of doubt, real or affected, which was necessary to account for
+his behaviour. But to have shown us in action the matter of the Ghost's
+revelation would have been hopelessly to ruin its effect. A repetition
+in narrative of matters already seen in action is the grossest of
+technical blunders.[6] Hamlet senior, in other words, being
+indispensable in the spirit, was superfluous in the flesh. But there was
+another and equally cogent reason for beginning the play after the
+commission of the initial crime or crimes. To have done otherwise would
+have been to discount, not only the Ghost, but the play-scene. By a
+piece of consummate ingenuity, which may, of course, have been conceived
+by the earlier playwright, the initial incidents of the story are in
+fact presented to us, in the guise of a play within the play, and as a
+means to the achievement of one of the greatest dramatic effects in all
+literature. The moment the idea of the play-scene presented itself to
+the author's mind, it became absolutely unthinkable that he should, to
+put it vulgarly, "queer the pitch" for the Players by showing us the
+real facts of which their performance was to be the counterfeit
+presentment. The dramatic effect of the incidents was incalculably
+heightened when they were presented, as in a looking-glass, before the
+guilty pair, with the eye of the avenger boring into their souls. And
+have we not here, perhaps, a clue to one of the most frequent and
+essential meanings of the word "dramatic"? May we not say that the
+dramatic quality of an incident is proportionate to the variety[7] and
+intensity of the emotions involved in it?
+
+All this may appear too obvious to be worth setting forth at such
+length. Very likely it never occurred to Shakespeare that it was
+possible to open the play at an earlier point; so that he can hardly be
+said to have exercised a deliberate choice in the matter. Nevertheless,
+the very obviousness of the considerations involved makes this a good
+example of the importance of discovering just the right point at which
+to raise the curtain. In the case of _The Tempest_, Shakespeare plunged
+into the middle of the crisis because his object was to produce a
+philosophico-dramatic entertainment rather than a play in the strict
+sense of the word. He wanted room for the enchantments of Ariel, the
+brutishnesses of Caliban, the humours of Stephano and Trinculo--all
+elements extrinsic to the actual story. But in _Hamlet_ he adopted a
+similar course for purely dramatic reasons--in order to concentrate his
+effects and present the dramatic elements of his theme at their
+highest potency.
+
+In sum, then, it was Shakespeare's usual practice, histories apart, to
+bring the whole action of his plays within the frame of the picture,
+leaving little or nothing to narrative exposition. The two notable
+exceptions to this rule are those we have just examined--_Hamlet_ and
+_The Tempest_. Furthermore, he usually opened his comedies with quiet
+conversational passages, presenting the antecedents of the crisis with
+great deliberation. In his tragedies, on the other hand, he was apt to
+lead off with a crisp, somewhat startling passage of more or less
+vehement action, appealing rather to the nerves than to the
+intelligence--such a passage as Gustav Freytag, in his _Technik des
+Dramas_, happily entitles an _einleitende Akkord_, an introductory
+chord. It may be added that this rule holds good both for _Coriolanus_
+and for _Julius Caesar_, in which the keynote is briskly struck in
+highly animated scenes of commotion among the Roman populace.
+
+Let us now look at the practice of Ibsen, which offers a sharp contrast
+to that of Shakespeare. To put it briefly, the plays in which Ibsen gets
+his whole action within the frame of the picture are as exceptional as
+those in which Shakespeare does not do so.
+
+Ibsen's practice in this matter has been compared with that of the Greek
+dramatists, who also were apt to attack their crisis in the middle, or
+even towards the end, rather than at the beginning. It must not be
+forgotten, however, that there is one great difference between his
+position and theirs. They could almost always rely upon a general
+knowledge, on the part of the audience, of the theme with which they
+were dealing. The purpose even of the Euripidean prologue is not so much
+to state unknown facts, as to recall facts vaguely remembered, to state
+the particular version of a legend which the poet proposes to adopt, and
+to define the point in the development of the legend at which he is
+about to set his figures in motion. Ibsen, on the other hand, drew upon
+no storehouse of tradition. He had to convey to his audience everything
+that he wanted them to know; and this was often a long and complex
+series of facts.
+
+The earliest play in which Ibsen can be said to show maturity of
+craftsmanship is _The Vikings at Helgeland_. It is curious to note that
+both in _The Vikings_ and in _The Pretenders_, two plays which are in
+some measure comparable with Shakespearean tragedies, he opens with a
+firmly-touched _einleitende Akkord_. In _The Vikings_, Ornulf and his
+sons encounter and fight with Sigurd and his men, very much after the
+fashion of the Montagues and Capulets in _Romeo and Juliet_. In _The
+Pretenders_ the rival factions of Haakon and Skule stand outside the
+cathedral of Bergen, intently awaiting the result of the ordeal which is
+proceeding within; and though they do not there and then come to blows,
+the air is electrical with their conflicting ambitions and passions. His
+modern plays, on the other hand, Ibsen opens quietly enough, though
+usually with some more or less arresting little incident, calculated to
+arouse immediate curiosity. One may cite as characteristic examples the
+hurried colloquy between Engstrand and Regina in _Ghosts_; Rebecca and
+Madam Helseth in _Rosmersholm_, watching to see whether Rosmer will
+cross the mill-race; and in _The Master Builder_, old Brovik's querulous
+outburst, immediately followed by the entrance of Solness and his
+mysterious behaviour towards Kaia. The opening of _Hedda Gabler_, with
+its long conversation between Miss Tesman and the servant Bertha, comes
+as near as Ibsen ever did to the conventional exposition of the French
+stage, conducted by a footman and a parlour-maid engaged in dusting the
+furniture. On the other hand, there never was a more masterly opening,
+in its sheer simplicity, than Nora's entrance in _A Doll's House_, and
+the little silent scene that precedes the appearance of Helmer.
+
+Regarding _The Vikings_ as Ibsen's first mature production, and
+surveying the whole series of his subsequent works in which he had stage
+presentation directly in view,[8] we find that in only two out of the
+fifteen plays does the whole action come within the frame of the
+picture. These two are _The League of Youth_ and _An Enemy of the
+People_. In neither of these have any antecedents to be stated; neither
+turns upon any disclosure of bygone events or emotions. We are, indeed,
+afforded brief glimpses into the past both of Stensgaard and of
+Stockmann; but the glimpses are incidental and inessential. It is
+certainly no mere coincidence that if one were asked to pick out the
+pieces of thinnest texture in all Ibsen's mature work, one would
+certainly select these two plays. Far be it from me to disparage _An
+Enemy of the People_; as a work of art it is incomparably greater than
+such a piece as _Pillars of Society_; but it is not so richly woven,
+not, as it were, so deep in pile. Written in half the time Ibsen usually
+devoted to a play, it is an outburst of humorous indignation, a _jeu
+d'esprit_, one might almost say, though the _jeu_ of a giant _esprit_.
+
+Observing the effect of comparative tenuity in these two plays, we
+cannot but surmise that the secret of the depth and richness of texture
+so characteristic of Ibsen's work, lay in his art of closely
+interweaving a drama of the present with a drama of the past. _An Enemy
+of the People_ is a straightforward, spirited melody; _The Wild Duck_
+and _Rosmersholm_ are subtly and intricately harmonized.
+
+Going a little more into detail, we find in Ibsen's work an
+extraordinary progress in the art of so unfolding the drama of the past
+as to make the gradual revelation no mere preface or prologue to the
+drama of the present, but an integral part of its action. It is true
+that in _The Vikings_ he already showed himself a master in this art.
+The great revelation--the disclosure of the fact that Sigurd, not
+Gunnar, did the deed of prowess which Hiördis demanded of the man who
+should be her mate--this crucial revelation is brought about in a scene
+of the utmost dramatic intensity. The whole drama of the past,
+indeed--both its facts and its emotions--may be said to be dragged to
+light in the very stress and pressure of the drama of the present. Not a
+single detail of it is narrated in cold blood, as, for example, Prospero
+relates to Miranda the story of their marooning, or Horatio expounds the
+Norwegian-Danish political situation. I am not holding up _The Vikings_
+as a great masterpiece; it has many weaknesses both of substance and of
+method; but in this particular art of indistinguishably blending the
+drama of the present with the drama of the past, it is already
+consummate. _The Pretenders_ scarcely comes into the comparison. It is
+Ibsen's one chronicle-play; and, like Shakespeare, he did not shrink
+from employing a good deal of narrative, though his narratives, it must
+be said, are always introduced under such circumstances as to make them
+a vital part of the drama. It is when we come to the modern plays that
+we find the poet falling back upon conventional and somewhat clumsy
+methods of exposition, which he only by degrees, though by rapid
+degrees, unlearns.
+
+_The League of Youth_, as we have seen, requires no exposition. All we
+have to learn is the existing relations of the characters, which appear
+quite naturally as the action proceeds. But let us look at _Pillars of
+Society_. Here we have to be placed in possession of a whole antecedent
+drama: the intrigue of Karsten Bernick with Dina Dorf's mother, the
+threatened scandal, Johan Tönnesen's vicarious acceptance of Bernick's
+responsibility, the subsidiary scandal of Lona Hessel's outburst on
+learning of Bernick's engagement to her half-sister, the report of an
+embezzlement committed by Johan before his departure for America. All
+this has to be conveyed to us in retrospect; or, rather, in the first
+place, we have to be informed of the false version of these incidents
+which is current in the little town, and on which Bernick's moral and
+commercial prestige is built up. What device, then, does Ibsen adopt to
+this end? He introduces a "sewing-bee" of tattling women, one of whom
+happens to be a stranger to the town, and unfamiliar with its gossip.
+Into her willing ear the others pour the popular version of the Bernick
+story; and, this impartment effected, the group of gossips disappears,
+to be heard of no more. These ladies perform the function, in fact, of
+the First, Second, and Third Gentlemen, so common in Elizabethan and
+pseudo-Elizabethan plays.[9] They are not quite so artless in their
+conventionality, for they bring with them the social atmosphere of the
+tattling little town, which is an essential factor in the drama.
+Moreover, their exposition is not a simple narrative of facts. It is to
+some extent subtilized by the circumstance that the facts are not facts,
+and that the gist of the drama is to lie in the gradual triumph of the
+truth over this tissue of falsehoods. Still, explain it as we may, the
+fact remains that in no later play does Ibsen initiate us into the
+preliminaries of his action by so hackneyed and unwieldy a device. It is
+no conventional canon, but a maxim of mere common sense, that the
+dramatist should be chary of introducing characters who have no personal
+share in the drama, and are mere mouthpieces for the conveyance of
+information. Nowhere else does Ibsen so flagrantly disregard so obvious
+a principle of dramatic economy.[10]
+
+When we turn to his next play, _A Doll's House_, we find that he has
+already made a great step in advance. He has progressed from the First,
+Second, and Third Gentlemen of the Elizabethans to the confidant[11] of
+the French classic drama. He even attempts, not very successfully, to
+disguise the confidant by giving her a personal interest, an effective
+share, in the drama. Nothing can really dissemble the fact that the long
+scene between Nora and Mrs. Linden, which occupies almost one-third of
+the first act, is simply a formal exposition, outside the action of the
+play. Just as it was providential that one of the house-wives of the
+sewing-bee in _Pillars of Society_ should have been a stranger to the
+town, so it was the luckiest of chances (for the dramatist's
+convenience) that an old school-friend should have dropped in from the
+clouds precisely half-an-hour before the entrance of Krogstad brings to
+a sudden head the great crisis of Nora's life. This happy conjuncture of
+events is manifestly artificial: a trick of the dramatist's trade: a
+point at which his art does not conceal his art. Mrs. Linden does not,
+like the dames of the sewing-bee, fade out of the saga; she even,
+through her influence on Krogstad, plays a determining part in the
+development of the action. But to all intents and purposes she remains a
+mere confidant, a pretext for Nora's review of the history of her
+married life. There are two other specimens of the genus confidant in
+Ibsen's later plays. Arnholm, in _The Lady from the Sea_, is little
+more; Dr. Herdal, in _The Master Builder_, is that and nothing else. It
+may be alleged in his defence that the family physician is the
+professional confidant of real life.
+
+In _Ghosts_, Ibsen makes a sudden leap to the extreme of his
+retrospective method. I am not one of those who consider this play
+Ibsen's masterpiece: I do not even place it, technically, in the first
+rank among his works. And why? Because there is here no reasonable
+equilibrium between the drama of the past and the drama of the present.
+The drama of the past is almost everything, the drama of the present
+next to nothing. As soon as we have probed to the depths the Alving
+marriage and its consequences, the play is over, and there is nothing
+left but for Regina to set off in pursuit of the joy of life, and for
+Oswald to collapse into imbecility. It is scarcely an exaggeration to
+call the play all exposition and no drama. Here for the first time,
+however, Ibsen perfected his peculiar gift of imparting tense dramatic
+interest to the unveiling of the past. While in one sense the play is
+all exposition, in another sense it may quite as truly be said to
+contain no exposition; for it contains no narrative delivered in cold
+blood, in mere calm retrospection, as a necessary preliminary to the
+drama which is in the meantime waiting at the door. In other words, the
+exposition is all drama, it _is_ the drama. The persons who are tearing
+the veils from the past, and for whom the veils are being torn, are
+intensely concerned in the process, which actually constitutes the
+dramatic crisis. The discovery of this method, or its rediscovery in
+modern drama,[12] was Ibsen's great technical achievement. In his best
+work, the progress of the unveiling occasions a marked development, or
+series of changes, in the actual and present relations of the
+characters. The drama of the past and the drama of the present proceed,
+so to speak, in interlacing rhythms, or, as I said before, in a rich,
+complex harmony. In _Ghosts_ this harmony is not so rich as in some
+later plays, because the drama of the present is disproportionately
+meagre. None the less, or all the more, is it a conspicuous example of
+Ibsen's method of raising his curtain, not at the beginning of the
+crisis, but rather at the beginning of the catastrophe.
+
+In _An Enemy of the People_, as already stated, he momentarily deserted
+that method, and gave us an action which begins, develops, and ends
+entirely within the frame of the picture. But in the two following
+plays, _The Wild Duck_ and _Rosmersholm_, he touched the highest point
+of technical mastery in his interweaving of the past with the present. I
+shall not attempt any analysis of the fabric of these plays. The process
+would be long, tedious, and unhelpful; for no one could hope to employ a
+method of such complexity without something of Ibsen's genius; and
+genius will evolve its methods for itself. Let me only ask the reader to
+compare the scene between old Werle and Gregers in the first act of _The
+Wild Duck_ with the scene between Nora and Mrs. Linden in the first act
+of _A Doll's House_, and mark the technical advance. Both scenes are, in
+a sense, scenes of exposition. Both are mainly designed to place us in
+possession of a sequence of bygone facts. But while the _Doll's House_
+scene is a piece of quiet gossip, brought about (as we have noted) by
+rather artificial means, and with no dramatic tension in it, the _Wild
+Duck_ scene is a piece of tense, one might almost say fierce, drama,
+fulfilling the Brunetière definition in that it shows us two characters,
+a father and son, at open war with each other. The one scene is outside
+the real action, the other is an integral part of it. The one belongs to
+Ibsen's tentative period, the other ushers in, one might almost say, his
+period of consummate mastery.[13]
+
+_Rosmersholm_ is so obviously nothing but the catastrophe of an
+antecedent drama that an attempt has actually been made to rectify
+Ibsen's supposed mistake, and to write the tragedy of the deceased
+Beata. It was made by an unskilful hand; but even a skilful hand would
+scarcely have done more than prove how rightly Ibsen judged that the
+recoil of Rebecca's crime upon herself and Rosmer would prove more
+interesting, and in a very real sense more dramatic, than the somewhat
+vulgar process of the crime itself. The play is not so profound in its
+humanity as _The Wild Duck_, but it is Ibsen's masterpiece in the art of
+withdrawing veil after veil. From the technical point of view, it will
+repay the closest study.
+
+We need not look closely at the remaining plays. _Hedda Gabler_ is
+perhaps that in which a sound proportion between the past and the
+present is most successfully preserved. The interest of the present
+action is throughout very vivid; but it is all rooted in facts and
+relations of the past, which are elicited under circumstances of high
+dramatic tension. Here again it is instructive to compare the scene
+between Hedda and Thea, in the first act, with the scene between Nora
+and Mrs. Linden. Both are scenes of exposition: and each is, in its way,
+character-revealing; but the earlier scene is a passage of quite
+unemotional narrative; the later is a passage of palpitating drama. In
+the plays subsequent to _Hedda Gabler_, it cannot be denied that the
+past took the upper hand of the present to a degree which could only be
+justified by the genius of an Ibsen. Three-fourths of the action of _The
+Master Builder_, _Little Eyolf_, _John Gabriel Borkman_, and _When We
+Dead Awaken_, consists of what may be called a passionate analysis of
+the past. Ibsen had the art of making such an analysis absorbingly
+interesting; but it is not a formula to be commended for the practical
+purposes of the everyday stage.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+[Footnote 1: Writing of _Le Supplice d'une Femme_, Alexandre Dumas
+_fils_ said: "This situation I declare to be one of the most dramatic
+and interesting in all drama. But a situation is not an idea. An idea,
+has a beginning, a middle and an end: an exposition, a development, a
+conclusion. Any one can relate a dramatic situation: the art lies in
+preparing it, getting it accepted, rendering it possible, especially in
+untying the knot."]
+
+[Footnote 2: This is what we regard as peculiarly the method of Ibsen.
+There is, however, this essential difference, that, instead of narrating
+his preliminaries in cold blood, Ibsen, in his best work, _dramatizes_
+the narration.]
+
+[Footnote 3: See Chapter XII.]
+
+[Footnote 4: This must not be taken to imply that, in a good
+stage-version of the play, Fortinbras should be altogether omitted. Mr.
+Forbes Robertson, in his Lyceum revival of 1897, found several
+advantages in his retention. Among the rest, it permitted the retention
+of one of Hamlet's most characteristic soliloquies.]
+
+[Footnote 5: I omit all speculation as to the form which the story
+assumed in the _Ur-Hamlet_. We have no evidence on the point; and, as
+the poet was no doubt free to remodel the material as he thought fit,
+even in following his original he was making a deliberate
+artistic choice.]
+
+[Footnote 6: Shakespeare committed it in _Romeo and Juliet_, where he
+made Friar Laurence, in the concluding scene, retell the whole story of
+the tragedy. Even in so early a play, such a manifest redundancy seems
+unaccountable. A narrative of things already seen may, of course, be a
+trait of character in the person delivering it; but, in that case, it
+will generally be mendacious (for instance, Falstaff and the men in
+buckram). Or it may be introduced for the sake of its effect upon the
+characters to whom the narration is addressed. But in these cases its
+purpose is no longer to convey information to the audience--it belongs,
+not to the "intelligence department," but to the department of
+analysis.]
+
+[Footnote 7: I say "variety" rather than complexity because I take it
+that the emotions of all concerned are here too intense to be very
+complex. The effect of the scene would appear to lie in the rapidly
+increasing intensity of comparatively simple emotions in Hamlet, in the
+King, in the Queen, and in the amazed and bewildered courtiers.]
+
+[Footnote 8: This excludes _Love's Comedy, Brand, Peer Gynt_, and
+_Emperor and Galilean_.]
+
+[Footnote 9: See, for example, _King Henry VIII_, Act IV, and the
+opening scene of Tennyson's _Queen Mary_.]
+
+[Footnote 10: This rule of economy does not necessarily exclude a group
+of characters performing something like the function of the antique
+Chorus; that is to say, commenting upon the action from a more or less
+disinterested point of view. The function of _Kaffee-Klatsch_ in
+_Pillars of Society_ is not at all that of the Chorus, but rather that
+of the Euripidean Prologue, somewhat thinly disguised.]
+
+[Footnote 11: It is perhaps worth nothing that Gabriele d'Annunzio in
+_La Gioconda_, reverts to, and outdoes, the French classic convention,
+by giving us three actors and four confidants. The play consists of a
+crisis in three lives, passively, though sympathetically, contemplated
+by what is in effect a Chorus of two men and two women. It would be
+interesting to inquire why, in this particular play, such an abuse of
+the confidant seems quite admissible, if not conspicuously right.]
+
+[Footnote 12: Dryden, in his _Essay of Dramatic Poesy_, represents this
+method as being characteristic of Greek tragedy as a whole. The tragic
+poet, he says, "set the audience, as it were, at the post where the race
+is to be concluded; and, saving them the tedious expectation of seeing
+the poet set out and ride the beginning of the course, they suffer you
+not to behold him, till he is in sight of the goal and just upon you."
+Dryden seems to think that the method was forced upon them by "the rule
+of time."]
+
+[Footnote 13: It is a rash enterprise to reconstruct Ibsen, but one
+cannot help wondering how he would have planned _A Doll's House_ had he
+written it in the 'eighties instead of the 'seventies. One can imagine a
+long opening scene between Helmer and Nora in which a great deal of the
+necessary information might have been conveyed; while it would have
+heightened by contrast the effect of the great final duologue as we now
+possess it. Such information as could not possibly have been conveyed in
+dialogue with Helmer might, one would think, have been left for Nora's
+first scene with Krogstad, the effect of which it would have enhanced.
+Perhaps Mrs. Linden might with advantage have been retained, though not
+in her present character of confidant, in order to show Nora in relation
+to another woman.]
+
+
+
+
+_CHAPTER VII_
+
+EXPOSITION: ITS END AND ITS MEANS
+
+
+We have passed in rapid survey the practices of Shakespeare and Ibsen in
+respect of their point and method of attack upon their themes. What
+practical lessons can we now deduce from this examination?
+
+One thing is clear: namely, that there is no inherent superiority in one
+method over another. There are masterpieces in which the whole crisis
+falls within the frame of the picture, and masterpieces in which the
+greater part of the crisis has to be conveyed to us in retrospect, only
+the catastrophe being transacted before our eyes. Genius can manifest
+itself equally in either form.
+
+But each form has its peculiar advantages. You cannot, in a
+retrospective play like _Rosmersholm_, attain anything like the
+magnificent onward rush of Othello, which moves--
+
+               "Like to the Pontick sea
+  Whose icy current and compulsive course
+  Ne'er feels retiring ebb, but keeps due on
+  To the Propontick and the Hellespont."
+
+The movement of _Rosmersholm_ is rather like that of a winding river,
+which flows with a full and steady current, but seems sometimes to be
+almost retracing its course. If, then, you aim at rapidity of movement,
+you will choose a theme which leaves little or nothing to retrospect;
+and conversely, if you have a theme the whole of which falls easily and
+conveniently within the frame of the picture, you will probably take
+advantage of the fact to give your play animated and rapid movement.
+
+There is an undeniable attraction in a play which constitutes, so to
+speak, one brisk and continuous adventure, begun, developed, and ended
+before our eyes. For light comedy in particular is this a desirable
+form, and for romantic plays in which no very searching character-study
+is attempted. _The Taming of the Shrew_ no doubt passed for a light
+comedy in Shakespeare's day, though we describe it by a briefer name.
+Its rapid, bustling action is possible because we are always ready to
+take the character of a shrew for granted. It would have been a very
+different play had the poet required to account for Katharine's
+peculiarities of temper by a retrospective study of her heredity and
+upbringing. Many eighteenth-century comedies are single-adventure plays,
+or dual-adventure plays, in the sense that the main action sometimes
+stands aside to let an underplot take the stage. Both _She Stoops to
+Conquer_ and _The Rivals_ are good examples of the rapid working-out of
+an intrigue, engendered, developed, and resolved all within the frame of
+the picture. Single-adventure plays of a more modern type are the elder
+Dumas's _Mademoiselle de Belle-Isle_, the younger Dumas's _Francillon_,
+Sardou's _Divorçons_, Sir Arthur Pinero's _Gay Lord Quex_, Mr. Shaw's
+_Devil's Disciple_, Oscar Wilde's _Importance of Being Earnest_, Mr.
+Galsworthy's _Silver Box_. Widely as these plays differ in type and
+tone, they are alike in this, that they do not attempt to present very
+complex character-studies, or to probe the deeps of human experience.
+The last play cited, _The Silver Box_, may perhaps be thought an
+exception to this rule; but, though the experience of the hapless
+charwoman is pitiful enough, hers is a simple soul, so inured to
+suffering that a little more or less is no such great matter. The play
+is an admirable genre-picture rather than a searching tragedy.
+
+The point to be observed is that, under modern conditions, it is
+difficult to produce a play of very complex psychological, moral, or
+emotional substance, in which the whole crisis comes within the frame of
+the picture. The method of attacking the crisis in the middle or towards
+the end is really a device for relaxing, in some measure, the narrow
+bounds of theatrical representation, and enabling the playwright to deal
+with a larger segment of human experience. It may be asked why modern
+conditions should in this respect differ from Elizabethan conditions,
+and why, if Shakespeare could produce such profound and complex
+tragedies as _Othello_ and _King Lear_ without a word of exposition or
+retrospect, the modern dramatist should not go and do likewise? The
+answer to this question is not simply that the modern dramatist is
+seldom a Shakespeare. That is true, but we must look deeper than that.
+There are, in fact, several points to be taken into consideration. For
+one thing--this is a minor point--Shakespeare had really far more
+elbow-room than the playwright of to-day. _Othello_ and _King Lear_, to
+say nothing of _Hamlet_, are exceedingly long plays. Something like a
+third of them is omitted in modern representation; and when we speak of
+their richness and complexity of characterization, we do not think
+simply of the plays as we see them compressed into acting limits, but of
+the plays as we know them in the study. It is possible, no doubt, for
+modern playwrights to let themselves go in the matter of length, and
+then print their plays with brackets or other marks to show the
+"passages omitted in representation." This is, however, essentially an
+inartistic practice, and one cannot regret that it has gone out of
+fashion. Another point to be considered is this: are Othello and Lear
+really very complex character-studies? They are extremely vivid: they
+are projected with enormous energy, in actions whose violence affords
+scope for the most vehement self-expression; but are they not, in
+reality, colossally simple rather than complex? It is true that in Lear
+the phenomena of insanity are reproduced with astonishing minuteness and
+truth; but this does not imply any elaborate analysis or demand any
+great space. Hamlet is complex; and were I "talking for victory," I
+should point out that _Hamlet_ is, of all the tragedies, precisely the
+one which does not come within the frame of the picture. But the true
+secret of the matter does not lie here: it lies in the fact that Hamlet
+unpacks his heart to us in a series of soliloquies--a device employed
+scarcely at all in the portrayal of Othello and Lear, and denied to the
+modern dramatist.[1] Yet again, the social position and environment of
+the great Shakespearean characters is taken for granted. No time is
+spent in "placing" them in a given stratum of society, or in
+establishing their heredity, traditions, education, and so forth. And,
+finally, the very copiousness of expression permitted by the rhetorical
+Elizabethan form came to Shakespeare's aid. The modern dramatist is
+hampered by all sorts of reticences. He has often to work rather in
+indirect suggestion than in direct expression. He has, in short, to
+submit to a hundred hampering conditions from which Shakespeare was
+exempt; wherefore, even if he had Shakespeare's genius, he would find it
+difficult to produce a very profound effect in a crisis worked out from
+first to last before the eyes of the audience.
+
+Nevertheless, as before stated, such a crisis has a charm of its own.
+There is a peculiar interest in watching the rise and development out of
+nothing, as it were, of a dramatic complication. For this class of play
+(despite the Shakespearean precedents) a quiet opening is often
+advisable, rather than a strong _einleitende Akkord_. "From calm,
+through storm, to calm," is its characteristic formula; whether the
+concluding calm be one of life and serenity or of despair and death. To
+my personal taste, one of the keenest forms of theatrical enjoyment is
+that of seeing the curtain go up on a picture of perfect tranquillity,
+wondering from what quarter the drama is going to arise, and then
+watching it gather on the horizon like a cloud no bigger than a man's
+hand. Of this type of opening, _An Enemy of the People_ provides us with
+a classic example; and among English plays we may cite Mr. Shaw's
+_Candida_, Mr. Barker's _Waste_, and Mr. Besier's _Don_, in which so
+sudden and unlooked-for a cyclone swoops down upon the calm of an
+English vicarage. An admirable instance of a fantastic type may be found
+in _Prunella_, by Messrs. Barker and Housman.[2]
+
+There is much to be said, however, in favour of the opening which does
+not present an aspect of delusive calm, but shows the atmosphere already
+charged with electricity. Compare, for instance, the opening of _The
+Case of Rebellious Susan_, by Mr. Henry Arthur Jones, with that of a
+French play of very similar theme--Dumas's _Francillon_. In the latter,
+we see the storm-cloud slowly gathering up on the horizon; in the
+former, it is already on the point of breaking, right overhead. Mr.
+Jones places us at the beginning, where Dumas leaves us at the end, of
+his first act. It is true that at the end of Mr. Jones's act he has not
+advanced any further than Dumas. The French author shows his heroine
+gradually working up to a nervous crisis, the English author introduces
+his heroine already at the height of her paroxysm, and the act consists
+of the unavailing efforts of her friends to smooth her down. The upshot
+is the same; but in Mr. Jones's act we are, as the French say, "in full
+drama" all the time, while in Dumas's we await the coming of the drama,
+and only by exerting all his wit, not to say over-exerting it, does he
+prevent our feeling impatient. I am not claiming superiority for either
+method; I merely point to a good example of two different ways of
+attacking the same problem.
+
+In _The Benefit of the Doubt_, by Sir Arthur Pinero, we have a crisply
+dramatic opening of the very best type. A few words from a contemporary
+criticism may serve to indicate the effect it produced on a first-night
+audience--
+
+  We are in the thick of the action at once, or at least in the thick
+  of the interest, so that the exposition, instead of being, so to
+  speak, a mere platform from which the train is presently to start,
+  becomes an inseparable part of the movement. The sense of dramatic
+  irony is strongly and yet delicately suggested. We foresee a
+  "peripety," apparent prosperity suddenly crumbling into disaster,
+  within the act itself; and, when it comes, it awakens our sympathy
+  and redoubles our interest.
+
+Almost the same words might be applied to the opening of _The Climbers_,
+by the late Clyde Fitch, one of the many individual scenes which make
+one deeply regret that Mr. Fitch did not live to do full justice to his
+remarkable talent.
+
+One of the ablest of recent openings is that of Mr. Galsworthy's _Silver
+Box_. The curtain rises upon a solid, dull, upper-middle-class
+dining-room, empty and silent, the electric lights burning, the tray
+with whiskey, siphon and cigarette-box marking the midnight hour. Then
+we have the stumbling, fumbling entrance of Jack Barthwick, beatifically
+drunk, his maudlin babble, and his ill-omened hospitality to the haggard
+loafer who follows at his heels. Another example of a high-pitched
+opening scene may be found in Mr. Perceval Landon's _The House
+Opposite_. Here we have a midnight parting between a married woman and
+her lover, in the middle of which the man, glancing at the lighted
+window of the house opposite, sees a figure moving in such a way as to
+suggest that a crime is being perpetrated. As a matter of fact, an old
+man is murdered, and his housekeeper is accused of the crime. The hero,
+if so he can be called, knows that it was a man, not a woman, who was in
+the victim's room that night; and the problem is: how can he give his
+evidence without betraying a woman's secret by admitting his presence in
+her house at midnight? I neither praise nor blame this class of story; I
+merely cite the play as one in which we plunge straight into the crisis,
+without any introductory period of tranquillity.
+
+The interest of Mr. Landon's play lay almost wholly in the story. There
+was just enough character in it to keep the story going, so to speak.
+The author might, on the other hand, have concentrated our attention on
+character, and made his play a soul-tragedy; but in that case it would
+doubtless have been necessary to take us some way backward in the
+heroine's antecedents and the history of her marriage. In other words,
+if the play had gone deeper into human nature, the preliminaries of the
+crisis would have had to be traced in some detail, possibly in a first
+act, introductory to the actual opening, but more probably, and better,
+in an exposition following the crisply touched _einleitende Akkord_.
+This brings us to the question how an exposition may best be managed.
+
+It may not unreasonably be contended, I think, that, when an exposition
+cannot be thoroughly dramatized--that is, wrung out, in the stress of
+the action, from the characters primarily concerned--it may best be
+dismissed, rapidly and even conventionally, by any not too improbable
+device. That is the principle on which Sir Arthur Pinero has always
+proceeded, and for which he has been unduly censured, by critics who
+make no allowances for the narrow limits imposed by custom and the
+constitution of the modern audience upon the playwrights of to-day. In
+_His House in Order_ (one of his greatest plays) Sir Arthur effects part
+of his exposition by the simple device of making Hilary Jesson a
+candidate for Parliament, and bringing on a reporter to interview his
+private secretary. The incident is perfectly natural and probable; all
+one can say of it is that it is perhaps an over-simplification of the
+dramatist's task.[3] _The Second Mrs. Tanqueray_ requires an unusual
+amount of preliminary retrospect. We have to learn the history of Aubrey
+Tanqueray's first marriage, with the mother of Ellean, as well as the
+history of Paula Ray's past life. The mechanism employed to this end has
+been much criticized, but seems to me admirable. Aubrey gives a farewell
+dinner-party to his intimate friends, Misquith and Jayne. Cayley
+Drummle, too, is expected, but has not arrived when the play opens.
+Without naming the lady, Aubrey announces to his guests his approaching
+marriage. He proposes to go out with them, and has one or two notes to
+write before doing so. Moreover, he is not sorry to give them an
+opportunity to talk over the announcement he has made; so he retires to
+a side-table in the same room, to do his writing. Misquith and Jayne
+exchange a few speeches in an undertone, and then Cayley Drummle comes
+in, bringing the story of George Orreyd's marriage to the unmentionable
+Miss Hervey. This story is so unpleasant to Tanqueray that, to get out
+of the conversation, he returns to his writing; but still he cannot help
+listening to Cayley's comments on George Orreyd's "disappearance"; and
+at last the situation becomes so intolerable to him that he purposely
+leaves the room, bidding the other two "Tell Cayley the news." The
+technical manipulation of all this seems to me above reproach
+--dramatically effective and yet life-like in every detail. If
+one were bound to raise an objection, it would be to the coincidence
+which brings to Cayley's knowledge, on one and the same evening, two
+such exactly similar misalliances in his own circle of acquaintance. But
+these are just the coincidences that do constantly happen. Every one
+knows that life is full of them.
+
+The exposition might, no doubt, have been more economically effected.
+Cayley Drummle might have figured as sole confidant and chorus; or even
+he might have been dispensed with, and all that was necessary might have
+appeared in colloquies between Aubrey and Paula on the one hand, Aubrey
+and Ellean on the other. But Cayley as sole confidant--the "Charles, his
+friend," of eighteenth-century comedy--would have been more plainly
+conventional than Cayley as one of a trio of Aubrey's old cronies,
+representing the society he is sacrificing in entering upon this
+experimental marriage; and to have conveyed the necessary information
+without any confidant or chorus at all would (one fancies) have strained
+probability, or, still worse, impaired consistency of character. Aubrey
+could not naturally discuss his late wife either with her successor or
+with her daughter; while, as for Paula's past, all he wanted was to
+avert his eyes from it. I do not say that these difficulties might not
+have been overcome; for, in the vocabulary of the truly ingenious
+dramatist there is no such word as impossible. But I do suggest that the
+result would scarcely have been worth the trouble, and that it is
+hyper-criticism which objects to an exposition so natural and probable
+as that of _The Second Mrs. Tanqueray_, simply on the ground that
+certain characters are introduced for the purpose of conveying certain
+information. It would be foolish to expect of every work of art an
+absolutely austere economy of means.
+
+Sometimes, however, Sir Arthur Pinero injudiciously emphasizes the
+artifices employed to bring about an exposition. In _The Thunderbolt_,
+for instance, in order that the Mortimores' family solicitor may without
+reproach ask for information on matters with which a family solicitor
+ought to be fully conversant, it has to be explained that the senior
+partner of the firm, who had the Mortimore business specially in hand,
+has been called away to London, and that a junior partner has taken his
+place. Such a rubbing-in, as it were, of an obvious device ought at all
+hazards to be avoided. If the information cannot be otherwise imparted
+(as in this case it surely could), the solicitor had better be allowed
+to ask one or two improbable questions--it is the lesser evil of
+the two.
+
+When the whole of a given subject cannot be got within the limits of
+presentation, is there any means of determining how much should be left
+for retrospect, and at what point the curtain ought to be raised? The
+principle would seem to be that slow and gradual processes, and
+especially separate lines of causation, should be left outside the frame
+of the picture, and that the curtain should be raised at the point where
+separate lines have converged, and where the crisis begins to move
+towards its solution with more or less rapidity and continuity. The
+ideas of rapidity and continuity may be conveniently summed up in the
+hackneyed and often misapplied term, unity of action. Though the unities
+of time and place are long ago exploded as binding principles--indeed,
+they never had any authority in English drama--yet it is true that a
+broken-backed action, whether in time or space, ought, so far as
+possible, to be avoided. An action with a gap of twenty years in it may
+be all very well in melodrama or romance, but scarcely in higher and
+more serious types of drama.[4] Especially is it to be desired that
+interest should be concentrated on one set of characters, and should not
+be frittered away on subsidiary or preliminary personages. Take, for
+instance, the case of _The Second Mrs. Tanqueray_. It would have been
+theoretically possible for Sir Arthur Pinero to have given us either (or
+both) of two preliminary scenes: he might have shown us the first Mrs.
+Tanqueray at home, and at the same time have introduced us more at large
+to the characters of Aubrey and Ellean; or he might have depicted for us
+one of the previous associations of Paula Ray--might perhaps have let us
+see her "keeping house" with Hugh Ardale. But either of these openings
+would have been disproportionate and superfluous. It would have excited,
+or tried to excite, our interest in something that was not the real
+theme of the play, and in characters which were to drop out before the
+real theme--the Aubrey-Paula marriage--was reached. Therefore the
+author, in all probability, never thought of beginning at either of
+these points. He passed instinctively to the point at which the two
+lines of causation converged, and from which the action could be carried
+continuously forward by one set of characters. He knew that we could
+learn in retrospect all that it was necessary for us to know of the
+first Mrs. Tanqueray, and that to introduce her in the flesh would be
+merely to lead the interest of the audience into a blind alley, and to
+break the back of his action. Again, in _His House in Order_ it may seem
+that the intrigue between Maurewarde and the immaculate Annabel, with
+its tragic conclusion, would have made a stirring introductory act. But
+to have presented such an act would have been to destroy the unity of
+the play, which centres in the character of Nina. Annabel is "another
+story"; and to have told, or rather shown us, more of it than was
+absolutely necessary, would have been to distract our attention from the
+real theme of the play, while at the same time fatally curtailing the
+all-too-brief time available for the working-out of that theme. There
+are cases, no doubt, when verbal exposition may advantageously be
+avoided by means of a dramatized "Prologue"--a single act, constituting
+a little drama in itself, and generally separated by a considerable
+space of time from the action proper. But this method is scarcely to be
+commended, except, as aforesaid, for purposes of melodrama and romance.
+A "Prologue" is for such plays as _The Prisoner of Zenda_ and _The Only
+Way_, not for such plays as _His House in Order_.
+
+The question whether a legato or a staccato opening be the more
+desirable must be decided in accordance with the nature and
+opportunities of each theme. The only rule that can be stated is that,
+when the attention of the audience is required for an exposition of any
+length, some attempt ought to be made to awaken in advance their general
+interest in the theme and characters. It is dangerous to plunge straight
+into narrative, or unemotional discussion, without having first made the
+audience actively desire the information to be conveyed to them.
+Especially is it essential that the audience should know clearly who are
+the subjects of the discussion or narrative--that they should not be
+mere names to them. It is a grave flaw in the construction of Mr.
+Granville Barker's otherwise admirable play _Waste_, that it should open
+with a long discussion, by people whom we scarcely know, of other people
+whom we do not know at all, whose names we may or may not have noted on
+the playbill.
+
+Trebell, Lord Charles Cantelupe, and Blackborough ought certainly to
+have been presented to us in the flesh, however briefly and summarily,
+before we were asked to interest ourselves in their characters and the
+political situation arising from them.
+
+There is, however, one limitation to this principle. A great effect is
+sometimes attained by retarding the entrance of a single leading figure
+for a whole act, or even two, while he is so constantly talked about as
+to beget in the audience a vivid desire to make his personal
+acquaintance. Thus Molière's Tartufe does not come on the stage until
+the third act of the comedy which bears his name. Ibsen's John Gabriel
+Borkman is unseen until the second act, though (through his wife's ears)
+we have already heard him pacing up and down his room like a wolf in his
+cage. Dubedat, in _The Doctor's Dilemma_, is not revealed to us in the
+flesh until the second act. But for this device to be successful, it is
+essential that only one leading character[5] should remain unseen, on
+whom the attention of the audience may, by that very fact, be riveted.
+In _Waste_, for instance, all would have been well had it suited Mr.
+Barker's purpose to leave Trebell invisible till the second act, while
+all the characters in the first act, clearly presented to us, canvassed
+him from their various points of view. Keen expectancy, in short, is the
+most desirable frame of mind in which an audience can be placed, so long
+as the expectancy be not ultimately disappointed. But there is no less
+desirable mental attitude than that of straining after gleams of
+guidance in an expository twilight.
+
+The advantage of a staccato opening--or, to vary the metaphor, a brisk,
+highly aerated introductory passage--is clearly exemplified in _A Doll's
+House_. It would have been quite possible for Ibsen to have sent up his
+curtain upon Nora and Mrs. Linden seated comfortably before the stove,
+and exchanging confidences as to their respective careers. Nothing
+indispensable would have been omitted; but how languid would have been
+the interest of the audience! As it is, a brief, bright scene has
+already introduced us, not only to Nora, but to Helmer, and aroused an
+eager desire for further insight into the affairs of this--to all
+appearance--radiantly happy household. Therefore, we settle down without
+impatience to listen to the fireside gossip of the two old
+school-fellows.
+
+The problem of how to open a play is complicated in the English theatre
+by considerations wholly foreign to art. Until quite recently, it used
+to be held impossible for a playwright to raise his curtain upon his
+leading character or characters, because the actor-manager would thus be
+baulked of his carefully arranged "entrance" and "reception," and,
+furthermore, because twenty-five per cent of the audience would probably
+arrive about a quarter of an hour late, and would thus miss the opening
+scene or scenes. It used at one time to be the fashion to add to the
+advertisement of a play an entreaty that the audience should be
+punctually in their seats, "as the interest began with the rise of the
+curtain." One has seen this assertion made with regard to plays in
+which, as a matter of fact, the interest had not begun at the fall of
+the curtain. Nowadays, managers, and even leading ladies, are a good
+deal less insistent on their "reception" than they used to be. They
+realize that it may be a distinct advantage to hold the stage from the
+very outset. There are few more effective openings than that of _The
+Second Mrs. Tanqueray_, where we find Aubrey Tanqueray seated squarely
+at his bachelor dinner-table with Misquith on his right and Jayne on his
+left. It may even be taken as a principle that, where it is desired to
+give to one character a special prominence and predominance, it ought,
+if possible, to be the first figure on which the eye of the audience
+falls. In a Sherlock Holmes play, for example, the curtain ought
+assuredly to rise on the great Sherlock enthroned in Baker Street, with
+Dr. Watson sitting at his feet. The solitary entrance of Richard III
+throws his figure into a relief which could by no other means have been
+attained. So, too, it would have been a mistake on Sophocles' part to
+let any one but the protagonist open the _Oedipus Rex_.
+
+So long as the fashion of late dinners continues, however, it must
+remain a measure of prudence to let nothing absolutely essential to the
+comprehension of a play be said or done during the first ten minutes
+after the rise of the curtain. Here, again, _A Doll's House_ may be
+cited as a model, though Ibsen, certainly, had no thought of the British
+dinner-hour in planning the play. The opening scene is just what the
+ideal opening scene ought to be--invaluable, yet not indispensable. The
+late-comer who misses it deprives himself of a preliminary glimpse into
+the characters of Nora and Helmer and the relation between them; but he
+misses nothing that is absolutely essential to his comprehension of the
+play as a whole. This, then, would appear to be a sound maxim both of
+art and prudence: let your first ten minutes by all means be crisp,
+arresting, stimulating, but do not let them embody any absolutely vital
+matter, ignorance of which would leave the spectator in the dark as to
+the general design and purport of the play.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+[Footnote 1: See Chapter XXIII.]
+
+[Footnote 2: Henri Becque's two best-known plays aptly exemplify the two
+types of opening. In _Les Corbeaux_ we have almost an entire act of calm
+domesticity in which the only hint of coming trouble is an allusion to
+Vigneron's attacks of vertigo. In _La Parisienne_ Clotilde and Lafont
+are in the thick of a vehement quarrel over a letter. It proceeds for
+ten minutes or so, at the end of which Clotilde says, "Prenez garde,
+voilà mon mari!"--and we find that the two are not husband and wife, but
+wife and lover.]
+
+[Footnote 3: Mrs. Craigie ("John Oliver Hobbes") opened her very
+successful play, _The Ambassador_, with a scene between Juliet
+Desborough and her sister Alice, a nun, who apparently left her convent
+specially to hear her sister's confession, and then returned to it for
+ever. This was certainly not an economical form of exposition, but it
+was not unsuited to the type of play.]
+
+[Footnote 4: In that charming comedy, _Rosemary_, by Messrs. Parker and
+Carson, there is a gap of fifty years between the last act and its
+predecessor; but the so-called last act is only an "epi-monologue."]
+
+[Footnote 5: Or at most two closely connected characters: for instance,
+a husband and wife.]
+
+
+
+
+_CHAPTER VIII_
+
+THE FIRST ACT
+
+
+Both in the theory and in practice, of late years, war has been declared
+in certain quarters against the division of a play into acts. Students
+of the Elizabethan stage have persuaded themselves, by what I believe to
+be a complete misreading of the evidence, that Shakespeare did not, as
+it were, "think in acts," but conceived his plays as continuous series
+of events, without any pause or intermission in their flow. It can, I
+think, be proved beyond any shadow of doubt that they are wrong in this;
+that the act division was perfectly familiar to Shakespeare, and was
+used by him to give to the action of his plays a rhythm which ought not,
+in representation, to be obscured or falsified. It is true that in the
+Elizabethan theatre there was no need of long interacts for the change
+of scenes, and that such interacts are an abuse that calls for remedy.
+But we have abundant evidence that the act division was sometimes marked
+on the Elizabethan stage, and have no reason to doubt that it was always
+more or less recognized, and was present to Shakespeare's mind no less
+than to Ibsen's or Pinero's.
+
+Influenced in part, perhaps, by the Elizabethan theorists, but mainly by
+the freakishness of his own genius, Mr. Bernard Shaw has taken to
+writing plays in one continuous gush of dialogue, and has put forward,
+more or less seriously, the claim that he is thereby reviving the
+practice of the Greeks. In a prefatory note to _Getting Married_,
+he says--
+
+  "There is a point of some technical interest to be noted in this
+  play. The customary division into acts and scenes has been disused,
+  and a return made to unity of time and place, as observed in the
+  ancient Greek drama. In the foregoing tragedy, _The Doctor's
+  Dilemma_, there are five acts; the place is altered five times; and
+  the time is spread over an undetermined period of more than a year.
+  No doubt the strain on the attention of the audience and on the
+  ingenuity of the playwright is much less; but I find in practice
+  that the Greek form is inevitable when the drama reaches a certain
+  point in poetic and intellectual evolution. Its adoption was not, on
+  my part, a deliberate display of virtuosity in form, but simply the
+  spontaneous falling of a play of ideas into the form most suitable
+  to it, which turned out to be the classical form."
+
+It is hard to say whether Mr. Shaw is here writing seriously or in a
+mood of solemn facetiousness. Perhaps he himself is not quite clear on
+the point. There can be no harm, at any rate, in assuming that he
+genuinely believes the unity of _Getting Married_ to be "a return to the
+unity observed in," say, the _Oedipus Rex_, and examining a little into
+so pleasant an illusion.
+
+It is, if I may so phrase it, a double-barrelled illusion. _Getting
+Married_ has not the unity of the Greek drama, and the Greek drama has
+not the unity of _Getting Married_. Whatever "unity" is predicable of
+either form of art is a wholly different thing from whatever "unity" is
+predicable of the other. Mr. Shaw, in fact, is, consciously or
+unconsciously, playing with words, very much as Lamb did when he said to
+the sportsman, "Is that your own hare or a wig?" There are, roughly
+speaking, three sorts of unity: the unity of a plum-pudding, the unity
+of a string or chain, and, the unity of the Parthenon. Let us call them,
+respectively, unity of concoction, unity of concatenation, and
+structural or organic unity. The second form of unity is that of most
+novels and some plays. They present a series of events, more or less
+closely intertwined or interlinked with one another, but not built up
+into any symmetrical interdependence. This unity of longitudinal
+extension does not here concern us, for it is not that of either Shaw or
+Sophocles. Plum-pudding unity, on the other hand--the unity of a number
+of ingredients stirred up together, put in a cloth, boiled to a certain
+consistency, and then served up in a blue flame of lambent humour--that
+is precisely the unity of _Getting Married_. A jumble of ideas,
+prejudices, points of view, and whimsicalities on the subject of
+marriage is tied up in a cloth and boiled into a sort of glutinous
+fusion or confusion, so that when the cloth is taken off they do not at
+once lose the coherent rotundity conferred upon them by pressure from
+without. In a quite real sense, the comparison does more than justice to
+the technical qualities of the play; for in a good plum-pudding the due
+proportions of the ingredients are carefully studied, whereas Mr. Shaw
+flings in recklessly whatever comes into his head. At the same time it
+is undeniably true that he shows us a number of people in one room,
+talking continuously and without a single pause, on different aspects of
+a given theme. If this be unity, then he has achieved it. In the
+theatre, as a matter of fact, the plum-pudding was served up in three
+chunks instead of one; but this was a mere concession to human weakness.
+The play had all the globular unity of a pill, though it happened to be
+too big a pill to be swallowed at one gulp.
+
+Turning now to the _Oedipus_--I choose that play as a typical example of
+Greek tragedy--what sort of unity do we find? It is the unity, not of a
+continuous mass or mash, but of carefully calculated proportion, order,
+interrelation of parts--the unity of a fine piece of architecture, or
+even of a living organism. The inorganic continuity of _Getting Married_
+it does not possess. If that be what we understand by unity, then Shaw
+has it and Sophocles has not. The _Oedipus_ is as clearly divided into
+acts as is _Hamlet_ or _Hedda Gabler_. In modern parlance, we should
+probably call it a play in five acts and an epilogue. It so happened
+that the Greek theatre did not possess a curtain, and did possess a
+Chorus; consequently, the Greek dramatist employed the Chorus, as we
+employ the curtain, to emphasize the successive stages of his action, to
+mark the rhythm of its progress, and, incidentally, to provide
+resting-places for the mind of the audience--intervals during which the
+strain upon their attention was relaxed, or at any rate varied. It is
+not even true that the Greeks habitually aimed at such continuity of
+time as we find in _Getting Married_. They treated time ideally, the
+imaginary duration of the story being, as a rule, widely different from
+the actual time of representation. In this respect the _Oedipus_ is
+something of an exception, since the events might, at a pinch, be
+conceived as passing within the "two hours' traffick of the stage"; but
+in many cases a whole day, or even more, must be understood to be
+compressed within these two hours. It is true that the continuous
+presence of the Chorus made it impossible for the Greeks to overleap
+months and years, as we do on the modern stage; but they did not aim at
+that strict coincidence of imaginary with actual time which Mr. Shaw
+believes himself to have achieved.[1] Even he, however, subjects the
+events which take place behind the scenes to a good deal of "ideal"
+compression.
+
+Of course, when Mr. Shaw protests that, in _Getting Married_, he did not
+indulge in a "deliberate display of virtuosity of form," that is only
+his fun. You cannot well have virtuosity of form where there is no form.
+What he did was to rely upon his virtuosity of dialogue to enable him to
+dispense with form. Whether he succeeded or not is a matter of opinion
+which does not at present concern us. The point to be noted is the
+essential difference between the formless continuity of _Getting
+Married_, and the sedulous ordering and balancing of clearly
+differentiated parts, which went to the structure of a Greek tragedy. A
+dramatist who can so develop his story as to bring it within the
+quasi-Aristotelean "unities" performs a curious but not particularly
+difficult or valuable feat; but this does not, or ought not to, imply
+the abandonment of the act-division, which is no mere convention, but a
+valuable means of marking the rhythm of the story. When, on the other
+hand, you have no story to tell, the act-division is manifestly
+superfluous; but it needs no "virtuosity" to dispense with it.
+
+It is a grave error, then, to suppose that the act is a mere division of
+convenience, imposed by the limited power of attention of the human
+mind, or by the need of the human body for occasional refreshment. A
+play with a well-marked, well-balanced act-structure is a higher
+artistic organism than a play with no act-structure, just as a
+vertebrate animal is higher than a mollusc. In every crisis of real life
+(unless it be so short as to be a mere incident) there is a rhythm of
+rise, progress, culmination and solution. We are not always, perhaps not
+often, conscious of these stages; but that is only because we do not
+reflect upon our experiences while they are passing, or map them out in
+memory when they are past. We do, however, constantly apply to real-life
+crises expressions borrowed more or less directly from the terminology
+of the drama. We say, somewhat incorrectly, "Things have come to a
+climax," meaning thereby a culmination; or we say, "The catastrophe is
+at hand," or, again, "What a fortunate _dénouement_!" Be this as it may,
+it is the business of the dramatist to analyse the crises with which he
+deals, and to present them to us in their rhythm of growth, culmination,
+solution. To this end the act-division is--not, perhaps, essential,
+since the rhythm may be marked even in a one-act play--but certainly of
+enormous and invaluable convenience. "Si l'acte n'existait pas, il
+faudrait l'inventer"; but as a matter of fact it has existed wherever,
+in the Western world, the drama has developed beyond its rudest
+beginnings.
+
+It was doubtless the necessity for marking this rhythm that Aristotle
+had in mind when he said that a dramatic action must have a beginning, a
+middle and an end. Taken in its simplicity, this principle would
+indicate the three-act division as the ideal scheme for a play. As a
+matter of fact, many of the best modern plays in all languages fall into
+three acts; one has only to note _Monsieur Alphonse, Françillon, La
+Parisienne, Amoureuse, A Doll's House, Ghosts, The Master Builder,
+Little Eyolf, Johannisfeuer, Caste, Candida, The Benefit of the Doubt,
+The Importance of Being Earnest, The Silver Box_; and, furthermore, many
+old plays which are nominally in five acts really fall into a triple
+rhythm, and might better have been divided into three. Alexandrian
+precept, handed on by Horace, gave to the five act division a purely
+arbitrary sanction, which induced playwrights to mask the natural rhythm
+of their themes beneath this artificial one.[2] But in truth the
+three-act division ought no more to be elevated into an absolute rule
+than the five-act division. We have seen that a play consists, or ought
+to consist, of a great crisis, worked out through a series of minor
+crises. An act, then, ought to consist either of a minor crisis, carried
+to its temporary solution, or of a well-marked group of such crises; and
+there can be no rule as to the number of such crises which ought to
+present themselves in the development of a given theme. On the modern
+stage, five acts may be regarded as the maximum, simply by reason of the
+time-limit imposed by social custom on a performance. But one frequently
+sees a melodrama divided into "five acts and eight tableaux," or even
+more; which practically means that the play is in eight, or nine, or ten
+acts, but that there will be only the four conventional interacts in the
+course of the evening. The playwright should not let himself be
+constrained by custom to force his theme into the arbitrary mould of a
+stated number of acts. Three acts is a good number, four acts is a good
+number,[3] there is no positive objection to five acts. Should he find
+himself hankering after more acts, he will do well to consider whether
+he be not, at one point or another, failing in the art of condensation
+and trespassing on the domain of the novelist.
+
+There is undoubted convenience in the rule of the modern stage: "One
+act, one scene." A change of scene in the middle of an act is not only
+materially difficult, but tends to impair the particular order of
+illusion at which the modern drama aims.[4] Roughly, indeed, an act may
+be defined as any part of a given crisis which works itself out at one
+time and in one place; but more fundamentally it is a segment of the
+action during which the author desires to hold the attention of his
+audience unbroken and unrelaxed. It is no mere convention, however,
+which decrees that the flight of time is best indicated by an interact.
+When the curtain is down, the action on the stage remains, as it were,
+in suspense. The audience lets its attention revert to the affairs of
+real life; and it is quite willing, when the mimic world is once more
+revealed, to suppose that any reasonable space of time has elapsed while
+its thoughts were occupied with other matters. It is much more difficult
+for it to accept a wholly imaginary lapse of time while its attention is
+centred on the mimic world. Some playwrights have of late years adopted
+the device of dropping their curtain once, or even twice, in the middle
+of an act, to indicate an interval of a few minutes, or even of an
+hour--for instance, of the time between "going in to dinner" and the
+return of the ladies to the drawing-room. Sir Arthur Pinero employs this
+device with good effect in _Iris_; so does Mr. Granville Barker in
+_Waste_, and Mr. Galsworthy in _The Silver Box_. It is certainly far
+preferable to that "ideal" treatment of time which was common in the
+French drama of the nineteenth century, and survives to this day in
+plays adapted or imitated from the French.
+
+I remember seeing in London, not very long ago, a one-act play on the
+subject of Rouget de l'Isle. In the space of about half-an-hour, he
+handed the manuscript of the "Marseillaise" to an opera-singer whom he
+adored, she took it away and sang it at the Opera, it caught the popular
+ear from that one performance, and the dying Rouget heard it sung by the
+passing multitude in the streets within about fifteen minutes of the
+moment when it first left his hands. (The whole piece, I repeat,
+occupied about half-an-hour; but as a good deal of that time was devoted
+to preliminaries, not more than fifteen minutes can have elapsed between
+the time when the cantatrice left Rouget's garret and the time when all
+Paris was singing the "Marseillaise.") This is perhaps an extreme
+instance of the ideal treatment of time; but one could find numberless
+cases in the works of Scribe, Labiche, and others, in which the
+transactions of many hours are represented as occurring within the
+limits of a single act. Our modern practice eschews such licenses. It
+will often compress into an act of half-an-hour more events than would
+probably happen in real life in a similar space of time, but not such a
+train of occurrences as to transcend the limits of possibility. It must
+be remembered, however, that the standard of verisimilitude naturally
+and properly varies with the seriousness of the theme under treatment.
+Improbabilities are admissible in light comedy, and still more in farce,
+which would wreck the fortunes of a drama purporting to present a sober
+and faithful picture of real life.
+
+Acts, then, mark the time-stages in the development of a given crisis;
+and each act ought to embody a minor crisis of its own, with a
+culmination and a temporary solution. It would be no gain, but a loss,
+if a whole two hours' or three hours' action could be carried through in
+one continuous movement, with no relaxation of the strain upon the
+attention of the audience, and without a single point at which the
+spectator might review what was past and anticipate what was to come.
+The act-division positively enhances the amount of pleasurable emotion
+through which the audience passes. Each act ought to stimulate and
+temporarily satisfy an interest of its own, while definitely advancing
+the main action. The psychological principle is evident enough; namely,
+that there is more sensation to be got out of three or four
+comparatively brief experiences, suited to our powers of perception,
+than out of one protracted experience, forced on us without relief,
+without contrast, in such a way as to fatigue and deaden our faculties.
+Who would not rather drink three, four, or five glasses of wine than put
+the bottle to his lips and let its contents pour down his throat in one
+long draught? Who would not rather see a stained-glass window broken
+into three, four, or five cunningly-proportioned "lights," than a great
+flat sheet of coloured glass, be its design never so effective?
+
+It used to be the fashion in mid Victorian melodramas to give each act a
+more or less alluring title of its own. I am far from recommending the
+revival of this practice; but it might be no bad plan for a beginner, in
+sketching out a play, to have in his mind, or in his private notes, a
+descriptive head-line for each act, thereby assuring himself that each
+had a character of its own, and at the same time contributed its due
+share to the advancement of the whole design. Let us apply this
+principle to a Shakespearean play--for example, to _Macbeth_. The act
+headings might run somewhat as follows--
+
+  ACT I.--TEMPTATION.
+
+  ACT II.--MURDER AND USURPATION.
+
+  ACT III.--THE FRENZY OF CRIME AND THE HAUNTING OF REMORSE.
+
+  ACT IV.--GATHERING RETRIBUTION.
+
+  ACT V.--RETRIBUTION CONSUMMATED.
+
+Can it be doubted that Shakespeare had in his mind the rhythm marked by
+this act-division? I do not mean, of course, that these phrases, or
+anything like them, were present to his consciousness, but merely that
+he "thought in acts," and mentally assigned to each act its definite
+share in the development of the crisis.
+
+Turning now to Ibsen, let us draw up an act-scheme for the simplest and
+most straightforward of his plays, _An Enemy of the People_. It might
+run as follows:
+
+  ACT I.--THE INCURABLE OPTIMIST.--Dr. Stockmann announces his
+  discovery of the insanitary condition of the Baths.
+
+  ACT II.--THE COMPACT MAJORITY.--Dr. Stockmann finds that he will
+  have to fight vested interests before the evils he has discovered
+  can be remedied, but is assured that the Compact Majority is at
+  his back.
+
+  ACT III.--THE TURN OF FORTUNE.--The Doctor falls from the pinnacle
+  of his optimistic confidence, and learns that he will have the
+  Compact Majority, not _at_, but _on_ his back.
+
+  ACT IV.--THE COMPACT MAJORITY ON THE WARPATH.--The crowd, finding
+  that its immediate interests are identical with those of the
+  privileged few, joins with the bureaucracy in shouting down the
+  truth, and organizing a conspiracy of silence.
+
+  ACT V.--OPTIMISM DISILLUSIONED BUT INDOMITABLE.--Dr. Stockmann,
+  gagged and thrown back into poverty, is tempted to take flight, but
+  determines to remain in his native place and fight for its moral, if
+  not for its physical, sanitation.
+
+Each of these acts is a little drama in itself, while each leads forward
+to the next, and marks a distinct phase in the development of
+the crisis.
+
+When the younger Dumas asked his father, that master of dramatic
+movement, to initiate him into the secret of dramatic craftsmanship, the
+great Alexandre replied in this concise formula: "Let your first act be
+clear, your last act brief, and the whole interesting." Of the wisdom of
+the first clause there can be no manner of doubt. Whether incidentally
+or by way of formal exposition, the first act ought to show us clearly
+who the characters are, what are their relations and relationships, and
+what is the nature of the gathering crisis. It is very important that
+the attention of the audience should not be overstrained in following
+out needlessly complex genealogies and kinships. How often, at the end
+of a first act, does one turn to one's neighbour and say, "Are Edith and
+Adela sisters or only half-sisters?" or, "Did you gather what was the
+villain's claim to the title?" If a story cannot be made clear without
+an elaborate study of one or more family trees, beware of it. In all
+probability, it is of very little use for dramatic purposes. But before
+giving it up, see whether the relationships, and other relations, cannot
+be simplified. Complexities which at first seemed indispensable will
+often prove to be mere useless encumbrances.
+
+In _Pillars of Society_ Ibsen goes as far as any playwright ought to go
+in postulating fine degrees of kinship--and perhaps a little further.
+Karsten Bernick has married into a family whose gradations put something
+of a strain on the apprehension and memory of an audience. We have to
+bear in mind that Mrs. Bernick has (_a_) a half-sister, Lona Hessel;
+(_b_) a full brother, Johan Tönnesen; (_c_) a cousin, Hilmar Tönnesen.
+Then Bernick has an unmarried sister, Martha; another relationship,
+however simple, to be borne in mind. And, finally, when we see Dina Dorf
+living in Bernick's house, and know that Bernick has had an intrigue
+with her mother, we are apt to fall into the error of supposing her to
+be Bernick's daughter. There is only one line which proves that this is
+not so--a remark to the effect that, when Madam Dorf came to the town.
+Dina was already old enough to run about and play angels in the theatre.
+Any one who does not happen to hear or notice this remark, is almost
+certain to misapprehend Dina's parentage. Taking one thing with another,
+then, the Bernick family group is rather more complex than is strictly
+desirable. Ibsen's reasons for making Lona Hessel a half-sister instead
+of a full sister of Mrs. Bernick are evident enough. He wanted her to be
+a considerably older woman, of a very different type of character; and
+it was necessary, in order to explain Karsten's desertion of Lona for
+Betty, that the latter should be an heiress, while the former was
+penniless. These reasons are clear and apparently adequate; yet it may
+be doubted whether the dramatist did not lose more than he gained by
+introducing even this small degree of complexity. It was certainly not
+necessary to explain the difference of age and character between Lona
+and Betty; while as for the money, there would have been nothing
+improbable in supposing that a wealthy uncle had marked his disapproval
+of Lona's strong-mindedness by bequeathing all his property to her
+younger sister. Again, there is no reason why Hilmar should not have
+been a brother of Johan and Betty;[5] in which case we should have had
+the simple family group of two brothers and two sisters, instead of the
+comparatively complex relationship of a brother and sister, a
+half-sister and a cousin.
+
+These may seem very trivial considerations: but nothing is really
+trivial when it comes to be placed under the powerful lens of theatrical
+presentation. Any given audience has only a certain measure of attention
+at command, and to claim attention for inessentials is to diminish the
+stock available for essentials. In only one other play does Ibsen
+introduce any complexity of relationship, and in that case it does not
+appear in the exposition, but is revealed at a critical moment towards
+the close. In _Little Eyolf_, Asta and Allmers are introduced to us at
+first as half-sister and half-brother; and only at the end of the second
+act does it appear that Asta's mother (Allmers' stepmother) was
+unfaithful to her husband, and that, Asta being the fruit of this
+infidelity, there is no blood kinship between her and Allmers. The
+danger of relying upon such complexities is shown by the fact that so
+acute a critic as M. Jules Lemaître, in writing of _Little Eyolf_,
+mistook the situation, and thought that Asta fled from Allmers because
+he was her brother, whereas in fact she fled because he was not. I had
+the honour of calling M. Lemaître's attention to this error, which he
+handsomely acknowledged.
+
+Complexities of kinship are, of course, not the only complexities which
+should, so far as possible, be avoided. Every complexity of relation or
+of antecedent circumstance is in itself a weakness, which, if it cannot
+be eliminated, must, so to speak, be lived down. No dramatic critic, I
+think, can have failed to notice that the good plays are those of which
+the story can be clearly indicated in ten lines; while it very often
+takes a column to give even a confused idea of the plot of a bad play.
+Here, then, is a preliminary test which may be commended to the would-be
+playwright, in order to ascertain whether the subject he is
+contemplating is or is not a good one: can he state the gist of it in a
+hundred words or so, like the "argument" of a Boccaccian novella? The
+test, of course, is far from being infallible; for a theme may err on
+the side of over-simplicity or emptiness, no less than on the side of
+over-complexity. But it is, at any rate, negatively useful: if the
+playwright finds that he cannot make his story comprehensible without a
+long explanation of an intricate network of facts, he may be pretty sure
+that he has got hold of a bad theme, or of one that stands sorely in
+need of simplification.[6]
+
+It is not sufficient, however, that a first act should fulfil Dumas's
+requirement by placing the situation clearly before us: it ought also to
+carry us some way towards the heart of the drama, or, at the very least,
+to point distinctly towards that quarter of the horizon where the clouds
+are gathering up. In a three-act play this is evidently demanded by the
+most elementary principles of proportion. It would be absurd to make
+one-third of the play merely introductory, and to compress the whole
+action into the remaining two-thirds. But even in a four- or five-act
+play, the interest of the audience ought to be strongly enlisted, and
+its anticipation headed in a definite direction, before the curtain
+falls for the first time. When we find a dramatist of repute neglecting
+this principle, we may suspect some reason with which art has no
+concern. Several of Sardou's social dramas begin with two acts of more
+or less smart and entertaining satire or caricature, and only at the end
+of the second or beginning of the third act (out of five) does the drama
+proper set in. What was the reason of this? Simply that under the system
+of royalties prevalent in France, it was greatly to the author's
+interest that his play should fill the whole evening. Sardou needed no
+more than three acts for the development of his drama; to have spread it
+out thinner would have been to weaken and injure it; wherefore he
+preferred to occupy an hour or so with clever dramatic journalism,
+rather than share the evening, and the fees, with another dramatist. So,
+at least, I have heard his practice explained; perhaps his own account
+of the matter may have been that he wanted to paint a broad social
+picture to serve as a background for his action.
+
+The question how far an audience ought to be carried towards the heart
+of a dramatic action in the course of the first act is always and
+inevitably one of proportion. It is clear that too much ought not to be
+told, so as to leave the remaining acts meagre and spun-out; nor should
+any one scene be so intense in its interest as to outshine all
+subsequent scenes, and give to the rest of the play an effect of
+anti-climax. If the strange and fascinating creations of Ibsen's last
+years were to be judged by ordinary dramaturgic canons, we should have
+to admit that in _Little Eyolf_ he was guilty of the latter fault, since
+in point of sheer "strength," in the common acceptation of the word, the
+situation at the end of the first act could scarcely be outdone, in that
+play or any other. The beginner, however, is far more likely to put too
+little than too much into his first act: he is more likely to leave our
+interest insufficiently stimulated than to carry us too far in the
+development of his theme. My own feeling is that, as a general rule,
+what Freytag calls the _erregende Moment_ ought by all means to fall
+within the first act. What is the _erregende Moment_? One is inclined to
+render it "the firing of the fuse." In legal parlance, it might be
+interpreted as the joining of issue. It means the point at which the
+drama, hitherto latent, plainly declares itself. It means the
+germination of the crisis, the appearance on the horizon of the cloud no
+bigger than a man's hand. I suggest, then, that this _erregende Moment_
+ought always to come within the first act--if it is to come at all There
+are plays, as we have seen, which depict life on so even a plane that it
+is impossible to say at any given point, "Here the drama sets in," or
+"The interest is heightened there."
+
+_Pillars of Society_ is, in a sense, Ibsen's prentice-work in the form
+of drama which he afterwards perfected; wherefore it affords us numerous
+illustrations of the problems we have to consider. Does he, or does he
+not, give us in the first act sufficient insight into his story? I am
+inclined to answer the question in the negative. The first act puts us
+in possession of the current version of the Bernick-Tönnesen family
+history, but it gives us no clear indication that this version is an
+elaborate tissue of falsehoods. It is true that Bernick's evident
+uneasiness and embarrassment at the mere idea of the reappearance of
+Lona and Johan may lead us to suspect that all is not as it seems; but
+simple annoyance at the inopportune arrival of the black sheep of the
+family might be sufficient to account for this. To all intents and
+purposes, we are completely in the dark as to the course the drama is
+about to take; and when, at the end of the first act, Lona Hessel
+marches in and flutters the social dovecote, we do not know in what
+light to regard her, or why we are supposed to sympathize with her. The
+fact that she is eccentric, and that she talks of "letting in fresh
+air," combines with our previous knowledge of the author's idiosyncrasy
+to assure us that she is his heroine; but so far as the evidence
+actually before us goes, we have no means of forming even the vaguest
+provisional judgment as to her true character. This is almost certainly
+a mistake in art. It is useless to urge that sympathy and antipathy are
+primitive emotions, and that we ought to be able to regard a character
+objectively, rating it as true or false, not as attractive or repellent.
+The answer to this is twofold. Firstly, the theatre has never been, and
+never will be, a moral dissecting room, nor has the theatrical audience
+anything in common with a class of students dispassionately following a
+professor's demonstration of cold scientific facts. Secondly, in the
+particular case in point, the dramatist makes a manifest appeal to our
+sympathies. There can be no doubt that we are intended to take Lona's
+part, as against the representatives of propriety and convention
+assembled at the sewing-bee; but we have been vouchsafed no rational
+reason for so doing. In other words, the author has not taken us far
+enough into his action to enable us to grasp the true import and
+significance of the situation. He relies for his effect either on the
+general principle that an eccentric character must be sympathetic, or on
+the knowledge possessed by those who have already seen or read the rest
+of the play. Either form of reliance is clearly inartistic. The former
+appeals to irrational prejudice; the latter ignores what we shall
+presently find to be a fundamental principle of the playwright's
+art--namely, that, with certain doubtful exceptions in the case of
+historical themes, he must never assume previous knowledge either of
+plot or character on the part of his public, but must always have in his
+mind's eye a first-night audience, which knows nothing but what he
+chooses to tell it.
+
+My criticism of the first act of _Pillars of Society_ may be summed up
+in saying that the author has omitted to place in it the _erregende
+Moment_. The issue is not joined, the true substance of the drama is not
+clear to us, until, in the second act, Bernick makes sure there are no
+listeners, and then holds out both hands to Johan, saying: "Johan, now
+we are alone; now you must give me leave to thank you," and so forth.
+Why should not this scene have occurred in the first act? Materially,
+there is no reason whatever. It would need only the change of a few
+words to lift the scene bodily out of the second act and transfer it to
+the first. Why did Ibsen not do so? His reason is not hard to divine; he
+wished to concentrate into two great scenes, with scarcely a moment's
+interval between them, the revelation of Bernick's treachery, first to
+Johan, second to Lona. He gained his point: the sledge-hammer effect of
+these two scenes is undeniable. But it remains a question whether he did
+not make a disproportionate sacrifice; whether he did not empty his
+first act in order to overfill his second. I do not say he did: I merely
+propound the question for the student's consideration. One thing we must
+recognize in dramatic art as in all other human affairs; namely, that
+perfection, if not unattainable, is extremely rare. We have often to
+make a deliberate sacrifice at one point in order to gain some greater
+advantage at another; to incur imperfection here that we may achieve
+perfection there. It is no disparagement to the great masters to admit
+that they frequently show us rather what to avoid than what to do.
+Negative instruction, indeed, is in its essence more desirable than
+positive. The latter tends to make us mere imitators, whereas the
+former, in saving us from dangers, leaves our originality unimpaired.
+
+It is curious to note that, in another play, Ibsen did actually transfer
+the _erregende Moment_, the joining of issue, from the second act to the
+first. In his early draft of _Rosmersholm_, the great scene in which
+Rosmer confesses to Kroll his change of views did not occur until the
+second act. There can be no doubt that the balance and proportion of the
+play gained enormously by the transference.
+
+After all, however, the essential question is not how much or how little
+is conveyed to us in the first act, but whether our interest is
+thoroughly aroused, and, what is of equal importance, skilfully carried
+forward. Before going more at large into this very important detail of
+the playwright's craft, it may be well to say something of the nature of
+dramatic interest in general.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+[Footnote 1: There are several cases in Greek drama in which a hero
+leaves the stage to fight a battle and returns victorious in a few
+minutes. See, for example, the _Supplices_ of Euripides.]
+
+[Footnote 2: So far was Shakespeare from ignoring the act-division that
+it is a question whether his art did not sometimes suffer from the
+supposed necessity of letting a fourth act intervene between the
+culmination in the third act and the catastrophe in the fifth.]
+
+[Footnote 3: I think it may be said that the majority of modern serious
+plays are in four acts. It is a favourite number with Sir Arthur Pinero,
+Mr. Henry Arthur Jones, Mr. Clyde Fitch, and Mr. Alfred Sutro.]
+
+[Footnote 4: This must not be taken to mean that in no case is a change
+of scene within the act advisable. The point to be considered is whether
+the author does or does not want to give the audience time for
+reflection--time to return to the real world--between two episodes. If
+it is of great importance that they should not do so, then a rapid
+change of scene may be the less of two evils. In this case the lights
+should be kept lowered in order to show that no interact is intended;
+but the fashion of changing the scene on a pitch-dark stage, without
+dropping the curtain, is much to be deprecated. If the revolving stage
+should ever become a common institution in English-speaking countries,
+dramatists would doubtless be more tempted than they are at present to
+change their scenes within the act; but I doubt whether the tendency
+would be wholly advantageous. No absolute rule, however, can be laid
+down, and it may well be maintained that a true dramatic artist could
+only profit by the greater flexibility of his medium.]
+
+[Footnote 5: He was, in the first draft; and Lona Hessel was only a
+distant relative of Bernick's.]
+
+[Footnote 6: The Greeks, who knew most things, knew the value of
+manageable dimensions and simple structure in a work of art, and had a
+word to express that combination of qualities--the word _eusynopton_.]
+
+
+
+
+_CHAPTER IX_
+
+"CURIOSITY" AND "INTEREST"
+
+
+The paradox of dramatic theory is this: while our aim is, of course, to
+write plays which shall achieve immortality, or shall at any rate become
+highly popular, and consequently familiar in advance to a considerable
+proportion of any given audience, we are all the time studying how to
+awaken and to sustain that interest, or, more precisely, that curiosity,
+which can be felt only by those who see the play for the first time,
+without any previous knowledge of its action. Under modern conditions
+especially, the spectators who come to the theatre with their minds an
+absolute blank as to what is awaiting them, are comparatively few; for
+newspaper criticism and society gossip very soon bruit abroad a general
+idea of the plot of any play which attains a reasonable measure of
+success. Why, then, should we assume, in the ideal spectator to whom we
+address ourselves, a state of mind which, we hope and trust, will not be
+the state of mind of the majority of actual spectators?
+
+To this question there are several answers. The first and most obvious
+is that to one audience, at any rate, every play must be absolutely new,
+and that it is this first-night audience which in great measure
+determines its success or failure. Many plays have survived a
+first-night failure, and still more have gone off in a rapid decline
+after a first-night success. But these caprices of fortune are not to be
+counted on. The only prudent course is for the dramatist to direct all
+his thought and care towards conciliating or dominating an audience to
+which his theme is entirely unknown,[1] and so coming triumphant through
+his first-night ordeal. This principle is subject to a certain
+qualification in the case of historic and legendary themes. In treating
+such subjects, the dramatist is not relieved of the necessity of
+developing his story clearly and interestingly, but has, on the
+contrary, an additional charge imposed upon him--that of not flagrantly
+defying or disappointing popular knowledge or prejudice. Charles I must
+not die in a green old age, Oliver Cromwell must not display the manners
+and graces of Sir Charles Grandison, Charles II must not be represented
+as a model of domestic virtue. Historians may indict a hero or whitewash
+a villain at their leisure; but to the dramatist a hero must be (more or
+less) a hero, a villain (more or less) a villain, if accepted tradition
+so decrees it.[2] Thus popular knowledge can scarcely be said to lighten
+a dramatist's task, but rather to impose a new limitation upon him. In
+some cases, however, he can rely on a general knowledge of the historic
+background of a given period, which may save him some exposition. An
+English audience, for instance, does not require to be told what was the
+difference between Cavaliers and Roundheads; nor does any audience, I
+imagine, look for a historical disquisition on the Reign of Terror. The
+dramatist has only to bring on some ruffianly characters in Phrygian
+caps, who address each other as "Citizen" and "Citizeness," and at once
+the imagination of the audience will supply the roll of the tumbrels and
+the silhouette of the guillotine in the background.
+
+To return to the general question: not only must the dramatist reckon
+with one all-important audience which is totally ignorant of the story
+he has to tell; he must also bear in mind that it is very easy to
+exaggerate the proportion of any given audience which will know his plot
+in advance, even when his play has been performed a thousand times.
+There are inexhaustible possibilities of ignorance in the theatrical
+public. A story is told, on pretty good authority, of a late eminent
+statesman who visited the Lyceum one night when Sir Henry Irving was
+appearing as Hamlet. After the third act he went to the actor's
+dressing-room, expressed great regret that duty called him back to
+Westminster, and begged Sir Henry to tell him how the play ended, as it
+had interested him greatly.[3] One of our most eminent novelists has
+assured me that he never saw or read _Macbeth_ until he was present at
+(I think) Mr. Forbes Robertson's revival of the play, he being then
+nearer fifty than forty. These, no doubt, are "freak" instances; but in
+any given audience, even at the most hackneyed classical plays, there
+will be a certain percentage of children (who contribute as much as
+their elders to the general temper of an audience), and also a
+percentage of adult ignoramuses. And if this be so in the case of plays
+which have held the stage for generations, are studied in schools, and
+are every day cited as matters of common knowledge, how much more
+certain may we be that even the most popular modern play will have to
+appeal night after night to a considerable number of people who have no
+previous acquaintance with either its story or its characters! The
+playwright may absolutely count on having to make such an appeal; but he
+must remember at the same time that he can by no means count on keeping
+any individual effect, more especially any notable trick or device, a
+secret from the generality of his audience. Mr. J.M. Barrie (to take a
+recent instance) sedulously concealed, throughout the greater part of
+_Little Mary_, what was meant by that ever-recurring expression, and
+probably relied to some extent on an effect of amused surprise when the
+disclosure was made. On the first night, the effect came off happily
+enough; but on subsequent nights, there would rarely be a score of
+people in the house who did not know the secret. The great majority
+might know nothing else about the play, but that they knew. Similarly,
+in the case of any mechanical _truc_, as the French call it, or feat of
+theatrical sleight-of-hand, it is futile to trust to its taking unawares
+any audience after the first. Nine-tenths of all subsequent audiences
+are sure to be on the look-out for it, and to know, or think they know,
+"how it's done."[4] These are the things which theatrical gossip,
+printed and oral, most industriously disseminates. The fine details of a
+plot are much less easily conveyed and less likely to be remembered.
+
+To sum up this branch of the argument: however oft-repeated and
+much-discussed a play may be, the playwright must assume that in every
+audience there will be an appreciable number of persons who know
+practically nothing about it, and whose enjoyment will depend, like that
+of the first-night audience, on the skill with which he develops his
+story. On the other hand, he can never rely on taking an audience by
+surprise at any particular point. The class of effect which depends on
+surprise is precisely the class of effect which is certain to be
+discounted.[5]
+
+We come now to a third reason why a playwright is bound to assume that
+the audience to which he addresses himself has no previous knowledge of
+his fable. It is simply that no other assumption has, or can have, any
+logical basis. If the audience is not to be conceived as ignorant, how
+much is it to be assumed to know? There is clearly no possible answer to
+this question, except a purely arbitrary one, having no relation to the
+facts. In any audience after the first, there will doubtless be a
+hundred degrees of knowledge and of ignorance. Many people will know
+nothing at all about the play; some people will have seen or read it
+yesterday, and will thus know all there is to know; while between these
+extremes there will be every variety of clearness or vagueness of
+knowledge. Some people will have read and remembered a detailed
+newspaper notice; others will have read the same notice and forgotten
+almost all of it. Some will have heard a correct and vivid account of
+the play, others a vague and misleading summary. It would be absolutely
+impossible to enumerate all the degrees of previous knowledge which are
+pretty certain to be represented in an average audience; and to which
+degree of knowledge is the playwright to address himself? If he is to
+have any firm ground under his feet, he must clearly adopt the only
+logical course, and address himself to a spectator assumed to have no
+previous knowledge whatever. To proceed on any other assumption would
+not only be to ignore the all-powerful first-night audience, but to
+plunge into a veritable morass of inconsistencies, dubieties and
+slovenlinesses.
+
+These considerations, however, have not yet taken us to the heart of the
+matter. We have seen that the dramatist has no rational course open to
+him but to assume complete ignorance in his audience; but we have also
+seen that, as a matter of fact, only one audience will be entirely in
+this condition, and that, the more successful the play is, the more
+widely will subsequent audiences tend to depart from it. Does it not
+follow that interest of plot, interest of curiosity as to coming events,
+is at best an evanescent factor in a play's attractiveness--of a certain
+importance, no doubt, on the first night, but less and less efficient
+the longer the play holds the stage?
+
+In a sense, this is undoubtedly true. We see every day that a mere
+story-play--a play which appeals to us solely by reason of the adroit
+stimulation and satisfaction of curiosity--very rapidly exhausts its
+success. No one cares to see it a second time; and spectators who happen
+to have read the plot in advance, find its attraction discounted even on
+a first hearing. But if we jump to the conclusion that the skilful
+marshalling and development of the story is an unimportant detail, which
+matters little when once the first-night ordeal is past, we shall go
+very far astray. Experience shows us that dramatic _interest_ is
+entirely distinct from mere _curiosity_, and survives when curiosity is
+dead. Though a skilfully-told story is not of itself enough to secure
+long life for a play, it materially and permanently enhances the
+attractions of a play which has other and higher claims to longevity.
+Character, poetry, philosophy, atmosphere, are all very good in their
+way; but they all show to greater advantage by aid of a well-ordered
+fable. In a picture, I take it, drawing is not everything; but drawing
+will always count for much.
+
+This separation of interest from curiosity is partly explicable by one
+very simple reflection. However well we may know a play beforehand, we
+seldom know it by heart or nearly by heart; so that, though we may
+anticipate a development in general outline, we do not clearly foresee
+the ordering of its details, which, therefore, may give us almost the
+same sort of pleasure that it gave us when the story was new to us. Most
+playgoers will, I think, bear me out in saying that we constantly find a
+great scene or act to be in reality richer in invention and more
+ingenious in arrangement than we remembered it to be.
+
+We come, now, to another point that must not be overlooked. It needs no
+subtle introspection to assure us that we, the audience, do our own
+little bit of acting, and instinctively place ourselves at the point of
+view of a spectator before whose eyes the drama is unrolling itself for
+the first time. If the play has any richness of texture, we have many
+sensations that he cannot have. We are conscious of ironies and
+subtleties which necessarily escape him, or which he can but dimly
+divine. But in regard to the actual development of the story, we imagine
+ourselves back into his condition of ignorance, with this difference,
+that we can more fully appreciate the dramatist's skill, and more
+clearly resent his clumsiness or slovenliness. Our sensations, in short,
+are not simply conditioned by our knowledge or ignorance of what is to
+come. The mood of dramatic receptivity is a complex one. We
+instinctively and without any effort remember that the dramatist is
+bound by the rules of the game, or, in other words, by the inherent
+conditions of his craft, to unfold his tale before an audience to which
+it is unknown; and it is with implicit reference to these conditions
+that we enjoy and appreciate his skill. Even the most unsophisticated
+audience realizes in some measure that the playwright is an artist
+presenting a picture of life under such-and-such assumptions and
+limitations, and appraises his skill by its own vague and instinctive
+standards. As our culture increases, we more and more consistently adopt
+this attitude, and take pleasure in a playwright's marshalling of
+material in proportion to its absolute skill, even if that skill no
+longer produces its direct and pristine effect upon us. In many cases,
+indeed, our pleasure consists of a delicate blending of surprise with
+realized anticipation. We foresaw, and are pleased to recognize, the art
+of the whole achievement, while details which had grown dim to us give
+us each its little thrill of fresh admiration. Regarded in this aspect,
+a great play is like a great piece of music: we can hear it again and
+again with ever-new realization of its subtle beauties, its complex
+harmonies, and with unfailing interest in the merits and demerits of
+each particular rendering.
+
+But we must look deeper than this if we would fully understand the true
+nature of dramatic interest. The last paragraph has brought us to the
+verge of the inmost secret, but we have yet to take the final step. We
+have yet to realize that, in truly great drama, the foreknowledge
+possessed by the audience is not a disadvantage with certain incidental
+mitigations and compensations, but is the source of the highest pleasure
+which the theatre is capable of affording us. In order to illustrate my
+meaning, I propose to analyse a particular scene, not, certainly, among
+the loftiest in dramatic literature, but particularly suited to my
+purpose, inasmuch as it is familiar to every one, and at the same time
+full of the essential qualities of drama. I mean the Screen Scene in
+_The School for Scandal_.
+
+In her "English Men of Letters" volume on Sheridan, Mrs. Oliphant
+discusses this scene. Speaking in particular of the moment at which the
+screen is overturned, revealing Lady Teazle behind it, she says--
+
+  "It would no doubt have been higher art could the dramatist have
+  deceived his audience as well as the personages of the play, and
+  made us also parties in the surprise of the discovery."
+
+There could scarcely be a completer reversal of the truth than this
+"hopeless comment," as Professor Brander Matthews has justly called it.
+The whole effect of the long and highly-elaborated scene depends upon
+our knowledge that Lady Teazle is behind the screen. Had the audience
+either not known that there was anybody there, or supposed it to be the
+"little French milliner," where would have been the breathless interest
+which has held us through a whole series of preceding scenes? When Sir
+Peter reveals to Joseph his generous intentions towards his wife, the
+point lies in the fact that Lady Teazle overhears; and this is doubly
+the case when he alludes to Joseph as a suitor for the hand of Maria.
+So, too, with the following scene between Joseph and Charles; in itself
+it would be flat enough; the fact that Sir Peter is listening lends it a
+certain piquancy; but this is ten times multiplied by the fact that Lady
+Teazle, too, hears all that passes. When Joseph is called from the room
+by the arrival of the pretended Old Stanley, there would be no interest
+in his embarrassment if we believed the person behind the screen to be
+the French milliner. And when Sir Peter yields to the temptation to let
+Charles into the secret of his brother's frailty, and we feel every
+moment more certain that the screen will be overthrown, where would be
+the excitement, the tension, if we did not know who was behind it? The
+real drama, in fact, passes behind the screen. It lies in the terror,
+humiliation, and disillusionment which we know to be coursing each other
+through Lady Teazle's soul. And all this Mrs. Oliphant would have
+sacrificed for a single moment of crude surprise!
+
+Now let us hear Professor Matthews's analysis of the effect of the
+scene. He says:
+
+"The playgoer's interest is really not so much as to what is to happen
+as the way in which this event is going to affect the characters
+involved. He thinks it likely enough that Sir Peter will discover that
+Lady Teazle is paying a visit to Joseph Surface; but what he is really
+anxious to learn is the way the husband will take it. What will Lady
+Teazle have to say when she is discovered where she has no business to
+be? How will Sir Peter receive her excuses? What will the effect be on
+the future conduct of both husband and wife? These are the questions
+which the spectators are eager to have answered."
+
+This is an admirable exposition of the frame of mind of the Drury Lane
+audience of May 8, 1777. who first saw the screen overturned. But in the
+thousands of audiences who have since witnessed the play, how many
+individuals, on an average, had any doubt as to what Lady Teazle would
+have to say, and how Sir Peter would receive her excuses? It would
+probably be safe to guess that, for a century past, two-thirds of every
+audience have clearly foreknown the outcome of the situation. Professor
+Matthews himself has edited Sheridan's plays, and probably knows _The
+School for Scandal_ almost by heart; yet we may be pretty sure that any
+reasonably good performance of the Screen Scene will to-day give him
+pleasure not so very much inferior to that which he felt the first time
+he saw it. In this pleasure, it is manifest that mere curiosity as to
+the immediate and subsequent conduct of Sir Peter and Lady Teazle can
+have no part. There is absolutely no question which Professor Matthews,
+or any playgoer who shares his point of view, is "eager to have
+answered."
+
+Assuming, then, that we are all familiar with the Screen Scene, and
+assuming that we, nevertheless, take pleasure in seeing it reasonably
+well acted,[6] let us try to discover of what elements that pleasure is
+composed. It is, no doubt, somewhat complex. For one thing, we have
+pleasure in meeting old friends. Sir Peter, Lady Teazle, Charles, even
+Joseph, are agreeable creatures who have all sorts of pleasant
+associations for us. Again, we love to encounter not only familiar
+characters but familiar jokes. Like Goldsmith's Diggory, we can never
+help laughing at the story of "ould Grouse in the gunroom." The best
+order of dramatic wit does not become stale, but rather grows upon us.
+We relish it at least as much at the tenth repetition as at the first.
+But while these considerations may partly account for the pleasure we
+take in seeing the play as a whole, they do not explain why the Screen
+Scene in particular should interest and excite us. Another source of
+pleasure, as before indicated, may be renewed recognition of the
+ingenuity with which the scene is pieced together. However familiar we
+may be with it, short of actually knowing it by heart, we do not recall
+the details of its dovetailing, and it is a delight to realize afresh
+the neatness of the manipulation by which the tension is heightened from
+speech to speech and from incident to incident. If it be objected that
+this is a pleasure which the critic alone is capable of experiencing, I
+venture to disagree. The most unsophisticated playgoer feels the effect
+of neat workmanship, though he may not be able to put his satisfaction
+into words. It is evident, however, that the mere intellectual
+recognition of fine workmanship is not sufficient to account for the
+emotions with which we witness the Screen Scene. A similar, though, of
+course, not quite identical, effect is produced by scenes of the utmost
+simplicity, in which there is no room for delicacy of dovetailing or
+neatness of manipulation.
+
+Where, then, are we to seek for the fundamental constituent in dramatic
+interest, as distinct from mere curiosity? Perhaps Mrs. Oliphant's
+glaring error may put us on the track of the truth. Mrs. Oliphant
+thought that Sheridan would have shown higher art had he kept the
+audience, as well as Sir Peter and Charles, ignorant of Lady Teazle's
+presence behind the screen. But this, as we saw, is precisely the
+reverse of the truth: the whole interest of the scene arises from our
+knowledge of Lady Teazle's presence. Had Sheridan fallen into Mrs.
+Oliphant's mistake, the little shock of surprise which the first-night
+audience would have felt when the screen was thrown down would have been
+no compensation at all for the comparative tameness and pointlessness of
+the preceding passages. Thus we see that the greater part of our
+pleasure arises precisely from the fact that we know what Sir Peter and
+Charles do not know, or, in other words, that we have a clear vision of
+all the circumstances, relations, and implications of a certain
+conjuncture of affairs, in which two, at least, of the persons concerned
+are ignorantly and blindly moving towards issues of which they do not
+dream. We are, in fact, in the position of superior intelligences
+contemplating, with miraculous clairvoyance, the stumblings and
+tumblings of poor blind mortals straying through the labyrinth of life.
+Our seat in the theatre is like a throne on the Epicurean Olympus,
+whence we can view with perfect intelligence, but without participation
+or responsibility, the intricate reactions of human destiny. And this
+sense of superiority does not pall upon us. When Othello comes on the
+scene, radiant and confident in Desdemona's love, our knowledge of the
+fate awaiting him makes him a hundred times more interesting than could
+any mere curiosity as to what was about to happen. It is our prevision
+of Nora's exit at the end of the last act that lends its dramatic
+poignancy to her entrance at the beginning of the first.
+
+There is nothing absolutely new in this theory.[7] "The irony of fate"
+has long been recognized as one of the main elements of dramatic effect.
+It has been especially dwelt upon in relation to Greek tragedy, of which
+the themes were all known in advance even to "first-day" audiences. We
+should take but little interest in seeing the purple carpet spread for
+Agamemnon's triumphal entry into his ancestral halls, if it were not for
+our foreknowledge of the net and the axe prepared for him. But, familiar
+as is this principle, I am not aware that it has hitherto been extended,
+as I suggest that it should be, to cover the whole field of dramatic
+interest. I suggest that the theorists have hitherto dwelt far too much
+on curiosity[8]--which may be defined as the interest of ignorance--and
+far too little on the feeling of superiority, of clairvoyance, with
+which we contemplate a foreknown action, whether of a comic or of a
+tragic cast. Of course the action must be, essentially if not in every
+detail, true to nature. We can derive no sense of superiority from our
+foreknowledge of an arbitrary or preposterous action; and that, I take
+it, is the reason why a good many plays have an initial success of
+curiosity, but cease to attract when their plot becomes familiar. Again,
+we take no pleasure in foreknowing the fate of wholly uninteresting
+people; which is as much as to say that character is indispensable to
+enduring interest in drama. With these provisos, I suggest a
+reconstruction of our theories of dramatic interest, in which mere
+first-night curiosity shall be relegated to the subordinate place which
+by right belongs to it.
+
+Nevertheless, we must come back to the point that there is always the
+ordeal of the first night to be faced, and that the plays are
+comparatively few which have lived-down a bad first-night. It is true
+that specifically first-night merit is a trivial matter compared with
+what may be called thousandth-performance merit; but it is equally true
+that there is no inconsistency between the two orders of merit, and that
+a play will never be less esteemed on its thousandth performance for
+having achieved a conspicuous first-night success. The practical lesson
+which seems to emerge from these considerations is that a wise
+theatrical policy would seek to diminish the all-importance of the
+first-night, and to give a play a greater chance of recovery than it has
+under present conditions, from the depressing effect of an inauspicious
+production. This is the more desirable as its initial misadventure may
+very likely be due to external and fortuitous circumstances, wholly
+unconnected with its inherent qualities.
+
+At the same time, we are bound to recognize that, from the very nature
+of the case, our present inquiry must be far more concerned with
+first-night than with thousandth-performance merit. Craftsmanship can,
+within limits, be acquired, genius cannot; and it is craftsmanship that
+pilots us through the perils of the first performance, genius that
+carries us on to the apotheosis of the thousandth. Therefore, our
+primary concern must be with the arousing and sustaining of curiosity,
+though we should never forget that it is only a means to the ultimate
+enlistment of the higher and more abiding forms of interest.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+[Footnote 1: The view that the dramatist has only to think of pleasing
+himself is elsewhere dealt with.]
+
+[Footnote 2: Two dramatists who have read these pages in proof, exclaim
+at this passage. The one says, "No, no!" the other asks, "Why?" I can
+only reiterate that, where there exists a strong and generally accepted
+tradition, the dramatist not only runs counter to it at his peril, but
+goes outside the true domain of his art in so doing. New truth, in
+history, must be established either by new documents, or by a careful
+and detailed re-interpretation of old documents; but the stage is not
+the place either for the production of documents or for historical
+exegesis. It is needless to say that where the popular mind is unbiased,
+the dramatist's hands are free. For instance, I presume that one might,
+in England, take any view one pleased of the character of Mary. Queen of
+Scots; but a highly unfavourable view would scarcely be accepted by
+Scottish audiences. Similarly, it would be both dangerous and
+unprofitable to present on the English stage any very damaging "scandal
+about Queen Elizabeth." Historical criticism, I understand, does not
+accept the view that Robespierre was mainly responsible for the Reign of
+Terror, and that his death betokened a general revolt against his
+sanguinary tyranny; but it would be very hard for any dramatist to
+secure general acceptance for a more accurate reading of his character
+and function. Some further remarks on this subject will be found in
+Chapter XIII.]
+
+[Footnote 3: A malicious anecdote to a similar effect was current in the
+early days of Sir Henry Irving's career. It was said that at Bristol one
+night, when Mr. Irving, as Hamlet, "took his call" after the first act,
+a man turned to his neighbour in the pit and said, "Can you tell me,
+sir, does that young man appear much in this play?" His neighbour
+informed him that Hamlet was rather largely concerned in the action,
+whereupon the inquirer remarked, "Oh! Then I'm off!"]
+
+[Footnote 4: If it be well done, it may remain highly effective in spite
+of being discounted by previous knowledge. For instance, the clock-trick
+in _Raffles_ was none the less amusing because every one was on the
+look-out for it.]
+
+[Footnote 5: The question whether it is ever politic for a playwright to
+keep a secret from his audience is discussed elsewhere. What I have here
+in mind is not an ordinary secret, but a more or less tricky effect of
+surprise.]
+
+[Footnote 6: The pleasure received from exceptionally good acting is, of
+course, a different matter. I assume that the acting is merely competent
+enough to pass muster without irritating us, and so distracting our
+attention.]
+
+[Footnote 7: I myself expressed it in slightly different terms nearly
+ten years ago. "Curiosity," I said, "is the accidental relish of a
+single night; whereas the essential and abiding pleasure of the theatre
+lies in foreknowledge. In relation to the characters in the drama, the
+audience are as gods looking before and after. Sitting in the theatre,
+we taste, for a moment, the glory of omniscience. With vision unsealed,
+we watch the gropings of purblind mortals after happiness, and smile at
+their stumblings, their blunders, their futile quests, their misplaced
+exultations, their groundless panics. To keep a secret from us is to
+reduce us to their level, and deprive us of our clairvoyant aloofness.
+There may be a pleasure in that too; we may join with zest in the game
+of blind-man's-buff; but the theatre is in its essence a place where we
+are privileged to take off the bandage we wear in daily life, and to
+contemplate, with laughter or with tears, the blindfold gambols of our
+neighbours."]
+
+[Footnote 8: Here an acute critic writes: "On the whole I agree; but I
+do think there is dramatic interest to be had out of curiosity, through
+the identification, so to speak, of the audience with the discovering
+persons on the stage. It is an interest of sympathy, not to be despised,
+rather than an interest of actual curiosity."]
+
+
+
+
+_CHAPTER X_
+
+FORESHADOWING, NOT FORESTALLING
+
+
+We return now to the point at which the foregoing disquisition--it is
+not a digression--became necessary. We had arrived at the general
+principle that the playwright's chief aim in his first act ought to be
+to arouse and carry forward the interest of the audience. This may seem
+a tolerably obvious statement; but it is worth while to examine a little
+more closely into its implications.
+
+As to arousing the interest of the audience, it is clear that very
+little specific advice can be given. One can only say, "Find an
+interesting theme, state its preliminaries clearly and crisply, and let
+issue be joined without too much delay." There can be no rules for
+finding an interesting theme, any more than for catching the Blue Bird.
+At a later stage we may perhaps attempt a summary enumeration of themes
+which are not interesting, which have exhausted any interest they ever
+possessed, and "repay careful avoidance." But such an enumeration would
+be out of place here, where we are studying principles of form apart
+from details of matter.
+
+The arousing of interest, however, is one thing, the carrying-forward of
+interest is another; and on the latter point there are one or two things
+that may profitably be said. Each act, as we have seen, should consist
+of, or at all events contain, a subordinate crisis, contributory to the
+main crisis of the play: and the art of act-construction lies in giving
+to each act an individuality and interest of its own, without so
+rounding it off as to obscure even for a moment its subsidiary, and, in
+the case of the first act, its introductory, relation to the whole. This
+is a point which many dramatists ignore or undervalue. Very often, when
+the curtain falls on a first or a second act, one says, "This is a
+fairly good act in itself; but whither does it lead? what is to come of
+it all?" It awakens no definite anticipation, and for two pins one would
+take up one's hat and go home. The author has neglected the art of
+carrying-forward the interest.
+
+It is curious to note that in the most unsophisticated forms of
+melodrama this art is deliberately ignored. In plays of the type of _The
+Worst Woman in London_, it appears to be an absolute canon of art that
+every act must have a "happy ending"--that the curtain must always fall
+on the hero, or, preferably, the comic man, in an attitude of triumph,
+while the villain and villainess cower before him in baffled impotence.
+We have perfect faith, of course, that the villain will come up smiling
+in the next act, and proceed with his nefarious practices; but, for the
+moment, virtue has it all its own way. This, however, is a very artless
+formula which has somehow developed of recent years; and it is doubtful
+whether even the audiences to which these plays appeal would not in
+reality prefer something a little less inept in the matter of
+construction. As soon as we get above this level, at all events, the
+fostering of anticipation becomes a matter of the first importance. The
+problem is, not to cut short the spectator's interest, or to leave it
+fluttering at a loose end, but to provide it either with a
+clearly-foreseen point in the next act towards which it can reach
+onwards, or with a definite enigma, the solution of which is impatiently
+awaited. In general terms, a bridge should be provided between one act
+and another, along which the spectator's mind cannot but travel with
+eager anticipation. And this is particularly important, or particularly
+apt to be neglected, at the end of the first act. At a later point, if
+the interest does not naturally and inevitably carry itself forward, the
+case is hopeless indeed.
+
+To illustrate what is meant by the carrying-forward of interest, let me
+cite one or two instances in which it is achieved with conspicuous
+success.
+
+In Oscar Wilde's first modern comedy, _Lady Windermere's Fan_, the
+heroine, Lady Windermere, has learnt that her husband has of late been
+seen to call very frequently at the house of a certain Mrs. Erlynne,
+whom nobody knows. Her suspicions thus aroused, she searches her
+husband's desk, discovers a private and locked bank-book, cuts it open,
+and finds that one large cheque after another has been drawn in favour
+of the lady in question. At this inopportune moment, Lord Windermere
+appears with a request that Mrs. Erlynne shall be invited to their
+reception that evening. Lady Windermere indignantly refuses, her husband
+insists, and, finally, with his own hand, fills in an invitation-card
+and sends it by messenger to Mrs. Erlynne. Here some playwrights might
+have been content to finish the act. It is sufficiently evident that
+Lady Windermere will not submit to the apparent insult, and that
+something exciting may be looked for at the reception in the following
+act. But Oscar Wilde was not content with this vague expectancy. He
+first defined it, and then he underlined the definition, in a perfectly
+natural and yet ingenious and skilful way. The day happens to be Lady
+Windermere's birthday, and at the beginning of the act her husband has
+given her a beautiful ostrich-feather fan. When he sends off the
+invitation, she turns upon him and says, "If that woman crosses my
+threshold, I shall strike her across the face with this fan." Here,
+again, many a dramatist might be content to bring down his curtain. The
+announcement of Lady Windermere's resolve carries forward the interest
+quite clearly enough for all practical purposes. But even this did not
+satisfy Wilde. He imagined a refinement, simple, probable, and yet
+immensely effective, which put an extraordinarily keen edge upon the
+expectancy of the audience. He made Lady Windermere ring for her butler,
+and say: "Parker, be sure you pronounce the names of the guests very
+distinctly to-night. Sometimes you speak so fast that I miss them. I am
+particularly anxious to hear the names quite clearly, so as to make no
+mistake." I well remember the effect which this little touch produced on
+the first night. The situation was, in itself, open to grave objections.
+There is no plausible excuse for Lord Windermere's obstinacy in forcing
+Mrs. Erlynne upon his wife, and risking a violent scandal in order to
+postpone an explanation which he must know to be ultimately inevitable.
+Though one had not as yet learnt the precise facts of the case, one felt
+pretty confident that his lordship's conduct would scarcely justify
+itself. But interest is largely independent of critical judgment, and,
+for my own part, I can aver that, when the curtain fell on the first
+act, a five-pound note would not have bribed me to leave the theatre
+without assisting at Lady Windermere's reception in the second act. That
+is the frame of mind which the author should try to beget in his
+audience; and Oscar Wilde, then almost a novice, had, in this one little
+passage between Lady Windermere and the butler, shown himself a master
+of the art of dramatic story-telling. The dramatist has higher functions
+than mere story-telling; but this is fundamental, and the true artist is
+the last to despise it.[1]
+
+For another example of a first act brought to what one may call a
+judiciously tantalizing conclusion, I turn to Mr. R.C. Carton's comedy
+_Wheels within Wheels._ Lord Eric Chantrell has just returned from
+abroad after many years' absence. He drives straight to the bachelor
+flat of his old chum, Egerton Vartrey. At the flat he finds only his
+friend's valet, Vartrey himself has been summoned to Scotland that very
+evening, and the valet is on the point of following him. He knows,
+however, that his master would wish his old friend to make himself at
+home in the flat; so he presently goes off, leaving the newcomer
+installed for the night. Lord Eric goes to the bedroom to change his
+clothes; and, the stage being thus left vacant, we hear a latch-key
+turning in the outer door. A lady in evening dress enters, goes up to
+the bureau at the back of the stage, and calmly proceeds to break it
+open and ransack it. While she is thus burglariously employed, Lord Eric
+enters, and cannot refrain from a slight expression of surprise. The
+lady takes the situation with humorous calmness, they fall into
+conversation, and it is manifest that at every word Lord Eric is more
+and more fascinated by the fair house-breaker. She learns who he is, and
+evidently knows all about him; but she is careful to give him no inkling
+of her own identity. At last she takes her leave, and he expresses such
+an eager hope of being allowed to renew their acquaintance, that it
+amounts to a declaration of a peculiar interest in her. Thereupon she
+addresses him to this effect: "Has it occurred to you to wonder how I
+got into your friend's rooms? I will show you how"--and, producing a
+latch-key, she holds it up, with all its questionable implications,
+before his eyes. Then she lays it on the table, says: "I leave you to
+draw your own conclusions" and departs. A better opening for a light
+social comedy could scarcely be devised. We have no difficulty in
+guessing that the lady, who is not quite young, and has clearly a strong
+sense of humour, is freakishly turning appearances against herself, by
+way of throwing a dash of cold water on Lord Eric's sudden flame of
+devotion. But we long for a clear explanation of the whole quaint little
+episode; and here, again, no reasonable offer would tempt us to leave
+the theatre before our curiosity is satisfied. The remainder of the
+play, though amusing, is unfortunately not up to the level of the first
+act; else _Wheels within Wheels_ would be a little classic of
+light comedy.
+
+For a third example of interest carefully carried forward, I turn to a
+recent Norwegian play, _The Idyll_, by Peter Egge. At the very rise of
+the curtain, we find Inga Gar, wife of an author and journalist, Dr.
+Gar, reading, with evident tokens of annoyance and distaste, a new book
+of poems by one Rolfe Ringve. Before her marriage, Inga was an actress
+of no great talent; Ringve made himself conspicuous by praising her far
+beyond her merits; and when, at last, an engagement between them was
+announced, people shrugged their shoulders and said: "They are going to
+regularize the situation." As a matter of fact (of this we have early
+assurance), though Ringve has been her ardent lover, Inga has neither
+loved him nor been his mistress. Ringve being called abroad, she has,
+during his absence, broken off her engagement to him, and has then,
+about a year before the play opens, married Dr. Gar, to whom she is
+devoted. While Gar is away on a short lecture tour, Ringve has published
+the book of love-poems which we find her reading. They are very
+remarkable poems; they have already made a great stir in the literary
+world; and interest is all the keener for the fact that they are
+evidently inspired by his passion for Inga, and are couched in such a
+tone of intimacy as to create a highly injurious impression of the
+relations between them. Gar, having just come home, has no suspicion of
+the nature of the book; and when an editor, who cherishes a grudge
+against him, conceives the malicious idea of asking him to review
+Ringve's masterpiece, he consents with alacrity. One or two small
+incidents have in the meantime shown us that there is a little rift in
+the idyllic happiness of Inga and Gar, arising from her inveterate habit
+of telling trifling fibs to avoid facing the petty annoyances of life.
+For instance, when Gar asks her casually whether she has read Ringve's
+poems, a foolish denial slips out, though she knows that the cut pages
+of the book will give her the lie. These incidents point to a state of
+unstable equilibrium in the relations between husband and wife;
+wherefore, when we see Gar, at the end of the act, preparing to read
+Ringve's poems, our curiosity is very keen as to how he will take them.
+We feel the next hour to be big with fate for these two people; and we
+long for the curtain to rise again upon the threatened household. The
+fuse has been fired; we are all agog for the explosion.
+
+In Herr Egge's place, I should have been inclined to have dropped my
+curtain upon Gar, with the light of the reading-lamp full upon him, in
+the act of opening the book, and then to have shown him, at the
+beginning of the second act, in exactly the same position. With more
+delicate art, perhaps, the author interposes a little domestic incident
+at the end of the first act, while leaving it clearly impressed on our
+minds that the reading of the poems is only postponed by a few minutes.
+That is the essential point: the actual moment upon which the curtain
+falls is of minor importance. What is of vast importance, on the other
+hand, is that the expectation of the audience should not be baffled, and
+that the curtain should rise upon the immediate sequel to the reading of
+the poems. This is, in the exact sense of the words, _a scène à
+faire_--an obligatory scene. The author has aroused in us a reasonable
+expectation of it, and should he choose to balk us--to raise his
+curtain, say, a week, or a month, later--we should feel that we had been
+trifled with. The general theory of the _scène à faire_ will presently
+come up for discussion. In the meantime, I merely make the obvious
+remark that it is worse than useless to awaken a definite expectation in
+the breast of the audience, and then to disappoint it.[2]
+
+The works of Sir Arthur Pinero afford many examples of interest very
+skilfully carried forward. In his farces--let no one despise the
+technical lessons to be learnt from a good farce--there is always an
+_adventure_ afoot, whose development we eagerly anticipate. When the
+curtain falls on the first act of _The Magistrate_, we foresee the
+meeting of all the characters at the Hôtel des Princes, and are
+impatient to assist at it. In _The Schoolmistress_, we would not for
+worlds miss Peggy Hesseltine's party, which we know awaits us in Act II.
+An excellent example, of a more serious order, is to be found in _The
+Benefit of the Doubt_. When poor Theo, rebuffed by her husband's chilly
+scepticism, goes off on some manifestly harebrained errand, we divine,
+as do her relatives, that she is about to commit social suicide by
+seeking out John Allingham; and we feel more than curiosity as to the
+event--we feel active concern, almost anxiety, as though our own
+personal interests were involved. Our anticipation is heightened, too,
+when we see Sir Fletcher Portwood and Mrs. Cloys set off upon her track.
+This gives us a definite point to which to look forward, while leaving
+the actual course of events entirely undefined. It fulfils one of the
+great ends of craftsmanship, in foreshadowing without forestalling an
+intensely interesting conjuncture of affairs.
+
+I have laid stress on the importance of carrying forward the interest of
+the audience because it is a detail that is often overlooked. There is,
+as a rule, no difficulty in the matter, always assuming that the theme
+be not inherently devoid of interest. One could mention many plays in
+which the author has, from sheer inadvertence, failed to carry forward
+the interest of the first act, though a very little readjustment, or a
+trifling exercise of invention, would have enabled him to do so.
+_Pillars of Society_, indeed, may be taken as an instance, though not a
+very flagrant one. Such interest as we feel at the end of the first act
+is vague and unfocused. We are sure that something is to come of the
+return of Lona and Johan, but we have no inkling as to what that
+something may be. If we guess that the so-called black sheep of the
+family will prove to be the white sheep, it is only because we know that
+it is Ibsen's habit to attack respectability and criticize accepted
+moral values--it is not because of anything that he has told us, or
+hinted to us, in the play itself. In no other case does he leave our
+interest at such a loose end as in this, his prentice-work in modern
+drama. In _The League of Youth_, an earlier play, but of an altogether
+lighter type, the interest is much more definitely carried forward at
+the end of the first act. Stensgaard has attacked Chamberlain Bratsberg
+in a rousing speech, and the Chamberlain has been induced to believe
+that the attack was directed not against himself, but against his enemy
+Monsen. Consequently he invites Stensgaard to his great dinner-party,
+and this invitation Stensgaard regards as a cowardly attempt at
+conciliation. We clearly see a crisis looming ahead, when this
+misunderstanding shall be cleared up; and we consequently look forward
+with lively interest to the dinner-party of the second act--which ends,
+as a matter of fact, in a brilliant scene of comedy.
+
+The principle, to recapitulate, is simply this: a good first act should
+never end in a blank wall. There should always be a window in it, with
+at least a glimpse of something attractive beyond. In _Pillars of
+Society_ there is a window, indeed; but it is of ground glass.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+[Footnote 1: That great story-teller, Alexandra Dumas _pere,_ those a
+straightforward way of carrying forward the interest at the end of the
+first act of _Henri III et sa Cour._ The Due de Guise, insulted by
+Saint-Mégrin, beckons to his henchman and says, as the curtain falls,
+_"Qu'on me cherche les mêmes hommes qui ont assassiné Dugast!"_]
+
+[Footnote 2: There are limits to the validity of this rule, as applied
+to minor incidents. For example, it may sometimes be a point of art to
+lead the audience to expect the appearance of one person, when in fact
+another is about to enter. But it is exceedingly dangerous to baffle the
+carefully fostered anticipation of an important scene. See Chapters
+XVII and XXI.]
+
+
+
+
+_BOOK III_
+
+THE MIDDLE
+
+
+
+
+_CHAPTER XI_
+
+TENSION AND ITS SUSPENSION
+
+
+In the days of the five-act dogma, each act was supposed to have its
+special and pre-ordained function. Freytag assigns to the second act, as
+a rule, the _Steigerung_ or heightening--the working-up, one might call
+it--of the interest. But the second act, in modern plays, has often to
+do all the work of the three middle acts under the older dispensation;
+wherefore the theory of their special functions has more of a historical
+than of a practical interest. For our present purposes, we may treat the
+interior section of a play as a unit, whether it consist of one, two, or
+three acts.
+
+The first act may be regarded as the porch or vestibule through which we
+pass into the main fabric--solemn or joyous, fantastic or austere--of
+the actual drama. Sometimes, indeed, the vestibule is reduced to a mere
+threshold which can be crossed in two strides; but normally the first
+act, or at any rate the greater part of it, is of an introductory
+character. Let us conceive, then, that we have passed the vestibule, and
+are now to study the principles on which the body of the structure
+is reared.
+
+In the first place, is the architectural metaphor a just one? Is there,
+or ought there to be, any analogy between a drama and a
+finely-proportioned building? The question has already been touched on
+in the opening paragraphs of Chapter VIII; but we may now look into it a
+little more closely.
+
+What is the characteristic of a fine piece of architecture? Manifestly
+an organic relation, a carefully-planned interdependence, between all
+its parts. A great building is a complete and rounded whole, just like a
+living organism. It is informed by an inner law of harmony and
+proportion, and cannot be run up at haphazard, with no definite and
+pre-determined design. Can we say the same of a great play?
+
+I think we can. Even in those plays which present a picture rather than
+an action, we ought to recognize a principle of selection, proportion,
+composition, which, if not absolutely organic, is at any rate the
+reverse of haphazard. We may not always be able to define the principle,
+to put it clearly in words; but if we feel that the author has been
+guided by no principle, that he has proceeded on mere hand-to-mouth
+caprice, that there is no "inner law of harmony and proportion" in his
+work, then we instinctively relegate it to a low place in our esteem.
+Hauptmann's _Weavers_ certainly cannot be called a piece of dramatic
+architecture, like _Rosmersholm_ or _Iris_; but that does not mean that
+it is a mere rambling series of tableaux. It is not easy to define the
+principle of unity in that brilliant comedy _The Madras House_; but we
+nevertheless feel that a principle of unity exists; or, if we do not, so
+much the worse for the play and its author.
+
+There is, indeed, a large class of plays, often popular, and sometimes
+meritorious, in relation to which the architectural metaphor entirely
+breaks down. They are what may be called "running fire" plays. We have
+all seen children setting a number of wooden blocks on end, at equal
+intervals, and then tilting over the first so that it falls against the
+second, which in turn falls against the third, and so on, till the whole
+row, with a rapid clack-clack-clack, lies flat upon the table. This is
+called a "running fire"; and this is the structural principle of a good
+many plays. We feel that the playwright is, so to speak, inventing as he
+goes along--that the action, like the child's fantastic serpentine of
+blocks, might at any moment take a turn in any possible direction
+without falsifying its antecedents or our expectations. No part of it is
+necessarily involved in any other part. If the play were found too long
+or too short, an act might be cut out or written in without
+necessitating any considerable readjustments in the other acts. The play
+is really a series of episodes,
+
+  "Which might, odd bobs, sir! in judicious hands,
+  Extend from here to Mesopotamy."
+
+The episodes may grow out of each other plausibly enough, but by no
+pre-ordained necessity, and with no far-reaching interdependence. We
+live, in such plays, from moment to moment, foreseeing nothing, desiring
+nothing; and though this frame of mind may be mildly agreeable, it
+involves none of that complexity of sensation with which we contemplate
+a great piece of architecture, or follow the development of a
+finely-constructed drama. To this order belong many cape-and-sword plays
+and detective dramas--plays like _The Adventure of Lady Ursula_, _The
+Red Robe_, the Musketeer romances that were at one time so popular, and
+most plays of the _Sherlock Holmes_ and _Raffles_ type. But pieces of a
+more ambitious order have been known to follow the same formula--some of
+the works, for instance, of Mr. Charles McEvoy, to say nothing of Mr.
+Bernard Shaw.
+
+We may take it, I think, that the architectural analogy holds good of
+every play which can properly be said to be "constructed." Construction
+means dramatic architecture, or in other words, a careful
+pre-arrangement of proportions and interdependencies. But to carry
+beyond this point the analogy between the two arts would be fantastic
+and unhelpful. The one exists in space, the other in time. The one seeks
+to beget in the spectator a state of placid, though it may be of
+aspiring, contemplation; the other, a state of more or less acute
+tension. The resemblances between music and architecture are, as is well
+known, much more extensive and illuminating. It might not be wholly
+fanciful to call music a sort of middle term between the two other arts.
+
+A great part of the secret of dramatic architecture lies in the one word
+"tension." To engender, maintain, suspend, heighten and resolve a state
+of tension--that is the main object of the dramatist's craft.
+
+What do we mean by tension? Clearly a stretching out, a stretching
+forward, of the mind. That is the characteristic mental attitude of the
+theatrical audience. If the mind is not stretching forward, the body
+will soon weary of its immobility and constraint. Attention may be
+called the momentary correlative of tension. When we are intent on what
+is to come, we are attentive to what is there and then happening. The
+term tension is sometimes applied, not to the mental state of the
+audience, but to the relation of the characters on the stage. "A scene
+of high tension" is primarily one in which the actors undergo a great
+emotional strain. But this is, after all, only a means towards
+heightening of the mental tension of the audience. In such a scene the
+mind stretches forward, no longer to something vague and distant, but to
+something instant and imminent.
+
+In discussing what Freytag calls the _erregende Moment,_ we might have
+defined it as the starting-point of the tension. A reasonable audience
+will, if necessary, endure a certain amount of exposition, a certain
+positing of character and circumstance, before the tension sets in; but
+when it once has set in, the playwright must on no account suffer it to
+relax until he deliberately resolves it just before the fall of the
+curtain. There are, of course, minor rhythms of tension and resolution,
+like the harmonic vibrations of a violin-string. That is implied when we
+say that a play consists of a great crisis worked out through a series
+of minor crises. But the main tension, once initiated, must never be
+relaxed. If it is, the play is over, though the author may have omitted
+to note the fact. Not infrequently, he begins a new play under the
+impression that he is finishing the old one. That is what Shakespeare
+did in _The Merchant of Venice._ The fifth act is an independent
+afterpiece, though its independence is slightly disguised by the fact
+that the _erregende Moment_ of the new play follows close upon the end
+of the old one, with no interact between. A very exacting technical
+criticism might accuse Ibsen of verging towards the same fault in _An
+Enemy of the People._ There the tension is practically resolved with Dr.
+Stockmann's ostracism at the end of the fourth act. At that point, if it
+did not know that there was another act to come, an audience might go
+home in perfect content. The fifth act is a sort of epilogue or sequel,
+built out of the materials of the preceding drama, but not forming an
+integral part of it. With a brief exposition to set forth the antecedent
+circumstances, it would be quite possible to present the fifth act as an
+independent comedietta.
+
+But here a point of great importance calls for our notice. Though the
+tension, once started, must never be relaxed: though it ought, on the
+contrary, to be heightened or tightened (as you choose to put it) from
+act to act; yet there are times when it may without disadvantage, or
+even with marked advantage, be temporarily suspended. In other words,
+the stretching-forward, without in any way slackening, may fall into the
+background of our consciousness, while other matters, the relevance of
+which may not be instantly apparent, are suffered to occupy the
+foreground. We know all too well, in everyday experience, that tension
+is not really relaxed by a temporary distraction. The dread of a coming
+ordeal in the witness-box or on the operating-table may be forcibly
+crushed down like a child's jack-in-the-box; but we are always conscious
+of the effort to compress it, and we know that it will spring up again
+the moment that effort ceases. Sir Arthur Pinero's play, _The
+Profligate,_ was written at a time when it was the fashion to give each
+act a sub-title; and one of its acts is headed "The Sword of Damocles."
+That is, indeed, the inevitable symbol of dramatic tension: we see a
+sword of Damocles (even though it be only a farcical blade of painted
+lathe) impending over someone's head: and when once we are confident
+that it will fall at the fated moment, we do not mind having our
+attention momentarily diverted to other matters. A rather flagrant
+example of suspended attention is afforded by Hamlet's advice to the
+Players. We know that Hamlet has hung a sword of Damocles over the
+King's head in the shape of the mimic murder-scene; and, while it is
+preparing, we are quite willing to have our attention switched off to
+certain abstract questions of dramatic criticism. The scene might have
+been employed to heighten the tension. Instead of giving the Players (in
+true princely fashion) a lesson in the general principles of their art,
+Hamlet might have specially "coached" them in the "business" of the
+scene to be enacted, and thus doubly impressed on the audience his
+resolve to "tent" the King "to the quick." I am far from suggesting that
+this would have been desirable; but it would obviously have been
+possible.[1] Shakespeare, as the experience of three centuries has
+shown, did right in judging that the audience was already sufficiently
+intent on the coming ordeal, and would welcome an interlude of
+aesthetic theory.
+
+There are times, moreover, when it is not only permissible to suspend
+the tension, but when, by so doing, a great artist can produce a
+peculiar and admirable effect. A sudden interruption, on the very brink
+of a crisis, may, as it were, whet the appetite of the audience for what
+is to come. We see in the Porter scene in Macbeth a suspension of this
+nature; but Shakespeare used it sparingly, unless, indeed, we are to
+consider as a deliberate point of art the retardation of movement
+commonly observable in the fourth acts of his tragedies. Ibsen, on the
+other hand, deliberately employed this device on three conspicuous
+occasions. The entrance of Dr. Rank in the last act of _A Doll's House_
+is a wholly unnecessary interruption to the development of the crisis
+between Nora and Helmer. The scene might be entirely omitted without
+leaving a perceptible hiatus in the action; yet who does not feel that
+this brief respite lends gathered impetus to the main action when it is
+resumed? The other instances are offered by the two apparitions of Ulric
+Brendel in _Rosmersholm._ The first occurs when Rosmer is on the very
+verge of his momentous confession to Kroll, the second when Rosmer and
+Rebecca are on the very verge of their last great resolve; and in each
+case we feel a distinct value (apart from the inherent quality of the
+Brendel scenes) in the very fact that the tension has been momentarily
+suspended. Such a _rallentando_ effect is like the apparent pause in the
+rush of a river before it thunders over a precipice.
+
+The possibility of suspending tension is of wider import than may at
+first sight appear. But for it, our dramas would have to be all bone and
+muscle, like the figures in an anatomical textbook. As it is, we are
+able, without relaxing tension, to shift it to various planes of
+consciousness, and thus find leisure to reproduce the surface aspects of
+life, with some of its accidents and irrelevances. For example, when the
+playwright has, at the end of his first act, succeeded in carrying
+onward the spectator's interest, and giving him something definite to
+look forward to, it does not at all follow that the expected scene,
+situation, revelation, or what not, should come at the beginning of the
+second act. In some cases it must do so; when, as in _The Idyll_ above
+cited, the spectator has been carefully induced to expect some imminent
+conjuncture which cannot be postponed. But this can scarcely be called a
+typical case. More commonly, when an author has enlisted the curiosity
+of his audience of some definite point, he will be in no great hurry to
+satisfy and dissipate it. He may devote the early part of the second act
+to working-up the same line of interest to a higher pitch; or he may
+hold it in suspense while he prepares some further development of the
+action. The closeness with which a line of interest, once started, ought
+to be followed up, must depend in some measure on the nature and tone of
+the play. If it be a serious play, in which character and action are
+very closely intertwined, any pause or break in the conjoint development
+is to be avoided. If, on the other hand, it is a play of light and
+graceful dialogue, in which the action is a pretext for setting the
+characters in motion rather than the chief means towards their
+manifestation, then the playwright can afford to relax the rate of his
+progress, and even to wander a little from the straight line of advance.
+In such a play, even the old institution of the "underplot" is not
+inadmissible; though the underplot ought scarcely to be a "plot," but
+only some very slight thread of interest, involving no strain on the
+attention.[2] It may almost be called an established practice, on the
+English stage, to let the dalliance of a pair of boy-and-girl lovers
+relieve the main interest of a more or less serious comedy; and there is
+no particular harm in such a convention, if it be not out of keeping
+with the general character of the play. In some plays the substance--the
+character-action, if one may so call it--is the main, and indeed the
+only, thing. In others the substance, though never unimportant, is in
+some degree subordinate to the embroideries; and it is for the
+playwright to judge how far this subordination may safely be carried.
+
+One principle, however, may be emphasized as almost universally valid,
+and that is that the end of an act should never leave the action just
+where it stood at the beginning. An audience has an instinctive sense
+of, and desire for, progress. It does not like to realize that things
+have been merely marking time. Even if it has been thoroughly
+entertained, from moment to moment, during the progress of an act, it
+does not like to feel at the end that nothing has really happened. The
+fall of the curtain gives time for reflection, and for the ordering of
+impressions which, while the action was afoot, were more or less vague
+and confused. It is therefore of great importance that each act should,
+to put it briefly, bear looking back upon--that it should appear to
+stand in due proportion to the general design of the play, and should
+not be felt to have been empty, or irrelevant, or disappointing. This
+is, indeed, a plain corollary from the principle of tension. Suspended
+it may be, sometimes with positive advantage; but it must not be
+suspended too long; and suspension for a whole act is equivalent to
+relaxation.
+
+To sum up: when once a play has begun to move, its movement ought to
+proceed continuously, and with gathering momentum; or, if it stands
+still for a space, the stoppage ought to be deliberate and purposeful.
+It is fatal when the author thinks it is moving, while in fact it is
+only revolving on its own axis.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+[Footnote 1: This method of heightening the tension would have been
+somewhat analogous to that employed by Oscar Wilde in Lady Windermere's
+instructions to her butler, cited on p. 115.]
+
+[Footnote 2: Dryden (_Of Dramatic Poesy_, p. 56, ed. Arnold, 1903) says:
+"Our plays, besides the main design, have underplots or by-concernments,
+of less considerable persons and intrigues, which are carried on with
+the motion of the main plot; as they say the orb of the fixed stars, and
+those of the planets, though they have motions of their own, are whirled
+about by the motion of the _primum mobile_, in which they are
+contained." This is an admirable description of the ideal underplot, as
+conceived by our forefathers; but we find that two lines of tension jar
+with and weaken each other.]
+
+
+
+
+_CHAPTER XII_
+
+PREPARATION: THE FINGER-POST
+
+
+We shall find, on looking into it, that most of the technical maxims
+that have any validity may be traced back, directly or indirectly, to
+the great principle of tension. The art of construction is summed up,
+first, in giving the mind of an audience something to which to stretch
+forward, and, secondly, in not letting it feel that it has stretched
+forward in vain. "You will find it infinitely pleasing," says Dryden,[1]
+"to be led in a labyrinth of design, where you see some of your way
+before you, yet discern not the end till you arrive at it." Or, he might
+have added, "if you foresee the end, but not the means by which it is to
+be reached." In drama, as in all art, the "how" is often more important
+than the "what."
+
+No technical maxim is more frequently cited than the remark of the
+younger Dumas: "The art of the theatre is the art of preparations." This
+is true in a larger sense than he intended; but at the same time there
+are limits to its truth, which we must not fail to observe.
+
+Dumas, as we know, was an inveterate preacher, using the stage as a
+pulpit for the promulgation of moral and social ideas which were, in
+their day, considered very advanced and daring. The primary meaning of
+his maxim, then, was that a startling idea, or a scene wherein such an
+idea was implied, ought not to be sprung upon an audience wholly
+unprepared to accept it. For instance, in _Monsieur Alphonse,_ a
+husband, on discovering that his wife has had an intrigue before their
+marriage, and that a little girl whom she wishes to adopt is really her
+daughter, instantly raises her from the ground where she lies grovelling
+at his feet, and says: "Créature de Dieu, toi qui as failli et te
+repens, relève toi, je te pardonne." This evangelical attitude on the
+part of Admiral de Montaiglin was in itself very surprising, and perhaps
+not wholly admirable, to the Parisian public of 1873; but Dumas had so
+"prepared" the _coup de théâtre_ that it passed with very slight
+difficulty on the first night, and with none at all at subsequent
+performances and revivals. How had he "prepared" it? Why, by playing, in
+a score of subtle ways, upon the sympathies and antipathies of the
+audience. For instance, as Sarcey points out, he had made M. de
+Montaiglin a sailor, "accustomed, during his distant voyages, to long
+reveries in view of the boundless ocean, whence he had acquired a
+mystical habit of mind.... Dumas certainly would never have placed this
+pardon in the mouth of a stockbroker." So far so good; but
+"preparation," in the sense of the word, is a device of rhetoric or of
+propaganda rather than of dramatic craftsmanship. It is a method of
+astutely undermining or outflanking prejudice. Desiring to enforce a
+general principle, you invent a case which is specially favourable to
+your argument, and insinuate it into the acceptance of the audience by
+every possible subtlety of adjustment. You trust, it would seem, that
+people who have applauded an act of pardon in an extreme case will be so
+much the readier to exercise that high prerogative in the less carefully
+"prepared" cases which present themselves in real life. This may or may
+not be a sound principle of persuasion; as we are not here considering
+the drama as an art of persuasion, we have not to decide between this
+and the opposite, or Shawesque, principle of shocking and startling an
+audience by the utmost violence of paradox. There is something to be
+said for both methods--for conversion by pill-and-jelly and for
+conversion by nitroglycerine.
+
+Reverting, now, to the domain of pure craftsmanship, can it be said that
+"the art of the theatre is the art of preparation"? Yes, it is very
+largely the art of delicate and unobtrusive preparation, of helping an
+audience to divine whither it is going, while leaving it to wonder how
+it is to get there. On the other hand, it is also the art of avoiding
+laborious, artificial and obvious preparations which lead to little or
+nothing. A due proportion must always be observed between the
+preparation and the result.
+
+To illustrate the meaning of preparation, as the word is here employed,
+I may perhaps be allowed to reprint a passage from a review of Mr.
+Israel Zangwill's play _Children of the Ghetto_.[2]
+
+  "... To those who have not read the novel, it must seem as though
+  the mere illustrations of Jewish life entirely overlaid and
+  overwhelmed the action. It is not so in reality. One who knows the
+  story beforehand can often see that it is progressing even in scenes
+  which seem purely episodic and unconnected either with each other or
+  with the general scheme. But Mr. Zangwill has omitted to provide
+  finger-posts, if I may so express it, to show those who do not know
+  the story beforehand whither he is leading them. He has neglected
+  the great art of forecasting, of keeping anticipation on the alert,
+  which is half the secret of dramatic construction. To forecast,
+  without discounting, your effects--that is all the Law and the
+  Prophets. In the first act of _Children of the Ghetto_, for
+  instance, we see the marriage in jest of Hannah to Sam Levine,
+  followed by the instant divorce with all its curious ceremonies.
+  This is amusing so far as it goes; but when the divorce is
+  completed, the whole thing seems to be over and done with. We have
+  seen some people, in whom as yet we take no particular interest,
+  enmeshed in a difficulty arising from a strange and primitive
+  formalism in the interpretation of law; and we have seen the meshes
+  cut to the satisfaction of all parties, and the incident to all
+  appearance closed. There is no finger-post to direct our
+  anticipation on the way it should go; and those who have not read
+  the book cannot possibly guess that this mock marriage, instantly
+  and ceremoniously dissolved, can have any ulterior effect upon the
+  fortunes of any one concerned. Thus, the whole scene, however
+  curious in itself, seems motiveless and resultless. How the
+  requisite finger-post was to be provided I cannot tell. That is not
+  my business; but a skilful dramatist would have made it his. Then,
+  in the second act, amid illustrations of social life in the Ghetto,
+  we have the meeting of Hannah with David Brandon, a prettily-written
+  scene of love-at-first-sight. But, so far as any one can see, there
+  is every prospect that the course of true love will run absolutely
+  smooth. Again we lack a finger-post to direct our interest forward;
+  nor do we see anything that seems to bring this act into vital
+  relation with its predecessor. Those who have read the book know
+  that David Brandon is a 'Cohen,' a priest, a descendant of Aaron,
+  and that a priest may not marry a divorced woman. Knowing this, we
+  have a sense of irony, of impending disaster, which renders the
+  love-scene of the second act dramatic. But to those, and they must
+  always be a majority in any given audience, who do not know this,
+  the scene has no more dramatic quality than lies in its actual
+  substance, which, although pretty enough, is entirely commonplace.
+  Not till the middle of the third act (out of four) is the obstacle
+  revealed, and we see that the mighty maze was not without a plan.
+  Here, then, the drama begins, after two acts and a half of
+  preparation, during which we were vouchsafed no inkling of what was
+  preparing. It is capital drama when we come to it, really human,
+  really tragic. The arbitrary prohibitions of the Mosaic law have no
+  religious or moral force either for David or for Hannah. They feel
+  it to be their right, almost their duty, to cast off their shackles.
+  In any community, save that of strict Judaism, they are perfectly
+  free to marry. But in thus flouting the letter of the law, Hannah
+  well knows that she will break her father's heart. Even as she
+  struggles to shake them off, the traditions of her race take firmer
+  hold on her; and in the highly dramatic last act (a not unskilful
+  adaptation to the stage of the crucial scene of the book) she bows
+  her neck beneath the yoke, and renounces love that the Law may be
+  fulfilled."
+
+To state the matter in other terms, we are conscious of no tension in
+the earlier acts of this play, because we have not been permitted to see
+the sword of Damocles hanging over the heads of Hannah and David
+Brandon. For lack of preparation, of pointing-forward, we feel none of
+that god-like superiority to the people of the mimic world which we have
+recognized as the characteristic privilege of the spectator. We know no
+more than they do of the implications of their acts, and the network of
+embarrassments in which they are involving themselves. Indeed, we know
+less than they do: for Hannah, as a well brought-up Jewess, is no doubt
+vaguely aware of the disabilities attaching to a divorced woman. A
+gentile audience, on the other hand, cannot possibly foresee how--
+
+  "Some consequence yet hanging in the stars
+  Shall bitterly begin his fearful date
+  With this night's revels."
+
+and, lacking that foreknowledge, it misses the specifically dramatic
+effect of the scenes. The author invites it to play at blind-man's-buff
+with the characters, instead of unsealing its eyes and enabling it to
+watch the game from its Olympian coign of vantage.
+
+Let the dramatist, then, never neglect to place the requisite
+finger-posts on the road he would have us follow. It is not, of course,
+necessary that we should be conscious of all the implications of any
+given scene or incident, but we must know enough of them not only to
+create the requisite tension, but to direct it towards the right quarter
+of the compass. Retrospective elucidations are valueless and sometimes
+irritating. It is in nowise to the author's interest that we should say,
+"Ah, if we had only known this, or foreseen that, in time, the effect of
+such-and-such a scene would have been entirely different!" We have no
+use for finger-posts that point backwards.[3]
+
+In the works of Sir Arthur Pinero I recall two cases in which the lack
+of a finger-post impairs the desired effect: slightly, in the one
+instance, in the other, very considerably. The third act of that
+delightful comedy _The Princess and the Butterfly_ contains no
+sufficient indication of Fay Zuliani's jealousy of the friendship
+between Sir George Lamorant and the Princess Pannonia. We are rather at
+a loss to account for the coldness of her attitude to the Princess, and
+her perverse naughtiness in going off to the Opera Ball. This renders
+the end of the act practically ineffective. We so little foresee what is
+to come of Fay's midnight escapade, that we take no particular interest
+in it, and are rather disconcerted by the care with which it is led up
+to, and the prominence assigned to it. This, however, is a trifling
+fault. Far different is the case in the last act of _The Benefit of the
+Doubt_, which goes near to ruining what is otherwise a very fine play.
+The defect, indeed, is not purely technical: on looking into it we find
+that the author is not in fact working towards an ending which can be
+called either inevitable or conspicuously desirable. His failure to
+point forward is no doubt partly due to his having nothing very
+satisfactory to point forward to. But it is only in retrospect that this
+becomes apparent. What we feel while the act is in progress is simply
+the lack of any finger-post to afford us an inkling of the end towards
+which we are proceeding. Through scene after scene we appear to be
+making no progress, but going round and round in a depressing circle.
+The tension, in a word, is fatally relaxed. It may perhaps be suggested
+as a maxim that when an author finds a difficulty in placing the
+requisite finger-posts, as he nears the end of his play, he will do well
+to suspect that the end he has in view is defective, and to try if he
+cannot amend it.
+
+In the ancient, and in the modern romantic, drama, oracles, portents,
+prophecies, horoscopes and such-like intromissions of the supernatural
+afforded a very convenient aid to the placing of the requisite
+finger-posts--"foreshadowing without forestalling." It has often been
+said that _Macbeth_ approaches the nearest of all Shakespeare's
+tragedies to the antique model: and in nothing is the resemblance
+clearer than in the employment of the Witches to point their skinny
+fingers into the fated future. In _Romeo and Juliet_, inward foreboding
+takes the place of outward prophecy. I have quoted above Romeo's
+prevision of "Some consequence yet hanging in the stars"; and beside it
+may be placed Juliet's--
+
+  "I have no joy of this contract to-night;
+  It is too rash, too unadvised, too sudden,
+  Too like the lightning which doth cease to be
+  Ere one can say it lightens."
+
+In _Othello,_ on the other hand, the most modern of all his plays,
+Shakespeare had recourse neither to outward boding, nor to inward
+foreboding, but planted a plain finger-post in the soil of human nature,
+when he made Brabantio say--
+
+  "Look to her, Moor, if thou hast eyes to see:
+  She has deceived her father, and may thee."
+
+Mr. Stephen Phillips, in the first act of _Paolo and Francesca,_ outdoes
+all his predecessors, ancient or modern, in his daring use of sibylline
+prophecy. He makes Giovanni's blind foster-mother, Angela, foretell the
+tragedy in almost every detail, save that, in her vision, she cannot see
+the face of Francesca's lover. Mr. Phillips, I take it, is here
+reinforcing ancient tradition by a reference to modern "psychical
+research." He trusts to our conceiving such clairvoyance to be not
+wholly impossible, and giving it what may be called provisional
+credence. Whether the device be artistic or not we need not here
+consider. I merely point to it as a conspicuous example of the use of
+the finger-post.[4]
+
+It need scarcely be said that a misleading finger-post is carefully to
+be avoided, except in the rare cases where it may be advisable to beget
+a momentary misapprehension on the part of the audience, which shall be
+almost instantly corrected in some pleasant or otherwise effective
+fashion.[5] It is naturally difficult to think of striking instances of
+the misleading finger-posts; for plays which contain such a blunder are
+not apt to survive, even in the memory. A small example occurs in a
+clever play named _A Modern Aspasia_ by Mr. Hamilton Fyfe. Edward
+Meredith has two households: a London house over which his lawful wife,
+Muriel, presides; and a country cottage where dwells his mistress,
+Margaret, with her two children. One day Muriel's automobile breaks down
+near Margaret's cottage, and, while the tyre is being repaired, Margaret
+gives her visitor tea, neither of them knowing the other. Throughout the
+scene we are naturally wondering whether a revelation is to occur; and
+when, towards the close, Muriel goes to Margaret's room, "to put her hat
+straight," we have no longer any doubt on the subject. It is practically
+inevitable that she should find in the room her husband's photograph, or
+some object which she should instantly recognize as his, and should
+return to the stage in full possession of the secret. This is so
+probable that nothing but a miracle can prevent it: we mentally give the
+author credit for bringing about his revelation in a very simple and
+natural way; and we are proportionately disappointed when we find that
+the miracle has occurred, and that Muriel returns to the sitting-room no
+wiser than she left it. Very possibly the general economy of the play
+demanded that the revelation should not take place at this juncture.
+That question does not here concern us. The point is that, having
+determined to reserve the revelation for his next act, the author ought
+not, by sending Muriel into Margaret's bedroom, to have awakened in us a
+confident anticipation of its occurring there and then. A romantic play
+by Mr. J. B. Fagan, entitled _Under Which King?_ offers another small
+instance of the same nature. The date is 1746; certain despatches of
+vast importance have to be carried by a Hanoverian officer from Moidart
+to Fort William. The Jacobites arrange to drug the officer; and, to make
+assurance doubly sure, in case the drug should fail to act, they post a
+Highland marksman in a narrow glen to pick him off as he passes. The
+drug does act; but his lady-love, to save his military honour, assumes
+male attire and rides off with the despatches. We hear her horse's hoofs
+go clattering down the road; and then, as the curtain falls, we hear a
+shot ring out into the night. This shot is a misleading finger-post.
+Nothing comes of it: we find in the next act that the marksman has
+missed! But marksmen, under such circumstances, have no business to
+miss. It is a breach of the dramatic proprieties. We feel that the
+author has been trifling with us in inflicting on us this purely
+mechanical and momentary "scare." The case would be different if the
+young lady knew that the marksman was lying in ambush, and determined to
+run the gantlet. In that case the incident would be a trait of
+character; but, unless my memory deceives me, that is not the case. On
+the stage, every bullet should have its billet--not necessarily in the
+person aimed at, but in the emotions or anticipations of the audience.
+This bullet may, indeed, give us a momentary thrill of alarm; but it is
+dearly bought at the expense of subsequent disillusionment.
+
+We have now to consider the subject of over-preparation, too obtrusive
+preparation, mountainous preparation leading only to a mouse-like
+effect. This is the characteristic error of the so-called "well-made
+play," the play of elaborate and ingenious intrigue. The trouble with
+the well-made play is that it is almost always, and of necessity,
+ill-made. Very rarely does the playwright succeed in weaving a web which
+is at once intricate, consistent, and clear. In nineteen cases out of
+twenty there are glaring flaws that have to be overlooked; or else the
+pattern is so involved that the mind's eye cannot follow it, and becomes
+bewildered and fatigued. A classical example of both faults may be found
+in Congreve's so-called comedy _The Double-Dealer_. This is, in fact, a
+powerful drama, somewhat in the Sardou manner; but Congreve had none of
+Sardou's deftness in manipulating an intrigue. Maskwell is not only a
+double-dealer, but a triple--or quadruple-dealer; so that the brain soon
+grows dizzy in the vortex of his villainies. The play, it may be noted,
+was a failure.
+
+There is a quite legitimate pleasure to be found, no doubt, in a complex
+intrigue which is also perspicuous. Plays such as Alexandre Dumas's
+_Mademoiselle de Belle-Isle_, or the pseudo-historical dramas of
+Scribe-_Adrienne Lecouvreur, Bertrand et Raton, Un Verre d'Eau, Les
+Trois Maupin,_ etc.--are amusing toys, like those social or military
+tableaux, the figures of which you can set in motion by dropping a penny
+in the slot. But the trick of this sort of "preparation" has long been
+found out, and even unsophisticated audiences are scarcely to be
+thrilled by it. We may accept it as a sound principle, based on common
+sense and justified by experience, that an audience should never be
+tempted to exclaim, "What a marvellously clever fellow is this
+playwright! How infinitely cleverer than the dramatist who constructs
+the tragi-comedy of life."
+
+This is what we inevitably exclaim as we watch Victorien Sardou, in whom
+French ingenuity culminated and caricatured itself, laying the
+foundations of one of his labyrinthine intrigues. The absurdities of
+"preparation" in this sense could scarcely be better satirized than in
+the following page from Francisque Sarcey's criticism of _Nos Intimes_
+(known in English as _Peril_)--a page which is intended, not as satire,
+but as eulogy--
+
+  At the sixth performance, I met, during the first interact, a man of
+  infinite taste who ... complained of the lengthiness of this first
+  act: "What a lot of details," he said, "which serve no purpose, and
+  had better have been omitted! What is the use of that long story
+  about the cactus with a flower that is unique in all the world? Why
+  trouble us with that dahlia-root, which M. Caussade's neighbour has
+  thrown over the garden wall? Was it necessary to inflict on us all
+  that talk about the fox that plays havoc in the garden? What have we
+  to do with that mischievous beast? And that Tolozan, with his
+  endless digressions! What do we care about his ideas on love, on
+  metempsychosis, on friendship, etc.? All this stuff only retards
+  the action."
+
+  "On the contrary," I replied, "all this is just what is going to
+  interest you. You are impatient of these details, because you are
+  looking out for the scenes of passion which have been promised you.
+  But reflect that, without these preparations, the scenes of passion
+  would not touch you. That cactus-flower will play its part, you may
+  be sure; that dahlia-root is not there for nothing; that fox to
+  which you object, and of which you will hear more talk during two
+  more acts, will bring about the solution of one of the most
+  entertaining situations in all drama."
+
+M. Sarcey does not tell us what his interlocutor replied; but he might
+have said, like the hero of _Le Réveillon_: "Are you sure there is no
+mistake? Are you defending Sardou, or attacking him?"
+
+For another example of ultra-complex preparation let me turn to a play
+by Mr. Sydney Grundy, entitled _The Degenerates_. Mr. Grundy, though an
+adept of the Scribe school, has done so much strong and original work
+that I apologize for exhuming a play in which he almost burlesqued his
+own method; but for that very reason it is difficult to find a more
+convincing or more deterrent example of misdirected ingenuity. The
+details of the plot need not be recited. It is sufficient to say that
+the curtain has not been raised ten minutes before our attention has
+been drawn to the fact that a certain Lady Saumarez has her monogram on
+everything she wears, even to her gloves: whence we at once foresee that
+she is destined to get into a compromising situation, to escape from it,
+but to leave a glove behind her. In due time the compromising situation
+arrives, and we find that it not only requires a room with three
+doors,[6] but that a locksmith has to be specially called in to provide
+two of these doors with peculiar locks, so that, when once shut, they
+cannot be opened from inside except with a key! What interest can we
+take in a situation turning on such contrivances? Sane technic laughs at
+locksmiths. And after all this preparation, the situation proves to be a
+familiar trick of theatrical thimble-rigging: you lift the thimble, and
+instead of Pea A, behold Pea B!--instead of Lady Saumarez it is Mrs.
+Trevelyan who is concealed in Isidore de Lorano's bedroom. Sir William
+Saumarez must be an exceedingly simple-minded person to accept the
+substitution, and exceedingly unfamiliar with the French drama of the
+'seventies and 'eighties. If he had his wits about him he would say: "I
+know this dodge: it comes from Sardou. Lady Saumarez has just slipped
+out by that door, up R., and if I look about I shall certainly find her
+fan, or her glove, or her handkerchief somewhere on the premises." The
+author may object that such criticism would end in paralysing the
+playwright, and that, if men always profited by the lessons of the
+stage, the world would long ago have become so wise that there would be
+no more room in it for drama, which lives on human folly. "You will tell
+me next," he may say, "that I must not make groundless jealousy the
+theme of a play, because every one who has seen Othello would at once
+detect the machinations of an Iago!" The retort is logically specious,
+but it mistakes the point. It would certainly be rash to put any limit
+to human gullibility, or to deny that Sir William Saumarez, in the given
+situation, might conceivably be hoodwinked. The question is not one of
+psychology but of theatrical expediency: and the point is that when a
+situation is at once highly improbable in real life and exceedingly
+familiar on the stage, we cannot help mentally caricaturing it as it
+proceeds, and are thus prevented from lending it the provisional
+credence on which interest and emotion depend.
+
+An instructive contrast to _The Degenerates_ may be found in a nearly
+contemporary play, _Mrs. Dane's Defence_, by Mr. Henry Arthur Jones. The
+first three acts of this play may be cited as an excellent example of
+dexterous preparation and development. Our interest in the sequence of
+events is aroused, sustained, and worked up to a high tension with
+consummate skill. There is no feverish overcrowding of incident, as is
+so often the case in the great French story-plays--_Adrienne
+Lecouvreur_, for example, or _Fédora_. The action moves onwards,
+unhasting, unresting, and the finger-posts are placed just where they
+are wanted.
+
+The observance of a due proportion between preparation and result is a
+matter of great moment. Even when the result achieved is in itself very
+remarkable, it may be dearly purchased by a too long and too elaborate
+process of preparation. A famous play which is justly chargeable with
+this fault is _The Gay Lord Quex_. The third act is certainly one of the
+most breathlessly absorbing scenes in modern drama; but by what long,
+and serpentine, and gritty paths do we not approach it! The elaborate
+series of trifling incidents by means of which Sophy Fullgarney is first
+brought from New Bond Street to Fauncey Court, and then substituted for
+the Duchess's maid, is at no point actually improbable; and yet we feel
+that a vast effort has been made to attain an end which, owing to the
+very length of the sequence of chances, at last assumes an air of
+improbability. There is little doubt that the substructure of the great
+scene might have been very much simpler. I imagine that Sir Arthur
+Pinero was betrayed into complexity and over-elaboration by his desire
+to use, as a background for his action, a study of that "curious phase
+of modern life," the manicurist's parlour. To those who find this study
+interesting, the disproportion between preliminaries and result may be
+less apparent. It certainly did not interfere with the success of the
+play in its novelty; but it may very probably curtail its lease of life.
+What should we know of _The School for Scandal_ to-day, if it consisted
+of nothing but the Screen Scene and two laborious acts of preparation?
+
+A too obvious preparation is very apt to defeat its end by begetting a
+perversely quizzical frame of mind in the audience. The desired effect
+is discounted, like a conjuring trick in which the mechanism is too
+transparent. Let me recall a trivial but instructive instance of this
+error. The occasion was the first performance of _Pillars of Society_ at
+the Gaiety Theatre, London--the first Ibsen performance ever given in
+England. At the end of the third act, Krap, Consul Bernick's clerk,
+knocks at the door of his master's office and says, "It is blowing up to
+a stiff gale. Is the _Indian Girl_ to sail in spite of it?" Whereupon
+Bernick, though he knows that the _Indian Girl_ is hopelessly
+unseaworthy, replies, "The _Indian Girl_ is to sail in spite of it." It
+had occurred to someone that the effect of this incident would be
+heightened if Krap, before knocking at the Consul's door, were to
+consult the barometer, and show by his demeanour that it was falling
+rapidly. A barometer had accordingly been hung, up stage, near the
+veranda entrance; and, as the scenic apparatus of a Gaiety matinée was
+in those days always of the scantiest, it was practically the one
+decoration of a room otherwise bare almost to indecency. It had stared
+the audience full in the face through three long acts; and when, at the
+end of the third, Krap went up to it and tapped it, a sigh of relief ran
+through the house, as much as to say, "At last! so _that_ was what it
+was for!"--to the no small detriment of the situation. Here the fault
+lay in the obtrusiveness of the preparation. Had the barometer passed
+practically unnoticed among the other details of a well-furnished hall,
+it would at any rate have been innocent, and perhaps helpful. As it was,
+it seemed to challenge the curiosity of the audience, saying, "I am
+evidently here with some intention; guess, now, what the intention can
+be!" The producer had failed in the art which conceals art.
+
+Another little trait from a play of those far-past days illustrates the
+same point. It was a drawing-room drama of the Scribe school. Near the
+beginning of an act, some one spilt a bottle of red ink, and mopped it
+up with his (or her) handkerchief, leaving the handkerchief on the
+escritoire. The act proceeded from scene to scene, and the handkerchief
+remained unnoticed; but every one in the audience who knew the rules of
+the game, kept his eye on the escritoire, and was certain that that ink
+had not been spilt for nothing. In due course a situation of great
+intensity was reached, wherein the villain produced a pistol and fired
+at the heroine, who fainted. As a matter of fact he had missed her; but
+her quick-witted friend seized the gory handkerchief, and, waving it in
+the air, persuaded the villain that the shot had taken deadly effect,
+and that he must flee for his life. Even in those days, such an
+unblushing piece of trickery was found more comic than impressive. It
+was a case of preparation "giving itself away."
+
+A somewhat later play, _The Mummy and the Humming Bird_, by Mr. Isaac
+Henderson, contains a good example of over-elaborate preparation. The
+Earl of Lumley, lost in his chemical studies with a more than Newtonian
+absorption, suffers his young wife to form a sentimental friendship with
+a scoundrel of an Italian novelist, Signor D'Orelli. Remaining at home
+one evening, when Lady Lumley and a party of friends, including
+D'Orelli, have gone off to dine at a restaurant, the Earl chances to
+look out of the window, and observes an organ-grinder making doleful
+music in the snow. His heart is touched, and he invites the music-monger
+to join him in his study and share his informal dinner. The conversation
+between them is carried on by means of signs, for the organ-grinder
+knows no English, and the Earl is painfully and improbably ignorant of
+Italian. He does not even know that Roma means Rome, and Londra, London.
+This ignorance, however, is part of the author's ingenuity. It leads to
+the establishment of a sort of object-speech, by aid of which the Earl
+learns that his guest has come to England to prosecute a vendetta
+against the man who ruined his happy Sicilian home. I need scarcely say
+that this villain is none other than D'Orelli; and when at last he and
+the Countess elope to Paris, the object-speech enables Giuseppe to
+convey to the Earl, by aid of a brandy-bottle, a siphon, a broken plate,
+and half-a-crown, not only the place of their destination, but the very
+hotel to which they are going. This is a fair example of that ingenuity
+for ingenuity's sake which was once thought the very essence of the
+playwright's craft, but has long ago lost all attraction for intelligent
+audiences.
+
+We may take it as a rule that any scene which requires an obviously
+purposeful scenic arrangement is thereby discounted. It may be strong
+enough to live down the disadvantage; but a disadvantage it is none the
+less. In a play of Mr. Carton's, _The Home Secretary_, a paper of great
+importance was known to be contained in an official despatch-box. When
+the curtain rose on the last act, it revealed this despatch-box on a
+table right opposite a French window, while at the other side of the
+room a high-backed arm-chair discreetly averted its face. Every one
+could see at a glance that the romantic Anarchist was going to sneak in
+at the window and attempt to abstract the despatch-box, while the
+heroine was to lie perdue in the high-backed chair; and when, at the
+fated moment, all this punctually occurred, one could scarcely repress
+an "Ah!" of sarcastic satisfaction. Similarly, in an able play named Mr.
+and Mrs. Daventry, Mr. Frank Harris had conceived a situation which
+required that the scene should be specially built for eavesdropping.[7]
+As soon as the curtain rose, and revealed a screen drawn halfway down
+the stage, with a sofa ensconced behind it, we knew what to expect. Of
+course Mrs. Daventry was to lie on the sofa and overhear a duologue
+between her husband and his mistress: the only puzzle was to understand
+why the guilty pair should neglect the precaution of looking behind the
+screen. As a matter of fact, Mrs. Daventry, before she lay down,
+switched off the lights, and Daventry and Lady Langham, finding the room
+dark, assumed it to be empty. With astounding foolhardiness, considering
+that the house was full of guests, and this a much frequented public
+room, Daventry proceeded to lock the door, and continue his conversation
+with Lady Langham in the firelight. Thus, when the lady's husband came
+knocking at the door, Mrs. Daventry was able to rescue the guilty pair
+from an apparently hopeless predicament, by calmly switching on the
+lights and opening the door to Sir John Langham. The situation was
+undoubtedly a "strong" one; but the tendency of modern technic is to
+hold "strength" too dearly purchased at such reckless expense of
+preparation.
+
+There are, then, very clear limits to the validity of the Dumas maxim
+that "The art of the theatre is the art of preparations." Certain it is
+that over-preparation is the most fatal of errors. The clumsiest thing a
+dramatist can possibly do is to lay a long and elaborate train for the
+ignition of a squib. We take pleasure in an event which has been
+"prepared" in the sense that we have been led to desire it, and have
+wondered how it was to be brought about. But we scoff at an occurrence
+which nothing but our knowledge of the tricks of the stage could
+possibly lead us to expect, yet which, knowing these tricks, we have
+foreseen from afar, and resented in advance.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+[Footnote 1: _Of Dramatic Poesy,_ ed. Arnold, 1903, p. 60.]
+
+[Footnote 2: _The World_, December 20, 1899.]
+
+[Footnote 3: At the end of the first act of _Lady Inger of Ostraat_,
+Ibsen evidently intends to produce a startling effect through the sudden
+appearance of Olaf Skaktavl in Lady Inger's hall. But as he has totally
+omitted to tell us who the strange man is, the incident has no meaning
+for us. In 1855 Ibsen had all his technical lessons yet to learn.]
+
+[Footnote 4: The fact that Mr. Phillips should have deemed such a
+foreshadowing necessary shows how instinctively a dramatist feels that
+the logic of his art requires him to assume that his audience is
+ignorant of his fable. In reality, very few members of the first-night
+audience, or of any other, can have depended on old Angela's
+vaticination for the requisite foresight of events. But this does not
+prove Angela to be artistically superfluous.]
+
+[Footnote 5: See pp. 118, 240.]
+
+[Footnote 6: There is no special harm in this: the question of exits and
+entrances and their mechanism is discussed in Chapter XXIII.]
+
+[Footnote 7: This might be said of the scene of the second act of _The
+Benefit of the Doubt_; but here the actual stage-topography is natural
+enough. The author, however, is rather over-anxious to emphasize the
+acoustic relations of the two rooms.]
+
+
+
+
+_CHAPTER XIII_
+
+THE OBLIGATORY SCENE
+
+
+I do not know whether it was Francisque Sarcey who invented the phrase
+_scène à faire_; but it certainly owes its currency to that valiant
+champion of the theatrical theatre, if I may so express it. Note that in
+this term I intend no disrespect. My conception of the theatrical
+theatre may not be exactly the same as M. Sarcey's; but at all events I
+share his abhorrence of the untheatrical theatre.
+
+What is the _scène à faire_? Sarcey has used the phrase so often, and in
+so many contexts, that it is impossible to tie him down to any strict
+definition. Instead of trying to do so, I will give a typical example of
+the way in which he usually employs the term.
+
+In _Les Fourchambault_, by Emile Augier, the first act introduces us to
+the household of a merchant, of Havre, who has married a wealthy, but
+extravagant woman, and has a son and daughter who are being gradually
+corrupted by their mother's worldliness. We learn that Fourchambault,
+senior, has, in his youth, betrayed a young woman who was a governess in
+his family. He wanted to marry her, but his relations maligned her
+character, and he cast her off; nor does he know what has become of her
+and her child. In the second act we pass to the house of an energetic
+and successful young shipowner named Bernard, who lives alone with his
+mother. Bernard, as we divine, is secretly devoted to a young lady named
+Marie Letellier, a guest in the Fourchambault house, to whom young
+Leopold Fourchambault is paying undesirable attentions. One day Bernard
+casually mentions to his mother that the house of Fourchambault is on
+the verge of bankruptcy; nothing less than a quarter of a million francs
+will enable it to tide over the crisis. Mme. Bernard, to her son's
+astonishment, begs him to lend the tottering firm the sum required. He
+objects that, unless the business is better managed, the loan will only
+postpone the inevitable disaster. "Well, then, my son," she replied,
+"you must go into partnership with M. Fourchambault." "I! with that
+imbecile!" he exclaims. "My son," she says gravely, and emphatically,
+"you must--it is your duty--I demand it of you!" "Ah!" cries Bernard. "I
+understand--he is my father!"
+
+After ecstatically lauding this situation and the scenes which have led
+up to it, M. Sarcey continues--
+
+  When the curtain falls upon the words "He is my father," I at once
+  see two _scènes à faire_, and I know that they will be _faites_: the
+  scene between the son and the father whom he is to save, the scene
+  between Bernard and his half-brother Leopold, who are in love with
+  the same woman, the one dishonourably and the other secretly and
+  nobly. What will they say to each other? I have no idea. But it is
+  precisely this _expectation mingled with uncertainly_ that is one of
+  the charms of the theatre. I say to myself, "Ah, they will have an
+  encounter! What will come of it?" And that this is the state of mind
+  of the whole audience is proved by the fact that when the two
+  characters of the _scènes à faire_ stand face to face, a thrill of
+  anticipation runs round the whole theatre.
+
+This, then, is the obligatory scene as Sarcey generally understands
+it--a scene which, for one reason or another, an audience expects and
+ardently desires. I have italicized the phrase "expectation mingled with
+uncertainty" because it expresses in other terms the idea which I have
+sought to convey in the formula "foreshadowing without forestalling."
+But before we can judge of the merits of M. Sarcey's theory, we must
+look into it a little more closely. I shall try, then, to state it in my
+own words, in what I believe to be its most rational and
+defensible form.
+
+An obligatory scene is one which the audience (more or less clearly and
+consciously) foresees and desires, and the absence of which it may with
+reason resent. On a rough analysis, it will appear, I think, that there
+are five ways in which a scene may become, in this sense, obligatory:
+
+(1) It may be necessitated by the inherent logic of the theme.
+
+(2) It may be demanded by the manifest exigencies of specifically
+dramatic effect.
+
+(3) The author himself may have rendered it obligatory by seeming
+unmistakably to lead up to it.
+
+(4) It may be required in order to justify some modification of
+character or alteration of will, too important to be taken for granted.
+
+(5) It may be imposed by history or legend.
+
+These five classes of obligatory scenes may be docketed, respectively,
+as the Logical, the Dramatic, the Structural, the Psychological, and the
+Historic. M. Sarcey generally employed the term in one of the first
+three senses, without clearly distinguishing between them. It is,
+indeed, not always easy to determine whether the compulsion (assuming it
+to exist at all) lies in the very essence of the theme or situation, or
+only in the author's manipulation of it.
+
+Was Sarcey right in assuming such a compulsion to be a constant and
+dominant factor in the playwright's craft? I think we shall see reason
+to believe him right in holding that it frequently arises, but wrong if
+he went the length of maintaining that there can be no good play without
+a definite _scène à faire_--as eighteenth-century landscape painters are
+said to have held that no one could be a master of his art till he knew
+where to place "the brown tree." I remember no passage in which Sarcey
+explicitly lays down so hard and fast a rule, but several in which he
+seems to take it for granted.[1]
+
+It may be asked whether--and if so, why--the theory of the obligatory
+scene holds good for the dramatist and not for the novelist? Perhaps it
+has more application to the novel than is commonly supposed; but in so
+far as it applies peculiarly to the drama, the reason is pretty clear.
+It lies in the strict concentration imposed on the dramatist, and the
+high mental tension which is, or ought to be, characteristic of the
+theatrical audience. The leisurely and comparatively passive
+novel-reader may never miss a scene which an audience, with its
+instincts of logic and of economy keenly alert, may feel to be
+inevitable. The dramatist is bound to extract from his material the last
+particle of that particular order of effect which the stage, and the
+stage alone, can give us. If he fails to do so, we feel that there has
+been no adequate justification for setting in motion all the complex
+mechanism of the theatre. His play is like a badly-designed engine in
+which a large part of the potential energy is dissipated to no purpose.
+The novelist, with a far wider range of effects at his command, and
+employing no special mechanism to bring them home to us, is much more
+free to select and to reject. He is exempt from the law of rigid economy
+to which the dramatist must submit. Far from being bound to do things in
+the most dramatic way, he often does wisely in rejecting that course, as
+unsuited to his medium. Fundamentally, no doubt, the same principle
+applies to both arts, but with a wholly different stringency in the case
+of the drama. "Advisable" in the novelist's vocabulary is translated by
+"imperative" in the dramatist's. The one is playing a long-drawn game,
+in which the loss of a trick or two need not prove fatal; the other has
+staked his all on a single rubber.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Obligatory scenes of the first type--those necessitated by the inherent
+logic of the theme--can naturally arise only in plays to which a
+definite theme can be assigned. If we say that woman's claim to possess
+a soul of her own, even in marriage, is the theme of _A Doll's House_,
+then evidently the last great balancing of accounts between Nora and
+Helmer is an obligatory scene. It would have been quite possible for
+Ibsen to have completed the play without any such scene: he might, for
+instance, have let Nora fulfil her intention of drowning herself; but in
+that case his play would have been merely a tragic anecdote with the
+point omitted. We should have felt vague intimations of a general idea
+hovering in the air, but it would have remained undefined and
+undeveloped. As we review, however, the series of Ibsen's plays, and
+notice how difficult it is to point to any individual scene and say,
+"This was clearly the _scène à faire_," we feel that, though the phrase
+may express a useful idea in a conveniently brief form, there is no
+possibility of making the presence or absence of a _scène à faire_ a
+general test of dramatic merit. In _The Wild Duck_, who would not say
+that, theoretically, the scene in which Gregers opens Hialmar's eyes to
+the true history of his marriage was obligatory in the highest degree?
+Yet Ibsen, as a matter of fact, does not present it to us: he sends the
+two men off for "a long walk" together: and who does not feel that this
+is a stroke of consummate art? In _Rosmersholm_, as we know, he has
+been accused of neglecting, not merely the scene, but the play, _à
+faire_; but who will now maintain that accusation? In _John Gabriel
+Borhman_, if we define the theme as the clash of two devouring egoisms,
+Ibsen has, in the third act, given us the obligatory scene; but he has
+done it, unfortunately, with an enfeebled hand; whereas the first and
+second acts, though largely expository, and even (in the Foldal scene)
+episodic, rank with his greatest achievements.
+
+For abundant examples of scenes rendered obligatory by the logic of the
+theme, we have only to turn to the works of those remorseless
+dialecticians, MM. Hervieu and Brieux. In such a play as _La Course du
+Flambeau_, there is scarcely a scene that may not be called an
+obligatory deduction from the thesis duly enunciated, with no small
+parade of erudition, in the first ten minutes of the play. It is that,
+in handing on the _vital lampada_, as Plato and "le bon poète Lucrèce"
+express it, the love of the parent for the child becomes a devouring
+mania, to which everything else is sacrificed, while the love of the
+child for the parent is a tame and essentially selfish emotion,
+absolutely powerless when it comes into competition with the passions
+which are concerned with the transmission of the vital flame. This
+theorem having been stated, what is the first obligatory scene?
+Evidently one in which a mother shall refuse a second marriage, with a
+man whom she loves, because it would injure the prospects and wound the
+feelings of her adored daughter. Then, when the adored daughter herself
+marries, the mother must make every possible sacrifice for her, and the
+daughter must accept them all with indifference, as mere matters of
+course. But what is the final, triumphant proof of the theorem? Why, of
+course, the mother must kill her mother to save the daughter's life! And
+this ultra-obligatory scene M. Hervieu duly serves up to us.
+Marie-Jeanne (the daughter) is ordered to the Engadine; Sabine (the
+mother) is warned that Madame Fontenais (the grandmother) must not go to
+that altitude on pain of death; but, by a series of violently artificial
+devices, things are so arranged that Marie-Jeanne cannot go unless
+Madame Fontenais goes too; and Sabine, rather than endanger her
+daughter's recovery, does not hesitate to let her mother set forth,
+unwittingly, to her doom. In the last scene of all, Marie-Jeanne
+light-heartedly prepares to leave her mother and go off with her husband
+to the ends of the earth; Sabine learns that the man she loved and
+rejected for Marie-Jeanne's sake is for ever lost to her; and, to
+complete the demonstration, Madame Fontenais falls dead at her feet.
+These scenes are unmistakably _scènes à faire_, dictated by the logic of
+the theme; but they belong to a conception of art in which the free
+rhythms of life are ruthlessly sacrificed to the needs of a
+demonstration. Obligatory scenes of this order are mere diagrams drawn
+with ruler and compass--the obligatory illustrations of an extravagantly
+over-systematic lecture.
+
+M. Brieux in some of his plays (not in all) is no less logic-ridden than
+M. Hervieu. Take, for instance, _Les Trois Filles de M. Dupont_: every
+character is a term in a syllogism, every scene is dictated by an
+imperious craving for symmetry. The main theorem may be stated in some
+such terms as these: "The French marriage system is immoral and
+abominable; yet the married woman is, on the whole, less pitiable than
+her unmarried sisters." In order to prove this thesis in due form, we
+begin at the beginning, and show how the marriage of Antonin Mairaut and
+Julie Dupont is brought about by the dishonest cupidity of the parents
+on both sides. The Duponts flatter themselves that they have cheated the
+Mairauts, the Mairauts that they have swindled the Duponts; while
+Antonin deliberately simulates artistic tastes to deceive Julie, and
+Julie as deliberately makes a show of business capacity in order to take
+in Antonin. Every scene between father and daughter is balanced by a
+corresponding scene between mother and son. Every touch of hypocrisy on
+the one side is scrupulously set off against a trait of dishonesty on
+the other. Julie's passion for children is emphasized, Antonin's
+aversion from them is underlined. But lest he should be accused of
+seeing everything in black, M. Brieux will not make the parents
+altogether detestable. Still holding the balance true, he lets M.
+Mairaut on the one side, and Madame Dupont on the other, develop amiable
+impulses, and protest, at a given moment, against the infamies committed
+and countenanced by their respective spouses. And in the second and
+third acts, the edifice of deception symmetrically built up in the first
+act is no less symmetrically demolished. The parents expose and denounce
+each other's villainies; Julie and Antonin, in a great scene of conjugal
+recrimination, lay bare the hypocrisies of allurement that have brought
+them together. Julie then determines to escape from the loathsome
+prison-house of her marriage; and this brings us to the second part of
+the theorem. The title shows that Julie has two sisters; but hitherto
+they have remained in the background. Why do they exist at all? Why has
+Providence blessed M. Dupont with "three fair daughters and no more"?
+Because Providence foresaw exactly the number M. Brieux would require
+for his demonstration. Are there not three courses open to a penniless
+woman in our social system--marriage, wage-earning industry, and
+wage-earning profligacy? Well, M. Dupont must have one daughter to
+represent each of these contingencies. Julie has illustrated the
+miseries of marriage; Caroline and Angèle shall illustrate respectively
+the still greater miseries of unmarried virtue and unmarried vice. When
+Julie declares her intention of breaking away from the house of bondage,
+her sisters rise up symmetrically, one on either hand, and implore her
+rather to bear the ills she has than to fly to others that she knows not
+of. "Symmetry of symmetries, all is symmetry" in the poetics of M.
+Brieux. But life does not fall into such obvious patterns. The
+obligatory scene which is imposed upon us, not by the logic of life, but
+by the logic of demonstration, is not a _scène à faire_, but a _scène
+à fuir_.
+
+Mr. Bernard Shaw, in some sense the Brieux of the English theatre, is
+not a man to be dominated by logic, or by anything else under the sun.
+He has, however, given us one or two excellent examples of the
+obligatory scene in the true and really artistic sense of the term. The
+scene of Candida's choice between Eugene and Morell crowns the edifice
+of _Candida_ as nothing else could. Given the characters and their
+respective attitudes towards life, this sententious thrashing-out of the
+situation was inevitable. So, too, in _Mrs. Warren's Profession_, the
+great scene of the second act between Vivie and her mother is a superb
+example of a scene imposed by the logic of the theme. On the other hand,
+in Mr. Henry Arthur Jones's finely conceived, though unequal, play,
+_Michael and his Lost Angel_, we miss what was surely an obligatory
+scene. The play is in fact a contest between the paganism of Audrie
+Lesden and the ascetic, sacerdotal idealism of Michael Feversham. In the
+second act, paganism snatches a momentary victory; and we confidently
+expect, in the third act, a set and strenuous effort on Audrie's part to
+break down in theory the ascetic ideal which has collapsed in practice.
+It is probable enough that she might not succeed in dragging her lover
+forth from what she regards as the prison-house of a superstition; but
+the logic of the theme absolutely demands that she should make the
+attempt. Mr. Jones has preferred to go astray after some comparatively
+irrelevant and commonplace matter, and has thus left his play
+incomplete. So, too, in _The Triumph of the Philistines_, Mr. Jones
+makes the mistake of expecting us to take a tender interest in a pair of
+lovers who have had never a love-scene to set our interest agoing. They
+are introduced to each other in the first act, and we shrewdly suspect
+(for in the theatre we are all inveterate match-makers) that they are
+going to fall in love; but we have not the smallest positive evidence of
+the fact before we find, in the second act, that misunderstandings have
+arisen, and the lady declines to look at the gentleman. The actress who
+played the part at the St. James's Theatre was blamed for failing to
+enlist our sympathies in this romance; but what actress can make much of
+a love part which, up to the very last moment, is all suspicion and
+jealousy? Fancy _Romeo and Juliet_ with the love-scenes omitted, "by
+special request!"
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+In a second class, according to our analysis, we place the obligatory
+scene which is imposed by "the manifest exigencies of specifically
+dramatic effect." Here it must of course be noted that the conception of
+"specifically dramatic effect" varies in some degree, from age to age,
+from generation to generation, and even, one may almost say, from
+theatre to theatre. Scenes of violence and slaughter were banished from
+the Greek theatre, mainly, no doubt, because rapid movement was rendered
+difficult by the hieratic trappings of the actors, and was altogether
+foreign to the spirit of tragedy; but it can scarcely be doubted that
+the tragic poets were the less inclined to rebel against this
+convention, because they extracted "specifically dramatic effects" of a
+very high order out of their "messenger-scenes." Even in the modern
+theatre we are thrilled by the description of Hippolytus dragged at his
+own chariot wheel, or Creusa and Creon devoured by Medea's veil of
+fire.[2] On the Elizabethan stage, the murder of Agamemnon would no
+doubt have been "subjected to our faithful eyes" like the blinding of
+Gloucester or the suffocation of Edward II; but who shall say that there
+is less "specifically dramatic effect" in Aeschylus's method of
+mirroring the scene in the clairvoyant ecstasy of Cassandra? I am much
+inclined to think that the dramatic effect of highly emotional narrative
+is underrated in the modern theatre.
+
+Again, at one class of theatre, the author of a sporting play--is bound
+to exhibit a horse-race on the stage, or he is held to have shirked his
+obligatory scene. At another class of theatre, we shall have a scene,
+perhaps, in a box in the Grand Stand, where some Lady Gay Spanker shall
+breathlessly depict, from start to finish, the race which is visible to
+her, but invisible to the audience. At a third class of the theatre, the
+"specifically dramatic effect" to be extracted from a horse-race is
+found in a scene in a Black-Country slum, where a group of working-men
+and women are feverishly awaiting the evening paper which shall bring
+them the result of the St. Leger, involving for some of them
+opulence--to the extent, perhaps, of a £5 note--and for others ruin.[3]
+
+The difficulty of deciding that any one form of scene is predestined by
+the laws of dramatic effect is illustrated in Tolstoy's grisly drama,
+_The Power of Darkness_. The scene in which Nikita kills Akoulina's
+child was felt to be too horrible for representation; whereupon the
+author wrote an alternative scene between Mitritch and Anna, which
+passes simultaneously with the murder scene, in an adjoining room. The
+two scenes fulfil exactly the same function in the economy of the play;
+it can be acted with either of them, it might be acted with both; and it
+is impossible to say which produces the intenser or more "specifically
+dramatic effect."
+
+The fact remains, however, that there is almost always a dramatic and
+undramatic, a more dramatic and a less dramatic, way of doing a thing;
+and an author who allows us to foresee and expect a dramatic way of
+attaining a given end, and then chooses an undramatic or less dramatic
+way, is guilty of having missed the obligatory scene. For a general
+discussion of what we mean by the terms "dramatic" and "undramatic" the
+reader may refer back to Chapter III. Here I need only give one or two
+particular illustrations.
+
+It will be remembered that one of the _scènes à faire_ which M. Sarcey
+foresaw in _Les Fourchambault_ was the encounter between the two
+brothers; the illegitimate Bernard and the legitimate Leopold. It would
+have been quite possible, and quite natural, to let the action of the
+play work itself out without any such encounter; or to let the encounter
+take place behind the scenes; but this would have been a patent ignoring
+of dramatic possibilities, and M. Sarcey would have had ample reason to
+pour the vials of his wrath on Augier's head. He was right, however, in
+his confidence that Augier would not fail to "make" the scene. And how
+did he "make" it? The one thing inevitable about it was that the truth
+should be revealed to Leopold; but there were a dozen different ways in
+which that might have been effected. Perhaps, in real life, Bernard
+would have said something to this effect: "Young man, you are making
+questionable advances to a lady in whom I am interested. I beg that you
+will cease to persecute her; and if you ask by what right I do so, I
+reply that I am in fact your elder brother, that I have saved our father
+from ruin, that I am henceforth the predominant partner in his business,
+and that, if you do not behave yourself, I shall see that your allowance
+is withdrawn, and that you have no longer the means to lead an idle and
+dissolute life." This would have been an ungracious but not unnatural
+way of going about the business. Had Augier chosen it, we should have
+had no right to complain on the score of probability; but it would have
+been evident to the least imaginative that he had left the specifically
+dramatic opportunities of the scene entirely undeveloped. Let us now see
+what he actually did. Marie Letellier, compromised by Leopold's conduct,
+has left the Fourchambault house and taken refuge with Mme. Bernard.
+Bernard loves her devotedly, but does not dream that she can see
+anything in his uncouth personality, and imagines that she loves
+Leopold. Accordingly, he determines that Leopold shall marry her, and
+tells him so. Leopold scoffs at the idea; Bernard insists; and little by
+little the conflict rises to a tone of personal altercation. At last
+Leopold says something slighting of Mile. Letellier, and Bernard--who,
+be it noted, has begun with no intention of revealing the kinship
+between them--loses his self-control and cries, "Ah, there speaks the
+blood of the man who slandered a woman in order to prevent his son from
+keeping his word to her. I recognize in you your grandfather, who was a
+miserable calumniator." "Repeat that word!" says Leopold. Bernard does
+so, and the other strikes him across the face with his glove. For a
+perceptible interval Bernard struggles with his rage in silence, and
+then: "It is well for you," he cries, "that you are my brother!"
+
+We need not follow the scene in the sentimental turning which it then
+takes, whereby it comes about, of course, that Bernard, not Leopold,
+marries Mile. Letellier. The point is that Augier has justified Sarcey's
+confidence by making the scene thoroughly and specifically dramatic; in
+other words, by charging it with emotion, and working up the tension to
+a very high pitch. And Sarcey was no doubt right in holding that this
+was what the whole audience instinctively expected, and that they would
+have been more or less consciously disappointed had the author baulked
+their expectation.
+
+An instructive example of the failure to "make" a dramatically
+obligatory scene may be found in _Agatha_ by Mrs. Humphry Ward and Mr.
+Louis Parker. Agatha is believed to be the child of Sir Richard and Lady
+Fancourt; but at a given point she learns that a gentleman whom she has
+known all her life as "Cousin Ralph" is in reality her father. She has a
+middle-aged suitor, Colonel Ford, whom she is very willing to marry; but
+at the end of the second act she refuses him, because she shrinks from
+the idea, on the one hand, of concealing the truth from him, on the
+other hand, of revealing her mother's trespass. This is not, in itself,
+a very strong situation, for we feel the barrier between the lovers to
+be unreal. Colonel Ford is a man of sense. The secret of Agatha's
+parentage can make no real difference to him. Nothing material--no point
+of law or of honour--depends on it. He will learn the truth, and all
+will come right between them. The only point on which our interest can
+centre is the question how he is to learn the truth; and here the
+authors go very far astray. There are two, and only two, really dramatic
+ways in which Colonel Ford can be enlightened. Lady Fancourt must
+realize that Agatha is wrecking her life to keep her mother's secret,
+and must either herself reveal it to Colonel Ford, or must encourage and
+enjoin Agatha to do so. Now, the authors choose neither of these ways:
+the secret slips out, through a chance misunderstanding in a
+conversation between Sir Richard Fancourt and the Colonel. This is a
+typical instance of an error of construction; and why?--because it
+leaves to chance what should be an act of will. Drama means a thing
+done, not merely a thing that happens; and the playwright who lets
+accident effect what might naturally and probably be a result of
+volition, or, in other words, of character, sins against the fundamental
+law of his craft. In the case before us, Lady Fancourt and Agatha--the
+two characters on whom our interest is centred--are deprived of all
+share in one of the crucial moments of the action. Whether the actual
+disclosure was made by the mother or by the daughter, there ought to
+have been a great scene between the two, in which the mother should have
+insisted that, by one or other, the truth must be told. It would have
+been a painful, a delicate, a difficult scene, but it was the obligatory
+scene of the play; and had we been allowed clearly to foresee it at the
+end of the second act, our interest would have been decisively carried
+forward. The scene, too, might have given the play a moral relevance
+which in fact it lacks. The readjustment of Agatha's scheme of things,
+so as to make room for her mother's history, might have been made
+explicit and partly intellectual, instead of implicit, inarticulate and
+wholly emotional.
+
+This case, then, clearly falls under our second heading. We cannot say
+that it is the logic of the theme which demands the scene, for no thesis
+or abstract idea is enunciated. Nor can we say that the course of events
+is unnatural or improbable; our complaint is that, without being at all
+less natural, they might have been highly dramatic, and that in fact
+they are not so.
+
+In a very different type of play, we find another example of the
+ignoring of a dramatically obligatory scene. The author of that charming
+fantasy, _The Passing of the Third Floor Back_, was long ago guilty of a
+play named _The Rise of Dick Halward_, chiefly memorable for having
+elicited from Mr. Bernard Shaw one of the most brilliant pages in
+English dramatic criticism. The hero of this play, after an adventurous
+youth in Mexico, has gone to the bar, but gets no briefs, and is
+therefore unable to marry a lady who announces that no suitor need apply
+who has less than £5000 a year. One fine day Dick receives from Mexico
+the will of an old comrade, which purports to leave to him, absolutely,
+half a million dollars, gold; but the will is accompanied by a letter,
+in which the old comrade states that the property is really left to him
+only in trust for the testator's long-lost son, whom Dick is enjoined to
+search out and endow with a capital which, at 5 per cent, represents
+accurately the desiderated £5000 a year. As a matter of fact (but this
+is not to our present purpose), the long-lost son is actually, at that
+moment, sharing Dick's chambers in the Temple. Dick, however, does not
+know this, and cannot resist the temptation to destroy the old miner's
+letter, and grab the property. We know, of course, that retribution is
+bound to descend upon him; but does not dramatic effect imperatively
+require that, for a brief space at any rate, he should be seen--with
+whatever qualms of conscience his nature might dictate--enjoying his
+ill-gotten wealth? Mr. Jerome, however, baulks us of this just
+expectation. In the very first scene of the second act we find that the
+game is up. The deceased miner wrote his letter to Dick seated in the
+doorway of a hut; a chance photographer took a snap-shot at him; and on
+returning to England, the chance photographer has nothing more pressing
+to do than to chance upon the one man who knows the long-lost son, and
+to show him the photograph of the dying miner, whom he at once
+recognizes. By aid of a microscope, the letter he is writing can be
+deciphered, and thus Dick's fraud is brought home to him. Now one would
+suppose that an author who had invented this monstrous and staggering
+concatenation of chances, must hope to justify it by some highly
+dramatic situation, in the obvious and commonplace sense of the word. It
+is not difficult, indeed, to foresee such a situation, in which Dick
+Halward should be confronted, as if by magic, with the very words of the
+letter he has so carefully destroyed. I am far from saying that this
+scene would, in fact, have justified its amazing antecedents; but it
+would have shown a realization on the author's part that he must at any
+rate attempt some effect proportionate to the strain he had placed upon
+our credulity. Mr. Jerome showed no such realization. He made the man
+who handed Dick the copy of the letter explain beforehand how it had
+been obtained; so that Dick, though doubtless surprised and disgusted,
+was not in the least thunderstruck, and manifested no emotion. Here,
+then, Mr. Jerome evidently missed a scene rendered obligatory by the law
+of the maximum of specifically dramatic effect.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The third, or structural, class of obligatory scenes may be more briefly
+dealt with, seeing that we have already, in the last chapter, discussed
+the principle involved. In this class we have placed, by definition,
+scenes which the author himself has rendered obligatory by seeming
+unmistakably to lead up to them--or, in other words, scenes indicated,
+or seeming to be indicated, by deliberately-planted finger-posts. It may
+appear as though the case of Dick Halward, which we have just been
+examining, in reality came under this heading. But it cannot actually be
+said that Mr. Jerome either did, or seemed to, point by finger-posts
+towards the obligatory scene. He rather appears to have been blankly
+unconscious of its possibility.
+
+We have noted in the foregoing chapter the unwisdom of planting
+misleading finger-posts; here we have only to deal with the particular
+case in which they seem to point to a definite and crucial scene. An
+example given by M. Sarcey himself will, I think, make the matter
+quite clear.
+
+M. Jules Lemaître's play, _Révoltée_, tells the story of a would-be
+intellectual, ill-conditioned young woman, married to a plain and
+ungainly professor of mathematics, whom she despises. We know that she
+is in danger of yielding to the fascinations of a seductive
+man-about-town; and having shown us this danger, the author proceeds to
+emphasize the manly and sterling character of the husband. He has the
+gentleness that goes with strength; but where his affections or his
+honour is concerned, he is not a man to be trifled with. This having
+been several times impressed upon us, we naturally expect that the wife
+is to be rescued by some striking manifestation of the husband's
+masterful virility. But no such matter! Rescued she is, indeed; but it
+is by the intervention of her half-brother, who fights a duel on her
+behalf, and is brought back wounded to restore peace to the
+mathematician's household: that man of science having been quite passive
+throughout, save for some ineffectual remonstrances. It happens that in
+this case we know just where the author went astray. Hélène (the wife)
+is the unacknowledged daughter of a great lady, Mme. de Voves; and the
+subject of the play, as the author first conceived it, was the relation
+between the mother, the illegitimate daughter, and the legitimate son;
+the daughter's husband taking only a subordinate place. But Lemaître
+chose as a model for the husband a man whom he had known and admired;
+and he allowed himself to depict in vivid colours his strong and
+sympathetic character, without noticing that he was thereby upsetting
+the economy of his play, and giving his audience reason to anticipate a
+line of development quite different from that which he had in mind.
+Inadvertently, in fact, he planted, not one, but two or three,
+misleading finger-posts.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+We come now to the fourth, or psychological, class of obligatory
+scenes--those which are "required in order to justify some modification
+of character or alteration of will, too important to be taken
+for granted."
+
+An obvious example of an obligatory scene of this class may be found in
+the third act of _Othello_. The poet is bound to show us the process by
+which Iago instils his poison into Othello's mind. He has backed
+himself, so to speak, to make this process credible to us; and, by a
+masterpiece of dexterity and daring, he wins his wager. Had he omitted
+this scene--had he shown us Othello at one moment full of serene
+confidence, and at his next appearance already convinced of Desdemona's
+guilt--he would have omitted the pivot and turning--point of the whole
+structure. It may seem fantastic to conceive that any dramatist could
+blunder so grossly; but there are not a few plays in which we observe a
+scarcely less glaring hiatus.
+
+A case in point may be found in Lord Tennyson's _Becket_. I am not one
+of those who hold Tennyson merely contemptible as a dramatist. I believe
+that, had he taken to playwriting nearly half-a-century earlier, and
+studied the root principles of craftsmanship, instead of blindly
+accepting the Elizabethan conventions, he might have done work as fine
+in the mass as are the best moments of _Queen Mary_ and _Harold_. As a
+whole, _Becket_ is one of his weakest productions; but the Prologue and
+the first act would have formed an excellent first and third act for a
+play of wholly different sequel, had he interposed, in a second act, the
+obligatory scene required to elucidate Becket's character. The historic
+and psychological problem of Thomas Becket is his startling
+transformation from an easy-going, luxurious, worldly statesman into a
+gaunt ecclesiastic, fanatically fighting for the rights of his see, of
+his order, and of Rome. In any drama which professes to deal (as this
+does) with his whole career, the intellectual interest cannot but centre
+in an analysis of the forces that brought about this seeming new-birth
+of his soul. It would have been open to the poet, no doubt, to take up
+his history at a later point, when he was already the full-fledged
+clerical and ultramontane. But this Tennyson does not do. He is at pains
+to present to us the magnificent Chancellor, the bosom friend of the
+King, and mild reprover of his vices; and then, without the smallest
+transition, hey presto! he is the intransigent priest, bitterly
+combating the Constitutions of Clarendon. It is true that in the
+Prologue the poet places one or two finger-posts--small, conventional
+foreshadowings of coming trouble. For instance, the game of chess
+between King and Chancellor ends with a victory for Becket, who says--
+
+  "You see my bishop
+  Hath brought your king to a standstill. You are beaten."
+
+The symbolical game of chess is a well-worn dramatic device. Becket,
+moreover, seems to feel some vague disquietude as to what may happen if
+he accepts the archbishopric; but there is nothing to show that he is
+conscious of any bias towards the intransigent clericalism of the later
+act. The character-problem, in fact, is not only not solved, but is
+ignored. The obligatory scene is skipped over, in the interval between
+the Prologue and the first act.
+
+One of the finest plays of our time--Sir Arthur Pinero's _Iris_--lacks,
+in my judgment, an obligatory scene. The character of Iris is admirably
+true, so far as it goes; but it is incomplete. The author seems to have
+evaded the crucial point of his play--the scene of her installation in
+Maldonado's flat. To perfect his psychological study, he was bound to
+bridge the chasm between the Iris of the third act and the Iris of the
+fourth. He builds two ends of the bridge, in the incident of the
+cheque-book at the close of the one act, and in the state of hebetude in
+which we find her at the opening of the other; but there remains a great
+gap at which the imagination boggles. The author has tried to throw a
+retrospective footway across it in Iris's confession to Trenwith in the
+fifth act; but I do not find that it quite meets the case. It would no
+doubt have been very difficult to keep the action within reasonable
+limits had a new act taken the place of the existing fourth; but Sir
+Arthur Pinero would probably have produced a completer work of art had
+he faced this difficulty, and contrived to compress into a single last
+act something like the matter of the existing fourth and fifth. It may
+be that he deliberately preferred that Iris should give in narrative the
+history of her decline; but I do not consider this a case in support of
+that slight plea for impassioned narrative which I ventured to put forth
+a few pages back. Her confession to Trenwith would have been far more
+dramatic and moving had it been about one-fourth part as long and
+one-fourth part as articulate.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Of the scene imposed by history or legend it is unnecessary to say very
+much. We saw in Chapter IX that the theatre is not the place for
+expounding the results of original research, which cast a new light on
+historic character. It is not the place for whitewashing Richard III, or
+representing him as a man of erect and graceful figure. It is not the
+place for proving that Guy Fawkes was an earnest Presbyterian, that Nell
+Gwynn was a lady of the strictest morals, or that George Washington was
+incapable of telling the truth. The playwright who deals with Henry VIII
+is bound to present him, in the schoolboy's phrase, as "a great
+widower." William the Silent must not be a chatterbox, Torquemada a
+humanitarian, Ivan the Terrible a conscientious opponent of capital
+punishment. And legend has its fixed points no less than history. In the
+theatre, indeed, there is little distinction between them: history is
+legend, and legend history. A dramatist may, if he pleases (though it is
+a difficult task), break wholly unfamiliar ground in the past; but where
+a historic legend exists he must respect it at his peril.
+
+From all this it is a simple deduction that where legend (historic or
+otherwise) associates a particular character with a particular scene
+that is by any means presentable on the stage, that scene becomes
+obligatory in a drama of which he is the leading figure. The fact that
+Shakespeare could write a play about King John, and say nothing about
+Runnymede and Magna Charta, shows that that incident in constitutional
+history had not yet passed into popular legend. When Sir Herbert Tree
+revived the play, he repaired the poet's omission by means of an
+inserted tableau. Even Shakespeare had not the hardihood to let Caesar
+fall without saying, "The Ides of March are come" and "Et tu, Brute!"
+Nero is bound to fiddle while Rome burns, or the audience will know the
+reason why.[4] Historic criticism will not hear of the "Thou hast
+conquered, Galilean!" which legend attributes to Julian the Apostate;
+yet Ibsen not only makes him say it, but may almost be said to find in
+the phrase the keynote of his world-historic drama. Tristram and Iseult
+must drink a love-philtre or they are not Tristram and Iseult. It would
+be the extreme of paradox to write a Paolo-and-Francesca play and omit
+the scene of "Quel giorno più non vi leggemmo avante."
+
+The cases are not very frequent, however, in which an individual
+incident is thus imposed by history or legend. The practical point to be
+noted is rather that, when an author introduces a strongly-marked
+historical character, he must be prepared to give him at least one good
+opportunity of acting up to the character which legend--the best of
+evidence in the theatre--assigns to him. When such a personage is
+presented to us, it ought to be at his highest potency. We do not
+want to see--
+
+  "From Marlborough's eyes the tears of dotage flow,
+  And Swift expire, a driveller and a show."
+
+If you deal with Napoleon, for instance, it is perfectly clear that he
+must dominate the stage. As soon as you bring in the name, the idea, of
+Napoleon Bonaparte, men have eyes and ears for nothing else; and they
+demand to see him, in a general way, acting up to their general
+conception of him. That was what Messrs. Lloyd Osbourne and Austin
+Strong forgot in their otherwise clever play, _The Exile_. It is useless
+to prove, historically, that at a given moment he was passive, supine,
+unconscious, while people around him were eagerly plotting his escape
+and restoration. That may have been so; but it is not what an audience
+wants to see. It wants to see Napoleon Napoleonizing. For anomalies and
+uncharacteristic episodes in Napoleon's career we must go to books; the
+playhouse is not the place for them. It is true that a dramatist like
+Mr. Bernard Shaw may, at his own risk and peril, set forth to give us a
+new reading of Caesar or of Napoleon, which may or may not be
+dramatically acceptable.[5] But this is not what Messrs. Osbourne and
+Strong tried to do. Their Napoleon was the Napoleon of tradition--only
+he failed to act "in a concatenation according."
+
+There are a few figures in history--and Napoleon is one of them--which
+so thrill the imagination that their mere name can dominate the stage,
+better, perhaps, than their bodily presence. In _L'Aiglon_, by M.
+Rostand, Napoleon is in fact the hero, though he lies dead in his
+far-off island, under the Southern Cross. Another such figure is Abraham
+Lincoln. In James Herne's sadly underrated play, _Griffith Davenport_,
+we were always conscious of "Mr. Lincoln" in the background; and the act
+in which Governor Morton of Indiana brought the President's instructions
+to Davenport might fairly be called an obligatory scene, inasmuch as it
+gave us the requisite sense of personal nearness to the master-spirit,
+without involving any risk of belittlement through imperfections of
+representation. There is a popular melodrama, passing in Palestine under
+the Romans, throughout the course of which we constantly feel the
+influence of a strange new prophet, unseen but wonder-working, who, if I
+remember rightly, is personally presented to us only in a final tableau,
+wherein he appears riding into Jerusalem amid the hosannas of the
+multitude. The execution of _Ben Hur_ is crude and commonplace, but the
+conception is by no means inartistic. Historical figures of the highest
+rank may perhaps be best adumbrated in this fashion, with or without one
+personal appearance, so brief that there shall be no danger of
+anti-climax.
+
+The last paragraph reminds us that the accomplished playwright shows his
+accomplishment quite as much in his recognition and avoidance of the
+_scène à ne pas faire_ as in his divination of the obligatory scene.
+There is always the chance that no one may miss a scene demanded by
+logic or psychology; but an audience knows too well when it has been
+bored or distressed by a superfluous, or inconsequent, or wantonly
+painful scene.
+
+Some twenty years ago, in criticizing a play named _Le Maître d'Armes_,
+M. Sarcey took the authors gravely to task, in the name of "Aristotle
+and common sense," for following the modern and reprehensible tendency
+to present "slices of life" rather than constructed and developed
+dramas. Especially he reproached them with deliberately omitting the
+_scène à faire_. A young lady is seduced, he says, and, for the sake of
+her child, implores her betrayer to keep his promise of marriage. He
+renews the promise, without the slightest intention of fulfilling it,
+and goes on board his yacht in order to make his escape. She discovers
+his purpose and follows him on board the yacht. "What is the scene,"
+asks M. Sarcey--here I translate literally--"which you expect, you, the
+public? It is the scene between the abandoned fair one and her seducer.
+The author may make it in a hundred ways, but make it he must!" Instead
+of which, the critic proceeds, we are fobbed off with a storm-scene, a
+rescue, and other sensational incidents, and hear no word of what passes
+between the villain and his victim. Here, I think, M. Sarcey is mistaken
+in his application of his pet principle. Words cannot express our
+unconcern as to what passes between the heroine and the villain on board
+the yacht--nay, more, our gratitude for being spared that painful and
+threadbare scene of recrimination. The plot demands, observe, that the
+villain shall not relent. We know quite well that he cannot, for if he
+did the play would fall to pieces. Why, then, should we expect or demand
+a sordid squabble which can lead to nothing? We--and by "we" I mean the
+public which relishes such plays--cannot possibly have any keen appetite
+for copious re-hashes of such very cold mutton as the appeals of the
+penitent heroine to the recalcitrant villain. And the moral seems to be
+that in this class of play--the drama, if one may call it so, of
+foregone character--the _scène à faire_ is precisely the scene to
+be omitted.
+
+In plays of a more ambitious class, skill is often shown by the
+indication, in place of the formal presentment, even of an important
+scene which the audience may, or might, have expected to witness in
+full. We have already noted such a case in _The Wild Duck_: Ibsen knew
+that what we really required to witness was not the actual process of
+Gregers's disclosure to Hialmar, but its effects. A small, but quite
+noticeable, example of a scene thus rightly left to the imagination
+occurred in Mr. Somerset Maugham's first play, _A Man of Honour_. In the
+first act, Jack Halliwell, his wife, and his sister-in-law call upon his
+friend Basil Kent. The sister-in-law, Hilda Murray, is a rich widow; and
+she and Kent presently go out on the balcony together and are lost to
+view. Then it appears, in a scene between the Halliwells, that they
+fully believe that Kent is in love with Mrs. Murray and is now proposing
+to her. But when the two re-enter from the balcony, it is evident from
+their mien that, whatever may have passed between them, they are not
+affianced lovers; and we presently learn that though Kent is in fact
+strongly attracted to Mrs. Murray, he considers himself bound in honour
+to marry a certain Jenny Bush, a Fleet Street barmaid, with whom he has
+become entangled. Many playwrights would, so to speak, have dotted the
+i's of the situation by giving us the scene between Kent and Mrs.
+Murray; but Mr. Maugham has done exactly right in leaving us to divine
+it. We know all that, at this point, we require to know of the relation
+between them; to have told us more would have been to anticipate and
+discount the course of events.
+
+A more striking instance of a scene rightly placed behind the scenes
+occurs in M. de Curel's terrible drama _Les Fossiles_. I need not go
+into the singularly unpleasing details of the plot. Suffice it to say
+that a very peculiar condition of things exists in the family of the Duc
+de Chantemelle. It has been fully discussed in the second act between
+the Duke and his daughter Claire, who has been induced to accept it for
+the sake of the family name. But a person more immediately concerned is
+Robert de Chantemelle, the only son of the house--will he also accept it
+quietly? A nurse, who is acquainted with the black secret, misbehaves
+herself, and is to be packed off. As she is a violent woman, Robert
+insists on dismissing her himself, and leaves the room to do so. The
+rest of the family are sure that, in her rage, she will blurt out the
+whole story; and they wait, in breathless anxiety, for Robert's return.
+What follows need not be told: the point is that this scene--the scene
+of tense expectancy as to the result of a crisis which is taking place
+in another room of the same house--is really far more dramatic than the
+crisis itself would be. The audience already knows all that the angry
+virago can say to her master; and of course no discussion of the merits
+of the case is possible between these two. Therefore M. de Curel is
+conspicuously right in sparing us the scene of vulgar violence, and
+giving us the scene of far higher tension in which Robert's father, wife
+and sister expect his return, their apprehension deepening with every
+moment that he delays.
+
+We see, then, that there is such a thing as a false _scène à faire_--a
+scene which at first sight seems obligatory, but is in fact much better
+taken for granted. It may be absolutely indispensable that it should be
+suggested to the mind of the audience, but neither indispensable nor
+advisable that it should be presented to their eyes. The judicious
+playwright will often ask himself, "Is it the actual substance of this
+scene that I require, or only its repercussion?"
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+[Footnote 1: For example, in his criticism of Becque's _La Parisienne
+(Quarante Ans de Théâtre_, VI, p. 364), he tells how, at the end of the
+second act, one of his neighbours said to him, "Eh! bien, vous voilà
+bien attrapé! Où est la _scène à faire_?" "I freely admit," he
+continues, "that there is no _scène à faire_; if there had been no third
+act I should not have been greatly astonished. When you make it your
+business to recite on the stage articles from the _Vie Parisienne_, it
+makes no difference whether you stop at the end of the second article or
+at the end of the third." This clearly implies that a play in which
+there is no _scène à faire_ is nothing but a series of newspaper
+sketches. Becque, one fancies, might have replied that the scene between
+Clotilde and Monsieur Simpson at the beginning of Act III was precisely
+the _scène à faire_ demanded by the logic of his cynicism.]
+
+[Footnote 2: I need scarcely direct the reader's attention to Mr.
+Gilbert Murray's noble renderings of these speeches.]
+
+[Footnote 3: Such a scene occurs in that very able play, _The Way the
+Money Goes_, by Lady Bell.]
+
+[Footnote 4: In Mr. Stephen Phillips's play he does not actually play on
+the lyre, but he improvises and recites an ode to the conflagration.]
+
+[Footnote 5: And, after all, Mr. Shaw does not run counter to the
+legend. He exhibits Caesar and Napoleon "in their well-known attitudes":
+only, by an odd metempsychosis, the soul of Mr. Shaw has somehow entered
+into them.]
+
+
+
+
+_CHAPTER XIV_
+
+THE PERIPETY
+
+
+In the Greek theatre, as every one knows, the _peripeteia_ or reversal
+of fortune--the turning of the tables, as we might say--was a
+clearly-defined and recognized portion of the dramatic organism. It was
+often associated with the _anagnorisis_ or recognition. Mr. Gilbert
+Murray has recently shown cause for believing that both these dramatic
+"forms" descended from the ritual in which Greek drama took its
+origin--the ritual celebrating the death and resurrection of the season
+of "mellow fruitfulness." If this theory be true, the _peripeteia_ was
+at first a change from sorrow to joy--joy in the rebirth of the
+beneficent powers of nature. And to this day a sudden change from gloom
+to exhilaration is a popular and effective incident--as when, at the end
+of a melodrama, the handcuffs are transferred from the wrists of the
+virtuous naval lieutenant to those of the wicked baronet, and, through
+the disclosure of a strawberry-mark on his left arm, the lieutenant is
+recognized as the long-lost heir to a dukedom and £50,000 a year.
+
+But when, as soon happened in Greece, the forms appropriate to a
+celebration of the death and resurrection of Dionysus came to be blent
+with the tomb-ritual of a hero, the term _peripeteia_ acquired a special
+association with a sudden decline from prosperity into adversity. In the
+Middle Ages, this was thought to be the very essence and meaning of
+tragedy, as we may see from Chaucer's lines:
+
+  "Tragedie is to seyn a certeyn storie,
+  As oldë bokës maken us memorie,
+  Of him that stood in gret prosperitee,
+  And is y-fallen out of heigh degree
+  Into miserie, and endeth wrecchedly."
+
+Aristotle cites a good instance of a peripety--to Anglicize the
+word--"where, in the _Lynceus_, the hero is led away to execution,
+followed by Danaus as executioner; but, as the effect of the
+antecedents, Danaus is executed and Lynceus escapes." But here, as in so
+many other contexts, we must turn for the classic example to the
+_Oedipus Rex_. Jocasta, hearing from the Corinthian stranger that
+Polybus, King of Corinth, the reputed father of Oedipus, is dead, sends
+for her husband to tell him that the oracle which doomed him to
+parricide is defeated, since Polybus has died a natural death. Oedipus
+exults in the news and triumphs over the oracles; but, as the scene
+proceeds, the further revelations made by the same stranger lead Jocasta
+to recognize in Oedipus her own child, who was exposed on Mount
+Kithairon; and, in the subsequent scene, the evidence of the old
+Shepherd brings Oedipus himself to the same crushing realization. No
+completer case of _anagnorisis_ and _peripeteia_ could well be
+conceived--whatever we may have to say of the means by which it is
+led up to.[1]
+
+Has the conception of the peripety, as an almost obligatory element in
+drama, any significance for the modern playwright? Obligatory, of
+course, it cannot be: it is easy to cite a hundred admirable plays in
+which it is impossible to discover anything that can reasonably be
+called a peripety. But this, I think, we may safely say: the dramatist
+is fortunate who finds in the development of his theme, without
+unnatural strain or too much preparation, opportunity for a great scene,
+highly-wrought, arresting, absorbing, wherein one or more of his
+characters shall experience a marked reversal either of inward
+soul-state or of outward fortune. The theory of the peripety, in short,
+practically resolves itself for us into the theory of the "great scene,"
+Plays there are, many and excellent plays, in which some one scene
+stands out from all the rest, impressing itself with peculiar vividness
+on the spectator's mind; and, nine times out of ten, this scene will be
+found to involve a peripety. It can do no harm, then, if the playwright
+should ask himself: "Can I, without any undue sacrifice, so develop my
+theme as to entail upon my leading characters, naturally and probably,
+an experience of this order?"
+
+The peripeties of real life are frequent, though they are apt to be too
+small in scale, or else too fatally conclusive, to provide material for
+drama. One of the commonest, perhaps, is that of the man who enters a
+physician's consulting-room to seek advice in some trifling ailment, and
+comes out again, half an hour later, doomed either to death or to some
+calamity worse than death. This situation has been employed, not
+ineffectively, by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, in the first act of a romantic
+drama, _The Fires of Fate_; but it is very difficult to find any
+dramatic sequel to a peripety involving mere physical disaster.[2] The
+moral peripety--the sudden dissipation of some illusion, or defeat of
+some imposture, or crumbling of some castle in the air--is a no less
+characteristic incident of real life, and much more amenable to the
+playwright's uses. Certainly there are few things more impressive in
+drama than to see a man or woman--or a man and woman--come upon the
+stage, radiant, confident, assured that
+
+  "God's in his heaven,
+   All's right with the world,"
+
+and leave it crushed and desperate, after a gradual and yet swift
+descent into Avernus. Such a scene is of the very marrow of drama. It is
+a play within a play; a concentrated, quintessentiated crisis.
+
+In the third act of _Othello_ we have a peripety handled with consummate
+theatrical skill. To me--I confess it with bated breath--the
+craftsmanship seems greatly superior to the psychology. Othello, when we
+look into it, succumbs with incredible facility to Iago's poisoned
+pin-pricks; but no audience dreams of looking into it; and there lies
+the proof of Shakespeare's technical mastery. In the Trial Scene in _The
+Merchant of Venice_ we have another great peripety. It illustrates the
+obvious principle that, where the drama consists in a conflict between
+two persons or parties, the peripety is generally a double one--the
+sudden collapse of Shylock's case implying an equally sudden restoration
+of Antonio's fortunes. Perhaps the most striking peripety in Ibsen is
+Stockmann's fall from jubilant self-confidence to defiant impotence in
+the third act of _An Enemy of the People_. Thinking that he has the
+"compact majority" at his back, he assumes the Burgomaster's insignia of
+office, and lords it over his incensed brother, only to learn, by blow
+on blow of disillusionment, that "the compact majority" has ratted, that
+he is to be deprived of his position and income, and that the commonest
+freedom of speech is to be denied him. In _A Doll's House_ there are two
+peripeties: Nora's fall from elation to despair in the first scene with
+Krogstad, and the collapse of Helmer's illusions in the last scene
+of all.
+
+A good instance of the "great scene" which involves a marked peripety
+occurs in Sardou's _Dora_, once famous in England under the title of
+_Diplomacy_. The "scene of the three men" shows how Tékli, a Hungarian
+exile, calls upon his old friend André de Maurillac, on the day of
+André's marriage, and congratulates him on having eluded the wiles of a
+dangerous adventuress, Dora de Rio-Zarès, by whom he had once seemed to
+be attracted. But it is precisely Dora whom André has married; and,
+learning this, Tékli tries to withdraw, or minimize, his imputation. For
+a moment a duel seems imminent; but André's friend, Favrolles, adjures
+him to keep his head; and the three men proceed to thrash the matter out
+as calmly as possible, with the result that, in the course of
+half-an-hour or so, it seems to be proved beyond all doubt that the
+woman André adores, and whom he has just married, is a treacherous spy,
+who sells to tyrannical foreign governments the lives of political
+exiles and the honour of the men who fall into her toils. The crushing
+suspicion is ultimately disproved, by one of the tricks in which Sardou
+delighted; but that does not here concern us. Artificial as are its
+causes and its consequences, the "scene of the three men," while it
+lasts, holds us breathless and absorbed; and André's fall from the
+pinnacle of happiness to the depth of misery, is a typical peripety.
+
+Equally typical and infinitely more tragic is another postnuptial
+peripety--the scene of the mutual confession of Angel Clare and Tess in
+Mr. Hardy's great novel. As it stands on the printed page, this scene is
+a superb piece of drama. Its greatness has been obscured in the English
+theatre by the general unskilfulness of the dramatic version presented.
+One magnificent scene does not make a play. In America, on the other
+hand, the fine acting of Mrs. Fiske secured popularity for a version
+which was, perhaps, rather better than that which we saw in England.
+
+I have said that dramatic peripeties are not infrequent in real life;
+and their scene, as is natural, is often laid in the law courts. It is
+unnecessary to recall the awful "reversal of fortune" that overtook one
+of the most brilliant of modern dramatists. About the same period,
+another drama of the English courts ended in a startling and terrible
+peripety. A young lady was staying as a guest with a half-pay officer
+and his wife. A valuable pearl belonging to the hostess disappeared; and
+the hostess accused her guest of having stolen it. The young lady, who
+had meanwhile married, brought an action for slander against her quondam
+friend. For several days the case continued, and everything seemed to be
+going in the plaintiff's favour. Major Blank, the defendant's husband,
+was ruthlessly cross-examined by Sir Charles Russell, afterwards Lord
+Chief Justice of England, with a view to showing that he was the real
+thief. He made a very bad witness, and things looked black against him.
+The end was nearing, and every one anticipated a verdict in the
+plaintiff's favour, when there came a sudden change of scene. The stolen
+pearl had been sold to a firm of jewellers, who had recorded the numbers
+of the Bank of England notes with which they paid for it. One of these
+notes was produced in court, and lo! it was endorsed with the name of
+the plaintiff.[3] In a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, the whole
+edifice of mendacity and perjury fell to pieces. The thief was arrested
+and imprisoned; but the peripety for her was less terrible than for her
+husband, who had married her in chivalrous faith in her innocence.
+
+Would it have been--or may it some day prove to be--possible to transfer
+this "well-made" drama of real life bodily to the stage? I am inclined
+to think not. It looks to me very much like one of those "blind alley"
+themes of which mention has been made. There is matter, indeed, for most
+painful drama in the relations of the husband and wife, both before and
+after the trial; but, from the psychological point of view, one can see
+nothing in the case but a distressing and inexplicable anomaly.[4] At
+the same time, the bare fact of the sudden and tremendous peripety is
+irresistibly dramatic; and Mr. Henry Arthur Jones has admitted that it
+suggested to him the great scene of the unmasking of Felicia Hindemarsh
+in _Mrs. Dane's Defence._
+
+It is instructive to note the delicate adjustment which Mr. Jones found
+necessary in order to adapt the theme to dramatic uses. In the first
+place, not wishing to plunge into the depths of tragedy, he left the
+heroine unmarried, though on the point of marriage. In the second place,
+he made the blot on her past, not a theft followed by an attempt to
+shift the guilt on to other shoulders, but an error of conduct, due to
+youth and inexperience, serious in itself, but rendered disastrous by
+tragic consequences over which she, Felicia, had no control. Thus Mr.
+Jones raised a real and fairly sufficient obstacle between his lovers,
+without rendering his heroine entirely unsympathetic, or presenting her
+in the guise of a bewildering moral anomaly. Thirdly, he transferred the
+scene of the peripety from a court of justice, with its difficult
+adjuncts and tedious procedure, to the private study of a great lawyer.
+At the opening of the scene between Mrs. Dane and Sir Daniel Carteret,
+she is, no doubt, still anxious and ill-at-ease, but reasonably
+confident of having averted all danger of exposure. Sir Daniel, too
+(like Sir Charles Russell in the pearl suit), is practically convinced
+of her innocence. He merely wants to get the case absolutely clear, for
+the final confounding of her accusers. At first, all goes smoothly. Mrs.
+Dane's answers to his questions are pat and plausible. Then she makes a
+single, almost imperceptible, slip of the tongue: she says, "We had
+governesses," instead of "I had governesses." Sir Daniel pricks up his
+ears: "We? You say you were an only child. Who's we?" "My cousin and I,"
+she answers. Sir Daniel thinks it odd that he has not heard of this
+cousin before; but he continues his interrogatory without serious
+suspicion. Then it occurs to him to look up, in a topographical
+dictionary, the little town of Tawhampton, where Mrs. Dane spent her
+youth. He reads the bald account of it, ending thus, "The living is a
+Vicarage, net yearly value £376, and has been held since 1875 by"--and
+he turns round upon her--"by the Rev. Francis Hindemarsh! Hindemarsh?"
+
+  Mrs. Dane: He was my uncle.
+
+  Sir Daniel: Your uncle?
+
+  Mrs. Dane: Sir Daniel, I've done wrong to hide from you that Felicia
+  Hindemarsh was my cousin.
+
+  Sir Daniel: Felicia Hindemarsh was your cousin!
+
+  Mrs. Dane: Can't you understand why I have hidden it? The whole
+  affair was so terrible.
+
+And so she stumbles on, from one inevitable admission to another, until
+the damning truth is clear that she herself is Felicia Hindemarsh, the
+central, though not the most guilty, figure in a horrible scandal.
+
+This scene is worthy of study as an excellent type of what may be called
+the judicial peripety, the crushing cross-examination, in which it is
+possible to combine the tension of the detective story with no small
+psychological subtlety. In Mr. Jones's scene, the psychology is obvious
+enough; but it is an admirable example of nice adjustment without any
+obtrusive ingenuity. The whole drama, in short, up to the last act is,
+in the exact sense of the word, a well-made play--complex yet clear,
+ingenious yet natural. In the comparative weakness of the last act we
+have a common characteristic of latter-day drama, which will have to be
+discussed in due course.
+
+In this case we have a peripety of external fortune. For a
+clearly-marked moral peripety we may turn to the great scene between
+Vivie and her mother in the second act of _Mrs. Warren's Profession._
+Whatever may be thought of the matter of this scene, its movement is
+excellent. After a short, sharp opening, which reveals to Mrs. Warren
+the unfilial dispositions of her daughter, and reduces her to whimpering
+dismay, the following little passage occurs:
+
+  Mrs. Warren: You're very rough with me, Vivie.
+
+  Vivie: Nonsense. What about bed? It's past ten.
+
+  Mrs. Warren (passionately): What's the use of my going to bed? Do
+  you think I could sleep?
+
+  Vivie: Why not? I shall.
+
+Then the mother turns upon the daughter's stony self-righteousness, and
+pours forth her sordid history in such a way as to throw a searchlight
+on the conditions which make such histories possible; until, exhausted
+by her outburst, she says, "Oh, dear! I do believe I am getting sleepy
+after all," and Vivie replies, "I believe it is I who will not be able
+to sleep now." Mr. Shaw, we see, is at pains to emphasize his peripety.
+
+Some "great scenes" consist, not of one decisive turning of the tables,
+but of a whole series of minor vicissitudes of fortune. Such a scene is
+the third act of _The Gay Lord Quex_, a prolonged and thrilling duel, in
+which Sophy Fullgarney passes by degrees from impertinent exultation to
+abject surrender and then springs up again to a mood of reckless
+defiance. In the "great scene" of _The Thunderbolt_, on the other
+hand--the scene of Thaddeus's false confession of having destroyed his
+brother's will--though there is, in fact, a great peripety, it is not
+that which attracts and absorbs our interest. All the greedy Mortimore
+family fall from the height of jubilant confidence in their new-found
+wealth to the depth of disappointment and exasperation. But this is not
+the aspect of the scene which grips and moves us. Our attention is
+centred on Thaddeus's struggle to take his wife's misdeed upon himself;
+and his failure cannot be described as a peripety, seeing that it sinks
+him only one degree lower in the slough of despair. Like the scene in
+Mrs. Dane's Defence, this is practically a piece of judicial drama--a
+hard-fought cross-examination. But as there is no reversal of fortune
+for the character in whom we are chiefly interested, it scarcely ranks
+as a scene of peripety.[5]
+
+Before leaving this subject, we may note that a favourite effect of
+romantic drama is an upward reversal of fortune through the
+recognition--the _anagnorisis_--of some great personage in disguise.
+Victor Hugo excelled in the superb gestures appropriate to such a scene:
+witness the passage in _Hernani_, before the tomb of Charlemagne, where
+the obscure bandit claims the right to take his place at the head of the
+princes and nobles whom the newly-elected Emperor has ordered off to
+execution:
+
+  Hernani:
+
+  Dieu qui donne le sceptre et qui te le donna
+  M'a fait duc de Segorbe et duc de Cardona,
+  Marquis de Monroy, comte Albatéra, vicomte
+  De Gor, seigneur de lieux dont j'ignore le compte.
+  Je suis Jean d'Aragon, grand maître d'Avis, né
+  Dans l'exil, fils proscrit d'un père assassiné
+  Par sentence du tien, roi Carlos de Castille.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+    (_Aux autres conjurés_)
+  Couvrons nous, grands d'Espagnol
+    (_Tous les Espagnols se couvrent_)
+      Oui, nos têtes, ô roi!
+  Ont le droit de tomber couvertes devant toi!
+
+An effective scene of this type occurs in _Monsieur Beaucaire_, where
+the supposed hairdresser is on the point of being ejected with contumely
+from the pump-room at Bath, when the French Ambassador enters, drops on
+his knee, kisses the young man's hand, and presents him to the astounded
+company as the Duc d'Orléans, Comte de Valois, and I know not what
+besides--a personage who immeasurably outshines the noblest of his
+insulters. Quieter, but not less telling, is the peripety in _The Little
+Father of the Wilderness_, by Messrs. Lloyd Osbourne and Austin Strong.
+The Père Marlotte, who, by his heroism and self-devotion, has added vast
+territories to the French possessions in America, is summoned to the
+court of Louis XV, and naturally concludes that the king has heard of
+his services and wishes to reward them. He finds, on the contrary, that
+he is wanted merely to decide a foolish bet; and he is treated with the
+grossest insolence and contempt. Just as he is departing in humiliation,
+the Governor-General of Canada arrives, with a suite of officers and
+Indians. The moment they are aware of Père Marlotte's presence, they all
+kneel to him and pay him deeper homage than they have paid to the king,
+who accepts the rebuke and joins in their demonstration.
+
+A famous peripety of the romantic order occurs in _H.M.S. Pinafore_,
+where, on the discovery that Captain Corcoran and Ralph Rackstraw have
+been changed at birth, Ralph instantly becomes captain of the ship,
+while the captain declines into an able-bodied seaman. This is one of
+the instances in which the idealism of art ekes out the imperfections
+of reality.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+[Footnote 1: That great spiritual drama known as the Book of Job opens,
+after the Prologue in Heaven, with one of the most startling of
+peripeties.]
+
+[Footnote 2: The first act of Mr. Gilbert Murray's _Carlyon Sahib_
+contains an incident of this nature; but it can scarcely be called a
+peripety, since the victim remains unconscious of his doom.]
+
+[Footnote 3: For the benefit of American readers, it may be well to
+state that the person who changes a Bank of England note is often asked
+to write his or her name on the back of it. It must have been in a
+moment of sheer aberration that the lady in question wrote her
+own name.]
+
+[Footnote 4: M. Bernstein, dishing up a similar theme with a piquant
+sauce of sensuality, made but a vulgar and trivial piece of work of it.]
+
+[Footnote 5: One of the most striking peripeties in recent English drama
+occurs in the third act of The Builder of Bridges, by Mr. Alfred Sutro.]
+
+
+
+
+_CHAPTER XV_
+
+PROBABILITY, CHANCE, AND COINCIDENCE
+
+
+Aristotle indulges in an often-quoted paradox to the effect that, in
+drama, the probable impossible is to be preferred to the improbable
+possible. With all respect, this seems to be a somewhat cumbrous way of
+stating the fact that plausibility is of more importance on the stage
+than what may be called demonstrable probability. There is no time, in
+the rush of a dramatic action, for a mathematical calculation of the
+chances for and against a given event, or for experimental proof that
+such and such a thing can or cannot be done. If a thing seem plausible,
+an audience will accept it without cavil; if it, seem incredible on the
+face of it, no evidence of its credibility will be of much avail. This
+is merely a corollary from the fundamental principle that the stage is
+the realm of appearances; not of realities, where paste jewels are at
+least as effective as real ones, and a painted forest is far more sylvan
+than a few wilted and drooping saplings, insecurely planted upon
+the boards.
+
+That is why an improbable or otherwise inacceptable incident cannot be
+validly defended on the plea that it actually happened: that it is on
+record in history or in the newspapers. In the first place, the
+dramatist can never put it on the stage as it happened. The bare fact
+may be historical, but it is not the bare fact that matters. The
+dramatist cannot restore it to its place in that intricate plexus of
+cause and effect, which is the essence and meaning of reality. He can
+only give his interpretation of the fact; and one knows not how to
+calculate the chances that his interpretation may be a false one. But
+even if this difficulty could be overcome; if the dramatist could prove
+that he had reproduced the event with photographic and cinematographic
+accuracy, his position would not thereby be improved. He would still
+have failed in his peculiar task, which is precisely that of
+interpretation. Not truth, but verisimilitude, is his aim; for the stage
+is the realm of appearances, in which intrusive realities become unreal.
+There are, as I have said, incalculable chances to one that the
+playwright's version of a given event will not coincide with that of the
+Recording Angel: but it may be true and convincing in relation to human
+nature in general, in which case it will belong to the sphere of great
+art; or, on a lower level, it may be agreeable and entertaining without
+being conspicuously false to human nature, in which case it will do no
+harm, since it makes no pretence to historic truth. It may be objected
+that the sixteenth-century public, and even, in the next century, the
+great Duke of Marlborough, got their knowledge of English history from
+Shakespeare, and the other writers of chronicle-plays. Well, I leave it
+to historians to determine whether this very defective and, in great
+measure, false vision of the past was better or worse than none. The
+danger at any rate, if danger there was, is now past and done with. Even
+our generals no longer go to the theatre or to the First Folio for their
+history. The dramatist may, with an easy conscience, interpret historic
+fact in the light of his general insight into human nature, so long as
+he does not so falsify the recorded event that common knowledge cries
+out against him.[1]
+
+Plausibility, then, not abstract or concrete probability, and still less
+literal faithfulness to recorded fact, is what the dramatist is bound to
+aim at. To understand this as a belittling of his art is to
+misunderstand the nature of art in general. The plausibility of bad art
+is doubtless contemptible and may be harmful. But to say that good art
+must be plausible is only to say that not every sort of truth, or every
+aspect of truth, is equally suitable for artistic representation--or, in
+more general terms, that the artist, without prejudice to his allegiance
+to nature, must respect the conditions of the medium in which he works.
+
+Our standards of plausibility, however, are far from being invariable.
+To each separate form of art, a different standard is applicable. In
+what may roughly be called realistic art, the terms plausible and
+probable are very nearly interchangeable. Where the dramatist appeals to
+the sanction of our own experience and knowledge, he must not introduce
+matter against which our experience and knowledge cry out. A very small
+inaccuracy in a picture which is otherwise photographic will often have
+a very disturbing effect. In plays of society in particular, the
+criticism "No one does such things," is held by a large class of
+playgoers to be conclusive and destructive. One has known people despise
+a play because Lady So-and-so's manner of speaking to her servants was
+not what they (the cavillers) were accustomed to. On the other hand, one
+has heard a whole production highly applauded because the buttons on a
+particular uniform were absolutely right. This merely means that when an
+effort after literal accuracy is apparent, the attention of the audience
+seizes on the most trifling details and is apt to magnify their
+importance. Niceties of language in especial are keenly, and often
+unjustly, criticized. If a particular expression does not happen to be
+current in the critic's own circle, he concludes that nobody uses it,
+and that the author is a pedant or a vulgarian. In view of this
+inevitable tendency, the prudent dramatist will try to keep out of his
+dialogue expressions that are peculiar to his own circle, and to use
+only what may be called everybody's English, or the language undoubtedly
+current throughout the whole class to which his personage belongs.
+
+It may be here pointed out that there are three different planes on
+which plausibility may or may not, be achieved. There is first the
+purely external plane, which concerns the producer almost as much as the
+playwright. On this plane we look for plausibility of costume, of
+manners, of dialect, of general environment. Then we have plausibility
+of what may be called uncharacteristic event--of such events as are
+independent of the will of the characters, and are not conditioned by
+their psychology. On this plane we have to deal with chance and
+accident, coincidence, and all "circumstances over which we have no
+control." For instance, the playwright who makes the "Marseillaise"
+become popular throughout Paris within half-an-hour of its having left
+the composer's desk, is guilty of a breach of plausibility on this
+plane. So, too, if I were to make my hero enter Parliament for the first
+time, and rise in a single session to be Prime Minister of
+England--there would be no absolute impossibility in the feat, but it
+would be a rather gross improbability of the second order. On the third
+plane we come to psychological plausibility, the plausibility of events
+dependent mainly or entirely on character. For example--to cite a much
+disputed instance--is it plausible that Nora, in _A Doll's House_,
+should suddenly develop the mastery of dialectics with which she crushes
+Helmer in the final scene, and should desert her husband and children,
+slamming the door behind her?
+
+It need scarcely be said that plausibility on the third plane is vastly
+the most important. A very austere criticism might even call it the one
+thing worth consideration. But, as a matter of fact, when we speak of
+plausibility, it is almost always the second plane--the plane of
+uncharacteristic circumstance--that we have in mind. To plausibility of
+the third order we give a more imposing name--we call it truth. We say
+that Nora's action is true--or untrue--to nature. We speak of the truth
+with which the madness of Lear, the malignity of Iago, the race hatred
+of Shylock, is portrayed. Truth, in fact, is the term which we use in
+cases where the tests to be applied are those of introspection,
+intuition, or knowledge sub-consciously garnered from spiritual
+experience. Where the tests are external, and matters of common
+knowledge or tangible evidence, we speak of plausibility.
+
+It would be a mistake, however, to imagine that because plausibility of
+the third degree, or truth, is the noblest attribute of drama, it is
+therefore the one thing needful. In some forms of drama it is greatly
+impaired, or absolutely nullified, if plausibility of the second degree,
+its necessary preliminary, be not carefully secured. In the case above
+imagined, for instance, of the young politician who should become Prime
+Minister immediately on entering Parliament: it would matter nothing
+with what profundity of knowledge or subtlety of skill the character was
+drawn: we should none the less decline to believe in him. Some
+dramatists, as a matter of fact, find it much easier to attain truth of
+character than plausibility of incident. Every one who is in the habit
+of reading manuscript plays, must have come across the would-be
+playwright who has a good deal of general ability and a considerable
+power of characterization, but seems to be congenitally deficient in the
+sense of external reality, so that the one thing he (or she) can by no
+means do is to invent or conduct an action that shall be in the least
+like any sequence of events in real life. It is naturally difficult to
+give examples, for the plays composed under this curious limitation are
+apt to remain in manuscript, or to be produced for one performance, and
+forgotten. There is, however, one recent play of this order which holds
+a certain place in dramatic literature. I do not know that Mr. Granville
+Barker was well-advised in printing _The Marrying of Anne Leete_ along
+with such immeasurably maturer and saner productions as _The Voysey
+Inheritance_ and _Waste_; but by doing so he has served my present purpose
+in providing me with a perfect example of a play as to which we cannot
+tell whether it possesses plausibility of the third degree, so
+absolutely does it lack that plausibility of the second degree which is
+its indispensable condition precedent.
+
+Francisque Sarcey was fond of insisting that an audience would generally
+accept without cavil any postulates in reason which an author chose to
+impose upon it, with regard to events supposed to have occurred before
+the rise of the curtain; always provided that the consequences deduced
+from them within the limits of the play were logical, plausible, and
+entertaining. The public will swallow a camel, he would maintain, in the
+past, though they will strain at a gnat in the present. A classical
+example of this principle is (once more) the _Oedipus Rex_, in which
+several of the initial postulates are wildly improbable: for instance,
+that Oedipus should never have inquired into the circumstances of the
+death of Laius, and that, having been warned by an oracle that he was
+doomed to marry his mother, he should not have been careful, before
+marrying any woman, to ascertain that she was younger than himself.
+There is at least so much justification for Sarcey's favourite
+principle, that we are less apt to scrutinize things merely narrated to
+us than events which take place before our eyes. It is simply a special
+instance of the well-worn
+
+  "Segnius irritant animos demissa per aurem
+  Quam quae sunt oculis subjecta fidelibus."
+
+But the principle is of very limited artistic validity. No one would
+nowadays think of justifying a gross improbability in the antecedents of
+a play by Ibsen or Sir Arthur Pinero, by Mr. Galsworthy or Mr. Granville
+Barker, on the plea that it occurred outside the frame of the picture.
+Such a plea might, indeed, secure a mitigation of sentence, but never a
+verdict of acquittal. Sarcey, on the other hand, brought up in the
+school of the "well-made" play, would rather have held it a feather in
+the playwright's cap that he should have known just where, and just how,
+he might safely outrage probability [2]. The inference is that we now
+take the dramatist's art more seriously than did the generation of the
+Second Empire in France.
+
+This brings us, however, to an important fact, which must by no means be
+overlooked. There is a large class of plays--or rather, there are
+several classes of plays, some of them not at all to be despised--the
+charm of which resides, not in probability, but in ingenious and
+delightful improbability. I am, of course, not thinking of sheer
+fantasies, like _A Midsummer Night's Dream_, or _Peter Pan_, or _The
+Blue Bird_. They may, indeed, possess plausibility of the third order,
+but plausibility of the second order has no application to them. Its
+writs do not run on their extramundane plane. The plays which appeal to
+us in virtue of their pleasant departures from probability are romances,
+farces, a certain order of light comedies and semi-comic melodramas--in
+short, the thousand and one plays in which the author, without
+altogether despising and abjuring truth, makes it on principle
+subsidiary to delightfulness. Plays of the _Prisoner of Zenda_ type
+would come under this head: so would Sir Arthur Pinero's farces, _The
+Magistrate_, _The Schoolmistress_, _Dandy Dick_; so would Mr. Carton's
+light comedies, _Lord and Lady Algy_, _Wheels within Wheels_, _Lady
+Huntworth's Experiment_; so would most of Mr. Barrie's comedies; so
+would Mr. Arnold Bennett's play, _The Honeymoon_. In a previous chapter
+I have sketched the opening act of Mr. Carton's _Wheels within Wheels_,
+which is a typical example of this style of work. Its charm lies in a
+subtle, all-pervading improbability, an infusion of fantasy so delicate
+that, while at no point can one say, "This is impossible," the total
+effect is far more entertaining than that of any probable sequence of
+events in real life. The whole atmosphere of such a play should be
+impregnated with humour, without reaching that gross supersaturation
+which we find in the lower order of farce-plays of the type of
+_Charlie's Aunt_ or _Niobe_.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Plausibility of development, as distinct from plausibility of theme or
+of character, depends very largely on the judicious handling of chance,
+and the exclusion, or very sparing employment, of coincidence. This is a
+matter of importance, into which we shall find it worth while to look
+somewhat closely.
+
+It is not always clearly recognized that chance and coincidence are by
+no means the same thing. Coincidence is a special and complex form of
+chance, which ought by no means to be confounded with the everyday
+variety. We need not here analyse chance, or discuss the philosophic
+value of the term. It is enough that we all know what we mean by it in
+common parlance. It may be well, however, to look into the etymology of
+the two words we are considering. They both come ultimately, from the
+Latin "cadere," to fall. Chance is a falling-out, like that of a die
+from the dice-box; and coincidence signifies one falling-out on the top
+of another, the concurrent happening of two or more chances which
+resemble or somehow fit into each other. If you rattle six dice in a box
+and throw them, and they turn up at haphazard--say, two aces, a deuce,
+two fours, and a six--there is nothing remarkable in this falling out.
+But if they all turn up sixes, you at once suspect that the dice are
+cogged; and if that be not so--if there be no sufficient cause behind
+the phenomenon--you say that this identical falling-out of six separate
+possibilities was a remarkable coincidence. Now, applying the
+illustration to drama, I should say that the playwright is perfectly
+justified in letting chance play its probable and even inevitable part
+in the affairs of his characters; but that, the moment we suspect him of
+cogging the dice, we feel that he is taking an unfair advantage of us,
+and our imagination either cries, "I won't play!" or continues the game
+under protest.
+
+Some critics have considered it a flaw in Shakespeare's art that the
+catastrophe of _Romeo and Juliet_ should depend upon a series of
+chances, and especially on the miscarriage of the Friar's letter to
+Romeo. This is not, I think, a valid criticism. We may, if we are so
+minded, pick to pieces the course of action which brought these chances
+into play. The device of the potion--even if such a drug were known to
+the pharmacopoeia--is certainly a very clumsy method of escape from the
+position in which Juliet is placed by her father's obstinacy. But when
+once we have accepted that integral part of the legend, the intervention
+of chance in the catastrophe is entirely natural and probable. Observe
+that there is no coincidence in the matter, no interlinking or
+dovetailing of chances. The catastrophe results from the hot-headed
+impetuosity of all the characters, which so hurries events that there is
+no time for the elimination of the results of chance. Letters do
+constantly go astray, even under our highly-organized system of
+conveyance; but their delay or disappearance seldom leads to tragic
+results, because most of us have learnt to take things calmly and wait
+for the next post. Yet if we could survey the world at large, it is
+highly probable that every day or every hour we should somewhere or
+other find some Romeo on the verge of committing suicide because of a
+chance misunderstanding with regard to his Juliet; and in a certain
+percentage of cases the explanatory letter or telegram would doubtless
+arrive too late.
+
+We all remember how, in Mr. Hardy's _Tess_, the main trouble arises from
+the fact that the letter pushed under Angel Clare's door slips also
+under the carpet of his room, and so is never discovered. This is an
+entirely probable chance; and the sternest criticism would hardly call
+it a flaw in the structure of the fable. But take another case: Madame X
+has had a child, of whom she has lost sight for more than twenty years,
+during which she has lived abroad. She returns to France, and
+immediately on landing at Bordeaux she kills a man who accompanies her.
+The court assigns her defence to a young advocate, and this young
+advocate happens to be her son. We have here a piling of chance upon
+chance, in which the long arm of coincidence[3] is very apparent. The
+coincidence would have been less startling had she returned to the place
+where she left her son and where she believed him to be. But no! she
+left him in Paris, and it is only by a series of pure chances that he
+happens to be in Bordeaux, where she happens to land, and happens to
+shoot a man. For the sake of a certain order of emotional effect, a
+certain order of audience is willing to accept this piling up of
+chances; but it relegates the play to a low and childish plane of art.
+The _Oedipus Rex_, indeed--which meets us at every turn--is founded on
+an absolutely astounding series of coincidences; but here the conception
+of fate comes in, and we vaguely figure to ourselves some malignant
+power deliberately pulling the strings which guide its puppets into such
+abhorrent tangles. On the modern view that "character is destiny," the
+conception of supernatural wire-pulling is excluded. It is true that
+amazing coincidences do occur in life; but when they are invented to
+serve an artist's purposes, we feel that he is simplifying his task
+altogether beyond reason, and substituting for normal and probable
+development an irrelevant plunge into the merely marvellous.
+
+Of the abuse of coincidence, I have already given a specimen in speaking
+of _The Rise of Dick Halward_ (Chapter XII). One or two more examples
+may not be out of place. I need not dwell on the significance of the
+fact that most of them occur in forgotten plays.
+
+In _The Man of Forty_, by Mr. Walter Frith, we find the following
+conjuncture of circumstances: Mr. Lewis Dunster has a long-lost wife and
+a long-lost brother. He has been for years in South Africa; they have
+meanwhile lived in London, but they do not know each other, and have
+held no communication. Lewis, returning from Africa, arrives in London.
+He does not know where to find either wife or brother, and has not the
+slightest wish to look for them; yet in the first house he goes to, the
+home of a lady whose acquaintance he chanced to make on the voyage, he
+encounters both his wife and his brother! Not quite so startling is the
+coincidence on which _Mrs. Willoughby's Kiss_, by Mr. Frank Stayton, is
+founded. An upper and lower flat in West Kensington are inhabited,
+respectively, by Mrs. Brandram and Mrs. Willoughby, whose husbands have
+both been many years absent in India. By pure chance the two husbands
+come home in the same ship; the two wives go to Plymouth to meet them,
+and by pure chance, for they are totally unacquainted with each other,
+they go to the same hotel; whence it happens that Mrs. Willoughby,
+meeting Mr. Brandram in a half-lighted room, takes him for her husband,
+flies to his arms and kisses him. More elaborate than either of these is
+the tangle of coincidences in Mr. Stuart Ogilvie's play, _The
+White Knight_--
+
+Giulietta, the ward of David Pennycuick, goes to study singing at Milan.
+Mr. Harry Rook, Pennycuick's most intimate friend, meets her by chance
+in Milan, and she becomes his mistress, neither having the least idea
+that the other knows Pennycuick. Then Viscount Hintlesham, like
+Pennycuick, a dupe of Rook's, meets her by chance at Monte Carlo and
+falls in love with her. He does not know that she knows Rook or
+Pennycuick, and she does not know that he knows them. Arriving in
+England, she finds in the manager, the promoter, and the chairman of the
+Electric White Lead Company her guardian, her seducer, and her lover.
+When she comes to see her guardian, the first person she meets is her
+seducer, and she learns that her lover has just left the house. Up to
+that moment, I repeat, she did not know that any one of these men knew
+any other; yet she does not even say, "How small the world is!"[4]
+Surely some such observation was obligatory under the circumstances.
+
+Let us turn now to a more memorable piece of work; that interesting play
+of Sir Arthur Pinero's transition period, _The Profligate_. Here the
+great situation of the third act is brought about by a chain of
+coincidences which would be utterly unthinkable in the author's maturer
+work. Leslie Brudenell, the heroine, is the ward of Mr. Cheal, a
+solicitor. She is to be married to Dunstan Renshaw; and, as she has no
+home, the bridal party meets at Mr. Cheal's office before proceeding to
+the registrar's. No sooner have they departed than Janet Preece, who has
+been betrayed and deserted by Dunstan Renshaw (under an assumed name)
+comes to the office to state her piteous case. This is not in itself a
+pure coincidence; for Janet happened to come to London in the same train
+with Leslie Brudenell and her brother Wilfrid; and Wilfrid, seeing in
+her a damsel in distress, recommended her to lay her troubles before a
+respectable solicitor, giving her Mr. Cheal's address. So far, then, the
+coincidence is not startling. It is natural enough that Renshaw's
+mistress and his betrothed should live in the same country town; and it
+is not improbable that they should come to London by the same train, and
+that Wilfrid Brudenell should give the bewildered and weeping young
+woman a commonplace piece of advice. The concatenation of circumstances
+is remarkable rather than improbable. But when, in the next act, not a
+month later, Janet Preece, by pure chance, drops in at the Florentine
+villa where Renshaw and Leslie are spending their honeymoon, we feel
+that the long arm of coincidence is stretched to its uttermost, and that
+even the thrilling situation which follows is very dearly bought. It
+would not have been difficult to attenuate the coincidence. What has
+actually happened is this: Janet has (we know not how) become a sort of
+maid-companion to a Mrs. Stonehay, whose daughter was a school-friend of
+Leslie's; the Stonehays have come to Florence, knowing nothing of
+Leslie's presence there; and they happen to visit the villa in order to
+see a fresco which it contains. If, now, we had been told that Janet's
+engagement by the Stonehays had resulted from her visit to Mr. Cheal,
+and that the Stonehays had come to Florence knowing Leslie to be there,
+and eager to find her, several links would have been struck off the
+chain of coincidence; or, to put it more exactly, a fairly coherent
+sequence of events would have been substituted for a series of
+incoherent chances. The same result might no doubt have been achieved in
+many other and neater ways. I merely indicate, by way of illustration, a
+quite obvious method of reducing the element of coincidence in the case.
+
+The coincidence in _The Second Mrs. Tanqueray_, by which Ellean meets
+and falls in love with one of Paula's ex-lovers, has been very severely
+criticized. It is certainly not one of the strong points of the play;
+but, unlike the series of chances we have just been examining, it places
+no excessive strain on our credulity. Such coincidences do occur in real
+life; we have all of us seen or heard of them; the worst we can say of
+this one is that it is neither positively good nor positively bad--a
+piece of indifferent craftsmanship. On the other hand, if we turn to
+_Letty_, the chance which, in the third act, leads Letchmere's party and
+Mandeville's party to choose the same restaurant, seems to me entirely
+justified. It is not really a coincidence at all, but one of those
+everyday happenings which are not only admissible in drama, but
+positively desirable, as part of the ordinary surface-texture of life.
+Entirely to eliminate chance from our representation of life would be a
+very unreasonable austerity. Strictly speaking, indeed, it is
+impossible; for even when we have worked out an unbroken chain of
+rational and commensurate causes and effects, it remains a chance, and
+an unlikely chance, that chance should not have interfered with it.
+
+All the plays touched upon in the last four paragraphs are in intention
+realistic. They aim, that is to say, at a literal and sober
+representation of life. In the other class of plays, which seek their
+effect, not in plodding probability, but in delightful improbability,
+the long arm of coincidence has its legitimate functions. Yet even here
+it is not quite unfettered. One of the most agreeable coincidences in
+fiction, I take it, is the simultaneous arrival in Bagdad, from
+different quarters of the globe, of three one-eyed calenders, all blind
+of the right eye, and all, in reality, the sons of kings. But it is to
+be noted that this coincidence is not a crucial occurrence in a story,
+but only a part of the story-teller's framework or mechanism--a device
+for introducing fresh series of adventures. This illustrates the
+Sarceyan principle above referred to, which Professor Brander Matthews
+has re-stated in what seems to me an entirely acceptable form--namely,
+that improbabilities which may be admitted on the outskirts of an
+action, must be rigidly excluded when the issue is joined and we are in
+the thick of things. Coincidences, in fact, become the more improbable
+in the direct ratio of their importance. We have all, in our own
+experience, met with amazing coincidences; but how few of us have ever
+gained or lost, been made happy or unhappy, by a coincidence, as
+distinct from a chance! It is not precisely probable that three
+brothers, who have separated in early life, and have not heard of one
+another for twenty years, should find themselves seated side by side at
+an Italian _table-d'hôte_; yet such coincidences have occurred, and are
+creditable enough so long as nothing particular comes of them. But if a
+dramatist were to make these three brothers meet in Messina on the eve
+of the earthquake, in order that they might all be killed, and thus
+enable his hero (their cousin) to succeed to a peerage and marry the
+heroine, we should say that his use of coincidence was not strictly
+artistic. A coincidence, in short, which coincides with a crisis is
+thereby raised to the _n_th power, and is wholly inacceptable in serious
+art. Mr. Bernard Shaw has based the action of _You Never Can Tell_ on
+the amazing coincidence that Mrs. Clandon and her children, coming to
+England after eighteen years' absence, should by pure chance run
+straight into the arms, or rather into the teeth, of the husband and
+father whom the mother, at any rate, only wishes to avoid. This is no
+bad starting-point for an extravaganza; but even Mr. Shaw, though a
+despiser of niceties of craftsmanship, introduces no coincidences into
+serious plays such as _Candida_ or _The Doctor's Dilemma_.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+[Footnote 1: The malignant caricature of Cromwell in W.G. Wills'
+_Charles_ I did not, indeed, prevent the acceptance of the play by the
+mid-Victorian public; but it will certainly shorten the life of the one
+play which might have secured for its author a lasting place in dramatic
+literature. It is unimaginable that future generations should accept a
+representation of Cromwell as
+
+  "A mouthing patriot, with an itching palm,
+  In one hand menace, in the other greed."]
+
+[Footnote 2: It is only fair to say that Sarcey drew a distinction
+between antecedent _events_ and what he calls "postulates of character."
+He did not maintain that an audience ought to accept a psychological
+impossibility, merely because it was placed outside the frame of the
+picture. See _Quarante Ans de Théâtre_, vii, p. 395.]
+
+[Footnote 3: This phrase, which occurs in Mr. Haddon Chambers's romantic
+melodrama, _Captain Swift_, was greeted with a burst of laughter by the
+first-night audience; but little did we then think that Mr. Chambers was
+enriching the English language. It is not, on examination, a
+particularly luminous phrase: "the three or four arms of coincidence"
+would really be more to the point. But it is not always the most
+accurate expression that is fittest to survive.]
+
+[Footnote 4: The abuse of coincidence is a legacy to modern drama from
+the Latin comedy, which, again, was founded on the Greek New Comedy. It
+is worth noting that in the days of Menander the world really was much
+smaller than it is to-day, when "thalassic" has grown into "oceanic"
+civilization. Travellers in those days followed a few main routes; half
+a dozen great seaports were rendezvous for all the world; the
+slave-trade was active, and kidnappings and abductions with the
+corresponding meetings and recognitions were no doubt frequent. Thus
+such a plot as that of the _Menaechmi_ was by no means the sheer
+impossibility which Shakespeare made it by attaching indistinguishable
+Dromios to his indistinguishable Antipholuses. To reduplicate a
+coincidence is in fact to multiply it by a figure far beyond my
+mathematics. It may be noted, too, that the practice of exposing
+children, on which the _Oedipus_, and many plays of Menander, are
+founded, was common in historic Greece, and that the hapless children
+were generally provided with identification-tokens _gnorismata_.]
+
+
+
+
+_CHAPTER XVI_
+
+LOGIC
+
+
+The term logic is often very vaguely used in relation to drama. French
+writers especially, who regard logic as one of the peculiar faculties of
+their national genius, are apt to insist upon it in and out of season.
+But, as we have already seen, logic is a gift which may easily be
+misapplied. It too often leads such writers as M. Brieux and M. Hervieu
+to sacrifice the undulant and diverse rhythms of life to a stiff and
+symmetrical formalism. The conception of a play as the exhaustive
+demonstration of a thesis has never taken a strong hold on the
+Anglo-Saxon mind; and, though some of M. Brieux's plays are much more
+than mere dramatic arguments, we need not, in the main, envy the French
+their logician-dramatists.
+
+But, though the presence of logic should never be forced upon the
+spectator's attention, still less should he be disturbed and baffled by
+its conspicuous absence. If the playwright announces a theme at all: if
+he lets it be seen that some general idea underlies his work: he is
+bound to present and develop that idea in a logical fashion, not to
+shift his ground, whether inadvertently or insidiously, and not to
+wander off into irrelevant side-issues. He must face his problem
+squarely. If he sets forth to prove anything at all, he must prove that
+thing and not some totally different thing. He must beware of the
+red-herring across the trail.
+
+For a clear example of defective logic, I turn to a French
+play--Sardou's _Spiritisme_. Both from internal and from external
+evidence, it is certain that M. Sardou was a believer in
+spiritualism--in the existence of disembodied intelligences, and their
+power of communicating with the living. Yet he had not the courage to
+assign to them an essential part in his drama. The spirits hover round
+the outskirts of the action, but do not really or effectually intervene
+in it. The hero's _belief_ in them, indeed, helps to bring about the
+conclusion; but the apparition which so potently works upon him is an
+admitted imposture, a pious fraud. Earlier in the play, two or three
+trivial and unnecessary miracles are introduced--just enough to hint at
+the author's faith without decisively affirming it. For instance:
+towards the close of Act I Madame d'Aubenas has gone off, nominally to
+take the night train for Poitiers, in reality to pay a visit to her
+lover, M. de Stoudza. When she has gone, her husband and his guests
+arrange a séance and evoke a spirit. No sooner have preliminaries been
+settled than the spirit spells out the word "O-u-v-r-e-z." They open the
+window, and behold! the sky is red with a glare which proves to proceed
+from the burning of the train in which Madame d'Aubenas is supposed to
+have started. The incident is effective enough, and a little creepy; but
+its effect is quite incommensurate with the strain upon our powers of
+belief. The thing is supposed to be a miracle, of that there can be no
+doubt; but it has not the smallest influence on the course of the play,
+except to bring on the hurry-scurry and alarm a few minutes earlier than
+might otherwise have been the case. Now, if the spirit, instead of
+merely announcing the accident, had informed M. d'Aubenas that his wife
+was not in it--if, for example, it had rapped out "Gilberte chez
+Stoudza"--it would have been an honest ghost (though indiscreet), and we
+should not have felt that our credulity had been taxed to no purpose. As
+it is, the logical deduction from M. Sardou's fable is that, though
+spirit communications are genuine enough, they are never of the
+slightest use; but we can scarcely suppose that that was what he
+intended to convey.
+
+It may be said, and perhaps with truth, that what Sardou lacked in this
+instance was not logic, but courage: he felt that an audience would
+accept episodic miracles, but would reject supernatural interference at
+a determining crisis in the play. In that case he would have done better
+to let the theme alone: for the manifest failure of logic leaves the
+play neither good drama nor good argument. This is a totally different
+matter from Ibsen's treatment of the supernatural in such plays as _The
+Lady from the Sea_, _The Master Builder_ and _Little Eyolf_. Ibsen, like
+Hawthorne, suggests without affirming the action of occult powers. He
+shows us nothing that is not capable of a perfectly natural explanation;
+but he leaves us to imagine, if we are so disposed, that there may be
+influences at work that are not yet formally recognized in physics and
+psychology. In this there is nothing illogical. The poet is merely
+appealing to a mood, familiar to all of us, in which we wonder whether
+there may not be more things in heaven and earth than are crystallized
+in our scientific formulas.
+
+It is a grave defect of logic to state, or hint at, a problem, and then
+illustrate it in such terms of character that it is solved in advance.
+In _The Liars_, by Mr. Henry Arthur Jones, there is an evident
+suggestion of the problem whether a man is ever justified in rescuing a
+woman, by means of the Divorce Court, from marital bondage which her
+soul abhors. The sententious Sir Christopher Deering argues the matter
+at great length: but all the time we are hungering for him to say the
+one thing demanded by the logic of the situation: to wit: "Whatever the
+abstract rights and wrongs of the case, this man would be an imbecile to
+elope with this woman, who is an empty-headed, empty-hearted creature,
+incapable either of the passion or of the loathing which alone could
+lend any semblance of reason to a breach of social law." Similarly, in
+_The Profligate_, Sir Arthur Pinero no doubt intended us to reflect upon
+the question whether, in entering upon marriage, a woman has a right to
+assume in her husband the same purity of antecedent conduct which he
+demands of her. That is an arguable question, and it has been argued
+often enough; but in this play it does not really arise, for the husband
+presented to us is no ordinary loose-liver, but (it would seem--for the
+case is not clearly stated) a particularly base and heartless seducer,
+whom it is evidently a misfortune for any woman to have married. The
+authors of these two plays have committed an identical error of logic:
+namely, that of suggesting a broad issue, and then stating such a set of
+circumstances that the issue does not really arise. In other words, they
+have from the outset begged the question. The plays, it may be said,
+were both successful in their day. Yes; but had they been logical their
+day might have lasted a century. A somewhat similar defect of logic
+constitutes a fatal blemish in _The Ideal Husband_, by Oscar Wilde.
+Intentionally or otherwise, the question suggested is whether a single
+flaw of conduct (the betrayal to financiers of a state secret) ought to
+blast a political career. Here, again, is an arguable point, on the
+assumption that the statesman is penitent and determined never to repeat
+his misdeed; but when we find that this particular statesman is prepared
+to go on betraying his country indefinitely, in order to save his own
+skin, the question falls to the ground--the answer is too obvious.
+
+It happened some years ago that two plays satirizing "yellow journalism"
+were produced almost simultaneously in London--_The Earth_ by Mr. James
+B. Fagan, and _What the Public Wants_ by Mr. Arnold Bennett. In point of
+intellectual grasp, or power of characterization, there could be no
+comparison between the two writers; yet I hold that, from the point of
+view of dramatic composition, _The Earth_ was the better play of the
+two, simply because it dealt logically with the theme announced, instead
+of wandering away into all sorts of irrelevances. Mr. Bennett, to begin
+with, could not resist making his Napoleon of the Press a native of the
+"Five Towns," and exhibiting him at large in provincial middle-class
+surroundings. All this is sheer irrelevance; for the type of journalism
+in question is not characteristically an outcome of any phase of
+provincial life. Mr. Bennett may allege that Sir Charles Worgan had to
+be born somewhere, and might as well be born in Bursley as anywhere
+else. I reply that, for the purposes of the play, he need not have been
+born anywhere. His birthplace and the surroundings of his boyhood have
+nothing to do with what may be called his journalistic psychology, which
+is, or ought to be, the theme of the play. Then, again, Mr. Bennett
+shows him dabbling in theatrical management and falling in
+love--irrelevances both. As a manager, no doubt, he insists on doing
+"what the public wants" (it is nothing worse than a revival of _The
+Merchant of Venice_) and thus offers another illustration of the results
+of obeying that principle. But all this is beside the real issue. The
+true gravamen of the charge against a Napoleon of the Press is not that
+he gives the public what it wants, but that he can make the public want
+what _he_ wants, think what _he_ thinks, believe what _he_ wants them to
+believe, and do what _he_ wants them to do. By dint of assertion,
+innuendo, and iteration in a hundred papers, he can create an apparent
+public opinion, or public emotion, which may be directed towards the
+most dangerous ends. This point Mr. Bennett entirely missed. What he
+gave us was in reality a comedy of middle-class life with a number of
+incidental allusions to "yellow" journalism and kindred topics. Mr.
+Fagan, working in broader outlines, and, it must be owned, in cruder
+colours, never strayed from the logical line of development, and took us
+much nearer the heart of his subject.
+
+A somewhat different, and very common, fault of logic was exemplified in
+Mr. Clyde Fitch's last play, _The City_. His theme, as announced in his
+title and indicated in his exposition, was the influence of New York
+upon a family which migrates thither from a provincial town. But the
+action is not really shaped by the influence of "the city." It might
+have taken practically the same course if the family had remained at
+home. The author had failed to establish a logical connection between
+his theme and the incidents supposed to illustrate it.[1]
+
+Fantastic plays, which assume an order of things more or less exempt
+from the limitations of physical reality, ought, nevertheless, to be
+logically faithful to their own assumptions. Some fantasies, indeed,
+which sinned against this principle, have had no small success. In
+_Pygmalion and Galatea_, for example, there is a conspicuous lack of
+logic. The following passage from a criticism of thirty years ago puts
+my point so clearly that I am tempted to copy it:
+
+  As we have no scientific record of a statue coming to life, the
+  probable moral and intellectual condition of a being so created is
+  left to the widest conjecture. The playwright may assume for it any
+  stage of development he pleases, and his audience will readily grant
+  his assumption. But if his work is to have any claim to artistic
+  value, he must not assume all sorts of different stages of
+  development at every second word his creation utters. He must not
+  make her a child in one speech, a woman of the world in the next,
+  and an idiot in the next again. Of course, it would be an extremely
+  difficult task clearly to define in all its bearings and details the
+  particular intellectual condition assumed at the outset, and then
+  gradually to indicate the natural growth of a fuller consciousness.
+  Difficult it would be, but by no means impossible; nay, it would be
+  this very problem which would tempt the true dramatist to adopt such
+  a theme. Mr. Gilbert has not essayed the task. He regulates
+  Galatea's state of consciousness by the fluctuating exigencies of
+  dialogue whose humour is levelled straight at the heads of the old
+  Haymarket pit.
+
+To indicate the nature of the inconsistencies which abound in every
+scene, I may say that, in the first act, Galatea does not know that she
+is a woman, but understands the word "beauty," knows (though Pygmalion
+is the only living creature she has ever seen) the meaning of agreement
+and difference of taste, and is alive to the distinction between an
+original and a copy. In the second act she has got the length of knowing
+the enormity of taking life, and appreciating the fine distinction
+between taking it of one's own motive, and taking it for money. Yet the
+next moment, when Leucippe enters with a fawn he has killed, it appears
+that she does not realize the difference between man and the brute
+creation. Thus we are for ever shifting from one plane of convention to
+another. There is no fixed starting-point for our imagination, no
+logical development of a clearly-stated initial condition. The play, it
+is true, enjoyed some five-and-twenty years of life; but it certainly
+cannot claim an enduring place either in literature or on the stage. It
+is still open to the philosophic dramatist to write a logical _Pygmalion
+and Galatea_.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+[Footnote 1: I am here writing from memory, having been unable to obtain
+a copy of _The City_; but my memory is pretty clear.]
+
+
+
+
+_CHAPTER XVII_
+
+KEEPING A SECRET
+
+
+It has been often and authoritatively laid down that a dramatist must on
+no account keep a secret from his audience. Like most authoritative
+maxims, this one seems to require a good deal of qualification. Let us
+look into the matter a little more closely.
+
+So far as I can see, the strongest reason against keeping a secret is
+that, try as you may, you cannot do it. This point has already been
+discussed in Chapter IX, where we saw that from only one audience can a
+secret be really hidden, a considerable percentage of any subsequent
+audience being certain to know all about it in advance. The more
+striking and successful is the first-night effect of surprise, the more
+certainly and rapidly will the report of it circulate through all strata
+of the theatrical public. But for this fact, one could quite well
+conceive a fascinating melodrama constructed, like a detective story,
+with a view to keeping the audience in the dark as long as possible. A
+pistol shot might ring out just before the rise of the curtain: a man
+(or woman) might be discovered in an otherwise empty room, weltering in
+his (or her) gore: and the remainder of the play might consist in the
+tracking down of the murderer, who would, of course, prove to be the
+very last person to be suspected. Such a play might make a great
+first-night success; but the more the author relied upon the mystery for
+his effect, the more fatally would that effect be discounted at each
+successive repetition.
+
+One author of distinction, M. Hervieu, has actually made the experiment
+of presenting an enigma--he calls the play _L'Enigme_--and reserving the
+solution to the very end. We know from the outset that one of two
+sisters-in-law is unfaithful to her husband, and the question is--which?
+The whole ingenuity of the author is centred on keeping the secret, and
+the spectator who does not know it in advance is all the time in the
+attitude of a detective questing for clues. He is challenged to guess
+which of the ladies is the frail one; and he is far too intent on this
+game to think or care about the emotional process of the play. I myself
+(I remember) guessed right, mainly because the name Giselle seemed to me
+more suggestive of flightiness than the staid and sober Leonore,
+wherefore I suspected that M. Hervieu, in order to throw dust in our
+eyes, had given it to the virtuous lady. But whether we guess right or
+wrong, this clue-hunting is an intellectual sport, not an artistic
+enjoyment. If there is any aesthetic quality in the play, it can only
+come home to us when we know the secret. And the same dilemma will
+present itself to any playwright who seeks to imitate M. Hervieu.
+
+The actual keeping of a secret, then--the appeal to the primary
+curiosity of actual ignorance--may be ruled out as practically
+impossible, and, when possible, unworthy of serious art. But there is
+also, as we have seen, the secondary curiosity of the audience which,
+though more or less cognizant of the essential facts, instinctively
+assumes ignorance, and judges the development of a play from that point
+of view. We all realize that a dramatist has no right to trust to our
+previous knowledge, acquired from outside sources. We know that a play,
+like every other work of art, ought to be self-sufficient, and even if,
+at any given moment, we have, as a matter of fact, knowledge which
+supplements what the playwright has told us, we feel that he ought not
+to have taken for granted our possession of any such external and
+fortuitous information. To put it briefly, the dramatist must formally
+_assume_ ignorance in his audience, though he must not practically _rely
+upon_ it. Therefore it becomes a point of real importance to determine
+how long a secret may be kept from an audience, assumed to have no
+outside knowledge, and at what point it ought to be revealed.
+
+When _Lady Windermere's Fan_ was first produced, no hint was given in
+the first act of the fact that Mrs. Erlynne was Lady Windermere's
+mother; so that Lord Windermere's insistence on inviting her to his
+wife's birthday reception remained wholly unexplained. But after a few
+nights the author made Lord Windermere exclaim, just as the curtain
+fell, "My God! What shall I do? I dare not tell her who this woman
+really is. The shame would kill her." It was, of course, said that this
+change had been made in deference to newspaper criticism; and Oscar
+Wilde, in a characteristic letter to the _St. James's Gazette_, promptly
+repelled this calumny. At a first-night supper-party, he said--
+
+  "All of my friends without exception were of the opinion that the
+  psychological interest of the second act would be greatly increased
+  by the disclosure of the actual relationship existing between Lady
+  Windermere and Mrs. Erlynne--an opinion, I may add, that had
+  previously been strongly held and urged by Mr. Alexander.... I
+  determined, consequently, to make a change in the precise moment of
+  revelation."
+
+It is impossible to say whether Wilde seriously believed that
+"psychology" entered into the matter at all, or whether he was laughing
+in his sleeve in putting forward this solemn plea. The truth is, I
+think, that this example cannot be cited either for or against the
+keeping of a secret, the essential fact being that the secret was such a
+bad and inacceptable one--inacceptable, I mean, as an explanation of
+Lord Windermere's conduct--that it was probably wise to make a clean
+breast of it as soon as possible, and get it over. It may be said with
+perfect confidence that it is useless to keep a secret which, when
+revealed, is certain to disappoint the audience, and to make it feel
+that it has been trifled with. That is an elementary dictate of
+prudence. But if the reason for Lord Windermere's conduct had been
+adequate, ingenious, such as to give us, when revealed, a little shock
+of pleasant surprise, the author need certainly have been in no hurry to
+disclose it. It is not improbable (though my memory is not clear on the
+point) that part of the strong interest we undoubtedly felt on the first
+night arose from the hope that Lord Windermere's seemingly unaccountable
+conduct might be satisfactorily accounted for. As this hope was futile,
+there was no reason, at subsequent performances, to keep up the pretence
+of preserving a secret which was probably known, as a matter of fact, to
+most of the audience, and which was worthless when revealed.
+
+In the second act of _The Devil's Disciple_, by Mr. Bernard Shaw, we
+have an instance of wholly inartistic secrecy, which would certainly be
+condemned in the work of any author who was not accepted in advance as a
+law unto himself. Richard Dudgeon has been arrested by the British
+soldiers, who mistake him for the Reverend Anthony Anderson. When
+Anderson comes home, it takes a very long time for his silly wife,
+Judith, to acquaint him with a situation that might have been explained
+in three words; and when, at last, he does understand it, he calls for a
+horse and his boots, and rushes off in mad haste, as though his one
+desire were to escape from the British and leave Dudgeon to his fate. In
+reality his purpose is to bring up a body of Continental troops to the
+rescue of Dudgeon; and this also he might (and certainly would) have
+conveyed in three words. But Mr. Shaw was so bent on letting Judith
+continue to conduct herself idiotically, that he made her sensible
+husband act no less idiotically, in order to throw dust in her eyes, and
+(incidentally) in the eyes of the audience. In the work of any other
+man, we should call this not only an injudicious, but a purposeless and
+foolish, keeping of a secret. Mr. Shaw may say that in order to develop
+the character of Judith as he had conceived it, he was forced to make
+her misunderstand her husband's motives. A development of character
+obtained by such artificial means cannot be of much worth; but even
+granting this plea, one cannot but point out that it would have been
+easy to keep Judith in the dark as to Anderson's purpose, without
+keeping the audience also in the dark, and making him behave like a
+fool. All that was required was to get Judith off the stage for a few
+moments, just before the true state of matters burst upon Anthony. It
+would then have been perfectly natural and probable that, not foreseeing
+her misunderstanding, he should hurry off without waiting to explain
+matters to her. But that he should deliberately leave her in her
+delusion, and even use phrases carefully calculated to deceive both her
+and the audience,[1] would be, in a writer who professed to place reason
+above caprice, a rather gross fault of art.
+
+Mr. Henry Arthur Jones's light comedy, _Whitewashing Julia_, proves that
+it is possible, without incurring disaster, to keep a secret throughout
+a play, and never reveal it at all. More accurately, what Mr. Jones does
+is to pretend that there is some explanation of Mrs. Julia Wren's
+relations with the Duke of Savona, other than the simple explanation
+that she was his mistress, and to keep us waiting for this
+"whitewashing" disclosure, when in fact he has nothing of the sort up
+his sleeve, and the plain truth is precisely what the gossips of
+Shanctonbury surmise. Julia does not even explain or justify her conduct
+from her own point of view. She gives out that "an explanation will be
+forthcoming at the right moment"; but the right moment never arrives.
+All we are told is that she, Julia, considers that there was never
+anything degrading in her conduct; and this we are asked to accept as
+sufficient. It was a daring policy to dangle before our eyes an
+explanation, which always receded as we advanced towards it, and proved
+in the end to be wholly unexplanatory. The success of the play, however,
+was sufficient to show that, in light comedy, at any rate, a secret may
+with impunity be kept, even to the point of tantalization.[2]
+
+Let us now look at a couple of cases in which the keeping of a secret
+seems pretty clearly wrong, inasmuch as it diminishes tension, and
+deprives the audience of that superior knowledge in which lies the irony
+of drama. In a play named _Her Advocate_, by Mr. Walter Frith (founded
+on one of Grenville Murray's _French Pictures in English Chalk_), a K.C.
+has fallen madly in love with a woman whose defence he has undertaken.
+He believes passionately in her innocence, and, never doubting that she
+loves him in return, he is determined to secure for her a triumphant
+acquittal. Just at the crucial moment, however, he learns that she loves
+another man; and, overwhelmed by this disillusion, he has still to face
+the ordeal and plead her cause. The conjuncture would be still more
+dramatic if the revelation of this love were to put a different
+complexion on the murder, and, by introducing a new motive, shake the
+advocate's faith in his client's innocence. But that is another matter;
+the question here to be considered is whether the author did right in
+reserving the revelation to the last possible moment. In my opinion he
+would have done better to have given us an earlier inkling of the true
+state of affairs. To keep the secret, in this case, was to place the
+audience as well as the advocate on a false trail, and to deprive it of
+the sense of superiority it would have felt in seeing him marching
+confidently towards a happiness which it knew to be illusory.
+
+The second case is that of _La Douloureuse_, by M. Maurice Donnay.
+Through two acts out of the four an important secret is so carefully
+kept that there seems to be no obstacle between the lovers with whom
+(from the author's point of view) we are supposed to sympathize. The
+first act is devoted to an elaborate painting of a somewhat revolting
+phase of parvenu society in Paris. Towards the end of the act we learn
+that the sculptor, Philippe Lauberthie, is the lover of Hélène Ardan, a
+married woman; and at the very end her husband, Ardan, commits suicide.
+This act, therefore, is devoted, not, as the orthodox formula goes, to
+raising an obstacle between the lovers, but rather to destroying one. In
+the second act there still seems to be no obstacle of any sort. Hélène's
+year of widowhood is nearly over; she and Philippe are presently to be
+married; all is harmony, adoration, and security. In the last scene of
+the act, a cloud no bigger than a man's hand appears on the horizon. We
+find that Gotte des Trembles, Hélène's bosom friend, is also in love
+with Philippe, and is determined to let him know it. But Philippe
+resists her blandishments with melancholy austerity, and when the
+curtain falls on the second act, things seem to be perfectly safe and in
+order. Hélène a widow, and Philippe austere--what harm can Gotte
+possibly do?
+
+The fact is, M. Donnay is carefully keeping a secret from us. Philippe
+is not Hélène's first lover; her son, Georges, is not the child of her
+late husband; and Gotte, and Gotte alone, knows the truth. Had we also
+been initiated from the outset (and nothing would have been easier or
+more natural--three words exchanged between Gotte and Hélène would have
+done it) we should have been at no loss to foresee the impending drama,
+and the sense of irony would have tripled the interest of the
+intervening scenes. The effect of M. Donnay's third act is not a whit
+more forcible because it comes upon us unprepared. We learn at the
+beginning that Philippe's austerity has not after all been proof against
+Gotte's seductions; but it has now returned upon him embittered by
+remorse, and he treats Gotte with sternness approaching to contumely.
+She takes her revenge by revealing Hélène's secret; he tells Hélène that
+he knows it; and she, putting two and two together, divines how it has
+come to his knowledge. This long scene of mutual reproach and remorseful
+misery is, in reality, the whole drama, and might have been cited in
+Chapter XIV as a fine example of a peripety. Hélène enters Philippe's
+studio happy and serene, she leaves it broken-hearted; but the effect of
+the scene is not a whit greater because, in the two previous acts, we
+have been studiously deprived of the information that would have led us
+vaguely to anticipate it.
+
+To sum up this question of secrecy: the current maxim, "Never keep a
+secret from your audience," would appear to be an over-simplification of
+a somewhat difficult question of craftsmanship. We may agree that it is
+often dangerous and sometimes manifestly foolish to keep a secret; but,
+on the other hand, there is certainly no reason why the playwright
+should blurt out all his secrets at the first possible opportunity. The
+true art lies in knowing just how long to keep silent, and just the
+right time to speak. In the first act of _Letty_, Sir Arthur Pinero
+gains a memorable effect by keeping a secret, not very long, indeed, but
+long enough and carefully enough to show that he knew very clearly what
+he was doing. We are introduced to Nevill Letchmere's bachelor
+apartments. Animated scenes occur between Letchmere and his
+brother-in-law, Letchmere and his sister, Letchmere and Letty, Marion
+and Hilda Gunning. It is evident that Letty dreams of marriage with
+Letchmere; and for aught that we see or hear, there is no just cause or
+impediment to the contrary. It is only, at the end of the very admirable
+scene between Letchmere and Mandeville that the following little
+passage occurs:
+
+  MANDEVILLE: ... At all events I _am_ qualified to tell her I'm
+  fairly gone on her--honourably gone on her--if I choose to do it.
+
+  LETCHMERE: Qualified?
+
+  MANDEVILLE: Which is more than you are, Mr. Letchmere. I _am_ a
+  single man; you ain't, bear in mind.
+
+  LETCHMERE: (_imperturbably_): Very true.
+
+This one little touch is a masterpiece of craftsmanship. It would have
+been the most natural thing in the world for either the sister or the
+brother-in-law, concerned about their own matrimonial difficulties, to
+let fall some passing allusion to Letchmere's separation from his wife;
+but the author carefully avoided this, carefully allowed us to make our
+first acquaintance with Letty in ignorance of the irony of her position,
+and then allowed the truth to slip out just in time to let us feel the
+whole force of that irony during the last scene of the act and the
+greater part of the second act. A finer instance of the delicate grading
+of tension it would be difficult to cite.
+
+One thing is certain; namely, that if a secret is to be kept at all, it
+must be worth the keeping; if a riddle is propounded, its answer must be
+pleasing and ingenious, or the audience will resent having been led to
+cudgel its brains for nothing. This is simply a part of the larger
+principle, before insisted on, that when a reasonable expectation is
+aroused, it can be baffled only at the author's peril. If the crux of a
+scene or of a whole play lie in the solution of some material difficulty
+or moral problem, it must on no account be solved by a mere trick or
+evasion. The dramatist is very ill-advised who sets forth with pomp and
+circumstance to perform some intellectual or technical feat, and then
+merely skirts round it or runs away from it. A fair proportion should
+always be observed between effort and effect, between promise and
+performance.
+
+"But if the audience happens to misread the playwright's design, and
+form exaggerated and irrational expectations?" That merely means that
+the playwright does not know his business, or, at any rate, does not
+know his audience. It is his business to play upon the collective mind
+of his audience as upon a keyboard--to arouse just the right order and
+measure of anticipation, and fulfil it, or outdo it, in just the right
+way at just the right time. The skill of the dramatist, as distinct from
+his genius or inspiration, lies in the correctness of his insight into
+the mind of his audience.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+[Footnote 1: For instance: "If you can get a word with him by pretending
+that you are his wife, tell him to hold his tongue until morning; _that
+will give me all the start I need_."]
+
+[Footnote 2: In _The Idyll_, by Herr Egge, of which some account is
+given in Chapter X, the author certainly does right in not allowing the
+audience for a moment to share the hero's doubts as to the heroine's
+past. It would have been very easy for him to have kept the secret; but
+he takes the earliest opportunity of assuring us that her relations with
+Ringve were quite innocent.]
+
+
+
+
+_BOOK IV_
+
+
+THE END
+
+
+
+
+_CHAPTER XVIII_
+
+CLIMAX AND ANTICLIMAX
+
+
+If it were as easy to write a good last act as a good first act, we
+should be able to reckon three masterpieces for every one that we can
+name at present. The reason why the last act should offer special
+difficulties is not far to seek. We have agreed to regard a play as
+essentially a crisis in the lives of one or more persons; and we all
+know that crises are much more apt to have a definite beginning than a
+definite end. We can almost always put our finger upon the moment--not,
+indeed, when the crisis began--but when we clearly realized its presence
+or its imminence. A chance meeting, the receipt of a letter or a
+telegram, a particular turn given to a certain conversation, even the
+mere emergence into consciousness of a previously latent feeling or
+thought, may mark quite definitely the moment of germination, so to
+speak, of a given crisis; and it is comparatively easy to dramatize such
+a moment. But how few crises come to a definite or dramatic conclusion!
+Nine times out of ten they end in some petty compromise, or do not end
+at all, but simply subside, like the waves of the sea when the storm has
+blown itself out. It is the playwright's chief difficulty to find a
+crisis with an ending which satisfies at once his artistic conscience
+and the requirements of dramatic effect.
+
+And the difficulty becomes greater the nearer we approach to reality. In
+the days when tragedy and comedy were cast in fixed, conventional
+moulds, the playwright's task was much simpler. It was thoroughly
+understood that a tragedy ended with one or more deaths, a comedy with
+one or more marriages; so that the question of a strong or a weak ending
+did not arise. The end might be strongly or weakly led up to, but, in
+itself, it was fore-ordained. Now that these moulds are broken, and both
+marriage and death may be said to have lost their prestige as the be-all
+and end-all of drama, the playwright's range of choice is unlimited, and
+the difficulty of choosing has become infinitely greater. Our comedies
+are much more apt to begin than to end with marriage, and death has come
+to be regarded as a rather cheap and conventional expedient for cutting
+the knots of life.
+
+From the fact that "the difficulty becomes greater the nearer we
+approach to reality," it further follows that the higher the form of
+drama, the more probable is it that the demands of truth and the
+requirements of dramatic effect may be found to clash. In melodrama, the
+curtain falls of its own accord, so to speak, when the handcuffs are
+transferred from the hero's wrists to the villain's. In an
+adventure-play, whether farcical or romantic, when the adventure is over
+the play is done. The author's task is merely to keep the interest of
+the adventure afoot until he is ready to drop his curtain. This is a
+point of craftsmanship in which playwrights often fail; but it is a
+point of craftsmanship only. In plays of a higher order, on the other
+hand, the difficulty is often inherent in the theme, and not to be
+overcome by any feat of craftsmanship. If the dramatist were to eschew
+all crises that could not be made to resolve themselves with
+specifically dramatic crispness and decisiveness, he would very
+seriously limit the domain of his art. Many excellent themes would be
+distorted and ruined by having an emphatic ending forced upon them. It
+is surely much better that they should be brought to their natural
+unemphatic ending, than that they should be either falsified or ignored.
+
+I suggest, then, that the modern tendency to take lightly Aristotle's
+demand that the drama should have a "beginning, a middle, _and an end_,"
+arises from the nature of things, and implies, not necessarily, nor even
+probably, a decline in craftsmanship, but a new intimacy of relation to
+life, and a new sincerity of artistic conscience. I suggest that the
+"weak last act," of which critics so often complain, is a natural
+development from which authors ought not, on occasion, to shrink, and of
+which critics ought, on occasion, to recognize the necessity. To elevate
+it into a system is absurd. There is certainly no more reason for
+deliberately avoiding an emphatic ending than for mechanically forcing
+one. But authors and critics alike should learn to distinguish the
+themes which do, from the themes which do not, call for a definite,
+trenchant solution, and should handle them, and judge them, in
+accordance with their inherent quality.
+
+Let us, however, define our terms, and be sure that we know what we are
+talking about. By an "unemphatic ending" I am far from meaning a
+makeshift ending, an ending carelessly and conventionally huddled up.
+Nor do I mean an indecisive ending, where the curtain falls, as the
+saying goes, on a note of interrogation. An unemphatic ending, as I
+understand it, is a deliberate anticlimax, an idyllic, or elegiac, or
+philosophic last act, following upon a penultimate act of very much
+higher tension. The disposition to condemn such an ending off-hand is
+what I am here pleading against. It is sometimes assumed that the
+playwright ought always to make his action conclude within five minutes
+of its culmination; but for such a hard-and-fast rule I can find no
+sufficient reason. The consequences of a great emotional or spiritual
+crisis cannot always be worked out, or even foreshadowed, within so
+brief a space of time. If, after such a crisis, we are unwilling to keep
+our seats for another half-hour, in order to learn "what came of it
+all," the author has evidently failed to awaken in us any real interest
+in his characters.
+
+A good instance of the unemphatic ending is the last act of Sir Arthur
+Pinero's _Letty_. This "epilogue"--so the author calls it--has been
+denounced as a concession to popular sentimentality, and an unpardonable
+anticlimax. An anticlimax it is, beyond all doubt; but it does not
+follow that it is an artistic blemish. Nothing would have been easier
+than not to write it--to make the play end with Letty's awakening from
+her dream, and her flight from Letchmere's rooms. But the author has set
+forth, not merely to interest us in an adventure, but to draw a
+character; and it was essential to our full appreciation of Letty's
+character that we should know what, after all, she made of her life.
+When Iris, most hapless of women, went out into the dark, there was
+nothing more that we needed to know of her. We could guess the sequel
+only too easily. But the case of Letty was wholly different. Her exit
+was an act of will, triumphing over a form of temptation peculiarly
+alluring to her temperament. There was in her character precisely that
+grit which Iris lacked; and we wanted to know what it would do for her.
+This was not a case for an indecisive ending, a note of interrogation.
+The author felt no doubt as to Letty's destiny, and he wanted to leave
+his audience in no doubt. From Iris's fate we were only too willing to
+avert our eyes; but it would have been a sensible discomfort to us to be
+left in the dark about Letty's.
+
+This, then, I regard as a typical instance of justified anticlimax.
+Another is the idyllic last act of _The Princess and the Butterfly_, in
+which, moreover, despite its comparatively subdued tone, the tension is
+maintained to the end. A very different matter is the third act of _The
+Benefit of the Doubt_, already alluded to. This is a pronounced case of
+the makeshift ending, inspired (to all appearance) simply by the fact
+that the play must end somehow, and that no better idea happens to
+present itself. Admirable as are the other acts, one is almost inclined
+to agree with Dumas that an author ought not to embark upon a theme
+unless he foresees a better way out of it than this. It should be noted,
+too, that _The Benefit of the Doubt_ is a three-act play, and that, in a
+play laid out on this scale, a whole act of anticlimax is necessarily
+disproportionate. It is one thing to relax the tension in the last act
+out of four or five; quite another thing in the last act out of three.
+In other words, the culminating point of a four-or five-act play may be
+placed in the penultimate act; in a three-act play, it should come, at
+earliest, in the penultimate scene.[1]
+
+In the works of Mr. Henry Arthur Jones we find several instances of the
+unemphatic last act--some clearly justified, others much less so. Among
+the former I unhesitatingly reckon the fourth act of _Mrs. Dane's
+Defence_. It would not have been difficult, but surely most inartistic,
+to huddle up the action in five minutes after Mrs. Dane's tragic
+collapse under Sir Daniel Carteret's cross-examination. She might have
+taken poison and died in picturesque contortions on the sofa; or Lionel
+might have defied all counsels of prudence and gone off with her in
+spite of her past; or she might have placed Lionel's hand in Janet's,
+saying: "The game is up. Bless you, my children. I am going into the
+nearest nunnery." As a matter of fact, Mr. Jones brought his action to
+its natural close in a quiet, sufficiently adroit, last act; and I do
+not see that criticism has any just complaint to make.
+
+In recent French drama, _La Douloureuse_, already cited, affords an
+excellent instance of a quiet last act. After the violent and
+heartrending rupture between the lovers in the third act, we feel that,
+though this paroxysm of pain is justified by the circumstances, it will
+not last for ever, and Philippe and Hélène will come together again.
+This is also M. Donnay's view; and he devotes his whole last act, quite
+simply, to a duologue of reconciliation. It seems to me a fault of
+proportion, however, that he should shift his locality from Paris to the
+Riviera, and should place the brief duologue in a romantic woodland
+scene. An act of anticlimax should be treated, so to speak, as
+unpretentiously as possible. To invent an elaborate apparatus for it is
+to emphasize the anticlimax by throwing it into unnecessary relief.
+
+This may be a convenient place for a few words on the modern fashion of
+eschewing emphasis, not only in last acts, but at every point where the
+old French dramaturgy demanded it, and especially in act-endings.
+_Punch_ has a pleasant allusion to this tendency in two suggested
+examination-papers for an "Academy of Dramatists":
+
+  A--FOR THE CLASSICAL SIDE ONLY.
+    1. What is a "curtain"; and how should it be led up to?
+
+  B--FOR THE MODERN SIDE ONLY.
+    1. What is a "curtain"; and how can it be avoided?
+
+Some modern playwrights have fled in a sort of panic from the old
+"picture-poster situation" to the other extreme of always dropping their
+curtain when the audience least expects it. This is not a practice to be
+commended. One has often seen an audience quite unnecessarily chilled by
+a disconcerting "curtain." There should be moderation even in the
+shrinking from theatricality.
+
+This shrinking is particularly marked, though I do not say it is carried
+too far, in the plays of Mr. Galsworthy. Even the most innocent tricks
+of emphasis are to him snares of the Evil One. He would sooner die than
+drop his curtain on a particularly effective line. It is his chief
+ambition that you should never discern any arrangement, any intention,
+in his work. As a rule, the only reason you can see for his doing thus
+or thus is his desire that you should see no reason for it. He does not
+carry this tendency, as some do, to the point of eccentricity; but he
+certainly goes as far as any one should be advised to follow. A little
+further, and you incur the danger of becoming affectedly unaffected,
+artificially inartificial.
+
+I am far from pleading for the conventional tableau at the end of each
+act, with all the characters petrified, as it were, in
+penny-plain-twopence-coloured attitudes. But it is certainly desirable
+that the fall of the curtain should not take an audience entirely by
+surprise, and even that the spectator should feel the moment to be
+rightly chosen, though he might be unable to give any reason for his
+feeling. Moreover--this may seem a super-subtlety, but one has seen it
+neglected with notably bad effect--a playwright should never let his
+audience expect the fall of a curtain at a given point, and then balk
+their expectancy, unless he is sure that he holds in reserve a more than
+adequate compensation. There is nothing so dangerous as to let a play,
+or an act, drag on when the audience feels in its heart that it is
+really over, and that "the rest is silence"--or ought to be. The end of
+Mr. Granville Barker's fine play, _The Voysey Inheritance_, was injured
+by the fact that, several minutes before the curtain actually fell, he
+had given what seemed an obvious "cue for curtain." I do not say that
+what followed was superfluous; what I do say is that the author ought to
+have been careful not to let us imagine that the colloquy between Edward
+and Alice was over when in fact it had still some minutes to run. An
+even more remarkable play, _The Madras House_, was ruined, on its first
+night, by a long final anticlimax. Here, however, the fault did not lie
+in awakening a premature expectation of the close, but in the fact that
+we somehow were more interested in the other characters of the play than
+in the pair who held the stage throughout the long concluding scene.
+
+Once more I turn to _La Douloureuse_ for an instance of an admirable
+act-ending of the quiet modern type. The third act--the terrible
+peripety in the love of Philippe and Hélène--has run its agonizing
+course, and worked itself out. The old dramaturgy would certainly have
+ended the scene with a bang, so to speak--a swoon or a scream, a tableau
+of desolation, or, at the very least, a piece of tearful rhetoric. M.
+Donnay does nothing of the sort. He lets his lovers unpack their hearts
+with words until they are exhausted, broken, dazed with misery, and have
+nothing more to say. Then Hélène asks: "What o'clock is it?" Philippe
+looks at his watch: "Nearly seven." "I must be going"--and she dries her
+eyes, smoothes her hair, pulls herself together, in a word, to face the
+world again. The mechanical round of life re-asserts its hold upon them.
+"Help me with my cloak," she says; and he holds her mantle for her, and
+tucks in the puffed sleeves of her blouse. Then he takes up the lamp and
+lights her out--and the curtain falls. A model "curtain"!
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+[Footnote 1: The fact that a great poet can ignore such precepts with
+impunity is proved by the exquisite anticlimax of the third act of
+D'Annunzio's _La Gioconda_.]
+
+
+
+
+_CHAPTER XIX_
+
+CONVERSION
+
+
+The reader may have noticed, possibly with surprise, that some of the
+stock terms of dramatic criticism occur but rarely in these pages, or
+not at all. One of them is _dénouement_. According to orthodox theory, I
+ought to have made the _dénouement_ the subject of a whole chapter, if
+not of a whole book. Why have I not done so?
+
+For two reasons. The lesser, but not negligible, reason is that we
+possess no convenient English word for the unknotting or disentangling
+of a complication. Dénouement itself cannot be plausibly Anglicized, and
+no native word has as yet, by common consent, been accepted as its
+equivalent. I sometimes wish we could adopt, and print without italics,
+the excellent and expressive Greek word "lusis"; but I cannot, on my own
+responsibility, attempt so daring an innovation. The second and
+determining reason for not making the _dénouement_ one of the heads of
+my argument, is that, the play of intrigue being no longer the dominant
+dramatic form, the image of disentangling has lost some of its special
+fitness. It is only in a somewhat strained and conventional sense that
+the term _nodus_, or knot, can be applied to the sort of crisis with
+which the modern drama normally deals; and if we do not naturally think
+of the crisis as a knot, we naturally do not think of its close as an
+unknotting.
+
+Nevertheless, there are frequent cases in which the end of a play
+depends on something very like the unravelling of a tangled skein; and
+still more often, perhaps, is it brought about through the loosening of
+some knot in the mind of one or more of the characters. This was the
+characteristic end of the old comedy. The heavy father, or cantankerous
+guardian, who for four acts and a half had stood between the lovers,
+suddenly changed his mind, and all was well. Even by our ancestors this
+was reckoned a rather too simple method of disentanglement. Lisideius,
+in Dryden's dialogue,[1] in enumerating the points in which the French
+drama is superior to the English notes that--
+
+  You never see any of their plays end with a conversion, or simple
+  change of will, which is the ordinary way which our poets use to end
+  theirs. It shew little art in the conclusion of a dramatick poem,
+  when they who have hindered the felicity during the four acts,
+  desist from it in the fifth, without some powerful cause to take
+  them off their design.
+
+The remark of Lisideius is suggested by a passage in Corneille, who
+instances, as an apt and artistic method of bringing about the
+conversion of a heavy father, that his daughter's lover should earn his
+gratitude by rescuing him from assassination!
+
+Conversions, closely examined, will be found to fall into two classes:
+changes in volition, and changes in sentiment. It was the former class
+that Dryden had in mind; and, with reference to this class, the
+principle he indicates remains a sound one. A change of resolve should
+never be due to a mere lapse of time--to the necessity for bringing the
+curtain down and letting the audience go home. It must always be
+rendered plausible by some new fact or new motive: some hitherto untried
+appeal to reason or emotion. This rule, however, is too obvious to
+require enforcement. It was not quite superfluous so long as the old
+convention of comedy endured. For a century and a half after Dryden's
+time, hard-hearted parents were apt to withdraw their opposition to
+their children's "felicity" for no better reason than that the fifth act
+was drawing to a close. But this formula is practically obsolete.
+Changes of will, on the modern stage, are not always adequately motived;
+but that is because of individual inexpertness, not because of any
+failure to recognize theoretically the necessity for adequate
+motivation.
+
+Changes of sentiment are much more important and more difficult to
+handle. A change of will can always manifest itself in action but it is
+very difficult to externalize convincingly a mere change of heart. When
+the conclusion of a play hinges (as it frequently does) on a conversion
+of this nature, it becomes a matter of the first moment that it should
+not merely be asserted, but proved. Many a promising play has gone wrong
+because of the author's neglect, or inability, to comply with this
+condition.
+
+It has often been observed that of all Ibsen's thoroughly mature works,
+from _A Doll's House_ to _John Gabriel Borkman_, _The Lady from the Sea_
+is the loosest in texture, the least masterly in construction. The fact
+that it leaves this impression on the mind is largely due, I think, to a
+single fault. The conclusion of the play--Ellida's clinging to Wangel
+and rejection of the Stranger--depends entirely on a change in Wangel's
+mental attitude, _of which we have no proof whatever beyond his bare
+assertion_. Ellida, in her overwrought mood, is evidently inclining to
+yield to the uncanny allurement of the Stranger's claim upon her, when
+Wangel, realizing that her sanity is threatened, says:
+
+  WANGEL: It shall not come to that. There is no other way of
+  deliverance for you--at least I see none. And therefore--therefore
+  I--cancel our bargain on the spot. Now you can choose your own path,
+  in full--full freedom.
+
+  ELLIDA (_Gazes at him awhile, as if speechless_): Is this
+  true--true--what you say? Do you mean it--from your inmost heart?
+
+  WANGEL: Yes--from the inmost depths of my tortured heart, I mean
+  it.... Now your own true life can return to its--its right groove
+  again. For now you can choose in freedom; and on your own
+  responsibility, Ellida.
+
+  ELLIDA: In freedom--and on my own responsibility? Responsibility?
+  This--this transforms everything.
+
+--and she promptly gives the Stranger his dismissal. Now this is
+inevitably felt to be a weak conclusion, because it turns entirely on a
+condition of Wangel's mind of which he gives no positive and convincing
+evidence. Nothing material is changed by his change of heart. He could
+not in any case have restrained Ellida by force; or, if the law gave him
+the abstract right to do so, he certainly never had the slightest
+intention of exercising it. Psychologically, indeed, the incident is
+acceptable enough. The saner part of Ellida's will was always on
+Wangel's side; and a merely verbal undoing of the "bargain" with which
+she reproached herself might quite naturally suffice to turn the scale
+decisively in his favour. But what may suffice for Ellida is not enough
+for the audience. Too much is made to hang upon a verbally announced
+conversion. The poet ought to have invented some material--or, at the
+very least, some impressively symbolic--proof of Wangel's change of
+heart. Had he done so, _The Lady from the Sea_ would assuredly have
+taken a higher rank among his works.
+
+Let me further illustrate my point by comparing a very small thing with
+a very great. The late Captain Marshall wrote a "farcical romance" named
+_The Duke of Killiecrankie_, in which that nobleman, having been again
+and again rejected by the Lady Henrietta Addison, kidnapped the obdurate
+fair one, and imprisoned her in a crag-castle in the Highlands. Having
+kept her for a week in deferential durance, and shown her that he was
+not the inefficient nincompoop she had taken him for, he threw open the
+prison gate, and said to her: "Go! I set you free!" The moment she saw
+the gate unlocked, and realized that she could indeed go when and where
+she pleased, she also realized that she had not the least wish to go,
+and flung herself into her captor's arms. Here we have Ibsen's situation
+transposed into the key of fantasy, and provided with the material
+"guarantee of good faith" which is lacking in _The Lady from the Sea_.
+The Duke's change of mind, his will to set the Lady Henrietta free, is
+visibly demonstrated by the actual opening of the prison gate, so that
+we believe in it, and believe that she believes in it. The play was a
+trivial affair, and is deservedly forgotten; but the situation was
+effective because it obeyed the law that a change of will or of feeling,
+occurring at a crucial point in a dramatic action, must be certified by
+some external evidence, on pain of leaving the audience unimpressed.
+
+This is a more important matter than it may at first sight appear. How
+to bring home to the audience a decisive change of heart is one of the
+ever-recurring problems of the playwright's craft. In _The Lady from the
+Sea_, Ibsen failed to solve it: in _Rosmersholm_ he solved it by heroic
+measures. The whole catastrophe is determined by Rosmer's inability to
+accept without proof Rebecca's declaration that Rosmersholm has
+"ennobled" her, and that she is no longer the same woman whose
+relentless egoism drove Beata into the mill-race. Rebecca herself puts
+it to him: "How can you believe me on my bare word after to-day?" There
+is only one proof she can give--that of "going the way Beata went." She
+gives it: and Rosmer, who cannot believe her if she lives, and will not
+survive her if she dies, goes with her to her end. But the cases are not
+very frequent, fortunately, in which such drastic methods of proof are
+appropriate or possible. The dramatist must, as a rule, attain his end
+by less violent means; and often he fails to attain it at all.
+
+A play by Mr. Haddon Chambers, _The Awakening_, turned on a sudden
+conversion--the "awakening," in fact, referred to in the title. A
+professional lady-killer, a noted Don Juan, has been idly making love to
+a country maiden, whose heart is full of innocent idealisms. She
+discovers his true character, or, at any rate, his reputation, and is
+horror-stricken, while practically at the same moment, he "awakens" to
+the error of his ways, and is seized with a passion for her as single
+minded and idealistic as hers for him. But how are the heroine and the
+audience to be assured of the fact? That is just the difficulty; and the
+author takes no effectual measures to overcome it. The heroine, of
+course, is ultimately convinced; but the audience remains sceptical, to
+the detriment of the desired effect. "Sceptical," perhaps, is not quite
+the right word. The state of mind of a fictitious character is not a
+subject for actual belief or disbelief. We are bound to accept
+theoretically what the author tells us; but in this case he has failed
+to make us intimately feel and know that it is true.[2]
+
+In Mr. Alfred Sutro's play _The Builder of Bridges_, Dorothy Faringay,
+in her devotion to her forger brother, has conceived the rather
+disgraceful scheme of making one of his official superiors fall in love
+with her, in order to induce him to become practically an accomplice in
+her brother's crime. She succeeds beyond her hopes. Edward Thursfield
+does fall in love with her, and, at a great sacrifice, replaces the
+money the brother has stolen. But, in a very powerful peripety-scene in
+the third act, Thursfield learns that Dorothy has been deliberately
+beguiling him, while in fact she was engaged to another man. The truth
+is, however, that she has really come to love Thursfield passionately,
+and has broken her engagement with the other, for whom she never truly
+cared. So the author tells us, and so we are willing enough to
+believe--if he can devise any adequate method of making Thursfield
+believe it. Mr. Sutro's handling of the difficulty seems to me fairly,
+but not conspicuously, successful. I cite the case as a typical instance
+of the problem, apart from the merits or demerits of the solution.
+
+It may be said that the difficulty of bringing home to us the reality of
+a revulsion of feeling, or a radical change of mental attitude, is only
+a particular case of the playwright's general problem of convincingly
+externalizing inward conditions and processes. That is true: but the
+special importance of a conversion which unties the knot and brings the
+curtain down seemed to render it worthy of special consideration.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+[Footnote 1: _Of Dramatic Poesy_, ed. Arnold, 1903, p. 51.]
+
+[Footnote 2: In Mr. Somerset Maugham's _Grace_ the heroine undergoes a
+somewhat analogous change of heart, coming to love the husband whom she
+has previously despised. But we have no difficulty in accepting her
+conversion, partly because its reasons are clear and fairly adequate,
+partly because there is no question of convincing the husband, who has
+never realized her previous contempt for him.]
+
+
+
+
+_CHAPTER XX_
+
+BLIND-ALLEY THEMES--AND OTHERS
+
+
+A blind-alley theme, as its name imports, is one from which there is no
+exit. It is a problem incapable of solution, or, rather, of which all
+possible solutions are equally unsatisfactory and undesirable. The
+playwright cannot too soon make sure that he has not strayed into such a
+no-thoroughfare. Whether an end be comic or tragic, romantic or ironic,
+happy or disastrous, it should satisfy something within us--our sense of
+truth, or of beauty, or of sublimity, or of justice, or of humour, or,
+at the least or lowest, our cynical sense of the baseness of human
+nature, and the vanity of human aspirations. But a play which satisfies
+neither our higher nor our lower instincts, baffles our sympathies, and
+leaves our desires at fault between equally inacceptable
+alternatives--such a play, whatever beauties of detail it may possess,
+is a weariness of the spirit, and an artistic blunder.
+
+There are in literature two conspicuous examples of the blind-alley
+theme--two famous plays, wherein two heroines are placed in somewhat
+similar dilemmas, which merely paralyse our sympathies and inhibit our
+moral judgment. The first of these is _Measure for Measure_. If ever
+there was an insoluble problem in casuistry, it is that which
+Shakespeare has here chosen to present to us. Isabella is forced to
+choose between what we can only describe as two detestable evils. If she
+resists Angelo, and lets her brother die, she recoils from an act of
+self-sacrifice; and, although we may coldly approve, we cannot admire or
+take pleasure in her action. If, on the other hand, she determines at
+all costs to save her brother's life, her sacrifice is a thing from
+which we want only to avert the mind: it belongs to the region of what
+Aristotle calls to _miaron_, the odious and intolerable. Shakespeare,
+indeed, confesses the problem insoluble in the fact that he leaves it
+unsolved--evading it by means of a mediaeval trick. But where, then, was
+the use of presenting it? What is the artistic profit of letting the
+imagination play around a problem which merely baffles and repels it?
+Sardou, indeed, presented the same problem, not as the theme of a whole
+play, but only of a single act; and he solved it by making Floria Tosca
+kill Scarpia. This is a solution which, at any rate, satisfies our
+craving for crude justice, and is melodramatically effective.
+Shakespeare probably ignored it, partly because it was not in his
+sources, partly because, for some obscure reason, he supposed himself to
+be writing a comedy. The result is that, though the play contains some
+wonderful poetry, and has been from time to time revived, it has never
+taken any real hold upon popular esteem.
+
+The second glaring instance of a blind-alley theme is that of _Monna
+Vanna_. We have all of us, I suppose, stumbled, either as actors or
+onlookers, into painful situations, which not even a miracle of tact
+could possibly save. As a rule, of course, they are comic, and the agony
+they cause may find a safety-valve in laughter. But sometimes there
+occurs some detestable incident, over which it is equally impossible to
+laugh and to weep. The wisest words, the most graceful acts, are of no
+avail. One longs only to sink into the earth, or vanish into thin air.
+Such a situation, on the largest possible scale, is that presented in
+_Monna Vanna_. It differs from that of _Measure for Measure_ in the fact
+that there can be no doubt as to the moral aspect of the case. It is
+quite clear that Giovanna ought to sacrifice herself to save, not one
+puling Claudio, but a whole city full of men, women, and children. What
+she does is absolutely right; but the conjuncture is none the less a
+grotesque and detestable one, which ought to be talked about and thought
+about as little as possible. Every word that is uttered is a failure in
+tact. Guido, the husband, behaves, in the first act, with a violent
+egoism, which is certainly lacking in dignity; but will any one tell me
+what would be a dignified course for him to pursue under the
+circumstances? The sage old Marco, too--that fifteenth-century
+Renan--flounders just as painfully as the hot-headed Guido. It is the
+fatality of the case that "he cannot open his mouth without putting his
+foot in it"; and a theme which exposes a well-meaning old gentleman to
+this painful necessity is one by all means to be avoided. The fact that
+it is a false alarm, and that there is no rational explanation for
+Prinzivalle's wanton insult to a woman whom he reverently idolizes, in
+no way makes matters better.[1] Not the least grotesque thing in the
+play is Giovanna's expectation that Guido will receive Prinzivalle with
+open arms because he has--changed his mind. We can feel neither approval
+nor disapproval, sympathy nor antipathy, in such a deplorable
+conjunction of circumstances. All we wish is that we had not been called
+upon to contemplate it.[2] Maeterlinck, like Shakespeare, was simply
+dallying with the idea of a squalid heroism--so squalid, indeed, that
+neither he nor his predecessor had the courage to carry it through.
+
+Pray observe that the defect of these two themes is not merely that they
+are "unpleasant." It is that there is no possible way out of them which
+is not worse than unpleasant: humiliating, and distressing. Let the
+playwright, then, before embarking on a theme, make sure that he has
+some sort of satisfaction to offer us at the end, if it be only the
+pessimistic pleasure of realizing some part of "the bitter, old and
+wrinkled truth" about life. The crimes of destiny there is some profit
+in contemplating; but its stupid vulgarities minister neither to profit
+nor delight.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+It may not be superfluous to give at this point a little list of
+subjects which, though not blind-alley themes, are equally to be
+avoided. Some of them, indeed, are the reverse of blind-alley themes,
+their drawback lying in the fact that the way out of them is too
+tediously apparent.
+
+At the head of this list I would place what may be called the "white
+marriage" theme: not because it is ineffective, but because its
+effectiveness is very cheap and has been sadly overdone. It occurs in
+two varieties: either a proud but penniless damsel is married to a
+wealthy parvenu, or a woman of culture and refinement is married to a
+"rough diamond." In both cases the action consists of the transformation
+of a nominal into a real marriage; and it is almost impossible, in these
+days, to lend any novelty to the process. In the good old _Lady of
+Lyons_ the theme was decked in trappings of romantic absurdity, which
+somehow harmonized with it. One could hear in it a far-off echo of
+revolutionary rodomontade. The social aspect of the matter was
+emphasized, and the satire on middle-class snobbery was cruelly
+effective. The personal aspect, on the other hand--the unfulfilment of
+the nominal marriage--was lightly and discreetly handled, according to
+early-Victorian convention. In later days--from the time of M. George
+Ohnet's _Maître de Forges_ onwards--this is the aspect on which
+playwrights have preferred to dwell. Usually, the theme shades off into
+the almost equally hackneyed _Still Waters Run Deep_ theme; for there is
+apt to be an aristocratic lover whom the unpolished but formidable
+husband threatens to shoot or horsewhip, and thereby overcomes the last
+remnant of repugnance in the breast of his haughty spouse. In _The
+Ironmaster_ the lover was called the Duc de Bligny, or, more commonly,
+the Dook de Bleeny; but he has appeared under many aliases. In the chief
+American version of the theme, Mr. Vaughn Moody's _Great Divide_, the
+lover is dispensed with altogether, being inconsistent, no doubt, with
+the austere manners of Milford Corners, Mass. In one of the recent
+French versions, on the other hand--M. Bernstein's _Samson_--the
+aristocratic lover is almost as important a character as the virile,
+masterful, plebeian husband. It appears from this survey--which might be
+largely extended--that there are several ways of handling the theme; but
+there is no way of renewing and deconventionalizing it. No doubt it has
+a long life before it on the plane of popular melodrama, but scarcely,
+one hopes, on any higher plane.
+
+Another theme which ought to be relegated to the theatrical lumber-room
+is that of patient, inveterate revenge. This form of vindictiveness is,
+from a dramatic point of view, an outworn passion. It is too obviously
+irrational and anti-social to pass muster in modern costume. The actual
+vendetta may possibly survive in some semi-barbarous regions, and
+Grangerfords and Shepherdsons (as in Mark Twain's immortal romance) may
+still be shooting each other at sight. But these things are relics of
+the past; they do not belong to the normal, typical life of our time. It
+is useless to say that human nature is the same in all ages. That is one
+of the facile axioms of psychological incompetence. Far be it from me to
+deny that malice, hatred, spite, and the spirit of retaliation are, and
+will be until the millennium, among the most active forces in human
+nature. But most people are coming to recognize that life is too short
+for deliberate, elaborate, cold-drawn revenge. They will hit back when
+they conveniently can; they will cherish for half a lifetime a passive,
+an obstructive, ill-will; they will even await for years an opportunity
+of "getting their knife into" an enemy. But they have grown chary of
+"cutting off their nose to spite their face"; they will very rarely
+sacrifice their own comfort in life to the mere joy of protracted,
+elaborate reprisals. Vitriol and the revolver--an outburst of rage,
+culminating in a "short, sharp shock"--these belong, if you will, to
+modern life. But long-drawn, unhasting, unresting machination, with no
+end in view beyond an ultimate unmasking, a turn of the tables--in a
+word, a strong situation--this, I take it, belongs to a phase of
+existence more leisurely than ours. There is no room in our crowded
+century for such large and sustained passions. One could mention
+plays--but they are happily forgotten--in which retribution was delayed
+for some thirty or forty years, during which the unconscious object of
+it enjoyed a happy and prosperous existence. These, no doubt, are
+extreme instances; but cold-storage revenge, as a whole, ought to be as
+rare on the stage as it is in real life. The serious playwright will do
+well to leave it to the melodramatists.
+
+A third theme to be handled with the greatest caution, if at all, is
+that of heroic self-sacrifice. Not that self-sacrifice, like revenge, is
+an outworn passion. It still rages in daily life; but no audience of
+average intelligence will to-day accept it with the uncritical
+admiration which it used to excite in the sentimental dramas of last
+century. Even then--even in 1869--Meilhac and Halévy, in their
+ever-memorable _Froufrou_, showed what disasters often result from it;
+but it retained its prestige with the average playwright--and with some
+who were above the average--for many a day after that. I can recall a
+play, by a living English author, in which a Colonel in the Indian Army
+pleaded guilty to a damning charge of cowardice rather than allow a lady
+whom he chivalrously adored to learn that it was her husband who was the
+real coward and traitor. He knew that the lady detested her husband; he
+knew that they had no children to suffer by the husband's disgrace; he
+knew that there was a quite probable way by which he might have cleared
+his own character without casting any imputation on the other man. But
+in a sheer frenzy of self-sacrifice he blasted his own career, and
+thereby inflicted far greater pain upon the woman he loved than if he
+had told the truth or suffered it to be told. And twenty years
+afterwards, when the villain was dead, the hero still resolutely refused
+to clear his own character, lest the villain's widow should learn the
+truth about her wholly unlamented husband. This was an extravagant and
+childish case; but the superstition of heroic self-sacrifice still
+lingers in certain quarters, and cannot be too soon eradicated. I do not
+mean, of course, that self-sacrifice is never admirable, but only that
+it can no longer be accepted as a thing inherently noble, apart from its
+circumstances and its consequences. An excellent play might be written
+with the express design of placing the ethics of self-sacrifice in their
+true light. Perhaps the upshot might be the recognition of the simple
+principle that it is immoral to make a sacrifice which the person
+supposed to benefit by it has no right to accept.
+
+Another motive against which it is perhaps not quite superfluous to warn
+the aspiring playwright is the "voix du sang." It is only a few years
+since this miraculous voice was heard speaking loud and long in His
+Majesty's Theatre, London, and in a play by a no less modern-minded
+author than the late Clyde Fitch. It was called _The Last of the
+Dandies_,[3] and its hero was Count D'Orsay. At a given moment, D'Orsay
+learned that a young man known as Lord Raoul Ardale was in reality his
+son. Instantly the man of the world, the squire of dames, went off into
+a deliquium of tender emotion. For "my bo-ô-oy" he would do anything and
+everything. He would go down to Crockford's and win a pot of money to
+pay "my boy's" debts--Fortune could not but be kind to a doting parent.
+In the beautiful simplicity of his soul, he looked forward with eager
+delight to telling Raoul that the mother he adored was no better than
+she should be, and that he had no right to his name or title. Not for a
+moment did he doubt that the young man would share his transports. When
+the mother opposed his purpose of betraying her secret, he wept with
+disappointment. "All day," he said, "I have been saying to myself: When
+that sun sets, I shall hear him say, 'Good-night, Father!'" He
+postulated in so many words the "voix du sang," trusting that, even if
+the revelation were not formally made, "Nature would send the boy some
+impulse" of filial affection. It is hard to believe--but it is the
+fact--that, well within the present century, such ingenuous nonsense as
+this was gravely presented to the public of a leading theatre, by an
+author of keen intelligence, who, but for an unhappy accident, would now
+be at the zenith of his career. There are few more foolish conventions
+than that of the "voix du sang." Perhaps, however, the rising generation
+of playwrights has more need to be warned against the opposite or
+Shawesque convention, that kinship utters itself mainly in wrangling and
+mutual dislike.
+
+Among inherently feeble and greatly overdone expedients may be reckoned
+the oath or promise of secrecy, exacted for no sufficient reason, and
+kept in defiance of common sense and common humanity. Lord Windermere's
+conduct in Oscar Wilde's play is a case in point, though he has not even
+an oath to excuse his insensate secretiveness. A still clearer instance
+is afforded by Clyde Fitch's play _The Girl with the Green Eyes_. In
+other respects a very able play, it is vitiated by the certainty that
+Austin ought to have, and would have, told the truth ten times over,
+rather than subject his wife's jealous disposition to the strain he
+puts upon it.
+
+It would not be difficult to prolong this catalogue of themes and
+motives that have come down in the world, and are no longer presentable
+in any society that pretends to intelligence. But it is needless to
+enter into further details. There is a general rule, of sovereign
+efficacy, for avoiding such anachronisms: "Go to life for your themes,
+and not to the theatre." Observe that rule, and you are safe. But it is
+easier said than done.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+[Footnote 1: I have good reason for believing that, in M. Maeterlinck's
+original scheme, Prinzivalle imposed no such humiliating condition.
+Giovanna went of her own motive to appeal to his clemency; and her
+success was so complete that her husband, on her return, could not
+believe that it had been won by avowable means. This is a really fine
+conception--what a pity that the poet departed from it!]
+
+[Footnote 2: Much has been made of the Censor's refusal to license
+_Monna Vanna_; but I think there is more to be said for his action in
+this than in many other cases. In those countries where the play has
+succeeded, I cannot but suspect that the appeal it made was not wholly
+to the higher instincts of the public.]
+
+[Footnote 3: I am not sure what was the precise relationship of this
+play to the same author's _Beau Brummel_. D'Orsay's death scene was
+certainly a repetition of Brummel's.]
+
+
+
+
+_CHAPTER XXI_
+
+THE FULL CLOSE
+
+
+In an earlier chapter, I have tried to show that a certain tolerance for
+anticlimax, for a fourth or fifth act of calm after the storm of the
+penultimate act, is consonant with right reason, and is a practically
+inevitable result of a really intimate relation between drama and life.
+But it would be a complete misunderstanding of my argument to suppose
+that I deny the practical, and even the artistic, superiority of those
+themes in which the tension can be maintained and heightened to the
+very end.
+
+The fact that tragedy has from of old been recognized as a higher form
+than comedy is partly due, no doubt, to the tragic poet's traditional
+right to round off a human destiny in death. "Call no man happy till his
+life be ended," said Sophocles, quoting from an earlier sage; and it
+needed no profundity of wisdom to recognize in the "happy ending" of
+comedy a conventional, ephemeral thing. But when, after all the
+peripeties of life, the hero "home has gone and ta'en his wages," we
+feel that, at any rate, we have looked destiny squarely in the face,
+without evasion or subterfuge. Perhaps the true justification of tragedy
+as a form of art is that, after this experience, we should feel life to
+be, not less worth living, but greater and more significant than before.
+
+This is no place, however, for a discussion of the aesthetic basis of
+tragedy in general.[1] What is here required, from the point of view of
+craftsmanship, is not so much a glorification of the tragic ending, as a
+warning against its facile misuse. A very great play may, and often
+must, end in death; but you cannot make a play great by simply killing
+off your protagonist. Death is, after all, a very inexpensive means of
+avoiding anticlimax. Tension, as we saw, is symbolized in the sword of
+Damocles; and it can always be maintained, in a mechanical way, by
+letting your hero play about with a revolver, or placing an overdose of
+chloral well within your heroine's reach. At the time when the English
+drama was awaking from the lethargy of the 'seventies, an idea got
+abroad that a non-sanguinary ending was always and necessarily
+inartistic, and that a self-respecting playwright must at all hazards
+kill somebody before dropping his curtain. This was an extravagant
+reaction against the purely commercial principle that the public would
+not, on any terms, accept a tragic ending. As a matter of fact, the
+mortality was not very great; for managers were resolute in the old
+belief, and few dramatists had the courage or authority to stand up
+against them. But I have often heard playwrights lamenting their
+inability to massacre the luckless children of their fancy, who, nine
+times out of ten, had done nothing to incur such a doom. The real
+trouble was that death seemed to be the only method of avoiding
+anticlimax.
+
+It is a very sound rule that, before you determine to write a tragedy,
+you should make sure that you have a really tragic theme: that you can
+place your hero at such odds with life that reconciliation, or mere
+endurance, would be morally base or psychologically improbable.
+Moreover, you must strike deep into character before you are justified
+in passing capital sentence on your personages. Death is a
+disproportionate close for a commonplace and superficially-studied life.
+It is true that quite commonplace people do die; indeed, they
+preponderate in the bills of mortality; but death on the stage confers a
+sort of distinction which ought not to be accorded without due and
+sufficient cause. To one god in particular we may apply the Horatian
+maxim, "Nec deus intersit, nisi dignus vindice nodus."
+
+In German aesthetic theory, the conception _tragische Schuld_--"tragic
+guilt"--plays a large part. It descends, no doubt, from the Aristotelian
+maxim that a tragic hero must neither be too good nor too bad; but it
+also belongs to a moralizing conception, which tacitly or explicitly
+assumes that the dramatist's aim ought to be "to justify the ways of God
+to man." In these days we look at drama more objectively, and do not
+insist on deciding in what degree a man has deserved death, if only we
+feel that he has necessarily or probably incurred it. But in order that
+we may be satisfied of this, we must know him intimately and feel with
+him intensely. We must, in other words, believe that he dies because he
+cannot live, and not merely to suit the playwright's convenience and
+help him to an effective "curtain."
+
+As we review the series of Ibsen's modern plays, we cannot but feel
+that, though he did not shrink from death, he never employed it, except
+perhaps in his last melancholy effort, as a mere way of escape from a
+difficulty. In five out of his thirteen modern plays, no one dies at
+all.[2] One might even say six: for Oswald, in _Ghosts_, may live for
+years; but I hold it as only fair to count the death of his mind as more
+than equivalent to bodily death. Solness, on the plane of literal fact,
+dies by an accident; on the plane of symbolic interpretation, he dies of
+the over-great demands which Hilda makes upon his "sickly conscience."
+Little Eyolf's death can also be regarded from a symbolic point of view;
+but there is no substantial reason to think of it otherwise than as an
+accident. John Gabriel Borkman dies of heart seizure, resulting from
+sudden exposure to extreme cold. In the case of Solness and Borkman,
+death is a quite natural and probable result of the antecedent
+conditions; and in the case of Eyolf, it is not a way out of the action,
+but rather the way into it. There remain the three cases of suicide:
+Rebecca and Rosmer, Hedda Gabler, and Hedvig. I have already, in Chapter
+XIX, shown how the death of Rebecca was the inevitable outcome of the
+situation--the one conclusive proof of her "ennoblement"--and how it was
+almost equally inevitable that Rosmer should accompany her to her end.
+Hedda Gabler was constitutionally fated to suicide: a woman of low
+vitality, overmastering egoism, and acute supersensitiveness, placed in
+a predicament which left her nothing to expect from life but tedium and
+humiliation. The one case left--that of Hedvig--is the only one in which
+Ibsen can possibly be accused of wanton bloodshed. Björnson, in a very
+moving passage in his novel, _The Paths of God_, did actually, though
+indirectly, make that accusation. Certainly, there is no more
+heartrending incident in fiction; and certainly it is a thing that only
+consummate genius can justify. Ibsen happened to possess that genius,
+and I am not far from agreeing with those who hold _The Wild Duck_ to be
+his greatest work. But for playwrights who are tempted to seek for
+effects of pathos by similar means, one may without hesitation lay down
+this maxim: Be sure you are an Ibsen before you kill your Hedvig.
+
+This analysis of Ibsen's practice points to the fact--for such I believe
+it to be--that what the modern playwright has chiefly to guard against
+is the temptation to overdo suicide as a means of cutting the dramatic
+knot. In France and Germany there is another temptation, that of the
+duel;[3] but in Anglo-Saxon countries it scarcely presents itself.
+Death, other than self-inflicted, is much less tempting, and less apt to
+be resorted to in and out of season. The heroine, whether virtuous or
+erring, who dies of consumption, has gone greatly out of vogue. A broken
+heart is no longer held to be necessarily fatal. The veriest tyro
+realizes that death by crude accident is inadmissible as a determining
+factor in serious drama; and murder is practically (though not
+absolutely) relegated to the melodramatic domain. The one urgent
+question, then, is that of the artistic use and abuse of suicide.
+
+The principle is pretty plain, I think, that it ought to be the
+artist's, as it is the man's, last resort. We know that, in most
+civilized countries, suicide is greatly on the increase. It cannot be
+called an infrequent incident in daily life. It is certain, too, that
+the motives impelling to it are apt to be of a dramatic nature, and
+therefore suited to the playwright's purposes. But it is, on the other
+hand, such a crude and unreasoning means of exit from the tangle of
+existence that a playwright of delicate instincts will certainly employ
+it only under the strongest compulsion from his artistic conscience.
+
+Sir Arthur Pinero has three suicides on his record, though one of them
+was, so to speak, nipped in the bud. In _The Profligate_, as presented
+on the stage, Dunstan Renshaw changed his mind before draining the fatal
+goblet; and in this case the stage version was surely the right one. The
+suicide, to which the author still clings in the printed text,
+practically dates the play as belonging to the above-mentioned period of
+rebellion against the conventional "happy ending," when the ambitious
+British dramatist felt that honour required him to kill his man on the
+smallest provocation.[4] Nearly a quarter of a century has passed since
+then, and the disproportion between such a play and such a catastrophe
+is now apparent to everyone. It is not that we judge Renshaw's
+delinquencies to be over-punished by death--that is not the question.
+The fact is simply that the characters are not large enough, true
+enough, living enough--that the play does not probe deep enough into
+human experience--to make the august intervention of death seem other
+than an incongruity. The suicide of Paula Tanqueray, though it, too, has
+been much criticized, is a very different matter. Inevitable it cannot
+be called: if the play had been written within the past ten years, Sir
+Arthur would very likely have contrived to do without it. But it is, in
+itself, probable enough: both the good and the bad in Paula's character
+might easily make her feel that only the dregs of life remained to her,
+and they not worth drinking. The worst one can say of it is that it sins
+against the canon of practical convenience which enjoins on the prudent
+dramatist strict economy in suicide. The third case, Zoe Blundell's leap
+to nothingness, in that harsh and ruthless masterpiece, _Mid-Channel_,
+is as inevitable as anything can well be in human destiny. Zoe has made
+a miserable and hopeless muddle of her life. In spite of her goodness of
+heart, she has no interests and no ideals, apart from the personal
+satisfactions which have now been poisoned at their source. She has
+intervened disastrously in the destinies of others. She is ill; her
+nerves are all on edge; and she is, as it were, driven into a corner,
+from which there is but one easy and rapid exit. Here is a case, if ever
+there was one, where the end is imposed upon the artist by the whole
+drift of his action. It may be said that chance plays a large part in
+the concatenation of events--that, for instance, if Leonard Ferris had
+not happened to live at the top of a very high building, Zoe would not
+have encountered the sudden temptation to which she yields. But this, as
+I have tried to show above, is a baseless complaint. Chance is a
+constant factor in life, now aiding, now thwarting, the will. To
+eliminate it altogether would be to produce a most unlifelike world. It
+is only when the playwright so manipulates and reduplicates chance as to
+make it seem no longer chance, but purposeful arrangement, that we have
+the right to protest.
+
+Another instance of indisputably justified suicide may be found in Mr.
+Galsworthy's _Justice_. The whole theme of the play is nothing but the
+hounding to his end of a luckless youth, who has got on the wrong side
+of the law, and finds all the forces of society leagued against him. In
+Mr. Granville Barker's _Waste_, the artistic justification for Trebell's
+self-effacement is less clear and compulsive. It is true that the play
+was suggested by the actual suicide, not of a politician, but of a
+soldier, who found his career ruined by some pitiful scandal. But the
+author has made no attempt to reproduce the actual circumstances of that
+case; and even if he had reproduced the external circumstances, the
+psychological conditions would clearly have eluded him. Thus the appeal
+to fact is, as it always must be, barred. In two cases, indeed, much
+more closely analogous to Trebell's than that which actually suggested
+it--two famous cases in which a scandal cut short a brilliant political
+career--suicide played no part in the catastrophe. These real-life
+instances are, I repeat, irrelevant. The only question is whether Mr.
+Barker has made us feel that a man of Trebell's character would
+certainly not survive the paralysing of his energies; and that question
+every spectator must answer for himself. I am far from answering it in
+the negative. I merely suggest that the playwright may one day come
+across a theme for which there is no conceivable ending but suicide, and
+may wish that he had let Trebell live, lest people should come to regard
+him as a spendthrift of self-slaughter.
+
+The suicide which brings to a close Mr. Clyde Fitch's very able play,
+_The Climbers_, stands on a somewhat different level. Here it is not the
+protagonist who makes away with himself, nor is his destiny the main
+theme of the play. Mr. Fitch has painted a broad social picture, in
+which, if there is any concentration of interest, it is upon Blanche and
+Warden. Sterling's suicide, then, though it does in fact cut the chief
+knot of the play, is to be regarded rather as a characteristic and
+probable incident of a certain phase of life, than as the culmination of
+a spiritual tragedy. It has not the artistic significance, either good
+or bad, that it would have if the character and destiny of Sterling were
+our main concernment.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The happy playwright, one may say, is he whose theme does not force upon
+him either a sanguinary or a tame last act, but enables him, without
+troubling the coroner, to sustain and increase the tension up to the
+very close. Such themes are not too common, but they do occur. Dumas
+found one in _Denise_, and another in _Francillon_, where the famous "Il
+en a menti!" comes within two minutes of the fall of the curtain. In
+_Heimat_ (Magda) and in _Johannisfeuer_, Sudermann keeps the tension at
+its height up to the fall of the curtain. Sir Arthur Pinero's _Iris_ is
+a case in point; so are Mr. Shaw's _Candida_ and _The Devil's Disciple_;
+so is Mr. Galsworthy's _Strife_. Other instances will no doubt occur to
+the reader; yet he will probably be surprised to find that it is not
+very easy to recall them.
+
+For this is not, in fact, the typical modern formula. In plays which do
+not end in death, it will generally be found that the culminating scene
+occurs in the penultimate act, and that, if anticlimax is avoided, it is
+not by the maintenance of an unbroken tension, by its skilful renewal
+and reinforcement in the last act. This is a resource which the
+playwright will do well to bear in mind. Where he cannot place his
+"great scene" in his last act, he should always consider whether it be
+not possible to hold some development in reserve whereby the tension may
+be screwed up again--if unexpectedly, so much the better. Some of the
+most successful plays within my recollection have been those in which
+the last act came upon us as a pleasant surprise. An anticlimax had
+seemed inevitable; and behold! the author had found a way out of it.
+
+_An Enemy of the People_ may perhaps be placed in this class, though, as
+before remarked, the last act is almost an independent comedy. Had the
+play ended with the fourth act, no one would have felt that anything was
+lacking; so that in his fifth act, Ibsen was not so much grappling with
+an urgent technical problem, as amusing himself by wringing the last
+drop of humour out of the given situation. A more strictly apposite
+example may be found in Sir Arthur Pinero's play, _His House in Order_.
+Here the action undoubtedly culminates in the great scene between Nina
+and Hilary Jesson in the third act; yet we await with eager anticipation
+the discomfiture of the Ridgeley family; and when we realize that it is
+to be brought about by the disclosure to Filmer of Annabel's secret, the
+manifest rightness of the proceeding gives us a little shock of
+pleasure. Mr. Somerset Maugham, again, in the last act of _Grace_,
+employs an ingenious device to keep the tension at a high pitch. The
+matter of the act consists mainly of a debate as to whether Grace Insole
+ought, or ought not, to make a certain painful avowal to her husband. As
+the negative opinion was to carry the day, Mr. Maugham saw that there
+was grave danger that the final scene might appear an almost ludicrous
+anticlimax. To obviate this, he made Grace, at the beginning of the act,
+write a letter of confession, and address it to Claude; so that all
+through the discussion we had at the back of our mind the question "Will
+the letter reach his hands? Will the sword of Damocles fall?" This may
+seem like a leaf from the book of Sardou; but in reality it was a
+perfectly natural and justified expedient. It kept the tension alive
+throughout a scene of ethical discussion, interesting in itself, but
+pretty clearly destined to lead up to the undramatic alternative--a
+policy of silence and inaction. Mr. Clyde Fitch, in the last act of _The
+Truth_, made an elaborate and daring endeavour to relieve the
+mawkishness of the clearly-foreseen reconciliation between Warder and
+Becky. He let Becky fall in with her father's mad idea of working upon
+Warder's compassion by pretending that she had tried to kill herself.
+Only at the last moment did she abandon the sordid comedy, and so prove
+herself (as we are asked to suppose) cured for ever of the habit of
+fibbing. Mr. Fitch here showed good technical insight marred by
+over-hasty execution. That Becky should be tempted to employ her old
+methods, and should overcome the temptation, was entirely right; but the
+actual deception attempted was so crude and hopeless that there was no
+plausibility in her consenting to it, and no merit in her desisting
+from it.
+
+In light comedy and farce it is even more desirable than in serious
+drama to avoid a tame and perfunctory last act. Very often a seemingly
+trivial invention will work wonders in keeping the interest afoot. In
+Mr. Anstey's delightful farce, _The Brass Bottle_, one looked forward
+rather dolefully to a flat conclusion; but by the simple device of
+letting the Jinny omit to include Pringle in his "act of oblivion," the
+author is enabled to make his last scene quite as amusing as any of its
+predecessors. Mr. Arnold Bennett, in _The Honeymoon_, had the audacity
+to play a deliberate trick on the audience, in order to evade an
+anticlimax. Seeing that his third act could not at best be very good, he
+purposely put the audience on a false scent, made it expect an
+absolutely commonplace ending (the marriage of Flora to Charles Haslam),
+and then substituted one which, if not very brilliant, was at least
+ingenious and unforeseen. Thus, by defeating the expectation of a
+superlatively bad act, he made a positively insignificant act seem
+comparatively good. Such feats of craftsmanship are entertaining, but
+too dangerous to be commended for imitation.
+
+In some modern plays a full close is achieved by the simple expedient of
+altogether omitting the last act, or last scene, and leaving the end of
+the play to the imagination. This method is boldly and (I understand)
+successfully employed by Mr. Edward Sheldon in his powerful play, _The
+Nigger_. Philip Morrow, the popular Governor of one of the Southern
+States, has learnt that his grandmother was a quadroon, and that
+consequently he has in him a much-attenuated strain of African blood. In
+the Southern States, attenuation matters nothing: if the remotest
+filament of a man's ancestry runs back to Africa, he is "a nigger all
+right." Philip has just suppressed a race-riot in the city, and, from
+the balcony of the State Capitol, is to address the troops who have
+aided him, and the assembled multitude. Having resolutely parted from
+the woman he adores, but can no longer marry, he steps out upon the
+balcony to announce that he is a negro, that he resigns the
+Governorship, and that henceforth he casts in his lot with his black
+brethren. The stage-direction runs thus--
+
+  The afternoon sun strikes his figure. At his appearance a shout goes
+  up--long, steady, enthusiastic cheering; and, after a moment, the
+  big regimental band begins playing, very slowly, "My Country, 'tis
+  of Thee." ... All the people in the room are smiling and applauding
+  enthusiastically; and--as Phil in vain raises his hand for silence,
+  and the band crashes through the National Anthem, and the roar of
+  voices still rises from below--
+
+  THE CURTAIN FALLS.
+
+One does not know whether to praise Mr. Sheldon for having adroitly
+avoided an anticlimax, or to reproach him with having unblushingly
+shirked a difficulty. To my sense, the play has somewhat the air of a
+hexameter line with the spondee cut off.[5] One _does_ want to see the
+peripety through. But if the audience is content to imagine the sequel,
+Mr. Sheldon's craftsmanship is justified, and there is no more to be
+said. M. Brieux experienced some difficulty in bringing his early play,
+_Blanchette_, to a satisfactory close. The third act which he originally
+wrote was found unendurably cynical; a more agreeable third act was
+condemned as an anticlimax; and for some time the play was presented
+with no third act at all. It did not end, but simply left off. No doubt
+it is better that a play should stop in the middle than that it should
+drag on tediously and ineffectually. But it would be foolish to make a
+system of such an expedient. It is, after all, an evasion, not a
+solution, of the artist's problem.
+
+An incident which occurred during the rehearsals for the first
+production of _A Doll's House_, at the Novelty Theatre, London,
+illustrates the difference between the old, and what was then the new,
+fashion of ending a play. The business manager of the company, a man of
+ripe theatrical experience, happened to be present one day when Miss
+Achurch and Mr. Waring were rehearsing the last great scene between Nora
+and Helmar. At the end of it, he came up to me, in a state of high
+excitement. "This is a fine play!" he said. "This is sure to be a big
+thing!" I was greatly pleased. "If this scene, of all others," I
+thought, "carries a man like Mr. Smith off his feet, it cannot fail to
+hold the British public." But I was somewhat dashed when, a day or two
+later, Mr. Smith came up to me again, in much less buoyant spirits. "I
+made a mistake about that scene," he said. "They tell me it's the end of
+the _last_ act--I thought it was the end of the _first_!"
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+[Footnote 1: The reader who wishes to pursue the theme may do so to
+excellent advantage in Professor Bradley's _Shakespearean Tragedy_.]
+
+[Footnote 2: It is true that in _A Doll's House_, Dr. Rank announces his
+approaching demise: but he does not actually die, nor is his fate an
+essential part of the action of the play.]
+
+[Footnote 3: The duel, even in countries whose customs permit of it, is
+essentially an inartistic end; for it leaves the catastrophe to be
+decided either by Chance or Providence--two equally inadmissible
+arbiters in modern drama. Alexandre Dumas _fils_, in his preface to
+_Héloïse Paranquet_, condemns the duel as a dramatic expedient. "Not to
+mention," he says, "the fact that it has been much over-done, we are
+bound to recognize that Providence, in a fit of absence of mind,
+sometimes suffers the rascal to kill the honest man. Let me recommend my
+young colleagues," he proceeds, "never to end a piece which pretends to
+reproduce a phase of real life, by an intervention of chance." The
+recommendation came rather oddly from the dramatist who, in
+_L'Etrangère_, had disposed of his "vibrion," the Duc de Septmonts, by
+making Clarkson kill him in a duel. Perhaps he did not reckon
+_L'Etrangère_ as pretending to reproduce a phase of real life. A duel
+is, of course, perfectly admissible in a French or German play, simply
+as part of a picture of manners. Its stupid inconclusiveness may be the
+very point to be illustrated. It is only when represented as a moral
+arbitrament that it becomes an anachronism.]
+
+[Footnote 4: I am glad to see, from Mr. Malcolm Salaman's introduction
+to the printed play, that, even in those days of our hot youth, my own
+aesthetic principles were less truculent.]
+
+[Footnote 5: This image is sometimes suggested by an act-ending which
+leaves a marked situation obviously unresolved. The curtain should never
+be dropped at such a point as to leave the characters in a physical or
+mental attitude which cannot last for more than a moment, and must
+certainly be followed, then and there, by important developments. In
+other words, a situation ought not to be cut short at the very height of
+its tension, but only when it has reached a point of--at any rate
+momentary--relaxation.]
+
+
+
+
+_BOOK V_
+
+EPILOGUE
+
+
+
+
+_CHAPTER XXII_
+
+CHARACTER AND PSYCHOLOGY
+
+
+For the invention and ordering of incident it is possible, if not to lay
+down rules, at any rate to make plausible recommendations; but the power
+to observe, to penetrate, and to reproduce character can neither be
+acquired nor regulated by theoretical recommendations. Indirectly, of
+course, all the technical discussions of the previous chapters tend, or
+ought to tend, towards the effective presentment of character; for
+construction, in drama of any intellectual quality, has no other end.
+But specific directions for character-drawing would be like rules for
+becoming six feet high. Either you have it in you, or you have it not.
+
+Under the heading of character, however, two points arise which may be
+worth a brief discussion: first, ought we always to aim at development
+in character? second, what do we, or ought we to, mean by "psychology"?
+
+It is a frequent critical complaint that in such-and-such a character
+there is "no development": that it remains the same throughout a play;
+or (so the reproach is sometimes worded) that it is not a character but
+an invariable attitude. A little examination will show us, I think,
+that, though the critic may in these cases be pointing to a real fault,
+he does not express himself quite accurately.
+
+What is character? For the practical purposes of the dramatist, it may
+be defined as a complex of intellectual, emotional, and nervous habits.
+Some of these habits are innate and temperamental--habits formed, no
+doubt, by far-off ancestors.[1] But this distinction does not here
+concern us. Temperamental bias is a habit, like another, only somewhat
+older, and, therefore, harder to deflect or eradicate. What do we imply,
+then, when we complain that, in a given character, no development has
+taken place? We imply that he ought, within the limits of the play, to
+have altered the mental habits underlying his speech and actions. But is
+this a reasonable demand? Is it consistent with the usual and desirable
+time-limits of drama? In the long process of a novel, there may be time
+for the gradual alteration of habits: in the drama, which normally
+consists of a single crisis, any real change of character would have to
+be of a catastrophic nature, in which experience does not encourage us
+to put much faith. It was, indeed--as Dryden pointed out in a passage
+quoted above[2]--one of the foibles of our easy-going ancestors to treat
+character as practically reversible when the time approached for ringing
+down the curtain. The same convention survives to this day in certain
+forms of drama. Even Ibsen, in his earlier work, had not shaken it off;
+witness the sudden ennoblement of Bernick in _Pillars of Society_. But
+it can scarcely be that sort of "development" which the critics consider
+indispensable. What is it, then, that they have in mind?
+
+By "development" of character, I think they mean, not change, but rather
+unveiling, disclosure. They hold, not unreasonably, that a dramatic
+crisis ought to disclose latent qualities in the persons chiefly
+concerned in it, and involve, not, indeed, a change, but, as it were, an
+exhaustive manifestation of character. The interest of the highest order
+of drama should consist in the reaction of character to a series of
+crucial experiences. We should, at the end of a play, know more of the
+protagonist's character than he himself, or his most intimate friend,
+could know at the beginning; for the action should have been such as to
+put it to some novel and searching test. The word "development" might be
+very aptly used in the photographic sense. A drama ought to bring out
+character as the photographer's chemicals "bring out" the forms latent
+in the negative. But this is quite a different thing from development in
+the sense of growth or radical change. In all modern drama, there is
+perhaps no character who "develops," in the ordinary sense of the word,
+so startlingly as Ibsen's Nora; and we cannot but feel that the poet has
+compressed into a week an evolution which, in fact, would have demanded
+many months.
+
+The complaint that a character preserves the same attitude throughout
+means (if it be justified) that it is not a human being at all, but a
+mere embodiment of two or three characteristics which are fully
+displayed within the first ten minutes, and then keep on repeating
+themselves, like a recurrent decimal. Strong theatrical effects can be
+produced by this method, which is that of the comedy of types, or of
+"humors." But it is now generally, and rightly, held that a character
+should be primarily an individual, and only incidentally (if at all)
+capable of classification under this type or that. It is a little
+surprising to find Sarcey, so recently as 1889, laying it down that "a
+character is a master faculty or passion, which absorbs all the rest....
+To study and paint a character is, therefore, by placing a man in a
+certain number of situations, to show how this principal motive force in
+his nature annihilates or directs all those which, if he had been
+another man, would probably have come into action." This dogma of the
+"ruling passion" belongs rather to the eighteenth century than to the
+close of the nineteenth.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+We come now to the second of the questions above propounded, which I
+will state more definitely in this form: Is "psychology" simply a more
+pedantic term for "character-drawing"? Or can we establish a distinction
+between the two ideas? I do not think that, as a matter of fact, any
+difference is generally and clearly recognized; but I suggest that it is
+possible to draw a distinction which might, if accepted, prove
+serviceable both to critics and to playwrights.
+
+Let me illustrate my meaning by an example. In _Bella Donna_, by Messrs.
+Robert Hichens and James B. Fagan, we have a murder-story of a not
+uncommon or improbable type. A woman of very shady reputation marries an
+amiable idealist who is infatuated with her. She naturally finds his
+idealism incomprehensible and his amiability tedious. His position as
+heir-presumptive to a peerage is shattered by the birth of an
+heir-apparent. She becomes passionately enamoured of an Egyptian
+millionaire; and she sets to work to poison her husband with
+sugar-of-lead, provided by her oriental lover. How her criminal purpose
+is thwarted by a wise Jewish physician is nothing to the present
+purpose. In intent she is a murderess, no less than Lucrezia Borgia or
+the Marquise de Brinvilliers. And the authors have drawn her character
+cleverly enough. They have shown her in the first act as a
+shallow-souled materialist, and in the later acts as a vain, irritable,
+sensual, unscrupulous creature. But have they given us any insight into
+her psychology? No, that is just what they have not done. They have
+assigned to her certain characteristics without which cruel and
+cold-blooded murder would be inconceivable; but they have afforded us no
+insight into the moral conditions and, mental processes which make it,
+not only conceivable, but almost an everyday occurrence. For the average
+human mind, I suppose, the psychology of crime, and especially of
+fiendish, hypocritical murder-by-inches, has an undeniable fascination.
+To most of us it seems an abhorrent miracle; and it would interest us
+greatly to have it brought more or less within the range of our
+comprehension, and co-ordinated with other mental phenomena which we can
+and do understand. But of such illumination we find nothing in _Bella
+Donna_. It leaves the working of a poisoner's mind as dark to us as
+ever. So far as that goes, we might just as well have read the report of
+a murder-trial, wherein the facts are stated with, perhaps, some
+superficial speculation as to motive, but no attempt is made to
+penetrate to underlying soul-states. Yet this is surely the highest
+privilege of art--to take us behind and beneath those surfaces of things
+which are apparent to the detective and the reporter, the juryman and
+the judge.
+
+Have we not here, then, the distinction between character-drawing and
+psychology? Character-drawing is the presentment of human nature in its
+commonly-recognized, understood, and accepted aspects; psychology is, as
+it were, the exploration of character, the bringing of hitherto
+unsurveyed tracts within the circle of our knowledge and comprehension.
+In other words, character-drawing is synthetic, psychology analytic.
+This does not mean that the one is necessarily inferior to the other.
+Some of the greatest masterpieces of creative art have been achieved by
+the synthesis of known elements. Falstaff, for example--there is no more
+brilliant or more living character in all fiction; yet it is impossible
+to say that Shakespeare has here taken us into previously unplumbed
+depths of human nature, as he has in Hamlet, or in Lear. No doubt it is
+often very hard to decide whether a given personage is a mere projection
+of the known or a divination of the unknown. What are we to say, for
+example, of Cleopatra, or of Shylock, or of Macbeth? Richard II, on the
+other hand, is as clearly a piece of psychology as the Nurse in _Romeo
+and Juliet_ is a piece of character-drawing. The comedy of types
+necessarily tends to keep within the limits of the known, and
+Molière--in spite of Alceste and Don Juan--is characteristically a
+character-drawer, as Racine is characteristically a psychologist. Ibsen
+is a psychologist or he is nothing. Earl Skule and Bishop Nicholas,
+Hedda Gabler and John Gabriel Borkman are daring explorations of
+hitherto uncharted regions of the human soul. But Ibsen, too, was a
+character-drawer when it suited him. One is tempted to say that there is
+no psychology in Brand--he is a mere incarnation of intransigent
+idealism--while Peer Gynt is as brilliant a psychological inspiration as
+Don Quixote. Dr. Stockmann is a vigorously-projected character, Hialmar
+Ekdal a piece of searching psychology. Finally, my point could scarcely
+be better illustrated than by a comparison--cruel but instructive
+--between Rebecca in _Rosmersholm_ and the heroine in _Bella
+Donna_. Each is, in effect, a murderess, though it was a moral, not a
+mineral, poison that Rebecca employed. But while we know nothing
+whatever of Mrs. Armine's mental processes, Rebecca's temptations,
+struggles, sophistries, hesitations, resolves, and revulsions of feeling
+are all laid bare to us, so that we feel her to be no monster, but a
+living woman, comprehensible to our intelligence, and, however
+blameworthy, not wholly beyond the range of our sympathies. There are
+few greater achievements of psychology.
+
+Among the playwrights of to-day, I should call Mr. Granville Barker
+above all things a psychologist. It is his instinct to venture into
+untrodden fields of character, or, at any rate, to probe deeply into
+phenomena which others have noted but superficially, if at all. Hence
+the occasional obscurity of his dialogue. Mr. Shaw is not, primarily,
+either a character-drawer or a psychologist, but a dealer in personified
+ideas. His leading figures are, as a rule, either his mouthpieces or his
+butts. When he gives us a piece of real character-drawing, it is
+generally in some subordinate personage. Mr. Galsworthy, I should say,
+shows himself a psychologist in _Strife_, a character-drawer in _The
+Silver Box_ and _Justice_. Sir Arthur Pinero, a character-drawer of
+great versatility, becomes a psychologist in some of his studies of
+feminine types--in Iris, in Letty, in the luckless heroine of
+_Mid-Channel_. Mr. Clyde Fitch had, at least, laudable ambitions in the
+direction of psychology. Becky in _The Truth_, and Jinny in _The Girl
+with the Green Eyes_, in so far as they are successfully drawn, really
+do mean a certain advance on our knowledge of feminine human nature.
+Unfortunately, owing to the author's over-facile and over-hasty method
+of work, they are now and then a little out of drawing. The most
+striking piece of psychology known to me in American drama is the Faith
+Healer in William Vaughn Moody's drama of that name. If the last act of
+_The Faith Healer_ were as good as the rest of it, one might safely call
+it the finest play ever written, at any rate in the English language,
+beyond the Atlantic. The psychologists of the modern French stage, I
+take it, are M. de Curel and M. de Porto-Riche. MM. Brieux and Hervieu
+are, like Mr. Shaw, too much concerned with ideas to probe very deep
+into character. In Germany, Hauptmann, and, so far as I understand him,
+Wedekind, are psychologists, Sudermann, a vigorous character-drawer.
+
+It is pretty clear that, if this distinction were accepted, it would be
+of use to the critic, inasmuch as we should have two terms for two
+ideas, instead of one popular term with a rather pedantic synonym. But
+what would be its practical use to the artist, the craftsman? Simply
+this, that if the word "psychology" took on for him a clear and definite
+meaning, it might stimulate at once his imagination and his ambition.
+Messrs. Hichens and Fagan, for example, might have asked themselves--or
+each other--"Are we getting beneath the surface of this woman's nature?
+Are we plucking the heart out of her mystery? Cannot we make the
+specific processes of a murderess's mind clearer to ourselves and to our
+audiences?" Whether they would have been capable of rising to the
+opportunity, I cannot tell; but in the case of other authors one not
+infrequently feels: "This man could have taken us deeper into this
+problem if he had only thought of it." I do not for a moment mean that
+every serious dramatist should always be aiming at psychological
+exploration. The character-drawer's appeal to common knowledge and
+instant recognition is often all that is required, or that would be in
+place. But there are also occasions not a few when the dramatist shows
+himself unequal to his opportunities if he does not at least attempt to
+bring hitherto unrecorded or unscrutinized phases of character within
+the scope of our understanding and our sympathies.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+[Footnote 1: If this runs counter to the latest biological orthodoxy, I
+am sorry. Habits are at any rate transmissible by imitation, if not
+otherwise.]
+
+[Footnote 2: Chapter XIX.]
+
+
+
+
+_CHAPTER XXIII_
+
+DIALOGUE AND DETAILS
+
+
+The extraordinary progress made by the drama of the English language
+during the past quarter of a century is in nothing more apparent than in
+the average quality of modern dialogue. Tolerably well-written dialogue
+is nowadays the rule rather than the exception. Thirty years ago, the
+idea that it was possible to combine naturalness with vivacity and
+vigour had scarcely dawned upon the playwright's mind. He passed and
+repassed from stilted pathos to strained and verbal wit (often mere
+punning); and when a reformer like T.W. Robertson tried to come a little
+nearer to the truth of life, he was apt to fall into babyish simplicity
+or flat commonness.
+
+Criticism has not given sufficient weight to the fact that English
+dramatic writing laboured for centuries--and still labours to some
+degree--under a historic misfortune. It has never wholly recovered from
+the euphuism--to use the word in its widest sense--of the late sixteenth
+century. The influence of John Lyly and his tribe is still traceable,
+despite a hundred metamorphoses, in some of the plays of to-day and in
+many of the plays of yesterday. From the very beginnings of English
+comedy, it was accepted as almost self-evident that "wit"--a factitious,
+supererogatory sparkle--was indispensable to all dialogue of a
+non-tragic order. Language was a newly discovered and irresistibly
+fascinating playground for the fancy. Conversation must be thick-strewn
+with verbal quibbles, similes, figures, and flourishes of every
+description, else it was unworthy to be spoken on the stage. We all know
+how freely Shakespeare yielded to this convention, and so helped to
+establish it. Sometimes, not always, his genius enabled him to render it
+delightful; but in most of the Elizabethans--though it be heresy to say
+so--it is an extremely tedious mannerism. After the Restoration, when
+modern light talk came into being in the coffee-houses, the fashion of
+the day, no doubt, favoured a straining after wit; so that the
+playwrights were in some measure following nature--that very small
+corner of nature which they called "the town"--in accepting and making a
+law of the Elizabethan convention. The leading characters of Restoration
+comedy, from Etherege to Vanbrugh, are consciously and almost
+professionally wits. Simile and repartee are as indispensable a part of
+a gentleman's social outfit as his wig or his rapier. In Congreve the
+word "wit" is almost as common as the thing. When Farquhar made some
+movement towards a return to nature, he was rewarded with Pope's line,
+which clings like a burr to his memory--
+
+  "What pert, low dialogue has Farquhar writ."
+
+If eighteenth-century comedy, as a whole, is not brilliantly written, it
+is for lack of talent in the playwrights, not for lack of desire or
+intention. Goldsmith, like Farquhar and Steele, vaguely realized the
+superiority of humour to wit; but he died too early to exercise much
+influence on his successors. In Sheridan the convention of wit
+reasserted itself triumphantly, and the scene in which Lady Teazle, Mrs.
+Candour, and the rest of the scandalous college sit in a semicircle and
+cap malicious similes, came to be regarded as an unapproachable model of
+comedy dialogue. The convention maintained itself firmly down to the
+days of _Money_ and _London Assurance_, the dullness of the intervening
+period being due, not to any change of theory, but to sheer impotence of
+practice. T.W. Robertson, as above mentioned, attempted a return to
+nature, with occasional and very partial success; but wit, with a dash
+of fanciful sentiment, reasserted itself in James Albery; while in H.J.
+Byron it degenerated into mere punning and verbal horse-play. I should
+not be surprised if the historian of the future were to find in the
+plays of Mr. Henry Arthur Jones the first marked symptoms of a
+reaction--of a tendency to reject extrinsic and fanciful ornament in
+dialogue, and to rely for its effect upon its vivid appropriateness to
+character and situation. In the early plays of Sir Arthur Pinero there
+is a great deal of extrinsic ornament; especially of that
+metaphor-hunting which was one of the characteristic forms of euphuism.
+Take this, for example, from _The Profligate_. Dunstan Renshaw has
+expressed to Hugh Murray the opinion that "marriages of contentment are
+the reward of husbands who have taken the precaution to sow their wild
+oats rather thickly"; whereupon the Scotch solicitor replies--
+
+  HUGH MURRAY: Contentment! Renshaw, do you imagine that there is no
+  autumn in the life of a profligate? Do you think there is no moment
+  when the accursed crop begins to rear its millions of heads above
+  ground; when the rich man would give his wealth to be able to tread
+  them back into the earth which rejects the foul load? To-day you
+  have robbed some honest man of a sweet companion!
+
+  DUNSTAN RENSHAW: Look here, Mr. Murray--!
+
+  HUGH MURRAY: To-morrow, next week, next month, you may be happy--but
+  what of the time when those wild oats thrust their ears through the
+  very seams of the floor trodden by the wife whose respect you will
+  have learned to covet! You may drag her into the crowded
+  streets--there is the same vile growth springing up from the chinks
+  of the pavement! In your house or in the open, the scent of the
+  mildewed grain always in your nostrils, and in your ears no music
+  but the wind's rustle amongst the fat sheaves! And, worst of all,
+  your wife's heart a granary bursting with the load of shame your
+  profligacy has stored there! I warn you--Mr. Lawrence Kenward!
+
+If we compare this passage with any page taken at random from
+_Mid-Channel_, we might think that a century of evolution lay between
+them, instead of barely twenty years.
+
+The convention of wit-at-any-price is, indeed, moribund; but it is
+perhaps not quite superfluous, even now, to emphasize the difference
+between what the French call the "mot d'auteur" and the "mot de
+situation." The terms practically explain themselves; but a third class
+ought to be added--the "mot de caractère." The "mot d'auteur" is the
+distinguishing mark of the Congreve-Sheridan convention. It survives in
+full vigour--or, shall one say, it sings its swan-song?--in the works of
+Oscar Wilde. For instance, the scene of the five men in the third act of
+_Lady Windermere's Fan_ is a veritable running-fire of epigrams wholly
+unconnected with the situation, and very slightly related, if at all, to
+the characters of the speakers. The mark of the "mot d'auteur" is that
+it can with perfect ease be detached from its context. I could fill this
+page with sayings from the scene in question, all perfectly
+comprehensible without any account of the situation. Among them would be
+one of those; profound sayings which Wilde now and then threw off in his
+lightest moods, like opals among soap-bubbles. "In the world," says
+Dumby, "there are two tragedies. One is not getting what one wants, and
+the other is getting it." This may rank with Lord Illingworth's speech
+in _A Woman of No Importance_: "All thought is immoral. Its very essence
+is destruction. If you think of anything you kill it. Nothing survives
+being thought of." When we hear such sayings as these--or the immortal
+"Vulgarity is the behaviour of other people"--we do not enquire too
+curiously into their appropriateness to character or situation; but none
+the less do they belong to an antiquated conception of drama.
+
+It is useless to begin to give specimens of the "mot de caractère" and
+"mot de situation." All really dramatic dialogue falls under one head or
+the other. One could easily pick out a few brilliantly effective
+examples of each class: but as their characteristic is to fade when
+uprooted from the soil in which they grow, they would take up space to
+very little purpose.
+
+But there is another historic influence, besides that of euphuism, which
+has been hurtful, though in a minor degree, to the development of a
+sound style in dialogue. Some of the later Elizabethans, and notably
+Webster and Ford, cultivated a fashion of abrupt utterance, whereby an
+immensity of spiritual significance--generally tragic--was supposed to
+be concentrated into a few brief words. The classic example is
+Ferdinand's "Cover her face. Mine eyes dazzle. She died young," in _The
+Duchess of Malfy_. Charles Lamb celebrated the virtues of this pregnant,
+staccato style with somewhat immoderate admiration, and thus helped to
+set a fashion of spasmodic pithiness in dialogue, which too often
+resulted in dense obscurity. Not many plays composed under this
+influence have reached the stage; not one has held it. But we find in
+some recent writing a qualified recrudescence of the spasmodic manner,
+with a touch of euphuism thrown in. This is mainly due, I think, to the
+influence of George Meredith, who accepted the convention of wit as the
+informing spirit of comedy dialogue, and whose abnormally rapid faculty
+of association led him to delight in a sort of intellectual shorthand
+which the normal mind finds very difficult to decipher. Meredith was a
+man of brilliant genius, which lent a fascination to his very
+mannerisms; but when these mannerisms are transferred by lesser men to a
+medium much less suited to them--that of the stage--the result is apt to
+be disastrous. I need not go into particulars; for no play of which the
+dialogue places a constant strain on the intellectual muscles of the
+audience ever has held, or ever will hold, a place in living dramatic
+literature. I will merely note the curious fact that English--my own
+language--is the only language out of the three or four known to me in
+which I have ever come across an entirely incomprehensible play. I could
+name English plays, both pre-Meredithian and post-Meredithian, which
+might almost as well be written in Chinese for all that I can make
+of them.
+
+Obscurity and precocity are generally symptoms of an exaggerated dread
+of the commonplace. The writer of dramatic prose has, indeed, a very
+difficult task if he is to achieve style without deserting nature.
+Perhaps it would be more accurate to say that the difficulty lies in
+getting criticism to give him credit for the possession of style,
+without incurring the reproach of mannerism. How is one to give
+concentration and distinction to ordinary talk, while making it still
+seem ordinary? Either the distinction will strike the critics, and they
+will call it pompous and unreal, or the ordinariness will come home to
+them, and they will deny the distinction. This is the dramatist's
+constant dilemma. One can only comfort him with the assurance that if he
+has given his dialogue the necessary concentration, and has yet kept it
+plausibly near to the language of life, he has achieved style, and may
+snap his fingers at the critics. Style, in prose drama, is the sifting
+of common speech.
+
+It is true, however, that, with equal concentration and equal
+naturalness, one man may give his work a beauty of cadence and phrasing
+which another man may entirely miss. Two recent writers of English
+dramatic prose have stood out from their fellows in respect of the sheer
+beauty of their style--I need scarcely name Oscar Wilde and J.M. Synge.
+But Wilde's dialogue can by no means be called free from mannerism,[1]
+while Synge wrote in a language which had a music of its own, even
+before his genius took hold of it.
+
+It does not seem very profitable to try to concentrate into a definition
+the distinctive qualities of dramatic dialogue. The late Mrs. Craigie
+("John Oliver Hobbes") attempted to do so in the preface to a charming
+play, _The Ambassador_; and the result at any rate the sequel--was that
+her next play, _The Wisdom of the Wise_, was singularly self-conscious
+and artificial. She found in "emotion" the test of dramatic quality in
+any given utterance. "Stage dialogue," she says, "may or may not have
+many qualities, but it must be emotional." Here we have a statement
+which is true in a vague and general sense, untrue in the definite and
+particular sense in which alone it could afford any practical guidance.
+"My lord, the carriage waits," may be, in its right place, a highly
+dramatic speech, even though it be uttered with no emotion, and arouse
+no emotion in the person addressed. What Mrs. Craigie meant, I take it,
+was that, to be really dramatic, every speech must have some bearing,
+direct or indirect, prospective, present, or retrospective, upon
+individual human destinies. The dull play, the dull scene, the dull
+speech, is that in which we do not perceive this connection; but when
+once we are interested in the individuals concerned, we are so quick to
+perceive the connection, even though it be exceedingly distant and
+indirect, that the dramatist who should always hold the fear of Mrs.
+Craigie's aphorism consciously before his eyes would unnecessarily
+fetter and restrict himself. Even the driest scientific proposition may,
+under special circumstances, become electrical with drama. The statement
+that the earth moves round the sun does not, in itself, stir our pulses;
+yet what playwright has ever invented a more dramatic utterance than
+that which some one invented for Galileo: "E pur si muove!"? In all
+this, to be sure, I am illustrating, not confuting, Mrs. Craigie's
+maxim. I have no wish to confute it, for, in the largest interpretation,
+it is true; but I suggest that it is true only when attenuated almost
+beyond recognition, and quite beyond the point at which it can be of any
+practical help to the practical dramatist. He must rely on his instinct,
+not numb and bewilder it by constantly subjecting it to the dictates of
+hard-and-fast aesthetic theory.
+
+We shall scarcely come much nearer to helpful truth than the point we
+have already reached, in the principle that all dialogue, except the
+merely mechanical parts--the connective tissue of the play--should
+consist either of "mots de caractère" or of "mots de situation." But if
+we go to French critics for this principle, do not let us go to French
+dramatists for models of practice. It is part of the abiding insularity
+of our criticism that the same writers who cannot forgive an English
+dramatist what they conceive to be a stilted turn of phrase, will pass
+without remark, if not with positive admiration, the outrageously
+rhetorical style which is still prevalent in French drama. Here, for
+instance, is a quite typical passage from _Le Duel_, by M. Henri
+Lavedan, an author of no small repute; and it would be easy to find even
+more magniloquent tirades in the works of almost any of his
+contemporaries. I translate from the concluding scene between the Abbé
+and the Duchess:
+
+  THE ABBÉ: "In our strange life, there are sometimes unexpected and
+  decisive moments, sovereign, though we know not why. We feel it,
+  that is all!--fulgurant moments, which throw, as it were, a flash of
+  lightning upon our destinies, like those meteors which shine forth
+  from time to time in the heavens, and of which none can say what
+  their purple signifies, whether it be a cataclysm or an apotheosis.
+  Well, it appears to me that we, you and I, are now face to face with
+  one of these moments!"
+
+  THE DUCHESS: "So I, too, believe."
+
+  THE ABBÉ: "We must take care, then, that it be an apotheosis. That
+  is why I want--Mon Dieu, madame! how shall I say it to you? Where
+  shall I go to find the chosen words, the words of pure gold, of
+  diamonds, the immaculate words that are worthy of us? All that you
+  are, all that you are worth, I know, and I alone know. You have
+  opened, that I might read it, the book of hours that is your mind. I
+  am in no wise disquieted about you or your future; yet, that I may
+  be fully reassured before we part, I wish, I wish you to tell me, to
+  declare to me, that you are at this very moment in absolute repose,
+  calm as a lake."
+
+And so Monsieur l'Abbé goes on for another page. If it be said that this
+ornate eloquence is merely professional, I reply that his brother, the
+atheist doctor, and the Duchess herself, are quite as copious in their
+rhetoric, and scarcely less ornate.
+
+It is a mistake to suppose that "literary merit" can be imparted to
+drama by such flagrant departures from nature; though some critics have
+not yet outgrown that superstition. Let the playwright take to heart an
+anecdote told by Professor Matthews in his _Inquiries and Opinions_--an
+anecdote of a New England farmer, who, being asked who was the architect
+of his house, replied: "Oh, I built that house myself; but there's a man
+coming down from Boston next week to put on the architecture." Better no
+style at all than style thus plastered on.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+What is to be said of the possibilities of blank verse as a dramatic
+medium? This is a thorny question, to be handled with caution. One can
+say with perfect assurance, however, that its possibilities are
+problematical, its difficulties and dangers certain.
+
+To discuss the question whether drama in verse is in its very nature
+nobler than drama in prose would lead us away from craftsmanship into
+the realm of pure aesthetics. For my own part, I doubt it. I suspect
+that the drama, like all literature, took its rise in verse, for the
+simple reason that verse is easier to make--and to memorize--than prose.
+Primitive peoples felt with Goethe--though not quite in the same
+sense--that "art is art because it is not nature." Not merely for
+emotional, but for all sorts of literary, expression, they demanded a
+medium clearly marked off from the speech of everyday life. The drama
+"lisped in numbers, for the numbers came." Even of so modern a writer
+(comparatively) as Shakespeare, it would scarcely be true to say that he
+"chose" verse as his medium, in the same sense in which Ibsen chose
+prose. He accepted it just as he accepted the other traditions and
+methods of the theatre of his time. In familiar passages he broke away
+from it; but on the whole it provided (among other advantages) a
+convenient and even necessary means of differentiation between the mimic
+personage and the audience, from whom he was not marked off by the
+proscenium arch and the artificial lights which make a world apart of
+the modern stage.
+
+And Shakespeare so glorified this metrical medium as to give it an
+overwhelming prestige. It was extremely easy to write blank verse after
+a fashion; and playwrights who found it flow almost spontaneously from
+their pens were only too ready to overlook the world-wide difference
+between their verse and that of the really great Elizabethans. Just
+after the Restoration, there was an attempt to introduce the rhymed
+couplet as the medium for heroic plays; but that, on the other hand, was
+too difficult to establish itself in general use. Tragedy soon fell back
+upon the fatally facile unrhymed iambic, and a reign of stilted, stodgy
+mediocrity set in. There is nothing drearier in literature than the
+century-and-a-half of English tragedy, from Otway to Sheridan Knowles.
+One is lost in wonder at the genius of the actors who could infuse life
+and passion into those masterpieces of turgid conventionality. The
+worship of the minor Elizabethans, which began with Lamb and culminated
+in Swinburne, brought into fashion (as we have seen) a spasmodic rather
+than a smoothly rhetorical way of writing, but did not really put new
+life into the outworn form. It may almost be called an appalling fact
+that for at least two centuries--from 1700 to 1900--not a single
+blank-verse play was produced which lives, or deserves to live,[2] on
+the stage of to-day.
+
+I have thus glanced at the history of the blank-verse play because I
+believe that it can never revive until we clearly realize and admit that
+it is, and has been for a century, thoroughly dead, while, for a century
+before that again, it was only galvanized into a semblance of life by a
+great school of rhetorical acting. The playwright who sets forth with
+the idea that, in writing a poetical drama, he is going to continue the
+great Elizabethan tradition, is starting on a wild-goose chase. The
+great Elizabethan tradition is an incubus to be exorcised. It was
+because Mr. Stephen Phillips was not Elizabethanizing, but clothing a
+vital and personal conception of drama in verse of very appealing
+lyrical quality, that some of us thought we saw in _Paolo and Francesca_
+the dawn of a new art. Apparently it was a false dawn; but I still
+believe that our orientation was right when we looked for the daybreak
+in the lyric quarter of the heavens. The very summits of Shakespeare's
+achievement are his glorious lyrical passages. Think of the exquisite
+elegiacs of Macbeth! Think of the immortal death-song of Cleopatra! If
+verse has any function on the stage, it is that of imparting lyric
+beauty to passionate speech. For the mere rhetorical "elevation" of
+blank verse we have no use whatever. It consists in saying simple things
+with verbose pomposity. But should there arise a man who combines
+highly-developed dramatic faculty with great lyric genius, it is quite
+possible that he may give us the new poetic drama for which our
+idealists are sighing. He will choose his themes, I take it, from
+legend, or from the domain of pure fantasy--themes which can be steeped
+from first to last in an atmosphere of poetry, as _Tristan und Isolde_
+is steeped in an atmosphere of music. Of historic themes, I would
+counsel this hypothetical genius to beware. If there are any which can
+fittingly be steeped in a lyric atmosphere, they are to be sought on the
+outskirts of history, or in the debatable land between history and
+legend. The formula of Schiller can no more be revived than the formula
+of Chapman or of Rowe. That a new historic drama awaits us in the
+future, I have little doubt; but it will be written in prose. The idea
+that the poetry of drama is to be sought specifically in verse has long
+ago been exploded by Ibsen and Maeterlinck and D'Annunzio and Synge. But
+there are, no doubt, themes which peculiarly lend themselves to
+lyrico-dramatic treatment, and we shall all welcome the poet who
+discovers and develops them.
+
+One warning let me add, in no uncertain voice. If you choose to write a
+blank-verse play, write it in blank verse, and not in some nondescript
+rhythm which is one long series of jolts and pitfalls to the sensitive
+ear. Many playwrights have thought by this means to escape from the
+monotony of blank verse; not one (that I ever heard of) has achieved
+even temporary success. If you cannot save your blank verse from
+monotony without breaking it on the wheel, that merely means that you
+cannot write blank verse, and had better let it alone. Again, in spite
+of Elizabethan precedent, there is nothing more irritating on the modern
+stage than a play which keeps on changing from verse to prose and back
+again. It gives the verse-passages an air of pompous self-consciousness.
+We seem to hear the author saying, as he shifts his gear, "Look you now!
+I am going to be eloquent and impressive!" The most destructive fault a
+dramatist can commit, in my judgment, is to pass, in the same work of
+art, from one plane of convention to another.[3]
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+We must now consider for a moment the question--if question it can be
+called--of the soliloquy and the aside. The example of Ibsen has gone
+far towards expelling these slovenlinesses from the work of all
+self-respecting playwrights. But theorists spring up every now and then
+to defend them. "The stage is the realm of convention," they argue. "If
+you accept a room with its fourth wall removed, which nothing short of
+an earthquake could render possible in real life, why should you jib at
+the idea--in which, after all, there is nothing absolutely
+impossible--that a man should utter aloud the thoughts that are passing
+through his mind?"
+
+It is all a question, once more, of planes of convention. No doubt there
+is an irreducible minimum of convention in all drama; but how strange is
+the logic which leaps from that postulate to the assertion that, if we
+admit a minimum, we cannot, or ought not to, exclude a maximum! There
+are plays which do not, and there are plays which do, set forth to give
+as nearly as possible an exact reproduction of the visual and auditory
+realities of life. In the Elizabethan theatre, with its platform stage
+under the open sky, any pictorial exactness of reproduction was clearly
+impossible. Its fundamental conditions necessitated very nearly[4] a
+maximum of convention; therefore such conventions as blank verse and the
+soliloquy were simply of a piece with all the rest. In the theatre of
+the eighteenth century and early nineteenth, the proscenium arch--the
+frame of the picture--made pictorial realism theoretically possible. But
+no one recognized the possibility; and indeed, on a candle-lit stage, it
+would have been extremely difficult. As a matter of fact, the
+Elizabethan platform survived in the shape of a long "apron," projecting
+in front of the proscenium, on which the most important parts of the
+action took place. The characters, that is to say, were constantly
+stepping out of the frame of the picture; and while this visual
+convention maintained itself, there was nothing inconsistent or jarring
+in the auditory convention of the soliloquy. Only in the last quarter of
+the nineteenth century did new methods of lighting, combined with new
+literary and artistic influences, complete the evolutionary process, and
+lead to the withdrawal of the whole stage--the whole dramatic
+domain--within the frame of the picture. It was thus possible to reduce
+visual convention to a minimum so trifling that in a well-set "interior"
+it needs a distinct effort of attention to be conscious of it at all. In
+fact, if we come to think of it, the removal of the fourth wall is
+scarcely to be classed as a convention; for in real life, as we do not
+happen to have eyes in the back of our heads, we are never visually
+conscious of all four walls of a room at once. If, then, in a room that
+is absolutely real, we see a man who (in all other respects) strives to
+be equally real, suddenly begin to expound himself aloud, in good, set
+terms, his own emotions, motives, or purposes, we instantly plump down
+from one plane of convention to another, and receive a disagreeable jar
+to our sense of reality. Up to that moment, all the efforts of author,
+producer, and actor have centred in begetting in us a particular order
+of illusion; and lo! the effort is suddenly abandoned, and the illusion
+shattered by a crying unreality. In modern serious drama, therefore, the
+soliloquy can only be regarded as a disturbing anachronism.[5]
+
+The physical conditions which tended to banish it from the stage were
+reinforced by the growing perception of its artistic slovenliness. It
+was found that the most delicate analyses could be achieved without its
+aid; and it became a point of honour with the self-respecting artist to
+accept a condition which rendered his material somewhat harder of
+manipulation, indeed, but all the more tempting to wrestle with and
+overcome. A drama with soliloquies and asides is like a picture with
+inscribed labels issuing from the mouths of the figures. In that way,
+any bungler can reveal what is passing in the minds of his personages.
+But the glorious problem of the modern playwright is to make his
+characters reveal the inmost workings of their souls without saying or
+doing anything that they would not say or do in the real world.[6]
+
+There are degrees, however, even in the makeshift and the slovenly; and
+not all lapses into anachronism are equally to be condemned. One thing
+is so patent as to call for no demonstration: to wit, that the aside is
+ten times worse than the soliloquy. It is always possible that a man
+might speak his thought, but it is glaringly impossible that he should
+speak it so as to be heard by the audience and not heard by others on
+the stage. In French light comedy and farce of the mid-nineteenth
+century, the aside is abused beyond even the license of fantasy. A man
+will speak an aside of several lines over the shoulder of another person
+whom he is embracing. Not infrequently in a conversation between two
+characters, each will comment aside on every utterance of the other,
+before replying to it. The convenience of this method of proceeding is
+manifest. It is as though the author stood by and delivered a running
+commentary on the secret motives and designs of his characters. But it
+is such a crying confession of unreality that, on the English-speaking
+stage, at any rate, it would scarcely be tolerated to-day, even in
+farce. In serious modern drama the aside is now practically unknown. It
+is so obsolete, indeed, that actors are puzzled how to handle it, and
+audiences what to make of it. In an ambitious play produced at a leading
+London theatre about ten years ago, a lady, on leaving the stage,
+announced, in an aside, her intention of drowning herself, and several
+critics, the next day, not understanding that she was speaking aside,
+severely blamed the gentleman who was on the stage with her for not
+frustrating her intention. About the same time, there occurred one of
+the most glaring instances within my recollection of inept
+conventionalism. The hero of the play was Eugene Aram. Alone in his room
+at dead of night, Aram heard Houseman breaking open the outside shutters
+of the window. Designing to entrap the robber, what did he do? He went
+up to the window and drew back the curtains, with a noise loud enough to
+be heard in the next parish. It was inaudible, however, to Houseman on
+the other side of the shutters. He proceeded with his work, opened the
+window, and slipped in, Aram hiding in the shadow. Then, while Houseman
+peered about him with his lantern, not six feet from Aram, and actually
+between him and the audience, Aram indulged in a long and loud monologue
+as to whether he should shoot Houseman or not, ending with a prayer to
+heaven to save him from more blood-guiltiness! Such are the childish
+excesses to which a playwright will presently descend when once he
+begins to dally with facile convention.
+
+An aside is intolerable because it is _not_ heard by the other person on
+the stage: it outrages physical possibility. An overheard soliloquy, on
+the other hand, is intolerable because it _is_ heard. It keeps within
+the bounds of physical possibility, but it stultifies the only logical
+excuse for the soliloquy, namely, that it is an externalization of
+thought which would in reality remain unuttered. This point is so clear
+that I need not insist upon it.
+
+Are there, in modern drama, any admissible soliloquies? A few brief
+ejaculations of joy, or despair, are, of course, natural enough, and no
+one will cavil at them. The approach of mental disease is often marked
+by a tendency to unrestrained loquacity, which goes on even while the
+sufferer is alone; and this distressing symptom may, on rare occasions,
+be put to artistic use. Short of actual derangement, however, there are
+certain states of nervous surexcitation which cause even healthy people
+to talk to themselves; and if an author has the skill to make us realize
+that his character is passing through such a crisis, he may risk a
+soliloquy, not only without reproach, but with conspicuous psychological
+justification. In the third act of Clyde Fitch's play, _The Girl with
+the Green Eyes_, there is a daring attempt at such a soliloquy, where
+Jinny says: "Good Heavens! why am I maudling on like this to myself out
+loud? It's really nothing--Jack will explain once more that he can't
+explain"--and so on. Whether the attempt justified itself or not would
+depend largely on the acting. In any case, it is clear that the author,
+though as a rule somewhat lax in his craftsmanship, was here aiming at
+psychological truth.
+
+A word must be said as to a special case of the soliloquy--the letter
+which a person speaks aloud as he writes it, or reads over to himself
+aloud. This is a convention to be employed as sparingly as possible; but
+it is not exactly on a level with the ordinary soliloquy. A letter has
+an actual objective existence. The words are formulated in the
+character's mind and are supposed to be externalized, even though the
+actor may not really write them on the paper. Thus the letter has, so to
+speak, the same right to come to the knowledge of the audience as any
+other utterance. It is, in fact, part of the dialogue of the play, only
+that it happens to be inaudible. A soliloquy, on the other hand, has no
+real existence. It is a purely artificial unravelling of motive or
+emotion, which, nine times out of ten, would not become articulate at
+all, even in the speaker's brain or heart. Thus it is by many degrees a
+greater infraction of the surface texture of life than the spoken
+letter, which we may call inadvisable rather than inadmissible.
+
+Some theorists carry their solicitude for surface reality to such an
+extreme as to object to any communication between two characters which
+is not audible to every one on the stage. This is a very idle pedantry.
+The difference between a conversation in undertones and a soliloquy or
+aside is abundantly plain: the one occurs every hour of the day, the
+other never occurs at all. When two people, or a group, are talking
+among themselves, unheard by the others on the stage, it requires a
+special effort to remember that, as a matter of fact, the others
+probably do hear them. Even if the scene be unskilfully arranged, it is
+not the audibility of one group, but the inaudibility of the others,
+that is apt to strike us as unreal.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+This is not the only form of technical pedantry that one occasionally
+encounters. Some years ago, a little band of playwrights and would-be
+playwrights, in fanatical reaction against the Sardou technique, tried
+to lay down a rule that no room on the stage must ever have more than
+one door, and that no letter must ever enter into the mechanism of a
+play. I do not know which contention was the more ridiculous.
+
+Nothing is commoner in modern house-planning than rooms which have at
+least two doors and a French window. We constantly see rooms or halls
+which, if transported to the stage, would provide three or four
+entrances and exits; and this is even more true of the "central heated"
+houses of America than of English houses. The technical purists used
+especially to despise the French window--a harmless, agreeable and very
+common device. Why the playwright should make "one room one door" an
+inexorable canon of art is more than human reason can divine. There are
+cases, no doubt, in which probability demands that the dramatist should
+be content with one practicable opening to his scene, and should plan
+his entrances and exits accordingly. This is no such great feat as might
+be imagined. Indeed a playwright will sometimes deliberately place a
+particular act in a room with one door, because it happens to facilitate
+the movement he desires. It is absurd to lay down any rule in the
+matter, other than that the scene should provide a probable locality for
+whatever action is to take place in it. I am the last to defend the old
+French farce with its ten or a dozen doors through which the characters
+kept scuttling in and out like rabbits in a warren. But the fact that we
+are tired of conventional laxity is no good reason for rushing to the
+other extreme of conventional and hampering austerity.
+
+Similarly, because the forged will and the lost "marriage lines" have
+been rightly relegated to melodrama, is there any reason why we should
+banish from the stage every form of written document? Mr. Bernard Shaw,
+in an article celebrating the advent of the new technique, once wrote,
+"Nowadays an actor cannot open a letter or toss off somebody else's
+glass of poison without having to face a brutal outburst of jeering."
+What an extravagance to bracket as equally exploded absurdities the
+opening of a letter and the tossing off of the wrong glass of poison!
+Letters--more's the pity--play a gigantic part in the economy of modern
+life. The General Post Office is a vast mechanism for the distribution
+of tragedy, comedy, melodrama, and farce throughout the country and
+throughout the world. To whose door has not Destiny come in the disguise
+of a postman, and slipped its decree, with a double rat-tat, into the
+letter-box? Whose heart has not sickened as he heard the postman's
+footstep pass his door without pausing? Whose hand has not trembled as
+he opened a letter? Whose face has not blanched as he took in its
+import, almost without reading the words? Why, I would fain know, should
+our stage-picture of life be falsified by the banishment of the postman?
+Even the revelation brought about by the discovery of a forgotten letter
+or bundle of letters is not an infrequent incident of daily life. Why
+should it be tabu on the stage? Because the French dramatist, forty
+years ago, would sometimes construct a Chinese-puzzle play around some
+stolen letter or hidden document, are we to suffer no "scrap of paper"
+to play any part whatever in English drama? Even the Hebrew sense of
+justice would recoil from such a conclusion. It would be a case of "The
+fathers have eaten sour grapes, and other people's children must pay the
+penalty." Against such whimsies of reactionary purism, the playwright's
+sole and sufficient safeguard is a moderate exercise of common sense.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+[Footnote 1: So, too, with the style of Congreve. It is much, and
+justly, admired; but who does not feel more than a touch of mannerism in
+such a passage as this?--
+
+  MILLAMANT: "... Let us never visit together, nor go to a play
+  together; but let us be very strange and well-bred: let us be as
+  strange as if we had been married a great while; and as well-bred as
+  if we were not married at all."
+
+  MIRABELL: "Have you any more conditions to offer? Hitherto your
+  demands are pretty reasonable."
+
+  MILLAMANT: "Trifles!--as liberty to pay and receive visits to and
+  from whom I please; to write and receive letters, without
+  interrogatories or wry faces on your part; to wear what I please;
+  and choose conversation with regard only to my own taste; to have no
+  obligation upon me to converse with wits that I don't like because
+  they are your acquaintances; or to be intimate with fools because
+  they may be your relatives.... These articles subscribed, if I
+  continue to endure you a little longer, I may by degrees dwindle
+  into a wife."
+
+This is very pretty prose, granted; but it is the prose of literature,
+not of life.]
+
+[Footnote 2: From the fact that I do not make an exception in favour of
+_The Blot in the Scutcheon_ or _Stratford_, I must leave the reader to
+draw what inference he pleases. On the other hand, I believe that a
+reconstruction of Tennyson's _Queen Mary_, with a few connecting links
+written in, might take a permanent place in the theatre.]
+
+[Footnote 3: Mr. Israel Zangwill, in his symbolic play, _The War-God_,
+has put blank verse to what I believe to be a new use, with noteworthy
+success. He writes in very strict measure, but without the least
+inversion or inflation, without a touch of Elizabethan, or
+conventionally poetic, diction. He is thus enabled to use the most
+modern expressions, and even slang, without incongruity; while at the
+same time he can give rhetorical movement to the speeches of his
+symbolic personages, and, in passages of argument, can achieve that
+clash of measured phrase against measured phrase which the Greeks called
+"stichomythy," and which the French dramatist sometimes produces in
+rapid rapier play with the Alexandrine. Mr. Zangwill's practice is in
+absolute contradiction of the principle above suggested that blank
+verse, to be justified in drama, ought to be lyrical. His verse is a
+product of pure intellect and wit, without a single lyric accent. It is
+measured prose; if it ever tries to be more, it fails. I think, then,
+that he has shown a new use for blank verse, in rhetorico-symbolic
+drama. But it is no small literary feat to handle the measure as
+he does.]
+
+[Footnote 4: Not quite. The drama of some Oriental peoples recognizes
+conventions which the Elizabethans did not admit.]
+
+[Footnote 5: A conversation on the telephone often provides a convenient
+and up-to-date substitute for a soliloquy; but that is an expedient
+which ought not to be abused.]
+
+[Footnote 6: The soliloquy is often not only slovenly, but a gratuitous
+and unnecessary slovenliness. In _Les Corbeaux_, by Henry Becque,
+produced in 1889, there occur two soliloquies--one by Teissier (Act ii,
+Scene 3), the other by Madame de Saint-Genis (Act in, Scene 10)--either
+or both of which could be omitted without leaving any sensible gap. The
+latter is wholly superfluous, the former conveys some information which
+might have been taken for granted, and could, in any case, have been
+conveyed without difficulty in some other way. Yet Becque was, in his
+day, regarded as a quite advanced technician.]
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Play-Making, by William Archer
+
+*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 10865 ***
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+      The Project Gutenberg eBook of A Manual of Craftsmanship
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+<div>*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 10865 ***</div>
+
+<h1>PLAY-MAKING</h1>
+
+<center><h2><i>A Manual of Craftsmanship</i></h2></center>
+
+<center><h2>by William Archer</h2></center>
+<br>
+
+<h2><i>With a New Introduction to the Dover Edition</i></h2>
+
+<center><h2>by John Gassner</h2></center>
+
+<h3><i>Sterling Professor of Playwriting and Dramatic Literature, Yale
+University</i></h3>
+
+
+
+<br><br><hr style="width: 35%;"><br><br>
+<h2>PREFATORY NOTE</h2>
+
+<p>This book is, to all intents and purposes, entirely new. No considerable
+portion of it has already appeared, although here and there short
+passages and phrases from articles of bygone years are
+embedded--indistinguishably, I hope--in the text. I have tried, wherever
+it was possible, to select my examples from published plays, which the
+student may read for himself, and so check my observations. One reason,
+among others, which led me to go to Shakespeare and Ibsen for so many of
+my illustrations, was that they are the most generally accessible of
+playwrights.</p>
+
+<p>If the reader should feel that I have been over lavish in the use of
+footnotes, I have two excuses to allege. The first is that more than
+half of the following chapters were written on shipboard and in places
+where I had scarcely any books to refer to; so that a great deal had to
+be left to subsequent enquiry and revision. The second is that several
+of my friends, dramatists and others, have been kind enough to read my
+manuscript, and to suggest valuable afterthoughts.</p>
+
+<p>LONDON</p>
+
+<p><i>January</i>, 1912</p>
+<br>
+
+<p>To</p>
+
+<p>Brander Matthews</p>
+
+<p>Guide Philosopher and Friend</p>
+
+
+<br><br><hr style="width: 35%;"><br><br>
+<h2>CONTENTS</h2>
+
+&nbsp;&nbsp;<a href="#BOOK_I">BOOK I</a><br>
+<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;PROLOGUE<br>
+<br>
+<table><tr><td>&nbsp;&nbsp;<a href="#CHAPTER_I">CHAPTER I</a></td><td>INTRODUCTORY</td></tr>
+<tr><td>&nbsp;&nbsp;<a href="#CHAPTER_II">CHAPTER II</a></td><td>THE CHOICE OF A THEME</td></tr>
+<tr><td>&nbsp;&nbsp;<a href="#CHAPTER_III">CHAPTER III</a>&nbsp;</td><td>DRAMATIC AND UNDRAMATIC</td></tr>
+<tr><td>&nbsp;&nbsp;<a href="#CHAPTER_IV">CHAPTER IV</a></td><td>THE ROUTINE OF COMPOSITION</td></tr>
+<tr><td>&nbsp;&nbsp;<a href="#CHAPTER_V">CHAPTER V</a></td><td>DRAMATIS PERSONAE</td></tr></table>
+<br>
+<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;<a href="#BOOK_II">BOOK II</a><br>
+<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;THE BEGINNING<br>
+<br>
+<table><tr><td>&nbsp;&nbsp;<a href="#CHAPTER_VI">CHAPTER VI</a></td><td>THE POINT OF ATTACK: SHAKESPEARE AND IBSEN</td></tr>
+<tr><td>&nbsp;&nbsp;<a href="#CHAPTER_VII">CHAPTER VII</a></td><td>EXPOSITION: ITS END AND ITS MEANS</td></tr>
+<tr><td>&nbsp;&nbsp;<a href="#CHAPTER_VIII">CHAPTER VIII</a>&nbsp;</td><td>THE FIRST ACT</td></tr>
+<tr><td>&nbsp;&nbsp;<a href="#CHAPTER_IX">CHAPTER IX</a></td><td>CURIOSITY&quot; AND &quot;INTEREST&quot;</td></tr>
+<tr><td>&nbsp;&nbsp;<a href="#CHAPTER_X">CHAPTER X</a></td><td>FORESHADOWING, NOT FORESTALLING</td></tr></table>
+<br>
+<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;<a href="#BOOK_III">BOOK III</a><br>
+<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;THE MIDDLE<br>
+<br>
+<table><tr><td>&nbsp;&nbsp;<a href="#CHAPTER_XI">CHAPTER XI</a></td><td>TENSION AND ITS SUSPENSION</td></tr>
+<tr><td>&nbsp;&nbsp;<a href="#CHAPTER_XII">CHAPTER XII</a></td><td>PREPARATION: THE FINGER-POST</td></tr>
+<tr><td>&nbsp;&nbsp;<a href="#CHAPTER_XIII">CHAPTER XIII</a>&nbsp;</td><td>THE OBLIGATORY SCENE</td></tr>
+<tr><td>&nbsp;&nbsp;<a href="#CHAPTER_XIV">CHAPTER XIV</a></td><td>THE PERIPETY</td></tr>
+<tr><td>&nbsp;&nbsp;<a href="#CHAPTER_XV">CHAPTER XV</a></td><td>PROBABILITY, CHANCE AND COINCIDENCE</td></tr>
+<tr><td>&nbsp;&nbsp;<a href="#CHAPTER_XVI">CHAPTER XVI</a></td><td>LOGIC</td></tr>
+<tr><td>&nbsp;&nbsp;<a href="#CHAPTER_XVII">CHAPTER XVII</a></td><td>KEEPING A SECRET</td></tr></table>
+<br>
+<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;<a href="#BOOK_IV">BOOK IV</a><br>
+<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;THE END<br>
+<br>
+<table><tr><td>&nbsp;&nbsp;<a href="#CHAPTER_XVIII">CHAPTER XVIII</a></td><td>CLIMAX AND ANTICLIMAX</td></tr>
+<tr><td>&nbsp;&nbsp;<a href="#CHAPTER_XIX">CHAPTER XIX</a></td><td>CONVERSION</td></tr>
+<tr><td>&nbsp;&nbsp;<a href="#CHAPTER_XX">CHAPTER XX</a></td><td>BLIND-ALLEY THEMES--AND OTHERS</td></tr>
+<tr><td>&nbsp;&nbsp;<a href="#CHAPTER_XXI">CHAPTER XXI</a></td><td>THE FULL CLOSE</td></tr></table>
+<br>
+<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;<a href="#BOOK_V">BOOK V</a><br>
+<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;EPILOGUE<br>
+<br>
+<table><tr><td>&nbsp;&nbsp;<a href="#CHAPTER_XXII">CHAPTER XXII</a></td><td>CHARACTER AND PSYCHOLOGY</td></tr>
+<tr><td>&nbsp;&nbsp;<a href="#CHAPTER_XXIII">CHAPTER XXIII</a></td><td>DIALOGUE AND DETAILS</td></tr></table>
+
+
+
+<br><br><hr style="width: 35%;"><br><br>
+<h2><a name="BOOK_I"></a>BOOK I</h2>
+
+<p>PROLOGUE</p>
+
+
+<br><br><hr style="width: 35%;"><br><br>
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_I"></a>CHAPTER I</h2>
+
+<p>INTRODUCTORY</p>
+<br>
+
+<p>There are no rules for writing a play. It is easy, indeed, to lay down
+negative recommendations--to instruct the beginner how <i>not</i> to do it.
+But most of these &quot;don'ts&quot; are rather obvious; and those which are not
+obvious are apt to be questionable. It is certain, for instance, that if
+you want your play to be acted, anywhere else than in China, you must
+not plan it in sixteen acts of an hour apiece; but where is the tyro who
+needs a text-book to tell him that? On the other hand, most theorists of
+to-day would make it an axiom that you must not let your characters
+narrate their circumstances, or expound their motives, in speeches
+addressed, either directly to the audience, or ostensibly to their
+solitary selves. But when we remember that, of all dramatic openings,
+there is none finer than that which shows Richard Plantagenet limping
+down the empty stage to say--<br>
+<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&quot;Now is the winter of our discontent<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;Made glorious summer by this sun of York;<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;And all the clouds that lour'd upon our house<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;In the deep bosom of the ocean buried&quot;--<br>
+<br>
+we feel that the axiom requires large qualifications. There are no
+absolute rules, in fact, except such as are dictated by the plainest
+common sense. Aristotle himself did not so much dogmatize as analyse,
+classify, and generalize from, the practices of the Attic dramatists. He
+said, &quot;you had better&quot; rather than &quot;you must.&quot; It was Horace, in an age
+of deep dramatic decadence, who re-stated the pseudo-Aristotelian
+formulas of the Alexandrians as though they were unassailable dogmas
+of art.</p>
+
+<p>How comes it, then, that there is a constant demand for text-books of
+the art and craft of drama? How comes it that so many people--and I
+among the number--who could not write a play to save their lives, are
+eager to tell others how to do so? And, stranger still, how comes it
+that so many people are willing to sit at the feet of these instructors?
+It is not so with the novel. Popular as is that form of literature,
+guides to novel-writing, if they exist at all, are comparatively rare.
+Why are people possessed with the idea that the art of dramatic fiction
+differs from that of narrative fiction, in that it can and must
+be taught?</p>
+
+<p>The reason is clear, and is so far valid as to excuse, if not to
+justify, such works as the present. The novel, as soon as it is legibly
+written, exists, for what it is worth. The page of black and white is
+the sole intermediary between the creative and the perceptive brain.
+Even the act of printing merely widens the possible appeal: it does not
+alter its nature. But the drama, before it can make its proper appeal at
+all, must be run through a highly complex piece of mechanism--the
+theatre--the precise conditions of which are, to most beginners, a
+fascinating mystery. While they feel a strong inward conviction of their
+ability to master it, they are possessed with an idea, often exaggerated
+and superstitious, of its technical complexities. Having, as a rule,
+little or no opportunity of closely examining or experimenting with it,
+they are eager to &quot;read it up,&quot; as they might any other machine. That is
+the case of the average aspirant, who has neither the instinct of the
+theatre fully developed in his blood, nor such a congenital lack of that
+instinct as to be wholly inapprehensive of any technical difficulties or
+problems. The intelligent novice, standing between these extremes,
+tends, as a rule, to overrate the efficacy of theoretical instruction,
+and to expect of analytic criticism more than it has to give.</p>
+
+<p>There is thus a fine opening for pedantry on the one side, and quackery
+on the other, to rush in. The pedant, in this context, is he who
+constructs a set of rules from metaphysical or psychological first
+principles, and professes to bring down a dramatic decalogue from the
+Sinai of some lecture-room in the University of Weissnichtwo. The quack,
+on the other hand, is he who generalizes from the worst practices of the
+most vulgar theatrical journeymen, and has no higher ambition than to
+interpret the oracles of the box-office. If he succeeded in so doing,
+his function would not be wholly despicable; but as he is generally
+devoid of insight, and as, moreover, the oracles of the box-office vary
+from season to season, if not from month to month, his lucubrations are
+about as valuable as those of Zadkiel or Old Moore.<a name="FNanchor1"></a><a href="#Footnote_1"><sup>[1]</sup></a></p>
+
+<p>What, then, is the excuse for such a discussion as is here attempted?
+Having admitted that there are no rules for dramatic composition, and
+that the quest of such rules is apt to result either in pedantry or
+quackery, why should I myself set forth upon so fruitless and foolhardy
+an enterprise? It is precisely because I am alive to its dangers that I
+have some hope of avoiding them. Rules there are none; but it does not
+follow that some of the thousands who are fascinated by the art of the
+playwright may not profit by having their attention called, in a plain
+and practical way, to some of its problems and possibilities. I have
+myself felt the need of some such handbook, when would-be dramatists
+have come to me for advice and guidance. It is easy to name excellent
+treatises on the drama; but the aim of such books is to guide the
+judgment of the critic rather than the creative impulse of the
+playwright. There are also valuable collections of dramatic criticisms;
+but any practical hints that they may contain are scattered and
+unsystematic. On the other hand, the advice one is apt to give to
+beginners--&quot;Go to the theatre; study its conditions and mechanism for
+yourself&quot;--is, in fact, of very doubtful value. It might, in many cases,
+be wiser to warn the aspirant to keep himself unspotted from the
+playhouse. To send him there is to imperil, on the one hand, his
+originality of vision, on the other, his individuality of method. He may
+fall under the influence of some great master, and see life only through
+his eyes; or he may become so habituated to the current tricks of the
+theatrical trade as to lose all sense of their conventionality and
+falsity, and find himself, in the end, better fitted to write what I
+have called a quack handbook than a living play. It would be ridiculous,
+of course, to urge an aspirant positively to avoid the theatre; but the
+common advice to steep himself in it is beset with dangers.</p>
+
+<p>It may be asked why, if I have any guidance and help to give, I do not
+take it myself, and write plays instead of instructing others in the
+art. This is a variant of an ancient and fallacious jibe against
+criticism in general. It is quite true that almost all critics who are
+worth their salt are &quot;stickit&quot; artists. Assuredly, if I had the power, I
+should write plays instead of writing about them; but one may have a
+great love for an art, and some insight into its principles and methods,
+without the innate faculty required for actual production. On the other
+hand, there is nothing to show that, if I were a creative artist, I
+should be a good mentor for beginners. An accomplished painter may be
+the best teacher of painters; but an accomplished dramatist is scarcely
+the best guide for dramatists. He cannot analyse his own practice, and
+discriminate between that in it which is of universal validity, and that
+which may be good for him, but would be bad for any one else. If he
+happened to be a great man, he would inevitably, even if unconsciously,
+seek to impose upon his disciples his individual attitude towards life;
+if he were a lesser man, he would teach them only his tricks. But
+dramatists do not, as a matter of fact, take pupils or write
+handbooks.<a name="FNanchor2"></a><a href="#Footnote_2"><sup>[2]</sup></a> When they expound their principles of art, it is generally
+in answer to, or in anticipation of, criticism--with a view, in short,
+not to helping others, but to defending themselves. If beginners, then,
+are to find any systematic guidance, they must turn to the critics, not
+to the dramatists; and no person of common sense holds it a reproach to
+a critic to tell him that he is a &quot;stickit&quot; playwright.</p>
+
+<p>If questions are worth discussing at all, they are worth discussing
+gravely. When, in the following pages, I am found treating with all
+solemnity matters of apparently trivial detail, I beg the reader to
+believe that very possibly I do not in my heart overrate their
+importance. One thing is certain, and must be emphasized from the
+outset: namely, that if any part of the dramatist's art can be taught,
+it is only a comparatively mechanical and formal part--the art of
+structure. One may learn how to tell a story in good dramatic form: how
+to develop and marshal it in such a way as best to seize and retain the
+interest of a theatrical audience. But no teaching or study can enable a
+man to choose or invent a good story, and much less to do that which
+alone lends dignity to dramatic story-telling--to observe and portray
+human character. This is the aim and end of all serious drama; and it
+will be apt to appear as though, in the following pages, this aim and
+end were ignored. In reality it is not so. If I hold comparatively
+mechanical questions of pure craftsmanship to be worth discussing, it is
+because I believe that only by aid of competent craftsmanship can the
+greatest genius enable his creations to live and breathe upon the stage.
+The profoundest insight into human nature and destiny cannot find valid
+expression through the medium of the theatre without some understanding
+of the peculiar art of dramatic construction. Some people are born with
+such an instinct for this art, that a very little practice renders them
+masters of it. Some people are born with a hollow in their cranium where
+the bump of drama ought to be. But between these extremes, as I said
+before, there are many people with moderately developed and cultivable
+faculty; and it is these who, I trust, may find some profit in the
+following discussions.<a name="FNanchor3"></a><a href="#Footnote_3"><sup>[3]</sup></a> Let them not forget, however, that the topics
+treated of are merely the indispensable rudiments of the art, and are
+not for a moment to be mistaken for its ultimate and incommunicable
+secrets. Beethoven could not have composed the Ninth Symphony without a
+mastery of harmony and counterpoint; but there are thousands of masters
+of harmony and counterpoint who could not compose the Ninth Symphony.</p>
+
+<p>The art of theatrical story-telling is necessarily relative to the
+audience to whom the story is to be told. One must assume an audience of
+a certain status and characteristics before one can rationally discuss
+the best methods of appealing to its intelligence and its sympathies.
+The audience I have throughout assumed is drawn from what may be called
+the ordinary educated public of London and New York. It is not an ideal
+or a specially selected audience; but it is somewhat above the average
+of the theatre-going public, that average being sadly pulled down by the
+myriad frequenters of musical farce and absolutely worthless melodrama.
+It is such an audience as assembles every night at, say, the half-dozen
+best theatres of each city. A peculiarly intellectual audience it
+certainly is not. I gladly admit that theatrical art owes much, in both
+countries, to voluntary organizations of intelligent or would-be
+intelligent<a name="FNanchor4"></a><a href="#Footnote_4"><sup>[4]</sup></a> playgoers, who have combined to provide themselves with
+forms of drama which specially interest them, and do not attract the
+great public. But I am entirely convinced that the drama renounces its
+chief privilege and glory when it waives its claim to be a popular art,
+and is content to address itself to coteries, however &quot;high-browed.&quot;
+Shakespeare did not write for a coterie: yet he produced some works of
+considerable subtlety and profundity. Moli&egrave;re was popular with the
+ordinary parterre of his day: yet his plays have endured for over two
+centuries, and the end of their vitality does not seem to be in sight.
+Ibsen did not write for a coterie, though special and regrettable
+circumstances have made him, in England, something of a coterie-poet. In
+Scandinavia, in Germany, even in America, he casts his spell over great
+audiences, if not through long runs (which are a vice of the merely
+commercial theatre), at any rate through frequently-repeated
+representations. So far as I know, history records no instance of a
+playwright failing to gain the ear of his contemporaries, and then being
+recognized and appreciated by posterity. Alfred de Musset might,
+perhaps, be cited as a case in point; but he did not write with a view
+to the stage, and made no bid for contemporary popularity. As soon as it
+occurred to people to produce his plays, they were found to be
+delightful. Let no playwright, then, make it his boast that he cannot
+disburden his soul within the three hours' limit, and cannot produce
+plays intelligible or endurable to any audience but a band of adepts. A
+popular audience, however, does not necessarily mean the mere riff-raff
+of the theatrical public. There is a large class of playgoers, both in
+England and America, which is capable of appreciating work of a high
+intellectual order, if only it does not ignore the fundamental
+conditions of theatrical presentation. It is an audience of this class
+that I have in mind throughout the following pages; and I believe that a
+playwright who despises such an audience will do so to the detriment,
+not only of his popularity and profits, but of the artistic quality
+of his work.</p>
+
+<p>Some people may exclaim: &quot;Why should the dramatist concern himself about
+his audience? That may be all very well for the mere journeymen of the
+theatre, the hacks who write to an actor-manager's order--not for the
+true artist! He has a soul above all such petty considerations. Art, to
+him, is simply self-expression. He writes to please himself, and has no
+thought of currying favour with an audience, whether intellectual or
+idiotic.&quot; To this I reply simply that to an artist of this way of
+thinking I have nothing to say. He has a perfect right to express
+himself in a whole literature of so-called plays, which may possibly be
+studied, and even acted, by societies organized to that laudable end.
+But the dramatist who declares his end to be mere self-expression
+stultifies himself in that very phrase. The painter may paint, the
+sculptor model, the lyric poet sing, simply to please himself,<a name="FNanchor5"></a><a href="#Footnote_5"><sup>[5]</sup></a> but
+the drama has no meaning except in relation to an audience. It is a
+portrayal of life by means of a mechanism so devised as to bring it home
+to a considerable number of people assembled in a given place. &quot;The
+public,&quot; it has been well said, &quot;constitutes the theatre.&quot; The moment a
+playwright confines his work within the two or three hours' limit
+prescribed by Western custom for a theatrical performance, he is
+currying favour with an audience. That limit is imposed simply by the
+physical endurance and power of sustained attention that can be demanded
+of Western human beings assembled in a theatre. Doubtless an author
+could express himself more fully and more subtly if he ignored these
+limitations; the moment he submits to them, he renounces the pretence
+that mere self-expression is his aim. I know that there are
+haughty-souls who make no such submission, and express themselves in
+dramas which, so far as their proportions are concerned, might as well
+be epic poems or historical romances.<a name="FNanchor6"></a><a href="#Footnote_6"><sup>[6]</sup></a> To them, I repeat, I have
+nothing to say. The one and only subject of the following discussions is
+the best method of fitting a dramatic theme for representation before an
+audience assembled in a theatre. But this, be it noted, does not
+necessarily mean &quot;writing down&quot; to the audience in question. It is by
+obeying, not by ignoring, the fundamental conditions of his craft that
+the dramatist may hope to lead his audience upward to the highest
+intellectual level which he himself can attain.</p>
+
+<p>These pages, in short, are addressed to students of play-writing who
+sincerely desire to do sound, artistic work under the conditions and
+limitations of the actual, living playhouse. This does not mean, of
+course, that they ought always to be studying &quot;what the public wants.&quot;
+The dramatist should give the public what he himself wants--but in such
+form as to make it comprehensible and interesting in a theatre.</p>
+
+
+
+<br><br><hr style="width: 35%;"><br><br>
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_II"></a>CHAPTER II</h2>
+
+<p>THE CHOICE OF A THEME</p>
+<br>
+
+<p>The first step towards writing a play is manifestly to choose a theme.</p>
+
+<p>Even this simple statement, however, requires careful examination before
+we can grasp its full import. What, in the first place, do we mean by a
+&quot;theme&quot;? And, secondly, in what sense can we, or ought we to,
+&quot;choose&quot; one?</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Theme&quot; may mean either of two things: either the subject of a play, or
+its story. The former is, perhaps, its proper or more convenient sense.
+The theme of <i>Romeo and Juliet</i> is youthful love crossed by ancestral
+hate; the theme of <i>Othello</i> is jealousy; the theme of <i>Le Tartufe</i> is
+hypocrisy; the theme of <i>Caste</i> is fond hearts and coronets; the theme
+of <i>Getting Married</i> is getting married; the theme of <i>Maternit&eacute;</i> is
+maternity. To every play it is possible, at a pinch, to assign a theme;
+but in many plays it is evident that no theme expressible in abstract
+terms was present to the author's mind. Nor are these always plays of a
+low class. It is only by a somewhat artificial process of abstraction
+that we can formulate a theme for <i>As You Like It</i>, for <i>The Way of the
+World</i>, or for <i>Hedda Gabler</i>.</p>
+
+<p>The question now arises: ought a theme, in its abstract form, to be the
+first germ of a play? Ought the dramatist to say, &quot;Go to, I will write a
+play on temperance, or on woman's suffrage, or on capital and labour,&quot;
+and then cast about for a story to illustrate his theme? This is a
+possible, but not a promising, method of procedure. A story made to the
+order of a moral concept is always apt to advertise its origin, to the
+detriment of its illusive quality. If a play is to be a moral apologue
+at all, it is well to say so frankly--probably in the title--and aim,
+not at verisimilitude, but at neatness and appositeness in the working
+out of the fable. The French <i>proverbe</i> proceeds on this principle, and
+is often very witty and charming.<a name="FNanchor7"></a><a href="#Footnote_7"><sup>[7]</sup></a> A good example in English is <i>A
+Pair of Spectacles</i>, by Mr. Sydney Grundy, founded on a play by Labiche.
+In this bright little comedy every incident and situation bears upon the
+general theme, and pleases us, not by its probability, but by its
+ingenious appropriateness. The dramatic fable, in fact, holds very much
+the same rank in drama as the narrative fable holds in literature at
+large. We take pleasure in them on condition that they be witty, and
+that they do not pretend to be what they are not.</p>
+
+<p>A play manifestly suggested by a theme of temporary interest will often
+have a great but no less temporary success. For instance, though there
+was a good deal of clever character-drawing in <i>An Englishman's Home</i>,
+by Major du Maurier, the theme was so evidently the source and
+inspiration of the play that it will scarcely bear revival. In America,
+where the theme was of no interest, the play failed.</p>
+
+<p>It is possible, no doubt, to name excellent plays in which the theme, in
+all probability, preceded both the story and the characters in the
+author's mind. Such plays are most of M. Brieux's; such plays are Mr.
+Galsworthy's <i>Strife</i> and <i>Justice</i>. The French plays, in my judgment,
+suffer artistically from the obtrusive predominance of the theme--that
+is to say, the abstract element--over the human and concrete factors in
+the composition. Mr. Galsworthy's more delicate and unemphatic art
+eludes this danger, at any rate in <i>Strife</i>. We do not remember until
+all is over that his characters represent classes, and his action is,
+one might almost say, a sociological symbol. If, then, the theme does,
+as a matter of fact, come first in the author's conception, he will do
+well either to make it patently and confessedly dominant, as in the
+<i>proverbe</i>, or to take care that, as in <i>Strife</i>, it be not suffered to
+make its domination felt, except as an afterthought.<a name="FNanchor8"></a><a href="#Footnote_8"><sup>[8]</sup></a> No outside force
+should appear to control the free rhythm of the action.</p>
+
+<p>The theme may sometimes be, not an idea, an abstraction or a principle,
+but rather an environment, a social phenomenon of one sort or another.
+The author's primary object in such a case is, not to portray any
+individual character or tell any definite story, but to transfer to the
+stage an animated picture of some broad aspect or phase of life, without
+concentrating the interest on any one figure or group. There are
+theorists who would, by definition, exclude from the domain of drama any
+such cinematograph-play, as they would probably call it; but we shall
+see cause, as we go on, to distrust definitions, especially when they
+seek to clothe themselves with the authority of laws. Tableau-plays of
+the type here in question may even claim classical precedent. What else
+is Ben Jonson's <i>Bartholomew Fair</i>? What else is Schiller's
+<i>Wallensteins Lager</i>? Amongst more recent plays, Hauptmann's <i>Die Weber</i>
+and Gorky's <i>Nachtasyl</i> are perhaps the best examples of the type. The
+drawback of such themes is, not that they do not conform to this or that
+canon of art, but that it needs an exceptional amount of knowledge and
+dramaturgic skill to handle them successfully. It is far easier to tell
+a story on the stage than to paint a picture, and few playwrights can
+resist the temptation to foist a story upon their picture, thus marring
+it by an inharmonious intrusion of melodrama or farce. This has often
+been done upon deliberate theory, in the belief that no play can exist,
+or can attract playgoers, without a definite and more or less exciting
+plot. Thus the late James A. Herne inserted into a charming idyllic
+picture of rural life, entitled <i>Shore Acres</i>, a melodramatic scene in a
+lighthouse, which was hopelessly out of key with the rest of the play.
+The dramatist who knows any particular phase of life so thoroughly as to
+be able to transfer its characteristic incidents to the stage, may be
+advised to defy both critical and managerial prejudice, and give his
+tableau-play just so much of story as may naturally and inevitably fall
+within its limits.</p>
+
+<p>One of the most admirable and enthralling scenes I ever saw on any stage
+was that of the Trafalgar Square suffrage meeting in Miss Elizabeth
+Robins's <i>Votes for Women</i>. Throughout a whole act it held us
+spellbound, while the story of the play stood still, and we forgot its
+existence. It was only within a few minutes of the end, when the story
+was dragged in neck and crop, that the reality of the thing vanished,
+and the interest with it.</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 25%;">
+
+<p>If an abstract theme be not an advisable starting-point, what is? A
+character? A situation? Or a story? On this point it would be absurd to
+lay down any rule; the more so as, in many cases, a playwright is quite
+unable to say in what form the germ of a play first floated into his
+mind. The suggestion may come from a newspaper paragraph, from an
+incident seen in the street, from an emotional adventure or a comic
+misadventure, from a chance word dropped by an acquaintance, or from
+some flotsam or jetsam of phrase or fable that has drifted from the
+other end of history. Often, too, the original germ, whatever it may be,
+is transformed beyond recognition before a play is done.<a name="FNanchor9"></a><a href="#Footnote_9"><sup>[9]</sup></a> In the mind
+of the playwright figs grow from thistles, and a silk purse--perhaps a
+Fortunatus' purse--may often be made from a sow's ear. The whole
+delicate texture of Ibsen's <i>Doll's House</i> was woven from a commonplace
+story of a woman who forged a cheque in order to redecorate her
+drawing-room. Stevenson's romance of <i>Prince Otto</i> (to take an example
+from fiction) grew out of a tragedy on the subject of Semiramis!</p>
+
+<p>One thing, however, we may say with tolerable confidence: whatever may
+be the germ of a play--whether it be an anecdote, a situation, or what
+not--the play will be of small account as a work of art unless
+character, at a very early point, enters into and conditions its
+development. The story which is independent of character--which can be
+carried through by a given number of ready-made puppets--is essentially
+a trivial thing. Unless, at an early stage of the organizing process,
+character begins to take the upper hand--unless the playwright finds
+himself thinking, &quot;Oh, yes, George is just the man to do this,&quot; or,
+&quot;That is quite foreign to Jane's temperament&quot;--he may be pretty sure
+that it is a piece of mechanism he is putting together, not a drama with
+flesh and blood in it. The difference between a live play and a dead one
+is that in the former the characters control the plot, while in the
+latter the plot controls the characters. Which is not to say, of course,
+that there may not be clever and entertaining plays which are &quot;dead&quot; in
+this sense, and dull and unattractive plays which are &quot;live.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>A great deal of ink has been wasted in controversy over a remark of
+Aristotle's that the action or <i>muthos</i>, not the character or <i>&ecirc;thos</i>,
+is the essential element in drama. The statement is absolutely true and
+wholly unimportant. A play can exist without anything that can be called
+character, but not without some sort of action. This is implied in the
+very word &quot;drama,&quot; which means a doing, not a mere saying or existing.
+It would be possible, no doubt, to place Don Quixote, or Falstaff, or
+Peer Gynt, on the stage, and let him develop his character in mere
+conversation, or even monologue, without ever moving from his chair. But
+it is a truism that deeds, not words, are the demonstration and test of
+character; wherefore, from time immemorial, it has been the recognized
+business of the theatre to exhibit character in action. Historically,
+too, we find that drama has everywhere originated in the portrayal of an
+action--some exploit or some calamity in the career of some demigod or
+hero. Thus story or plot is by definition, tradition, and practical
+reason, the fundamental element in drama; but does it therefore follow
+that it is the noblest element, or that by which its value should be
+measured? Assuredly not. The skeleton is, in a sense, the fundamental
+element in the human organism. It can exist, and, with a little
+assistance, retain its form, when stripped of muscle and blood and
+nerve; whereas a boneless man would be an amorphous heap, more helpless
+than a jelly-fish. But do we therefore account the skeleton man's
+noblest part? Scarcely. It is by his blood and nerve that he lives, not
+by his bones; and it is because his bones are, comparatively speaking,
+dead matter that they continue to exist when the flesh has fallen away
+from them. It is, therefore, if not a misreading of Aristotle,<a name="FNanchor10"></a><a href="#Footnote_10"><sup>[10]</sup></a> at any
+rate a perversion of reason, to maintain that the drama lives by action,
+rather than by character. Action ought to exist for the sake of
+character: when the relation is reversed, the play may be an ingenious
+toy, but scarcely a vital work of art.</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 25%;">
+
+<p>It is time now to consider just what we mean when we say that the first
+step towards play-writing is the &quot;choice&quot; of a theme.</p>
+
+<p>In many cases, no doubt, it is the plain and literal fact that the
+impulse to write some play--any play--exists, so to speak, in the
+abstract, unassociated with any particular subject, and that the
+would-be playwright proceeds, as he thinks, to set his imagination to
+work, and invent a story. But this frame of mind is to be regarded with
+suspicion. Few plays of much value, one may guess, have resulted from
+such an abstract impulse. Invention, in these cases, is apt to be
+nothing but recollection in disguise, the shaking of a kaleidoscope
+formed of fragmentary reminiscences. I remember once, in some momentary
+access of ambition, trying to invent a play. I occupied several hours of
+a long country walk in, as I believed, creating out of nothing at all a
+dramatic story. When at last I had modelled it into some sort of
+coherency, I stepped back from it in my mind, as it were, and
+contemplated it as a whole. No sooner had I done so than it began to
+seem vaguely familiar. &quot;Where have I seen this story before?&quot; I asked
+myself; and it was only after cudgelling my brains for several minutes
+that I found I had re-invented Ibsen's <i>Hedda Gabler</i>. Thus, when we
+think we are choosing a plot out of the void, we are very apt to be, in
+fact, ransacking the store-house of memory. The plot which chooses us
+is much more to be depended upon--the idea which comes when we least
+expect it, perhaps from the most unlikely quarter, clamours at the gates
+of birth, and will not let us rest till it be clothed in dramatic flesh
+and blood.<a name="FNanchor11"></a><a href="#Footnote_11"><sup>[11]</sup></a> It may very well happen, of course, that it has to
+wait--that it has to be pigeon-holed for a time, until its due turn
+comes.<a name="FNanchor12"></a><a href="#Footnote_12"><sup>[12]</sup></a> Occasionally, perhaps, it may slip out of its pigeon-hole for
+an airing, only to be put back again in a slightly more developed form.
+Then at last its convenient season will arrive, and the play will be
+worked out, written, and launched into the struggle for life. In the
+sense of selecting from among a number of embryonic themes stored in his
+mind, the playwright has often to make a deliberate choice; but when,
+moved by a purely abstract impulse, he goes out of set purpose to look
+for a theme, it may be doubted whether he is likely to return with any
+very valuable treasure-trove.<a name="FNanchor13"></a><a href="#Footnote_13"><sup>[13]</sup></a></p>
+
+<p>The same principle holds good in the case of the ready-made poetic or
+historical themes, which are--rightly or wrongly--considered suitable
+for treatment in blank verse. Whether, and how far, the blank verse
+drama can nowadays be regarded as a vital and viable form is a question
+to be considered later. In the meantime it is sufficient to say that
+whatever principles of conception and construction apply to the modern
+prose drama, apply with equal cogency to the poetic drama. The
+verse-poet may perhaps take one or two licenses denied to the
+prose-poet. For instance, we may find reason to think the soliloquy more
+excusable in verse than in prose. But fundamentally, the two forms are
+ruled by the same set of conditions, which the verse-poet, no less than
+the prose-poet, can ignore only at his peril. Unless, indeed, he
+renounces from the outset all thought of the stage and chooses to
+produce that cumbrous nondescript, a &quot;closet drama.&quot; Of such we do not
+speak, but glance and pass on. What laws, indeed, can apply to a form
+which has no proper element, but, like the amphibious animal described
+by the sailor, &quot;cannot live on land and dies in the water&quot;?</p>
+
+<p>To return to our immediate topic, the poet who essays dramatic
+composition on mere abstract impulse, because other poets have done so,
+or because he is told that it pays, is only too likely to produce
+willy-nilly a &quot;closet drama.&quot; Let him beware of saying to himself, &quot;I
+will gird up my loins and write a play. Shall it be a Phaedra, or a
+Semiramis, or a Sappho, or a Cleopatra? A Julian, or an Attila, or a
+Savanarola, or a Cromwell?&quot; A drama conceived in this reach-me-down
+fashion will scarcely have the breath of life in it. If, on the other
+hand, in the course of his legendary, romantic, or historical reading,
+some character should take hold upon his imagination and demand to be
+interpreted, or some episode should, as it were, startle him by putting
+on vivid dramatic form before his mind's eye, then let him by all means
+yield to the inspiration, and try to mould the theme into a drama. The
+real labour of creation will still lie before him; but he may face it
+with the hope of producing a live play, not a long-drawn rhetorical
+anachronism, whether of the rotund or of the spasmodic type.</p>
+
+
+
+<br><br><hr style="width: 35%;"><br><br>
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_III"></a>CHAPTER III</h2>
+
+<p>DRAMATIC AND UNDRAMATIC</p>
+<br>
+
+<p>It may be well, at this point, to consider for a little what we mean
+when we use the term &quot;dramatic.&quot; We shall probably not arrive at any
+definition which can be applied as an infallible touchstone to
+distinguish the dramatic from the undramatic. Perhaps, indeed, the
+upshot may rather be to place the student on his guard against troubling
+too much about the formal definitions of critical theorists.</p>
+
+<p>The orthodox opinion of the present time is that which is generally
+associated with the name of the late Ferdinand Bruneti&egrave;re. &quot;The theatre
+in general,&quot; said that critic, &quot;is nothing but the place for the
+development of the human will, attacking the obstacles opposed to it by
+destiny, fortune, or circumstances.&quot; And again: &quot;Drama is a
+representation of the will of man in conflict with the mysterious powers
+or natural forces which limit and belittle us; it is one of us thrown
+living upon the stage, there to struggle against fatality, against
+social law, against one of his fellow-mortals, against himself, if need
+be, against the ambitions, the interests, the prejudices, the folly, the
+malevolence of those who surround him.&quot;<a name="FNanchor14"></a><a href="#Footnote_14"><sup>[14]</sup></a></p>
+
+<p>The difficulty about this definition is that, while it describes the
+matter of a good many dramas, it does not lay down any true
+differentia--any characteristic common to all drama, and possessed by no
+other form of fiction. Many of the greatest plays in the world can with
+difficulty be brought under the formula, while the majority of romances
+and other stories come under it with ease. Where, for instance, is the
+struggle in the <i>Agamemnon</i>? There is no more struggle between
+Clytemnestra and Agamemnon than there is between the spider and the fly
+who walks into his net. There is not even a struggle in Clytemnestra's
+mind. Agamemnon's doom is sealed from the outset, and she merely carries
+out a pre-arranged plot. There is contest indeed in the succeeding plays
+of the trilogy; but it will scarcely be argued that the <i>Agamemnon</i>,
+taken alone, is not a great drama. Even the <i>Oedipus</i> of Sophocles,
+though it may at first sight seem a typical instance of a struggle
+against Destiny, does not really come under the definition. Oedipus, in
+fact, does not struggle at all. His struggles, in so far as that word
+can be applied to his misguided efforts to escape from the toils of
+fate, are all things of the past; in the actual course of the tragedy he
+simply writhes under one revelation after another of bygone error and
+unwitting crime. It would be a mere play upon words to recognize as a
+dramatic &quot;struggle&quot; the writhing of a worm on a hook. And does not this
+description apply very closely to the part played by another great
+protagonist--Othello to wit? There is no struggle, no conflict, between
+him and Iago. It is Iago alone who exerts any will; neither Othello nor
+Desdemona makes the smallest fight. From the moment when Iago sets his
+machination to work, they are like people sliding down an ice-slope to
+an inevitable abyss. Where is the conflict in <i>As You Like It</i>? No one,
+surely, will pretend that any part of the interest or charm of the play
+arises from the struggle between the banished Duke and the Usurper, or
+between Orlando and Oliver. There is not even the conflict, if so it can
+be called, which nominally brings so many hundreds of plays under the
+Bruneti&egrave;re canon--the conflict between an eager lover and a more or less
+reluctant maid. Or take, again, Ibsen's <i>Ghosts</i>--in what valid sense
+can it be said that that tragedy shows us will struggling against
+obstacles? Oswald, doubtless, wishes to live, and his mother desires
+that he should live; but this mere will for life cannot be the
+differentia that makes of <i>Ghosts</i> a drama. If the reluctant descent of
+the &quot;downward path to death&quot; constituted drama, then Tolstoy's <i>Death of
+Ivan Ilytch</i> would be one of the greatest dramas ever written--which it
+certainly is not. Yet again, if we want to see will struggling against
+obstacles, the classic to turn to is not <i>Hamlet</i>, not <i>Lear</i>, but
+<i>Robinson Crusoe</i>; yet no one, except a pantomime librettist, ever saw a
+drama in Defoe's narrative. In a Platonic dialogue, in <i>Paradise Lost</i>,
+in <i>John Gilpin</i>, there is a struggle of will against obstacles; there
+is none in <i>Hannele</i>, which, nevertheless, is a deeply-moving drama.
+Such a struggle is characteristic of all great fiction, from <i>Clarissa
+Harlowe</i> to <i>The House with the Green Shutters</i>; whereas in many plays
+the struggle, if there be any at all, is the merest matter of form (for
+instance, a quite conventional love-story), while the real interest
+resides in something quite different.</p>
+
+<p>The plain truth seems to be that conflict is <i>one</i> of the most dramatic
+elements in life, and that many dramas--perhaps most--do, as a matter
+of fact, turn upon strife of one sort or another. But it is clearly an
+error to make conflict indispensable to drama, and especially to
+insist--as do some of Bruneti&egrave;re's followers--that the conflict must be
+between will and will. A stand-up fight between will and will--such a
+fight as occurs in, say, the <i>Hippolytus</i> of Euripides, or Racine's
+<i>Andromaque</i>, or Moli&egrave;re's <i>Tartufe</i>, or Ibsen's <i>Pretenders</i>, or
+Dumas's <i>Fran&ccedil;illon</i>, or Sudermann's <i>Heimat</i>, or Sir Arthur Pinero's
+<i>Gay Lord Quex</i>, or Mr. Shaw's <i>Candida</i>, or Mr. Galsworthy's
+<i>Strife</i>--such a stand-up fight, I say, is no doubt one of the intensest
+forms of drama. But it is comparatively rare at any rate as the formula
+of a whole play. In individual scenes a conflict of will is frequent
+enough; but it is, after all, only one among a multitude of equally
+telling forms of drama. No one can say that the Balcony Scene in <i>Romeo
+and Juliet</i> is undramatic, or the &quot;Galeoto f&uacute; il libro&quot; scene in Mr.
+Stephen Phillips's <i>Paolo and Francesca</i>; yet the point of these scenes
+is not a clash, but an ecstatic concordance, of wills. Is the
+death-scene of Cleopatra undramatic? Or the Banquet scene in <i>Macbeth</i>?
+Or the pastoral act in <i>The Winter's Tale</i>? Yet in none of these is
+there any conflict of wills. In the whole range of drama there is
+scarcely a passage which one would call more specifically dramatic than
+the Screen Scene in <i>The School for Scandal</i>; yet it would be the
+veriest quibbling to argue that any appreciable part of its effect
+arises from the clash of will against will. This whole comedy, indeed,
+suffices to show the emptiness of the theory. With a little strain it is
+possible to bring it within the letter of the formula; but who can
+pretend that any considerable part of the attraction or interest of the
+play is due to that possibility?</p>
+
+<p>The champions of the theory, moreover, place it on a metaphysical basis,
+finding in the will the essence of human personality, and therefore of
+the art which shows human personality raised to its highest power. It
+seems unnecessary, however, to apply to Schopenhauer for an explanation
+of whatever validity the theory may possess. For a sufficient account of
+the matter, we need go no further than the simple psychological
+observation that human nature loves a fight, whether it be with clubs or
+with swords, with tongues or with brains. One of the earliest forms of
+mediaeval drama was the &quot;estrif&quot; or &quot;flyting&quot;--the scolding-match
+between husband and wife, or between two rustic gossips. This motive is
+glorified in the quarrel between Brutus and Cassius, degraded in the
+patter of two &quot;knockabout comedians.&quot; Certainly there is nothing more
+telling in drama than a piece of &quot;cut-and-thrust&quot; dialogue after the
+fashion of the ancient &quot;stichomythia.&quot; When a whole theme involving
+conflict, or even a single scene of the nature described as a
+&quot;passage-at-arms,&quot; comes naturally in the playwright's way, by all means
+let him seize the opportunity. But do not let him reject a theme or
+scene as undramatic merely because it has no room for a clash of
+warring wills.</p>
+
+<p>There is a variant of the &quot;conflict&quot; theory which underlines the word
+&quot;obstacles&quot; in the above-quoted dictum of Bruneti&egrave;re, and lays down the
+rule: &quot;No obstacle, no drama.&quot; Though far from being universally valid,
+this form of the theory has a certain practical usefulness, and may well
+be borne in mind. Many a play would have remained unwritten if the
+author had asked himself, &quot;Is there a sufficient obstacle between my two
+lovers?&quot; or, in more general terms, &quot;between my characters and the
+realization of their will?&quot; There is nothing more futile than a play in
+which we feel that there is no real obstacle to the inevitable happy
+ending, and that the curtain might just as well fall in the middle of
+the first act as at the end of the third. Comedies abound (though they
+reach the stage only by accident) in which the obstacle between Corydon
+and Phyllis, between Lord Edwin and Lady Angelina, is not even a defect
+or peculiarity of character, but simply some trumpery
+misunderstanding<a name="FNanchor15"></a><a href="#Footnote_15"><sup>[15]</sup></a> which can be kept afoot only so long as every one
+concerned holds his or her common sense in studious abeyance. &quot;Pyramus
+and Thisbe without the wall&quot; may be taken as the formula for the whole
+type of play. But even in plays of a much higher type, the author might
+often ask himself with advantage whether he could not strengthen his
+obstacle, and so accentuate the struggle which forms the matter of his
+play. Though conflict may not be essential to drama, yet, when you set
+forth to portray a struggle, you may as well make it as real and intense
+as possible.</p>
+
+<p>It seems to me that in the late William Vaughn Moody's drama, <i>The Great
+Divide</i>, the body of the play, after the stirring first act, is weakened
+by our sense that the happy ending is only being postponed by a violent
+effort. We have been assured from the very first--even before Ruth
+Jordan has set eyes on Stephen Ghent--that just such a rough diamond is
+the ideal of her dreams. It is true that, after their marriage, the
+rough diamond seriously misconducts himself towards her; and we have
+then to consider the rather unattractive question whether a single act
+of brutality on the part of a drunken husband ought to be held so
+unpardonable as to break up a union which otherwise promises to be quite
+satisfactory. But the author has taken such pains to emphasize the fact
+that these two people are really made for each other, that the answer to
+the question is not for a moment in doubt, and we become rather
+impatient of the obstinate sulkiness of Ruth's attitude. If there had
+been a real disharmony of character to be overcome, instead of, or in
+addition to, the sordid misadventure which is in fact the sole barrier
+between them, the play would certainly have been stronger, and perhaps
+more permanently popular.</p>
+
+<p>In a play by Mr. James Bernard Fagan, <i>The Prayer of the Sword</i>, we have
+a much clearer example of an inadequate obstacle. A youth named Andrea
+has been brought up in a monastery, and destined for the priesthood; but
+his tastes and aptitudes are all for a military career. He is, however,
+on the verge of taking his priestly vows, when accident calls him forth
+into the world, and he has the good fortune to quell a threatened
+revolution in a romantic Duchy, ruled over by a duchess of surpassing
+loveliness. With her he naturally falls in love; and the tragedy lies,
+or ought to lie, in the conflict between this earthly passion and his
+heavenly calling and election. But the author has taken pains to make
+the obstacle between Andrea and Ilaria absolutely unreal. The fact that
+Andrea has as yet taken no irrevocable vow is not the essence of the
+matter. Vow or no vow, there would have been a tragic conflict if Andrea
+had felt absolutely certain of his calling to the priesthood, and had
+defied Heaven, and imperilled his immortal soul, because of his
+overwhelming passion. That would have been a tragic situation; but the
+author had carefully avoided it. From the very first--before Andrea had
+ever seen Ilaria--it had been impressed upon us that he had no priestly
+vocation. There was no struggle in his soul between passion and duty;
+there was no struggle at all in his soul. His struggles are all with
+external forces and influences; wherefore the play, which a real
+obstacle might have converted into a tragedy, remained a sentimental
+romance--and is forgotten.</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 25%;">
+
+<p>What, then, is the essence of drama, if conflict be not it? What is the
+common quality of themes, scenes, and incidents, which we recognize as
+specifically dramatic? Perhaps we shall scarcely come nearer to a
+helpful definition than if we say that the essence of drama is <i>crisis</i>.
+A play is a more or less rapidly-developing crisis in destiny or
+circumstance, and a dramatic scene is a crisis within a crisis, clearly
+furthering the ultimate event. The drama may be called the art of
+crises, as fiction is the art of gradual developments. It is the
+slowness of its processes which differentiates the typical novel from
+the typical play. If the novelist does not take advantage of the
+facilities offered by his form for portraying gradual change, whether in
+the way of growth or of decay, he renounces his own birthright, in order
+to trespass on the domain of the dramatist. Most great novels embrace
+considerable segments of many lives; whereas the drama gives us only the
+culminating points--or shall we say the intersecting culminations?--two
+or three destinies. Some novelists have excelled precisely in the art
+with which they have made the gradations of change in character or
+circumstance so delicate as to be imperceptible from page to page, and
+measurable, as in real life, only when we look back over a considerable
+period. The dramatist, on the other hand, deals in rapid and startling
+changes, the &quot;peripeties,&quot; as the Greeks called them, which may be the
+outcome of long, slow processes, but which actually occur in very brief
+spaces of time. Nor is this a merely mechanical consequence of the
+narrow limits of stage presentation. The crisis is as real, though not
+as inevitable, a part of human experience as the gradual development.
+Even if the material conditions of the theatre permitted the
+presentation of a whole <i>Middlemarch</i> or <i>Anna Kar&eacute;nine</i>--as the
+conditions of the Chinese theatre actually do--some dramatists, we
+cannot doubt, would voluntarily renounce that license of prolixity, in
+order to cultivate an art of concentration and crisis. The Greek drama
+&quot;subjected to the faithful eyes,&quot; as Horace phrases it, the culminating
+points of the Greek epic; the modern drama places under the lens of
+theatrical presentment the culminating points of modern experience.</p>
+
+<p>But, manifestly, it is not every crisis that is dramatic. A serious
+illness, a law-suit, a bankruptcy, even an ordinary prosaic marriage,
+may be a crisis in a man's life, without being necessarily, or even
+probably, material for drama. How, then, do we distinguish a dramatic
+from a non-dramatic crisis? Generally, I think, by the fact that it
+develops, or can be made naturally to develop, through a series of minor
+crises, involving more or less emotional excitement, and, if possible,
+the vivid manifestation of character. Take, for instance, the case of a
+bankruptcy. Most people, probably, who figure in the <i>Gazette</i> do not go
+through any one, or two, or three critical moments of special tension,
+special humiliation, special agony. They gradually drift to leeward in
+their affairs, undergoing a series of small discouragements, small
+vicissitudes of hope and fear, small unpleasantnesses, which they take
+lightly or hardly according to their temperament, or the momentary state
+of their liver. In this average process of financial decline, there may
+be--there has been--matter for many excellent novels, but scarcely for a
+drama. That admirable chapter in <i>Little Dorrit,</i> wherein Dickens
+describes the gradual degradation of the Father of the Marshalsea, shows
+how a master of fiction deals with such a subject; but it would be quite
+impossible to transfer this chapter to the stage. So, too, with the
+bankruptcy of Colonel Newcome--certain emotional crises arising from it
+have, indeed, been placed on the stage, but only after all Thackeray's
+knowledge of the world and fine gradations of art had been eliminated.
+Mr. Hardy's <i>Mayor of Casterbridge</i> has, I think, been dramatized, but
+not, I think, with success. A somewhat similar story of financial ruin,
+the grimly powerful <i>House with the Green Shutters</i>, has not even
+tempted the dramatiser. There are, in this novel, indeed, many
+potentially dramatic crises; the trouble is that they are too numerous
+and individually too small to be suitable for theatrical presentment.
+Moreover, they are crises affecting a taciturn and inarticulate race,<a name="FNanchor16"></a><a href="#Footnote_16"><sup>[16]</sup></a>
+a fact which places further difficulties in the way of the playwright.
+In all these cases, in short, the bankruptcy portrayed is a matter of
+slow development, with no great outstanding moments, and is consequently
+suited for treatment in fiction rather than in drama.</p>
+
+<p>But bankruptcy sometimes occurs in the form of one or more sudden, sharp
+crises, and has, therefore, been utilized again and again as a dramatic
+motive. In a hundred domestic dramas or melodramas, we have seen the
+head of a happy household open a newspaper or a telegram announcing the
+failure of some enterprise in which all his fortune is embarked. So
+obviously dramatic is this incident that it has become sadly hackneyed.
+Again, we have bankruptcy following upon a course of gambling, generally
+in stocks. Here there is evident opportunity, which has been frequently
+utilized, for a series of crises of somewhat violent and commonplace
+emotion. In American drama especially, the duels of Wall Street, the
+combats of bull and bear, form a very popular theme, which clearly falls
+under the Bruneti&egrave;re formula. Few American dramatists can resist the
+temptation of showing some masterful financier feverishly watching the
+&quot;ticker&quot; which proclaims him a millionaire or a beggar. The &quot;ticker&quot; had
+not been invented in the days when Ibsen wrote <i>The League of Youth</i>,
+otherwise he would doubtless have made use of it in the fourth act of
+that play. The most popular of all Bj&ouml;rnson's plays is specifically
+entitled <i>A Bankruptcy</i>. Here the poet has had the art to select a
+typical phase of business life, which naturally presents itself in the
+form of an ascending curve, so to speak, of emotional crises. We see the
+energetic, active business man, with a number of irons in the fire,
+aware in his heart that he is insolvent, but not absolutely clear as to
+his position, and hoping against hope to retrieve it. We see him give a
+great dinner-party, in order to throw dust in the eyes of the world, and
+to secure the support of a financial magnate, who is the guest of
+honour. The financial magnate is inclined to &quot;bite,&quot; and goes off,
+leaving the merchant under the impression that he is saved. This is an
+interesting and natural, but scarcely a thrilling, crisis. It does not,
+therefore, discount the supreme crisis of the play, in which a cold,
+clear-headed business man, who has been deputed by the banks to look
+into the merchant's affairs, proves to him, point by point, that it
+would be dishonest of him to flounder any longer in the swamp of
+insolvency, into which he can only sink deeper and drag more people down
+with him. Then the bankrupt produces a pistol and threatens murder and
+suicide if the arbiter of his fate will not consent to give him one more
+chance; but his frenzy breaks innocuous against the other's calm,
+relentless reason. Here we have, I repeat, a typically dramatic theme: a
+great crisis, bringing out vivid manifestations of character, not only
+in the bankrupt himself, but in those around him, and naturally
+unfolding itself through a series of those lesser crises, which we call
+interesting and moving scenes. The play is scarcely a great one, partly
+because its ending is perfunctory, partly because Bj&ouml;rnson, poet though
+he was, had not Ibsen's art of &quot;throwing in a little poetry&quot; into his
+modern dramas. I have summarized it up to its culminating point, because
+it happened to illustrate the difference between a bankruptcy, dramatic
+in its nature and treatment, and those undramatic bankruptcies to which
+reference has been made. In <i>La Douloureuse</i>, by Maurice Donnay,
+bankruptcy is incidentally employed to bring about a crisis of a
+different order. A ball is proceeding at the house of a Parisian
+financier, when the whisper spreads that the host is ruined, and has
+committed suicide in a room above; whereupon the guests, after a moment
+of flustered consternation, go on supping and dancing!<a name="FNanchor17"></a><a href="#Footnote_17"><sup>[17]</sup></a> We are not at
+all deeply interested in the host or his fortunes. The author's purpose
+is to illustrate, rather crudely, the heartlessness of plutocratic
+Bohemia; and by means of the bankruptcy and suicide he brings about what
+may be called a crisis of collective character.<a name="FNanchor18"></a><a href="#Footnote_18"><sup>[18]</sup></a></p>
+
+<hr style="width: 25%;">
+
+<p>As regards individual incidents, it may be said in general that the
+dramatic way of treating them is the crisp and staccato, as opposed to
+the smooth or legato, method. It may be thought a point of inferiority
+in dramatic art that it should deal so largely in shocks to the nerves,
+and should appeal by preference, wherever it is reasonably possible, to
+the cheap emotions of curiosity and surprise. But this is a criticism,
+not of dramatic art, but of human nature. We may wish that mankind took
+more pleasure in pure apprehension than in emotion; but so long as the
+fact is otherwise, that way of handling an incident by which the
+greatest variety of poignancy of emotion can be extracted from it will
+remain the specifically dramatic way.</p>
+
+<p>We shall have to consider later the relation between what may be called
+primary and secondary suspense or surprise--that is to say between
+suspense or surprise actually experienced by the spectator to whom the
+drama is new, and suspense or surprise experienced only sympathetically,
+on behalf of the characters, by a spectator who knows perfectly what is
+to follow. The two forms of emotion are so far similar that we need not
+distinguish between them in considering the general content of the term
+&quot;dramatic.&quot; It is plain that the latter or secondary form of emotion
+must be by far the commoner, and the one to which the dramatist of any
+ambition must make his main appeal; for the longer his play endures, the
+larger will be the proportion of any given audience which knows it
+beforehand, in outline, if not in detail.</p>
+
+<p>As a typical example of a dramatic way of handling an incident, so as to
+make a supreme effect of what might else have been an anti-climax, one
+may cite the death of Othello. Shakespeare was faced by no easy problem.
+Desdemona was dead, Emilia dead, Iago wounded and doomed to the torture;
+how was Othello to die without merely satiating the audience with a glut
+of blood? How was his death to be made, not a foregone conclusion, a
+mere conventional suicide, but the culminating moment of the tragedy? In
+no single detail, perhaps, did Shakespeare ever show his dramatic genius
+more unmistakably than in his solution of this problem. We all remember
+how, as he is being led away, Othello stays his captors with a gesture,
+and thus addresses them:</p>
+
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&quot;Soft you; a word or two, before you go.<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;I have done the state some service, and they know 't;<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;No more of that. I pray you, in your letters,<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;When you shall these unlucky deeds relate,<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;Speak of me as I am; nothing extenuate,<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;Nor set down aught in malice, then must you speak<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;Of one that loved not wisely but too well;<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;Of one not easily jealous, but, being wrought,<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;Perplex'd in the extreme; of one whose hand,<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;Like the base Indian, threw a pearl away<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;Richer than all his tribe; of one whose subdued eyes,<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;Albeit unused to the melting mood,<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;Drop tears as fast as the Arabian trees<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;Their medicinal gum. Set you down this;<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;And say besides, that in Aleppo once,<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;Where a malignant and a turban'd Turk<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;Beat a Venetian and traduced the state,<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;I took by the throat the circumcised dog,<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;And smote him--thus!&quot;<br>
+
+<p>What is the essence of Shakespeare's achievement in this marvellous
+passage? What is it that he has done? He has thrown his audience, just
+as Othello has thrown his captors, off their guard, and substituted a
+sudden shock of surprise for a tedious fulfilment of expectation. In
+other words, he has handled the incident crisply instead of flaccidly,
+and so given it what we may call the specific accent of drama.</p>
+
+<p>Another consummate example of the dramatic handling of detail may be
+found in the first act of Ibsen's <i>Little Eyolf</i>. The lame boy, Eyolf,
+has followed the Rat-wife down to the wharf, has fallen into the water,
+and been drowned. This is the bare fact: how is it to be conveyed to the
+child's parents and to the audience?</p>
+
+<p>A Greek dramatist would probably have had recourse to a long and
+elaborately worked-up &quot;messenger-speech,&quot; a pathetic recitation. That
+was the method best suited to the conditions, and to what may be called
+the prevailing tempo, of the Greek theatre. I am far from saying that it
+was a bad method: no method is bad which holds and moves an audience.
+But in this case it would have had the disadvantage of concentrating
+attention on the narrator instead of on the child's parents, on the mere
+event instead of on the emotions it engendered. In the modern theatre,
+with greater facilities for reproducing the actual movement of life, the
+dramatist naturally aims at conveying to the audience the growing
+anxiety, the suspense and the final horror, of the father and mother.
+The most commonplace playwright would have seen this opportunity and
+tried to make the most of it. Every one can think of a dozen commonplace
+ways in which the scene could be arranged and written; and some of them
+might be quite effective. The great invention by which Ibsen snatches
+the scene out of the domain of the commonplace, and raises it to the
+height of dramatic poetry, consists in leaving it doubtful to the father
+and mother what is the meaning of the excitement on the beach and the
+confused cries which reach their ears, until one cry comes home to them
+with terrible distinctness, &quot;The crutch is floating!&quot; It would be hard
+to name any single phrase in literature in which more dramatic effect is
+concentrated than in these four words--they are only two words in the
+original. However dissimilar in its nature and circumstances, this
+incident is comparable with the death of Othello, inasmuch as in each
+case the poet, by a supreme felicity of invention, has succeeded in
+doing a given thing in absolutely the most dramatic method conceivable.
+Here we recognize in a consummate degree what has been called the
+&quot;fingering of the dramatist&quot;; and I know not how better to express the
+common quality of the two incidents than in saying that each is touched
+with extraordinary crispness, so as to give to what in both cases has
+for some time been expected and foreseen a sudden thrill of novelty and
+unexpectedness. That is how to do a thing dramatically.<a name="FNanchor19"></a><a href="#Footnote_19"><sup>[19]</sup></a></p>
+
+<p>And now, after all this discussion of the &quot;dramatic&quot; in theme and
+incident, it remains to be said that the tendency of recent theory, and
+of some recent practice, has been to widen the meaning of the word,
+until it bursts the bonds of all definition. Plays have been written,
+and have found some acceptance, in which the endeavour of the dramatist
+has been to depict life, not in moments of crisis, but in its most level
+and humdrum phases, and to avoid any crispness of touch in the
+presentation of individual incidents. &quot;Dramatic,&quot; in the eyes of writers
+of this school, has become a term of reproach, synonymous with
+&quot;theatrical.&quot; They take their cue from Maeterlinck's famous essay on
+&quot;The Tragic in Daily Life,&quot; in which he lays it down that: &quot;An old man,
+seated in his armchair, waiting patiently, with his lamp beside
+him--submitting with bent head to the presence of his soul and his
+destiny--motionless as he is, does yet live in reality a deeper, more
+human, and more universal life than the lover who strangles his
+mistress, the captain who conquers in battle, or the husband who
+'avenges his honour.'&quot; They do not observe that Maeterlinck, in his own
+practice, constantly deals with crises, and often with violent and
+startling ones.</p>
+
+<p>At the same time, I am far from suggesting that the reaction against the
+traditional &quot;dramatic&quot; is a wholly mistaken movement. It is a valuable
+corrective of conventional theatricalism; and it has, at some points,
+positively enlarged the domain of dramatic art. Any movement is good
+which helps to free art from the tyranny of a code of rules and
+definitions. The only really valid definition of the dramatic is: Any
+representation of imaginary personages which is capable of interesting
+an average audience assembled in a theatre. We must say &quot;representation
+of imaginary personages&quot; in order to exclude a lecture or a prize-fight;
+and we must say &quot;an average audience&quot; (or something to that effect) in
+order to exclude a dialogue of Plato or of Landor, the recitation of
+which might interest a specially selected public. Any further attempt to
+limit the content of the term &quot;dramatic&quot; is simply the expression of an
+opinion that such-and-such forms of representation will not be found to
+interest an audience; and this opinion may always be rebutted by
+experiment. In all that I have said, then, as to the dramatic and the
+non-dramatic, I must be taken as meaning: &quot;Such-and-such forms and
+methods have been found to please, and will probably please again. They
+are, so to speak, safer and easier than other forms and methods. But it
+is the part of original genius to override the dictates of experience,
+and nothing in these pages is designed to discourage original genius
+from making the attempt.&quot; We have already seen, indeed, that in a
+certain type of play--the broad picture of a social phenomenon or
+environment--it is preferable that no attempt should be made to depict a
+marked crisis. There should be just enough story to afford a plausible
+excuse for raising and for lowering the curtain.<a name="FNanchor20"></a><a href="#Footnote_20"><sup>[20]</sup></a></p>
+
+<p>Let us not, however, seem to grant too much to the innovators and the
+quietists. To say that a drama should be, or tends to be, the
+presentation of a crisis in the life of certain characters, is by no
+means to insist on a mere arbitrary convention. It is to make at once an
+induction from the overwhelming majority of existing dramas, and a
+deduction from the nature and inherent conditions of theatrical
+presentation. The fact that theatrical conditions often encourage a
+violent exaggeration of the characteristically dramatic elements in life
+does not make these elements any the less real or any the less
+characteristically dramatic. It is true that crispness of handling may
+easily degenerate into the pursuit of mere picture-poster situation; but
+that is no reason why the artist should not seek to achieve crispness
+within the bounds prescribed by nature and common sense. There is a
+drama--I have myself seen it--in which the heroine, fleeing from the
+villain, is stopped by a yawning chasm. The pursuer is at her heels, and
+it seems as though she has no resource but to hurl herself into the
+abyss. But she is accompanied by three Indian servants, who happen, by
+the mercy of Providence, to be accomplished acrobats. The second climbs
+on the shoulders of the first, the third on the shoulders of the second;
+and then the whole trio falls forward across the chasm, the top one
+grasping some bush or creeper on the other side; so that a living bridge
+is formed, on which the heroine (herself, it would seem, something of an
+acrobat) can cross the dizzy gulf and bid defiance to the baffled
+villain. This is clearly a dramatic crisis within our definition; but,
+no less clearly, it is not a piece of rational or commendable drama. To
+say that such-and-such a factor is necessary, or highly desirable, in a
+dramatic scene, is by no means to imply that every scene which contains
+this factor is good drama. Let us take the case of another heroine--Nina
+in Sir Arthur Pinero's <i>His House in Order</i>. The second wife of Filmer
+Jesson, she is continually being offered up as a sacrifice on the altar
+dedicated to the memory of his adored first wife. Not only her husband,
+but the relatives of the sainted Annabel, make her life a burden to her.
+Then it comes to her knowledge--she obtains absolute proof--that
+Annabel was anything but the saint she was believed to be. By a single
+word she can overturn the altar of her martyrdom, and shatter the
+dearest illusion of her persecutors. Shall she speak that word, or shall
+she not? Here is a crisis which comes within our definition just as
+clearly as the other;<a name="FNanchor21"></a><a href="#Footnote_21"><sup>[21]</sup></a> only it happens to be entirely natural and
+probable, and eminently illustrative of character. Ought we, then, to
+despise it because of the element it has in common with the
+picture-poster situation of preposterous melodrama? Surely not. Let
+those who have the art--the extremely delicate and difficult art--of
+making drama without the characteristically dramatic ingredients, do so
+by all means; but let them not seek to lay an embargo on the judicious
+use of these ingredients as they present themselves in life.</p>
+
+
+
+<br><br><hr style="width: 35%;"><br><br>
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_IV"></a>CHAPTER IV</h2>
+
+<p>THE ROUTINE OF COMPOSITION</p>
+<br>
+
+<p>As no two people, probably, ever did, or ever will, pursue the same
+routine in play-making, it is manifestly impossible to lay down any
+general rules on the subject. There are one or two considerations,
+however, which it may not be wholly superfluous to suggest to beginners.</p>
+
+<p>An invaluable insight into the methods of a master is provided by the
+scenarios and drafts of plays published in Henrik Ibsen's <i>Efterladte
+Skrifter</i>. The most important of these &quot;fore-works,&quot; as he used to call
+them, have now been translated under the title of <i>From Ibsen's
+Workshop</i> (Scribner), and may be studied with the greatest profit. Not
+that the student should mechanically imitate even Ibsen's routine of
+composition, which, indeed, varied considerably from play to play. The
+great lesson to be learnt from Ibsen's practice is that the play should
+be kept fluid or plastic as long as possible, and not suffered to become
+immutably fixed, either in the author's mind or on paper, before it has
+had time to grow and ripen. Many, if not most, of Ibsen's greatest
+individual inspirations came to him as afterthoughts, after the play had
+reached a point of development at which many authors would have held the
+process of gestation ended, and the work of art ripe for birth. Among
+these inspired afterthoughts may be reckoned Nora's great line,
+&quot;Millions of women have done that&quot;--the most crushing repartee in
+literature--Hedvig's threatened blindness, with all that ensues from it,
+and Little Eyolf's crutch, used to such purpose as we have already seen.</p>
+
+<p>This is not to say that the drawing-up of a tentative scenario ought not
+to be one of the playwright's first proceedings. Indeed, if he is able
+to dispense with a scenario on paper, it can only be because his mind is
+so clear, and so retentive of its own ideas, as to enable him to carry
+in his head, always ready for reference, a more or less detailed scheme.
+Go-as-you-please composition may be possible for the novelist, perhaps
+even for the writer of a one-act play, a mere piece of dialogue; but in
+a dramatic structure of any considerable extent, proportion, balance,
+and the interconnection of parts are so essential that a scenario is
+almost as indispensable to a dramatist as a set of plans to an
+architect. There is one dramatist of note whom one suspects of sometimes
+working without any definite scenario, and inventing as he goes along.
+That dramatist, I need scarcely say, is Mr. Bernard Shaw. I have no
+absolute knowledge of his method; but if he schemed out any scenario for
+<i>Getting Married</i> or <i>Misalliance</i>, he has sedulously concealed the
+fact--to the detriment of the plays.<a name="FNanchor22"></a><a href="#Footnote_22"><sup>[22]</sup></a></p>
+
+<p>The scenario or skeleton is so manifestly the natural ground-work of a
+dramatic performance that the playwrights of the Italian <i>commedia dell'
+arte</i> wrote nothing more than a scheme of scenes, and left the actors to
+do the rest. The same practice prevailed in early Elizabethan days, as
+one or two MS. &quot;Plats,&quot; designed to be hung up in the wings, are extant
+to testify. The transition from extempore acting regulated by a scenario
+to the formal learning of parts falls within the historical period of
+the German stage. It seems probable that the romantic playwrights of the
+sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, both in England and in Spain, may
+have adopted a method not unlike that of the drama of improvisation,
+that is to say, they may have drawn out a scheme of entrances and exits,
+and then let their characters discourse (on paper) as their fancy
+prompted. So, at least, the copious fluency of their dialogue seems to
+suggest. But the typical modern play is a much more close-knit organism,
+in which every word has to be weighed far more carefully than it was by
+playwrights who stood near to the days of improvisation, and could
+indulge in &quot;the large utterance of the early gods.&quot; Consequently it
+would seem that, until a play has been thought out very clearly and in
+great detail, any scheme of entrances and exits ought to be merely
+provisional and subject to indefinite modification. A modern play is not
+a framework of story loosely draped in a more or less gorgeous robe of
+language. There is, or ought to be, a close interdependence between
+action, character and dialogue, which forbids a playwright to tie his
+hands very far in advance.</p>
+
+<p>As a rule, then, it would seem to be an unfavourable sign when a drama
+presents itself at an early stage with a fixed and unalterable outline.
+The result may be a powerful, logical, well-knit piece of work; but the
+breath of life will scarcely be in it. Room should be left as long as
+possible for unexpected developments of character. If your characters
+are innocent of unexpected developments, the less characters they.<a name="FNanchor23"></a><a href="#Footnote_23"><sup>[23]</sup></a>
+Not that I, personally, have any faith in those writers of fiction, be
+they playwrights or novelists, who contend that they do not speak
+through the mouths of their personages, but rather let their personages
+speak through them. &quot;I do not invent or create&quot; I have heard an eminent
+novelist say: &quot;I simply record; my characters speak and act, and I write
+down their sayings and doings.&quot; This author may be a fine psychologist
+for purposes of fiction, but I question his insight into his own mental
+processes. The apparent spontaneity of a character's proceedings is a
+pure illusion. It means no more than that the imagination, once set in
+motion along a given line, moves along that line with an ease and
+freedom which seems to its possessor preternatural and almost
+uncanny.<a name="FNanchor24"></a><a href="#Footnote_24"><sup>[24]</sup></a></p>
+
+<p>Most authors, however, who have any real gift for character-creation
+probably fall more or less under this illusion, though they are sane
+enough and modest enough to realize that an illusion it is.<a name="FNanchor25"></a><a href="#Footnote_25"><sup>[25]</sup></a> A
+character will every now and then seem to take the bit between his teeth
+and say and do things for which his creator feels himself hardly
+responsible. The playwright's scheme should not, then, until the latest
+possible moment, become so hard and fast as to allow his characters no
+elbow room for such manifestations of spontaneity. And this is only one
+of several forms of afterthought which may arise as the play develops.
+The playwright may all of a sudden see that a certain character is
+superfluous, or that a new character is needed, or that a new
+relationship between two characters would simplify matters, or that a
+scene that he has placed in the first act ought to be in the second, or
+that he can dispense with it altogether, or that it reveals too much to
+the audience and must be wholly recast.<a name="FNanchor26"></a><a href="#Footnote_26"><sup>[26]</sup></a></p>
+
+<p>These are only a few of the re-adjustments which have constantly to be
+made if a play is shaping itself by a process of vital growth; and that
+is why the playwright may be advised to keep his material fluid as long
+as he can. Ibsen had written large portions of the play now known to us
+as <i>Rosmersholm</i> before he decided that Rebecca should not be married to
+Rosmer. He also, at a comparatively late stage, did away with two
+daughters whom he had at first given to Rosmer, and decided to make her
+childlessness the main cause of Beata's tragedy.</p>
+
+<p>Perhaps I insist too strongly on the advisability of treating a dramatic
+theme as clay to be modelled and remodelled, rather than as wood or
+marble to be carved unalterably and once for all. If so, it is because
+of a personal reminiscence. In my early youth, I had, like everybody
+else, ambitions in the direction of play-writing; and it was my
+inability to keep a theme plastic that convinced me of my lack of
+talent. It pleased me greatly to draw out a detailed scenario, working
+up duly to a situation at the end of each act; and, once made, that
+scenario was like a cast-iron mould into which the dialogue had simply
+to be poured. The result was that the play had all the merits of a
+logical, well-ordered essay. My situations worked out like the Q.E.D.'s
+of Euclid. My characters obstinately refused to come to life, or to take
+the bit between their teeth. They were simply cog-wheels in a
+pre-arranged mechanism. In one respect, my two or three plays were
+models--in respect of brevity and conciseness. I was never troubled by
+the necessity of cutting down--so cruel a necessity to many
+playwrights.<a name="FNanchor27"></a><a href="#Footnote_27"><sup>[27]</sup></a> My difficulty was rather to find enough for my
+characters to say--for they never wanted to say anything that was not
+strictly germane to the plot. It was this that made me despair of
+play-writing, and realize that my mission was to teach other people how
+to write plays. And, similarly, the aspirant who finds that his people
+never want to say more than he can allow them to say--that they never
+rush headlong into blind alleys, or do things that upset the balance of
+the play and have to be resolutely undone--that aspirant will do well
+not to be over-confident of his dramatic calling and election. There may
+be authors who can write vital plays, as Shakespeare is said (on rather
+poor evidence)<a name="FNanchor28"></a><a href="#Footnote_28"><sup>[28]</sup></a> to have done, without blotting a line; but I believe
+them to be rare. In our day, the great playwright is more likely to be
+he who does not shrink, on occasion, from blotting an act or two.</p>
+
+<p>There is a modern French dramatist who writes, with success, such plays
+as I might have written had I combined a strong philosophical faculty
+with great rhetorical force and fluency. The dramas of M. Paul Hervieu
+have all the neatness and cogency of a geometrical demonstration. One
+imagines that, for M. Hervieu, the act of composition means merely the
+careful filling in of a scenario as neat and complete as a schedule.<a name="FNanchor29"></a><a href="#Footnote_29"><sup>[29]</sup></a>
+But for that very reason, despite their undoubted intellectual power, M.
+Hervieu's dramas command our respect rather than our enthusiasm. The
+dramatist should aim at <i>being</i> logical without <i>seeming</i> so.<a name="FNanchor30"></a><a href="#Footnote_30"><sup>[30]</sup></a></p>
+
+<p>It is sometimes said that a playwright ought to construct his play
+backwards, and even to write his last act first.<a name="FNanchor31"></a><a href="#Footnote_31"><sup>[31]</sup></a> This doctrine
+belongs to the period of the well-made play, when climax was regarded as
+the one thing needful in dramatic art, and anticlimax as the
+unforgivable sin. Nowadays, we do not insist that every play should end
+with a tableau, or with an emphatic <i>mot de la fin</i>. We are more willing
+to accept a quiet, even an indecisive, ending.<a name="FNanchor32"></a><a href="#Footnote_32"><sup>[32]</sup></a> Nevertheless it is
+and must ever be true that, at a very early period in the scheming of
+his play, the playwright ought to assure himself that his theme is
+capable of a satisfactory ending. Of course this phrase does not imply a
+&quot;happy ending,&quot; but one which satisfies the author as being artistic,
+effective, inevitable (in the case of a serious play), or, in one word,
+&quot;right.&quot; An obviously makeshift ending can never be desirable, either
+from the ideal or from the practical point of view. Many excellent plays
+have been wrecked on this rock. The very frequent complaint that &quot;the
+last act is weak&quot; is not always or necessarily a just reproach; but it
+is so when the author has clearly been at a loss for an ending, and has
+simply huddled his play up in a conventional and perfunctory fashion. It
+may even be said that some apparently promising themes are deceptive in
+their promise, since they are inherently incapable of a satisfactory
+ending. The playwright should by all means make sure that he has not run
+up against one of these blind-alley themes.<a name="FNanchor33"></a><a href="#Footnote_33"><sup>[33]</sup></a> He should, at an early
+point, see clearly the end for which he is making, and be sure that it
+is an end which he actively desires, not merely one which satisfies
+convention, or which &quot;will have to do.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>Some dramatists, when a play is provisionally mapped out, do not attempt
+to begin at the beginning and write it as a coherent whole, but make a
+dash first at the more salient and critical scenes, or those which
+specially attract their imagination. On such a point every author must
+obviously be a law unto himself. From the theoretical point of view, one
+can only approve the practice, since it certainly makes for plasticity.
+It is evident that a detached scene, written while those that lead up to
+it are as yet but vaguely conceived, must be subject to indefinite
+modification.<a name="FNanchor34"></a><a href="#Footnote_34"><sup>[34]</sup></a> In several of Ibsen's very roughest drafts, we find
+short passages of dialogue sketched out even before the names have been
+assigned to the characters, showing that some of his earliest ideas came
+to him, as it were, ready dramatized. One would be tempted to hope much
+of an author who habitually and unaffectedly thus &quot;lisped in dialogue
+for the dialogue came.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>Ought the playwright, at an early stage in the process of each act, to
+have the details of its scene clearly before him? Ought he to draw out a
+scene-plot, and know, from moment to moment, just where each character
+is, whether He is standing on the hearthrug and She sitting on the
+settee, or <i>vice versa</i>? There is no doubt that furniture, properties,
+accidents of environment, play a much larger part in modern drama than
+they did on the Elizabethan, the eighteenth century, or even the
+early-Victorian stage. Some of us, who are not yet centenarians, can
+remember to have seen rooms on the stage with no furniture at all except
+two or three chairs &quot;painted on the flat.&quot; Under such conditions, it was
+clearly useless for the playwright to trouble his head about furniture,
+and even &quot;positions&quot; might well be left for arrangement at rehearsal.
+This carelessness of the environment, however, is no longer possible.
+Whether we like it or no (and some theorists do not like it at all),
+scenery has ceased to be a merely suggestive background against which
+the figures stand out in high relief. The stage now aims at presenting a
+complete picture, with the figures, not &quot;a little out of the picture,&quot;
+but completely in it. This being so, the playwright must evidently, at
+some point in the working out of his theme, visualize the stage-picture
+in considerable detail; and we find that almost all modern dramatists
+do, as a matter of fact, pay great attention to what may be called the
+topography of their scenes, and the shifting &quot;positions&quot; of their
+characters. The question is: at what stage of the process of composition
+ought this visualization to occur? Here, again, it would be absurd to
+lay down a general rule; but I am inclined to think, both theoretically
+and from what can be gathered of the practice of the best dramatists,
+that it is wisest to reserve it for a comparatively late stage. A
+playwright of my acquaintance, and a very remarkable playwright too,
+used to scribble the first drafts of his play in little notebooks, which
+he produced from his pocket whenever he had a moment to spare--often on
+the top of an omnibus. Only when the first draft was complete did he
+proceed to set the scenes, as it were, and map out the stage-management.
+On the other hand, one has heard of playwrights whose first step in
+setting to work upon a particular act was to construct a complete model
+of the scene, and people it with manikins to represent the characters.
+As a general practice, this is scarcely to be commended. It is wiser,
+one fancies, to have the matter of the scene pretty fully roughed-out
+before details of furniture, properties, and position are arranged.<a name="FNanchor35"></a><a href="#Footnote_35"><sup>[35]</sup></a>
+It may happen, indeed, that some natural phenomenon, some property or
+piece of furniture, is the very pivot of the scene; in which case it
+must, of course, be posited from the first. From the very moment of his
+conceiving the fourth act of <i>Le Tartufe</i>, Moli&egrave;re must have had clearly
+in view the table under which Orgon hides; and Sheridan cannot have got
+very far with the Screen Scene before he had mentally placed the screen.
+But even where a great deal turns on some individual object, the
+detailed arrangements of the scene may in most cases be taken for
+granted until a late stage in its working out.</p>
+
+<p>One proviso, however, must be made; where any important effect depends
+upon a given object, or a particular arrangement of the scene, the
+playwright cannot too soon assure himself that the object comes well
+within the physical possibilities of the stage, and that the arrangement
+is optically<a name="FNanchor36"></a><a href="#Footnote_36"><sup>[36]</sup></a> possible and effective. Few things, indeed, are quite
+impossible to the modern stage; but there are many that had much better
+not be attempted. It need scarcely be added that the more serious a play
+is, or aspires to be, the more carefully should the author avoid any
+such effects as call for the active collaboration of the
+stage-carpenter, machinist, or electrician. Even when a mechanical
+effect can be produced to perfection, the very fact that the audience
+cannot but admire the ingenuity displayed, and wonder &quot;how it is done,&quot;
+implies a failure of that single-minded attention to the essence of the
+matter in hand which the dramatist would strive to beget and maintain. A
+small but instructive example of a difficult effect, such as the prudent
+playwright will do well to avoid, occurs in the third act of Ibsen's
+<i>Little Eyolf</i>. During the greater part of the act, the flag in
+Allmers's garden is hoisted to half-mast in token of mourning; until at
+the end, when he and Rita attain a serener frame of mind, he runs it up
+to the truck. Now, from the poetic and symbolic point of view, this flag
+is all that can be desired; but from the practical point of view it
+presents grave difficulties. Nothing is so pitifully ineffective as a
+flag in a dead calm, drooping nervelessly against the mast; and though,
+no doubt, by an ingenious arrangement of electric fans, it might be
+possible to make this flag flutter in the breeze, the very fact of its
+doing so would tend to set the audience wondering by what mechanism the
+effect was produced, instead of attending to the soul-struggles of Rita
+and Allmers. It would be absurd to blame Ibsen for overriding theatrical
+prudence in such a case; I merely point out to beginners that it is
+wise, before relying on an effect of this order, to make sure that it
+is, not only possible, but convenient from the practical point of view.
+In one or two other cases Ibsen strained the resources of the stage. The
+illumination in the last act of <i>Pillars of Society</i> cannot be carried
+out as he describes it; or rather, if it were carried out on some
+exceptionally large and well-equipped stage, the feat of the mechanician
+would eclipse the invention of the poet. On the other hand, the abode of
+the Wild Duck in the play of that name is a conception entirely
+consonant with the optics of the theatre; for no detail at all need be,
+or ought to be, visible, and a vague effect of light is all that is
+required. Only in his last melancholy effort did Ibsen, in a play
+designed for representation, demand scenic effects entirely beyond the
+resources of any theatre not specially fitted for spectacular drama, and
+possible, even in such a theatre, only in some ridiculously
+makeshift form.</p>
+
+<p>There are two points of routine on which I am compelled to speak in no
+uncertain voice--two practices which I hold to be almost equally
+condemnable. In the first place, no playwright who understands the
+evolution of the modern theatre can nowadays use in his stage-directions
+the abhorrent jargon of the early nineteenth century. When one comes
+across a manuscript bespattered with such cabalistic signs as &quot;R.2.E.,&quot;
+&quot;R.C.,&quot; &quot;L.C.,&quot; &quot;L.U.E.,&quot; and so forth, one sees at a glance that the
+writer has neither studied dramatic literature nor thought out for
+himself the conditions of the modern theatre, but has found his dramatic
+education between the buff covers of <i>French's Acting Edition</i>. Some
+beginners imagine that a plentiful use of such abbreviations will be
+taken as a proof of their familiarity with the stage; whereas, in fact,
+it only shows their unfamiliarity with theatrical history. They might as
+well set forth to describe a modern battleship in the nautical
+terminology of Captain Marryat. &quot;Right First Entrance,&quot; &quot;Left Upper
+Entrance,&quot; and so forth, are terms belonging to the period when there
+were no &quot;box&quot; rooms or &quot;set&quot; exteriors on the stage, when the sides of
+each scene were composed of &quot;wings&quot; shoved on in grooves, and entrances
+could be made between each pair of wings. Thus, &quot;R. 1 E.&quot; meant the
+entrance between the proscenium and the first &quot;wing&quot; on the right, &quot;R. 2
+E.&quot; meant the entrance between the first pair of &quot;wings,&quot; and so forth.
+&quot;L.U.E.&quot; meant the entrance at the left between the last &quot;wing&quot; and the
+back cloth. Now grooves and &quot;wings&quot; have disappeared from the stage. The
+&quot;box&quot; room is entered, like any room in real life, by doors or French
+windows; and the only rational course is to state the position of your
+doors in your opening stage-direction, and thereafter to say in plain
+language by which door an entrance or an exit is to be made. In exterior
+scenes where, for example, trees or clumps of shrubbery answer in a
+measure to the old &quot;wings,&quot; the old terminology may not be quite
+meaningless; but it is far better eschewed. It is a good general rule to
+avoid, so far as possible, expressions which show that the author has a
+stage scene, and not an episode of real life, before his eyes. Men of
+the theatre are the last to be impressed by theatrical jargon; and when
+the play comes to be printed, the general reader is merely bewildered
+and annoyed by technicalities, which tend, moreover, to disturb
+his illusion.</p>
+
+<p>A still more emphatic warning must be given against another and more
+recent abuse in the matter of stage-directions. The &quot;L.U.E.'s,&quot; indeed,
+are bound very soon to die a natural death. The people who require to be
+warned against them are, as a rule, scarcely worth warning. But it is
+precisely the cleverest people (to use clever in a somewhat narrow
+sense) who are apt to be led astray by Mr. Bernard Shaw's practice of
+expanding his stage-directions into essays, disquisitions, monologues,
+pamphlets. This is a practice which goes far to justify the belief of
+some foreign critics that the English, or, since Mr. Shaw is in
+question, let us say the inhabitants of the British Islands, are
+congenitally incapable of producing a work of pure art. Our
+novelists--Fielding, Thackeray, George Eliot--have been sufficiently,
+though perhaps not unjustly, called over the coals for their habit of
+coming in front of their canvas, and either gossiping with the reader or
+preaching at him. But, if it be a sound maxim that the novelist should
+not obtrude his personality on his reader, how much more is this true of
+the dramatist! When the dramatist steps to the footlights and begins to
+lecture, all illusion is gone. It may be said that, as a matter of fact,
+this does not occur: that on the stage we hear no more of the
+disquisitions of Mr. Shaw and his imitators than we do of the curt, and
+often non-existent, stage-directions of Shakespeare and his
+contemporaries. To this the reply is twofold. First, the very fact that
+these disquisitions are written proves that the play is designed to be
+printed and read, and that we are, therefore, justified in applying to
+it the standard of what may be called literary illusion. Second, when a
+playwright gets into the habit of talking around his characters, he
+inevitably, even if unconsciously, slackens his endeavour to make them
+express themselves as completely as may be in their own proper medium of
+dramatic action and dialogue. You cannot with impunity mix up two
+distinct forms of art--the drama and the sociological essay or lecture.
+To Mr. Shaw, of course, much may, and must, be forgiven. His
+stage-directions are so brilliant that some one, some day, will
+assuredly have them spoken by a lecturer in the orchestra while the
+action stands still on the stage. Thus, he will have begotten a bastard,
+but highly entertaining, form of art. My protest has no practical
+application to him, for he is a standing exception to all rules. It is
+to the younger generation that I appeal not to be misled by his
+seductive example. They have little chance of rivalling him as
+sociological essayists; but if they treat their art seriously, and as a
+pure art, they may easily surpass him as dramatists. By adopting his
+practice they will tend to produce, not fine works of art, but inferior
+sociological documents. They will impair their originality and spoil
+their plays in order to do comparatively badly what Mr. Shaw has done
+incomparably well.</p>
+
+<p>The common-sense rule as to stage directions is absolutely plain; be
+they short, or be they long, they ought always to be <i>impersonal</i>. The
+playwright who cracks jokes in his stage-directions, or indulges in
+graces of style, is intruding himself between the spectator and the work
+of art, to the inevitable detriment of the illusion. In preparing a play
+for the press, the author should make his stage-directions as brief as
+is consistent with clearness. Few readers will burden their memory with
+long and detailed descriptions. When a new character of importance
+appears, a short description of his or her personal appearance and dress
+may be helpful to the reader; but even this should be kept impersonal.
+Moreover, as a play has always to be read before it can be rehearsed or
+acted, it is no bad plan to make the stage-directions, from the first,
+such as tend to bring the play home clearly to the reader's mental
+vision. And here I may mention a principle, based on more than mere
+convenience, which some playwrights observe with excellent results. Not
+merely in writing stage-directions, but in visualizing a scene, the idea
+of the stage should, as far as possible, be banished from the author's
+mind. He should see and describe the room, the garden, the sea-shore, or
+whatever the place of his action may be, not as a stage-scene, but as a
+room, garden, or sea-shore in the real world. The cultivation of this
+habit ought to be, and I believe is in some cases, a safeguard against
+theatricality.</p>
+
+
+
+<br><br><hr style="width: 35%;"><br><br>
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_V"></a>CHAPTER V</h2>
+
+<p>DRAMATIS PERSONAE</p>
+<br>
+
+<p>The theme being chosen, the next step will probably be to determine what
+characters shall be employed in developing it. Most playwrights, I take
+it, draw up a provisional Dramatis Personae before beginning the serious
+work of construction. Ibsen seems always to have done so; but, in some
+of his plays, the list of persons was at first considerably larger than
+it ultimately became. The frugal poet sometimes saved up the characters
+rejected from one play, and used them in another. Thus Boletta and Hilda
+Wangel were originally intended to have been the daughters of Rosmer and
+Beata; and the delightful Foldal of <i>John Gabriel Borkman</i> was a
+character left over from <i>The Lady from the Sea</i>.</p>
+
+<p>The playwright cannot proceed far in planning out his work without
+determining, roughly at any rate, what auxiliary characters he means to
+employ. There are in every play essential characters, without whom the
+theme is unthinkable, and auxiliary characters, not indispensable to the
+theme, but simply convenient for filling in the canvas and carrying on
+the action. It is not always possible to decide whether a character is
+essential or auxiliary--it depends upon how we define the theme. In
+<i>Hamlet</i>, for example, Hamlet, Claudius, and Gertrude are manifestly
+essential: for the theme is the hesitancy of a young man of a certain
+temperament in taking vengeance upon the seducer of his mother and
+murderer of his father. But is Ophelia essential, or merely auxiliary?
+Essential, if we consider Hamlet's pessimistic feeling as to woman and
+the &quot;breeding of sinners&quot; a necessary part of his character; auxiliary,
+if we take the view that without this feeling he would still have been
+Hamlet, and the action, to all intents and purposes, the same. The
+remaining characters, on the other hand, are clearly auxiliary. This is
+true even of the Ghost: for Hamlet might have learnt of his father's
+murder in fifty other ways.</p>
+
+<p>Polonius, Laertes, Horatio, and the rest might all have been utterly
+different, or might never have existed at all, and yet the essence of
+the play might have remained intact.</p>
+
+<p>It would be perfectly possible to write a <i>Hamlet</i> after the manner of
+Racine, in which there should be only six personages instead of
+Shakespeare's six-and-twenty: and in this estimate I assume Ophelia to
+be an essential character. The dramatis personae would be: Hamlet, his
+confidant; Ophelia, her confidant; and the King and Queen, who would
+serve as confidants to each other. Indeed, an economy of one person
+might be affected by making the Queen (as she naturally might) play the
+part of confidant to Ophelia.</p>
+
+<p>Shakespeare, to be sure, did not deliberately choose between his own
+method and that of Racine. Classic concentration was wholly unsuited to
+the physical conditions of the Elizabethan stage, on which external
+movement and bustle were imperatively demanded. But the modern
+playwright has a wide latitude of choice in this purely technical
+matter. He may work out his plot with the smallest possible number of
+characters, or he may introduce a crowd of auxiliary personages. The
+good craftsman will be guided by the nature of his theme. In a broad
+social study or a picturesque romance, you may have as many auxiliary
+figures as you please. In a subtle comedy, or a psychological tragedy,
+the essential characters should have the stage as much as possible to
+themselves. In Becque's <i>La Parisienne</i> there are only four characters
+and a servant; in Rostand's <i>Cyrano de Bergerac</i> there are fifty-four
+personages named in the playbill, to say nothing of supernumeraries. In
+<i>Peer Gynt</i>, a satiric phantasmagory, Ibsen introduces some fifty
+individual characters, with numberless supernumeraries; in <i>An Enemy of
+the People</i>, a social comedy, he has eleven characters and a crowd; for
+<i>Ghosts</i> and <i>Rosmersholm</i>, psychological tragedies, six persons apiece
+are sufficient.</p>
+
+<p>It can scarcely be necessary, at this time of day, to say much on the
+subject of nomenclature. One does occasionally, in manuscripts of a
+quite hopeless type, find the millionaire's daughter figuring as &quot;Miss
+Aurea Golden,&quot; and her poor but sprightly cousin as &quot;Miss Lalage Gay&quot;;
+but the veriest tyro realizes, as a rule, that this sort of punning
+characterization went out with the eighteenth century, or survived into
+the nineteenth century only as a flagrant anachronism, like
+knee-breeches and hair-powder.</p>
+
+<p>A curious essay might be written on the reasons why such names as Sir
+John Brute, Sir Tunbelly Clumsy, Sir Peter Teazle, Sir Anthony Absolute,
+Sir Lucius O'Trigger, Lord Foppington, Lord Rake, Colonel Bully,
+Lovewell, Heartfree, Gripe, Shark and the rest were regarded as a matter
+of course in &quot;the comedy of manners,&quot; but have become offensive to-day,
+except in deliberate imitations of the eighteenth-century style. The
+explanation does not lie merely in the contrast between &quot;conventional&quot;
+comedy and &quot;realistic&quot; drama. Our forefathers (whatever Lamb may say)
+did not consciously place their comedy in a realm of convention, but
+generally considered themselves, and sometimes were, realists. The
+fashion of label-names, if we may call them so, came down from the
+Elizabethans, who, again, borrowed it from the Mediaeval Moralities.<a name="FNanchor37"></a><a href="#Footnote_37"><sup>[37]</sup></a>
+Shakespeare himself gave us Master Slender and Justice Shallow; but it
+was in the Jonsonian comedy of types that the practice of advertising a
+&quot;humour&quot; or &quot;passion&quot; in a name (English or Italian) established itself
+most firmly. Hence such strange appellatives as Sir Epicure Mammon, Sir
+Amorous La Foole, Morose, Wellbred, Downright, Fastidius Brisk, Volpone,
+Corbaccio, Sordido, and Fallace. After the Restoration, Jonson, Beaumont
+and Fletcher, and Massinger were, for a time, more popular than
+Shakespeare; so that the label-names seemed to have the sanction of the
+giants that were before the Flood. Even when comedy began to deal with
+individuals rather than mere incarnations of a single &quot;humour,&quot; the
+practice of giving them obvious pseudonyms held its ground. Probably it
+was reinforced by the analogous practice which obtained in journalism,
+in which real persons were constantly alluded to (and libelled) under
+fictitious designations, more or less transparent to the initiated. Thus
+a label-name did not carry with it a sense of unreality, but rather,
+perhaps, a vague suggestion of covert reference to a real person. I must
+not here attempt to trace the stages by which the fashion went out. It
+could doubtless be shown that the process of change ran parallel to the
+shrinkage of the &quot;apron&quot; and the transformation of the platform-stage
+into the picture-stage. That transformation was completed about the
+middle of the nineteenth century; and it was about that time that
+label-names made their latest appearances in works of any artistic
+pretension--witness the Lady Gay Spanker of <i>London Assurance</i>, and the
+Captain Dudley (or &quot;Deadly&quot;) Smooth of <i>Money</i>. Faint traces of the
+practice survive in T.W. Robertson, as in his master, Thackeray. But it
+was in his earliest play of any note that he called a journalist Stylus.
+In his later comedies the names are admirably chosen: they are
+characteristic without eccentricity or punning. One feels that Eccles in
+<i>Caste</i> could not possibly have borne any other name. How much less
+living would he be had he been called Mr. Soaker or Mr. Tosspot!</p>
+
+<p>Characteristic without eccentricity--that is what a name ought to be. As
+the characteristic quality depends upon a hundred indefinable,
+subconscious associations, it is clearly impossible to suggest any
+principle of choice. The only general rule that can be laid down is that
+the key of the nomenclature, so to speak, may rightly vary with the key
+of the play--that farcical names are, within limits, admissible in
+farce, eccentric names in eccentric comedy, while soberly appropriate
+names are alone in place in serious plays. Some dramatists are
+habitually happy in their nomenclature, others much less so. Ibsen would
+often change a name three or four times in the course of writing a play,
+until at last he arrived at one which seemed absolutely to fit the
+character; but the appropriateness of his names is naturally lost upon
+foreign audiences.</p>
+
+<p>One word may perhaps be said on the recent fashion--not to say fad--of
+suppressing in the printed play the traditional list of &quot;Dramatis
+Personae.&quot; Bj&ouml;rnson, in some of his later plays, was, so far as I am
+aware, the first of the moderns to adopt this plan. I do not know
+whether his example has influenced certain English playwrights, or
+whether they arrived independently at the same austere principle, by
+sheer force of individual genius. The matter is a trifling one--so
+trifling that the departure from established practice has something of
+the air of a pedantry. It is not, on the whole, to be approved. It adds
+perceptibly to the difficulty which some readers experience in picking
+up the threads of a play; and it deprives other readers of a real and
+appreciable pleasure of anticipation. There is a peculiar and not
+irrational charm in looking down a list of quite unknown names, and
+thinking: &quot;In the course of three hours, I shall know these people: I
+shall have read their hearts: I shall have lived with them through a
+great crisis in their lives: some of them may be my friends for ever.&quot;
+It is one of the glories and privileges of the dramatist's calling that
+he can arouse in us this eager and poignant expectation; and I cannot
+commend his wisdom in deliberately taking the edge off it, and making us
+feel as though we were not sitting down to a play, but to a sort of
+conversational novel. A list of characters, it is true, may also affect
+one with acute anticipations of boredom; but I have never yet found a
+play less tedious by reason of the suppression of the &quot;Dramatis
+Personae.&quot;</p>
+
+
+
+<br><br><hr style="width: 35%;"><br><br>
+<h2><a name="BOOK_II"></a>BOOK II</h2>
+
+<p>THE BEGINNING</p>
+
+
+
+<br><br><hr style="width: 35%;"><br><br>
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_VI"></a>CHAPTER VI</h2>
+
+<p>THE POINT OF ATTACK: SHAKESPEARE AND IBSEN</p>
+<br>
+
+<p>Though, as we have already noted, the writing of plays does not always
+follow the chronological sequence of events, in discussing the process
+of their evolution we are bound to assume that the playwright begins at
+the beginning, and proceeds in orderly fashion, by way of the middle, to
+the end. It was one of Aristotle's requirements that a play should have
+a beginning, middle and end; and though it may seem that it scarcely
+needed an Aristotle to lay down so self-evident a proposition, the fact
+is that playwrights are more than sufficiently apt to ignore or despise
+the rule.<a name="FNanchor38"></a><a href="#Footnote_38"><sup>[38]</sup></a> Especially is there a tendency to rebel against the
+requirement that a play should have an end. We have seen a good many
+plays of late which do not end, but simply leave off: at their head we
+might perhaps place Ibsen's <i>Ghosts</i>. But let us not anticipate. For the
+moment, what we have to inquire is where, and how, a play ought
+to begin.</p>
+
+<p>In life there are no such things as beginnings. Even a man's birth is a
+quite arbitrary point at which to launch his biography; for the
+determining factors in his career are to be found in persons, events,
+and conditions that existed before he was ever thought of. For the
+biographer, however, and for the novelist as a writer of fictitious
+biography, birth forms a good conventional starting-point. He can give a
+chapter or so to &quot;Ancestry,&quot; and then relate the adventures of his hero
+from the cradle onwards. But the dramatist, as we have seen, deals, not
+with protracted sequences of events, but with short, sharp crises. The
+question for him, therefore, is: at what moment of the crisis, or of its
+antecedents, he had better ring up his curtain? At this point he is like
+the photographer studying his &quot;finder&quot; in order to determine how much of
+a given prospect he can &quot;get in.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>The answer to the question depends on many things, but chiefly on the
+nature of the crisis and the nature of the impression which the
+playwright desires to make upon his audience. If his play be a comedy,
+and if his object be gently and quietly to interest and entertain, the
+chances are that he begins by showing us his personages in their normal
+state, concisely indicates their characters, circumstances and
+relations, and then lets the crisis develop from the outset before our
+eyes. If, on the other hand, his play be of a more stirring description,
+and he wants to seize the spectator's attention firmly from the start,
+he will probably go straight at his crisis, plunging, perhaps, into the
+very middle of it, even at the cost of having afterwards to go back in
+order to put the audience in possession of the antecedent circumstances.
+In a third type of play, common of late years, and especially affected
+by Ibsen, the curtain rises on a surface aspect of profound peace, which
+is presently found to be but a thin crust over an absolutely volcanic
+condition of affairs, the origin of which has to be traced backwards, it
+may be for many years.</p>
+
+<p>Let us glance at a few of Shakespeare's openings, and consider at what
+points he attacks his various themes. Of his comedies, all except one
+begin with a simple conversation, showing a state of affairs from which
+the crisis develops with more or less rapidity, but in which it is as
+yet imperceptibly latent. In no case does he plunge into the middle of
+his subject, leaving its antecedents to be stated in what is technically
+called an &quot;exposition.&quot; Neither in tragedy nor in comedy, indeed, was
+this Shakespeare's method. In his historical plays he relied to some
+extent on his hearers' knowledge of history, whether gathered from books
+or from previous plays of the historical series; and where such
+knowledge was not to be looked for, he would expound the situation in
+good set terms, like those of a Euripidean Prologue. But the
+chronicle-play is a species apart, and practically an extinct species:
+we need not pause to study its methods. In his fictitious plays, with
+two notable exceptions, it was Shakespeare's constant practice to bring
+the whole action within the frame of the picture, opening at such a
+point that no retrospect should be necessary, beyond what could be
+conveyed in a few casual words. The exceptions are <i>The Tempest</i> and
+<i>Hamlet</i>, to which we shall return in due course.</p>
+
+<p>How does <i>The Merchant of Venice</i> open? With a long conversation
+exhibiting the character of Antonio, the friendship between him and
+Bassanio, the latter's financial straits, and his purpose of wooing
+Portia. The second scene displays the character of Portia, and informs
+us of her father's device with regard to her marriage; but this
+information is conveyed in three or four lines. Not till the third scene
+do we see or hear of Shylock, and not until very near the end of the act
+is there any foreshadowing of what is to be the main crisis of the play.
+Not a single antecedent event has to be narrated to us; for the mere
+fact that Antonio has been uncivil to Shylock, and shown disapproval of
+his business methods, can scarcely be regarded as a preliminary outside
+the frame of the picture.</p>
+
+<p>In <i>As You Like It</i> there are no preliminaries to be stated beyond the
+facts that Orlando is at enmity with his elder brother, and that Duke
+Frederick has usurped the coronet and dukedom of Rosalind's father.
+These facts being made apparent without any sort of formal exposition,
+the crisis of the play rapidly announces itself in the wrestling-match
+and its sequels. In <i>Much Ado About Nothing</i> there is even less of
+antecedent circumstance to be imparted. We learn in the first scene,
+indeed, that Beatrice and Benedick have already met and crossed swords;
+but this is not in the least essential to the action; the play might
+have been to all intents and purposes the same had they never heard of
+each other until after the rise of the curtain. In <i>Twelfth Night</i> there
+is a semblance of a retrospective exposition in the scene between Viola
+and the Captain; but it is of the simplest nature, and conveys no
+information beyond what, at a later period, would have been imparted on
+the playbill, thus--<br>
+<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&quot;Orsino, Duke of Illyria, in love with Olivia.<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;Olivia, an heiress, in mourning for her brother,&quot;<br>
+<br>
+and so forth. In <i>The Taming of the Shrew</i> there are no antecedents
+whatever to be stated. It is true that Lucentio, in the opening speech,
+is good enough to inform Tranio who he is and what he is doing
+there--facts with which Tranio is already perfectly acquainted. But this
+was merely a conventional opening, excused by the fashion of the time;
+it was in no sense a necessary exposition. For the rest, the crisis of
+the play--the battle between Katherine and Petruchio--begins, develops,
+and ends before our very eyes. In <i>The Winter's Tale</i>, a brief
+conversation between Camillo and Archidamus informs us that the King of
+Bohemia is paying a visit to the King of Sicilia; and that is absolutely
+all we need to know. It was not even necessary that it should be
+conveyed to us in this way. The situation would be entirely
+comprehensible if the scene between Camillo and Archidamus were omitted.</p>
+
+<p>It is needless to go through the whole list of comedies. The broad fact
+is that in all the plays commonly so described, excepting only <i>The
+Tempest</i>, the whole action comes within the frame of the picture. In
+<i>The Tempest</i> the poet employs a form of opening which otherwise he
+reserves for tragedies. The first scene is simply an animated tableau,
+calculated to arrest the spectator's attention, without conveying to him
+any knowledge either of situation or character. Such gleams of character
+as do, in fact, appear in the dialogue, are scarcely perceived in the
+hurly-burly of the storm. Then, in the calm which ensues, Prospero
+expounds to Miranda in great detail the antecedents of the crisis now
+developing. It might almost seem, indeed, that the poet, in this, his
+poetic last-will-and-testament, intended to warn his successors against
+the dangers of a long narrative exposition; for Prospero's story sends
+Miranda to sleep. Be this as it may, we have here a case in which
+Shakespeare deliberately adopted the plan of placing on the stage, not
+the whole crisis, but only its culmination, leaving its earlier stages
+to be conveyed in narrative.<a name="FNanchor39"></a><a href="#Footnote_39"><sup>[39]</sup></a> It would have been very easy for him to
+have begun at the beginning and shown us in action the events narrated
+by Prospero. This course would have involved no greater leap, either in
+time or space, than he had perpetrated in the almost contemporary
+<i>Winter's Tale</i>; and it cannot be said that there would have been any
+difficulty in compressing into three acts, or even two, the essentials
+of the action of the play as we know it. His reasons for departing from
+his usual practice were probably connected with the particular occasion
+for which the play was written. He wanted to produce a masque rather
+than a drama. We must not, therefore, attach too much significance to
+the fact that in almost the only play in which Shakespeare seems to have
+built entirely out of his own head, with no previous play or novel to
+influence him, he adopted the plan of going straight to the catastrophe,
+in which he had been anticipated by Sophocles (<i>Oedipus Rex</i>), and was
+to be followed by Ibsen (<i>Ghosts</i>, <i>Rosmersholm</i>, etc.).</p>
+
+<p>Coming now to the five great tragedies, we find that in four of them
+Shakespeare began, as in <i>The Tempest</i>, with a picturesque and stirring
+episode calculated to arrest the spectator's attention and awaken his
+interest, while conveying to him little or no information. The opening
+scene of <i>Romeo and Juliet</i> is simply a brawl, bringing home to us
+vividly the family feud which is the root of the tragedy, but informing
+us of nothing beyond the fact that such a feud exists. This is, indeed,
+absolutely all that we require to know. There is not a single
+preliminary circumstance, outside the limits of the play, that has to be
+explained to us. The whole tragedy germinates and culminates within what
+the prologue calls &quot;the two hours' traffick of the stage.&quot; The opening
+colloquy of the Witches in <i>Macbeth</i>, strikes the eerie keynote, but
+does nothing more. Then, in the second scene, we learn that there has
+been a great battle and that a nobleman named Macbeth has won a victory
+which covers him with laurels. This can in no sense be called an
+exposition. It is the account of a single event, not of a sequence; and
+that event is contemporary, not antecedent. In the third scene, the
+meeting of Macbeth and Banquo with the Witches, we have what may be
+called an exposition reversed; not a narrative of the past, but a
+foreshadowing of the future. Here we touch on one of the subtlest of the
+playwright's problems--the art of arousing anticipation in just the
+right measure. But that is not the matter at present in hand.<a name="FNanchor40"></a><a href="#Footnote_40"><sup>[40]</sup></a></p>
+
+<p>In the opening scene of <i>Othello</i> it is true that some talk passes
+between Iago and Roderigo before they raise the alarm and awaken
+Brabantio; but it is carefully non-expository talk; it expounds nothing
+but Iago's character. Far from being a real exception to the rule that
+Shakespeare liked to open his tragedies with a very crisply dramatic
+episode, <i>Othello</i> may rather be called its most conspicuous example.
+The rousing of Brabantio is immediately followed by the encounter
+between his men and Othello's, which so finely brings out the lofty
+character of the Moor; and only in the third scene, that of the Doge's
+Council, do we pass from shouts and swords to quiet discussion and, in a
+sense, exposition. Othello's great speech, while a vital portion of the
+drama, is in so far an exposition that it refers to events which do not
+come absolutely within the frame of the picture. But they are very
+recent, very simple, events. If Othello's speech were omitted, or cut
+down to half a dozen lines, we should know much less of his character
+and Desdemona's, but the mere action of the play would remain perfectly
+comprehensible.</p>
+
+<p><i>King Lear</i> necessarily opens with a great act of state, the partition
+of the kingdom. A few words between Kent and Gloucester show us what is
+afoot, and then, at one plunge, we are in the thick of the drama. There
+was no opportunity here for one of those picturesque tableaux, exciting
+rather than informative, which initiate the other tragedies. It would
+have had to be artificially dragged in; and it was the less necessary,
+as the partition scene took on, in a very few lines, just that
+arresting, stimulating quality which the poet seems to have desired in
+the opening of a play of this class.</p>
+
+<p>Finally, when we turn to <i>Hamlet</i>, we find a consummate example of the
+crisply-touched opening tableau, making a nervous rather than an
+intellectual appeal, informing us of nothing, but exciting a vivid,
+though quite vague, anticipation. The silent transit of the Ghost,
+desiring to speak, yet tongue-tied, is certainly one of Shakespeare's
+unrivalled masterpieces of dramatic craftsmanship. One could pretty
+safely wager that if the <i>Ur-Hamlet</i>, on which Shakespeare worked, were
+to come to light to-morrow, this particular trait would not be found in
+it. But, oddly enough, into the middle of this admirable opening
+tableau, Shakespeare inserts a formal exposition, introduced in the most
+conventional way. Marcellus, for some unexplained reason, is ignorant of
+what is evidently common knowledge as to the affairs of the realm, and
+asks to be informed; whereupon Horatio, in a speech of some twenty-five
+lines, sets forth the past relations between Norway and Denmark, and
+prepares us for the appearance of Fortinbras in the fourth act. In
+modern stage versions all this falls away, and nobody who has not
+studied the printed text is conscious of its absence. The commentators,
+indeed, have proved that Fortinbras is an immensely valuable element in
+the moral scheme of the play; but from the point of view of pure drama,
+there is not the slightest necessity for this Norwegian-Danish
+embroilment or its consequences.<a name="FNanchor41"></a><a href="#Footnote_41"><sup>[41]</sup></a> The real exposition--for <i>Hamlet</i>
+differs from the other tragedies in requiring an exposition--comes in
+the great speech of the Ghost in Scene V. The contrast between this
+speech and Horatio's lecture in the first scene, exemplifies the
+difference between a dramatized and an undramatized exposition. The
+crisis, as we now learn, began months or years before the rise of the
+curtain. It began when Claudius inveigled the affections of Gertrude;
+and it would have been possible for the poet to have started from this
+point, and shown us in action all that he in fact conveys to us by way
+of narration. His reason for choosing the latter course is abundantly
+obvious.<a name="FNanchor42"></a><a href="#Footnote_42"><sup>[42]</sup></a> Hamlet the Younger was to be the protagonist: the interest
+of the play was to centre in his mental processes. To have awakened our
+interest in Hamlet the Elder would, therefore, have been a superfluity
+and an irrelevance. Moreover (to say nothing of the fact that the Ghost
+was doubtless a popular figure in the old play, and demanded by the
+public) it was highly desirable that Hamlet's knowledge of the usurper's
+crime should come to him from a supernatural witness, who could not be
+cross-questioned or called upon to give material proof. This was the
+readiest as well as the most picturesque method of begetting in him that
+condition of doubt, real or affected, which was necessary to account for
+his behaviour. But to have shown us in action the matter of the Ghost's
+revelation would have been hopelessly to ruin its effect. A repetition
+in narrative of matters already seen in action is the grossest of
+technical blunders.<a name="FNanchor43"></a><a href="#Footnote_43"><sup>[43]</sup></a> Hamlet senior, in other words, being
+indispensable in the spirit, was superfluous in the flesh. But there was
+another and equally cogent reason for beginning the play after the
+commission of the initial crime or crimes. To have done otherwise would
+have been to discount, not only the Ghost, but the play-scene. By a
+piece of consummate ingenuity, which may, of course, have been conceived
+by the earlier playwright, the initial incidents of the story are in
+fact presented to us, in the guise of a play within the play, and as a
+means to the achievement of one of the greatest dramatic effects in all
+literature. The moment the idea of the play-scene presented itself to
+the author's mind, it became absolutely unthinkable that he should, to
+put it vulgarly, &quot;queer the pitch&quot; for the Players by showing us the
+real facts of which their performance was to be the counterfeit
+presentment. The dramatic effect of the incidents was incalculably
+heightened when they were presented, as in a looking-glass, before the
+guilty pair, with the eye of the avenger boring into their souls. And
+have we not here, perhaps, a clue to one of the most frequent and
+essential meanings of the word &quot;dramatic&quot;? May we not say that the
+dramatic quality of an incident is proportionate to the variety<a name="FNanchor44"></a><a href="#Footnote_44"><sup>[44]</sup></a> and
+intensity of the emotions involved in it?</p>
+
+<p>All this may appear too obvious to be worth setting forth at such
+length. Very likely it never occurred to Shakespeare that it was
+possible to open the play at an earlier point; so that he can hardly be
+said to have exercised a deliberate choice in the matter. Nevertheless,
+the very obviousness of the considerations involved makes this a good
+example of the importance of discovering just the right point at which
+to raise the curtain. In the case of <i>The Tempest</i>, Shakespeare plunged
+into the middle of the crisis because his object was to produce a
+philosophico-dramatic entertainment rather than a play in the strict
+sense of the word. He wanted room for the enchantments of Ariel, the
+brutishnesses of Caliban, the humours of Stephano and Trinculo--all
+elements extrinsic to the actual story. But in <i>Hamlet</i> he adopted a
+similar course for purely dramatic reasons--in order to concentrate his
+effects and present the dramatic elements of his theme at their
+highest potency.</p>
+
+<p>In sum, then, it was Shakespeare's usual practice, histories apart, to
+bring the whole action of his plays within the frame of the picture,
+leaving little or nothing to narrative exposition. The two notable
+exceptions to this rule are those we have just examined--<i>Hamlet</i> and
+<i>The Tempest</i>. Furthermore, he usually opened his comedies with quiet
+conversational passages, presenting the antecedents of the crisis with
+great deliberation. In his tragedies, on the other hand, he was apt to
+lead off with a crisp, somewhat startling passage of more or less
+vehement action, appealing rather to the nerves than to the
+intelligence--such a passage as Gustav Freytag, in his <i>Technik des
+Dramas</i>, happily entitles an <i>einleitende Akkord</i>, an introductory
+chord. It may be added that this rule holds good both for <i>Coriolanus</i>
+and for <i>Julius Caesar</i>, in which the keynote is briskly struck in
+highly animated scenes of commotion among the Roman populace.</p>
+
+<p>Let us now look at the practice of Ibsen, which offers a sharp contrast
+to that of Shakespeare. To put it briefly, the plays in which Ibsen gets
+his whole action within the frame of the picture are as exceptional as
+those in which Shakespeare does not do so.</p>
+
+<p>Ibsen's practice in this matter has been compared with that of the Greek
+dramatists, who also were apt to attack their crisis in the middle, or
+even towards the end, rather than at the beginning. It must not be
+forgotten, however, that there is one great difference between his
+position and theirs. They could almost always rely upon a general
+knowledge, on the part of the audience, of the theme with which they
+were dealing. The purpose even of the Euripidean prologue is not so much
+to state unknown facts, as to recall facts vaguely remembered, to state
+the particular version of a legend which the poet proposes to adopt, and
+to define the point in the development of the legend at which he is
+about to set his figures in motion. Ibsen, on the other hand, drew upon
+no storehouse of tradition. He had to convey to his audience everything
+that he wanted them to know; and this was often a long and complex
+series of facts.</p>
+
+<p>The earliest play in which Ibsen can be said to show maturity of
+craftsmanship is <i>The Vikings at Helgeland</i>. It is curious to note that
+both in <i>The Vikings</i> and in <i>The Pretenders</i>, two plays which are in
+some measure comparable with Shakespearean tragedies, he opens with a
+firmly-touched <i>einleitende Akkord</i>. In <i>The Vikings</i>, Ornulf and his
+sons encounter and fight with Sigurd and his men, very much after the
+fashion of the Montagues and Capulets in <i>Romeo and Juliet</i>. In <i>The
+Pretenders</i> the rival factions of Haakon and Skule stand outside the
+cathedral of Bergen, intently awaiting the result of the ordeal which is
+proceeding within; and though they do not there and then come to blows,
+the air is electrical with their conflicting ambitions and passions. His
+modern plays, on the other hand, Ibsen opens quietly enough, though
+usually with some more or less arresting little incident, calculated to
+arouse immediate curiosity. One may cite as characteristic examples the
+hurried colloquy between Engstrand and Regina in <i>Ghosts</i>; Rebecca and
+Madam Helseth in <i>Rosmersholm</i>, watching to see whether Rosmer will
+cross the mill-race; and in <i>The Master Builder</i>, old Brovik's querulous
+outburst, immediately followed by the entrance of Solness and his
+mysterious behaviour towards Kaia. The opening of <i>Hedda Gabler</i>, with
+its long conversation between Miss Tesman and the servant Bertha, comes
+as near as Ibsen ever did to the conventional exposition of the French
+stage, conducted by a footman and a parlour-maid engaged in dusting the
+furniture. On the other hand, there never was a more masterly opening,
+in its sheer simplicity, than Nora's entrance in <i>A Doll's House</i>, and
+the little silent scene that precedes the appearance of Helmer.</p>
+
+<p>Regarding <i>The Vikings</i> as Ibsen's first mature production, and
+surveying the whole series of his subsequent works in which he had stage
+presentation directly in view,<a name="FNanchor45"></a><a href="#Footnote_45"><sup>[45]</sup></a> we find that in only two out of the
+fifteen plays does the whole action come within the frame of the
+picture. These two are <i>The League of Youth</i> and <i>An Enemy of the
+People</i>. In neither of these have any antecedents to be stated; neither
+turns upon any disclosure of bygone events or emotions. We are, indeed,
+afforded brief glimpses into the past both of Stensgaard and of
+Stockmann; but the glimpses are incidental and inessential. It is
+certainly no mere coincidence that if one were asked to pick out the
+pieces of thinnest texture in all Ibsen's mature work, one would
+certainly select these two plays. Far be it from me to disparage <i>An
+Enemy of the People</i>; as a work of art it is incomparably greater than
+such a piece as <i>Pillars of Society</i>; but it is not so richly woven,
+not, as it were, so deep in pile. Written in half the time Ibsen usually
+devoted to a play, it is an outburst of humorous indignation, a <i>jeu
+d'esprit</i>, one might almost say, though the <i>jeu</i> of a giant <i>esprit</i>.</p>
+
+<p>Observing the effect of comparative tenuity in these two plays, we
+cannot but surmise that the secret of the depth and richness of texture
+so characteristic of Ibsen's work, lay in his art of closely
+interweaving a drama of the present with a drama of the past. <i>An Enemy
+of the People</i> is a straightforward, spirited melody; <i>The Wild Duck</i>
+and <i>Rosmersholm</i> are subtly and intricately harmonized.</p>
+
+<p>Going a little more into detail, we find in Ibsen's work an
+extraordinary progress in the art of so unfolding the drama of the past
+as to make the gradual revelation no mere preface or prologue to the
+drama of the present, but an integral part of its action. It is true
+that in <i>The Vikings</i> he already showed himself a master in this art.
+The great revelation--the disclosure of the fact that Sigurd, not
+Gunnar, did the deed of prowess which Hi&ouml;rdis demanded of the man who
+should be her mate--this crucial revelation is brought about in a scene
+of the utmost dramatic intensity. The whole drama of the past,
+indeed--both its facts and its emotions--may be said to be dragged to
+light in the very stress and pressure of the drama of the present. Not a
+single detail of it is narrated in cold blood, as, for example, Prospero
+relates to Miranda the story of their marooning, or Horatio expounds the
+Norwegian-Danish political situation. I am not holding up <i>The Vikings</i>
+as a great masterpiece; it has many weaknesses both of substance and of
+method; but in this particular art of indistinguishably blending the
+drama of the present with the drama of the past, it is already
+consummate. <i>The Pretenders</i> scarcely comes into the comparison. It is
+Ibsen's one chronicle-play; and, like Shakespeare, he did not shrink
+from employing a good deal of narrative, though his narratives, it must
+be said, are always introduced under such circumstances as to make them
+a vital part of the drama. It is when we come to the modern plays that
+we find the poet falling back upon conventional and somewhat clumsy
+methods of exposition, which he only by degrees, though by rapid
+degrees, unlearns.</p>
+
+<p><i>The League of Youth</i>, as we have seen, requires no exposition. All we
+have to learn is the existing relations of the characters, which appear
+quite naturally as the action proceeds. But let us look at <i>Pillars of
+Society</i>. Here we have to be placed in possession of a whole antecedent
+drama: the intrigue of Karsten Bernick with Dina Dorf's mother, the
+threatened scandal, Johan T&ouml;nnesen's vicarious acceptance of Bernick's
+responsibility, the subsidiary scandal of Lona Hessel's outburst on
+learning of Bernick's engagement to her half-sister, the report of an
+embezzlement committed by Johan before his departure for America. All
+this has to be conveyed to us in retrospect; or, rather, in the first
+place, we have to be informed of the false version of these incidents
+which is current in the little town, and on which Bernick's moral and
+commercial prestige is built up. What device, then, does Ibsen adopt to
+this end? He introduces a &quot;sewing-bee&quot; of tattling women, one of whom
+happens to be a stranger to the town, and unfamiliar with its gossip.
+Into her willing ear the others pour the popular version of the Bernick
+story; and, this impartment effected, the group of gossips disappears,
+to be heard of no more. These ladies perform the function, in fact, of
+the First, Second, and Third Gentlemen, so common in Elizabethan and
+pseudo-Elizabethan plays.<a name="FNanchor46"></a><a href="#Footnote_46"><sup>[46]</sup></a> They are not quite so artless in their
+conventionality, for they bring with them the social atmosphere of the
+tattling little town, which is an essential factor in the drama.
+Moreover, their exposition is not a simple narrative of facts. It is to
+some extent subtilized by the circumstance that the facts are not facts,
+and that the gist of the drama is to lie in the gradual triumph of the
+truth over this tissue of falsehoods. Still, explain it as we may, the
+fact remains that in no later play does Ibsen initiate us into the
+preliminaries of his action by so hackneyed and unwieldy a device. It is
+no conventional canon, but a maxim of mere common sense, that the
+dramatist should be chary of introducing characters who have no personal
+share in the drama, and are mere mouthpieces for the conveyance of
+information. Nowhere else does Ibsen so flagrantly disregard so obvious
+a principle of dramatic economy.<a name="FNanchor47"></a><a href="#Footnote_47"><sup>[47]</sup></a></p>
+
+<p>When we turn to his next play, <i>A Doll's House</i>, we find that he has
+already made a great step in advance. He has progressed from the First,
+Second, and Third Gentlemen of the Elizabethans to the confidant<a name="FNanchor48"></a><a href="#Footnote_48"><sup>[48]</sup></a> of
+the French classic drama. He even attempts, not very successfully, to
+disguise the confidant by giving her a personal interest, an effective
+share, in the drama. Nothing can really dissemble the fact that the long
+scene between Nora and Mrs. Linden, which occupies almost one-third of
+the first act, is simply a formal exposition, outside the action of the
+play. Just as it was providential that one of the house-wives of the
+sewing-bee in <i>Pillars of Society</i> should have been a stranger to the
+town, so it was the luckiest of chances (for the dramatist's
+convenience) that an old school-friend should have dropped in from the
+clouds precisely half-an-hour before the entrance of Krogstad brings to
+a sudden head the great crisis of Nora's life. This happy conjuncture of
+events is manifestly artificial: a trick of the dramatist's trade: a
+point at which his art does not conceal his art. Mrs. Linden does not,
+like the dames of the sewing-bee, fade out of the saga; she even,
+through her influence on Krogstad, plays a determining part in the
+development of the action. But to all intents and purposes she remains a
+mere confidant, a pretext for Nora's review of the history of her
+married life. There are two other specimens of the genus confidant in
+Ibsen's later plays. Arnholm, in <i>The Lady from the Sea</i>, is little
+more; Dr. Herdal, in <i>The Master Builder</i>, is that and nothing else. It
+may be alleged in his defence that the family physician is the
+professional confidant of real life.</p>
+
+<p>In <i>Ghosts</i>, Ibsen makes a sudden leap to the extreme of his
+retrospective method. I am not one of those who consider this play
+Ibsen's masterpiece: I do not even place it, technically, in the first
+rank among his works. And why? Because there is here no reasonable
+equilibrium between the drama of the past and the drama of the present.
+The drama of the past is almost everything, the drama of the present
+next to nothing. As soon as we have probed to the depths the Alving
+marriage and its consequences, the play is over, and there is nothing
+left but for Regina to set off in pursuit of the joy of life, and for
+Oswald to collapse into imbecility. It is scarcely an exaggeration to
+call the play all exposition and no drama. Here for the first time,
+however, Ibsen perfected his peculiar gift of imparting tense dramatic
+interest to the unveiling of the past. While in one sense the play is
+all exposition, in another sense it may quite as truly be said to
+contain no exposition; for it contains no narrative delivered in cold
+blood, in mere calm retrospection, as a necessary preliminary to the
+drama which is in the meantime waiting at the door. In other words, the
+exposition is all drama, it <i>is</i> the drama. The persons who are tearing
+the veils from the past, and for whom the veils are being torn, are
+intensely concerned in the process, which actually constitutes the
+dramatic crisis. The discovery of this method, or its rediscovery in
+modern drama,<a name="FNanchor49"></a><a href="#Footnote_49"><sup>[49]</sup></a> was Ibsen's great technical achievement. In his best
+work, the progress of the unveiling occasions a marked development, or
+series of changes, in the actual and present relations of the
+characters. The drama of the past and the drama of the present proceed,
+so to speak, in interlacing rhythms, or, as I said before, in a rich,
+complex harmony. In <i>Ghosts</i> this harmony is not so rich as in some
+later plays, because the drama of the present is disproportionately
+meagre. None the less, or all the more, is it a conspicuous example of
+Ibsen's method of raising his curtain, not at the beginning of the
+crisis, but rather at the beginning of the catastrophe.</p>
+
+<p>In <i>An Enemy of the People</i>, as already stated, he momentarily deserted
+that method, and gave us an action which begins, develops, and ends
+entirely within the frame of the picture. But in the two following
+plays, <i>The Wild Duck</i> and <i>Rosmersholm</i>, he touched the highest point
+of technical mastery in his interweaving of the past with the present. I
+shall not attempt any analysis of the fabric of these plays. The process
+would be long, tedious, and unhelpful; for no one could hope to employ a
+method of such complexity without something of Ibsen's genius; and
+genius will evolve its methods for itself. Let me only ask the reader to
+compare the scene between old Werle and Gregers in the first act of <i>The
+Wild Duck</i> with the scene between Nora and Mrs. Linden in the first act
+of <i>A Doll's House</i>, and mark the technical advance. Both scenes are, in
+a sense, scenes of exposition. Both are mainly designed to place us in
+possession of a sequence of bygone facts. But while the <i>Doll's House</i>
+scene is a piece of quiet gossip, brought about (as we have noted) by
+rather artificial means, and with no dramatic tension in it, the <i>Wild
+Duck</i> scene is a piece of tense, one might almost say fierce, drama,
+fulfilling the Brunetiere definition in that it shows us two characters,
+a father and son, at open war with each other. The one scene is outside
+the real action, the other is an integral part of it. The one belongs to
+Ibsen's tentative period, the other ushers in, one might almost say, his
+period of consummate mastery.<a name="FNanchor50"></a><a href="#Footnote_50"><sup>[50]</sup></a></p>
+
+<p><i>Rosmersholm</i> is so obviously nothing but the catastrophe of an
+antecedent drama that an attempt has actually been made to rectify
+Ibsen's supposed mistake, and to write the tragedy of the deceased
+Beata. It was made by an unskilful hand; but even a skilful hand would
+scarcely have done more than prove how rightly Ibsen judged that the
+recoil of Rebecca's crime upon herself and Rosmer would prove more
+interesting, and in a very real sense more dramatic, than the somewhat
+vulgar process of the crime itself. The play is not so profound in its
+humanity as <i>The Wild Duck</i>, but it is Ibsen's masterpiece in the art of
+withdrawing veil after veil. From the technical point of view, it will
+repay the closest study.</p>
+
+<p>We need not look closely at the remaining plays. <i>Hedda Gabler</i> is
+perhaps that in which a sound proportion between the past and the
+present is most successfully preserved. The interest of the present
+action is throughout very vivid; but it is all rooted in facts and
+relations of the past, which are elicited under circumstances of high
+dramatic tension. Here again it is instructive to compare the scene
+between Hedda and Thea, in the first act, with the scene between Nora
+and Mrs. Linden. Both are scenes of exposition: and each is, in its way,
+character-revealing; but the earlier scene is a passage of quite
+unemotional narrative; the later is a passage of palpitating drama. In
+the plays subsequent to <i>Hedda Gabler</i>, it cannot be denied that the
+past took the upper hand of the present to a degree which could only be
+justified by the genius of an Ibsen. Three-fourths of the action of <i>The
+Master Builder</i>, <i>Little Eyolf</i>, <i>John Gabriel Borkman</i>, and <i>When We
+Dead Awaken</i>, consists of what may be called a passionate analysis of
+the past. Ibsen had the art of making such an analysis absorbingly
+interesting; but it is not a formula to be commended for the practical
+purposes of the everyday stage.</p>
+
+
+
+
+<br><br><hr style="width: 35%;"><br><br>
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_VII"></a>CHAPTER VII</h2>
+
+<p>EXPOSITION: ITS END AND ITS MEANS</p>
+<br>
+
+<p>We have passed in rapid survey the practices of Shakespeare and Ibsen in
+respect of their point and method of attack upon their themes. What
+practical lessons can we now deduce from this examination?</p>
+
+<p>One thing is clear: namely, that there is no inherent superiority in one
+method over another. There are masterpieces in which the whole crisis
+falls within the frame of the picture, and masterpieces in which the
+greater part of the crisis has to be conveyed to us in retrospect, only
+the catastrophe being transacted before our eyes. Genius can manifest
+itself equally in either form.</p>
+
+<p>But each form has its peculiar advantages. You cannot, in a
+retrospective play like <i>Rosmersholm</i>, attain anything like the
+magnificent onward rush of Othello, which moves--</p>
+
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&quot;Like to the Pontick sea<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;Whose icy current and compulsive course<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;Ne'er feels retiring ebb, but keeps due on<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;To the Propontick and the Hellespont.&quot;<br>
+
+<p>The movement of <i>Rosmersholm</i> is rather like that of a winding river,
+which flows with a full and steady current, but seems sometimes to be
+almost retracing its course. If, then, you aim at rapidity of movement,
+you will choose a theme which leaves little or nothing to retrospect;
+and conversely, if you have a theme the whole of which falls easily and
+conveniently within the frame of the picture, you will probably take
+advantage of the fact to give your play animated and rapid movement.</p>
+
+<p>There is an undeniable attraction in a play which constitutes, so to
+speak, one brisk and continuous adventure, begun, developed, and ended
+before our eyes. For light comedy in particular is this a desirable
+form, and for romantic plays in which no very searching character-study
+is attempted. <i>The Taming of the Shrew</i> no doubt passed for a light
+comedy in Shakespeare's day, though we describe it by a briefer name.
+Its rapid, bustling action is possible because we are always ready to
+take the character of a shrew for granted. It would have been a very
+different play had the poet required to account for Katharine's
+peculiarities of temper by a retrospective study of her heredity and
+upbringing. Many eighteenth-century comedies are single-adventure plays,
+or dual-adventure plays, in the sense that the main action sometimes
+stands aside to let an underplot take the stage. Both <i>She Stoops to
+Conquer</i> and <i>The Rivals</i> are good examples of the rapid working-out of
+an intrigue, engendered, developed, and resolved all within the frame of
+the picture. Single-adventure plays of a more modern type are the elder
+Dumas's <i>Mademoiselle de Belle-Isle</i>, the younger Dumas's <i>Francillon</i>,
+Sardou's <i>Divor&ccedil;ons</i>, Sir Arthur Pinero's <i>Gay Lord Quex</i>, Mr. Shaw's
+<i>Devil's Disciple</i>, Oscar Wilde's <i>Importance of Being Earnest</i>, Mr.
+Galsworthy's <i>Silver Box</i>. Widely as these plays differ in type and
+tone, they are alike in this, that they do not attempt to present very
+complex character-studies, or to probe the deeps of human experience.
+The last play cited, <i>The Silver Box</i>, may perhaps be thought an
+exception to this rule; but, though the experience of the hapless
+charwoman is pitiful enough, hers is a simple soul, so inured to
+suffering that a little more or less is no such great matter. The play
+is an admirable genre-picture rather than a searching tragedy.</p>
+
+<p>The point to be observed is that, under modern conditions, it is
+difficult to produce a play of very complex psychological, moral, or
+emotional substance, in which the whole crisis comes within the frame of
+the picture. The method of attacking the crisis in the middle or towards
+the end is really a device for relaxing, in some measure, the narrow
+bounds of theatrical representation, and enabling the playwright to deal
+with a larger segment of human experience. It may be asked why modern
+conditions should in this respect differ from Elizabethan conditions,
+and why, if Shakespeare could produce such profound and complex
+tragedies as <i>Othello</i> and <i>King Lear</i> without a word of exposition or
+retrospect, the modern dramatist should not go and do likewise? The
+answer to this question is not simply that the modern dramatist is
+seldom a Shakespeare. That is true, but we must look deeper than that.
+There are, in fact, several points to be taken into consideration. For
+one thing--this is a minor point--Shakespeare had really far more
+elbow-room than the playwright of to-day. <i>Othello</i> and <i>King Lear</i>, to
+say nothing of <i>Hamlet</i>, are exceedingly long plays. Something like a
+third of them is omitted in modern representation; and when we speak of
+their richness and complexity of characterization, we do not think
+simply of the plays as we see them compressed into acting limits, but of
+the plays as we know them in the study. It is possible, no doubt, for
+modern playwrights to let themselves go in the matter of length, and
+then print their plays with brackets or other marks to show the
+&quot;passages omitted in representation.&quot; This is, however, essentially an
+inartistic practice, and one cannot regret that it has gone out of
+fashion. Another point to be considered is this: are Othello and Lear
+really very complex character-studies? They are extremely vivid: they
+are projected with enormous energy, in actions whose violence affords
+scope for the most vehement self-expression; but are they not, in
+reality, colossally simple rather than complex? It is true that in Lear
+the phenomena of insanity are reproduced with astonishing minuteness and
+truth; but this does not imply any elaborate analysis or demand any
+great space. Hamlet is complex; and were I &quot;talking for victory,&quot; I
+should point out that <i>Hamlet</i> is, of all the tragedies, precisely the
+one which does not come within the frame of the picture. But the true
+secret of the matter does not lie here: it lies in the fact that Hamlet
+unpacks his heart to us in a series of soliloquies--a device employed
+scarcely at all in the portrayal of Othello and Lear, and denied to the
+modern dramatist.<a name="FNanchor51"></a><a href="#Footnote_51"><sup>[51]</sup></a> Yet again, the social position and environment of
+the great Shakespearean characters is taken for granted. No time is
+spent in &quot;placing&quot; them in a given stratum of society, or in
+establishing their heredity, traditions, education, and so forth. And,
+finally, the very copiousness of expression permitted by the rhetorical
+Elizabethan form came to Shakespeare's aid. The modern dramatist is
+hampered by all sorts of reticences. He has often to work rather in
+indirect suggestion than in direct expression. He has, in short, to
+submit to a hundred hampering conditions from which Shakespeare was
+exempt; wherefore, even if he had Shakespeare's genius, he would find it
+difficult to produce a very profound effect in a crisis worked out from
+first to last before the eyes of the audience.</p>
+
+<p>Nevertheless, as before stated, such a crisis has a charm of its own.
+There is a peculiar interest in watching the rise and development out of
+nothing, as it were, of a dramatic complication. For this class of play
+(despite the Shakespearean precedents) a quiet opening is often
+advisable, rather than a strong <i>einleitende Akkord</i>. &quot;From calm,
+through storm, to calm,&quot; is its characteristic formula; whether the
+concluding calm be one of life and serenity or of despair and death. To
+my personal taste, one of the keenest forms of theatrical enjoyment is
+that of seeing the curtain go up on a picture of perfect tranquillity,
+wondering from what quarter the drama is going to arise, and then
+watching it gather on the horizon like a cloud no bigger than a man's
+hand. Of this type of opening, <i>An Enemy of the People</i> provides us with
+a classic example; and among English plays we may cite Mr. Shaw's
+<i>Candida</i>, Mr. Barker's <i>Waste</i>, and Mr. Besier's <i>Don</i>, in which so
+sudden and unlooked-for a cyclone swoops down upon the calm of an
+English vicarage. An admirable instance of a fantastic type may be found
+in <i>Prunella</i>, by Messrs. Barker and Housman.<a name="FNanchor52"></a><a href="#Footnote_52"><sup>[52]</sup></a></p>
+
+<p>There is much to be said, however, in favour of the opening which does
+not present an aspect of delusive calm, but shows the atmosphere already
+charged with electricity. Compare, for instance, the opening of <i>The
+Case of Rebellious Susan</i>, by Mr. Henry Arthur Jones, with that of a
+French play of very similar theme--Dumas's <i>Francillon</i>. In the latter,
+we see the storm-cloud slowly gathering up on the horizon; in the
+former, it is already on the point of breaking, right overhead. Mr.
+Jones places us at the beginning, where Dumas leaves us at the end, of
+his first act. It is true that at the end of Mr. Jones's act he has not
+advanced any further than Dumas. The French author shows his heroine
+gradually working up to a nervous crisis, the English author introduces
+his heroine already at the height of her paroxysm, and the act consists
+of the unavailing efforts of her friends to smooth her down. The upshot
+is the same; but in Mr. Jones's act we are, as the French say, &quot;in full
+drama&quot; all the time, while in Dumas's we await the coming of the drama,
+and only by exerting all his wit, not to say over-exerting it, does he
+prevent our feeling impatient. I am not claiming superiority for either
+method; I merely point to a good example of two different ways of
+attacking the same problem.</p>
+
+<p>In <i>The Benefit of the Doubt</i>, by Sir Arthur Pinero, we have a crisply
+dramatic opening of the very best type. A few words from a contemporary
+criticism may serve to indicate the effect it produced on a first-night
+audience--</p>
+
+&nbsp;&nbsp;We are in the thick of the action at once, or at least in the thick<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;of the interest, so that the exposition, instead of being, so to<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;speak, a mere platform from which the train is presently to start,<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;becomes an inseparable part of the movement. The sense of dramatic<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;irony is strongly and yet delicately suggested. We foresee a<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&quot;peripety,&quot; apparent prosperity suddenly crumbling into disaster,<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;within the act itself; and, when it comes, it awakens our sympathy<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;and redoubles our interest.<br>
+
+<p>Almost the same words might be applied to the opening of <i>The Climbers</i>,
+by the late Clyde Fitch, one of the many individual scenes which make
+one deeply regret that Mr. Fitch did not live to do full justice to his
+remarkable talent.</p>
+
+<p>One of the ablest of recent openings is that of Mr. Galsworthy's <i>Silver
+Box</i>. The curtain rises upon a solid, dull, upper-middle-class
+dining-room, empty and silent, the electric lights burning, the tray
+with whiskey, siphon and cigarette-box marking the midnight hour. Then
+we have the stumbling, fumbling entrance of Jack Barthwick, beatifically
+drunk, his maudlin babble, and his ill-omened hospitality to the haggard
+loafer who follows at his heels. Another example of a high-pitched
+opening scene may be found in Mr. Perceval Landon's <i>The House
+Opposite</i>. Here we have a midnight parting between a married woman and
+her lover, in the middle of which the man, glancing at the lighted
+window of the house opposite, sees a figure moving in such a way as to
+suggest that a crime is being perpetrated. As a matter of fact, an old
+man is murdered, and his housekeeper is accused of the crime. The hero,
+if so he can be called, knows that it was a man, not a woman, who was in
+the victim's room that night; and the problem is: how can he give his
+evidence without betraying a woman's secret by admitting his presence in
+her house at midnight? I neither praise nor blame this class of story; I
+merely cite the play as one in which we plunge straight into the crisis,
+without any introductory period of tranquillity.</p>
+
+<p>The interest of Mr. Landon's play lay almost wholly in the story. There
+was just enough character in it to keep the story going, so to speak.
+The author might, on the other hand, have concentrated our attention on
+character, and made his play a soul-tragedy; but in that case it would
+doubtless have been necessary to take us some way backward in the
+heroine's antecedents and the history of her marriage. In other words,
+if the play had gone deeper into human nature, the preliminaries of the
+crisis would have had to be traced in some detail, possibly in a first
+act, introductory to the actual opening, but more probably, and better,
+in an exposition following the crisply touched <i>einleitende Akkord</i>.
+This brings us to the question how an exposition may best be managed.</p>
+
+<p>It may not unreasonably be contended, I think, that, when an exposition
+cannot be thoroughly dramatized--that is, wrung out, in the stress of
+the action, from the characters primarily concerned--it may best be
+dismissed, rapidly and even conventionally, by any not too improbable
+device. That is the principle on which Sir Arthur Pinero has always
+proceeded, and for which he has been unduly censured, by critics who
+make no allowances for the narrow limits imposed by custom and the
+constitution of the modern audience upon the playwrights of to-day. In
+<i>His House in Order</i> (one of his greatest plays) Sir Arthur effects part
+of his exposition by the simple device of making Hilary Jesson a
+candidate for Parliament, and bringing on a reporter to interview his
+private secretary. The incident is perfectly natural and probable; all
+one can say of it is that it is perhaps an over-simplification of the
+dramatist's task.<a name="FNanchor53"></a><a href="#Footnote_53"><sup>[53]</sup></a> <i>The Second Mrs. Tanqueray</i> requires an unusual
+amount of preliminary retrospect. We have to learn the history of Aubrey
+Tanqueray's first marriage, with the mother of Ellean, as well as the
+history of Paula Ray's past life. The mechanism employed to this end has
+been much criticized, but seems to me admirable. Aubrey gives a farewell
+dinner-party to his intimate friends, Misquith and Jayne. Cayley
+Drummle, too, is expected, but has not arrived when the play opens.
+Without naming the lady, Aubrey announces to his guests his approaching
+marriage. He proposes to go out with them, and has one or two notes to
+write before doing so. Moreover, he is not sorry to give them an
+opportunity to talk over the announcement he has made; so he retires to
+a side-table in the same room, to do his writing. Misquith and Jayne
+exchange a few speeches in an undertone, and then Cayley Drummle comes
+in, bringing the story of George Orreyd's marriage to the unmentionable
+Miss Hervey. This story is so unpleasant to Tanqueray that, to get out
+of the conversation, he returns to his writing; but still he cannot help
+listening to Cayley's comments on George Orreyd's &quot;disappearance&quot;; and
+at last the situation becomes so intolerable to him that he purposely
+leaves the room, bidding the other two &quot;Tell Cayley the news.&quot; The
+technical manipulation of all this seems to me above
+reproach--dramatically effective and yet life-like in every detail. If
+one were bound to raise an objection, it would be to the coincidence
+which brings to Cayley's knowledge, on one and the same evening, two
+such exactly similar misalliances in his own circle of acquaintance. But
+these are just the coincidences that do constantly happen. Every one
+knows that life is full of them.</p>
+
+<p>The exposition might, no doubt, have been more economically effected.
+Cayley Drummle might have figured as sole confidant and chorus; or even
+he might have been dispensed with, and all that was necessary might have
+appeared in colloquies between Aubrey and Paula on the one hand, Aubrey
+and Ellean on the other. But Cayley as sole confidant--the &quot;Charles, his
+friend,&quot; of eighteenth-century comedy--would have been more plainly
+conventional than Cayley as one of a trio of Aubrey's old cronies,
+representing the society he is sacrificing in entering upon this
+experimental marriage; and to have conveyed the necessary information
+without any confidant or chorus at all would (one fancies) have strained
+probability, or, still worse, impaired consistency of character. Aubrey
+could not naturally discuss his late wife either with her successor or
+with her daughter; while, as for Paula's past, all he wanted was to
+avert his eyes from it. I do not say that these difficulties might not
+have been overcome; for, in the vocabulary of the truly ingenious
+dramatist there is no such word as impossible. But I do suggest that the
+result would scarcely have been worth the trouble, and that it is
+hyper-criticism which objects to an exposition so natural and probable
+as that of <i>The Second Mrs. Tanqueray</i>, simply on the ground that
+certain characters are introduced for the purpose of conveying certain
+information. It would be foolish to expect of every work of art an
+absolutely austere economy of means.</p>
+
+<p>Sometimes, however, Sir Arthur Pinero injudiciously emphasizes the
+artifices employed to bring about an exposition. In <i>The Thunderbolt</i>,
+for instance, in order that the Mortimores' family solicitor may without
+reproach ask for information on matters with which a family solicitor
+ought to be fully conversant, it has to be explained that the senior
+partner of the firm, who had the Mortimore business specially in hand,
+has been called away to London, and that a junior partner has taken his
+place. Such a rubbing-in, as it were, of an obvious device ought at all
+hazards to be avoided. If the information cannot be otherwise imparted
+(as in this case it surely could), the solicitor had better be allowed
+to ask one or two improbable questions--it is the lesser evil of
+the two.</p>
+
+<p>When the whole of a given subject cannot be got within the limits of
+presentation, is there any means of determining how much should be left
+for retrospect, and at what point the curtain ought to be raised? The
+principle would seem to be that slow and gradual processes, and
+especially separate lines of causation, should be left outside the frame
+of the picture, and that the curtain should be raised at the point where
+separate lines have converged, and where the crisis begins to move
+towards its solution with more or less rapidity and continuity. The
+ideas of rapidity and continuity may be conveniently summed up in the
+hackneyed and often misapplied term, unity of action. Though the unities
+of time and place are long ago exploded as binding principles--indeed,
+they never had any authority in English drama--yet it is true that a
+broken-backed action, whether in time or space, ought, so far as
+possible, to be avoided. An action with a gap of twenty years in it may
+be all very well in melodrama or romance, but scarcely in higher and
+more serious types of drama.<a name="FNanchor54"></a><a href="#Footnote_54"><sup>[54]</sup></a> Especially is it to be desired that
+interest should be concentrated on one set of characters, and should not
+be frittered away on subsidiary or preliminary personages. Take, for
+instance, the case of <i>The Second Mrs. Tanqueray</i>. It would have been
+theoretically possible for Sir Arthur Pinero to have given us either (or
+both) of two preliminary scenes: he might have shown us the first Mrs.
+Tanqueray at home, and at the same time have introduced us more at large
+to the characters of Aubrey and Ellean; or he might have depicted for us
+one of the previous associations of Paula Ray--might perhaps have let us
+see her &quot;keeping house&quot; with Hugh Ardale. But either of these openings
+would have been disproportionate and superfluous. It would have excited,
+or tried to excite, our interest in something that was not the real
+theme of the play, and in characters which were to drop out before the
+real theme--the Aubrey-Paula marriage--was reached. Therefore the
+author, in all probability, never thought of beginning at either of
+these points. He passed instinctively to the point at which the two
+lines of causation converged, and from which the action could be carried
+continuously forward by one set of characters. He knew that we could
+learn in retrospect all that it was necessary for us to know of the
+first Mrs. Tanqueray, and that to introduce her in the flesh would be
+merely to lead the interest of the audience into a blind alley, and to
+break the back of his action. Again, in <i>His House in Order</i> it may seem
+that the intrigue between Maurewarde and the immaculate Annabel, with
+its tragic conclusion, would have made a stirring introductory act. But
+to have presented such an act would have been to destroy the unity of
+the play, which centres in the character of Nina. Annabel is &quot;another
+story&quot;; and to have told, or rather shown us, more of it than was
+absolutely necessary, would have been to distract our attention from the
+real theme of the play, while at the same time fatally curtailing the
+all-too-brief time available for the working-out of that theme. There
+are cases, no doubt, when verbal exposition may advantageously be
+avoided by means of a dramatized &quot;Prologue&quot;--a single act, constituting
+a little drama in itself, and generally separated by a considerable
+space of time from the action proper. But this method is scarcely to be
+commended, except, as aforesaid, for purposes of melodrama and romance.
+A &quot;Prologue&quot; is for such plays as <i>The Prisoner of Zenda</i> and <i>The Only
+Way</i>, not for such plays as <i>His House in Order</i>.</p>
+
+<p>The question whether a legato or a staccato opening be the more
+desirable must be decided in accordance with the nature and
+opportunities of each theme. The only rule that can be stated is that,
+when the attention of the audience is required for an exposition of any
+length, some attempt ought to be made to awaken in advance their general
+interest in the theme and characters. It is dangerous to plunge straight
+into narrative, or unemotional discussion, without having first made the
+audience actively desire the information to be conveyed to them.
+Especially is it essential that the audience should know clearly who are
+the subjects of the discussion or narrative--that they should not be
+mere names to them. It is a grave flaw in the construction of Mr.
+Granville Barker's otherwise admirable play <i>Waste</i>, that it should open
+with a long discussion, by people whom we scarcely know, of other people
+whom we do not know at all, whose names we may or may not have noted on
+the playbill.</p>
+
+<p>Trebell, Lord Charles Cantelupe, and Blackborough ought certainly to
+have been presented to us in the flesh, however briefly and summarily,
+before we were asked to interest ourselves in their characters and the
+political situation arising from them.</p>
+
+<p>There is, however, one limitation to this principle. A great effect is
+sometimes attained by retarding the entrance of a single leading figure
+for a whole act, or even two, while he is so constantly talked about as
+to beget in the audience a vivid desire to make his personal
+acquaintance. Thus Moli&egrave;re's Tartufe does not come on the stage until
+the third act of the comedy which bears his name. Ibsen's John Gabriel
+Borkman is unseen until the second act, though (through his wife's ears)
+we have already heard him pacing up and down his room like a wolf in his
+cage. Dubedat, in <i>The Doctor's Dilemma</i>, is not revealed to us in the
+flesh until the second act. But for this device to be successful, it is
+essential that only one leading character<a name="FNanchor55"></a><a href="#Footnote_55"><sup>[55]</sup></a> should remain unseen, on
+whom the attention of the audience may, by that very fact, be riveted.
+In <i>Waste</i>, for instance, all would have been well had it suited Mr.
+Barker's purpose to leave Trebell invisible till the second act, while
+all the characters in the first act, clearly presented to us, canvassed
+him from their various points of view. Keen expectancy, in short, is the
+most desirable frame of mind in which an audience can be placed, so long
+as the expectancy be not ultimately disappointed. But there is no less
+desirable mental attitude than that of straining after gleams of
+guidance in an expository twilight.</p>
+
+<p>The advantage of a staccato opening--or, to vary the metaphor, a brisk,
+highly aerated introductory passage--is clearly exemplified in <i>A Doll's
+House</i>. It would have been quite possible for Ibsen to have sent up his
+curtain upon Nora and Mrs. Linden seated comfortably before the stove,
+and exchanging confidences as to their respective careers. Nothing
+indispensable would have been omitted; but how languid would have been
+the interest of the audience! As it is, a brief, bright scene has
+already introduced us, not only to Nora, but to Helmer, and aroused an
+eager desire for further insight into the affairs of this--to all
+appearance--radiantly happy household. Therefore, we settle down without
+impatience to listen to the fireside gossip of the two old
+school-fellows.</p>
+
+<p>The problem of how to open a play is complicated in the English theatre
+by considerations wholly foreign to art. Until quite recently, it used
+to be held impossible for a playwright to raise his curtain upon his
+leading character or characters, because the actor-manager would thus be
+baulked of his carefully arranged &quot;entrance&quot; and &quot;reception,&quot; and,
+furthermore, because twenty-five per cent of the audience would probably
+arrive about a quarter of an hour late, and would thus miss the opening
+scene or scenes. It used at one time to be the fashion to add to the
+advertisement of a play an entreaty that the audience should be
+punctually in their seats, &quot;as the interest began with the rise of the
+curtain.&quot; One has seen this assertion made with regard to plays in
+which, as a matter of fact, the interest had not begun at the fall of
+the curtain. Nowadays, managers, and even leading ladies, are a good
+deal less insistent on their &quot;reception&quot; than they used to be. They
+realize that it may be a distinct advantage to hold the stage from the
+very outset. There are few more effective openings than that of <i>The
+Second Mrs. Tanqueray</i>, where we find Aubrey Tanqueray seated squarely
+at his bachelor dinner-table with Misquith on his right and Jayne on his
+left. It may even be taken as a principle that, where it is desired to
+give to one character a special prominence and predominance, it ought,
+if possible, to be the first figure on which the eye of the audience
+falls. In a Sherlock Holmes play, for example, the curtain ought
+assuredly to rise on the great Sherlock enthroned in Baker Street, with
+Dr. Watson sitting at his feet. The solitary entrance of Richard III
+throws his figure into a relief which could by no other means have been
+attained. So, too, it would have been a mistake on Sophocles' part to
+let any one but the protagonist open the <i>Oedipus Rex</i>.</p>
+
+<p>So long as the fashion of late dinners continues, however, it must
+remain a measure of prudence to let nothing absolutely essential to the
+comprehension of a play be said or done during the first ten minutes
+after the rise of the curtain. Here, again, <i>A Doll's House</i> may be
+cited as a model, though Ibsen, certainly, had no thought of the British
+dinner-hour in planning the play. The opening scene is just what the
+ideal opening scene ought to be--invaluable, yet not indispensable. The
+late-comer who misses it deprives himself of a preliminary glimpse into
+the characters of Nora and Helmer and the relation between them; but he
+misses nothing that is absolutely essential to his comprehension of the
+play as a whole. This, then, would appear to be a sound maxim both of
+art and prudence: let your first ten minutes by all means be crisp,
+arresting, stimulating, but do not let them embody any absolutely vital
+matter, ignorance of which would leave the spectator in the dark as to
+the general design and purport of the play.</p>
+
+
+
+
+<br><br><hr style="width: 35%;"><br><br>
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_VIII"></a>CHAPTER VIII</h2>
+
+<p>THE FIRST ACT</p>
+<br>
+
+<p>Both in the theory and in practice, of late years, war has been declared
+in certain quarters against the division of a play into acts. Students
+of the Elizabethan stage have persuaded themselves, by what I believe to
+be a complete misreading of the evidence, that Shakespeare did not, as
+it were, &quot;think in acts,&quot; but conceived his plays as continuous series
+of events, without any pause or intermission in their flow. It can, I
+think, be proved beyond any shadow of doubt that they are wrong in this;
+that the act division was perfectly familiar to Shakespeare, and was
+used by him to give to the action of his plays a rhythm which ought not,
+in representation, to be obscured or falsified. It is true that in the
+Elizabethan theatre there was no need of long interacts for the change
+of scenes, and that such interacts are an abuse that calls for remedy.
+But we have abundant evidence that the act division was sometimes marked
+on the Elizabethan stage, and have no reason to doubt that it was always
+more or less recognized, and was present to Shakespeare's mind no less
+than to Ibsen's or Pinero's.</p>
+
+<p>Influenced in part, perhaps, by the Elizabethan theorists, but mainly by
+the freakishness of his own genius, Mr. Bernard Shaw has taken to
+writing plays in one continuous gush of dialogue, and has put forward,
+more or less seriously, the claim that he is thereby reviving the
+practice of the Greeks. In a prefatory note to <i>Getting Married</i>,
+he says--</p>
+
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&quot;There is a point of some technical interest to be noted in this<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;play. The customary division into acts and scenes has been disused,<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;and a return made to unity of time and place, as observed in the<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;ancient Greek drama. In the foregoing tragedy, <i>The Doctor's<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;Dilemma</i>, there are five acts; the place is altered five times; and<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;the time is spread over an undetermined period of more than a year.<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;No doubt the strain on the attention of the audience and on the<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;ingenuity of the playwright is much less; but I find in practice<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;that the Greek form is inevitable when the drama reaches a certain<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;point in poetic and intellectual evolution. Its adoption was not, on<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;my part, a deliberate display of virtuosity in form, but simply the<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;spontaneous falling of a play of ideas into the form most suitable<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;to it, which turned out to be the classical form.&quot;<br>
+
+<p>It is hard to say whether Mr. Shaw is here writing seriously or in a
+mood of solemn facetiousness. Perhaps he himself is not quite clear on
+the point. There can be no harm, at any rate, in assuming that he
+genuinely believes the unity of <i>Getting Married</i> to be &quot;a return to the
+unity observed in,&quot; say, the <i>Oedipus Rex</i>, and examining a little into
+so pleasant an illusion.</p>
+
+<p>It is, if I may so phrase it, a double-barrelled illusion. <i>Getting
+Married</i> has not the unity of the Greek drama, and the Greek drama has
+not the unity of <i>Getting Married</i>. Whatever &quot;unity&quot; is predicable of
+either form of art is a wholly different thing from whatever &quot;unity&quot; is
+predicable of the other. Mr. Shaw, in fact, is, consciously or
+unconsciously, playing with words, very much as Lamb did when he said to
+the sportsman, &quot;Is that your own hare or a wig?&quot; There are, roughly
+speaking, three sorts of unity: the unity of a plum-pudding, the unity
+of a string or chain, and, the unity of the Parthenon. Let us call them,
+respectively, unity of concoction, unity of concatenation, and
+structural or organic unity. The second form of unity is that of most
+novels and some plays. They present a series of events, more or less
+closely intertwined or interlinked with one another, but not built up
+into any symmetrical interdependence. This unity of longitudinal
+extension does not here concern us, for it is not that of either Shaw or
+Sophocles. Plum-pudding unity, on the other hand--the unity of a number
+of ingredients stirred up together, put in a cloth, boiled to a certain
+consistency, and then served up in a blue flame of lambent humour--that
+is precisely the unity of <i>Getting Married</i>. A jumble of ideas,
+prejudices, points of view, and whimsicalities on the subject of
+marriage is tied up in a cloth and boiled into a sort of glutinous
+fusion or confusion, so that when the cloth is taken off they do not at
+once lose the coherent rotundity conferred upon them by pressure from
+without. In a quite real sense, the comparison does more than justice to
+the technical qualities of the play; for in a good plum-pudding the due
+proportions of the ingredients are carefully studied, whereas Mr. Shaw
+flings in recklessly whatever comes into his head. At the same time it
+is undeniably true that he shows us a number of people in one room,
+talking continuously and without a single pause, on different aspects of
+a given theme. If this be unity, then he has achieved it. In the
+theatre, as a matter of fact, the plum-pudding was served up in three
+chunks instead of one; but this was a mere concession to human weakness.
+The play had all the globular unity of a pill, though it happened to be
+too big a pill to be swallowed at one gulp.</p>
+
+<p>Turning now to the <i>Oedipus</i>--I choose that play as a typical example of
+Greek tragedy--what sort of unity do we find? It is the unity, not of a
+continuous mass or mash, but of carefully calculated proportion, order,
+interrelation of parts--the unity of a fine piece of architecture, or
+even of a living organism. The inorganic continuity of <i>Getting Married</i>
+it does not possess. If that be what we understand by unity, then Shaw
+has it and Sophocles has not. The <i>Oedipus</i> is as clearly divided into
+acts as is <i>Hamlet</i> or <i>Hedda Gabler</i>. In modern parlance, we should
+probably call it a play in five acts and an epilogue. It so happened
+that the Greek theatre did not possess a curtain, and did possess a
+Chorus; consequently, the Greek dramatist employed the Chorus, as we
+employ the curtain, to emphasize the successive stages of his action, to
+mark the rhythm of its progress, and, incidentally, to provide
+resting-places for the mind of the audience--intervals during which the
+strain upon their attention was relaxed, or at any rate varied. It is
+not even true that the Greeks habitually aimed at such continuity of
+time as we find in <i>Getting Married</i>. They treated time ideally, the
+imaginary duration of the story being, as a rule, widely different from
+the actual time of representation. In this respect the <i>Oedipus</i> is
+something of an exception, since the events might, at a pinch, be
+conceived as passing within the &quot;two hours' traffick of the stage&quot;; but
+in many cases a whole day, or even more, must be understood to be
+compressed within these two hours. It is true that the continuous
+presence of the Chorus made it impossible for the Greeks to overleap
+months and years, as we do on the modern stage; but they did not aim at
+that strict coincidence of imaginary with actual time which Mr. Shaw
+believes himself to have achieved.<a name="FNanchor56"></a><a href="#Footnote_56"><sup>[56]</sup></a> Even he, however, subjects the
+events which take place behind the scenes to a good deal of &quot;ideal&quot;
+compression.</p>
+
+<p>Of course, when Mr. Shaw protests that, in <i>Getting Married</i>, he did not
+indulge in a &quot;deliberate display of virtuosity of form,&quot; that is only
+his fun. You cannot well have virtuosity of form where there is no form.
+What he did was to rely upon his virtuosity of dialogue to enable him to
+dispense with form. Whether he succeeded or not is a matter of opinion
+which does not at present concern us. The point to be noted is the
+essential difference between the formless continuity of <i>Getting
+Married</i>, and the sedulous ordering and balancing of clearly
+differentiated parts, which went to the structure of a Greek tragedy. A
+dramatist who can so develop his story as to bring it within the
+quasi-Aristotelean &quot;unities&quot; performs a curious but not particularly
+difficult or valuable feat; but this does not, or ought not to, imply
+the abandonment of the act-division, which is no mere convention, but a
+valuable means of marking the rhythm of the story. When, on the other
+hand, you have no story to tell, the act-division is manifestly
+superfluous; but it needs no &quot;virtuosity&quot; to dispense with it.</p>
+
+<p>It is a grave error, then, to suppose that the act is a mere division of
+convenience, imposed by the limited power of attention of the human
+mind, or by the need of the human body for occasional refreshment. A
+play with a well-marked, well-balanced act-structure is a higher
+artistic organism than a play with no act-structure, just as a
+vertebrate animal is higher than a mollusc. In every crisis of real life
+(unless it be so short as to be a mere incident) there is a rhythm of
+rise, progress, culmination and solution. We are not always, perhaps not
+often, conscious of these stages; but that is only because we do not
+reflect upon our experiences while they are passing, or map them out in
+memory when they are past. We do, however, constantly apply to real-life
+crises expressions borrowed more or less directly from the terminology
+of the drama. We say, somewhat incorrectly, &quot;Things have come to a
+climax,&quot; meaning thereby a culmination; or we say, &quot;The catastrophe is
+at hand,&quot; or, again, &quot;What a fortunate <i>d&eacute;nouement</i>!&quot; Be this as it may,
+it is the business of the dramatist to analyse the crises with which he
+deals, and to present them to us in their rhythm of growth, culmination,
+solution. To this end the act-division is--not, perhaps, essential,
+since the rhythm may be marked even in a one-act play--but certainly of
+enormous and invaluable convenience. &quot;Si l'acte n'existait pas, il
+faudrait l'inventer&quot;; but as a matter of fact it has existed wherever,
+in the Western world, the drama has developed beyond its rudest
+beginnings.</p>
+
+<p>It was doubtless the necessity for marking this rhythm that Aristotle
+had in mind when he said that a dramatic action must have a beginning, a
+middle and an end. Taken in its simplicity, this principle would
+indicate the three-act division as the ideal scheme for a play. As a
+matter of fact, many of the best modern plays in all languages fall into
+three acts; one has only to note <i>Monsieur Alphonse, Francillon, La
+Parisienne, Amoureuse, A Doll's House, Ghosts, The Master Builder,
+Little Eyolf, Johannisfeuer, Caste, Candida, The Benefit of the Doubt,
+The Importance of Being Earnest, The Silver Box</i>; and, furthermore, many
+old plays which are nominally in five acts really fall into a triple
+rhythm, and might better have been divided into three. Alexandrian
+precept, handed on by Horace, gave to the five act division a purely
+arbitrary sanction, which induced playwrights to mask the natural rhythm
+of their themes beneath this artificial one.<a name="FNanchor57"></a><a href="#Footnote_57"><sup>[57]</sup></a> But in truth the
+three-act division ought no more to be elevated into an absolute rule
+than the five-act division. We have seen that a play consists, or ought
+to consist, of a great crisis, worked out through a series of minor
+crises. An act, then, ought to consist either of a minor crisis, carried
+to its temporary solution, or of a well-marked group of such crises; and
+there can be no rule as to the number of such crises which ought to
+present themselves in the development of a given theme. On the modern
+stage, five acts may be regarded as the maximum, simply by reason of the
+time-limit imposed by social custom on a performance. But one frequently
+sees a melodrama divided into &quot;five acts and eight tableaux,&quot; or even
+more; which practically means that the play is in eight, or nine, or ten
+acts, but that there will be only the four conventional interacts in the
+course of the evening. The playwright should not let himself be
+constrained by custom to force his theme into the arbitrary mould of a
+stated number of acts. Three acts is a good number, four acts is a good
+number,<a name="FNanchor58"></a><a href="#Footnote_58"><sup>[58]</sup></a> there is no positive objection to five acts. Should he find
+himself hankering after more acts, he will do well to consider whether
+he be not, at one point or another, failing in the art of condensation
+and trespassing on the domain of the novelist.</p>
+
+<p>There is undoubted convenience in the rule of the modern stage: &quot;One
+act, one scene.&quot; A change of scene in the middle of an act is not only
+materially difficult, but tends to impair the particular order of
+illusion at which the modern drama aims.<a name="FNanchor59"></a><a href="#Footnote_59"><sup>[59]</sup></a> Roughly, indeed, an act may
+be defined as any part of a given crisis which works itself out at one
+time and in one place; but more fundamentally it is a segment of the
+action during which the author desires to hold the attention of his
+audience unbroken and unrelaxed. It is no mere convention, however,
+which decrees that the flight of time is best indicated by an interact.
+When the curtain is down, the action on the stage remains, as it were,
+in suspense. The audience lets its attention revert to the affairs of
+real life; and it is quite willing, when the mimic world is once more
+revealed, to suppose that any reasonable space of time has elapsed while
+its thoughts were occupied with other matters. It is much more difficult
+for it to accept a wholly imaginary lapse of time while its attention is
+centred on the mimic world. Some playwrights have of late years adopted
+the device of dropping their curtain once, or even twice, in the middle
+of an act, to indicate an interval of a few minutes, or even of an
+hour--for instance, of the time between &quot;going in to dinner&quot; and the
+return of the ladies to the drawing-room. Sir Arthur Pinero employs this
+device with good effect in <i>Iris</i>; so does Mr. Granville Barker in
+<i>Waste</i>, and Mr. Galsworthy in <i>The Silver Box</i>. It is certainly far
+preferable to that &quot;ideal&quot; treatment of time which was common in the
+French drama of the nineteenth century, and survives to this day in
+plays adapted or imitated from the French.</p>
+
+<p>I remember seeing in London, not very long ago, a one-act play on the
+subject of Rouget de l'Isle. In the space of about half-an-hour, he
+handed the manuscript of the &quot;Marseillaise&quot; to an opera-singer whom he
+adored, she took it away and sang it at the Opera, it caught the popular
+ear from that one performance, and the dying Rouget heard it sung by the
+passing multitude in the streets within about fifteen minutes of the
+moment when it first left his hands. (The whole piece, I repeat,
+occupied about half-an-hour; but as a good deal of that time was devoted
+to preliminaries, not more than fifteen minutes can have elapsed between
+the time when the cantatrice left Rouget's garret and the time when all
+Paris was singing the &quot;Marseillaise.&quot;) This is perhaps an extreme
+instance of the ideal treatment of time; but one could find numberless
+cases in the works of Scribe, Labiche, and others, in which the
+transactions of many hours are represented as occurring within the
+limits of a single act. Our modern practice eschews such licenses. It
+will often compress into an act of half-an-hour more events than would
+probably happen in real life in a similar space of time, but not such a
+train of occurrences as to transcend the limits of possibility. It must
+be remembered, however, that the standard of verisimilitude naturally
+and properly varies with the seriousness of the theme under treatment.
+Improbabilities are admissible in light comedy, and still more in farce,
+which would wreck the fortunes of a drama purporting to present a sober
+and faithful picture of real life.</p>
+
+<p>Acts, then, mark the time-stages in the development of a given crisis;
+and each act ought to embody a minor crisis of its own, with a
+culmination and a temporary solution. It would be no gain, but a loss,
+if a whole two hours' or three hours' action could be carried through in
+one continuous movement, with no relaxation of the strain upon the
+attention of the audience, and without a single point at which the
+spectator might review what was past and anticipate what was to come.
+The act-division positively enhances the amount of pleasurable emotion
+through which the audience passes. Each act ought to stimulate and
+temporarily satisfy an interest of its own, while definitely advancing
+the main action. The psychological principle is evident enough; namely,
+that there is more sensation to be got out of three or four
+comparatively brief experiences, suited to our powers of perception,
+than out of one protracted experience, forced on us without relief,
+without contrast, in such a way as to fatigue and deaden our faculties.
+Who would not rather drink three, four, or five glasses of wine than put
+the bottle to his lips and let its contents pour down his throat in one
+long draught? Who would not rather see a stained-glass window broken
+into three, four, or five cunningly-proportioned &quot;lights,&quot; than a great
+flat sheet of coloured glass, be its design never so effective?</p>
+
+<p>It used to be the fashion in mid Victorian melodramas to give each act a
+more or less alluring title of its own. I am far from recommending the
+revival of this practice; but it might be no bad plan for a beginner, in
+sketching out a play, to have in his mind, or in his private notes, a
+descriptive head-line for each act, thereby assuring himself that each
+had a character of its own, and at the same time contributed its due
+share to the advancement of the whole design. Let us apply this
+principle to a Shakespearean play--for example, to <i>Macbeth</i>. The act
+headings might run somewhat as follows--<br>
+
+<table><tr><td>&nbsp;&nbsp;ACT I.</td><td>--</td><td>TEMPTATION.</td></tr>
+
+<tr><td>&nbsp;&nbsp;ACT II.</td><td>--</td><td>MURDER AND USURPATION.</td></tr>
+
+<tr><td>&nbsp;&nbsp;ACT III.</td><td>--</td><td>THE FRENZY OF CRIME AND THE HAUNTING OF REMORSE.</td></tr>
+
+<tr><td>&nbsp;&nbsp;ACT IV.</td><td>--</td><td>GATHERING RETRIBUTION.</td></tr>
+
+<tr><td>&nbsp;&nbsp;ACT V.</td><td>--</td><td>RETRIBUTION CONSUMMATED.</td></tr></table>
+
+<p>Can it be doubted that Shakespeare had in his mind the rhythm marked by
+this act-division? I do not mean, of course, that these phrases, or
+anything like them, were present to his consciousness, but merely that
+he &quot;thought in acts,&quot; and mentally assigned to each act its definite
+share in the development of the crisis.</p>
+
+<p>Turning now to Ibsen, let us draw up an act-scheme for the simplest and
+most straightforward of his plays, <i>An Enemy of the People</i>. It might
+run as follows:</p>
+
+&nbsp;&nbsp;ACT I.--THE INCURABLE OPTIMIST.--Dr. Stockmann announces his<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;discovery of the insanitary condition of the Baths.<br>
+<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;ACT II.--THE COMPACT MAJORITY.--Dr. Stockmann finds that he will<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;have to fight vested interests before the evils he has discovered<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;can be remedied, but is assured that the Compact Majority is at<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;his back.<br>
+<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;ACT III.--THE TURN OF FORTUNE.--The Doctor falls from the pinnacle<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;of his optimistic confidence, and learns that he will have the<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;Compact Majority, not <i>at</i>, but <i>on</i> his back.<br>
+<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;ACT IV.--THE COMPACT MAJORITY ON THE WARPATH.--The crowd, finding<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;that its immediate interests are identical with those of the<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;privileged few, joins with the bureaucracy in shouting down the<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;truth, and organizing a conspiracy of silence.<br>
+<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;ACT V.--OPTIMISM DISILLUSIONED BUT INDOMITABLE.--Dr. Stockmann,<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;gagged and thrown back into poverty, is tempted to take flight, but<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;determines to remain in his native place and fight for its moral, if<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;not for its physical, sanitation.<br>
+
+<p>Each of these acts is a little drama in itself, while each leads forward
+to the next, and marks a distinct phase in the development of
+the crisis.</p>
+
+<p>When the younger Dumas asked his father, that master of dramatic
+movement, to initiate him into the secret of dramatic craftsmanship, the
+great Alexandre replied in this concise formula: &quot;Let your first act be
+clear, your last act brief, and the whole interesting.&quot; Of the wisdom of
+the first clause there can be no manner of doubt. Whether incidentally
+or by way of formal exposition, the first act ought to show us clearly
+who the characters are, what are their relations and relationships, and
+what is the nature of the gathering crisis. It is very important that
+the attention of the audience should not be overstrained in following
+out needlessly complex genealogies and kinships. How often, at the end
+of a first act, does one turn to one's neighbour and say, &quot;Are Edith and
+Adela sisters or only half-sisters?&quot; or, &quot;Did you gather what was the
+villain's claim to the title?&quot; If a story cannot be made clear without
+an elaborate study of one or more family trees, beware of it. In all
+probability, it is of very little use for dramatic purposes. But before
+giving it up, see whether the relationships, and other relations, cannot
+be simplified. Complexities which at first seemed indispensable will
+often prove to be mere useless encumbrances.</p>
+
+<p>In <i>Pillars of Society</i> Ibsen goes as far as any playwright ought to go
+in postulating fine degrees of kinship--and perhaps a little further.
+Karsten Bernick has married into a family whose gradations put something
+of a strain on the apprehension and memory of an audience. We have to
+bear in mind that Mrs. Bernick has (<i>a</i>) a half-sister, Lona Hessel;
+(<i>b</i>) a full brother, Johan T&ouml;nnesen; (<i>c</i>) a cousin, Hilmar T&ouml;nnesen.
+Then Bernick has an unmarried sister, Martha; another relationship,
+however simple, to be borne in mind. And, finally, when we see Dina Dorf
+living in Bernick's house, and know that Bernick has had an intrigue
+with her mother, we are apt to fall into the error of supposing her to
+be Bernick's daughter. There is only one line which proves that this is
+not so--a remark to the effect that, when Madam Dorf came to the town.
+Dina was already old enough to run about and play angels in the theatre.
+Any one who does not happen to hear or notice this remark, is almost
+certain to misapprehend Dina's parentage. Taking one thing with another,
+then, the Bernick family group is rather more complex than is strictly
+desirable. Ibsen's reasons for making Lona Hessel a half-sister instead
+of a full sister of Mrs. Bernick are evident enough. He wanted her to be
+a considerably older woman, of a very different type of character; and
+it was necessary, in order to explain Karsten's desertion of Lona for
+Betty, that the latter should be an heiress, while the former was
+penniless. These reasons are clear and apparently adequate; yet it may
+be doubted whether the dramatist did not lose more than he gained by
+introducing even this small degree of complexity. It was certainly not
+necessary to explain the difference of age and character between Lona
+and Betty; while as for the money, there would have been nothing
+improbable in supposing that a wealthy uncle had marked his disapproval
+of Lona's strong-mindedness by bequeathing all his property to her
+younger sister. Again, there is no reason why Hilmar should not have
+been a brother of Johan and Betty;<a name="FNanchor60"></a><a href="#Footnote_60"><sup>[60]</sup></a> in which case we should have had
+the simple family group of two brothers and two sisters, instead of the
+comparatively complex relationship of a brother and sister, a
+half-sister and a cousin.</p>
+
+<p>These may seem very trivial considerations: but nothing is really
+trivial when it comes to be placed under the powerful lens of theatrical
+presentation. Any given audience has only a certain measure of attention
+at command, and to claim attention for inessentials is to diminish the
+stock available for essentials. In only one other play does Ibsen
+introduce any complexity of relationship, and in that case it does not
+appear in the exposition, but is revealed at a critical moment towards
+the close. In <i>Little Eyolf</i>, Asta and Allmers are introduced to us at
+first as half-sister and half-brother; and only at the end of the second
+act does it appear that Asta's mother (Allmers' stepmother) was
+unfaithful to her husband, and that, Asta being the fruit of this
+infidelity, there is no blood kinship between her and Allmers. The
+danger of relying upon such complexities is shown by the fact that so
+acute a critic as M. Jules Lema&icirc;tre, in writing of <i>Little Eyolf</i>,
+mistook the situation, and thought that Asta fled from Allmers because
+he was her brother, whereas in fact she fled because he was not. I had
+the honour of calling M. Lema&icirc;tre's attention to this error, which he
+handsomely acknowledged.</p>
+
+<p>Complexities of kinship are, of course, not the only complexities which
+should, so far as possible, be avoided. Every complexity of relation or
+of antecedent circumstance is in itself a weakness, which, if it cannot
+be eliminated, must, so to speak, be lived down. No dramatic critic, I
+think, can have failed to notice that the good plays are those of which
+the story can be clearly indicated in ten lines; while it very often
+takes a column to give even a confused idea of the plot of a bad play.
+Here, then, is a preliminary test which may be commended to the would-be
+playwright, in order to ascertain whether the subject he is
+contemplating is or is not a good one: can he state the gist of it in a
+hundred words or so, like the &quot;argument&quot; of a Boccaccian novella? The
+test, of course, is far from being infallible; for a theme may err on
+the side of over-simplicity or emptiness, no less than on the side of
+over-complexity. But it is, at any rate, negatively useful: if the
+playwright finds that he cannot make his story comprehensible without a
+long explanation of an intricate network of facts, he may be pretty sure
+that he has got hold of a bad theme, or of one that stands sorely in
+need of simplification.<a name="FNanchor61"></a><a href="#Footnote_61"><sup>[61]</sup></a></p>
+
+<p>It is not sufficient, however, that a first act should fulfil Dumas's
+requirement by placing the situation clearly before us: it ought also to
+carry us some way towards the heart of the drama, or, at the very least,
+to point distinctly towards that quarter of the horizon where the clouds
+are gathering up. In a three-act play this is evidently demanded by the
+most elementary principles of proportion. It would be absurd to make
+one-third of the play merely introductory, and to compress the whole
+action into the remaining two-thirds. But even in a four- or five-act
+play, the interest of the audience ought to be strongly enlisted, and
+its anticipation headed in a definite direction, before the curtain
+falls for the first time. When we find a dramatist of repute neglecting
+this principle, we may suspect some reason with which art has no
+concern. Several of Sardou's social dramas begin with two acts of more
+or less smart and entertaining satire or caricature, and only at the end
+of the second or beginning of the third act (out of five) does the drama
+proper set in. What was the reason of this? Simply that under the system
+of royalties prevalent in France, it was greatly to the author's
+interest that his play should fill the whole evening. Sardou needed no
+more than three acts for the development of his drama; to have spread it
+out thinner would have been to weaken and injure it; wherefore he
+preferred to occupy an hour or so with clever dramatic journalism,
+rather than share the evening, and the fees, with another dramatist. So,
+at least, I have heard his practice explained; perhaps his own account
+of the matter may have been that he wanted to paint a broad social
+picture to serve as a background for his action.</p>
+
+<p>The question how far an audience ought to be carried towards the heart
+of a dramatic action in the course of the first act is always and
+inevitably one of proportion. It is clear that too much ought not to be
+told, so as to leave the remaining acts meagre and spun-out; nor should
+any one scene be so intense in its interest as to outshine all
+subsequent scenes, and give to the rest of the play an effect of
+anti-climax. If the strange and fascinating creations of Ibsen's last
+years were to be judged by ordinary dramaturgic canons, we should have
+to admit that in <i>Little Eyolf</i> he was guilty of the latter fault, since
+in point of sheer &quot;strength,&quot; in the common acceptation of the word, the
+situation at the end of the first act could scarcely be outdone, in that
+play or any other. The beginner, however, is far more likely to put too
+little than too much into his first act: he is more likely to leave our
+interest insufficiently stimulated than to carry us too far in the
+development of his theme. My own feeling is that, as a general rule,
+what Freytag calls the <i>erregende Moment</i> ought by all means to fall
+within the first act. What is the <i>erregende Moment</i>? One is inclined to
+render it &quot;the firing of the fuse.&quot; In legal parlance, it might be
+interpreted as the joining of issue. It means the point at which the
+drama, hitherto latent, plainly declares itself. It means the
+germination of the crisis, the appearance on the horizon of the cloud no
+bigger than a man's hand. I suggest, then, that this <i>erregende Moment</i>
+ought always to come within the first act--if it is to come at all There
+are plays, as we have seen, which depict life on so even a plane that it
+is impossible to say at any given point, &quot;Here the drama sets in,&quot; or
+&quot;The interest is heightened there.&quot;</p>
+
+<p><i>Pillars of Society</i> is, in a sense, Ibsen's prentice-work in the form
+of drama which he afterwards perfected; wherefore it affords us numerous
+illustrations of the problems we have to consider. Does he, or does he
+not, give us in the first act sufficient insight into his story? I am
+inclined to answer the question in the negative. The first act puts us
+in possession of the current version of the Bernick-T&ouml;nnesen family
+history, but it gives us no clear indication that this version is an
+elaborate tissue of falsehoods. It is true that Bernick's evident
+uneasiness and embarrassment at the mere idea of the reappearance of
+Lona and Johan may lead us to suspect that all is not as it seems; but
+simple annoyance at the inopportune arrival of the black sheep of the
+family might be sufficient to account for this. To all intents and
+purposes, we are completely in the dark as to the course the drama is
+about to take; and when, at the end of the first act, Lona Hessel
+marches in and flutters the social dovecote, we do not know in what
+light to regard her, or why we are supposed to sympathize with her. The
+fact that she is eccentric, and that she talks of &quot;letting in fresh
+air,&quot; combines with our previous knowledge of the author's idiosyncrasy
+to assure us that she is his heroine; but so far as the evidence
+actually before us goes, we have no means of forming even the vaguest
+provisional judgment as to her true character. This is almost certainly
+a mistake in art. It is useless to urge that sympathy and antipathy are
+primitive emotions, and that we ought to be able to regard a character
+objectively, rating it as true or false, not as attractive or repellent.
+The answer to this is twofold. Firstly, the theatre has never been, and
+never will be, a moral dissecting room, nor has the theatrical audience
+anything in common with a class of students dispassionately following a
+professor's demonstration of cold scientific facts. Secondly, in the
+particular case in point, the dramatist makes a manifest appeal to our
+sympathies. There can be no doubt that we are intended to take Lona's
+part, as against the representatives of propriety and convention
+assembled at the sewing-bee; but we have been vouchsafed no rational
+reason for so doing. In other words, the author has not taken us far
+enough into his action to enable us to grasp the true import and
+significance of the situation. He relies for his effect either on the
+general principle that an eccentric character must be sympathetic, or on
+the knowledge possessed by those who have already seen or read the rest
+of the play. Either form of reliance is clearly inartistic. The former
+appeals to irrational prejudice; the latter ignores what we shall
+presently find to be a fundamental principle of the playwright's
+art--namely, that, with certain doubtful exceptions in the case of
+historical themes, he must never assume previous knowledge either of
+plot or character on the part of his public, but must always have in his
+mind's eye a first-night audience, which knows nothing but what he
+chooses to tell it.</p>
+
+<p>My criticism of the first act of <i>Pillars of Society</i> may be summed up
+in saying that the author has omitted to place in it the <i>erregende
+Moment</i>. The issue is not joined, the true substance of the drama is not
+clear to us, until, in the second act, Bernick makes sure there are no
+listeners, and then holds out both hands to Johan, saying: &quot;Johan, now
+we are alone; now you must give me leave to thank you,&quot; and so forth.
+Why should not this scene have occurred in the first act? Materially,
+there is no reason whatever. It would need only the change of a few
+words to lift the scene bodily out of the second act and transfer it to
+the first. Why did Ibsen not do so? His reason is not hard to divine; he
+wished to concentrate into two great scenes, with scarcely a moment's
+interval between them, the revelation of Bernick's treachery, first to
+Johan, second to Lona. He gained his point: the sledge-hammer effect of
+these two scenes is undeniable. But it remains a question whether he did
+not make a disproportionate sacrifice; whether he did not empty his
+first act in order to overfill his second. I do not say he did: I merely
+propound the question for the student's consideration. One thing we must
+recognize in dramatic art as in all other human affairs; namely, that
+perfection, if not unattainable, is extremely rare. We have often to
+make a deliberate sacrifice at one point in order to gain some greater
+advantage at another; to incur imperfection here that we may achieve
+perfection there. It is no disparagement to the great masters to admit
+that they frequently show us rather what to avoid than what to do.
+Negative instruction, indeed, is in its essence more desirable than
+positive. The latter tends to make us mere imitators, whereas the
+former, in saving us from dangers, leaves our originality unimpaired.</p>
+
+<p>It is curious to note that, in another play, Ibsen did actually transfer
+the <i>erregende Moment</i>, the joining of issue, from the second act to the
+first. In his early draft of <i>Rosmersholm</i>, the great scene in which
+Rosmer confesses to Kroll his change of views did not occur until the
+second act. There can be no doubt that the balance and proportion of the
+play gained enormously by the transference.</p>
+
+<p>After all, however, the essential question is not how much or how little
+is conveyed to us in the first act, but whether our interest is
+thoroughly aroused, and, what is of equal importance, skilfully carried
+forward. Before going more at large into this very important detail of
+the playwright's craft, it may be well to say something of the nature of
+dramatic interest in general.</p>
+
+
+<br><br><hr style="width: 35%;"><br><br>
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_IX"></a>CHAPTER IX</h2>
+
+<p>&quot;CURIOSITY&quot; AND &quot;INTEREST&quot;</p>
+<br>
+
+<p>The paradox of dramatic theory is this: while our aim is, of course, to
+write plays which shall achieve immortality, or shall at any rate become
+highly popular, and consequently familiar in advance to a considerable
+proportion of any given audience, we are all the time studying how to
+awaken and to sustain that interest, or, more precisely, that curiosity,
+which can be felt only by those who see the play for the first time,
+without any previous knowledge of its action. Under modern conditions
+especially, the spectators who come to the theatre with their minds an
+absolute blank as to what is awaiting them, are comparatively few; for
+newspaper criticism and society gossip very soon bruit abroad a general
+idea of the plot of any play which attains a reasonable measure of
+success. Why, then, should we assume, in the ideal spectator to whom we
+address ourselves, a state of mind which, we hope and trust, will not be
+the state of mind of the majority of actual spectators?</p>
+
+<p>To this question there are several answers. The first and most obvious
+is that to one audience, at any rate, every play must be absolutely new,
+and that it is this first-night audience which in great measure
+determines its success or failure. Many plays have survived a
+first-night failure, and still more have gone off in a rapid decline
+after a first-night success. But these caprices of fortune are not to be
+counted on. The only prudent course is for the dramatist to direct all
+his thought and care towards conciliating or dominating an audience to
+which his theme is entirely unknown,<a name="FNanchor62"></a><a href="#Footnote_62"><sup>[62]</sup></a> and so coming triumphant through
+his first-night ordeal. This principle is subject to a certain
+qualification in the case of historic and legendary themes. In treating
+such subjects, the dramatist is not relieved of the necessity of
+developing his story clearly and interestingly, but has, on the
+contrary, an additional charge imposed upon him--that of not flagrantly
+defying or disappointing popular knowledge or prejudice. Charles I must
+not die in a green old age, Oliver Cromwell must not display the manners
+and graces of Sir Charles Grandison, Charles II must not be represented
+as a model of domestic virtue. Historians may indict a hero or whitewash
+a villain at their leisure; but to the dramatist a hero must be (more or
+less) a hero, a villain (more or less) a villain, if accepted tradition
+so decrees it.<a name="FNanchor63"></a><a href="#Footnote_63"><sup>[63]</sup></a> Thus popular knowledge can scarcely be said to lighten
+a dramatist's task, but rather to impose a new limitation upon him. In
+some cases, however, he can rely on a general knowledge of the historic
+background of a given period, which may save him some exposition. An
+English audience, for instance, does not require to be told what was the
+difference between Cavaliers and Roundheads; nor does any audience, I
+imagine, look for a historical disquisition on the Reign of Terror. The
+dramatist has only to bring on some ruffianly characters in Phrygian
+caps, who address each other as &quot;Citizen&quot; and &quot;Citizeness,&quot; and at once
+the imagination of the audience will supply the roll of the tumbrels and
+the silhouette of the guillotine in the background.</p>
+
+<p>To return to the general question: not only must the dramatist reckon
+with one all-important audience which is totally ignorant of the story
+he has to tell; he must also bear in mind that it is very easy to
+exaggerate the proportion of any given audience which will know his plot
+in advance, even when his play has been performed a thousand times.
+There are inexhaustible possibilities of ignorance in the theatrical
+public. A story is told, on pretty good authority, of a late eminent
+statesman who visited the Lyceum one night when Sir Henry Irving was
+appearing as Hamlet. After the third act he went to the actor's
+dressing-room, expressed great regret that duty called him back to
+Westminster, and begged Sir Henry to tell him how the play ended, as it
+had interested him greatly.<a name="FNanchor64"></a><a href="#Footnote_64"><sup>[64]</sup></a> One of our most eminent novelists has
+assured me that he never saw or read <i>Macbeth</i> until he was present at
+(I think) Mr. Forbes Robertson's revival of the play, he being then
+nearer fifty than forty. These, no doubt, are &quot;freak&quot; instances; but in
+any given audience, even at the most hackneyed classical plays, there
+will be a certain percentage of children (who contribute as much as
+their elders to the general temper of an audience), and also a
+percentage of adult ignoramuses. And if this be so in the case of plays
+which have held the stage for generations, are studied in schools, and
+are every day cited as matters of common knowledge, how much more
+certain may we be that even the most popular modern play will have to
+appeal night after night to a considerable number of people who have no
+previous acquaintance with either its story or its characters! The
+playwright may absolutely count on having to make such an appeal; but he
+must remember at the same time that he can by no means count on keeping
+any individual effect, more especially any notable trick or device, a
+secret from the generality of his audience. Mr. J.M. Barrie (to take a
+recent instance) sedulously concealed, throughout the greater part of
+<i>Little Mary</i>, what was meant by that ever-recurring expression, and
+probably relied to some extent on an effect of amused surprise when the
+disclosure was made. On the first night, the effect came off happily
+enough; but on subsequent nights, there would rarely be a score of
+people in the house who did not know the secret. The great majority
+might know nothing else about the play, but that they knew. Similarly,
+in the case of any mechanical <i>truc</i>, as the French call it, or feat of
+theatrical sleight-of-hand, it is futile to trust to its taking unawares
+any audience after the first. Nine-tenths of all subsequent audiences
+are sure to be on the look-out for it, and to know, or think they know,
+&quot;how it's done.&quot;<a name="FNanchor65"></a><a href="#Footnote_65"><sup>[65]</sup></a> These are the things which theatrical gossip,
+printed and oral, most industriously disseminates. The fine details of a
+plot are much less easily conveyed and less likely to be remembered.</p>
+
+<p>To sum up this branch of the argument: however oft-repeated and
+much-discussed a play may be, the playwright must assume that in every
+audience there will be an appreciable number of persons who know
+practically nothing about it, and whose enjoyment will depend, like that
+of the first-night audience, on the skill with which he develops his
+story. On the other hand, he can never rely on taking an audience by
+surprise at any particular point. The class of effect which depends on
+surprise is precisely the class of effect which is certain to be
+discounted.<a name="FNanchor66"></a><a href="#Footnote_66"><sup>[66]</sup></a></p>
+
+<p>We come now to a third reason why a playwright is bound to assume that
+the audience to which he addresses himself has no previous knowledge of
+his fable. It is simply that no other assumption has, or can have, any
+logical basis. If the audience is not to be conceived as ignorant, how
+much is it to be assumed to know? There is clearly no possible answer to
+this question, except a purely arbitrary one, having no relation to the
+facts. In any audience after the first, there will doubtless be a
+hundred degrees of knowledge and of ignorance. Many people will know
+nothing at all about the play; some people will have seen or read it
+yesterday, and will thus know all there is to know; while between these
+extremes there will be every variety of clearness or vagueness of
+knowledge. Some people will have read and remembered a detailed
+newspaper notice; others will have read the same notice and forgotten
+almost all of it. Some will have heard a correct and vivid account of
+the play, others a vague and misleading summary. It would be absolutely
+impossible to enumerate all the degrees of previous knowledge which are
+pretty certain to be represented in an average audience; and to which
+degree of knowledge is the playwright to address himself? If he is to
+have any firm ground under his feet, he must clearly adopt the only
+logical course, and address himself to a spectator assumed to have no
+previous knowledge whatever. To proceed on any other assumption would
+not only be to ignore the all-powerful first-night audience, but to
+plunge into a veritable morass of inconsistencies, dubieties and
+slovenlinesses.</p>
+
+<p>These considerations, however, have not yet taken us to the heart of the
+matter. We have seen that the dramatist has no rational course open to
+him but to assume complete ignorance in his audience; but we have also
+seen that, as a matter of fact, only one audience will be entirely in
+this condition, and that, the more successful the play is, the more
+widely will subsequent audiences tend to depart from it. Does it not
+follow that interest of plot, interest of curiosity as to coming events,
+is at best an evanescent factor in a play's attractiveness--of a certain
+importance, no doubt, on the first night, but less and less efficient
+the longer the play holds the stage?</p>
+
+<p>In a sense, this is undoubtedly true. We see every day that a mere
+story-play--a play which appeals to us solely by reason of the adroit
+stimulation and satisfaction of curiosity--very rapidly exhausts its
+success. No one cares to see it a second time; and spectators who happen
+to have read the plot in advance, find its attraction discounted even on
+a first hearing. But if we jump to the conclusion that the skilful
+marshalling and development of the story is an unimportant detail, which
+matters little when once the first-night ordeal is past, we shall go
+very far astray. Experience shows us that dramatic <i>interest</i> is
+entirely distinct from mere <i>curiosity</i>, and survives when curiosity is
+dead. Though a skilfully-told story is not of itself enough to secure
+long life for a play, it materially and permanently enhances the
+attractions of a play which has other and higher claims to longevity.
+Character, poetry, philosophy, atmosphere, are all very good in their
+way; but they all show to greater advantage by aid of a well-ordered
+fable. In a picture, I take it, drawing is not everything; but drawing
+will always count for much.</p>
+
+<p>This separation of interest from curiosity is partly explicable by one
+very simple reflection. However well we may know a play beforehand, we
+seldom know it by heart or nearly by heart; so that, though we may
+anticipate a development in general outline, we do not clearly foresee
+the ordering of its details, which, therefore, may give us almost the
+same sort of pleasure that it gave us when the story was new to us. Most
+playgoers will, I think, bear me out in saying that we constantly find a
+great scene or act to be in reality richer in invention and more
+ingenious in arrangement than we remembered it to be.</p>
+
+<p>We come, now, to another point that must not be overlooked. It needs no
+subtle introspection to assure us that we, the audience, do our own
+little bit of acting, and instinctively place ourselves at the point of
+view of a spectator before whose eyes the drama is unrolling itself for
+the first time. If the play has any richness of texture, we have many
+sensations that he cannot have. We are conscious of ironies and
+subtleties which necessarily escape him, or which he can but dimly
+divine. But in regard to the actual development of the story, we imagine
+ourselves back into his condition of ignorance, with this difference,
+that we can more fully appreciate the dramatist's skill, and more
+clearly resent his clumsiness or slovenliness. Our sensations, in short,
+are not simply conditioned by our knowledge or ignorance of what is to
+come. The mood of dramatic receptivity is a complex one. We
+instinctively and without any effort remember that the dramatist is
+bound by the rules of the game, or, in other words, by the inherent
+conditions of his craft, to unfold his tale before an audience to which
+it is unknown; and it is with implicit reference to these conditions
+that we enjoy and appreciate his skill. Even the most unsophisticated
+audience realizes in some measure that the playwright is an artist
+presenting a picture of life under such-and-such assumptions and
+limitations, and appraises his skill by its own vague and instinctive
+standards. As our culture increases, we more and more consistently adopt
+this attitude, and take pleasure in a playwright's marshalling of
+material in proportion to its absolute skill, even if that skill no
+longer produces its direct and pristine effect upon us. In many cases,
+indeed, our pleasure consists of a delicate blending of surprise with
+realized anticipation. We foresaw, and are pleased to recognize, the art
+of the whole achievement, while details which had grown dim to us give
+us each its little thrill of fresh admiration. Regarded in this aspect,
+a great play is like a great piece of music: we can hear it again and
+again with ever-new realization of its subtle beauties, its complex
+harmonies, and with unfailing interest in the merits and demerits of
+each particular rendering.</p>
+
+<p>But we must look deeper than this if we would fully understand the true
+nature of dramatic interest. The last paragraph has brought us to the
+verge of the inmost secret, but we have yet to take the final step. We
+have yet to realize that, in truly great drama, the foreknowledge
+possessed by the audience is not a disadvantage with certain incidental
+mitigations and compensations, but is the source of the highest pleasure
+which the theatre is capable of affording us. In order to illustrate my
+meaning, I propose to analyse a particular scene, not, certainly, among
+the loftiest in dramatic literature, but particularly suited to my
+purpose, inasmuch as it is familiar to every one, and at the same time
+full of the essential qualities of drama. I mean the Screen Scene in
+<i>The School for Scandal</i>.</p>
+
+<p>In her &quot;English Men of Letters&quot; volume on Sheridan, Mrs. Oliphant
+discusses this scene. Speaking in particular of the moment at which the
+screen is overturned, revealing Lady Teazle behind it, she says--</p>
+
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&quot;It would no doubt have been higher art could the dramatist have<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;deceived his audience as well as the personages of the play, and<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;made us also parties in the surprise of the discovery.&quot;<br>
+
+<p>There could scarcely be a completer reversal of the truth than this
+&quot;hopeless comment,&quot; as Professor Brander Matthews has justly called it.
+The whole effect of the long and highly-elaborated scene depends upon
+our knowledge that Lady Teazle is behind the screen. Had the audience
+either not known that there was anybody there, or supposed it to be the
+&quot;little French milliner,&quot; where would have been the breathless interest
+which has held us through a whole series of preceding scenes? When Sir
+Peter reveals to Joseph his generous intentions towards his wife, the
+point lies in the fact that Lady Teazle overhears; and this is doubly
+the case when he alludes to Joseph as a suitor for the hand of Maria.
+So, too, with the following scene between Joseph and Charles; in itself
+it would be flat enough; the fact that Sir Peter is listening lends it a
+certain piquancy; but this is ten times multiplied by the fact that Lady
+Teazle, too, hears all that passes. When Joseph is called from the room
+by the arrival of the pretended Old Stanley, there would be no interest
+in his embarrassment if we believed the person behind the screen to be
+the French milliner. And when Sir Peter yields to the temptation to let
+Charles into the secret of his brother's frailty, and we feel every
+moment more certain that the screen will be overthrown, where would be
+the excitement, the tension, if we did not know who was behind it? The
+real drama, in fact, passes behind the screen. It lies in the terror,
+humiliation, and disillusionment which we know to be coursing each other
+through Lady Teazle's soul. And all this Mrs. Oliphant would have
+sacrificed for a single moment of crude surprise!</p>
+
+<p>Now let us hear Professor Matthews's analysis of the effect of the
+scene. He says:</p>
+
+<p>&quot;The playgoer's interest is really not so much as to what is to happen
+as the way in which this event is going to affect the characters
+involved. He thinks it likely enough that Sir Peter will discover that
+Lady Teazle is paying a visit to Joseph Surface; but what he is really
+anxious to learn is the way the husband will take it. What will Lady
+Teazle have to say when she is discovered where she has no business to
+be? How will Sir Peter receive her excuses? What will the effect be on
+the future conduct of both husband and wife? These are the questions
+which the spectators are eager to have answered.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>This is an admirable exposition of the frame of mind of the Drury Lane
+audience of May 8, 1777. who first saw the screen overturned. But in the
+thousands of audiences who have since witnessed the play, how many
+individuals, on an average, had any doubt as to what Lady Teazle would
+have to say, and how Sir Peter would receive her excuses? It would
+probably be safe to guess that, for a century past, two-thirds of every
+audience have clearly foreknown the outcome of the situation. Professor
+Matthews himself has edited Sheridan's plays, and probably knows <i>The
+School for Scandal</i> almost by heart; yet we may be pretty sure that any
+reasonably good performance of the Screen Scene will to-day give him
+pleasure not so very much inferior to that which he felt the first time
+he saw it. In this pleasure, it is manifest that mere curiosity as to
+the immediate and subsequent conduct of Sir Peter and Lady Teazle can
+have no part. There is absolutely no question which Professor Matthews,
+or any playgoer who shares his point of view, is &quot;eager to have
+answered.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>Assuming, then, that we are all familiar with the Screen Scene, and
+assuming that we, nevertheless, take pleasure in seeing it reasonably
+well acted,<a name="FNanchor67"></a><a href="#Footnote_67"><sup>[67]</sup></a> let us try to discover of what elements that pleasure is
+composed. It is, no doubt, somewhat complex. For one thing, we have
+pleasure in meeting old friends. Sir Peter, Lady Teazle, Charles, even
+Joseph, are agreeable creatures who have all sorts of pleasant
+associations for us. Again, we love to encounter not only familiar
+characters but familiar jokes. Like Goldsmith's Diggory, we can never
+help laughing at the story of &quot;ould Grouse in the gunroom.&quot; The best
+order of dramatic wit does not become stale, but rather grows upon us.
+We relish it at least as much at the tenth repetition as at the first.
+But while these considerations may partly account for the pleasure we
+take in seeing the play as a whole, they do not explain why the Screen
+Scene in particular should interest and excite us. Another source of
+pleasure, as before indicated, may be renewed recognition of the
+ingenuity with which the scene is pieced together. However familiar we
+may be with it, short of actually knowing it by heart, we do not recall
+the details of its dovetailing, and it is a delight to realize afresh
+the neatness of the manipulation by which the tension is heightened from
+speech to speech and from incident to incident. If it be objected that
+this is a pleasure which the critic alone is capable of experiencing, I
+venture to disagree. The most unsophisticated playgoer feels the effect
+of neat workmanship, though he may not be able to put his satisfaction
+into words. It is evident, however, that the mere intellectual
+recognition of fine workmanship is not sufficient to account for the
+emotions with which we witness the Screen Scene. A similar, though, of
+course, not quite identical, effect is produced by scenes of the utmost
+simplicity, in which there is no room for delicacy of dovetailing or
+neatness of manipulation.</p>
+
+<p>Where, then, are we to seek for the fundamental constituent in dramatic
+interest, as distinct from mere curiosity? Perhaps Mrs. Oliphant's
+glaring error may put us on the track of the truth. Mrs. Oliphant
+thought that Sheridan would have shown higher art had he kept the
+audience, as well as Sir Peter and Charles, ignorant of Lady Teazle's
+presence behind the screen. But this, as we saw, is precisely the
+reverse of the truth: the whole interest of the scene arises from our
+knowledge of Lady Teazle's presence. Had Sheridan fallen into Mrs.
+Oliphant's mistake, the little shock of surprise which the first-night
+audience would have felt when the screen was thrown down would have been
+no compensation at all for the comparative tameness and pointlessness of
+the preceding passages. Thus we see that the greater part of our
+pleasure arises precisely from the fact that we know what Sir Peter and
+Charles do not know, or, in other words, that we have a clear vision of
+all the circumstances, relations, and implications of a certain
+conjuncture of affairs, in which two, at least, of the persons concerned
+are ignorantly and blindly moving towards issues of which they do not
+dream. We are, in fact, in the position of superior intelligences
+contemplating, with miraculous clairvoyance, the stumblings and
+tumblings of poor blind mortals straying through the labyrinth of life.
+Our seat in the theatre is like a throne on the Epicurean Olympus,
+whence we can view with perfect intelligence, but without participation
+or responsibility, the intricate reactions of human destiny. And this
+sense of superiority does not pall upon us. When Othello comes on the
+scene, radiant and confident in Desdemona's love, our knowledge of the
+fate awaiting him makes him a hundred times more interesting than could
+any mere curiosity as to what was about to happen. It is our prevision
+of Nora's exit at the end of the last act that lends its dramatic
+poignancy to her entrance at the beginning of the first.</p>
+
+<p>There is nothing absolutely new in this theory.<a name="FNanchor68"></a><a href="#Footnote_68"><sup>[68]</sup></a> &quot;The irony of fate&quot;
+has long been recognized as one of the main elements of dramatic effect.
+It has been especially dwelt upon in relation to Greek tragedy, of which
+the themes were all known in advance even to &quot;first-day&quot; audiences. We
+should take but little interest in seeing the purple carpet spread for
+Agamemnon's triumphal entry into his ancestral halls, if it were not for
+our foreknowledge of the net and the axe prepared for him. But, familiar
+as is this principle, I am not aware that it has hitherto been extended,
+as I suggest that it should be, to cover the whole field of dramatic
+interest. I suggest that the theorists have hitherto dwelt far too much
+on curiosity<a name="FNanchor69"></a><a href="#Footnote_69"><sup>[69]</sup></a>--which may be defined as the interest of ignorance--and
+far too little on the feeling of superiority, of clairvoyance, with
+which we contemplate a foreknown action, whether of a comic or of a
+tragic cast. Of course the action must be, essentially if not in every
+detail, true to nature. We can derive no sense of superiority from our
+foreknowledge of an arbitrary or preposterous action; and that, I take
+it, is the reason why a good many plays have an initial success of
+curiosity, but cease to attract when their plot becomes familiar. Again,
+we take no pleasure in foreknowing the fate of wholly uninteresting
+people; which is as much as to say that character is indispensable to
+enduring interest in drama. With these provisos, I suggest a
+reconstruction of our theories of dramatic interest, in which mere
+first-night curiosity shall be relegated to the subordinate place which
+by right belongs to it.</p>
+
+<p>Nevertheless, we must come back to the point that there is always the
+ordeal of the first night to be faced, and that the plays are
+comparatively few which have lived-down a bad first-night. It is true
+that specifically first-night merit is a trivial matter compared with
+what may be called thousandth-performance merit; but it is equally true
+that there is no inconsistency between the two orders of merit, and that
+a play will never be less esteemed on its thousandth performance for
+having achieved a conspicuous first-night success. The practical lesson
+which seems to emerge from these considerations is that a wise
+theatrical policy would seek to diminish the all-importance of the
+first-night, and to give a play a greater chance of recovery than it has
+under present conditions, from the depressing effect of an inauspicious
+production. This is the more desirable as its initial misadventure may
+very likely be due to external and fortuitous circumstances, wholly
+unconnected with its inherent qualities.</p>
+
+<p>At the same time, we are bound to recognize that, from the very nature
+of the case, our present inquiry must be far more concerned with
+first-night than with thousandth-performance merit. Craftsmanship can,
+within limits, be acquired, genius cannot; and it is craftsmanship that
+pilots us through the perils of the first performance, genius that
+carries us on to the apotheosis of the thousandth. Therefore, our
+primary concern must be with the arousing and sustaining of curiosity,
+though we should never forget that it is only a means to the ultimate
+enlistment of the higher and more abiding forms of interest.</p>
+
+
+<br><br><hr style="width: 35%;"><br><br>
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_X"></a>CHAPTER X</h2>
+
+<p>FORESHADOWING, NOT FORESTALLING</p>
+<br>
+
+<p>We return now to the point at which the foregoing disquisition--it is
+not a digression--became necessary. We had arrived at the general
+principle that the playwright's chief aim in his first act ought to be
+to arouse and carry forward the interest of the audience. This may seem
+a tolerably obvious statement; but it is worth while to examine a little
+more closely into its implications.</p>
+
+<p>As to arousing the interest of the audience, it is clear that very
+little specific advice can be given. One can only say, &quot;Find an
+interesting theme, state its preliminaries clearly and crisply, and let
+issue be joined without too much delay.&quot; There can be no rules for
+finding an interesting theme, any more than for catching the Blue Bird.
+At a later stage we may perhaps attempt a summary enumeration of themes
+which are not interesting, which have exhausted any interest they ever
+possessed, and &quot;repay careful avoidance.&quot; But such an enumeration would
+be out of place here, where we are studying principles of form apart
+from details of matter.</p>
+
+<p>The arousing of interest, however, is one thing, the carrying-forward of
+interest is another; and on the latter point there are one or two things
+that may profitably be said. Each act, as we have seen, should consist
+of, or at all events contain, a subordinate crisis, contributory to the
+main crisis of the play: and the art of act-construction lies in giving
+to each act an individuality and interest of its own, without so
+rounding it off as to obscure even for a moment its subsidiary, and, in
+the case of the first act, its introductory, relation to the whole. This
+is a point which many dramatists ignore or undervalue. Very often, when
+the curtain falls on a first or a second act, one says, &quot;This is a
+fairly good act in itself; but whither does it lead? what is to come of
+it all?&quot; It awakens no definite anticipation, and for two pins one would
+take up one's hat and go home. The author has neglected the art of
+carrying-forward the interest.</p>
+
+<p>It is curious to note that in the most unsophisticated forms of
+melodrama this art is deliberately ignored. In plays of the type of <i>The
+Worst Woman in London</i>, it appears to be an absolute canon of art that
+every act must have a &quot;happy ending&quot;--that the curtain must always fall
+on the hero, or, preferably, the comic man, in an attitude of triumph,
+while the villain and villainess cower before him in baffled impotence.
+We have perfect faith, of course, that the villain will come up smiling
+in the next act, and proceed with his nefarious practices; but, for the
+moment, virtue has it all its own way. This, however, is a very artless
+formula which has somehow developed of recent years; and it is doubtful
+whether even the audiences to which these plays appeal would not in
+reality prefer something a little less inept in the matter of
+construction. As soon as we get above this level, at all events, the
+fostering of anticipation becomes a matter of the first importance. The
+problem is, not to cut short the spectator's interest, or to leave it
+fluttering at a loose end, but to provide it either with a
+clearly-foreseen point in the next act towards which it can reach
+onwards, or with a definite enigma, the solution of which is impatiently
+awaited. In general terms, a bridge should be provided between one act
+and another, along which the spectator's mind cannot but travel with
+eager anticipation. And this is particularly important, or particularly
+apt to be neglected, at the end of the first act. At a later point, if
+the interest does not naturally and inevitably carry itself forward, the
+case is hopeless indeed.</p>
+
+<p>To illustrate what is meant by the carrying-forward of interest, let me
+cite one or two instances in which it is achieved with
+conspicuous success.</p>
+
+<p>In Oscar Wilde's first modern comedy, <i>Lady Windermere's Fan</i>, the
+heroine, Lady Windermere, has learnt that her husband has of late been
+seen to call very frequently at the house of a certain Mrs. Erlynne,
+whom nobody knows. Her suspicions thus aroused, she searches her
+husband's desk, discovers a private and locked bank-book, cuts it open,
+and finds that one large cheque after another has been drawn in favour
+of the lady in question. At this inopportune moment, Lord Windermere
+appears with a request that Mrs. Erlynne shall be invited to their
+reception that evening. Lady Windermere indignantly refuses, her husband
+insists, and, finally, with his own hand, fills in an invitation-card
+and sends it by messenger to Mrs. Erlynne. Here some playwrights might
+have been content to finish the act. It is sufficiently evident that
+Lady Windermere will not submit to the apparent insult, and that
+something exciting may be looked for at the reception in the following
+act. But Oscar Wilde was not content with this vague expectancy. He
+first defined it, and then he underlined the definition, in a perfectly
+natural and yet ingenious and skilful way. The day happens to be Lady
+Windermere's birthday, and at the beginning of the act her husband has
+given her a beautiful ostrich-feather fan. When he sends off the
+invitation, she turns upon him and says, &quot;If that woman crosses my
+threshold, I shall strike her across the face with this fan.&quot; Here,
+again, many a dramatist might be content to bring down his curtain. The
+announcement of Lady Windermere's resolve carries forward the interest
+quite clearly enough for all practical purposes. But even this did not
+satisfy Wilde. He imagined a refinement, simple, probable, and yet
+immensely effective, which put an extraordinarily keen edge upon the
+expectancy of the audience. He made Lady Windermere ring for her butler,
+and say: &quot;Parker, be sure you pronounce the names of the guests very
+distinctly to-night. Sometimes you speak so fast that I miss them. I am
+particularly anxious to hear the names quite clearly, so as to make no
+mistake.&quot; I well remember the effect which this little touch produced on
+the first night. The situation was, in itself, open to grave objections.
+There is no plausible excuse for Lord Windermere's obstinacy in forcing
+Mrs. Erlynne upon his wife, and risking a violent scandal in order to
+postpone an explanation which he must know to be ultimately inevitable.
+Though one had not as yet learnt the precise facts of the case, one felt
+pretty confident that his lordship's conduct would scarcely justify
+itself. But interest is largely independent of critical judgment, and,
+for my own part, I can aver that, when the curtain fell on the first
+act, a five-pound note would not have bribed me to leave the theatre
+without assisting at Lady Windermere's reception in the second act. That
+is the frame of mind which the author should try to beget in his
+audience; and Oscar Wilde, then almost a novice, had, in this one little
+passage between Lady Windermere and the butler, shown himself a master
+of the art of dramatic story-telling. The dramatist has higher functions
+than mere story-telling; but this is fundamental, and the true artist is
+the last to despise it.<a name="FNanchor70"></a><a href="#Footnote_70"><sup>[70]</sup></a></p>
+
+<p>For another example of a first act brought to what one may call a
+judiciously tantalizing conclusion, I turn to Mr. R.C. Carton's comedy
+<i>Wheels within Wheels.</i> Lord Eric Chantrell has just returned from
+abroad after many years' absence. He drives straight to the bachelor
+flat of his old chum, Egerton Vartrey. At the flat he finds only his
+friend's valet, Vartrey himself has been summoned to Scotland that very
+evening, and the valet is on the point of following him. He knows,
+however, that his master would wish his old friend to make himself at
+home in the flat; so he presently goes off, leaving the newcomer
+installed for the night. Lord Eric goes to the bedroom to change his
+clothes; and, the stage being thus left vacant, we hear a latch-key
+turning in the outer door. A lady in evening dress enters, goes up to
+the bureau at the back of the stage, and calmly proceeds to break it
+open and ransack it. While she is thus burglariously employed, Lord Eric
+enters, and cannot refrain from a slight expression of surprise. The
+lady takes the situation with humorous calmness, they fall into
+conversation, and it is manifest that at every word Lord Eric is more
+and more fascinated by the fair house-breaker. She learns who he is, and
+evidently knows all about him; but she is careful to give him no inkling
+of her own identity. At last she takes her leave, and he expresses such
+an eager hope of being allowed to renew their acquaintance, that it
+amounts to a declaration of a peculiar interest in her. Thereupon she
+addresses him to this effect: &quot;Has it occurred to you to wonder how I
+got into your friend's rooms? I will show you how&quot;--and, producing a
+latch-key, she holds it up, with all its questionable implications,
+before his eyes. Then she lays it on the table, says: &quot;I leave you to
+draw your own conclusions&quot; and departs. A better opening for a light
+social comedy could scarcely be devised. We have no difficulty in
+guessing that the lady, who is not quite young, and has clearly a strong
+sense of humour, is freakishly turning appearances against herself, by
+way of throwing a dash of cold water on Lord Eric's sudden flame of
+devotion. But we long for a clear explanation of the whole quaint little
+episode; and here, again, no reasonable offer would tempt us to leave
+the theatre before our curiosity is satisfied. The remainder of the
+play, though amusing, is unfortunately not up to the level of the first
+act; else <i>Wheels within Wheels</i> would be a little classic of
+light comedy.</p>
+
+<p>For a third example of interest carefully carried forward, I turn to a
+recent Norwegian play, <i>The Idyll</i>, by Peter Egge. At the very rise of
+the curtain, we find Inga Gar, wife of an author and journalist, Dr.
+Gar, reading, with evident tokens of annoyance and distaste, a new book
+of poems by one Rolfe Ringve. Before her marriage, Inga was an actress
+of no great talent; Ringve made himself conspicuous by praising her far
+beyond her merits; and when, at last, an engagement between them was
+announced, people shrugged their shoulders and said: &quot;They are going to
+regularize the situation.&quot; As a matter of fact (of this we have early
+assurance), though Ringve has been her ardent lover, Inga has neither
+loved him nor been his mistress. Ringve being called abroad, she has,
+during his absence, broken off her engagement to him, and has then,
+about a year before the play opens, married Dr. Gar, to whom she is
+devoted. While Gar is away on a short lecture tour, Ringve has published
+the book of love-poems which we find her reading. They are very
+remarkable poems; they have already made a great stir in the literary
+world; and interest is all the keener for the fact that they are
+evidently inspired by his passion for Inga, and are couched in such a
+tone of intimacy as to create a highly injurious impression of the
+relations between them. Gar, having just come home, has no suspicion of
+the nature of the book; and when an editor, who cherishes a grudge
+against him, conceives the malicious idea of asking him to review
+Ringve's masterpiece, he consents with alacrity. One or two small
+incidents have in the meantime shown us that there is a little rift in
+the idyllic happiness of Inga and Gar, arising from her inveterate habit
+of telling trifling fibs to avoid facing the petty annoyances of life.
+For instance, when Gar asks her casually whether she has read Ringve's
+poems, a foolish denial slips out, though she knows that the cut pages
+of the book will give her the lie. These incidents point to a state of
+unstable equilibrium in the relations between husband and wife;
+wherefore, when we see Gar, at the end of the act, preparing to read
+Ringve's poems, our curiosity is very keen as to how he will take them.
+We feel the next hour to be big with fate for these two people; and we
+long for the curtain to rise again upon the threatened household. The
+fuse has been fired; we are all agog for the explosion.</p>
+
+<p>In Herr Egge's place, I should have been inclined to have dropped my
+curtain upon Gar, with the light of the reading-lamp full upon him, in
+the act of opening the book, and then to have shown him, at the
+beginning of the second act, in exactly the same position. With more
+delicate art, perhaps, the author interposes a little domestic incident
+at the end of the first act, while leaving it clearly impressed on our
+minds that the reading of the poems is only postponed by a few minutes.
+That is the essential point: the actual moment upon which the curtain
+falls is of minor importance. What is of vast importance, on the other
+hand, is that the expectation of the audience should not be baffled, and
+that the curtain should rise upon the immediate sequel to the reading of
+the poems. This is, in the exact sense of the words, <i>a sc&egrave;ne &agrave;
+faire</i>--an obligatory scene. The author has aroused in us a reasonable
+expectation of it, and should he choose to balk us--to raise his
+curtain, say, a week, or a month, later--we should feel that we had been
+trifled with. The general theory of the <i>sc&egrave;ne &agrave; faire</i> will presently
+come up for discussion. In the meantime, I merely make the obvious
+remark that it is worse than useless to awaken a definite expectation in
+the breast of the audience, and then to disappoint it.<a name="FNanchor71"></a><a href="#Footnote_71"><sup>[71]</sup></a></p>
+
+<p>The works of Sir Arthur Pinero afford many examples of interest very
+skilfully carried forward. In his farces--let no one despise the
+technical lessons to be learnt from a good farce--there is always an
+<i>adventure</i> afoot, whose development we eagerly anticipate. When the
+curtain falls on the first act of <i>The Magistrate</i>, we foresee the
+meeting of all the characters at the H&ocirc;tel des Princes, and are
+impatient to assist at it. In <i>The Schoolmistress</i>, we would not for
+worlds miss Peggy Hesseltine's party, which we know awaits us in Act II.
+An excellent example, of a more serious order, is to be found in <i>The
+Benefit of the Doubt</i>. When poor Theo, rebuffed by her husband's chilly
+scepticism, goes off on some manifestly harebrained errand, we divine,
+as do her relatives, that she is about to commit social suicide by
+seeking out John Allingham; and we feel more than curiosity as to the
+event--we feel active concern, almost anxiety, as though our own
+personal interests were involved. Our anticipation is heightened, too,
+when we see Sir Fletcher Portwood and Mrs. Cloys set off upon her track.
+This gives us a definite point to which to look forward, while leaving
+the actual course of events entirely undefined. It fulfils one of the
+great ends of craftsmanship, in foreshadowing without forestalling an
+intensely interesting conjuncture of affairs.</p>
+
+<p>I have laid stress on the importance of carrying forward the interest of
+the audience because it is a detail that is often overlooked. There is,
+as a rule, no difficulty in the matter, always assuming that the theme
+be not inherently devoid of interest. One could mention many plays in
+which the author has, from sheer inadvertence, failed to carry forward
+the interest of the first act, though a very little readjustment, or a
+trifling exercise of invention, would have enabled him to do so.
+<i>Pillars of Society</i>, indeed, may be taken as an instance, though not a
+very flagrant one. Such interest as we feel at the end of the first act
+is vague and unfocused. We are sure that something is to come of the
+return of Lona and Johan, but we have no inkling as to what that
+something may be. If we guess that the so-called black sheep of the
+family will prove to be the white sheep, it is only because we know that
+it is Ibsen's habit to attack respectability and criticize accepted
+moral values--it is not because of anything that he has told us, or
+hinted to us, in the play itself. In no other case does he leave our
+interest at such a loose end as in this, his prentice-work in modern
+drama. In <i>The League of Youth</i>, an earlier play, but of an altogether
+lighter type, the interest is much more definitely carried forward at
+the end of the first act. Stensgaard has attacked Chamberlain Bratsberg
+in a rousing speech, and the Chamberlain has been induced to believe
+that the attack was directed not against himself, but against his enemy
+Monsen. Consequently he invites Stensgaard to his great dinner-party,
+and this invitation Stensgaard regards as a cowardly attempt at
+conciliation. We clearly see a crisis looming ahead, when this
+misunderstanding shall be cleared up; and we consequently look forward
+with lively interest to the dinner-party of the second act--which ends,
+as a matter of fact, in a brilliant scene of comedy.</p>
+
+<p>The principle, to recapitulate, is simply this: a good first act should
+never end in a blank wall. There should always be a window in it, with
+at least a glimpse of something attractive beyond. In <i>Pillars of
+Society</i> there is a window, indeed; but it is of ground glass.</p>
+
+
+
+<br><br><hr style="width: 35%;"><br><br>
+<h2><a name="BOOK_III"></a>BOOK III</h2>
+
+<p>THE MIDDLE</p>
+
+
+
+<br><br><hr style="width: 35%;"><br><br>
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_XI"></a>CHAPTER XI</h2>
+
+<p>TENSION AND ITS SUSPENSION</p>
+<br>
+
+<p>In the days of the five-act dogma, each act was supposed to have its
+special and pre-ordained function. Freytag assigns to the second act, as
+a rule, the <i>Steigerung</i> or heightening--the working-up, one might call
+it--of the interest. But the second act, in modern plays, has often to
+do all the work of the three middle acts under the older dispensation;
+wherefore the theory of their special functions has more of a historical
+than of a practical interest. For our present purposes, we may treat the
+interior section of a play as a unit, whether it consist of one, two, or
+three acts.</p>
+
+<p>The first act may be regarded as the porch or vestibule through which we
+pass into the main fabric--solemn or joyous, fantastic or austere--of
+the actual drama. Sometimes, indeed, the vestibule is reduced to a mere
+threshold which can be crossed in two strides; but normally the first
+act, or at any rate the greater part of it, is of an introductory
+character. Let us conceive, then, that we have passed the vestibule, and
+are now to study the principles on which the body of the structure
+is reared.</p>
+
+<p>In the first place, is the architectural metaphor a just one? Is there,
+or ought there to be, any analogy between a drama and a
+finely-proportioned building? The question has already been touched on
+in the opening paragraphs of Chapter VIII; but we may now look into it a
+little more closely.</p>
+
+<p>What is the characteristic of a fine piece of architecture? Manifestly
+an organic relation, a carefully-planned interdependence, between all
+its parts. A great building is a complete and rounded whole, just like a
+living organism. It is informed by an inner law of harmony and
+proportion, and cannot be run up at haphazard, with no definite and
+pre-determined design. Can we say the same of a great play?</p>
+
+<p>I think we can. Even in those plays which present a picture rather than
+an action, we ought to recognize a principle of selection, proportion,
+composition, which, if not absolutely organic, is at any rate the
+reverse of haphazard. We may not always be able to define the principle,
+to put it clearly in words; but if we feel that the author has been
+guided by no principle, that he has proceeded on mere hand-to-mouth
+caprice, that there is no &quot;inner law of harmony and proportion&quot; in his
+work, then we instinctively relegate it to a low place in our esteem.
+Hauptmann's <i>Weavers</i> certainly cannot be called a piece of dramatic
+architecture, like <i>Rosmersholm</i> or <i>Iris</i>; but that does not mean that
+it is a mere rambling series of tableaux. It is not easy to define the
+principle of unity in that brilliant comedy <i>The Madras House</i>; but we
+nevertheless feel that a principle of unity exists; or, if we do not, so
+much the worse for the play and its author.</p>
+
+<p>There is, indeed, a large class of plays, often popular, and sometimes
+meritorious, in relation to which the architectural metaphor entirely
+breaks down. They are what may be called &quot;running fire&quot; plays. We have
+all seen children setting a number of wooden blocks on end, at equal
+intervals, and then tilting over the first so that it falls against the
+second, which in turn falls against the third, and so on, till the whole
+row, with a rapid clack-clack-clack, lies flat upon the table. This is
+called a &quot;running fire&quot;; and this is the structural principle of a good
+many plays. We feel that the playwright is, so to speak, inventing as he
+goes along--that the action, like the child's fantastic serpentine of
+blocks, might at any moment take a turn in any possible direction
+without falsifying its antecedents or our expectations. No part of it is
+necessarily involved in any other part. If the play were found too long
+or too short, an act might be cut out or written in without
+necessitating any considerable readjustments in the other acts. The play
+is really a series of episodes,</p>
+
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&quot;Which might, odd bobs, sir! in judicious hands,<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;Extend from here to Mesopotamy.&quot;<br>
+
+<p>The episodes may grow out of each other plausibly enough, but by no
+pre-ordained necessity, and with no far-reaching interdependence. We
+live, in such plays, from moment to moment, foreseeing nothing, desiring
+nothing; and though this frame of mind may be mildly agreeable, it
+involves none of that complexity of sensation with which we contemplate
+a great piece of architecture, or follow the development of a
+finely-constructed drama. To this order belong many cape-and-sword plays
+and detective dramas--plays like <i>The Adventure of Lady Ursula</i>, <i>The
+Red Robe</i>, the Musketeer romances that were at one time so popular, and
+most plays of the <i>Sherlock Holmes</i> and <i>Raffles</i> type. But pieces of a
+more ambitious order have been known to follow the same formula--some of
+the works, for instance, of Mr. Charles McEvoy, to say nothing of Mr.
+Bernard Shaw.</p>
+
+<p>We may take it, I think, that the architectural analogy holds good of
+every play which can properly be said to be &quot;constructed.&quot; Construction
+means dramatic architecture, or in other words, a careful
+pre-arrangement of proportions and interdependencies. But to carry
+beyond this point the analogy between the two arts would be fantastic
+and unhelpful. The one exists in space, the other in time. The one seeks
+to beget in the spectator a state of placid, though it may be of
+aspiring, contemplation; the other, a state of more or less acute
+tension. The resemblances between music and architecture are, as is well
+known, much more extensive and illuminating. It might not be wholly
+fanciful to call music a sort of middle term between the two other arts.</p>
+
+<p>A great part of the secret of dramatic architecture lies in the one word
+&quot;tension.&quot; To engender, maintain, suspend, heighten and resolve a state
+of tension--that is the main object of the dramatist's craft.</p>
+
+<p>What do we mean by tension? Clearly a stretching out, a stretching
+forward, of the mind. That is the characteristic mental attitude of the
+theatrical audience. If the mind is not stretching forward, the body
+will soon weary of its immobility and constraint. Attention may be
+called the momentary correlative of tension. When we are intent on what
+is to come, we are attentive to what is there and then happening. The
+term tension is sometimes applied, not to the mental state of the
+audience, but to the relation of the characters on the stage. &quot;A scene
+of high tension&quot; is primarily one in which the actors undergo a great
+emotional strain. But this is, after all, only a means towards
+heightening of the mental tension of the audience. In such a scene the
+mind stretches forward, no longer to something vague and distant, but to
+something instant and imminent.</p>
+
+<p>In discussing what Freytag calls the <i>erregende Moment,</i> we might have
+defined it as the starting-point of the tension. A reasonable audience
+will, if necessary, endure a certain amount of exposition, a certain
+positing of character and circumstance, before the tension sets in; but
+when it once has set in, the playwright must on no account suffer it to
+relax until he deliberately resolves it just before the fall of the
+curtain. There are, of course, minor rhythms of tension and resolution,
+like the harmonic vibrations of a violin-string. That is implied when we
+say that a play consists of a great crisis worked out through a series
+of minor crises. But the main tension, once initiated, must never be
+relaxed. If it is, the play is over, though the author may have omitted
+to note the fact. Not infrequently, he begins a new play under the
+impression that he is finishing the old one. That is what Shakespeare
+did in <i>The Merchant of Venice.</i> The fifth act is an independent
+afterpiece, though its independence is slightly disguised by the fact
+that the <i>erregende Moment</i> of the new play follows close upon the end
+of the old one, with no interact between. A very exacting technical
+criticism might accuse Ibsen of verging towards the same fault in <i>An
+Enemy of the People.</i> There the tension is practically resolved with Dr.
+Stockmann's ostracism at the end of the fourth act. At that point, if it
+did not know that there was another act to come, an audience might go
+home in perfect content. The fifth act is a sort of epilogue or sequel,
+built out of the materials of the preceding drama, but not forming an
+integral part of it. With a brief exposition to set forth the antecedent
+circumstances, it would be quite possible to present the fifth act as an
+independent comedietta.</p>
+
+<p>But here a point of great importance calls for our notice. Though the
+tension, once started, must never be relaxed: though it ought, on the
+contrary, to be heightened or tightened (as you choose to put it) from
+act to act; yet there are times when it may without disadvantage, or
+even with marked advantage, be temporarily suspended. In other words,
+the stretching-forward, without in any way slackening, may fall into the
+background of our consciousness, while other matters, the relevance of
+which may not be instantly apparent, are suffered to occupy the
+foreground. We know all too well, in everyday experience, that tension
+is not really relaxed by a temporary distraction. The dread of a coming
+ordeal in the witness-box or on the operating-table may be forcibly
+crushed down like a child's jack-in-the-box; but we are always conscious
+of the effort to compress it, and we know that it will spring up again
+the moment that effort ceases. Sir Arthur Pinero's play, <i>The
+Profligate,</i> was written at a time when it was the fashion to give each
+act a sub-title; and one of its acts is headed &quot;The Sword of Damocles.&quot;
+That is, indeed, the inevitable symbol of dramatic tension: we see a
+sword of Damocles (even though it be only a farcical blade of painted
+lathe) impending over someone's head: and when once we are confident
+that it will fall at the fated moment, we do not mind having our
+attention momentarily diverted to other matters. A rather flagrant
+example of suspended attention is afforded by Hamlet's advice to the
+Players. We know that Hamlet has hung a sword of Damocles over the
+King's head in the shape of the mimic murder-scene; and, while it is
+preparing, we are quite willing to have our attention switched off to
+certain abstract questions of dramatic criticism. The scene might have
+been employed to heighten the tension. Instead of giving the Players (in
+true princely fashion) a lesson in the general principles of their art,
+Hamlet might have specially &quot;coached&quot; them in the &quot;business&quot; of the
+scene to be enacted, and thus doubly impressed on the audience his
+resolve to &quot;tent&quot; the King &quot;to the quick.&quot; I am far from suggesting that
+this would have been desirable; but it would obviously have been
+possible.<a name="FNanchor72"></a><a href="#Footnote_72"><sup>[72]</sup></a> Shakespeare, as the experience of three centuries has
+shown, did right in judging that the audience was already sufficiently
+intent on the coming ordeal, and would welcome an interlude of
+aesthetic theory.</p>
+
+<p>There are times, moreover, when it is not only permissible to suspend
+the tension, but when, by so doing, a great artist can produce a
+peculiar and admirable effect. A sudden interruption, on the very brink
+of a crisis, may, as it were, whet the appetite of the audience for what
+is to come. We see in the Porter scene in Macbeth a suspension of this
+nature; but Shakespeare used it sparingly, unless, indeed, we are to
+consider as a deliberate point of art the retardation of movement
+commonly observable in the fourth acts of his tragedies. Ibsen, on the
+other hand, deliberately employed this device on three conspicuous
+occasions. The entrance of Dr. Rank in the last act of <i>A Doll's House</i>
+is a wholly unnecessary interruption to the development of the crisis
+between Nora and Helmer. The scene might be entirely omitted without
+leaving a perceptible hiatus in the action; yet who does not feel that
+this brief respite lends gathered impetus to the main action when it is
+resumed? The other instances are offered by the two apparitions of Ulric
+Brendel in <i>Rosmersholm.</i> The first occurs when Rosmer is on the very
+verge of his momentous confession to Kroll, the second when Rosmer and
+Rebecca are on the very verge of their last great resolve; and in each
+case we feel a distinct value (apart from the inherent quality of the
+Brendel scenes) in the very fact that the tension has been momentarily
+suspended. Such a <i>rallentando</i> effect is like the apparent pause in the
+rush of a river before it thunders over a precipice.</p>
+
+<p>The possibility of suspending tension is of wider import than may at
+first sight appear. But for it, our dramas would have to be all bone and
+muscle, like the figures in an anatomical textbook. As it is, we are
+able, without relaxing tension, to shift it to various planes of
+consciousness, and thus find leisure to reproduce the surface aspects of
+life, with some of its accidents and irrelevances. For example, when the
+playwright has, at the end of his first act, succeeded in carrying
+onward the spectator's interest, and giving him something definite to
+look forward to, it does not at all follow that the expected scene,
+situation, revelation, or what not, should come at the beginning of the
+second act. In some cases it must do so; when, as in <i>The Idyll</i> above
+cited, the spectator has been carefully induced to expect some imminent
+conjuncture which cannot be postponed. But this can scarcely be called a
+typical case. More commonly, when an author has enlisted the curiosity
+of his audience of some definite point, he will be in no great hurry to
+satisfy and dissipate it. He may devote the early part of the second act
+to working-up the same line of interest to a higher pitch; or he may
+hold it in suspense while he prepares some further development of the
+action. The closeness with which a line of interest, once started, ought
+to be followed up, must depend in some measure on the nature and tone of
+the play. If it be a serious play, in which character and action are
+very closely intertwined, any pause or break in the conjoint development
+is to be avoided. If, on the other hand, it is a play of light and
+graceful dialogue, in which the action is a pretext for setting the
+characters in motion rather than the chief means towards their
+manifestation, then the playwright can afford to relax the rate of his
+progress, and even to wander a little from the straight line of advance.
+In such a play, even the old institution of the &quot;underplot&quot; is not
+inadmissible; though the underplot ought scarcely to be a &quot;plot,&quot; but
+only some very slight thread of interest, involving no strain on the
+attention.<a name="FNanchor73"></a><a href="#Footnote_73"><sup>[73]</sup></a> It may almost be called an established practice, on the
+English stage, to let the dalliance of a pair of boy-and-girl lovers
+relieve the main interest of a more or less serious comedy; and there is
+no particular harm in such a convention, if it be not out of keeping
+with the general character of the play. In some plays the substance--the
+character-action, if one may so call it--is the main, and indeed the
+only, thing. In others the substance, though never unimportant, is in
+some degree subordinate to the embroideries; and it is for the
+playwright to judge how far this subordination may safely be carried.</p>
+
+<p>One principle, however, may be emphasized as almost universally valid,
+and that is that the end of an act should never leave the action just
+where it stood at the beginning. An audience has an instinctive sense
+of, and desire for, progress. It does not like to realize that things
+have been merely marking time. Even if it has been thoroughly
+entertained, from moment to moment, during the progress of an act, it
+does not like to feel at the end that nothing has really happened. The
+fall of the curtain gives time for reflection, and for the ordering of
+impressions which, while the action was afoot, were more or less vague
+and confused. It is therefore of great importance that each act should,
+to put it briefly, bear looking back upon--that it should appear to
+stand in due proportion to the general design of the play, and should
+not be felt to have been empty, or irrelevant, or disappointing. This
+is, indeed, a plain corollary from the principle of tension. Suspended
+it may be, sometimes with positive advantage; but it must not be
+suspended too long; and suspension for a whole act is equivalent to
+relaxation.</p>
+
+<p>To sum up: when once a play has begun to move, its movement ought to
+proceed continuously, and with gathering momentum; or, if it stands
+still for a space, the stoppage ought to be deliberate and purposeful.
+It is fatal when the author thinks it is moving, while in fact it is
+only revolving on its own axis.</p>
+
+
+
+<br><br><hr style="width: 35%;"><br><br>
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_XII"></a>CHAPTER XII</h2>
+
+<p>PREPARATION: THE FINGER-POST</p>
+<br>
+
+<p>We shall find, on looking into it, that most of the technical maxims
+that have any validity may be traced back, directly or indirectly, to
+the great principle of tension. The art of construction is summed up,
+first, in giving the mind of an audience something to which to stretch
+forward, and, secondly, in not letting it feel that it has stretched
+forward in vain. &quot;You will find it infinitely pleasing,&quot; says Dryden,<a name="FNanchor74"></a><a href="#Footnote_74"><sup>[74]</sup></a>
+&quot;to be led in a labyrinth of design, where you see some of your way
+before you, yet discern not the end till you arrive at it.&quot; Or, he might
+have added, &quot;if you foresee the end, but not the means by which it is to
+be reached.&quot; In drama, as in all art, the &quot;how&quot; is often more important
+than the &quot;what.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>No technical maxim is more frequently cited than the remark of the
+younger Dumas: &quot;The art of the theatre is the art of preparations.&quot; This
+is true in a larger sense than he intended; but at the same time there
+are limits to its truth, which we must not fail to observe.</p>
+
+<p>Dumas, as we know, was an inveterate preacher, using the stage as a
+pulpit for the promulgation of moral and social ideas which were, in
+their day, considered very advanced and daring. The primary meaning of
+his maxim, then, was that a startling idea, or a scene wherein such an
+idea was implied, ought not to be sprung upon an audience wholly
+unprepared to accept it. For instance, in <i>Monsieur Alphonse,</i> a
+husband, on discovering that his wife has had an intrigue before their
+marriage, and that a little girl whom she wishes to adopt is really her
+daughter, instantly raises her from the ground where she lies grovelling
+at his feet, and says: &quot;Cr&eacute;ature de Dieu, toi qui as failli et te
+repens, rel&egrave;ve toi, je te pardonne.&quot; This evangelical attitude on the
+part of Admiral de Montaiglin was in itself very surprising, and perhaps
+not wholly admirable, to the Parisian public of 1873; but Dumas had so
+&quot;prepared&quot; the <i>coup de th&eacute;&acirc;tre</i> that it passed with very slight
+difficulty on the first night, and with none at all at subsequent
+performances and revivals. How had he &quot;prepared&quot; it? Why, by playing, in
+a score of subtle ways, upon the sympathies and antipathies of the
+audience. For instance, as Sarcey points out, he had made M. de
+Montaiglin a sailor, &quot;accustomed, during his distant voyages, to long
+reveries in view of the boundless ocean, whence he had acquired a
+mystical habit of mind.... Dumas certainly would never have placed this
+pardon in the mouth of a stockbroker.&quot; So far so good; but
+&quot;preparation,&quot; in the sense of the word, is a device of rhetoric or of
+propaganda rather than of dramatic craftsmanship. It is a method of
+astutely undermining or outflanking prejudice. Desiring to enforce a
+general principle, you invent a case which is specially favourable to
+your argument, and insinuate it into the acceptance of the audience by
+every possible subtlety of adjustment. You trust, it would seem, that
+people who have applauded an act of pardon in an extreme case will be so
+much the readier to exercise that high prerogative in the less carefully
+&quot;prepared&quot; cases which present themselves in real life. This may or may
+not be a sound principle of persuasion; as we are not here considering
+the drama as an art of persuasion, we have not to decide between this
+and the opposite, or Shawesque, principle of shocking and startling an
+audience by the utmost violence of paradox. There is something to be
+said for both methods--for conversion by pill-and-jelly and for
+conversion by nitroglycerine.</p>
+
+<p>Reverting, now, to the domain of pure craftsmanship, can it be said that
+&quot;the art of the theatre is the art of preparation&quot;? Yes, it is very
+largely the art of delicate and unobtrusive preparation, of helping an
+audience to divine whither it is going, while leaving it to wonder how
+it is to get there. On the other hand, it is also the art of avoiding
+laborious, artificial and obvious preparations which lead to little or
+nothing. A due proportion must always be observed between the
+preparation and the result.</p>
+
+<p>To illustrate the meaning of preparation, as the word is here employed,
+I may perhaps be allowed to reprint a passage from a review of Mr.
+Israel Zangwill's play <i>Children of the Ghetto</i>.<a name="FNanchor75"></a><a href="#Footnote_75"><sup>[75]</sup></a></p>
+
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&quot; ... To those who have not read the novel, it must seem as though<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;the mere illustrations of Jewish life entirely overlaid and<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;overwhelmed the action. It is not so in reality. One who knows the<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;story beforehand can often see that it is progressing even in scenes<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;which seem purely episodic and unconnected either with each other or<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;with the general scheme. But Mr. Zangwill has omitted to provide<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;finger-posts, if I may so express it, to show those who do not know<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;the story beforehand whither he is leading them. He has neglected<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;the great art of forecasting, of keeping anticipation on the alert,<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;which is half the secret of dramatic construction. To forecast,<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;without discounting, your effects--that is all the Law and the<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;Prophets. In the first act of <i>Children of the Ghetto</i>, for<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;instance, we see the marriage in jest of Hannah to Sam Levine,<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;followed by the instant divorce with all its curious ceremonies.<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;This is amusing so far as it goes; but when the divorce is<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;completed, the whole thing seems to be over and done with. We have<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;seen some people, in whom as yet we take no particular interest,<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;enmeshed in a difficulty arising from a strange and primitive<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;formalism in the interpretation of law; and we have seen the meshes<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;cut to the satisfaction of all parties, and the incident to all<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;appearance closed. There is no finger-post to direct our<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;anticipation on the way it should go; and those who have not read<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;the book cannot possibly guess that this mock marriage, instantly<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;and ceremoniously dissolved, can have any ulterior effect upon the<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;fortunes of any one concerned. Thus, the whole scene, however<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;curious in itself, seems motiveless and resultless. How the<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;requisite finger-post was to be provided I cannot tell. That is not<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;my business; but a skilful dramatist would have made it his. Then,<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;in the second act, amid illustrations of social life in the Ghetto,<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;we have the meeting of Hannah with David Brandon, a prettily-written<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;scene of love-at-first-sight. But, so far as any one can see, there<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;is every prospect that the course of true love will run absolutely<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;smooth. Again we lack a finger-post to direct our interest forward;<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;nor do we see anything that seems to bring this act into vital<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;relation with its predecessor. Those who have read the book know<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;that David Brandon is a 'Cohen,' a priest, a descendant of Aaron,<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;and that a priest may not marry a divorced woman. Knowing this, we<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;have a sense of irony, of impending disaster, which renders the<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;love-scene of the second act dramatic. But to those, and they must<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;always be a majority in any given audience, who do not know this,<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;the scene has no more dramatic quality than lies in its actual<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;substance, which, although pretty enough, is entirely commonplace.<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;Not till the middle of the third act (out of four) is the obstacle<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;revealed, and we see that the mighty maze was not without a plan.<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;Here, then, the drama begins, after two acts and a half of<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;preparation, during which we were vouchsafed no inkling of what was<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;preparing. It is capital drama when we come to it, really human,<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;really tragic. The arbitrary prohibitions of the Mosaic law have no<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;religious or moral force either for David or for Hannah. They feel<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;it to be their right, almost their duty, to cast off their shackles.<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;In any community, save that of strict Judaism, they are perfectly<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;free to marry. But in thus flouting the letter of the law, Hannah<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;well knows that she will break her father's heart. Even as she<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;struggles to shake them off, the traditions of her race take firmer<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;hold on her; and in the highly dramatic last act (a not unskilful<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;adaptation to the stage of the crucial scene of the book) she bows<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;her neck beneath the yoke, and renounces love that the Law may be<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;fulfilled.&quot;<br>
+
+<p>To state the matter in other terms, we are conscious of no tension in
+the earlier acts of this play, because we have not been permitted to see
+the sword of Damocles hanging over the heads of Hannah and David
+Brandon. For lack of preparation, of pointing-forward, we feel none of
+that god-like superiority to the people of the mimic world which we have
+recognized as the characteristic privilege of the spectator. We know no
+more than they do of the implications of their acts, and the network of
+embarrassments in which they are involving themselves. Indeed, we know
+less than they do: for Hannah, as a well brought-up Jewess, is no doubt
+vaguely aware of the disabilities attaching to a divorced woman. A
+gentile audience, on the other hand, cannot possibly foresee how--<br>
+<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&quot;Some consequence yet hanging in the stars<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;Shall bitterly begin his fearful date<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;With this night's revels.&quot;<br>
+<br>
+and, lacking that foreknowledge, it misses the specifically dramatic
+effect of the scenes. The author invites it to play at blind-man's-buff
+with the characters, instead of unsealing its eyes and enabling it to
+watch the game from its Olympian coign of vantage.</p>
+
+<p>Let the dramatist, then, never neglect to place the requisite
+finger-posts on the road he would have us follow. It is not, of course,
+necessary that we should be conscious of all the implications of any
+given scene or incident, but we must know enough of them not only to
+create the requisite tension, but to direct it towards the right quarter
+of the compass. Retrospective elucidations are valueless and sometimes
+irritating. It is in nowise to the author's interest that we should say,
+&quot;Ah, if we had only known this, or foreseen that, in time, the effect of
+such-and-such a scene would have been entirely different!&quot; We have no
+use for finger-posts that point backwards.<a name="FNanchor76"></a><a href="#Footnote_76"><sup>[76]</sup></a></p>
+
+<p>In the works of Sir Arthur Pinero I recall two cases in which the lack
+of a finger-post impairs the desired effect: slightly, in the one
+instance, in the other, very considerably. The third act of that
+delightful comedy <i>The Princess and the Butterfly</i> contains no
+sufficient indication of Fay Zuliani's jealousy of the friendship
+between Sir George Lamorant and the Princess Pannonia. We are rather at
+a loss to account for the coldness of her attitude to the Princess, and
+her perverse naughtiness in going off to the Opera Ball. This renders
+the end of the act practically ineffective. We so little foresee what is
+to come of Fay's midnight escapade, that we take no particular interest
+in it, and are rather disconcerted by the care with which it is led up
+to, and the prominence assigned to it. This, however, is a trifling
+fault. Far different is the case in the last act of <i>The Benefit of the
+Doubt</i>, which goes near to ruining what is otherwise a very fine play.
+The defect, indeed, is not purely technical: on looking into it we find
+that the author is not in fact working towards an ending which can be
+called either inevitable or conspicuously desirable. His failure to
+point forward is no doubt partly due to his having nothing very
+satisfactory to point forward to. But it is only in retrospect that this
+becomes apparent. What we feel while the act is in progress is simply
+the lack of any finger-post to afford us an inkling of the end towards
+which we are proceeding. Through scene after scene we appear to be
+making no progress, but going round and round in a depressing circle.
+The tension, in a word, is fatally relaxed. It may perhaps be suggested
+as a maxim that when an author finds a difficulty in placing the
+requisite finger-posts, as he nears the end of his play, he will do well
+to suspect that the end he has in view is defective, and to try if he
+cannot amend it.</p>
+
+<p>In the ancient, and in the modern romantic, drama, oracles, portents,
+prophecies, horoscopes and such-like intromissions of the supernatural
+afforded a very convenient aid to the placing of the requisite
+finger-posts--&quot;foreshadowing without forestalling.&quot; It has often been
+said that <i>Macbeth</i> approaches the nearest of all Shakespeare's
+tragedies to the antique model: and in nothing is the resemblance
+clearer than in the employment of the Witches to point their skinny
+fingers into the fated future. In <i>Romeo and Juliet</i>, inward foreboding
+takes the place of outward prophecy. I have quoted above Romeo's
+prevision of &quot;Some consequence yet hanging in the stars&quot;; and beside it
+may be placed Juliet's--</p>
+
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&quot;I have no joy of this contract to-night;<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;It is too rash, too unadvised, too sudden,<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;Too like the lightning which doth cease to be<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;Ere one can say it lightens.&quot;<br>
+
+<p>In <i>Othello,</i> on the other hand, the most modern of all his plays,
+Shakespeare had recourse neither to outward boding, nor to inward
+foreboding, but planted a plain finger-post in the soil of human nature,
+when he made Brabantio say--</p>
+
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&quot;Look to her, Moor, if thou hast eyes to see:<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;She has deceived her father, and may thee.&quot;<br>
+
+<p>Mr. Stephen Phillips, in the first act of <i>Paolo and Francesca,</i> outdoes
+all his predecessors, ancient or modern, in his daring use of sibylline
+prophecy. He makes Giovanni's blind foster-mother, Angela, foretell the
+tragedy in almost every detail, save that, in her vision, she cannot see
+the face of Francesca's lover. Mr. Phillips, I take it, is here
+reinforcing ancient tradition by a reference to modern &quot;psychical
+research.&quot; He trusts to our conceiving such clairvoyance to be not
+wholly impossible, and giving it what may be called provisional
+credence. Whether the device be artistic or not we need not here
+consider. I merely point to it as a conspicuous example of the use of
+the finger-post.<a name="FNanchor77"></a><a href="#Footnote_77"><sup>[77]</sup></a></p>
+
+<p>It need scarcely be said that a misleading finger-post is carefully to
+be avoided, except in the rare cases where it may be advisable to beget
+a momentary misapprehension on the part of the audience, which shall be
+almost instantly corrected in some pleasant or otherwise effective
+fashion.<a name="FNanchor78"></a><a href="#Footnote_78"><sup>[78]</sup></a> It is naturally difficult to think of striking instances of
+the misleading finger-posts; for plays which contain such a blunder are
+not apt to survive, even in the memory. A small example occurs in a
+clever play named <i>A Modern Aspasia</i> by Mr. Hamilton Fyfe. Edward
+Meredith has two households: a London house over which his lawful wife,
+Muriel, presides; and a country cottage where dwells his mistress,
+Margaret, with her two children. One day Muriel's automobile breaks down
+near Margaret's cottage, and, while the tyre is being repaired, Margaret
+gives her visitor tea, neither of them knowing the other. Throughout the
+scene we are naturally wondering whether a revelation is to occur; and
+when, towards the close, Muriel goes to Margaret's room, &quot;to put her hat
+straight,&quot; we have no longer any doubt on the subject. It is practically
+inevitable that she should find in the room her husband's photograph, or
+some object which she should instantly recognize as his, and should
+return to the stage in full possession of the secret. This is so
+probable that nothing but a miracle can prevent it: we mentally give the
+author credit for bringing about his revelation in a very simple and
+natural way; and we are proportionately disappointed when we find that
+the miracle has occurred, and that Muriel returns to the sitting-room no
+wiser than she left it. Very possibly the general economy of the play
+demanded that the revelation should not take place at this juncture.
+That question does not here concern us. The point is that, having
+determined to reserve the revelation for his next act, the author ought
+not, by sending Muriel into Margaret's bedroom, to have awakened in us a
+confident anticipation of its occurring there and then. A romantic play
+by Mr. J. B. Fagan, entitled <i>Under Which King?</i> offers another small
+instance of the same nature. The date is 1746; certain despatches of
+vast importance have to be carried by a Hanoverian officer from Moidart
+to Fort William. The Jacobites arrange to drug the officer; and, to make
+assurance doubly sure, in case the drug should fail to act, they post a
+Highland marksman in a narrow glen to pick him off as he passes. The
+drug does act; but his lady-love, to save his military honour, assumes
+male attire and rides off with the despatches. We hear her horse's hoofs
+go clattering down the road; and then, as the curtain falls, we hear a
+shot ring out into the night. This shot is a misleading fingerpost.
+Nothing comes of it: we find in the next act that the marksman has
+missed! But marksmen, under such circumstances, have no business to
+miss. It is a breach of the dramatic proprieties. We feel that the
+author has been trifling with us in inflicting on us this purely
+mechanical and momentary &quot;scare.&quot; The case would be different if the
+young lady knew that the marksman was lying in ambush, and determined to
+run the gantlet. In that case the incident would be a trait of
+character; but, unless my memory deceives me, that is not the case. On
+the stage, every bullet should have its billet--not necessarily in the
+person aimed at, but in the emotions or anticipations of the audience.
+This bullet may, indeed, give us a momentary thrill of alarm; but it is
+dearly bought at the expense of subsequent disillusionment.</p>
+
+<p>We have now to consider the subject of over-preparation, too obtrusive
+preparation, mountainous preparation leading only to a mouse-like
+effect. This is the characteristic error of the so-called &quot;well-made
+play,&quot; the play of elaborate and ingenious intrigue. The trouble with
+the well-made play is that it is almost always, and of necessity,
+ill-made. Very rarely does the playwright succeed in weaving a web which
+is at once intricate, consistent, and clear. In nineteen cases out of
+twenty there are glaring flaws that have to be overlooked; or else the
+pattern is so involved that the mind's eye cannot follow it, and becomes
+bewildered and fatigued. A classical example of both faults may be found
+in Congreve's so-called comedy <i>The Double-Dealer</i>. This is, in fact, a
+powerful drama, somewhat in the Sardou manner; but Congreve had none of
+Sardou's deftness in manipulating an intrigue. Maskwell is not only a
+double-dealer, but a triple--or quadruple-dealer; so that the brain soon
+grows dizzy in the vortex of his villainies. The play, it may be noted,
+was a failure.</p>
+
+<p>There is a quite legitimate pleasure to be found, no doubt, in a complex
+intrigue which is also perspicuous. Plays such as Alexandre Dumas's
+<i>Mademoiselle de Belle-Isle</i>, or the pseudo-historical dramas of
+Scribe-<i>Adrienne Lecouvreur, Bertrand et Raton, Un Verre d'Eau, Les
+Trois Maupin,</i> etc.--are amusing toys, like those social or military
+tableaux, the figures of which you can set in motion by dropping a penny
+in the slot. But the trick of this sort of &quot;preparation&quot; has long been
+found out, and even unsophisticated audiences are scarcely to be
+thrilled by it. We may accept it as a sound principle, based on common
+sense and justified by experience, that an audience should never be
+tempted to exclaim, &quot;What a marvellously clever fellow is this
+playwright! How infinitely cleverer than the dramatist who constructs
+the tragi-comedy of life.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>This is what we inevitably exclaim as we watch Victorien Sardou, in whom
+French ingenuity culminated and caricatured itself, laying the
+foundations of one of his labyrinthine intrigues. The absurdities of
+&quot;preparation&quot; in this sense could scarcely be better satirized than in
+the following page from Francisque Sarcey's criticism of <i>Nos Intimes</i>
+(known in English as <i>Peril</i>)--a page which is intended, not as satire,
+but as eulogy--</p>
+
+&nbsp;&nbsp;At the sixth performance, I met, during the first interact, a man of<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;infinite taste who ... complained of the lengthiness of this first<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;act: &quot;What a lot of details,&quot; he said, &quot;which serve no purpose, and<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;had better have been omitted! What is the use of that long story<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;about the cactus with a flower that is unique in all the world? Why<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;trouble us with that dahlia-root, which M. Caussade's neighbour has<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;thrown over the garden wall? Was it necessary to inflict on us all<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;that talk about the fox that plays havoc in the garden? What have we<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;to do with that mischievous beast? And that Tolozan, with his<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;endless digressions! What do we care about his ideas on love, on<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;metempsychosis, on friendship, etc.? All this stuff only retards<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;the action.&quot;<br>
+
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&quot;On the contrary,&quot; I replied, &quot;all this is just what is going to<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;interest you. You are impatient of these details, because you are<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;looking out for the scenes of passion which have been promised you.<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;But reflect that, without these preparations, the scenes of passion<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;would not touch you. That cactus-flower will play its part, you may<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;be sure; that dahlia-root is not there for nothing; that fox to<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;which you object, and of which you will hear more talk during two<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;more acts, will bring about the solution of one of the most<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;entertaining situations in all drama.&quot;<br>
+
+<p>M. Sarcey does not tell us what his interlocutor replied; but he might
+have said, like the hero of <i>Le R&eacute;veillon</i>: &quot;Are you sure there is no
+mistake? Are you defending Sardou, or attacking him?&quot;</p>
+
+<p>For another example of ultra-complex preparation let me turn to a play
+by Mr. Sydney Grundy, entitled <i>The Degenerates</i>. Mr. Grundy, though an
+adept of the Scribe school, has done so much strong and original work
+that I apologize for exhuming a play in which he almost burlesqued his
+own method; but for that very reason it is difficult to find a more
+convincing or more deterrent example of misdirected ingenuity. The
+details of the plot need not be recited. It is sufficient to say that
+the curtain has not been raised ten minutes before our attention has
+been drawn to the fact that a certain Lady Saumarez has her monogram on
+everything she wears, even to her gloves: whence we at once foresee that
+she is destined to get into a compromising situation, to escape from it,
+but to leave a glove behind her. In due time the compromising situation
+arrives, and we find that it not only requires a room with three
+doors,<a name="FNanchor79"></a><a href="#Footnote_79"><sup>[79]</sup></a> but that a locksmith has to be specially called in to provide
+two of these doors with peculiar locks, so that, when once shut, they
+cannot be opened from inside except with a key! What interest can we
+take in a situation turning on such contrivances? Sane technic laughs at
+locksmiths. And after all this preparation, the situation proves to be a
+familiar trick of theatrical thimble-rigging: you lift the thimble, and
+instead of Pea A, behold Pea B!--instead of Lady Saumarez it is Mrs.
+Trevelyan who is concealed in Isidore de Lorano's bedroom. Sir William
+Saumarez must be an exceedingly simple-minded person to accept the
+substitution, and exceedingly unfamiliar with the French drama of the
+'seventies and 'eighties. If he had his wits about him he would say: &quot;I
+know this dodge: it comes from Sardou. Lady Saumarez has just slipped
+out by that door, up R., and if I look about I shall certainly find her
+fan, or her glove, or her handkerchief somewhere on the premises.&quot; The
+author may object that such criticism would end in paralysing the
+playwright, and that, if men always profited by the lessons of the
+stage, the world would long ago have become so wise that there would be
+no more room in it for drama, which lives on human folly. &quot;You will tell
+me next,&quot; he may say, &quot;that I must not make groundless jealousy the
+theme of a play, because every one who has seen Othello would at once
+detect the machinations of an Iago!&quot; The retort is logically specious,
+but it mistakes the point. It would certainly be rash to put any limit
+to human gullibility, or to deny that Sir William Saumarez, in the given
+situation, might conceivably be hoodwinked. The question is not one of
+psychology but of theatrical expediency: and the point is that when a
+situation is at once highly improbable in real life and exceedingly
+familiar on the stage, we cannot help mentally caricaturing it as it
+proceeds, and are thus prevented from lending it the provisional
+credence on which interest and emotion depend.</p>
+
+<p>An instructive contrast to <i>The Degenerates</i> may be found in a nearly
+contemporary play, <i>Mrs. Dane's Defence</i>, by Mr. Henry Arthur Jones. The
+first three acts of this play may be cited as an excellent example of
+dexterous preparation and development. Our interest in the sequence of
+events is aroused, sustained, and worked up to a high tension with
+consummate skill. There is no feverish overcrowding of incident, as is
+so often the case in the great French story-plays--<i>Adrienne
+Lecouvreur</i>, for example, or <i>F&eacute;dora</i>. The action moves onwards,
+unhasting, unresting, and the finger-posts are placed just where they
+are wanted.</p>
+
+<p>The observance of a due proportion between preparation and result is a
+matter of great moment. Even when the result achieved is in itself very
+remarkable, it may be dearly purchased by a too long and too elaborate
+process of preparation. A famous play which is justly chargeable with
+this fault is <i>The Gay Lord Quex</i>. The third act is certainly one of the
+most breathlessly absorbing scenes in modern drama; but by what long,
+and serpentine, and gritty paths do we not approach it! The elaborate
+series of trifling incidents by means of which Sophy Fullgarney is first
+brought from New Bond Street to Fauncey Court, and then substituted for
+the Duchess's maid, is at no point actually improbable; and yet we feel
+that a vast effort has been made to attain an end which, owing to the
+very length of the sequence of chances, at last assumes an air of
+improbability. There is little doubt that the substructure of the great
+scene might have been very much simpler. I imagine that Sir Arthur
+Pinero was betrayed into complexity and over-elaboration by his desire
+to use, as a background for his action, a study of that &quot;curious phase
+of modern life,&quot; the manicurist's parlour. To those who find this study
+interesting, the disproportion between preliminaries and result may be
+less apparent. It certainly did not interfere with the success of the
+play in its novelty; but it may very probably curtail its lease of life.
+What should we know of <i>The School for Scandal</i> to-day, if it consisted
+of nothing but the Screen Scene and two laborious acts of preparation?</p>
+
+<p>A too obvious preparation is very apt to defeat its end by begetting a
+perversely quizzical frame of mind in the audience. The desired effect
+is discounted, like a conjuring trick in which the mechanism is too
+transparent. Let me recall a trivial but instructive instance of this
+error. The occasion was the first performance of <i>Pillars of Society</i> at
+the Gaiety Theatre, London--the first Ibsen performance ever given in
+England. At the end of the third act, Krap, Consul Bernick's clerk,
+knocks at the door of his master's office and says, &quot;It is blowing up to
+a stiff gale. Is the <i>Indian Girl</i> to sail in spite of it?&quot; Whereupon
+Bernick, though he knows that the <i>Indian Girl</i> is hopelessly
+unseaworthy, replies, &quot;The <i>Indian Girl</i> is to sail in spite of it.&quot; It
+had occurred to someone that the effect of this incident would be
+heightened if Krap, before knocking at the Consul's door, were to
+consult the barometer, and show by his demeanour that it was falling
+rapidly. A barometer had accordingly been hung, up stage, near the
+veranda entrance; and, as the scenic apparatus of a Gaiety matin&eacute;e was
+in those days always of the scantiest, it was practically the one
+decoration of a room otherwise bare almost to indecency. It had stared
+the audience full in the face through three long acts; and when, at the
+end of the third, Krap went up to it and tapped it, a sigh of relief ran
+through the house, as much as to say, &quot;At last! so <i>that</i> was what it
+was for!&quot;--to the no small detriment of the situation. Here the fault
+lay in the obtrusiveness of the preparation. Had the barometer passed
+practically unnoticed among the other details of a well-furnished hall,
+it would at any rate have been innocent, and perhaps helpful. As it was,
+it seemed to challenge the curiosity of the audience, saying, &quot;I am
+evidently here with some intention; guess, now, what the intention can
+be!&quot; The producer had failed in the art which conceals art.</p>
+
+<p>Another little trait from a play of those far-past days illustrates the
+same point. It was a drawing-room drama of the Scribe school. Near the
+beginning of an act, some one spilt a bottle of red ink, and mopped it
+up with his (or her) handkerchief, leaving the handkerchief on the
+escritoire. The act proceeded from scene to scene, and the handkerchief
+remained unnoticed; but every one in the audience who knew the rules of
+the game, kept his eye on the escritoire, and was certain that that ink
+had not been spilt for nothing. In due course a situation of great
+intensity was reached, wherein the villain produced a pistol and fired
+at the heroine, who fainted. As a matter of fact he had missed her; but
+her quick-witted friend seized the gory handkerchief, and, waving it in
+the air, persuaded the villain that the shot had taken deadly effect,
+and that he must flee for his life. Even in those days, such an
+unblushing piece of trickery was found more comic than impressive. It
+was a case of preparation &quot;giving itself away.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>A somewhat later play, <i>The Mummy and the Humming Bird</i>, by Mr. Isaac
+Henderson, contains a good example of over-elaborate preparation. The
+Earl of Lumley, lost in his chemical studies with a more than Newtonian
+absorption, suffers his young wife to form a sentimental friendship with
+a scoundrel of an Italian novelist, Signor D'Orelli. Remaining at home
+one evening, when Lady Lumley and a party of friends, including
+D'Orelli, have gone off to dine at a restaurant, the Earl chances to
+look out of the window, and observes an organ-grinder making doleful
+music in the snow. His heart is touched, and he invites the music-monger
+to join him in his study and share his informal dinner. The conversation
+between them is carried on by means of signs, for the organ-grinder
+knows no English, and the Earl is painfully and improbably ignorant of
+Italian. He does not even know that Roma means Rome, and Londra, London.
+This ignorance, however, is part of the author's ingenuity. It leads to
+the establishment of a sort of object-speech, by aid of which the Earl
+learns that his guest has come to England to prosecute a vendetta
+against the man who ruined his happy Sicilian home. I need scarcely say
+that this villain is none other than D'Orelli; and when at last he and
+the Countess elope to Paris, the object-speech enables Giuseppe to
+convey to the Earl, by aid of a brandy-bottle, a siphon, a broken plate,
+and half-a-crown, not only the place of their destination, but the very
+hotel to which they are going. This is a fair example of that ingenuity
+for ingenuity's sake which was once thought the very essence of the
+playwright's craft, but has long ago lost all attraction for intelligent
+audiences.</p>
+
+<p>We may take it as a rule that any scene which requires an obviously
+purposeful scenic arrangement is thereby discounted. It may be strong
+enough to live down the disadvantage; but a disadvantage it is none the
+less. In a play of Mr. Carton's, <i>The Home Secretary</i>, a paper of great
+importance was known to be contained in an official despatch-box. When
+the curtain rose on the last act, it revealed this despatch-box on a
+table right opposite a French window, while at the other side of the
+room a high-backed arm-chair discreetly averted its face. Every one
+could see at a glance that the romantic Anarchist was going to sneak in
+at the window and attempt to abstract the despatch-box, while the
+heroine was to lie perdue in the high-backed chair; and when, at the
+fated moment, all this punctually occurred, one could scarcely repress
+an &quot;Ah!&quot; of sarcastic satisfaction. Similarly, in an able play named Mr.
+and Mrs. Daventry, Mr. Frank Harris had conceived a situation which
+required that the scene should be specially built for eavesdropping.<a name="FNanchor80"></a><a href="#Footnote_80"><sup>[80]</sup></a>
+As soon as the curtain rose, and revealed a screen drawn halfway down
+the stage, with a sofa ensconced behind it, we knew what to expect. Of
+course Mrs. Daventry was to lie on the sofa and overhear a duologue
+between her husband and his mistress: the only puzzle was to understand
+why the guilty pair should neglect the precaution of looking behind the
+screen. As a matter of fact, Mrs. Daventry, before she lay down,
+switched off the lights, and Daventry and Lady Langham, finding the room
+dark, assumed it to be empty. With astounding foolhardiness, considering
+that the house was full of guests, and this a much frequented public
+room, Daventry proceeded to lock the door, and continue his conversation
+with Lady Langham in the firelight. Thus, when the lady's husband came
+knocking at the door, Mrs. Daventry was able to rescue the guilty pair
+from an apparently hopeless predicament, by calmly switching on the
+lights and opening the door to Sir John Langham. The situation was
+undoubtedly a &quot;strong&quot; one; but the tendency of modern technic is to
+hold &quot;strength&quot; too dearly purchased at such reckless expense of
+preparation.</p>
+
+<p>There are, then, very clear limits to the validity of the Dumas maxim
+that &quot;The art of the theatre is the art of preparations.&quot; Certain it is
+that over-preparation is the most fatal of errors. The clumsiest thing a
+dramatist can possibly do is to lay a long and elaborate train for the
+ignition of a squib. We take pleasure in an event which has been
+&quot;prepared&quot; in the sense that we have been led to desire it, and have
+wondered how it was to be brought about. But we scoff at an occurrence
+which nothing but our knowledge of the tricks of the stage could
+possibly lead us to expect, yet which, knowing these tricks, we have
+foreseen from afar, and resented in advance.</p>
+
+
+
+<br><br><hr style="width: 35%;"><br><br>
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_XIII"></a>CHAPTER XIII</h2>
+
+<p>THE OBLIGATORY SCENE</p>
+<br>
+
+<p>I do not know whether it was Francisque Sarcey who invented the phrase
+<i>sc&egrave;ne &agrave; faire</i>; but it certainly owes its currency to that valiant
+champion of the theatrical theatre, if I may so express it. Note that in
+this term I intend no disrespect. My conception of the theatrical
+theatre may not be exactly the same as M. Sarcey's; but at all events I
+share his abhorrence of the untheatrical theatre.</p>
+
+<p>What is the <i>sc&egrave;ne &agrave; faire</i>? Sarcey has used the phrase so often, and in
+so many contexts, that it is impossible to tie him down to any strict
+definition. Instead of trying to do so, I will give a typical example of
+the way in which he usually employs the term.</p>
+
+<p>In <i>Les Fourchambault</i>, by Emile Augier, the first act introduces us to
+the household of a merchant, of Havre, who has married a wealthy, but
+extravagant woman, and has a son and daughter who are being gradually
+corrupted by their mother's worldliness. We learn that Fourchambault,
+senior, has, in his youth, betrayed a young woman who was a governess in
+his family. He wanted to marry her, but his relations maligned her
+character, and he cast her off; nor does he know what has become of her
+and her child. In the second act we pass to the house of an energetic
+and successful young shipowner named Bernard, who lives alone with his
+mother. Bernard, as we divine, is secretly devoted to a young lady named
+Marie Letellier, a guest in the Fourchambault house, to whom young
+Leopold Fourchambault is paying undesirable attentions. One day Bernard
+casually mentions to his mother that the house of Fourchambault is on
+the verge of bankruptcy; nothing less than a quarter of a million francs
+will enable it to tide over the crisis. Mme. Bernard, to her son's
+astonishment, begs him to lend the tottering firm the sum required. He
+objects that, unless the business is better managed, the loan will only
+postpone the inevitable disaster. &quot;Well, then, my son,&quot; she replied,
+&quot;you must go into partnership with M. Fourchambault.&quot; &quot;I! with that
+imbecile!&quot; he exclaims. &quot;My son,&quot; she says gravely, and emphatically,
+&quot;you must--it is your duty--I demand it of you!&quot; &quot;Ah!&quot; cries Bernard. &quot;I
+understand--he is my father!&quot;</p>
+
+<p>After ecstatically lauding this situation and the scenes which have led
+up to it, M. Sarcey continues--</p>
+
+&nbsp;&nbsp;When the curtain falls upon the words &quot;He is my father,&quot; I at once<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;see two <i>sc&egrave;nes &agrave; faire</i>, and I know that they will be <i>faites</i>: the<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;scene between the son and the father whom he is to save, the scene<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;between Bernard and his half-brother Leopold, who are in love with<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;the same woman, the one dishonourably and the other secretly and<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;nobly. What will they say to each other? I have no idea. But it is<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;precisely this <i>expectation mingled with uncertainly</i> that is one of<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;the charms of the theatre. I say to myself, &quot;Ah, they will have an<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;encounter! What will come of it?&quot; And that this is the state of mind<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;of the whole audience is proved by the fact that when the two<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;characters of the <i>sc&egrave;nes &agrave; faire</i> stand face to face, a thrill of<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;anticipation runs round the whole theatre.<br>
+
+<p>This, then, is the obligatory scene as Sarcey generally understands
+it--a scene which, for one reason or another, an audience expects and
+ardently desires. I have italicized the phrase &quot;expectation mingled with
+uncertainty&quot; because it expresses in other terms the idea which I have
+sought to convey in the formula &quot;foreshadowing without forestalling.&quot;
+But before we can judge of the merits of M. Sarcey's theory, we must
+look into it a little more closely. I shall try, then, to state it in my
+own words, in what I believe to be its most rational and
+defensible form.</p>
+
+<p>An obligatory scene is one which the audience (more or less clearly and
+consciously) foresees and desires, and the absence of which it may with
+reason resent. On a rough analysis, it will appear, I think, that there
+are five ways in which a scene may become, in this sense, obligatory:</p>
+
+<p>(1) It may be necessitated by the inherent logic of the theme.</p>
+
+<p>(2) It may be demanded by the manifest exigencies of specifically
+dramatic effect.</p>
+
+<p>(3) The author himself may have rendered it obligatory by seeming
+unmistakably to lead up to it.</p>
+
+<p>(4) It may be required in order to justify some modification of
+character or alteration of will, too important to be taken for granted.</p>
+
+<p>(5) It may be imposed by history or legend.</p>
+
+<p>These five classes of obligatory scenes may be docketed, respectively,
+as the Logical, the Dramatic, the Structural, the Psychological, and the
+Historic. M. Sarcey generally employed the term in one of the first
+three senses, without clearly distinguishing between them. It is,
+indeed, not always easy to determine whether the compulsion (assuming it
+to exist at all) lies in the very essence of the theme or situation, or
+only in the author's manipulation of it.</p>
+
+<p>Was Sarcey right in assuming such a compulsion to be a constant and
+dominant factor in the playwright's craft? I think we shall see reason
+to believe him right in holding that it frequently arises, but wrong if
+he went the length of maintaining that there can be no good play without
+a definite <i>sc&egrave;ne &agrave; faire</i>--as eighteenth-century landscape painters are
+said to have held that no one could be a master of his art till he knew
+where to place &quot;the brown tree.&quot; I remember no passage in which Sarcey
+explicitly lays down so hard and fast a rule, but several in which he
+seems to take it for granted.<a name="FNanchor81"></a><a href="#Footnote_81"><sup>[81]</sup></a></p>
+
+<p>It may be asked whether--and if so, why--the theory of the obligatory
+scene holds good for the dramatist and not for the novelist? Perhaps it
+has more application to the novel than is commonly supposed; but in so
+far as it applies peculiarly to the drama, the reason is pretty clear.
+It lies in the strict concentration imposed on the dramatist, and the
+high mental tension which is, or ought to be, characteristic of the
+theatrical audience. The leisurely and comparatively passive
+novel-reader may never miss a scene which an audience, with its
+instincts of logic and of economy keenly alert, may feel to be
+inevitable. The dramatist is bound to extract from his material the last
+particle of that particular order of effect which the stage, and the
+stage alone, can give us. If he fails to do so, we feel that there has
+been no adequate justification for setting in motion all the complex
+mechanism of the theatre. His play is like a badly-designed engine in
+which a large part of the potential energy is dissipated to no purpose.
+The novelist, with a far wider range of effects at his command, and
+employing no special mechanism to bring them home to us, is much more
+free to select and to reject. He is exempt from the law of rigid economy
+to which the dramatist must submit. Far from being bound to do things in
+the most dramatic way, he often does wisely in rejecting that course, as
+unsuited to his medium. Fundamentally, no doubt, the same principle
+applies to both arts, but with a wholly different stringency in the case
+of the drama. &quot;Advisable&quot; in the novelist's vocabulary is translated by
+&quot;imperative&quot; in the dramatist's. The one is playing a long-drawn game,
+in which the loss of a trick or two need not prove fatal; the other has
+staked his all on a single rubber.</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 25%;">
+
+<p>Obligatory scenes of the first type--those necessitated by the inherent
+logic of the theme--can naturally arise only in plays to which a
+definite theme can be assigned. If we say that woman's claim to possess
+a soul of her own, even in marriage, is the theme of <i>A Doll's House</i>,
+then evidently the last great balancing of accounts between Nora and
+Helmer is an obligatory scene. It would have been quite possible for
+Ibsen to have completed the play without any such scene: he might, for
+instance, have let Nora fulfil her intention of drowning herself; but in
+that case his play would have been merely a tragic anecdote with the
+point omitted. We should have felt vague intimations of a general idea
+hovering in the air, but it would have remained undefined and
+undeveloped. As we review, however, the series of Ibsen's plays, and
+notice how difficult it is to point to any individual scene and say,
+&quot;This was clearly the <i>sc&egrave;ne &agrave; faire</i>,&quot; we feel that, though the phrase
+may express a useful idea in a conveniently brief form, there is no
+possibility of making the presence or absence of a <i>sc&egrave;ne &agrave; faire</i> a
+general test of dramatic merit. In <i>The Wild Duck</i>, who would not say
+that, theoretically, the scene in which Gregers opens Hialmar's eyes to
+the true history of his marriage was obligatory in the highest degree?
+Yet Ibsen, as a matter of fact, does not present it to us: he sends the
+two men off for &quot;a long walk&quot; together: and who does not feel that this
+is a stroke of consummate art? In <i>Rosmersholm</i>, as we know, he has
+been accused of neglecting, not merely the scene, but the play, <i>&agrave;
+faire</i>; but who will now maintain that accusation? In <i>John Gabriel
+Borhman</i>, if we define the theme as the clash of two devouring egoisms,
+Ibsen has, in the third act, given us the obligatory scene; but he has
+done it, unfortunately, with an enfeebled hand; whereas the first and
+second acts, though largely expository, and even (in the Foldal scene)
+episodic, rank with his greatest achievements.</p>
+
+<p>For abundant examples of scenes rendered obligatory by the logic of the
+theme, we have only to turn to the works of those remorseless
+dialecticians, MM. Hervieu and Brieux. In such a play as <i>La Course du
+Flambeau</i>, there is scarcely a scene that may not be called an
+obligatory deduction from the thesis duly enunciated, with no small
+parade of erudition, in the first ten minutes of the play. It is that,
+in handing on the <i>vital lampada</i>, as Plato and &quot;le bon po&egrave;te Lucr&egrave;ce&quot;
+express it, the love of the parent for the child becomes a devouring
+mania, to which everything else is sacrificed, while the love of the
+child for the parent is a tame and essentially selfish emotion,
+absolutely powerless when it comes into competition with the passions
+which are concerned with the transmission of the vital flame. This
+theorem having been stated, what is the first obligatory scene?
+Evidently one in which a mother shall refuse a second marriage, with a
+man whom she loves, because it would injure the prospects and wound the
+feelings of her adored daughter. Then, when the adored daughter herself
+marries, the mother must make every possible sacrifice for her, and the
+daughter must accept them all with indifference, as mere matters of
+course. But what is the final, triumphant proof of the theorem? Why, of
+course, the mother must kill her mother to save the daughter's life! And
+this ultra-obligatory scene M. Hervieu duly serves up to us.
+Marie-Jeanne (the daughter) is ordered to the Engadine; Sabine (the
+mother) is warned that Madame Fontenais (the grandmother) must not go to
+that altitude on pain of death; but, by a series of violently artificial
+devices, things are so arranged that Marie-Jeanne cannot go unless
+Madame Fontenais goes too; and Sabine, rather than endanger her
+daughter's recovery, does not hesitate to let her mother set forth,
+unwittingly, to her doom. In the last scene of all, Marie-Jeanne
+light-heartedly prepares to leave her mother and go off with her husband
+to the ends of the earth; Sabine learns that the man she loved and
+rejected for Marie-Jeanne's sake is for ever lost to her; and, to
+complete the demonstration, Madame Fontenais falls dead at her feet.
+These scenes are unmistakably <i>sc&egrave;nes &agrave; faire</i>, dictated by the logic of
+the theme; but they belong to a conception of art in which the free
+rhythms of life are ruthlessly sacrificed to the needs of a
+demonstration. Obligatory scenes of this order are mere diagrams drawn
+with ruler and compass--the obligatory illustrations of an extravagantly
+over-systematic lecture.</p>
+
+<p>M. Brieux in some of his plays (not in all) is no less logic-ridden than
+M. Hervieu. Take, for instance, <i>Les Trois Filles de M. Dupont</i>: every
+character is a term in a syllogism, every scene is dictated by an
+imperious craving for symmetry. The main theorem may be stated in some
+such terms as these: &quot;The French marriage system is immoral and
+abominable; yet the married woman is, on the whole, less pitiable than
+her unmarried sisters.&quot; In order to prove this thesis in due form, we
+begin at the beginning, and show how the marriage of Antonin Mairaut and
+Julie Dupont is brought about by the dishonest cupidity of the parents
+on both sides. The Duponts flatter themselves that they have cheated the
+Mairauts, the Mairauts that they have swindled the Duponts; while
+Antonin deliberately simulates artistic tastes to deceive Julie, and
+Julie as deliberately makes a show of business capacity in order to take
+in Antonin. Every scene between father and daughter is balanced by a
+corresponding scene between mother and son. Every touch of hypocrisy on
+the one side is scrupulously set off against a trait of dishonesty on
+the other. Julie's passion for children is emphasized, Antonin's
+aversion from them is underlined. But lest he should be accused of
+seeing everything in black, M. Brieux will not make the parents
+altogether detestable. Still holding the balance true, he lets M.
+Mairaut on the one side, and Madame Dupont on the other, develop amiable
+impulses, and protest, at a given moment, against the infamies committed
+and countenanced by their respective spouses. And in the second and
+third acts, the edifice of deception symmetrically built up in the first
+act is no less symmetrically demolished. The parents expose and denounce
+each other's villainies; Julie and Antonin, in a great scene of conjugal
+recrimination, lay bare the hypocrisies of allurement that have brought
+them together. Julie then determines to escape from the loathsome
+prison-house of her marriage; and this brings us to the second part of
+the theorem. The title shows that Julie has two sisters; but hitherto
+they have remained in the background. Why do they exist at all? Why has
+Providence blessed M. Dupont with &quot;three fair daughters and no more&quot;?
+Because Providence foresaw exactly the number M. Brieux would require
+for his demonstration. Are there not three courses open to a penniless
+woman in our social system--marriage, wage-earning industry, and
+wage-earning profligacy? Well, M. Dupont must have one daughter to
+represent each of these contingencies. Julie has illustrated the
+miseries of marriage; Caroline and Ang&egrave;le shall illustrate respectively
+the still greater miseries of unmarried virtue and unmarried vice. When
+Julie declares her intention of breaking away from the house of bondage,
+her sisters rise up symmetrically, one on either hand, and implore her
+rather to bear the ills she has than to fly to others that she knows not
+of. &quot;Symmetry of symmetries, all is symmetry&quot; in the poetics of M.
+Brieux. But life does not fall into such obvious patterns. The
+obligatory scene which is imposed upon us, not by the logic of life, but
+by the logic of demonstration, is not a <i>sc&egrave;ne &agrave; faire</i>, but a <i>sc&egrave;ne
+&agrave; fuir</i>.</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Bernard Shaw, in some sense the Brieux of the English theatre, is
+not a man to be dominated by logic, or by anything else under the sun.
+He has, however, given us one or two excellent examples of the
+obligatory scene in the true and really artistic sense of the term. The
+scene of Candida's choice between Eugene and Morell crowns the edifice
+of <i>Candida</i> as nothing else could. Given the characters and their
+respective attitudes towards life, this sententious thrashing-out of the
+situation was inevitable. So, too, in <i>Mrs. Warren's Profession</i>, the
+great scene of the second act between Vivie and her mother is a superb
+example of a scene imposed by the logic of the theme. On the other hand,
+in Mr. Henry Arthur Jones's finely conceived, though unequal, play,
+<i>Michael and his Lost Angel</i>, we miss what was surely an obligatory
+scene. The play is in fact a contest between the paganism of Audrie
+Lesden and the ascetic, sacerdotal idealism of Michael Feversham. In the
+second act, paganism snatches a momentary victory; and we confidently
+expect, in the third act, a set and strenuous effort on Audrie's part to
+break down in theory the ascetic ideal which has collapsed in practice.
+It is probable enough that she might not succeed in dragging her lover
+forth from what she regards as the prison-house of a superstition; but
+the logic of the theme absolutely demands that she should make the
+attempt. Mr. Jones has preferred to go astray after some comparatively
+irrelevant and commonplace matter, and has thus left his play
+incomplete. So, too, in <i>The Triumph of the Philistines</i>, Mr. Jones
+makes the mistake of expecting us to take a tender interest in a pair of
+lovers who have had never a love-scene to set our interest agoing. They
+are introduced to each other in the first act, and we shrewdly suspect
+(for in the theatre we are all inveterate match-makers) that they are
+going to fall in love; but we have not the smallest positive evidence of
+the fact before we find, in the second act, that misunderstandings have
+arisen, and the lady declines to look at the gentleman. The actress who
+played the part at the St. James's Theatre was blamed for failing to
+enlist our sympathies in this romance; but what actress can make much of
+a love part which, up to the very last moment, is all suspicion and
+jealousy? Fancy <i>Romeo and Juliet</i> with the love-scenes omitted, &quot;by
+special request!&quot;</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 25%;">
+
+<p>In a second class, according to our analysis, we place the obligatory
+scene which is imposed by &quot;the manifest exigencies of specifically
+dramatic effect.&quot; Here it must of course be noted that the conception of
+&quot;specifically dramatic effect&quot; varies in some degree, from age to age,
+from generation to generation, and even, one may almost say, from
+theatre to theatre. Scenes of violence and slaughter were banished from
+the Greek theatre, mainly, no doubt, because rapid movement was rendered
+difficult by the hieratic trappings of the actors, and was altogether
+foreign to the spirit of tragedy; but it can scarcely be doubted that
+the tragic poets were the less inclined to rebel against this
+convention, because they extracted &quot;specifically dramatic effects&quot; of a
+very high order out of their &quot;messenger-scenes.&quot; Even in the modern
+theatre we are thrilled by the description of Hippolytus dragged at his
+own chariot wheel, or Creusa and Creon devoured by Medea's veil of
+fire.<a name="FNanchor82"></a><a href="#Footnote_82"><sup>[82]</sup></a> On the Elizabethan stage, the murder of Agamemnon would no
+doubt have been &quot;subjected to our faithful eyes&quot; like the blinding of
+Gloucester or the suffocation of Edward II; but who shall say that there
+is less &quot;specifically dramatic effect&quot; in Aeschylus's method of
+mirroring the scene in the clairvoyant ecstasy of Cassandra? I am much
+inclined to think that the dramatic effect of highly emotional narrative
+is underrated in the modern theatre.</p>
+
+<p>Again, at one class of theatre, the author of a sporting play--is bound
+to exhibit a horse-race on the stage, or he is held to have shirked his
+obligatory scene. At another class of theatre, we shall have a scene,
+perhaps, in a box in the Grand Stand, where some Lady Gay Spanker shall
+breathlessly depict, from start to finish, the race which is visible to
+her, but invisible to the audience. At a third class of the theatre, the
+&quot;specifically dramatic effect&quot; to be extracted from a horse-race is
+found in a scene in a Black-Country slum, where a group of working-men
+and women are feverishly awaiting the evening paper which shall bring
+them the result of the St. Leger, involving for some of them
+opulence--to the extent, perhaps, of a &pound;5 note--and for others ruin.<a name="FNanchor83"></a><a href="#Footnote_83"><sup>[83]</sup></a></p>
+
+<p>The difficulty of deciding that any one form of scene is predestined by
+the laws of dramatic effect is illustrated in Tolstoy's grisly drama,
+<i>The Power of Darkness</i>. The scene in which Nikita kills Akoulina's
+child was felt to be too horrible for representation; whereupon the
+author wrote an alternative scene between Mitritch and Anna, which
+passes simultaneously with the murder scene, in an adjoining room. The
+two scenes fulfil exactly the same function in the economy of the play;
+it can be acted with either of them, it might be acted with both; and it
+is impossible to say which produces the intenser or more &quot;specifically
+dramatic effect.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>The fact remains, however, that there is almost always a dramatic and
+undramatic, a more dramatic and a less dramatic, way of doing a thing;
+and an author who allows us to foresee and expect a dramatic way of
+attaining a given end, and then chooses an undramatic or less dramatic
+way, is guilty of having missed the obligatory scene. For a general
+discussion of what we mean by the terms &quot;dramatic&quot; and &quot;undramatic&quot; the
+reader may refer back to Chapter III. Here I need only give one or two
+particular illustrations.</p>
+
+<p>It will be remembered that one of the <i>sc&egrave;nes &agrave; faire</i> which M. Sarcey
+foresaw in <i>Les Fourchambault</i> was the encounter between the two
+brothers; the illegitimate Bernard and the legitimate Leopold. It would
+have been quite possible, and quite natural, to let the action of the
+play work itself out without any such encounter; or to let the encounter
+take place behind the scenes; but this would have been a patent ignoring
+of dramatic possibilities, and M. Sarcey would have had ample reason to
+pour the vials of his wrath on Augier's head. He was right, however, in
+his confidence that Augier would not fail to &quot;make&quot; the scene. And how
+did he &quot;make&quot; it? The one thing inevitable about it was that the truth
+should be revealed to Leopold; but there were a dozen different ways in
+which that might have been effected. Perhaps, in real life, Bernard
+would have said something to this effect: &quot;Young man, you are making
+questionable advances to a lady in whom I am interested. I beg that you
+will cease to persecute her; and if you ask by what right I do so, I
+reply that I am in fact your elder brother, that I have saved our father
+from ruin, that I am henceforth the predominant partner in his business,
+and that, if you do not behave yourself, I shall see that your allowance
+is withdrawn, and that you have no longer the means to lead an idle and
+dissolute life.&quot; This would have been an ungracious but not unnatural
+way of going about the business. Had Augier chosen it, we should have
+had no right to complain on the score of probability; but it would have
+been evident to the least imaginative that he had left the specifically
+dramatic opportunities of the scene entirely undeveloped. Let us now see
+what he actually did. Marie Letellier, compromised by Leopold's conduct,
+has left the Fourchambault house and taken refuge with Mme. Bernard.
+Bernard loves her devotedly, but does not dream that she can see
+anything in his uncouth personality, and imagines that she loves
+Leopold. Accordingly, he determines that Leopold shall marry her, and
+tells him so. Leopold scoffs at the idea; Bernard insists; and little by
+little the conflict rises to a tone of personal altercation. At last
+Leopold says something slighting of Mile. Letellier, and Bernard--who,
+be it noted, has begun with no intention of revealing the kinship
+between them--loses his self-control and cries, &quot;Ah, there speaks the
+blood of the man who slandered a woman in order to prevent his son from
+keeping his word to her. I recognize in you your grandfather, who was a
+miserable calumniator.&quot; &quot;Repeat that word!&quot; says Leopold. Bernard does
+so, and the other strikes him across the face with his glove. For a
+perceptible interval Bernard struggles with his rage in silence, and
+then: &quot;It is well for you,&quot; he cries, &quot;that you are my brother!&quot;</p>
+
+<p>We need not follow the scene in the sentimental turning which it then
+takes, whereby it comes about, of course, that Bernard, not Leopold,
+marries Mile. Letellier. The point is that Augier has justified Sarcey's
+confidence by making the scene thoroughly and specifically dramatic; in
+other words, by charging it with emotion, and working up the tension to
+a very high pitch. And Sarcey was no doubt right in holding that this
+was what the whole audience instinctively expected, and that they would
+have been more or less consciously disappointed had the author baulked
+their expectation.</p>
+
+<p>An instructive example of the failure to &quot;make&quot; a dramatically
+obligatory scene may be found in <i>Agatha</i> by Mrs. Humphry Ward and Mr.
+Louis Parker. Agatha is believed to be the child of Sir Richard and Lady
+Fancourt; but at a given point she learns that a gentleman whom she has
+known all her life as &quot;Cousin Ralph&quot; is in reality her father. She has a
+middle-aged suitor, Colonel Ford, whom she is very willing to marry; but
+at the end of the second act she refuses him, because she shrinks from
+the idea, on the one hand, of concealing the truth from him, on the
+other hand, of revealing her mother's trespass. This is not, in itself,
+a very strong situation, for we feel the barrier between the lovers to
+be unreal. Colonel Ford is a man of sense. The secret of Agatha's
+parentage can make no real difference to him. Nothing material--no point
+of law or of honour--depends on it. He will learn the truth, and all
+will come right between them. The only point on which our interest can
+centre is the question how he is to learn the truth; and here the
+authors go very far astray. There are two, and only two, really dramatic
+ways in which Colonel Ford can be enlightened. Lady Fancourt must
+realize that Agatha is wrecking her life to keep her mother's secret,
+and must either herself reveal it to Colonel Ford, or must encourage and
+enjoin Agatha to do so. Now, the authors choose neither of these ways:
+the secret slips out, through a chance misunderstanding in a
+conversation between Sir Richard Fancourt and the Colonel. This is a
+typical instance of an error of construction; and why?--because it
+leaves to chance what should be an act of will. Drama means a thing
+done, not merely a thing that happens; and the playwright who lets
+accident effect what might naturally and probably be a result of
+volition, or, in other words, of character, sins against the fundamental
+law of his craft. In the case before us, Lady Fancourt and Agatha--the
+two characters on whom our interest is centred--are deprived of all
+share in one of the crucial moments of the action. Whether the actual
+disclosure was made by the mother or by the daughter, there ought to
+have been a great scene between the two, in which the mother should have
+insisted that, by one or other, the truth must be told. It would have
+been a painful, a delicate, a difficult scene, but it was the obligatory
+scene of the play; and had we been allowed clearly to foresee it at the
+end of the second act, our interest would have been decisively carried
+forward. The scene, too, might have given the play a moral relevance
+which in fact it lacks. The readjustment of Agatha's scheme of things,
+so as to make room for her mother's history, might have been made
+explicit and partly intellectual, instead of implicit, inarticulate and
+wholly emotional.</p>
+
+<p>This case, then, clearly falls under our second heading. We cannot say
+that it is the logic of the theme which demands the scene, for no thesis
+or abstract idea is enunciated. Nor can we say that the course of events
+is unnatural or improbable; our complaint is that, without being at all
+less natural, they might have been highly dramatic, and that in fact
+they are not so.</p>
+
+<p>In a very different type of play, we find another example of the
+ignoring of a dramatically obligatory scene. The author of that charming
+fantasy, <i>The Passing of the Third Floor Back</i>, was long ago guilty of a
+play named <i>The Rise of Dick Halward</i>, chiefly memorable for having
+elicited from Mr. Bernard Shaw one of the most brilliant pages in
+English dramatic criticism. The hero of this play, after an adventurous
+youth in Mexico, has gone to the bar, but gets no briefs, and is
+therefore unable to marry a lady who announces that no suitor need apply
+who has less than &pound;5000 a year. One fine day Dick receives from Mexico
+the will of an old comrade, which purports to leave to him, absolutely,
+half a million dollars, gold; but the will is accompanied by a letter,
+in which the old comrade states that the property is really left to him
+only in trust for the testator's long-lost son, whom Dick is enjoined to
+search out and endow with a capital which, at 5 per cent, represents
+accurately the desiderated &pound;5000 a year. As a matter of fact (but this
+is not to our present purpose), the long-lost son is actually, at that
+moment, sharing Dick's chambers in the Temple. Dick, however, does not
+know this, and cannot resist the temptation to destroy the old miner's
+letter, and grab the property. We know, of course, that retribution is
+bound to descend upon him; but does not dramatic effect imperatively
+require that, for a brief space at any rate, he should be seen--with
+whatever qualms of conscience his nature might dictate--enjoying his
+ill-gotten wealth? Mr. Jerome, however, baulks us of this just
+expectation. In the very first scene of the second act we find that the
+game is up. The deceased miner wrote his letter to Dick seated in the
+doorway of a hut; a chance photographer took a snap-shot at him; and on
+returning to England, the chance photographer has nothing more pressing
+to do than to chance upon the one man who knows the long-lost son, and
+to show him the photograph of the dying miner, whom he at once
+recognizes. By aid of a microscope, the letter he is writing can be
+deciphered, and thus Dick's fraud is brought home to him. Now one would
+suppose that an author who had invented this monstrous and staggering
+concatenation of chances, must hope to justify it by some highly
+dramatic situation, in the obvious and commonplace sense of the word. It
+is not difficult, indeed, to foresee such a situation, in which Dick
+Halward should be confronted, as if by magic, with the very words of the
+letter he has so carefully destroyed. I am far from saying that this
+scene would, in fact, have justified its amazing antecedents; but it
+would have shown a realization on the author's part that he must at any
+rate attempt some effect proportionate to the strain he had placed upon
+our credulity. Mr. Jerome showed no such realization. He made the man
+who handed Dick the copy of the letter explain beforehand how it had
+been obtained; so that Dick, though doubtless surprised and disgusted,
+was not in the least thunderstruck, and manifested no emotion. Here,
+then, Mr. Jerome evidently missed a scene rendered obligatory by the law
+of the maximum of specifically dramatic effect.</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 25%;">
+
+<p>The third, or structural, class of obligatory scenes may be more briefly
+dealt with, seeing that we have already, in the last chapter, discussed
+the principle involved. In this class we have placed, by definition,
+scenes which the author himself has rendered obligatory by seeming
+unmistakably to lead up to them--or, in other words, scenes indicated,
+or seeming to be indicated, by deliberately-planted finger-posts. It may
+appear as though the case of Dick Halward, which we have just been
+examining, in reality came under this heading. But it cannot actually be
+said that Mr. Jerome either did, or seemed to, point by finger-posts
+towards the obligatory scene. He rather appears to have been blankly
+unconscious of its possibility.</p>
+
+<p>We have noted in the foregoing chapter the unwisdom of planting
+misleading finger-posts; here we have only to deal with the particular
+case in which they seem to point to a definite and crucial scene. An
+example given by M. Sarcey himself will, I think, make the matter
+quite clear.</p>
+
+<p>M. Jules Lemaitre's play, <i>R&eacute;volt&eacute;e</i>, tells the story of a would-be
+intellectual, ill-conditioned young woman, married to a plain and
+ungainly professor of mathematics, whom she despises. We know that she
+is in danger of yielding to the fascinations of a seductive
+man-about-town; and having shown us this danger, the author proceeds to
+emphasize the manly and sterling character of the husband. He has the
+gentleness that goes with strength; but where his affections or his
+honour is concerned, he is not a man to be trifled with. This having
+been several times impressed upon us, we naturally expect that the wife
+is to be rescued by some striking manifestation of the husband's
+masterful virility. But no such matter! Rescued she is, indeed; but it
+is by the intervention of her half-brother, who fights a duel on her
+behalf, and is brought back wounded to restore peace to the
+mathematician's household: that man of science having been quite passive
+throughout, save for some ineffectual remonstrances. It happens that in
+this case we know just where the author went astray. Helene (the wife)
+is the unacknowledged daughter of a great lady, Mme. de Voves; and the
+subject of the play, as the author first conceived it, was the relation
+between the mother, the illegitimate daughter, and the legitimate son;
+the daughter's husband taking only a subordinate place. But Lemaitre
+chose as a model for the husband a man whom he had known and admired;
+and he allowed himself to depict in vivid colours his strong and
+sympathetic character, without noticing that he was thereby upsetting
+the economy of his play, and giving his audience reason to anticipate a
+line of development quite different from that which he had in mind.
+Inadvertently, in fact, he planted, not one, but two or three,
+misleading fingerposts.</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 25%;">
+
+<p>We come now to the fourth, or psychological, class of obligatory
+scenes--those which are &quot;required in order to justify some modification
+of character or alteration of will, too important to be taken
+for granted.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>An obvious example of an obligatory scene of this class may be found in
+the third act of <i>Othello</i>. The poet is bound to show us the process by
+which Iago instils his poison into Othello's mind. He has backed
+himself, so to speak, to make this process credible to us; and, by a
+masterpiece of dexterity and daring, he wins his wager. Had he omitted
+this scene--had he shown us Othello at one moment full of serene
+confidence, and at his next appearance already convinced of Desdemona's
+guilt--he would have omitted the pivot and turning--point of the whole
+structure. It may seem fantastic to conceive that any dramatist could
+blunder so grossly; but there are not a few plays in which we observe a
+scarcely less glaring hiatus.</p>
+
+<p>A case in point may be found in Lord Tennyson's <i>Becket</i>. I am not one
+of those who hold Tennyson merely contemptible as a dramatist. I believe
+that, had he taken to playwriting nearly half-a-century earlier, and
+studied the root principles of craftsmanship, instead of blindly
+accepting the Elizabethan conventions, he might have done work as fine
+in the mass as are the best moments of <i>Queen Mary</i> and <i>Harold</i>. As a
+whole, <i>Becket</i> is one of his weakest productions; but the Prologue and
+the first act would have formed an excellent first and third act for a
+play of wholly different sequel, had he interposed, in a second act, the
+obligatory scene required to elucidate Becket's character. The historic
+and psychological problem of Thomas Becket is his startling
+transformation from an easy-going, luxurious, worldly statesman into a
+gaunt ecclesiastic, fanatically fighting for the rights of his see, of
+his order, and of Rome. In any drama which professes to deal (as this
+does) with his whole career, the intellectual interest cannot but centre
+in an analysis of the forces that brought about this seeming new-birth
+of his soul. It would have been open to the poet, no doubt, to take up
+his history at a later point, when he was already the full-fledged
+clerical and ultramontane. But this Tennyson does not do. He is at pains
+to present to us the magnificent Chancellor, the bosom friend of the
+King, and mild reprover of his vices; and then, without the smallest
+transition, hey presto! he is the intransigent priest, bitterly
+combating the Constitutions of Clarendon. It is true that in the
+Prologue the poet places one or two finger-posts--small, conventional
+foreshadowings of coming trouble. For instance, the game of chess
+between King and Chancellor ends with a victory for Becket, who says--</p>
+
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&quot;You see my bishop<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;Hath brought your king to a standstill. You are beaten.&quot;<br>
+
+<p>The symbolical game of chess is a well-worn dramatic device. Becket,
+moreover, seems to feel some vague disquietude as to what may happen if
+he accepts the archbishopric; but there is nothing to show that he is
+conscious of any bias towards the intransigent clericalism of the later
+act. The character-problem, in fact, is not only not solved, but is
+ignored. The obligatory scene is skipped over, in the interval between
+the Prologue and the first act.</p>
+
+<p>One of the finest plays of our time--Sir Arthur Pinero's <i>Iris</i>--lacks,
+in my judgment, an obligatory scene. The character of Iris is admirably
+true, so far as it goes; but it is incomplete. The author seems to have
+evaded the crucial point of his play--the scene of her installation in
+Maldonado's flat. To perfect his psychological study, he was bound to
+bridge the chasm between the Iris of the third act and the Iris of the
+fourth. He builds two ends of the bridge, in the incident of the
+cheque-book at the close of the one act, and in the state of hebetude in
+which we find her at the opening of the other; but there remains a great
+gap at which the imagination boggles. The author has tried to throw a
+retrospective footway across it in Iris's confession to Trenwith in the
+fifth act; but I do not find that it quite meets the case. It would no
+doubt have been very difficult to keep the action within reasonable
+limits had a new act taken the place of the existing fourth; but Sir
+Arthur Pinero would probably have produced a completer work of art had
+he faced this difficulty, and contrived to compress into a single last
+act something like the matter of the existing fourth and fifth. It may
+be that he deliberately preferred that Iris should give in narrative the
+history of her decline; but I do not consider this a case in support of
+that slight plea for impassioned narrative which I ventured to put forth
+a few pages back. Her confession to Trenwith would have been far more
+dramatic and moving had it been about one-fourth part as long and
+one-fourth part as articulate.</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 25%;">
+
+<p>Of the scene imposed by history or legend it is unnecessary to say very
+much. We saw in Chapter IX that the theatre is not the place for
+expounding the results of original research, which cast a new light on
+historic character. It is not the place for whitewashing Richard III, or
+representing him as a man of erect and graceful figure. It is not the
+place for proving that Guy Fawkes was an earnest Presbyterian, that Nell
+Gwynn was a lady of the strictest morals, or that George Washington was
+incapable of telling the truth. The playwright who deals with Henry VIII
+is bound to present him, in the schoolboy's phrase, as &quot;a great
+widower.&quot; William the Silent must not be a chatterbox, Torquemada a
+humanitarian, Ivan the Terrible a conscientious opponent of capital
+punishment. And legend has its fixed points no less than history. In the
+theatre, indeed, there is little distinction between them: history is
+legend, and legend history. A dramatist may, if he pleases (though it is
+a difficult task), break wholly unfamiliar ground in the past; but where
+a historic legend exists he must respect it at his peril.</p>
+
+<p>From all this it is a simple deduction that where legend (historic or
+otherwise) associates a particular character with a particular scene
+that is by any means presentable on the stage, that scene becomes
+obligatory in a drama of which he is the leading figure. The fact that
+Shakespeare could write a play about King John, and say nothing about
+Runnymede and Magna Charta, shows that that incident in constitutional
+history had not yet passed into popular legend. When Sir Herbert Tree
+revived the play, he repaired the poet's omission by means of an
+inserted tableau. Even Shakespeare had not the hardihood to let Caesar
+fall without saying, &quot;The Ides of March are come&quot; and &quot;Et tu, Brute!&quot;
+Nero is bound to fiddle while Rome burns, or the audience will know the
+reason why.<a name="FNanchor84"></a><a href="#Footnote_84"><sup>[84]</sup></a> Historic criticism will not hear of the &quot;Thou hast
+conquered, Galilean!&quot; which legend attributes to Julian the Apostate;
+yet Ibsen not only makes him say it, but may almost be said to find in
+the phrase the keynote of his world-historic drama. Tristram and Iseult
+must drink a love-philtre or they are not Tristram and Iseult. It would
+be the extreme of paradox to write a Paolo-and-Francesca play and omit
+the scene of &quot;Quel giorno pi&ugrave; non vi leggemmo avante.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>The cases are not very frequent, however, in which an individual
+incident is thus imposed by history or legend. The practical point to be
+noted is rather that, when an author introduces a strongly-marked
+historical character, he must be prepared to give him at least one good
+opportunity of acting up to the character which legend--the best of
+evidence in the theatre--assigns to him. When such a personage is
+presented to us, it ought to be at his highest potency. We do not
+want to see--</p>
+
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&quot;From Marlborough's eyes the tears of dotage flow,<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;And Swift expire, a driveller and a show.&quot;<br>
+
+<p>If you deal with Napoleon, for instance, it is perfectly clear that he
+must dominate the stage. As soon as you bring in the name, the idea, of
+Napoleon Bonaparte, men have eyes and ears for nothing else; and they
+demand to see him, in a general way, acting up to their general
+conception of him. That was what Messrs. Lloyd Osbourne and Austin
+Strong forgot in their otherwise clever play, <i>The Exile</i>. It is useless
+to prove, historically, that at a given moment he was passive, supine,
+unconscious, while people around him were eagerly plotting his escape
+and restoration. That may have been so; but it is not what an audience
+wants to see. It wants to see Napoleon Napoleonizing. For anomalies and
+uncharacteristic episodes in Napoleon's career we must go to books; the
+playhouse is not the place for them. It is true that a dramatist like
+Mr. Bernard Shaw may, at his own risk and peril, set forth to give us a
+new reading of Caesar or of Napoleon, which may or may not be
+dramatically acceptable.<a name="FNanchor85"></a><a href="#Footnote_85"><sup>[85]</sup></a> But this is not what Messrs. Osbourne and
+Strong tried to do. Their Napoleon was the Napoleon of tradition--only
+he failed to act &quot;in a concatenation according.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>There are a few figures in history--and Napoleon is one of them--which
+so thrill the imagination that their mere name can dominate the stage,
+better, perhaps, than their bodily presence. In <i>L'Aiglon</i>, by M.
+Rostand, Napoleon is in fact the hero, though he lies dead in his
+far-off island, under the Southern Cross. Another such figure is Abraham
+Lincoln. In James Herne's sadly underrated play, <i>Griffith Davenport</i>,
+we were always conscious of &quot;Mr. Lincoln&quot; in the background; and the act
+in which Governor Morton of Indiana brought the President's instructions
+to Davenport might fairly be called an obligatory scene, inasmuch as it
+gave us the requisite sense of personal nearness to the master-spirit,
+without involving any risk of belittlement through imperfections of
+representation. There is a popular melodrama, passing in Palestine under
+the Romans, throughout the course of which we constantly feel the
+influence of a strange new prophet, unseen but wonder-working, who, if I
+remember rightly, is personally presented to us only in a final tableau,
+wherein he appears riding into Jerusalem amid the hosannas of the
+multitude. The execution of <i>Ben Hur</i> is crude and commonplace, but the
+conception is by no means inartistic. Historical figures of the highest
+rank may perhaps be best adumbrated in this fashion, with or without one
+personal appearance, so brief that there shall be no danger of
+anti-climax.</p>
+
+<p>The last paragraph reminds us that the accomplished playwright shows his
+accomplishment quite as much in his recognition and avoidance of the
+<i>sc&egrave;ne &agrave; ne pas faire</i> as in his divination of the obligatory scene.
+There is always the chance that no one may miss a scene demanded by
+logic or psychology; but an audience knows too well when it has been
+bored or distressed by a superfluous, or inconsequent, or wantonly
+painful scene.</p>
+
+<p>Some twenty years ago, in criticizing a play named <i>Le Ma&icirc;tre d'Armes</i>,
+M. Sarcey took the authors gravely to task, in the name of &quot;Aristotle
+and common sense,&quot; for following the modern and reprehensible tendency
+to present &quot;slices of life&quot; rather than constructed and developed
+dramas. Especially he reproached them with deliberately omitting the
+<i>sc&egrave;ne &agrave; faire</i>. A young lady is seduced, he says, and, for the sake of
+her child, implores her betrayer to keep his promise of marriage. He
+renews the promise, without the slightest intention of fulfilling it,
+and goes on board his yacht in order to make his escape. She discovers
+his purpose and follows him on board the yacht. &quot;What is the scene,&quot;
+asks M. Sarcey--here I translate literally--&quot;which you expect, you, the
+public? It is the scene between the abandoned fair one and her seducer.
+The author may make it in a hundred ways, but make it he must!&quot; Instead
+of which, the critic proceeds, we are fobbed off with a storm-scene, a
+rescue, and other sensational incidents, and hear no word of what passes
+between the villain and his victim. Here, I think, M. Sarcey is mistaken
+in his application of his pet principle. Words cannot express our
+unconcern as to what passes between the heroine and the villain on board
+the yacht--nay, more, our gratitude for being spared that painful and
+threadbare scene of recrimination. The plot demands, observe, that the
+villain shall not relent. We know quite well that he cannot, for if he
+did the play would fall to pieces. Why, then, should we expect or demand
+a sordid squabble which can lead to nothing? We--and by &quot;we&quot; I mean the
+public which relishes such plays--cannot possibly have any keen appetite
+for copious re-hashes of such very cold mutton as the appeals of the
+penitent heroine to the recalcitrant villain. And the moral seems to be
+that in this class of play--the drama, if one may call it so, of
+foregone character--the <i>sc&egrave;ne &agrave; faire</i> is precisely the scene to
+be omitted.</p>
+
+<p>In plays of a more ambitious class, skill is often shown by the
+indication, in place of the formal presentment, even of an important
+scene which the audience may, or might, have expected to witness in
+full. We have already noted such a case in <i>The Wild Duck</i>: Ibsen knew
+that what we really required to witness was not the actual process of
+Gregers's disclosure to Hialmar, but its effects. A small, but quite
+noticeable, example of a scene thus rightly left to the imagination
+occurred in Mr. Somerset Maugham's first play, <i>A Man of Honour</i>. In the
+first act, Jack Halliwell, his wife, and his sister-in-law call upon his
+friend Basil Kent. The sister-in-law, Hilda Murray, is a rich widow; and
+she and Kent presently go out on the balcony together and are lost to
+view. Then it appears, in a scene between the Halliwells, that they
+fully believe that Kent is in love with Mrs. Murray and is now proposing
+to her. But when the two re-enter from the balcony, it is evident from
+their mien that, whatever may have passed between them, they are not
+affianced lovers; and we presently learn that though Kent is in fact
+strongly attracted to Mrs. Murray, he considers himself bound in honour
+to marry a certain Jenny Bush, a Fleet Street barmaid, with whom he has
+become entangled. Many playwrights would, so to speak, have dotted the
+i's of the situation by giving us the scene between Kent and Mrs.
+Murray; but Mr. Maugham has done exactly right in leaving us to divine
+it. We know all that, at this point, we require to know of the relation
+between them; to have told us more would have been to anticipate and
+discount the course of events.</p>
+
+<p>A more striking instance of a scene rightly placed behind the scenes
+occurs in M. de Curel's terrible drama <i>Les Fossiles</i>. I need not go
+into the singularly unpleasing details of the plot. Suffice it to say
+that a very peculiar condition of things exists in the family of the Duc
+de Chantemelle. It has been fully discussed in the second act between
+the Duke and his daughter Claire, who has been induced to accept it for
+the sake of the family name. But a person more immediately concerned is
+Robert de Chantemelle, the only son of the house--will he also accept it
+quietly? A nurse, whoù is acquainted with the black secret, misbehaves
+herself, and is to be packed off. As she is a violent woman, Robert
+insists on dismissing her himself, and leaves the room to do so. The
+rest of the family are sure that, in her rage, she will blurt out the
+whole story; and they wait, in breathless anxiety, for Robert's return.
+What follows need not be told: the point is that this scene--the scene
+of tense expectancy as to the result of a crisis which is taking place
+in another room of the same house--is really far more dramatic than the
+crisis itself would be. The audience already knows all that the angry
+virago can say to her master; and of course no discussion of the merits
+of the case is possible between these two. Therefore M. de Curel is
+conspicuously right in sparing us the scene of vulgar violence, and
+giving us the scene of far higher tension in which Robert's father, wife
+and sister expect his return, their apprehension deepening with every
+moment that he delays.</p>
+
+<p>We see, then, that there is such a thing as a false <i>sc&egrave;ne &agrave; faire</i>--a
+scene which at first sight seems obligatory, but is in fact much better
+taken for granted. It may be absolutely indispensable that it should be
+suggested to the mind of the audience, but neither indispensable nor
+advisable that it should be presented to their eyes. The judicious
+playwright will often ask himself, &quot;Is it the actual substance of this
+scene that I require, or only its repercussion?&quot;</p>
+
+
+<br><br><hr style="width: 35%;"><br><br>
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_XIV"></a>CHAPTER XIV</h2>
+
+<p>THE PERIPETY</p>
+<br>
+
+<p>In the Greek theatre, as every one knows, the <i>peripeteia</i> or reversal
+of fortune--the turning of the tables, as we might say--was a
+clearly-defined and recognized portion of the dramatic organism. It was
+often associated with the <i>anagnorisis</i> or recognition. Mr. Gilbert
+Murray has recently shown cause for believing that both these dramatic
+&quot;forms&quot; descended from the ritual in which Greek drama took its
+origin--the ritual celebrating the death and resurrection of the season
+of &quot;mellow fruitfulness.&quot; If this theory be true, the <i>peripeteia</i> was
+at first a change from sorrow to joy--joy in the rebirth of the
+beneficent powers of nature. And to this day a sudden change from gloom
+to exhilaration is a popular and effective incident--as when, at the end
+of a melodrama, the handcuffs are transferred from the wrists of the
+virtuous naval lieutenant to those of the wicked baronet, and, through
+the disclosure of a strawberry-mark on his left arm, the lieutenant is
+recognized as the long-lost heir to a dukedom and &pound;50,000 a year.</p>
+
+<p>But when, as soon happened in Greece, the forms appropriate to a
+celebration of the death and resurrection of Dionysus came to be blent
+with the tomb-ritual of a hero, the term <i>peripeteia</i> acquired a special
+association with a sudden decline from prosperity into adversity. In the
+Middle Ages, this was thought to be the very essence and meaning of
+tragedy, as we may see from Chaucer's lines:</p>
+
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&quot;Tragedie is to seyn a certeyn storie,<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;As old&euml; bok&euml;s maken us memorie,<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;Of him that stood in gret prosperitee,<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;And is y-fallen out of heigh degree<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;Into miserie, and endeth wrecchedly.&quot;<br>
+
+<p>Aristotle cites a good instance of a peripety--to Anglicize the
+word--&quot;where, in the <i>Lynceus</i>, the hero is led away to execution,
+followed by Danaus as executioner; but, as the effect of the
+antecedents, Danaus is executed and Lynceus escapes.&quot; But here, as in so
+many other contexts, we must turn for the classic example to the
+<i>Oedipus Rex</i>. Jocasta, hearing from the Corinthian stranger that
+Polybus, King of Corinth, the reputed father of Oedipus, is dead, sends
+for her husband to tell him that the oracle which doomed him to
+parricide is defeated, since Polybus has died a natural death. Oedipus
+exults in the news and triumphs over the oracles; but, as the scene
+proceeds, the further revelations made by the same stranger lead Jocasta
+to recognize in Oedipus her own child, who was exposed on Mount
+Kithairon; and, in the subsequent scene, the evidence of the old
+Shepherd brings Oedipus himself to the same crushing realization. No
+completer case of <i>anagnorisis</i> and <i>peripeteia</i> could well be
+conceived--whatever we may have to say of the means by which it is
+led up to.<a name="FNanchor86"></a><a href="#Footnote_86"><sup>[86]</sup></a></p>
+
+<p>Has the conception of the peripety, as an almost obligatory element in
+drama, any significance for the modern playwright? Obligatory, of
+course, it cannot be: it is easy to cite a hundred admirable plays in
+which it is impossible to discover anything that can reasonably be
+called a peripety. But this, I think, we may safely say: the dramatist
+is fortunate who finds in the development of his theme, without
+unnatural strain or too much preparation, opportunity for a great scene,
+highly-wrought, arresting, absorbing, wherein one or more of his
+characters shall experience a marked reversal either of inward
+soul-state or of outward fortune. The theory of the peripety, in short,
+practically resolves itself for us into the theory of the &quot;great scene,&quot;
+Plays there are, many and excellent plays, in which some one scene
+stands out from all the rest, impressing itself with peculiar vividness
+on the spectator's mind; and, nine times out of ten, this scene will be
+found to involve a peripety. It can do no harm, then, if the playwright
+should ask himself: &quot;Can I, without any undue sacrifice, so develop my
+theme as to entail upon my leading characters, naturally and probably,
+an experience of this order?&quot;</p>
+
+<p>The peripeties of real life are frequent, though they are apt to be too
+small in scale, or else too fatally conclusive, to provide material for
+drama. One of the commonest, perhaps, is that of the man who enters a
+physician's consulting-room to seek advice in some trifling ailment, and
+comes out again, half an hour later, doomed either to death or to some
+calamity worse than death. This situation has been employed, not
+ineffectively, by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, in the first act of a romantic
+drama, <i>The Fires of Fate</i>; but it is very difficult to find any
+dramatic sequel to a peripety involving mere physical disaster.<a name="FNanchor87"></a><a href="#Footnote_87"><sup>[87]</sup></a> The
+moral peripety--the sudden dissipation of some illusion, or defeat of
+some imposture, or crumbling of some castle in the air--is a no less
+characteristic incident of real life, and much more amenable to the
+playwright's uses. Certainly there are few things more impressive in
+drama than to see a man or woman--or a man and woman--come upon the
+stage, radiant, confident, assured that<br>
+<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&quot;God's in his heaven,<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;All's right with the world,&quot;<br>
+<br>
+and leave it crushed and desperate, after a gradual and yet swift
+descent into Avernus. Such a scene is of the very marrow of drama. It is
+a play within a play; a concentrated, quintessentiated crisis.</p>
+
+<p>In the third act of <i>Othello</i> we have a peripety handled with consummate
+theatrical skill. To me--I confess it with bated breath--the
+craftsmanship seems greatly superior to the psychology. Othello, when we
+look into it, succumbs with incredible facility to Iago's poisoned
+pin-pricks; but no audience dreams of looking into it; and there lies
+the proof of Shakespeare's technical mastery. In the Trial Scene in <i>The
+Merchant of Venice</i> we have another great peripety. It illustrates the
+obvious principle that, where the drama consists in a conflict between
+two persons or parties, the peripety is generally a double one--the
+sudden collapse of Shylock's case implying an equally sudden restoration
+of Antonio's fortunes. Perhaps the most striking peripety in Ibsen is
+Stockmann's fall from jubilant self-confidence to defiant impotence in
+the third act of <i>An Enemy of the People</i>. Thinking that he has the
+&quot;compact majority&quot; at his back, he assumes the Burgomaster's insignia of
+office, and lords it over his incensed brother, only to learn, by blow
+on blow of disillusionment, that &quot;the compact majority&quot; has ratted, that
+he is to be deprived of his position and income, and that the commonest
+freedom of speech is to be denied him. In <i>A Doll's House</i> there are two
+peripeties: Nora's fall from elation to despair in the first scene with
+Krogstad, and the collapse of Helmer's illusions in the last scene
+of all.</p>
+
+<p>A good instance of the &quot;great scene&quot; which involves a marked peripety
+occurs in Sardou's <i>Dora</i>, once famous in England under the title of
+<i>Diplomacy</i>. The &quot;scene of the three men&quot; shows how T&eacute;kli, a Hungarian
+exile, calls upon his old friend Andr&eacute; de Maurillac, on the day of
+Andr&eacute;'s marriage, and congratulates him on having eluded the wiles of a
+dangerous adventuress, Dora de Rio-Zar&egrave;s, by whom he had once seemed to
+be attracted. But it is precisely Dora whom Andr&eacute; has married; and,
+learning this, T&eacute;kli tries to withdraw, or minimize, his imputation. For
+a moment a duel seems imminent; but Andr&eacute;'s friend, Favrolles, adjures
+him to keep his head; and the three men proceed to thrash the matter out
+as calmly as possible, with the result that, in the course of
+half-an-hour or so, it seems to be proved beyond all doubt that the
+woman Andr&eacute; adores, and whom he has just married, is a treacherous spy,
+who sells to tyrannical foreign governments the lives of political
+exiles and the honour of the men who fall into her toils. The crushing
+suspicion is ultimately disproved, by one of the tricks in which Sardou
+delighted; but that does not here concern us. Artificial as are its
+causes and its consequences, the &quot;scene of the three men,&quot; while it
+lasts, holds us breathless and absorbed; and Andr&eacute;'s fall from the
+pinnacle of happiness to the depth of misery, is a typical peripety.</p>
+
+<p>Equally typical and infinitely more tragic is another postnuptial
+peripety--the scene of the mutual confession of Angel Clare and Tess in
+Mr. Hardy's great novel. As it stands on the printed page, this scene is
+a superb piece of drama. Its greatness has been obscured in the English
+theatre by the general unskilfulness of the dramatic version presented.
+One magnificent scene does not make a play. In America, on the other
+hand, the fine acting of Mrs. Fiske secured popularity for a version
+which was, perhaps, rather better than that which we saw in England.</p>
+
+<p>I have said that dramatic peripeties are not infrequent in real life;
+and their scene, as is natural, is often laid in the law courts. It is
+unnecessary to recall the awful &quot;reversal of fortune&quot; that overtook one
+of the most brilliant of modern dramatists. About the same period,
+another drama of the English courts ended in a startling and terrible
+peripety. A young lady was staying as a guest with a half-pay officer
+and his wife. A valuable pearl belonging to the hostess disappeared; and
+the hostess accused her guest of having stolen it. The young lady, who
+had meanwhile married, brought an action for slander against her quondam
+friend. For several days the case continued, and everything seemed to be
+going in the plaintiff's favour. Major Blank, the defendant's husband,
+was ruthlessly cross-examined by Sir Charles Russell, afterwards Lord
+Chief Justice of England, with a view to showing that he was the real
+thief. He made a very bad witness, and things looked black against him.
+The end was nearing, and every one anticipated a verdict in the
+plaintiff's favour, when there came a sudden change of scene. The stolen
+pearl had been sold to a firm of jewellers, who had recorded the numbers
+of the Bank of England notes with which they paid for it. One of these
+notes was produced in court, and lo! it was endorsed with the name of
+the plaintiff.<a name="FNanchor88"></a><a href="#Footnote_88"><sup>[88]</sup></a> In a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, the whole
+edifice of mendacity and perjury fell to pieces. The thief was arrested
+and imprisoned; but the peripety for her was less terrible than for her
+husband, who had married her in chivalrous faith in her innocence.</p>
+
+<p>Would it have been--or may it some day prove to be--possible to transfer
+this &quot;well-made&quot; drama of real life bodily to the stage? I am inclined
+to think not. It looks to me very much like one of those &quot;blind alley&quot;
+themes of which mention has been made. There is matter, indeed, for most
+painful drama in the relations of the husband and wife, both before and
+after the trial; but, from the psychological point of view, one can see
+nothing in the case but a distressing and inexplicable anomaly.<a name="FNanchor89"></a><a href="#Footnote_89"><sup>[89]</sup></a> At
+the same time, the bare fact of the sudden and tremendous peripety is
+irresistibly dramatic; and Mr. Henry Arthur Jones has admitted that it
+suggested to him the great scene of the unmasking of Felicia Hindemarsh
+in <i>Mrs. Dane's Defence.</i></p>
+
+<p>It is instructive to note the delicate adjustment which Mr. Jones found
+necessary in order to adapt the theme to dramatic uses. In the first
+place, not wishing to plunge into the depths of tragedy, he left the
+heroine unmarried, though on the point of marriage. In the second place,
+he made the blot on her past, not a theft followed by an attempt to
+shift the guilt on to other shoulders, but an error of conduct, due to
+youth and inexperience, serious in itself, but rendered disastrous by
+tragic consequences over which she, Felicia, had no control. Thus Mr.
+Jones raised a real and fairly sufficient obstacle between his lovers,
+without rendering his heroine entirely unsympathetic, or presenting her
+in the guise of a bewildering moral anomaly. Thirdly, he transferred the
+scene of the peripety from a court of justice, with its difficult
+adjuncts and tedious procedure, to the private study of a great lawyer.
+At the opening of the scene between Mrs. Dane and Sir Daniel Carteret,
+she is, no doubt, still anxious and ill-at-ease, but reasonably
+confident of having averted all danger of exposure. Sir Daniel, too
+(like Sir Charles Russell in the pearl suit), is practically convinced
+of her innocence. He merely wants to get the case absolutely clear, for
+the final confounding of her accusers. At first, all goes smoothly. Mrs.
+Dane's answers to his questions are pat and plausible. Then she makes a
+single, almost imperceptible, slip of the tongue: she says, &quot;We had
+governesses,&quot; instead of &quot;I had governesses.&quot; Sir Daniel pricks up his
+ears: &quot;We? You say you were an only child. Who's we?&quot; &quot;My cousin and I,&quot;
+she answers. Sir Daniel thinks it odd that he has not heard of this
+cousin before; but he continues his interrogatory without serious
+suspicion. Then it occurs to him to look up, in a topographical
+dictionary, the little town of Tawhampton, where Mrs. Dane spent her
+youth. He reads the bald account of it, ending thus, &quot;The living is a
+Vicarage, net yearly value &pound;376, and has been held since 1875 by&quot;--and
+he turns round upon her--&quot;by the Rev. Francis Hindemarsh! Hindemarsh?&quot;</p>
+
+&nbsp;&nbsp;Mrs. Dane: He was my uncle.<br>
+
+&nbsp;&nbsp;Sir Daniel: Your uncle?<br>
+
+&nbsp;&nbsp;Mrs. Dane: Sir Daniel, I've done wrong to hide from you that Felicia<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;Hindemarsh was my cousin.<br>
+
+&nbsp;&nbsp;Sir Daniel: Felicia Hindemarsh was your cousin!<br>
+
+&nbsp;&nbsp;Mrs. Dane: Can't you understand why I have hidden it? The whole<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;affair was so terrible.<br>
+
+<p>And so she stumbles on, from one inevitable admission to another, until
+the damning truth is clear that she herself is Felicia Hindemarsh, the
+central, though not the most guilty, figure in a horrible scandal.</p>
+
+<p>This scene is worthy of study as an excellent type of what may be called
+the judicial peripety, the crushing cross-examination, in which it is
+possible to combine the tension of the detective story with no small
+psychological subtlety. In Mr. Jones's scene, the psychology is obvious
+enough; but it is an admirable example of nice adjustment without any
+obtrusive ingenuity. The whole drama, in short, up to the last act is,
+in the exact sense of the word, a well-made play--complex yet clear,
+ingenious yet natural. In the comparative weakness of the last act we
+have a common characteristic of latter-day drama, which will have to be
+discussed in due course.</p>
+
+<p>In this case we have a peripety of external fortune. For a
+clearly-marked moral peripety we may turn to the great scene between
+Vivie and her mother in the second act of <i>Mrs. Warren's Profession.</i>
+Whatever may be thought of the matter of this scene, its movement is
+excellent. After a short, sharp opening, which reveals to Mrs. Warren
+the unfilial dispositions of her daughter, and reduces her to whimpering
+dismay, the following little passage occurs:</p>
+
+&nbsp;&nbsp;Mrs. Warren: You're very rough with me, Vivie.<br>
+
+&nbsp;&nbsp;Vivie: Nonsense. What about bed? It's past ten.<br>
+
+&nbsp;&nbsp;Mrs. Warren (passionately): What's the use of my going to bed? Do<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;you think I could sleep?<br>
+
+&nbsp;&nbsp;Vivie: Why not? I shall.<br>
+
+<p>Then the mother turns upon the daughter's stony self-righteousness, and
+pours forth her sordid history in such a way as to throw a searchlight
+on the conditions which make such histories possible; until, exhausted
+by her outburst, she says, &quot;Oh, dear! I do believe I am getting sleepy
+after all,&quot; and Vivie replies, &quot;I believe it is I who will not be able
+to sleep now.&quot; Mr. Shaw, we see, is at pains to emphasize his peripety.</p>
+
+<p>Some &quot;great scenes&quot; consist, not of one decisive turning of the tables,
+but of a whole series of minor vicissitudes of fortune. Such a scene is
+the third act of <i>The Gay Lord Quex</i>, a prolonged and thrilling duel, in
+which Sophy Fullgarney passes by degrees from impertinent exultation to
+abject surrender and then springs up again to a mood of reckless
+defiance. In the &quot;great scene&quot; of <i>The Thunderbolt</i>, on the other
+hand--the scene of Thaddeus's false confession of having destroyed his
+brother's will--though there is, in fact, a great peripety, it is not
+that which attracts and absorbs our interest. All the greedy Mortimore
+family fall from the height of jubilant confidence in their new-found
+wealth to the depth of disappointment and exasperation. But this is not
+the aspect of the scene which grips and moves us. Our attention is
+centred on Thaddeus's struggle to take his wife's misdeed upon himself;
+and his failure cannot be described as a peripety, seeing that it sinks
+him only one degree lower in the slough of despair. Like the scene in
+Mrs. Dane's Defence, this is practically a piece of judicial drama--a
+hard-fought cross-examination. But as there is no reversal of fortune
+for the character in whom we are chiefly interested, it scarcely ranks
+as a scene of peripety.<a name="FNanchor90"></a><a href="#Footnote_90"><sup>[90]</sup></a></p>
+
+<p>Before leaving this subject, we may note that a favourite effect of
+romantic drama is an upward reversal of fortune through the
+recognition--the <i>anagnorisis</i>--of some great personage in disguise.
+Victor Hugo excelled in the superb gestures appropriate to such a scene:
+witness the passage in <i>Hernani</i>, before the tomb of Charlemagne, where
+the obscure bandit claims the right to take his place at the head of the
+princes and nobles whom the newly-elected Emperor has ordered off to
+execution:</p>
+
+&nbsp;&nbsp;Hernani:<br>
+
+&nbsp;&nbsp;Dieu qui donne le sceptre et qui te le donna<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;M'a fait duc de Segorbe et duc de Cardona,<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;Marquis de Monroy, comte Albat&eacute;ra, vicomte<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;De Gor, seigneur de lieux dont j'ignore le compte.<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;Je suis Jean d'Aragon, grand ma&icirc;tre d'Avis, n&eacute;<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;Dans l'exil, fils proscrit d'un p&egrave;re assassin&eacute;<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;Par sentence du tien, roi Carlos de Castille.<br>
+
+<hr style="width: 25%;">
+
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; (<i>Aux autres conjur&eacute;s</i>)<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;Couvrons nous, grands d'Espagnol<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; (<i>Tous les Espagnols se couvrent</i>)<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; Oui, nos t&ecirc;tes, &ocirc; roi!<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;Ont le droit de tomber couvertes devant toi!<br>
+
+<p>An effective scene of this type occurs in <i>Monsieur Beaucaire</i>, where
+the supposed hairdresser is on the point of being ejected with contumely
+from the pump-room at Bath, when the French Ambassador enters, drops on
+his knee, kisses the young man's hand, and presents him to the astounded
+company as the Duc d'Orl&eacute;ans, Comte de Valois, and I know not what
+besides--a personage who immeasurably outshines the noblest of his
+insulters. Quieter, but not less telling, is the peripety in <i>The Little
+Father of the Wilderness</i>, by Messrs. Lloyd Osbourne and Austin Strong.
+The P&egrave;re Marlotte, who, by his heroism and self-devotion, has added vast
+territories to the French possessions in America, is summoned to the
+court of Louis XV, and naturally concludes that the king has heard of
+his services and wishes to reward them. He finds, on the contrary, that
+he is wanted merely to decide a foolish bet; and he is treated with the
+grossest insolence and contempt. Just as he is departing in humiliation,
+the Governor-General of Canada arrives, with a suite of officers and
+Indians. The moment they are aware of Pere Marlotte's presence, they all
+kneel to him and pay him deeper homage than they have paid to the king,
+who accepts the rebuke and joins in their demonstration.</p>
+
+<p>A famous peripety of the romantic order occurs in <i>H.M.S. Pinafore</i>,
+where, on the discovery that Captain Corcoran and Ralph Rackstraw have
+been changed at birth, Ralph instantly becomes captain of the ship,
+while the captain declines into an able-bodied seaman. This is one of
+the instances in which the idealism of art ekes out the imperfections
+of reality.</p>
+
+
+
+<br><br><hr style="width: 35%;"><br><br>
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_XV"></a>CHAPTER XV</h2>
+
+<p>PROBABILITY, CHANCE, AND COINCIDENCE</p>
+<br>
+
+<p>Aristotle indulges in an often-quoted paradox to the effect that, in
+drama, the probable impossible is to be preferred to the improbable
+possible. With all respect, this seems to be a somewhat cumbrous way of
+stating the fact that plausibility is of more importance on the stage
+than what may be called demonstrable probability. There is no time, in
+the rush of a dramatic action, for a mathematical calculation of the
+chances for and against a given event, or for experimental proof that
+such and such a thing can or cannot be done. If a thing seem plausible,
+an audience will accept it without cavil; if it, seem incredible on the
+face of it, no evidence of its credibility will be of much avail. This
+is merely a corollary from the fundamental principle that the stage is
+the realm of appearances; not of realities, where paste jewels are at
+least as effective as real ones, and a painted forest is far more sylvan
+than a few wilted and drooping saplings, insecurely planted upon
+the boards.</p>
+
+<p>That is why an improbable or otherwise inacceptable incident cannot be
+validly defended on the plea that it actually happened: that it is on
+record in history or in the newspapers. In the first place, the
+dramatist can never put it on the stage as it happened. The bare fact
+may be historical, but it is not the bare fact that matters. The
+dramatist cannot restore it to its place in that intricate plexus of
+cause and effect, which is the essence and meaning of reality. He can
+only give his interpretation of the fact; and one knows not how to
+calculate the chances that his interpretation may be a false one. But
+even if this difficulty could be overcome; if the dramatist could prove
+that he had reproduced the event with photographic and cinematographic
+accuracy, his position would not thereby be improved. He would still
+have failed in his peculiar task, which is precisely that of
+interpretation. Not truth, but verisimilitude, is his aim; for the stage
+is the realm of appearances, in which intrusive realities become unreal.
+There are, as I have said, incalculable chances to one that the
+playwright's version of a given event will not coincide with that of the
+Recording Angel: but it may be true and convincing in relation to human
+nature in general, in which case it will belong to the sphere of great
+art; or, on a lower level, it may be agreeable and entertaining without
+being conspicuously false to human nature, in which case it will do no
+harm, since it makes no pretence to historic truth. It may be objected
+that the sixteenth-century public, and even, in the next century, the
+great Duke of Marlborough, got their knowledge of English history from
+Shakespeare, and the other writers of chronicle-plays. Well, I leave it
+to historians to determine whether this very defective and, in great
+measure, false vision of the past was better or worse than none. The
+danger at any rate, if danger there was, is now past and done with. Even
+our generals no longer go to the theatre or to the First Folio for their
+history. The dramatist may, with an easy conscience, interpret historic
+fact in the light of his general insight into human nature, so long as
+he does not so falsify the recorded event that common knowledge cries
+out against him.<a name="FNanchor91"></a><a href="#Footnote_91"><sup>[91]</sup></a></p>
+
+<p>Plausibility, then, not abstract or concrete probability, and still less
+literal faithfulness to recorded fact, is what the dramatist is bound to
+aim at. To understand this as a belittling of his art is to
+misunderstand the nature of art in general. The plausibility of bad art
+is doubtless contemptible and may be harmful. But to say that good art
+must be plausible is only to say that not every sort of truth, or every
+aspect of truth, is equally suitable for artistic representation--or, in
+more general terms, that the artist, without prejudice to his allegiance
+to nature, must respect the conditions of the medium in which he works.</p>
+
+<p>Our standards of plausibility, however, are far from being invariable.
+To each separate form of art, a different standard is applicable. In
+what may roughly be called realistic art, the terms plausible and
+probable are very nearly interchangeable. Where the dramatist appeals to
+the sanction of our own experience and knowledge, he must not introduce
+matter against which our experience and knowledge cry out. A very small
+inaccuracy in a picture which is otherwise photographic will often have
+a very disturbing effect. In plays of society in particular, the
+criticism &quot;No one does such things,&quot; is held by a large class of
+playgoers to be conclusive and destructive. One has known people despise
+a play because Lady So-and-so's manner of speaking to her servants was
+not what they (the cavillers) were accustomed to. On the other hand, one
+has heard a whole production highly applauded because the buttons on a
+particular uniform were absolutely right. This merely means that when an
+effort after literal accuracy is apparent, the attention of the audience
+seizes on the most trifling details and is apt to magnify their
+importance. Niceties of language in especial are keenly, and often
+unjustly, criticized. If a particular expression does not happen to be
+current in the critic's own circle, he concludes that nobody uses it,
+and that the author is a pedant or a vulgarian. In view of this
+inevitable tendency, the prudent dramatist will try to keep out of his
+dialogue expressions that are peculiar to his own circle, and to use
+only what may be called everybody's English, or the language undoubtedly
+current throughout the whole class to which his personage belongs.</p>
+
+<p>It may be here pointed out that there are three different planes on
+which plausibility may or may not, be achieved. There is first the
+purely external plane, which concerns the producer almost as much as the
+playwright. On this plane we look for plausibility of costume, of
+manners, of dialect, of general environment. Then we have plausibility
+of what may be called uncharacteristic event--of such events as are
+independent of the will of the characters, and are not conditioned by
+their psychology. On this plane we have to deal with chance and
+accident, coincidence, and all &quot;circumstances over which we have no
+control.&quot; For instance, the playwright who makes the &quot;Marseillaise&quot;
+become popular throughout Paris within half-an-hour of its having left
+the composer's desk, is guilty of a breach of plausibility on this
+plane. So, too, if I were to make my hero enter Parliament for the first
+time, and rise in a single session to be Prime Minister of
+England--there would be no absolute impossibility in the feat, but it
+would be a rather gross improbability of the second order. On the third
+plane we come to psychological plausibility, the plausibility of events
+dependent mainly or entirely on character. For example--to cite a much
+disputed instance--is it plausible that Nora, in <i>A Doll's House</i>,
+should suddenly develop the mastery of dialectics with which she crushes
+Helmer in the final scene, and should desert her husband and children,
+slamming the door behind her?</p>
+
+<p>It need scarcely be said that plausibility on the third plane is vastly
+the most important. A very austere criticism might even call it the one
+thing worth consideration. But, as a matter of fact, when we speak of
+plausibility, it is almost always the second plane--the plane of
+uncharacteristic circumstance--that we have in mind. To plausibility of
+the third order we give a more imposing name--we call it truth. We say
+that Nora's action is true--or untrue--to nature. We speak of the truth
+with which the madness of Lear, the malignity of Iago, the race hatred
+of Shylock, is portrayed. Truth, in fact, is the term which we use in
+cases where the tests to be applied are those of introspection,
+intuition, or knowledge sub-consciously garnered from spiritual
+experience. Where the tests are external, and matters of common
+knowledge or tangible evidence, we speak of plausibility.</p>
+
+<p>It would be a mistake, however, to imagine that because plausibility of
+the third degree, or truth, is the noblest attribute &quot;I drama, it is
+therefore the one thing needful. In some forms of drama it is greatly
+impaired, or absolutely nullified, if plausibility of the second degree,
+its necessary preliminary, be not carefully secured. In the case above
+imagined, for instance, of the young politician who should become Prime
+Minister immediately on entering Parliament: it would matter nothing
+with what profundity of knowledge or subtlety of skill the character was
+drawn: we should none the less decline to believe in him. Some
+dramatists, as a matter of fact, find it much easier to attain truth of
+character than plausibility of incident. Every one who is in the habit
+of reading manuscript plays, must have come across the would-be
+playwright who has a good deal of general ability and a considerable
+power of characterization, but seems to be congenitally deficient in the
+sense of external reality, so that the one thing he (or she) can by no
+means do is to invent or conduct an action that shall be in the least
+like any sequence of events in real life. It is naturally difficult to
+give examples, for the plays composed under this curious limitation are
+apt to remain in manuscript, or to be produced for one performance, and
+forgotten. There is, however, one recent play of this order which holds
+a certain place in dramatic literature. I do not know that Mr. Granville
+Barker was well-advised in printing <i>The Marrying of Anne Leete</i> along
+with such immeasurably maturer and saner productions as <i>The Voysey
+Inheritance</i> and <i>Waste</i>; but by doing so he has served my present purpose
+in providing me with a perfect example of a play as to which we cannot
+tell whether it possesses plausibility of the third degree, so
+absolutely does it lack that plausibility of the second degree which is
+its indispensable condition precedent.</p>
+
+<p>Francisque Sarcey was fond of insisting that an audience would generally
+accept without cavil any postulates in reason which an author chose to
+impose upon it, with regard to events supposed to have occurred before
+the rise of the curtain; always provided that the consequences deduced
+from them within the limits of the play were logical, plausible, and
+entertaining. The public will swallow a camel, he would maintain, in the
+past, though they will strain at a gnat in the present. A classical
+example of this principle is (once more) the <i>Oedipus Rex</i>, in which
+several of the initial postulates are wildly improbable: for instance,
+that Oedipus should never have inquired into the circumstances of the
+death of Laius, and that, having been warned by an oracle that he was
+doomed to marry his mother, he should not have been careful, before
+marrying any woman, to ascertain that she was younger than himself.
+There is at least so much justification for Sarcey's favourite
+principle, that we are less apt to scrutinize things merely narrated to
+us than events which take place before our eyes. It is simply a special
+instance of the well-worn</p>
+
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&quot;Segnius irritant animos demissa per aurem<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;Quam quae sunt oculis subjecta fidelibus.&quot;<br>
+
+<p>But the principle is of very limited artistic validity. No one would
+nowadays think of justifying a gross improbability in the antecedents of
+a play by Ibsen or Sir Arthur Pinero, by Mr. Galsworthy or Mr. Granville
+Barker, on the plea that it occurred outside the frame of the picture.
+Such a plea might, indeed, secure a mitigation of sentence, but never a
+verdict of acquittal. Sarcey, on the other hand, brought up in the
+school of the &quot;well-made&quot; play, would rather have held it a feather in
+the playwright's cap that he should have known just where, and just how,
+he might safely outrage probability <a name="FNanchor92"></a><a href="#Footnote_92"><sup>[92]</sup></a>. The inference is that we now
+take the dramatist's art more seriously than did the generation of the
+Second Empire in France.</p>
+
+<p>This brings us, however, to an important fact, which must by no means be
+overlooked. There is a large class of plays--or rather, there are
+several classes of plays, some of them not at all to be despised--the
+charm of which resides, not in probability, but in ingenious and
+delightful improbability. I am, of course, not thinking of sheer
+fantasies, like <i>A Midsummer Night's Dream</i>, or <i>Peter Pan</i>, or <i>The
+Blue Bird</i>. They may, indeed, possess plausibility of the third order,
+but plausibility of the second order has no application to them. Its
+writs do not run on their extramundane plane. The plays which appeal to
+us in virtue of their pleasant departures from probability are romances,
+farces, a certain order of light comedies and semi-comic melodramas--in
+short, the thousand and one plays in which the author, without
+altogether despising and abjuring truth, makes it on principle
+subsidiary to delightfulness. Plays of the <i>Prisoner of Zenda</i> type
+would come under this head: so would Sir Arthur Pinero's farces, <i>The
+Magistrate</i>, <i>The Schoolmistress</i>, <i>Dandy Dick</i>; so would Mr. Carton's
+light comedies, <i>Lord and Lady Algy</i>, <i>Wheels within Wheels</i>, <i>Lady
+Huntworth's Experiment</i>; so would most of Mr. Barrie's comedies; so
+would Mr. Arnold Bennett's play, <i>The Honeymoon</i>. In a previous chapter
+I have sketched the opening act of Mr. Carton's <i>Wheels within Wheels</i>,
+which is a typical example of this style of work. Its charm lies in a
+subtle, all-pervading improbability, an infusion of fantasy so delicate
+that, while at no point can one say, &quot;This is impossible,&quot; the total
+effect is far more entertaining than that of any probable sequence of
+events in real life. The whole atmosphere of such a play should be
+impregnated with humour, without reaching that gross supersaturation
+which we find in the lower order of farce-plays of the type of
+<i>Charlie's Aunt</i> or <i>Niobe</i>.</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 25%;">
+
+<p>Plausibility of development, as distinct from plausibility of theme or
+of character, depends very largely on the judicious handling of chance,
+and the exclusion, or very sparing employment, of coincidence. This is a
+matter of importance, into which we shall find it worth while to look
+somewhat closely.</p>
+
+<p>It is not always clearly recognized that chance and coincidence are by
+no means the same thing. Coincidence is a special and complex form of
+chance, which ought by no means to be confounded with the everyday
+variety. We need not here analyse chance, or discuss the philosophic
+value of the term. It is enough that we all know what we mean by it in
+common parlance. It may be well, however, to look into the etymology of
+the two words we are considering. They both come ultimately, from the
+Latin &quot;cadere,&quot; to fall. Chance is a falling-out, like that of a die
+from the dice-box; and coincidence signifies one falling-out on the top
+of another, the concurrent happening of two or more chances which
+resemble or somehow fit into each other. If you rattle six dice in a box
+and throw them, and they turn up at haphazard--say, two aces, a deuce,
+two fours, and a six--there is nothing remarkable in this falling out.
+But if they all turn up sixes, you at once suspect that the dice are
+cogged; and if that be not so--if there be no sufficient cause behind
+the phenomenon--you say that this identical falling-out of six separate
+possibilities was a remarkable coincidence. Now, applying the
+illustration to drama, I should say that the playwright is perfectly
+justified in letting chance play its probable and even inevitable part
+in the affairs of his characters; but that, the moment we suspect him of
+cogging the dice, we feel that he is taking an unfair advantage of us,
+and our imagination either cries, &quot;I won't play!&quot; or continues the game
+under protest.</p>
+
+<p>Some critics have considered it a flaw in Shakespeare's art that the
+catastrophe of <i>Romeo and Juliet</i> should depend upon a series of
+chances, and especially on the miscarriage of the Friar's letter to
+Romeo. This is not, I think, a valid criticism. We may, if we are so
+minded, pick to pieces the course of action which brought these chances
+into play. The device of the potion--even if such a drug were known to
+the pharmacopoeia--is certainly a very clumsy method of escape from the
+position in which Juliet is placed by her father's obstinacy. But when
+once we have accepted that integral part of the legend, the intervention
+of chance in the catastrophe is entirely natural and probable. Observe
+that there is no coincidence in the matter, no interlinking or
+dovetailing of chances. The catastrophe results from the hot-headed
+impetuosity of all the characters, which so hurries events that there is
+no time for the elimination of the results of chance. Letters do
+constantly go astray, even under our highly-organized system of
+conveyance; but their delay or disappearance seldom leads to tragic
+results, because most of us have learnt to take things calmly and wait
+for the next post. Yet if we could survey the world at large, it is
+highly probable that every day or every hour we should somewhere or
+other find some Romeo on the verge of committing suicide because of a
+chance misunderstanding with regard to his Juliet; and in a certain
+percentage of cases the explanatory letter or telegram would doubtless
+arrive too late.</p>
+
+<p>We all remember how, in Mr. Hardy's <i>Tess</i>, the main trouble arises from
+the fact that the letter pushed under Angel Clare's door slips also
+under the carpet of his room, and so is never discovered. This is an
+entirely probable chance; and the sternest criticism would hardly call
+it a flaw in the structure of the fable. But take another case: Madame X
+has had a child, of whom she has lost sight for more than twenty years,
+during which she has lived abroad. She returns to France, and
+immediately on landing at Bordeaux she kills a man who accompanies her.
+The court assigns her defence to a young advocate, and this young
+advocate happens to be her son. We have here a piling of chance upon
+chance, in which the long arm of coincidence<a name="FNanchor93"></a><a href="#Footnote_93"><sup>[93]</sup></a> is very apparent. The
+coincidence would have been less startling had she returned to the place
+where she left her son and where she believed him to be. But no! she
+left him in Paris, and it is only by a series of pure chances that he
+happens to be in Bordeaux, where she happens to land, and happens to
+shoot a man. For the sake of a certain order of emotional effect, a
+certain order of audience is willing to accept this piling up of
+chances; but it relegates the play to a low and childish plane of art.
+The <i>Oedipus Rex</i>, indeed--which meets us at every turn--is founded on
+an absolutely astounding series of coincidences; but here the conception
+of fate comes in, and we vaguely figure to ourselves some malignant
+power deliberately pulling the strings which guide its puppets into such
+abhorrent tangles. On the modern view that &quot;character is destiny,&quot; the
+conception of supernatural wire-pulling is excluded. It is true that
+amazing coincidences do occur in life; but when they are invented to
+serve an artist's purposes, we feel that he is simplifying his task
+altogether beyond reason, and substituting for normal and probable
+development an irrelevant plunge into the merely marvellous.</p>
+
+<p>Of the abuse of coincidence, I have already given a specimen in speaking
+of <i>The Rise of Dick Halward</i> (Chapter XII). One or two more examples
+may not be out of place. I need not dwell on the significance of the
+fact that most of them occur in forgotten plays.</p>
+
+<p>In <i>The Man of Forty</i>, by Mr. Walter Frith, we find the following
+conjuncture of circumstances: Mr. Lewis Dunster has a long-lost wife and
+a long-lost brother. He has been for years in South Africa; they have
+meanwhile lived in London, but they do not know each other, and have
+held no communication. Lewis, returning from Africa, arrives in London.
+He does not know where to find either wife or brother, and has not the
+slightest wish to look for them; yet in the first house he goes to, the
+home of a lady whose acquaintance he chanced to make on the voyage, he
+encounters both his wife and his brother! Not quite so startling is the
+coincidence on which <i>Mrs. Willoughby's Kiss</i>, by Mr. Frank Stayton, is
+founded. An upper and lower flat in West Kensington are inhabited,
+respectively, by Mrs. Brandram and Mrs. Willoughby, whose husbands have
+both been many years absent in India. By pure chance the two husbands
+come home in the same ship; the two wives go to Plymouth to meet them,
+and by pure chance, for they are totally unacquainted with each other,
+they go to the same hotel; whence it happens that Mrs. Willoughby,
+meeting Mr. Brandram in a half-lighted room, takes him for her husband,
+flies to his arms and kisses him. More elaborate than either of these is
+the tangle of coincidences in Mr. Stuart Ogilvie's play, <i>The
+White Knight</i>--</p>
+
+<p>Giulietta, the ward of David Pennycuick, goes to study singing at Milan.
+Mr. Harry Rook, Pennycuick's most intimate friend, meets her by chance
+in Milan, and she becomes his mistress, neither having the least idea
+that the other knows Pennycuick. Then Viscount Hintlesham, like
+Pennycuick, a dupe of Rook's, meets her by chance at Monte Carlo and
+falls in love with her. He does not know that she knows Rook or
+Pennycuick, and she does not know that he knows them. Arriving in
+England, she finds in the manager, the promoter, and the chairman of the
+Electric White Lead Company her guardian, her seducer, and her lover.
+When she comes to see her guardian, the first person she meets is her
+seducer, and she learns that her lover has just left the house. Up to
+that moment, I repeat, she did not know that any one of these men knew
+any other; yet she does not even say, &quot;How small the world is!&quot;<a name="FNanchor94"></a><a href="#Footnote_94"><sup>[94]</sup></a>
+Surely some such observation was obligatory under the circumstances.</p>
+
+<p>Let us turn now to a more memorable piece of work; that interesting play
+of Sir Arthur Pinero's transition period, <i>The Profligate</i>. Here the
+great situation of the third act is brought about by a chain of
+coincidences which would be utterly unthinkable in the author's maturer
+work. Leslie Brudenell, the heroine, is the ward of Mr. Cheal, a
+solicitor. She is to be married to Dunstan Renshaw; and, as she has no
+home, the bridal party meets at Mr. Cheal's office before proceeding to
+the registrar's. No sooner have they departed than Janet Preece, who has
+been betrayed and deserted by Dunstan Renshaw (under an assumed name)
+comes to the office to state her piteous case. This is not in itself a
+pure coincidence; for Janet happened to come to London in the same train
+with Leslie Brudenell and her brother Wilfrid; and Wilfrid, seeing in
+her a damsel in distress, recommended her to lay her troubles before a
+respectable solicitor, giving her Mr. Cheal's address. So far, then, the
+coincidence is not startling. It is natural enough that Renshaw's
+mistress and his betrothed should live in the same country town; and it
+is not improbable that they should come to London by the same train, and
+that Wilfrid Brudenell should give the bewildered and weeping young
+woman a commonplace piece of advice. The concatenation of circumstances
+is remarkable rather than improbable. But when, in the next act, not a
+month later, Janet Preece, by pure chance, drops in at the Florentine
+villa where Renshaw and Leslie are spending their honeymoon, we feel
+that the long arm of coincidence is stretched to its uttermost, and that
+even the thrilling situation which follows is very dearly bought. It
+would not have been difficult to attenuate the coincidence. What has
+actually happened is this: Janet has (we know not how) become a sort of
+maid-companion to a Mrs. Stonehay, whose daughter was a school-friend of
+Leslie's; the Stonehays have come to Florence, knowing nothing of
+Leslie's presence there; and they happen to visit the villa in order to
+see a fresco which it contains. If, now, we had been told that Janet's
+engagement by the Stonehays had resulted from her visit to Mr. Cheal,
+and that the Stonehays had come to Florence knowing Leslie to be there,
+and eager to find her, several links would have been struck off the
+chain of coincidence; or, to put it more exactly, a fairly coherent
+sequence of events would have been substituted for a series of
+incoherent chances. The same result might no doubt have been achieved in
+many other and neater ways. I merely indicate, by way of illustration, a
+quite obvious method of reducing the element of coincidence in the case.</p>
+
+<p>The coincidence in <i>The Second Mrs. Tanqueray</i>, by which Ellean meets
+and falls in love with one of Paula's ex-lovers, has been very severely
+criticized. It is certainly not one of the strong points of the play;
+but, unlike the series of chances we have just been examining, it places
+no excessive strain on our credulity. Such coincidences do occur in real
+life; we have all of us seen or heard of them; the worst we can say of
+this one is that it is neither positively good nor positively bad--a
+piece of indifferent craftsmanship. On the other hand, if we turn to
+<i>Letty</i>, the chance which, in the third act, leads Letchmere's party and
+Mandeville's party to choose the same restaurant, seems to me entirely
+justified. It is not really a coincidence at all, but one of those
+everyday happenings which are not only admissible in drama, but
+positively desirable, as part of the ordinary surface-texture of life.
+Entirely to eliminate chance from our representation of life would be a
+very unreasonable austerity. Strictly speaking, indeed, it is
+impossible; for even when we have worked out an unbroken chain of
+rational and commensurate causes and effects, it remains a chance, and
+an unlikely chance, that chance should not have interfered with it.</p>
+
+<p>All the plays touched upon in the last four paragraphs are in intention
+realistic. They aim, that is to say, at a literal and sober
+representation of life. In the other class of plays, which seek their
+effect, not in plodding probability, but in delightful improbability,
+the long arm of coincidence has its legitimate functions. Yet even here
+it is not quite unfettered. One of the most agreeable coincidences in
+fiction, I take it, is the simultaneous arrival in Bagdad, from
+different quarters of the globe, of three one-eyed calenders, all blind
+of the right eye, and all, in reality, the sons of kings. But it is to
+be noted that this coincidence is not a crucial occurrence in a story,
+but only a part of the story-teller's framework or mechanism--a device
+for introducing fresh series of adventures. This illustrates the
+Sarceyan principle above referred to, which Professor Brander Matthews
+has re-stated in what seems to me an entirely acceptable form--namely,
+that improbabilities which may be admitted on the outskirts of an
+action, must be rigidly excluded when the issue is joined and we are in
+the thick of things. Coincidences, in fact, become the more improbable
+in the direct ratio of their importance. We have all, in our own
+experience, met with amazing coincidences; but how few of us have ever
+gained or lost, been made happy or unhappy, by a coincidence, as
+distinct from a chance! It is not precisely probable that three
+brothers, who have separated in early life, and have not heard of one
+another for twenty years, should find themselves seated side by side at
+an Italian <i>table-d'h&ocirc;te</i>; yet such coincidences have occurred, and are
+creditable enough so long as nothing particular comes of them. But if a
+dramatist were to make these three brothers meet in Messina on the eve
+of the earthquake, in order that they might all be killed, and thus
+enable his hero (their cousin) to succeed to a peerage and marry the
+heroine, we should say that his use of coincidence was not strictly
+artistic. A coincidence, in short, which coincides with a crisis is
+thereby raised to the <i>n</i>th power, and is wholly inacceptable in serious
+art. Mr. Bernard Shaw has based the action of <i>You Never Can Tell</i> on
+the amazing coincidence that Mrs. Clandon and her children, coming to
+England after eighteen years' absence, should by pure chance run
+straight into the arms, or rather into the teeth, of the husband and
+father whom the mother, at any rate, only wishes to avoid. This is no
+bad starting-point for an extravaganza; but even Mr. Shaw, though a
+despiser of niceties of craftsmanship, introduces no coincidences into
+serious plays such as <i>Candida</i> or <i>The Doctor's Dilemma</i>.</p>
+
+
+
+<br><br><hr style="width: 35%;"><br><br>
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_XVI"></a>CHAPTER XVI</h2>
+
+<p>LOGIC</p>
+<br>
+
+<p>The term logic is often very vaguely used in relation to drama. French
+writers especially, who regard logic as one of the peculiar faculties of
+their national genius, are apt to insist upon it in and out of season.
+But, as we have already seen, logic is a gift which may easily be
+misapplied. It too often leads such writers as M. Brieux and M. Hervieu
+to sacrifice the undulant and diverse rhythms of life to a stiff and
+symmetrical formalism. The conception of a play as the exhaustive
+demonstration of a thesis has never taken a strong hold on the
+Anglo-Saxon mind; and, though some of M. Brieux's plays are much more
+than mere dramatic arguments, we need not, in the main, envy the French
+their logician-dramatists.</p>
+
+<p>But, though the presence of logic should never be forced upon the
+spectator's attention, still less should he be disturbed and baffled by
+its conspicuous absence. If the playwright announces a theme at all: if
+he lets it be seen that some general idea underlies his work: he is
+bound to present and develop that idea in a logical fashion, not to
+shift his ground, whether inadvertently or insidiously, and not to
+wander off into irrelevant side-issues. He must face his problem
+squarely. If he sets forth to prove anything at all, he must prove that
+thing and not some totally different thing. He must beware of the
+red-herring across the trail.</p>
+
+<p>For a clear example of defective logic, I turn to a French
+play--Sardou's <i>Spiritisme</i>. Both from internal and from external
+evidence, it is certain that M. Sardou was a believer in
+spiritualism--in the existence of disembodied intelligences, and their
+power of communicating with the living. Yet he had not the courage to
+assign to them an essential part in his drama. The spirits hover round
+the outskirts of the action, but do not really or effectually intervene
+in it. The hero's <i>belief</i> in them, indeed, helps to bring about the
+conclusion; but the apparition which so potently works upon him is an
+admitted imposture, a pious fraud. Earlier in the play, two or three
+trivial and unnecessary miracles are introduced--just enough to hint at
+the author's faith without decisively affirming it. For instance:
+towards the close of Act I Madame d'Aubenas has gone off, nominally to
+take the night train for Poitiers, in reality to pay a visit to her
+lover, M. de Stoudza. When she has gone, her husband and his guests
+arrange a s&eacute;ance and evoke a spirit. No sooner have preliminaries been
+settled than the spirit spells out the word &quot;O-u-v-r-e-z.&quot; They open the
+window, and behold! the sky is red with a glare which proves to proceed
+from the burning of the train in which Madame d'Aubenas is supposed to
+have started. The incident is effective enough, and a little creepy; but
+its effect is quite incommensurate with the strain upon our powers of
+belief. The thing is supposed to be a miracle, of that there can be no
+doubt; but it has not the smallest influence on the course of the play,
+except to bring on the hurry-scurry and alarm a few minutes earlier than
+might otherwise have been the case. Now, if the spirit, instead of
+merely announcing the accident, had informed M. d'Aubenas that his wife
+was not in it--if, for example, it had rapped out &quot;Gilberte chez
+Stoudza&quot;--it would have been an honest ghost (though indiscreet), and we
+should not have felt that our credulity had been taxed to no purpose. As
+it is, the logical deduction from M. Sardou's fable is that, though
+spirit communications are genuine enough, they are never of the
+slightest use; but we can scarcely suppose that that was what he
+intended to convey.</p>
+
+<p>It may be said, and perhaps with truth, that what Sardou lacked in this
+instance was not logic, but courage: he felt that an audience would
+accept episodic miracles, but would reject supernatural interference at
+a determining crisis in the play. In that case he would have done better
+to let the theme alone: for the manifest failure of logic leaves the
+play neither good drama nor good argument. This is a totally different
+matter from Ibsen's treatment of the supernatural in such plays as <i>The
+Lady from the Sea</i>, <i>The Master Builder</i> and <i>Little Eyolf</i>. Ibsen, like
+Hawthorne, suggests without affirming the action of occult powers. He
+shows us nothing that is not capable of a perfectly natural explanation;
+but he leaves us to imagine, if we are so disposed, that there may be
+influences at work that are not yet formally recognized in physics and
+psychology. In this there is nothing illogical. The poet is merely
+appealing to a mood, familiar to all of us, in which we wonder whether
+there may not be more things in heaven and earth than are crystallized
+in our scientific formulas.</p>
+
+<p>It is a grave defect of logic to state, or hint at, a problem, and then
+illustrate it in such terms of character that it is solved in advance.
+In <i>The Liars</i>, by Mr. Henry Arthur Jones, there is an evident
+suggestion of the problem whether a man is ever justified in rescuing a
+woman, by means of the Divorce Court, from marital bondage which her
+soul abhors. The sententious Sir Christopher Deering argues the matter
+at great length: but all the time we are hungering for him to say the
+one thing demanded by the logic of the situation: to wit: &quot;Whatever the
+abstract rights and wrongs of the case, this man would be an imbecile to
+elope with this woman, who is an empty-headed, empty-hearted creature,
+incapable either of the passion or of the loathing which alone could
+lend any semblance of reason to a breach of social law.&quot; Similarly, in
+<i>The Profligate</i>, Sir Arthur Pinero no doubt intended us to reflect upon
+the question whether, in entering upon marriage, a woman has a right to
+assume in her husband the same purity of antecedent conduct which he
+demands of her. That is an arguable question, and it has been argued
+often enough; but in this play it does not really arise, for the husband
+presented to us is no ordinary loose-liver, but (it would seem--for the
+case is not clearly stated) a particularly base and heartless seducer,
+whom it is evidently a misfortune for any woman to have married. The
+authors of these two plays have committed an identical error of logic:
+namely, that of suggesting a broad issue, and then stating such a set of
+circumstances that the issue does not really arise. In other words, they
+have from the outset begged the question. The plays, it may be said,
+were both successful in their day. Yes; but had they been logical their
+day might have lasted a century. A somewhat similar defect of logic
+constitutes a fatal blemish in <i>The Ideal Husband</i>, by Oscar Wilde.
+Intentionally or otherwise, the question suggested is whether a single
+flaw of conduct (the betrayal to financiers of a state secret) ought to
+blast a political career. Here, again, is an arguable point, on the
+assumption that the statesman is penitent and determined never to repeat
+his misdeed; but when we find that this particular statesman is prepared
+to go on betraying his country indefinitely, in order to save his own
+skin, the question falls to the ground--the answer is too obvious.</p>
+
+<p>It happened some years ago that two plays satirizing &quot;yellow journalism&quot;
+were produced almost simultaneously in London--<i>The Earth</i> by Mr. James
+B. Fagan, and <i>What the Public Wants</i> by Mr. Arnold Bennett. In point of
+intellectual grasp, or power of characterization, there could be no
+comparison between the two writers; yet I hold that, from the point of
+view of dramatic composition, <i>The Earth</i> was the better play of the
+two, simply because it dealt logically with the theme announced, instead
+of wandering away into all sorts of irrelevances. Mr. Bennett, to begin
+with, could not resist making his Napoleon of the Press a native of the
+&quot;Five Towns,&quot; and exhibiting him at large in provincial middle-class
+surroundings. All this is sheer irrelevance; for the type of journalism
+in question is not characteristically an outcome of any phase of
+provincial life. Mr. Bennett may allege that Sir Charles Worgan had to
+be born somewhere, and might as well be born in Bursley as anywhere
+else. I reply that, for the purposes of the play, he need not have been
+born anywhere. His birthplace and the surroundings of his boyhood have
+nothing to do with what may be called his journalistic psychology, which
+is, or ought to be, the theme of the play. Then, again, Mr. Bennett
+shows him dabbling in theatrical management and falling in
+love--irrelevances both. As a manager, no doubt, he insists on doing
+&quot;what the public wants&quot; (it is nothing worse than a revival of <i>The
+Merchant of Venice</i>) and thus offers another illustration of the results
+of obeying that principle. But all this is beside the real issue. The
+true gravamen of the charge against a Napoleon of the Press is not that
+he gives the public what it wants, but that he can make the public want
+what <i>he</i> wants, think what <i>he</i> thinks, believe what <i>he</i> wants them to
+believe, and do what <i>he</i> wants them to do. By dint of assertion,
+innuendo, and iteration in a hundred papers, he can create an apparent
+public opinion, or public emotion, which may be directed towards the
+most dangerous ends. This point Mr. Bennett entirely missed. What he
+gave us was in reality a comedy of middle-class life with a number of
+incidental allusions to &quot;yellow&quot; journalism and kindred topics. Mr.
+Fagan, working in broader outlines, and, it must be owned, in cruder
+colours, never strayed from the logical line of development, and took us
+much nearer the heart of his subject.</p>
+
+<p>A somewhat different, and very common, fault of logic was exemplified in
+Mr. Clyde Fitch's last play, <i>The City</i>. His theme, as announced in his
+title and indicated in his exposition, was the influence of New York
+upon a family which migrates thither from a provincial town. But the
+action is not really shaped by the influence of &quot;the city.&quot; It might
+have taken practically the same course if the family had remained at
+home. The author had failed to establish a logical connection between
+his theme and the incidents supposed to illustrate it.<a name="FNanchor95"></a><a href="#Footnote_95"><sup>[95]</sup></a></p>
+
+<p>Fantastic plays, which assume an order of things more or less exempt
+from the limitations of physical reality, ought, nevertheless, to be
+logically faithful to their own assumptions. Some fantasies, indeed,
+which sinned against this principle, have had no small success. In
+<i>Pygmalion and Galatea</i>, for example, there is a conspicuous lack of
+logic. The following passage from a criticism of thirty years ago puts
+my point so clearly that I am tempted to copy it:</p>
+
+&nbsp;&nbsp;As we have no scientific record of a statue coming to life, the<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;probable moral and intellectual condition of a being so created is<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;left to the widest conjecture. The playwright may assume for it any<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;stage of development he pleases, and his audience will readily grant<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;his assumption. But if his work is to have any claim to artistic<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;value, he must not assume all sorts of different stages of<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;development at every second word his creation utters. He must not<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;make her a child in one speech, a woman of the world in the next,<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;and an idiot in the next again. Of course, it would be an extremely<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;difficult task clearly to define in all its bearings and details the<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;particular intellectual condition assumed at the outset, and then<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;gradually to indicate the natural growth of a fuller consciousness.<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;Difficult it would be, but by no means impossible; nay, it would be<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;this very problem which would tempt the true dramatist to adopt such<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;a theme. Mr. Gilbert has not essayed the task. He regulates<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;Galatea's state of consciousness by the fluctuating exigencies of<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;dialogue whose humour is levelled straight at the heads of the old<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;Haymarket pit.<br>
+
+<p>To indicate the nature of the inconsistencies which abound in every
+scene, I may say that, in the first act, Galatea does not know that she
+is a woman, but understands the word &quot;beauty,&quot; knows (though Pygmalion
+is the only living creature she has ever seen) the meaning of agreement
+and difference of taste, and is alive to the distinction between an
+original and a copy. In the second act she has got the length of knowing
+the enormity of taking life, and appreciating the fine distinction
+between taking it of one's own motive, and taking it for money. Yet the
+next moment, when Leucippe enters with a fawn he has killed, it appears
+that she does not realize the difference between man and the brute
+creation. Thus we are for ever shifting from one plane of convention to
+another. There is no fixed starting-point for our imagination, no
+logical development of a clearly-stated initial condition. The play, it
+is true, enjoyed some five-and-twenty years of life; but it certainly
+cannot claim an enduring place either in literature or on the stage. It
+is still open to the philosophic dramatist to write a logical <i>Pygmalion
+and Galatea</i>.</p>
+
+
+<br><br><hr style="width: 35%;"><br><br>
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_XVII"></a>CHAPTER XVII></h2>
+
+<p>KEEPING A SECRET</p>
+<br>
+
+<p>It has been often and authoritatively laid down that a dramatist must on
+no account keep a secret from his audience. Like most authoritative
+maxims, this one seems to require a good deal of qualification. Let us
+look into the matter a little more closely.</p>
+
+<p>So far as I can see, the strongest reason against keeping a secret is
+that, try as you may, you cannot do it. This point has already been
+discussed in Chapter IX, where we saw that from only one audience can a
+secret be really hidden, a considerable percentage of any subsequent
+audience being certain to know all about it in advance. The more
+striking and successful is the first-night effect of surprise, the more
+certainly and rapidly will the report of it circulate through all strata
+of the theatrical public. But for this fact, one could quite well
+conceive a fascinating melodrama constructed, like a detective story,
+with a view to keeping the audience in the dark as long as possible. A
+pistol shot might ring out just before the rise of the curtain: a man
+(or woman) might be discovered in an otherwise empty room, weltering in
+his (or her) gore: and the remainder of the play might consist in the
+tracking down of the murderer, who would, of course, prove to be the
+very last person to be suspected. Such a play might make a great
+first-night success; but the more the author relied upon the mystery for
+his effect, the more fatally would that effect be discounted at each
+successive repetition.</p>
+
+<p>One author of distinction, M. Hervieu, has actually made the experiment
+of presenting an enigma--he calls the play <i>L'Enigme</i>--and reserving the
+solution to the very end. We know from the outset that one of two
+sisters-in-law is unfaithful to her husband, and the question is--which?
+The whole ingenuity of the author is centred on keeping the secret, and
+the spectator who does not know it in advance is all the time in the
+attitude of a detective questing for clues. He is challenged to guess
+which of the ladies is the frail one; and he is far too intent on this
+game to think or care about the emotional process of the play. I myself
+(I remember) guessed right, mainly because the name Giselle seemed to me
+more suggestive of flightiness than the staid and sober Leonore,
+wherefore I suspected that M. Hervieu, in order to throw dust in our
+eyes, had given it to the virtuous lady. But whether we guess right or
+wrong, this clue-hunting is an intellectual sport, not an artistic
+enjoyment. If there is any aesthetic quality in the play, it can only
+come home to us when we know the secret. And the same dilemma will
+present itself to any playwright who seeks to imitate M. Hervieu.</p>
+
+<p>The actual keeping of a secret, then--the appeal to the primary
+curiosity of actual ignorance--may be ruled out as practically
+impossible, and, when possible, unworthy of serious art. But there is
+also, as we have seen, the secondary curiosity of the audience which,
+though more or less cognizant of the essential facts, instinctively
+assumes ignorance, and judges the development of a play from that point
+of view. We all realize that a dramatist has no right to trust to our
+previous knowledge, acquired from outside sources. We know that a play,
+like every other work of art, ought to be self-sufficient, and even if,
+at any given moment, we have, as a matter of fact, knowledge which
+supplements what the playwright has told us, we feel that he ought not
+to have taken for granted our possession of any such external and
+fortuitous information. To put it briefly, the dramatist must formally
+<i>assume</i> ignorance in his audience, though he must not practically <i>rely
+upon</i> it. Therefore it becomes a point of real importance to determine
+how long a secret may be kept from an audience, assumed to have no
+outside knowledge, and at what point it ought to be revealed.</p>
+
+<p>When <i>Lady Windermere's Fan</i> was first produced, no hint was given in
+the first act of the fact that Mrs. Erlynne was Lady Windermere's
+mother; so that Lord Windermere's insistence on inviting her to his
+wife's birthday reception remained wholly unexplained. But after a few
+nights the author made Lord Windermere exclaim, just as the curtain
+fell, &quot;My God! What shall I do? I dare not tell her who this woman
+really is. The shame would kill her.&quot; It was, of course, said that this
+change had been made in deference to newspaper criticism; and Oscar
+Wilde, in a characteristic letter to the <i>St. James's Gazette</i>, promptly
+repelled this calumny. At a first-night supper-party, he said--</p>
+
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&quot;All of my friends without exception were of the opinion that the<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;psychological interest of the second act would be greatly increased<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;by the disclosure of the actual relationship existing between Lady<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;Windermere and Mrs. Erlynne--an opinion, I may add, that had<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;previously been strongly held and urged by Mr. Alexander.... I<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;determined, consequently, to make a change in the precise moment of<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;revelation.&quot;<br>
+
+<p>It is impossible to say whether Wilde seriously believed that
+&quot;psychology&quot; entered into the matter at all, or whether he was laughing
+in his sleeve in putting forward this solemn plea. The truth is, I
+think, that this example cannot be cited either for or against the
+keeping of a secret, the essential fact being that the secret was such a
+bad and inacceptable one--inacceptable, I mean, as an explanation of
+Lord Windermere's conduct--that it was probably wise to make a clean
+breast of it as soon as possible, and get it over. It may be said with
+perfect confidence that it is useless to keep a secret which, when
+revealed, is certain to disappoint the audience, and to make it feel
+that it has been trifled with. That is an elementary dictate of
+prudence. But if the reason for Lord Windermere's conduct had been
+adequate, ingenious, such as to give us, when revealed, a little shock
+of pleasant surprise, the author need certainly have been in no hurry to
+disclose it. It is not improbable (though my memory is not clear on the
+point) that part of the strong interest we undoubtedly felt on the first
+night arose from the hope that Lord Windermere's seemingly unaccountable
+conduct might be satisfactorily accounted for. As this hope was futile,
+there was no reason, at subsequent performances, to keep up the pretence
+of preserving a secret which was probably known, as a matter of fact, to
+most of the audience, and which was worthless when revealed.</p>
+
+<p>In the second act of <i>The Devil's Disciple</i>, by Mr. Bernard Shaw, we
+have an instance of wholly inartistic secrecy, which would certainly be
+condemned in the work of any author who was not accepted in advance as a
+law unto himself. Richard Dudgeon has been arrested by the British
+soldiers, who mistake him for the Reverend Anthony Anderson. When
+Anderson comes home, it takes a very long time for his silly wife,
+Judith, to acquaint him with a situation that might have been explained
+in three words; and when, at last, he does understand it, he calls for a
+horse and his boots, and rushes off in mad haste, as though his one
+desire were to escape from the British and leave Dudgeon to his fate. In
+reality his purpose is to bring up a body of Continental troops to the
+rescue of Dudgeon; and this also he might (and certainly would) have
+conveyed in three words. But Mr. Shaw was so bent on letting Judith
+continue to conduct herself idiotically, that he made her sensible
+husband act no less idiotically, in order to throw dust in her eyes, and
+(incidentally) in the eyes of the audience. In the work of any other
+man, we should call this not only an injudicious, but a purposeless and
+foolish, keeping of a secret. Mr. Shaw may say that in order to develop
+the character of Judith as he had conceived it, he was forced to make
+her misunderstand her husband's motives. A development of character
+obtained by such artificial means cannot be of much worth; but even
+granting this plea, one cannot but point out that it would have been
+easy to keep Judith in the dark as to Anderson's purpose, without
+keeping the audience also in the dark, and making him behave like a
+fool. All that was required was to get Judith off the stage for a few
+moments, just before the true state of matters burst upon Anthony. It
+would then have been perfectly natural and probable that, not foreseeing
+her misunderstanding, he should hurry off without waiting to explain
+matters to her. But that he should deliberately leave her in her
+delusion, and even use phrases carefully calculated to deceive both her
+and the audience,<a name="FNanchor96"></a><a href="#Footnote_96"><sup>[96]</sup></a> would be, in a writer who professed to place reason
+above caprice, a rather gross fault of art.</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Henry Arthur Jones's light comedy, <i>Whitewashing Julia</i>, proves that
+it is possible, without incurring disaster, to keep a secret throughout
+a play, and never reveal it at all. More accurately, what Mr. Jones does
+is to pretend that there is some explanation of Mrs. Julia Wren's
+relations with the Duke of Savona, other than the simple explanation
+that she was his mistress, and to keep us waiting for this
+&quot;whitewashing&quot; disclosure, when in fact he has nothing of the sort up
+his sleeve, and the plain truth is precisely what the gossips of
+Shanctonbury surmise. Julia does not even explain or justify her conduct
+from her own point of view. She gives out that &quot;an explanation will be
+forthcoming at the right moment&quot;; but the right moment never arrives.
+All we are told is that she, Julia, considers that there was never
+anything degrading in her conduct; and this we are asked to accept as
+sufficient. It was a daring policy to dangle before our eyes an
+explanation, which always receded as we advanced towards it, and proved
+in the end to be wholly unexplanatory. The success of the play, however,
+was sufficient to show that, in light comedy, at any rate, a secret may
+with impunity be kept, even to the point of tantalization.<a name="FNanchor97"></a><a href="#Footnote_97"><sup>[97]</sup></a></p>
+
+<p>Let us now look at a couple of cases in which the keeping of a secret
+seems pretty clearly wrong, inasmuch as it diminishes tension, and
+deprives the audience of that superior knowledge in which lies the irony
+of drama. In a play named <i>Her Advocate</i>, by Mr. Walter Frith (founded
+on one of Grenville Murray's <i>French Pictures in English Chalk</i>), a K.C.
+has fallen madly in love with a woman whose defence he has undertaken.
+He believes passionately in her innocence, and, never doubting that she
+loves him in return, he is determined to secure for her a triumphant
+acquittal. Just at the crucial moment, however, he learns that she loves
+another man; and, overwhelmed by this disillusion, he has still to face
+the ordeal and plead her cause. The conjuncture would be still more
+dramatic if the revelation of this love were to put a different
+complexion on the murder, and, by introducing a new motive, shake the
+advocate's faith in his client's innocence. But that is another matter;
+the question here to be considered is whether the author did right in
+reserving the revelation to the last possible moment. In my opinion he
+would have done better to have given us an earlier inkling of the true
+state of affairs. To keep the secret, in this case, was to place the
+audience as well as the advocate on a false trail, and to deprive it of
+the sense of superiority it would have felt in seeing him marching
+confidently towards a happiness which it knew to be illusory.</p>
+
+<p>The second case is that of <i>La Douloureuse</i>, by M. Maurice Donnay.
+Through two acts out of the four an important secret is so carefully
+kept that there seems to be no obstacle between the lovers with whom
+(from the author's point of view) we are supposed to sympathize. The
+first act is devoted to an elaborate painting of a somewhat revolting
+phase of parvenu society in Paris. Towards the end of the act we learn
+that the sculptor, Philippe Lauberthie, is the lover of H&eacute;l&egrave;ne Ardan, a
+married woman; and at the very end her husband, Ardan, commits suicide.
+This act, therefore, is devoted, not, as the orthodox formula goes, to
+raising an obstacle between the lovers, but rather to destroying one. In
+the second act there still seems to be no obstacle of any sort. H&eacute;l&egrave;ne's
+year of widowhood is nearly over; she and Philippe are presently to be
+married; all is harmony, adoration, and security. In the last scene of
+the act, a cloud no bigger than a man's hand appears on the horizon. We
+find that Gotte des Trembles, H&eacute;l&egrave;ne's bosom friend, is also in love
+with Philippe, and is determined to let him know it. But Philippe
+resists her blandishments with melancholy austerity, and when the
+curtain falls on the second act, things seem to be perfectly safe and in
+order. H&eacute;l&egrave;ne a widow, and Philippe austere--what harm can Gotte
+possibly do?</p>
+
+<p>The fact is, M. Donnay is carefully keeping a secret from us. Philippe
+is not H&eacute;l&egrave;ne's first lover; her son, Georges, is not the child of her
+late husband; and Gotte, and Gotte alone, knows the truth. Had we also
+been initiated from the outset (and nothing would have been easier or
+more natural--three words exchanged between Gotte and H&eacute;l&egrave;ne would have
+done it) we should have been at no loss to foresee the impending drama,
+and the sense of irony would have tripled the interest of the
+intervening scenes. The effect of M. Donnay's third act is not a whit
+more forcible because it comes upon us unprepared. We learn at the
+beginning that Philippe's austerity has not after all been proof against
+Gotte's seductions; but it has now returned upon him embittered by
+remorse, and he treats Gotte with sternness approaching to contumely.
+She takes her revenge by revealing H&eacute;l&egrave;ne's secret; he tells H&eacute;l&egrave;ne that
+he knows it; and she, putting two and two together, divines how it has
+come to his knowledge. This long scene of mutual reproach and remorseful
+misery is, in reality, the whole drama, and might have been cited in
+Chapter XIV as a fine example of a peripety. H&eacute;l&egrave;ne enters Philippe's
+studio happy and serene, she leaves it broken-hearted; but the effect of
+the scene is not a whit greater because, in the two previous acts, we
+have been studiously deprived of the information that would have led us
+vaguely to anticipate it.</p>
+
+<p>To sum up this question of secrecy: the current maxim, &quot;Never keep a
+secret from your audience,&quot; would appear to be an over-simplification of
+a somewhat difficult question of craftsmanship. We may agree that it is
+often dangerous and sometimes manifestly foolish to keep a secret; but,
+on the other hand, there is certainly no reason why the playwright
+should blurt out all his secrets at the first possible opportunity. The
+true art lies in knowing just how long to keep silent, and just the
+right time to speak. In the first act of <i>Letty</i>, Sir Arthur Pinero
+gains a memorable effect by keeping a secret, not very long, indeed, but
+long enough and carefully enough to show that he knew very clearly what
+he was doing. We are introduced to Nevill Letchmere's bachelor
+apartments. Animated scenes occur between Letchmere and his
+brother-in-law, Letchmere and his sister, Letchmere and Letty, Marion
+and Hilda Gunning. It is evident that Letty dreams of marriage with
+Letchmere; and for aught that we see or hear, there is no just cause or
+impediment to the contrary. It is only, at the end of the very admirable
+scene between Letchmere and Mandeville that the following little
+passage occurs:</p>
+
+&nbsp;&nbsp;MANDEVILLE: ... At all events I <i>am</i> qualified to tell her I'm<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;fairly gone on her--honourably gone on her--if I choose to do it.<br>
+
+&nbsp;&nbsp;LETCHMERE: Qualified?<br>
+
+&nbsp;&nbsp;MANDEVILLE: Which is more than you are, Mr. Letchmere. I <i>am</i> a<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;single man; you ain't, bear in mind.<br>
+
+&nbsp;&nbsp;LETCHMERE: (<i>imperturbably</i>): Very true.<br>
+
+<p>This one little touch is a masterpiece of craftsmanship. It would have
+been the most natural thing in the world for either the sister or the
+brother-in-law, concerned about their own matrimonial difficulties, to
+let fall some passing allusion to Letchmere's separation from his wife;
+but the author carefully avoided this, carefully allowed us to make our
+first acquaintance with Letty in ignorance of the irony of her position,
+and then allowed the truth to slip out just in time to let us feel the
+whole force of that irony during the last scene of the act and the
+greater part of the second act. A finer instance of the delicate grading
+of tension it would be difficult to cite.</p>
+
+<p>One thing is certain; namely, that if a secret is to be kept at all, it
+must be worth the keeping; if a riddle is propounded, its answer must be
+pleasing and ingenious, or the audience will resent having been led to
+cudgel its brains for nothing. This is simply a part of the larger
+principle, before insisted on, that when a reasonable expectation is
+aroused, it can be baffled only at the author's peril. If the crux of a
+scene or of a whole play lie in the solution of some material difficulty
+or moral problem, it must on no account be solved by a mere trick or
+evasion. The dramatist is very ill-advised who sets forth with pomp and
+circumstance to perform some intellectual or technical feat, and then
+merely skirts round it or runs away from it. A fair proportion should
+always be observed between effort and effect, between promise and
+performance.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;But if the audience happens to misread the playwright's design, and
+form exaggerated and irrational expectations?&quot; That merely means that
+the playwright does not know his business, or, at any rate, does not
+know his audience. It is his business to play upon the collective mind
+of his audience as upon a keyboard--to arouse just the right order and
+measure of anticipation, and fulfil it, or outdo it, in just the right
+way at just the right time. The skill of the dramatist, as distinct from
+his genius or inspiration, lies in the correctness of his insight into
+the mind of his audience.</p>
+
+
+<br><br><hr style="width: 35%;"><br><br>
+<h2><a name="BOOK_IV"></a>BOOK IV</h2>
+<br>
+
+<p>THE END</p>
+
+
+<br><br><hr style="width: 35%;"><br><br>
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_XVIII"></a>CHAPTER XVIII</h2>
+
+<p>CLIMAX AND ANTICLIMAX</p>
+<br>
+
+<p>If it were as easy to write a good last act as a good first act, we
+should be able to reckon three masterpieces for every one that we can
+name at present. The reason why the last act should offer special
+difficulties is not far to seek. We have agreed to regard a play as
+essentially a crisis in the lives of one or more persons; and we all
+know that crises are much more apt to have a definite beginning than a
+definite end. We can almost always put our finger upon the moment--not,
+indeed, when the crisis began--but when we clearly realized its presence
+or its imminence. A chance meeting, the receipt of a letter or a
+telegram, a particular turn given to a certain conversation, even the
+mere emergence into consciousness of a previously latent feeling or
+thought, may mark quite definitely the moment of germination, so to
+speak, of a given crisis; and it is comparatively easy to dramatize such
+a moment. But how few crises come to a definite or dramatic conclusion!
+Nine times out of ten they end in some petty compromise, or do not end
+at all, but simply subside, like the waves of the sea when the storm has
+blown itself out. It is the playwright's chief difficulty to find a
+crisis with an ending which satisfies at once his artistic conscience
+and the requirements of dramatic effect.</p>
+
+<p>And the difficulty becomes greater the nearer we approach to reality. In
+the days when tragedy and comedy were cast in fixed, conventional
+moulds, the playwright's task was much simpler. It was thoroughly
+understood that a tragedy ended with one or more deaths, a comedy with
+one or more marriages; so that the question of a strong or a weak ending
+did not arise. The end might be strongly or weakly led up to, but, in
+itself, it was fore-ordained. Now that these moulds are broken, and both
+marriage and death may be said to have lost their prestige as the be-all
+and end-all of drama, the playwright's range of choice is unlimited, and
+the difficulty of choosing has become infinitely greater. Our comedies
+are much more apt to begin than to end with marriage, and death has come
+to be regarded as a rather cheap and conventional expedient for cutting
+the knots of life.</p>
+
+<p>From the fact that &quot;the difficulty becomes greater the nearer we
+approach to reality,&quot; it further follows that the higher the form of
+drama, the more probable is it that the demands of truth and the
+requirements of dramatic effect may be found to clash. In melodrama, the
+curtain falls of its own accord, so to speak, when the handcuffs are
+transferred from the hero's wrists to the villain's. In an
+adventure-play, whether farcical or romantic, when the adventure is over
+the play is done. The author's task is merely to keep the interest of
+the adventure afoot until he is ready to drop his curtain. This is a
+point of craftsmanship in which playwrights often fail; but it is a
+point of craftsmanship only. In plays of a higher order, on the other
+hand, the difficulty is often inherent in the theme, and not to be
+overcome by any feat of craftsmanship. If the dramatist were to eschew
+all crises that could not be made to resolve themselves with
+specifically dramatic crispness and decisiveness, he would very
+seriously limit the domain of his art. Many excellent themes would be
+distorted and ruined by having an emphatic ending forced upon them. It
+is surely much better that they should be brought to their natural
+unemphatic ending, than that they should be either falsified or ignored.</p>
+
+<p>I suggest, then, that the modern tendency to take lightly Aristotle's
+demand that the drama should have a &quot;beginning, a middle, <i>and an end</i>,&quot;
+arises from the nature of things, and implies, not necessarily, nor even
+probably, a decline in craftsmanship, but a new intimacy of relation to
+life, and a new sincerity of artistic conscience. I suggest that the
+&quot;weak last act,&quot; of which critics so often complain, is a natural
+development from which authors ought not, on occasion, to shrink, and of
+which critics ought, on occasion, to recognize the necessity. To elevate
+it into a system is absurd. There is certainly no more reason for
+deliberately avoiding an emphatic ending than for mechanically forcing
+one. But authors and critics alike should learn to distinguish the
+themes which do, from the themes which do not, call for a definite,
+trenchant solution, and should handle them, and judge them, in
+accordance with their inherent quality.</p>
+
+<p>Let us, however, define our terms, and be sure that we know what we are
+talking about. By an &quot;unemphatic ending&quot; I am far from meaning a
+makeshift ending, an ending carelessly and conventionally huddled up.
+Nor do I mean an indecisive ending, where the curtain falls, as the
+saying goes, on a note of interrogation. An unemphatic ending, as I
+understand it, is a deliberate anticlimax, an idyllic, or elegiac, or
+philosophic last act, following upon a penultimate act of very much
+higher tension. The disposition to condemn such an ending off-hand is
+what I am here pleading against. It is sometimes assumed that the
+playwright ought always to make his action conclude within five minutes
+of its culmination; but for such a hard-and-fast rule I can find no
+sufficient reason. The consequences of a great emotional or spiritual
+crisis cannot always be worked out, or even foreshadowed, within so
+brief a space of time. If, after such a crisis, we are unwilling to keep
+our seats for another half-hour, in order to learn &quot;what came of it
+all,&quot; the author has evidently failed to awaken in us any real interest
+in his characters.</p>
+
+<p>A good instance of the unemphatic ending is the last act of Sir Arthur
+Pinero's <i>Letty</i>. This &quot;epilogue&quot;--so the author calls it--has been
+denounced as a concession to popular sentimentality, and an unpardonable
+anticlimax. An anticlimax it is, beyond all doubt; but it does not
+follow that it is an artistic blemish. Nothing would have been easier
+than not to write it--to make the play end with Letty's awakening from
+her dream, and her flight from Letchmere's rooms. But the author has set
+forth, not merely to interest us in an adventure, but to draw a
+character; and it was essential to our full appreciation of Letty's
+character that we should know what, after all, she made of her life.
+When Iris, most hapless of women, went out into the dark, there was
+nothing more that we needed to know of her. We could guess the sequel
+only too easily. But the case of Letty was wholly different. Her exit
+was an act of will, triumphing over a form of temptation peculiarly
+alluring to her temperament. There was in her character precisely that
+grit which Iris lacked; and we wanted to know what it would do for her.
+This was not a case for an indecisive ending, a note of interrogation.
+The author felt no doubt as to Letty's destiny, and he wanted to leave
+his audience in no doubt. From Iris's fate we were only too willing to
+avert our eyes; but it would have been a sensible discomfort to us to be
+left in the dark about Letty's.</p>
+
+<p>This, then, I regard as a typical instance of justified anticlimax.
+Another is the idyllic last act of <i>The Princess and the Butterfly</i>, in
+which, moreover, despite its comparatively subdued tone, the tension is
+maintained to the end. A very different matter is the third act of <i>The
+Benefit of the Doubt</i>, already alluded to. This is a pronounced case of
+the makeshift ending, inspired (to all appearance) simply by the fact
+that the play must end somehow, and that no better idea happens to
+present itself. Admirable as are the other acts, one is almost inclined
+to agree with Dumas that an author ought not to embark upon a theme
+unless he foresees a better way out of it than this. It should be noted,
+too, that <i>The Benefit of the Doubt</i> is a three-act play, and that, in a
+play laid out on this scale, a whole act of anticlimax is necessarily
+disproportionate. It is one thing to relax the tension in the last act
+out of four or five; quite another thing in the last act out of three.
+In other words, the culminating point of a four-or five-act play may be
+placed in the penultimate act; in a three-act play, it should come, at
+earliest, in the penultimate scene.<a name="FNanchor98"></a><a href="#Footnote_98"><sup>[98]</sup></a></p>
+
+<p>In the works of Mr. Henry Arthur Jones we find several instances of the
+unemphatic last act--some clearly justified, others much less so. Among
+the former I unhesitatingly reckon the fourth act of <i>Mrs. Dane's
+Defence</i>. It would not have been difficult, but surely most inartistic,
+to huddle up the action in five minutes after Mrs. Dane's tragic
+collapse under Sir Daniel Carteret's cross-examination. She might have
+taken poison and died in picturesque contortions on the sofa; or Lionel
+might have defied all counsels of prudence and gone off with her in
+spite of her past; or she might have placed Lionel's hand in Janet's,
+saying: &quot;The game is up. Bless you, my children. I am going into the
+nearest nunnery.&quot; As a matter of fact, Mr. Jones brought his action to
+its natural close in a quiet, sufficiently adroit, last act; and I do
+not see that criticism has any just complaint to make.</p>
+
+<p>In recent French drama, <i>La Douloureuse</i>, already cited, affords an
+excellent instance of a quiet last act. After the violent and
+heartrending rupture between the lovers in the third act, we feel that,
+though this paroxysm of pain is justified by the circumstances, it will
+not last for ever, and Philippe and H&eacute;l&egrave;ne will come together again.
+This is also M. Donnay's view; and he devotes his whole last act, quite
+simply, to a duologue of reconciliation. It seems to me a fault of
+proportion, however, that he should shift his locality from Paris to the
+Riviera, and should place the brief duologue in a romantic woodland
+scene. An act of anticlimax should be treated, so to speak, as
+unpretentiously as possible. To invent an elaborate apparatus for it is
+to emphasize the anticlimax by throwing it into unnecessary relief.</p>
+
+<p>This may be a convenient place for a few words on the modern fashion of
+eschewing emphasis, not only in last acts, but at every point where the
+old French dramaturgy demanded it, and especially in act-endings.
+<i>Punch</i> has a pleasant allusion to this tendency in two suggested
+examination-papers for an &quot;Academy of Dramatists&quot;:</p>
+
+&nbsp;&nbsp;A--FOR THE CLASSICAL SIDE ONLY.<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; 1. What is a &quot;curtain&quot;; and how should it be led up to?<br>
+
+&nbsp;&nbsp;B--FOR THE MODERN SIDE ONLY.<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; 1. What is a &quot;curtain&quot;; and how can it be avoided?<br>
+
+<p>Some modern playwrights have fled in a sort of panic from the old
+&quot;picture-poster situation&quot; to the other extreme of always dropping their
+curtain when the audience least expects it. This is not a practice to be
+commended. One has often seen an audience quite unnecessarily chilled by
+a disconcerting &quot;curtain.&quot; There should be moderation even in the
+shrinking from theatricality.</p>
+
+<p>This shrinking is particularly marked, though I do not say it is carried
+too far, in the plays of Mr. Galsworthy. Even the most innocent tricks
+of emphasis are to him snares of the Evil One. He would sooner die than
+drop his curtain on a particularly effective line. It is his chief
+ambition that you should never discern any arrangement, any intention,
+in his work. As a rule, the only reason you can see for his doing thus
+or thus is his desire that you should see no reason for it. He does not
+carry this tendency, as some do, to the point of eccentricity; but he
+certainly goes as far as any one should be advised to follow. A little
+further, and you incur the danger of becoming affectedly unaffected,
+artificially inartificial.</p>
+
+<p>I am far from pleading for the conventional tableau at the end of each
+act, with all the characters petrified, as it were, in
+penny-plain-twopence-coloured attitudes. But it is certainly desirable
+that the fall of the curtain should not take an audience entirely by
+surprise, and even that the spectator should feel the moment to be
+rightly chosen, though he might be unable to give any reason for his
+feeling. Moreover--this may seem a super-subtlety, but one has seen it
+neglected with notably bad effect--a playwright should never let his
+audience expect the fall of a curtain at a given point, and then balk
+their expectancy, unless he is sure that he holds in reserve a more than
+adequate compensation. There is nothing so dangerous as to let a play,
+or an act, drag on when the audience feels in its heart that it is
+really over, and that &quot;the rest is silence&quot;--or ought to be. The end of
+Mr. Granville Barker's fine play, <i>The Voysey Inheritance</i>, was injured
+by the fact that, several minutes before the curtain actually fell, he
+had given what seemed an obvious &quot;cue for curtain.&quot; I do not say that
+what followed was superfluous; what I do say is that the author ought to
+have been careful not to let us imagine that the colloquy between Edward
+and Alice was over when in fact it had still some minutes to run. An
+even more remarkable play, <i>The Madras House</i>, was ruined, on its first
+night, by a long final anticlimax. Here, however, the fault did not lie
+in awakening a premature expectation of the close, but in the fact that
+we somehow were more interested in the other characters of the play than
+in the pair who held the stage throughout the long concluding scene.</p>
+
+<p>Once more I turn to <i>La Douloureuse</i> for an instance of an admirable
+act-ending of the quiet modern type. The third act--the terrible
+peripety in the love of Philippe and H&eacute;l&egrave;ne--has run its agonizing
+course, and worked itself out. The old dramaturgy would certainly have
+ended the scene with a bang, so to speak--a swoon or a scream, a tableau
+of desolation, or, at the very least, a piece of tearful rhetoric. M.
+Donnay does nothing of the sort. He lets his lovers unpack their hearts
+with words until they are exhausted, broken, dazed with misery, and have
+nothing more to say. Then H&eacute;l&egrave;ne asks: &quot;What o'clock is it?&quot; Philippe
+looks at his watch: &quot;Nearly seven.&quot; &quot;I must be going&quot;--and she dries her
+eyes, smoothes her hair, pulls herself together, in a word, to face the
+world again. The mechanical round of life re-asserts its hold upon them.
+&quot;Help me with my cloak,&quot; she says; and he holds her mantle for her, and
+tucks in the puffed sleeves of her blouse. Then he takes up the lamp and
+lights her out--and the curtain falls. A model &quot;curtain&quot;!</p>
+
+
+
+
+<br><br><hr style="width: 35%;"><br><br>
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_XIX"></a>CHAPTER XIX</h2>
+
+<p>CONVERSION</p>
+<br>
+
+<p>The reader may have noticed, possibly with surprise, that some of the
+stock terms of dramatic criticism occur but rarely in these pages, or
+not at all. One of them is <i>d&eacute;nouement</i>. According to orthodox theory, I
+ought to have made the <i>d&eacute;nouement</i> the subject of a whole chapter, if
+not of a whole book. Why have I not done so?</p>
+
+<p>For two reasons. The lesser, but not negligible, reason is that we
+possess no convenient English word for the unknotting or disentangling
+of a complication. D&eacute;nouement itself cannot be plausibly Anglicized, and
+no native word has as yet, by common consent, been accepted as its
+equivalent. I sometimes wish we could adopt, and print without italics,
+the excellent and expressive Greek word &quot;lusis&quot;; but I cannot, on my own
+responsibility, attempt so daring an innovation. The second and
+determining reason for not making the <i>d&eacute;nouement</i> one of the heads of
+my argument, is that, the play of intrigue being no longer the dominant
+dramatic form, the image of disentangling has lost some of its special
+fitness. It is only in a somewhat strained and conventional sense that
+the term <i>nodus</i>, or knot, can be applied to the sort of crisis with
+which the modern drama normally deals; and if we do not naturally think
+of the crisis as a knot, we naturally do not think of its close as an
+unknotting.</p>
+
+<p>Nevertheless, there are frequent cases in which the end of a play
+depends on something very like the unravelling of a tangled skein; and
+still more often, perhaps, is it brought about through the loosening of
+some knot in the mind of one or more of the characters. This was the
+characteristic end of the old comedy. The heavy father, or cantankerous
+guardian, who for four acts and a half had stood between the lovers,
+suddenly changed his mind, and all was well. Even by our ancestors this
+was reckoned a rather too simple method of disentanglement. Lisideius,
+in Dryden's dialogue,<a name="FNanchor99"></a><a href="#Footnote_99"><sup>[99]</sup></a> in enumerating the points in which the French
+drama is superior to the English notes that--</p>
+
+&nbsp;&nbsp;You never see any of their plays end with a conversion, or simple<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;change of will, which is the ordinary way which our poets use to end<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;theirs. It shew little art in the conclusion of a dramatick poem,<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;when they who have hindered the felicity during the four acts,<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;desist from it in the fifth, without some powerful cause to take<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;them off their design.<br>
+
+<p>The remark of Lisideius is suggested by a passage in Corneille, who
+instances, as an apt and artistic method of bringing about the
+conversion of a heavy father, that his daughter's lover should earn his
+gratitude by rescuing him from assassination!</p>
+
+<p>Conversions, closely examined, will be found to fall into two classes:
+changes in volition, and changes in sentiment. It was the former class
+that Dryden had in mind; and, with reference to this class, the
+principle he indicates remains a sound one. A change of resolve should
+never be due to a mere lapse of time--to the necessity for bringing the
+curtain down and letting the audience go home. It must always be
+rendered plausible by some new fact or new motive: some hitherto untried
+appeal to reason or emotion. This rule, however, is too obvious to
+require enforcement. It was not quite superfluous so long as the old
+convention of comedy endured. For a century and a half after Dryden's
+time, hard-hearted parents were apt to withdraw their opposition to
+their children's &quot;felicity&quot; for no better reason than that the fifth act
+was drawing to a close. But this formula is practically obsolete.
+Changes of will, on the modern stage, are not always adequately motived;
+but that is because of individual inexpertness, not because of any
+failure to recognize theoretically the necessity for adequate
+motivation.</p>
+
+<p>Changes of sentiment are much more important and more difficult to
+handle. A change of will can always manifest itself in action but it is
+very difficult to externalize convincingly a mere change of heart. When
+the conclusion of a play hinges (as it frequently does) on a conversion
+of this nature, it becomes a matter of the first moment that it should
+not merely be asserted, but proved. Many a promising play has gone wrong
+because of the author's neglect, or inability, to comply with this
+condition.</p>
+
+<p>It has often been observed that of all Ibsen's thoroughly mature works,
+from <i>A Doll's House</i> to <i>John Gabriel Borkman</i>, <i>The Lady from the Sea</i>
+is the loosest in texture, the least masterly in construction. The fact
+that it leaves this impression on the mind is largely due, I think, to a
+single fault. The conclusion of the play--Ellida's clinging to Wangel
+and rejection of the Stranger--depends entirely on a change in Wangel's
+mental attitude, <i>of which we have no proof whatever beyond his bare
+assertion</i>. Ellida, in her overwrought mood, is evidently inclining to
+yield to the uncanny allurement of the Stranger's claim upon her, when
+Wangel, realizing that her sanity is threatened, says:</p>
+
+&nbsp;&nbsp;WANGEL: It shall not come to that. There is no other way of<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;deliverance for you--at least I see none. And therefore--therefore<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;I--cancel our bargain on the spot. Now you can choose your own path,<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;in full--full freedom.<br>
+
+&nbsp;&nbsp;ELLIDA (<i>Gazes at him awhile, as if speechless</i>): Is this<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;true--true--what you say? Do you mean it--from your inmost heart?<br>
+
+&nbsp;&nbsp;WANGEL: Yes--from the inmost depths of my tortured heart, I mean<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;it.... Now your own true life can return to its--its right groove<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;again. For now you can choose in freedom; and on your own<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;responsibility, Ellida.<br>
+
+&nbsp;&nbsp;ELLIDA: In freedom--and on my own responsibility? Responsibility?<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;This--this transforms everything.<br>
+
+<p>--and she promptly gives the Stranger his dismissal. Now this is
+inevitably felt to be a weak conclusion, because it turns entirely on a
+condition of Wangel's mind of which he gives no positive and convincing
+evidence. Nothing material is changed by his change of heart. He could
+not in any case have restrained Ellida by force; or, if the law gave him
+the abstract right to do so, he certainly never had the slightest
+intention of exercising it. Psychologically, indeed, the incident is
+acceptable enough. The saner part of Ellida's will was always on
+Wangel's side; and a merely verbal undoing of the &quot;bargain&quot; with which
+she reproached herself might quite naturally suffice to turn the scale
+decisively in his favour. But what may suffice for Ellida is not enough
+for the audience. Too much is made to hang upon a verbally announced
+conversion. The poet ought to have invented some material--or, at the
+very least, some impressively symbolic--proof of Wangel's change of
+heart. Had he done so, <i>The Lady from the Sea</i> would assuredly have
+taken a higher rank among his works.
+
+<p>Let me further illustrate my point by comparing a very small thing with
+a very great. The late Captain Marshall wrote a &quot;farcical romance&quot; named
+<i>The Duke of Killiecrankie</i>, in which that nobleman, having been again
+and again rejected by the Lady Henrietta Addison, kidnapped the obdurate
+fair one, and imprisoned her in a crag-castle in the Highlands. Having
+kept her for a week in deferential durance, and shown her that he was
+not the inefficient nincompoop she had taken him for, he threw open the
+prison gate, and said to her: &quot;Go! I set you free!&quot; The moment she saw
+the gate unlocked, and realized that she could indeed go when and where
+she pleased, she also realized that she had not the least wish to go,
+and flung herself into her captor's arms. Here we have Ibsen's situation
+transposed into the key of fantasy, and provided with the material
+&quot;guarantee of good faith&quot; which is lacking in <i>The Lady from the Sea</i>.
+The Duke's change of mind, his will to set the Lady Henrietta free, is
+visibly demonstrated by the actual opening of the prison gate, so that
+we believe in it, and believe that she believes in it. The play was a
+trivial affair, and is deservedly forgotten; but the situation was
+effective because it obeyed the law that a change of will or of feeling,
+occurring at a crucial point in a dramatic action, must be certified by
+some external evidence, on pain of leaving the audience unimpressed.</p>
+
+<p>This is a more important matter than it may at first sight appear. How
+to bring home to the audience a decisive change of heart is one of the
+ever-recurring problems of the playwright's craft. In <i>The Lady from the
+Sea</i>, Ibsen failed to solve it: in <i>Rosmersholm</i> he solved it by heroic
+measures. The whole catastrophe is determined by Rosmer's inability to
+accept without proof Rebecca's declaration that Rosmersholm has
+&quot;ennobled&quot; her, and that she is no longer the same woman whose
+relentless egoism drove Beata into the mill-race. Rebecca herself puts
+it to him: &quot;How can you believe me on my bare word after to-day?&quot; There
+is only one proof she can give--that of &quot;going the way Beata went.&quot; She
+gives it: and Rosmer, who cannot believe her if she lives, and will not
+survive her if she dies, goes with her to her end. But the cases are not
+very frequent, fortunately, in which such drastic methods of proof are
+appropriate or possible. The dramatist must, as a rule, attain his end
+by less violent means; and often he fails to attain it at all.</p>
+
+<p>A play by Mr. Haddon Chambers, <i>The Awakening</i>, turned on a sudden
+conversion--the &quot;awakening,&quot; in fact, referred to in the title. A
+professional lady-killer, a noted Don Juan, has been idly making love to
+a country maiden, whose heart is full of innocent idealisms. She
+discovers his true character, or, at any rate, his reputation, and is
+horror-stricken, while practically at the same moment, he &quot;awakens&quot; to
+the error of his ways, and is seized with a passion for her as single
+minded and idealistic as hers for him. But how are the heroine and the
+audience to be assured of the fact? That is just the difficulty; and the
+author takes no effectual measures to overcome it. The heroine, of
+course, is ultimately convinced; but the audience remains sceptical, to
+the detriment of the desired effect. &quot;Sceptical,&quot; perhaps, is not quite
+the right word. The state of mind of a fictitious character is not a
+subject for actual belief or disbelief. We are bound to accept
+theoretically what the author tells us; but in this case he has failed
+to make us intimately feel and know that it is true.<a name="FNanchor100"></a><a href="#Footnote_100"><sup>[100]</sup></a></p>
+
+<p>In Mr. Alfred Sutro's play <i>The Builder of Bridges</i>, Dorothy Faringay,
+in her devotion to her forger brother, has conceived the rather
+disgraceful scheme of making one of his official superiors fall in love
+with her, in order to induce him to become practically an accomplice in
+her brother's crime. She succeeds beyond her hopes. Edward Thursfield
+does fall in love with her, and, at a great sacrifice, replaces the
+money the brother has stolen. But, in a very powerful peripety-scene in
+the third act, Thursfield learns that Dorothy has been deliberately
+beguiling him, while in fact she was engaged to another man. The truth
+is, however, that she has really come to love Thursfield passionately,
+and has broken her engagement with the other, for whom she never truly
+cared. So the author tells us, and so we are willing enough to
+believe--if he can devise any adequate method of making Thursfield
+believe it. Mr. Sutro's handling of the difficulty seems to me fairly,
+but not conspicuously, successful. I cite the case as a typical instance
+of the problem, apart from the merits or demerits of the solution.</p>
+
+<p>It may be said that the difficulty of bringing home to us the reality of
+a revulsion of feeling, or a radical change of mental attitude, is only
+a particular case of the playwright's general problem of convincingly
+externalizing inward conditions and processes. That is true: but the
+special importance of a conversion which unties the knot and brings the
+curtain down seemed to render it worthy of special consideration.</p>
+
+
+<br><br><hr style="width: 35%;"><br><br>
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_XX"></a>CHAPTER XX</h2>
+
+<p>BLIND-ALLEY THEMES--AND OTHERS</p>
+<br>
+
+<p>A blind-alley theme, as its name imports, is one from which there is no
+exit. It is a problem incapable of solution, or, rather, of which all
+possible solutions are equally unsatisfactory and undesirable. The
+playwright cannot too soon make sure that he has not strayed into such a
+no-thoroughfare. Whether an end be comic or tragic, romantic or ironic,
+happy or disastrous, it should satisfy something within us--our sense of
+truth, or of beauty, or of sublimity, or of justice, or of humour, or,
+at the least or lowest, our cynical sense of the baseness of human
+nature, and the vanity of human aspirations. But a play which satisfies
+neither our higher nor our lower instincts, baffles our sympathies, and
+leaves our desires at fault between equally inacceptable
+alternatives--such a play, whatever beauties of detail it may possess,
+is a weariness of the spirit, and an artistic blunder.</p>
+
+<p>There are in literature two conspicuous examples of the blind-alley
+theme--two famous plays, wherein two heroines are placed in somewhat
+similar dilemmas, which merely paralyse our sympathies and inhibit our
+moral judgment. The first of these is <i>Measure for Measure</i>. If ever
+there was an insoluble problem in casuistry, it is that which
+Shakespeare has here chosen to present to us. Isabella is forced to
+choose between what we can only describe as two detestable evils. If she
+resists Angelo, and lets her brother die, she recoils from an act of
+self-sacrifice; and, although we may coldly approve, we cannot admire or
+take pleasure in her action. If, on the other hand, she determines at
+all costs to save her brother's life, her sacrifice is a thing from
+which we want only to avert the mind: it belongs to the region of what
+Aristotle calls to <i>miaron</i>, the odious and intolerable. Shakespeare,
+indeed, confesses the problem insoluble in the fact that he leaves it
+unsolved--evading it by means of a mediaeval trick. But where, then, was
+the use of presenting it? What is the artistic profit of letting the
+imagination play around a problem which merely baffles and repels it?
+Sardou, indeed, presented the same problem, not as the theme of a whole
+play, but only of a single act; and he solved it by making Floria Tosca
+kill Scarpia. This is a solution which, at any rate, satisfies our
+craving for crude justice, and is melodramatically effective.
+Shakespeare probably ignored it, partly because it was not in his
+sources, partly because, for some obscure reason, he supposed himself to
+be writing a comedy. The result is that, though the play contains some
+wonderful poetry, and has been from time to time revived, it has never
+taken any real hold upon popular esteem.</p>
+
+<p>The second glaring instance of a blind-alley theme is that of <i>Monna
+Vanna</i>. We have all of us, I suppose, stumbled, either as actors or
+onlookers, into painful situations, which not even a miracle of tact
+could possibly save. As a rule, of course, they are comic, and the agony
+they cause may find a safety-valve in laughter. But sometimes there
+occurs some detestable incident, over which it is equally impossible to
+laugh and to weep. The wisest words, the most graceful acts, are of no
+avail. One longs only to sink into the earth, or vanish into thin air.
+Such a situation, on the largest possible scale, is that presented in
+<i>Monna Vanna</i>. It differs from that of <i>Measure for Measure</i> in the fact
+that there can be no doubt as to the moral aspect of the case. It is
+quite clear that Giovanna ought to sacrifice herself to save, not one
+puling Claudio, but a whole city full of men, women, and children. What
+she does is absolutely right; but the conjuncture is none the less a
+grotesque and detestable one, which ought to be talked about and thought
+about as little as possible. Every word that is uttered is a failure in
+tact. Guido, the husband, behaves, in the first act, with a violent
+egoism, which is certainly lacking in dignity; but will any one tell me
+what would be a dignified course for him to pursue under the
+circumstances? The sage old Marco, too--that fifteenth-century
+Renan--flounders just as painfully as the hot-headed Guido. It is the
+fatality of the case that &quot;he cannot open his mouth without putting his
+foot in it&quot;; and a theme which exposes a well-meaning old gentleman to
+this painful necessity is one by all means to be avoided. The fact that
+it is a false alarm, and that there is no rational explanation for
+Prinzivalle's wanton insult to a woman whom he reverently idolizes, in
+no way makes matters better.<a name="FNanchor101"></a><a href="#Footnote_101"><sup>[101]</sup></a> Not the least grotesque thing in the
+play is Giovanna's expectation that Guido will receive Prinzivalle with
+open arms because he has--changed his mind. We can feel neither approval
+nor disapproval, sympathy nor antipathy, in such a deplorable
+conjunction of circumstances. All we wish is that we had not been called
+upon to contemplate it.<a name="FNanchor102"></a><a href="#Footnote_102"><sup>[102]</sup></a> Maeterlinck, like Shakespeare, was simply
+dallying with the idea of a squalid heroism--so squalid, indeed, that
+neither he nor his predecessor had the courage to carry it through.</p>
+
+<p>Pray observe that the defect of these two themes is not merely that they
+are &quot;unpleasant.&quot; It is that there is no possible way out of them which
+is not worse than unpleasant: humiliating, and distressing. Let the
+playwright, then, before embarking on a theme, make sure that he has
+some sort of satisfaction to offer us at the end, if it be only the
+pessimistic pleasure of realizing some part of &quot;the bitter, old and
+wrinkled truth&quot; about life. The crimes of destiny there is some profit
+in contemplating; but its stupid vulgarities minister neither to profit
+nor delight.</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 25%;">
+
+<p>It may not be superfluous to give at this point a little list of
+subjects which, though not blind-alley themes, are equally to be
+avoided. Some of them, indeed, are the reverse of blind-alley themes,
+their drawback lying in the fact that the way out of them is too
+tediously apparent.</p>
+
+<p>At the head of this list I would place what may be called the &quot;white
+marriage&quot; theme: not because it is ineffective, but because its
+effectiveness is very cheap and has been sadly overdone. It occurs in
+two varieties: either a proud but penniless damsel is married to a
+wealthy parvenu, or a woman of culture and refinement is married to a
+&quot;rough diamond.&quot; In both cases the action consists of the transformation
+of a nominal into a real marriage; and it is almost impossible, in these
+days, to lend any novelty to the process. In the good old <i>Lady of
+Lyons</i> the theme was decked in trappings of romantic absurdity, which
+somehow harmonized with it. One could hear in it a far-off echo of
+revolutionary rodomontade. The social aspect of the matter was
+emphasized, and the satire on middle-class snobbery was cruelly
+effective. The personal aspect, on the other hand--the unfulfilment of
+the nominal marriage--was lightly and discreetly handled, according to
+early-Victorian convention. In later days--from the time of M. George
+Ohnet's <i>Ma&icirc;tre de Forges</i> onwards--this is the aspect on which
+playwrights have preferred to dwell. Usually, the theme shades off into
+the almost equally hackneyed <i>Still Waters Run Deep</i> theme; for there is
+apt to be an aristocratic lover whom the unpolished but formidable
+husband threatens to shoot or horsewhip, and thereby overcomes the last
+remnant of repugnance in the breast of his haughty spouse. In <i>The
+Ironmaster</i> the lover was called the Duc de Bligny, or, more commonly,
+the Dook de Bleeny; but he has appeared under many aliases. In the chief
+American version of the theme, Mr. Vaughn Moody's <i>Great Divide</i>, the
+lover is dispensed with altogether, being inconsistent, no doubt, with
+the austere manners of Milford Corners, Mass. In one of the recent
+French versions, on the other hand--M. Bernstein's <i>Samson</i>--the
+aristocratic lover is almost as important a character as the virile,
+masterful, plebeian husband. It appears from this survey--which might be
+largely extended--that there are several ways of handling the theme; but
+there is no way of renewing and deconventionalizing it. No doubt it has
+a long life before it on the plane of popular melodrama, but scarcely,
+one hopes, on any higher plane.</p>
+
+<p>Another theme which ought to be relegated to the theatrical lumber-room
+is that of patient, inveterate revenge. This form of vindictiveness is,
+from a dramatic point of view, an outworn passion. It is too obviously
+irrational and anti-social to pass muster in modern costume. The actual
+vendetta may possibly survive in some semi-barbarous regions, and
+Grangerfords and Shepherdsons (as in Mark Twain's immortal romance) may
+still be shooting each other at sight. But these things are relics of
+the past; they do not belong to the normal, typical life of our time. It
+is useless to say that human nature is the same in all ages. That is one
+of the facile axioms of psychological incompetence. Far be it from me to
+deny that malice, hatred, spite, and the spirit of retaliation are, and
+will be until the millennium, among the most active forces in human
+nature. But most people are coming to recognize that life is too short
+for deliberate, elaborate, cold-drawn revenge. They will hit back when
+they conveniently can; they will cherish for half a lifetime a passive,
+an obstructive, ill-will; they will even await for years an opportunity
+of &quot;getting their knife into&quot; an enemy. But they have grown chary of
+&quot;cutting off their nose to spite their face&quot;; they will very rarely
+sacrifice their own comfort in life to the mere joy of protracted,
+elaborate reprisals. Vitriol and the revolver--an outburst of rage,
+culminating in a &quot;short, sharp shock&quot;--these belong, if you will, to
+modern life. But long-drawn, unhasting, unresting machination, with no
+end in view beyond an ultimate unmasking, a turn of the tables--in a
+word, a strong situation--this, I take it, belongs to a phase of
+existence more leisurely than ours. There is no room in our crowded
+century for such large and sustained passions. One could mention
+plays--but they are happily forgotten--in which retribution was delayed
+for some thirty or forty years, during which the unconscious object of
+it enjoyed a happy and prosperous existence. These, no doubt, are
+extreme instances; but cold-storage revenge, as a whole, ought to be as
+rare on the stage as it is in real life. The serious playwright will do
+well to leave it to the melodramatists.</p>
+
+<p>A third theme to be handled with the greatest caution, if at all, is
+that of heroic self-sacrifice. Not that self-sacrifice, like revenge, is
+an outworn passion. It still rages in daily life; but no audience of
+average intelligence will to-day accept it with the uncritical
+admiration which it used to excite in the sentimental dramas of last
+century. Even then--even in 1869--Meilhac and Hal&eacute;vy, in their
+ever-memorable <i>Froufrou</i>, showed what disasters often result from it;
+but it retained its prestige with the average playwright--and with some
+who were above the average--for many a day after that. I can recall a
+play, by a living English author, in which a Colonel in the Indian Army
+pleaded guilty to a damning charge of cowardice rather than allow a lady
+whom he chivalrously adored to learn that it was her husband who was the
+real coward and traitor. He knew that the lady detested her husband; he
+knew that they had no children to suffer by the husband's disgrace; he
+knew that there was a quite probable way by which he might have cleared
+his own character without casting any imputation on the other man. But
+in a sheer frenzy of self-sacrifice he blasted his own career, and
+thereby inflicted far greater pain upon the woman he loved than if he
+had told the truth or suffered it to be told. And twenty years
+afterwards, when the villain was dead, the hero still resolutely refused
+to clear his own character, lest the villain's widow should learn the
+truth about her wholly unlamented husband. This was an extravagant and
+childish case; but the superstition of heroic self-sacrifice still
+lingers in certain quarters, and cannot be too soon eradicated. I do not
+mean, of course, that self-sacrifice is never admirable, but only that
+it can no longer be accepted as a thing inherently noble, apart from its
+circumstances and its consequences. An excellent play might be written
+with the express design of placing the ethics of self-sacrifice in their
+true light. Perhaps the upshot might be the recognition of the simple
+principle that it is immoral to make a sacrifice which the person
+supposed to benefit by it has no right to accept.</p>
+
+<p>Another motive against which it is perhaps not quite superfluous to warn
+the aspiring playwright is the &quot;voix du sang.&quot; It is only a few years
+since this miraculous voice was heard speaking loud and long in His
+Majesty's Theatre, London, and in a play by a no less modern-minded
+author than the late Clyde Fitch. It was called <i>The Last of the
+Dandies</i>,<a name="FNanchor103"></a><a href="#Footnote_103"><sup>[103]</sup></a> and its hero was Count D'Orsay. At a given moment, D'Orsay
+learned that a young man known as Lord Raoul Ardale was in reality his
+son. Instantly the man of the world, the squire of dames, went off into
+a deliquium of tender emotion. For &quot;my bo-o-oy&quot; he would do anything and
+everything. He would go down to Crockford's and win a pot of money to
+pay &quot;my boy's&quot; debts--Fortune could not but be kind to a doting parent.
+In the beautiful simplicity of his soul, he looked forward with eager
+delight to telling Raoul that the mother he adored was no better than
+she should be, and that he had no right to his name or title. Not for a
+moment did he doubt that the young man would share his transports. When
+the mother opposed his purpose of betraying her secret, he wept with
+disappointment. &quot;All day,&quot; he said, &quot;I have been saying to myself: When
+that sun sets, I shall hear him say, 'Good-night, Father!'&quot; He
+postulated in so many words the &quot;voix du sang,&quot; trusting that, even if
+the revelation were not formally made, &quot;Nature would send the boy some
+impulse&quot; of filial affection. It is hard to believe--but it is the
+fact--that, well within the present century, such ingenuous nonsense as
+this was gravely presented to the public of a leading theatre, by an
+author of keen intelligence, who, but for an unhappy accident, would now
+be at the zenith of his career. There are few more foolish conventions
+than that of the &quot;voix du sang.&quot; Perhaps, however, the rising generation
+of playwrights has more need to be warned against the opposite or
+Shawesque convention, that kinship utters itself mainly in wrangling and
+mutual dislike.</p>
+
+<p>Among inherently feeble and greatly overdone expedients may be reckoned
+the oath or promise of secrecy, exacted for no sufficient reason, and
+kept in defiance of common sense and common humanity. Lord Windermere's
+conduct in Oscar Wilde's play is a case in point, though he has not even
+an oath to excuse his insensate secretiveness. A still clearer instance
+is afforded by Clyde Fitch's play <i>The Girl with the Green Eyes</i>. In
+other respects a very able play, it is vitiated by the certainty that
+Austin ought to have, and would have, told the truth ten times over,
+rather than subject his wife's jealous disposition to the strain he
+puts upon it.</p>
+
+<p>It would not be difficult to prolong this catalogue of themes and
+motives that have come down in the world, and are no longer presentable
+in any society that pretends to intelligence. But it is needless to
+enter into further details. There is a general rule, of sovereign
+efficacy, for avoiding such anachronisms: &quot;Go to life for your themes,
+and not to the theatre.&quot; Observe that rule, and you are safe. But it is
+easier said than done.</p>
+
+
+<br><br><hr style="width: 35%;"><br><br>
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_XXI"></a>CHAPTER XXI</h2>
+
+<p>THE FULL CLOSE</p>
+<br>
+
+<p>In an earlier chapter, I have tried to show that a certain tolerance for
+anticlimax, for a fourth or fifth act of calm after the storm of the
+penultimate act, is consonant with right reason, and is a practically
+inevitable result of a really intimate relation between drama and life.
+But it would be a complete misunderstanding of my argument to suppose
+that I deny the practical, and even the artistic, superiority of those
+themes in which the tension can be maintained and heightened to the
+very end.</p>
+
+<p>The fact that tragedy has from of old been recognized as a higher form
+than comedy is partly due, no doubt, to the tragic poet's traditional
+right to round off a human destiny in death. &quot;Call no man happy till his
+life be ended,&quot; said Sophocles, quoting from an earlier sage; and it
+needed no profundity of wisdom to recognize in the &quot;happy ending&quot; of
+comedy a conventional, ephemeral thing. But when, after all the
+peripeties of life, the hero &quot;home has gone and ta'en his wages,&quot; we
+feel that, at any rate, we have looked destiny squarely in the face,
+without evasion or subterfuge. Perhaps the true justification of tragedy
+as a form of art is that, after this experience, we should feel life to
+be, not less worth living, but greater and more significant than before.</p>
+
+<p>This is no place, however, for a discussion of the aesthetic basis of
+tragedy in general.<a name="FNanchor104"></a><a href="#Footnote_104"><sup>[104]</sup></a> What is here required, from the point of view of
+craftsmanship, is not so much a glorification of the tragic ending, as a
+warning against its facile misuse. A very great play may, and often
+must, end in death; but you cannot make a play great by simply killing
+off your protagonist. Death is, after all, a very inexpensive means of
+avoiding anticlimax. Tension, as we saw, is symbolized in the sword of
+Damocles; and it can always be maintained, in a mechanical way, by
+letting your hero play about with a revolver, or placing an overdose of
+chloral well within your heroine's reach. At the time when the English
+drama was awaking from the lethargy of the 'seventies, an idea got
+abroad that a non-sanguinary ending was always and necessarily
+inartistic, and that a self-respecting playwright must at all hazards
+kill somebody before dropping his curtain. This was an extravagant
+reaction against the purely commercial principle that the public would
+not, on any terms, accept a tragic ending. As a matter of fact, the
+mortality was not very great; for managers were resolute in the old
+belief, and few dramatists had the courage or authority to stand up
+against them. But I have often heard playwrights lamenting their
+inability to massacre the luckless children of their fancy, who, nine
+times out of ten, had done nothing to incur such a doom. The real
+trouble was that death seemed to be the only method of avoiding
+anticlimax.</p>
+
+<p>It is a very sound rule that, before you determine to write a tragedy,
+you should make sure that you have a really tragic theme: that you can
+place your hero at such odds with life that reconciliation, or mere
+endurance, would be morally base or psychologically improbable.
+Moreover, you must strike deep into character before you are justified
+in passing capital sentence on your personages. Death is a
+disproportionate close for a commonplace and superficially-studied life.
+It is true that quite commonplace people do die; indeed, they
+preponderate in the bills of mortality; but death on the stage confers a
+sort of distinction which ought not to be accorded without due and
+sufficient cause. To one god in particular we may apply the Horatian
+maxim, &quot;Nec deus intersit, nisi dignus vindice nodus.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>In German aesthetic theory, the conception <i>tragische Schuld</i>--&quot;tragic
+guilt&quot;--plays a large part. It descends, no doubt, from the Aristotelian
+maxim that a tragic hero must neither be too good nor too bad; but it
+also belongs to a moralizing conception, which tacitly or explicitly
+assumes that the dramatist's aim ought to be &quot;to justify the ways of God
+to man.&quot; In these days we look at drama more objectively, and do not
+insist on deciding in what degree a man has deserved death, if only we
+feel that he has necessarily or probably incurred it. But in order that
+we may be satisfied of this, we must know him intimately and feel with
+him intensely. We must, in other words, believe that he dies because he
+cannot live, and not merely to suit the playwright's convenience and
+help him to an effective &quot;curtain.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>As we review the series of Ibsen's modern plays, we cannot but feel
+that, though he did not shrink from death, he never employed it, except
+perhaps in his last melancholy effort, as a mere way of escape from a
+difficulty. In five out of his thirteen modern plays, no one dies at
+all.<a name="FNanchor105"></a><a href="#Footnote_105"><sup>[105]</sup></a> One might even say six: for Oswald, in <i>Ghosts</i>, may live for
+years; but I hold it as only fair to count the death of his mind as more
+than equivalent to bodily death. Solness, on the plane of literal fact,
+dies by an accident; on the plane of symbolic interpretation, he dies of
+the over-great demands which Hilda makes upon his &quot;sickly conscience.&quot;
+Little Eyolf's death can also be regarded from a symbolic point of view;
+but there is no substantial reason to think of it otherwise than as an
+accident. John Gabriel Borkman dies of heart seizure, resulting from
+sudden exposure to extreme cold. In the case of Solness and Borkman,
+death is a quite natural and probable result of the antecedent
+conditions; and in the case of Eyolf, it is not a way out of the action,
+but rather the way into it. There remain the three cases of suicide:
+Rebecca and Rosmer, Hedda Gabler, and Hedvig. I have already, in Chapter
+XIX, shown how the death of Rebecca was the inevitable outcome of the
+situation--the one conclusive proof of her &quot;ennoblement&quot;--and how it was
+almost equally inevitable that Rosmer should accompany her to her end.
+Hedda Gabler was constitutionally fated to suicide: a woman of low
+vitality, overmastering egoism, and acute supersensitiveness, placed in
+a predicament which left her nothing to expect from life but tedium and
+humiliation. The one case left--that of Hedvig--is the only one in which
+Ibsen can possibly be accused of wanton bloodshed. Bj&ouml;rnson, in a very
+moving passage in his novel, <i>The Paths of God</i>, did actually, though
+indirectly, make that accusation. Certainly, there is no more
+heartrending incident in fiction; and certainly it is a thing that only
+consummate genius can justify. Ibsen happened to possess that genius,
+and I am not far from agreeing with those who hold <i>The Wild Duck</i> to be
+his greatest work. But for playwrights who are tempted to seek for
+effects of pathos by similar means, one may without hesitation lay down
+this maxim: Be sure you are an Ibsen before you kill your Hedvig.</p>
+
+<p>This analysis of Ibsen's practice points to the fact--for such I believe
+it to be--that what the modern playwright has chiefly to guard against
+is the temptation to overdo suicide as a means of cutting the dramatic
+knot. In France and Germany there is another temptation, that of the
+duel;<a name="FNanchor106"></a><a href="#Footnote_106"><sup>[106]</sup></a> but in Anglo-Saxon countries it scarcely presents itself.
+Death, other than self-inflicted, is much less tempting, and less apt to
+be resorted to in and out of season. The heroine, whether virtuous or
+erring, who dies of consumption, has gone greatly out of vogue. A broken
+heart is no longer held to be necessarily fatal. The veriest tyro
+realizes that death by crude accident is inadmissible as a determining
+factor in serious drama; and murder is practically (though not
+absolutely) relegated to the melodramatic domain. The one urgent
+question, then, is that of the artistic use and abuse of suicide.</p>
+
+<p>The principle is pretty plain, I think, that it ought to be the
+artist's, as it is the man's, last resort. We know that, in most
+civilized countries, suicide is greatly on the increase. It cannot be
+called an infrequent incident in daily life. It is certain, too, that
+the motives impelling to it are apt to be of a dramatic nature, and
+therefore suited to the playwright's purposes. But it is, on the other
+hand, such a crude and unreasoning means of exit from the tangle of
+existence that a playwright of delicate instincts will certainly employ
+it only under the strongest compulsion from his artistic conscience.</p>
+
+<p>Sir Arthur Pinero has three suicides on his record, though one of them
+was, so to speak, nipped in the bud. In <i>The Profligate</i>, as presented
+on the stage, Dunstan Renshaw changed his mind before draining the fatal
+goblet; and in this case the stage version was surely the right one. The
+suicide, to which the author still clings in the printed text,
+practically dates the play as belonging to the above-mentioned period of
+rebellion against the conventional &quot;happy ending,&quot; when the ambitious
+British dramatist felt that honour required him to kill his man on the
+smallest provocation.<a name="FNanchor107"></a><a href="#Footnote_107"><sup>[107]</sup></a> Nearly a quarter of a century has passed since
+then, and the disproportion between such a play and such a catastrophe
+is now apparent to everyone. It is not that we judge Renshaw's
+delinquencies to be over-punished by death--that is not the question.
+The fact is simply that the characters are not large enough, true
+enough, living enough--that the play does not probe deep enough into
+human experience--to make the august intervention of death seem other
+than an incongruity. The suicide of Paula Tanqueray, though it, too, has
+been much criticized, is a very different matter. Inevitable it cannot
+be called: if the play had been written within the past ten years, Sir
+Arthur would very likely have contrived to do without it. But it is, in
+itself, probable enough: both the good and the bad in Paula's character
+might easily make her feel that only the dregs of life remained to her,
+and they not worth drinking. The worst one can say of it is that it sins
+against the canon of practical convenience which enjoins on the prudent
+dramatist strict economy in suicide. The third case, Zoe Blundell's leap
+to nothingness, in that harsh and ruthless masterpiece, <i>Mid-Channel</i>,
+is as inevitable as anything can well be in human destiny. Zoe has made
+a miserable and hopeless muddle of her life. In spite of her goodness of
+heart, she has no interests and no ideals, apart from the personal
+satisfactions which have now been poisoned at their source. She has
+intervened disastrously in the destinies of others. She is ill; her
+nerves are all on edge; and she is, as it were, driven into a corner,
+from which there is but one easy and rapid exit. Here is a case, if ever
+there was one, where the end is imposed upon the artist by the whole
+drift of his action. It may be said that chance plays a large part in
+the concatenation of events--that, for instance, if Leonard Ferris had
+not happened to live at the top of a very high building, Zoe would not
+have encountered the sudden temptation to which she yields. But this, as
+I have tried to show above, is a baseless complaint. Chance is a
+constant factor in life, now aiding, now thwarting, the will. To
+eliminate it altogether would be to produce a most unlifelike world. It
+is only when the playwright so manipulates and reduplicates chance as to
+make it seem no longer chance, but purposeful arrangement, that we have
+the right to protest.</p>
+
+<p>Another instance of indisputably justified suicide may be found in Mr.
+Galsworthy's <i>Justice</i>. The whole theme of the play is nothing but the
+hounding to his end of a luckless youth, who has got on the wrong side
+of the law, and finds all the forces of society leagued against him. In
+Mr. Granville Barker's <i>Waste</i>, the artistic justification for Trebell's
+self-effacement is less clear and compulsive. It is true that the play
+was suggested by the actual suicide, not of a politician, but of a
+soldier, who found his career ruined by some pitiful scandal. But the
+author has made no attempt to reproduce the actual circumstances of that
+case; and even if he had reproduced the external circumstances, the
+psychological conditions would clearly have eluded him. Thus the appeal
+to fact is, as it always must be, barred. In two cases, indeed, much
+more closely analogous to Trebell's than that which actually suggested
+it--two famous cases in which a scandal cut short a brilliant political
+career--suicide played no part in the catastrophe. These real-life
+instances are, I repeat, irrelevant. The only question is whether Mr.
+Barker has made us feel that a man of Trebell's character would
+certainly not survive the paralysing of his energies; and that question
+every spectator must answer for himself. I am far from answering it in
+the negative. I merely suggest that the playwright may one day come
+across a theme for which there is no conceivable ending but suicide, and
+may wish that he had let Trebell live, lest people should come to regard
+him as a spendthrift of self-slaughter.</p>
+
+<p>The suicide which brings to a close Mr. Clyde Fitch's very able play,
+<i>The Climbers</i>, stands on a somewhat different level. Here it is not the
+protagonist who makes away with himself, nor is his destiny the main
+theme of the play. Mr. Fitch has painted a broad social picture, in
+which, if there is any concentration of interest, it is upon Blanche and
+Warden. Sterling's suicide, then, though it does in fact cut the chief
+knot of the play, is to be regarded rather as a characteristic and
+probable incident of a certain phase of life, than as the culmination of
+a spiritual tragedy. It has not the artistic significance, either good
+or bad, that it would have if the character and destiny of Sterling were
+our main concernment.</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 25%;">
+
+<p>The happy playwright, one may say, is he whose theme does not force upon
+him either a sanguinary or a tame last act, but enables him, without
+troubling the coroner, to sustain and increase the tension up to the
+very close. Such themes are not too common, but they do occur. Dumas
+found one in <i>Denise</i>, and another in <i>Francillon</i>, where the famous &quot;Il
+en a menti!&quot; comes within two minutes of the fall of the curtain. In
+<i>Heimat</i> (Magda) and in <i>Johannisfeuer</i>, Sudermann keeps the tension at
+its height up to the fall of the curtain. Sir Arthur Pinero's <i>Iris</i> is
+a case in point; so are Mr. Shaw's <i>Candida</i> and <i>The Devil's Disciple</i>;
+so is Mr. Galsworthy's <i>Strife</i>. Other instances will no doubt occur to
+the reader; yet he will probably be surprised to find that it is not
+very easy to recall them.</p>
+
+<p>For this is not, in fact, the typical modern formula. In plays which do
+not end in death, it will generally be found that the culminating scene
+occurs in the penultimate act, and that, if anticlimax is avoided, it is
+not by the maintenance of an unbroken tension, by its skilful renewal
+and reinforcement in the last act. This is a resource which the
+playwright will do well to bear in mind. Where he cannot place his
+&quot;great scene&quot; in his last act, he should always consider whether it be
+not possible to hold some development in reserve whereby the tension may
+be screwed up again--if unexpectedly, so much the better. Some of the
+most successful plays within my recollection have been those in which
+the last act came upon us as a pleasant surprise. An anticlimax had
+seemed inevitable; and behold! the author had found a way out of it.</p>
+
+<p><i>An Enemy of the People</i> may perhaps be placed in this class, though, as
+before remarked, the last act is almost an independent comedy. Had the
+play ended with the fourth act, no one would have felt that anything was
+lacking; so that in his fifth act, Ibsen was not so much grappling with
+an urgent technical problem, as amusing himself by wringing the last
+drop of humour out of the given situation. A more strictly apposite
+example may be found in Sir Arthur Pinero's play, <i>His House in Order</i>.
+Here the action undoubtedly culminates in the great scene between Nina
+and Hilary Jesson in the third act; yet we await with eager anticipation
+the discomfiture of the Ridgeley family; and when we realize that it is
+to be brought about by the disclosure to Filmer of Annabel's secret, the
+manifest rightness of the proceeding gives us a little shock of
+pleasure. Mr. Somerset Maugham, again, in the last act of <i>Grace</i>,
+employs an ingenious device to keep the tension at a high pitch. The
+matter of the act consists mainly of a debate as to whether Grace Insole
+ought, or ought not, to make a certain painful avowal to her husband. As
+the negative opinion was to carry the day, Mr. Maugham saw that there
+was grave danger that the final scene might appear an almost ludicrous
+anticlimax. To obviate this, he made Grace, at the beginning of the act,
+write a letter of confession, and address it to Claude; so that all
+through the discussion we had at the back of our mind the question &quot;Will
+the letter reach his hands? Will the sword of Damocles fall?&quot; This may
+seem like a leaf from the book of Sardou; but in reality it was a
+perfectly natural and justified expedient. It kept the tension alive
+throughout a scene of ethical discussion, interesting in itself, but
+pretty clearly destined to lead up to the undramatic alternative--a
+policy of silence and inaction. Mr. Clyde Fitch, in the last act of <i>The
+Truth</i>, made an elaborate and daring endeavour to relieve the
+mawkishness of the clearly-foreseen reconciliation between Warder and
+Becky. He let Becky fall in with her father's mad idea of working upon
+Warder's compassion by pretending that she had tried to kill herself.
+Only at the last moment did she abandon the sordid comedy, and so prove
+herself (as we are asked to suppose) cured for ever of the habit of
+fibbing. Mr. Fitch here showed good technical insight marred by
+over-hasty execution. That Becky should be tempted to employ her old
+methods, and should overcome the temptation, was entirely right; but the
+actual deception attempted was so crude and hopeless that there was no
+plausibility in her consenting to it, and no merit in her desisting
+from it.</p>
+
+<p>In light comedy and farce it is even more desirable than in serious
+drama to avoid a tame and perfunctory last act. Very often a seemingly
+trivial invention will work wonders in keeping the interest afoot. In
+Mr. Anstey's delightful farce, <i>The Brass Bottle</i>, one looked forward
+rather dolefully to a flat conclusion; but by the simple device of
+letting the Jinny omit to include Pringle in his &quot;act of oblivion,&quot; the
+author is enabled to make his last scene quite as amusing as any of its
+predecessors. Mr. Arnold Bennett, in <i>The Honeymoon</i>, had the audacity
+to play a deliberate trick on the audience, in order to evade an
+anticlimax. Seeing that his third act could not at best be very good, he
+purposely put the audience on a false scent, made it expect an
+absolutely commonplace ending (the marriage of Flora to Charles Haslam),
+and then substituted one which, if not very brilliant, was at least
+ingenious and unforeseen. Thus, by defeating the expectation of a
+superlatively bad act, he made a positively insignificant act seem
+comparatively good. Such feats of craftsmanship are entertaining, but
+too dangerous to be commended for imitation.</p>
+
+<p>In some modern plays a full close is achieved by the simple expedient of
+altogether omitting the last act, or last scene, and leaving the end of
+the play to the imagination. This method is boldly and (I understand)
+successfully employed by Mr. Edward Sheldon in his powerful play, <i>The
+Nigger</i>. Philip Morrow, the popular Governor of one of the Southern
+States, has learnt that his grandmother was a quadroon, and that
+consequently he has in him a much-attenuated strain of African blood. In
+the Southern States, attenuation matters nothing: if the remotest
+filament of a man's ancestry runs back to Africa, he is &quot;a nigger all
+right.&quot; Philip has just suppressed a race-riot in the city, and, from
+the balcony of the State Capitol, is to address the troops who have
+aided him, and the assembled multitude. Having resolutely parted from
+the woman he adores, but can no longer marry, he steps out upon the
+balcony to announce that he is a negro, that he resigns the
+Governorship, and that henceforth he casts in his lot with his black
+brethren. The stage-direction runs thus--</p>
+
+&nbsp;&nbsp;The afternoon sun strikes his figure. At his appearance a shout goes<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;up--long, steady, enthusiastic cheering; and, after a moment, the<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;big regimental band begins playing, very slowly, &quot;My Country, 'tis<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;of Thee.&quot; ... All the people in the room are smiling and applauding<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;enthusiastically; and--as Phil in vain raises his hand for silence,<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;and the band crashes through the National Anthem, and the roar of<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;voices still rises from below--<br>
+
+&nbsp;&nbsp;THE CURTAIN FALLS.<br>
+
+<p>One does not know whether to praise Mr. Sheldon for having adroitly
+avoided an anticlimax, or to reproach him with having unblushingly
+shirked a difficulty. To my sense, the play has somewhat the air of a
+hexameter line with the spondee cut off.<a name="FNanchor108"></a><a href="#Footnote_108"><sup>[108]</sup></a> One <i>does</i> want to see the
+peripety through. But if the audience is content to imagine the sequel,
+Mr. Sheldon's craftsmanship is justified, and there is no more to be
+said. M. Brieux experienced some difficulty in bringing his early play,
+<i>Blanchette</i>, to a satisfactory close. The third act which he originally
+wrote was found unendurably cynical; a more agreeable third act was
+condemned as an anticlimax; and for some time the play was presented
+with no third act at all. It did not end, but simply left off. No doubt
+it is better that a play should stop in the middle than that it should
+drag on tediously and ineffectually. But it would be foolish to make a
+system o&pound; such an expedient. It is, after all, an evasion, not a
+solution, of the artist's problem.</p>
+
+<p>An incident which occurred during the rehearsals for the first
+production of <i>A Doll's House</i>, at the Novelty Theatre, London,
+illustrates the difference between the old, and what was then the new,
+fashion of ending a play. The business manager of the company, a man of
+ripe theatrical experience, happened to be present one day when Miss
+Achurch and Mr. Waring were rehearsing the last great scene between Nora
+and Helmar. At the end of it, he came up to me, in a state of high
+excitement. &quot;This is a fine play!&quot; he said. &quot;This is sure to be a big
+thing!&quot; I was greatly pleased. &quot;If this scene, of all others,&quot; I
+thought, &quot;carries a man like Mr. Smith off his feet, it cannot fail to
+hold the British public.&quot; But I was somewhat dashed when, a day or two
+later, Mr. Smith came up to me again, in much less buoyant spirits. &quot;I
+made a mistake about that scene,&quot; he said. &quot;They tell me it's the end of
+the <i>last</i> act--I thought it was the end of the <i>first</i>!&quot;</p>
+
+
+<br><br><hr style="width: 35%;"><br><br>
+<h2><a name="BOOK_V"></a>BOOK V</h2>
+
+<p>EPILOGUE</p>
+
+
+<br><br><hr style="width: 35%;"><br><br>
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_XXII"></a>CHAPTER XXII</h2>
+
+<p>CHARACTER AND PSYCHOLOGY</p>
+<br>
+
+<p>For the invention and ordering of incident it is possible, if not to lay
+down rules, at any rate to make plausible recommendations; but the power
+to observe, to penetrate, and to reproduce character can neither be
+acquired nor regulated by theoretical recommendations. Indirectly, of
+course, all the technical discussions of the previous chapters tend, or
+ought to tend, towards the effective presentment of character; for
+construction, in drama of any intellectual quality, has no other end.
+But specific directions for character-drawing would be like rules for
+becoming six feet high. Either you have it in you, or you have it not.</p>
+
+<p>Under the heading of character, however, two points arise which may be
+worth a brief discussion: first, ought we always to aim at development
+in character? second, what do we, or ought we to, mean by &quot;psychology&quot;?</p>
+
+<p>It is a frequent critical complaint that in such-and-such a character
+there is &quot;no development&quot;: that it remains the same throughout a play;
+or (so the reproach is sometimes worded) that it is not a character but
+an invariable attitude. A little examination will show us, I think,
+that, though the critic may in these cases be pointing to a real fault,
+he does not express himself quite accurately.</p>
+
+<p>What is character? For the practical purposes of the dramatist, it may
+be defined as a complex of intellectual, emotional, and nervous habits.
+Some of these habits are innate and temperamental--habits formed, no
+doubt, by far-off ancestors.<a name="FNanchor109"></a><a href="#Footnote_109"><sup>[109]</sup></a> But this distinction does not here
+concern us. Temperamental bias is a habit, like another, only somewhat
+older, and, therefore, harder to deflect or eradicate. What do we imply,
+then, when we complain that, in a given character, no development has
+taken place? We imply that he ought, within the limits of the play, to
+have altered the mental habits underlying his speech and actions. But is
+this a reasonable demand? Is it consistent with the usual and desirable
+time-limits of drama? In the long process of a novel, there may be time
+for the gradual alteration of habits: in the drama, which normally
+consists of a single crisis, any real change of character would have to
+be of a catastrophic nature, in which experience does not encourage us
+to put much faith. It was, indeed--as Dryden pointed out in a passage
+quoted above<a name="FNanchor110"></a><a href="#Footnote_110"><sup>[110]</sup></a>--one of the foibles of our easy-going ancestors to treat
+character as practically reversible when the time approached for ringing
+down the curtain. The same convention survives to this day in certain
+forms of drama. Even Ibsen, in his earlier work, had not shaken it off;
+witness the sudden ennoblement of Bernick in <i>Pillars of Society</i>. But
+it can scarcely be that sort of &quot;development&quot; which the critics consider
+indispensable. What is it, then, that they have in mind?</p>
+
+<p>By &quot;development&quot; of character, I think they mean, not change, but rather
+unveiling, disclosure. They hold, not unreasonably, that a dramatic
+crisis ought to disclose latent qualities in the persons chiefly
+concerned in it, and involve, not, indeed, a change, but, as it were, an
+exhaustive manifestation of character. The interest of the highest order
+of drama should consist in the reaction of character to a series of
+crucial experiences. We should, at the end of a play, know more of the
+protagonist's character than he himself, or his most intimate friend,
+could know at the beginning; for the action should have been such as to
+put it to some novel and searching test. The word &quot;development&quot; might be
+very aptly used in the photographic sense. A drama ought to bring out
+character as the photographer's chemicals &quot;bring out&quot; the forms latent
+in the negative. But this is quite a different thing from development in
+the sense of growth or radical change. In all modern drama, there is
+perhaps no character who &quot;develops,&quot; in the ordinary sense of the word,
+so startlingly as Ibsen's Nora; and we cannot but feel that the poet has
+compressed into a week an evolution which, in fact, would have demanded
+many months.</p>
+
+<p>The complaint that a character preserves the same attitude throughout
+means (if it be justified) that it is not a human being at all, but a
+mere embodiment of two or three characteristics which are fully
+displayed within the first ten minutes, and then keep on repeating
+themselves, like a recurrent decimal. Strong theatrical effects can be
+produced by this method, which is that of the comedy of types, or of
+&quot;humors.&quot; But it is now generally, and rightly, held that a character
+should be primarily an individual, and only incidentally (if at all)
+capable of classification under this type or that. It is a little
+surprising to find Sarcey, so recently as 1889, laying it down that &quot;a
+character is a master faculty or passion, which absorbs all the rest....
+To study and paint a character is, therefore, by placing a man in a
+certain number of situations, to show how this principal motive force in
+his nature annihilates or directs all those which, if he had been
+another man, would probably have come into action.&quot; This dogma of the
+&quot;ruling passion&quot; belongs rather to the eighteenth century than to the
+close of the nineteenth.</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 25%;">
+
+<p>We come now to the second of the questions above propounded, which I
+will state more definitely in this form: Is &quot;psychology&quot; simply a more
+pedantic term for &quot;character-drawing&quot;? Or can we establish a distinction
+between the two ideas? I do not think that, as a matter of fact, any
+difference is generally and clearly recognized; but I suggest that it is
+possible to draw a distinction which might, if accepted, prove
+serviceable both to critics and to playwrights.</p>
+
+<p>Let me illustrate my meaning by an example. In <i>Bella Donna</i>, by Messrs.
+Robert Hichens and James B. Fagan, we have a murder-story of a not
+uncommon or improbable type. A woman of very shady reputation marries an
+amiable idealist who is infatuated with her. She naturally finds his
+idealism incomprehensible and his amiability tedious. His position as
+heir-presumptive to a peerage is shattered by the birth of an
+heir-apparent. She becomes passionately enamoured of an Egyptian
+millionaire; and she sets to work to poison her husband with
+sugar-of-lead, provided by her oriental lover. How her criminal purpose
+is thwarted by a wise Jewish physician is nothing to the present
+purpose. In intent she is a murderess, no less than Lucrezia Borgia or
+the Marquise de Brinvilliers. And the authors have drawn her character
+cleverly enough. They have shown her in the first act as a
+shallow-souled materialist, and in the later acts as a vain, irritable,
+sensual, unscrupulous creature. But have they given us any insight into
+her psychology? No, that is just what they have not done. They have
+assigned to her certain characteristics without which cruel and
+cold-blooded murder would be inconceivable; but they have afforded us no
+insight into the moral conditions and, mental processes which make it,
+not only conceivable, but almost an everyday occurrence. For the average
+human mind, I suppose, the psychology of crime, and especially of
+fiendish, hypocritical murder-by-inches, has an undeniable fascination.
+To most of us it seems an abhorrent miracle; and it would interest us
+greatly to have it brought more or less within the range of our
+comprehension, and co-ordinated with other mental phenomena which we can
+and do understand. But of such illumination we find nothing in <i>Bella
+Donna</i>. It leaves the working of a poisoner's mind as dark to us as
+ever. So far as that goes, we might just as well have read the report of
+a murder-trial, wherein the facts are stated with, perhaps, some
+superficial speculation as to motive, but no attempt is made to
+penetrate to underlying soul-states. Yet this is surely the highest
+privilege of art--to take us behind and beneath those surfaces of things
+which are apparent to the detective and the reporter, the juryman and
+the judge.</p>
+
+<p>Have we not here, then, the distinction between character-drawing and
+psychology? Character-drawing is the presentment of human nature in its
+commonly-recognized, understood, and accepted aspects; psychology is, as
+it were, the exploration of character, the bringing of hitherto
+unsurveyed tracts within the circle of our knowledge and comprehension.
+In other words, character-drawing is synthetic, psychology analytic.
+This does not mean that the one is necessarily inferior to the other.
+Some of the greatest masterpieces of creative art have been achieved by
+the synthesis of known elements. Falstaff, for example--there is no more
+brilliant or more living character in all fiction; yet it is impossible
+to say that Shakespeare has here taken us into previously unplumbed
+depths of human nature, as he has in Hamlet, or in Lear. No doubt it is
+often very hard to decide whether a given personage is a mere projection
+of the known or a divination of the unknown. What are we to say, for
+example, of Cleopatra, or of Shylock, or of Macbeth? Richard II, on the
+other hand, is as clearly a piece of psychology as the Nurse in <i>Romeo
+and Juliet</i> is a piece of character-drawing. The comedy of types
+necessarily tends to keep within the limits of the known, and
+Moli&egrave;re--in spite of Alceste and Don Juan--is characteristically a
+character-drawer, as Racine is characteristically a psychologist. Ibsen
+is a psychologist or he is nothing. Earl Skule and Bishop Nicholas,
+Hedda Gabler and John Gabriel Borkman are daring explorations of
+hitherto uncharted regions of the human soul. But Ibsen, too, was a
+character-drawer when it suited him. One is tempted to say that there is
+no psychology in Brand--he is a mere incarnation of intransigent
+idealism--while Peer Gynt is as brilliant a psychological inspiration as
+Don Quixote. Dr. Stockmann is a vigorously-projected character, Hialmar
+Ekdal a piece of searching psychology. Finally, my point could scarcely
+be better illustrated than by a comparison--cruel but
+instructive--between Rebecca in <i>Rosmersholm</i> and the heroine in <i>Bella
+Donna</i>. Each is, in effect, a murderess, though it was a moral, not a
+mineral, poison that Rebecca employed. But while we know nothing
+whatever of Mrs. Armine's mental processes, Rebecca's temptations,
+struggles, sophistries, hesitations, resolves, and revulsions of feeling
+are all laid bare to us, so that we feel her to be no monster, but a
+living woman, comprehensible to our intelligence, and, however
+blameworthy, not wholly beyond the range of our sympathies. There are
+few greater achievements of psychology.</p>
+
+<p>Among the playwrights of to-day, I should call Mr. Granville Barker
+above all things a psychologist. It is his instinct to venture into
+untrodden fields of character, or, at any rate, to probe deeply into
+phenomena which others have noted but superficially, if at all. Hence
+the occasional obscurity of his dialogue. Mr. Shaw is not, primarily,
+either a character-drawer or a psychologist, but a dealer in personified
+ideas. His leading figures are, as a rule, either his mouthpieces or his
+butts. When he gives us a piece of real character-drawing, it is
+generally in some subordinate personage. Mr. Galsworthy, I should say,
+shows himself a psychologist in <i>Strife</i>, a character-drawer in <i>The
+Silver Box</i> and <i>Justice</i>. Sir Arthur Pinero, a character-drawer of
+great versatility, becomes a psychologist in some of his studies of
+feminine types--in Iris, in Letty, in the luckless heroine of
+<i>Mid-Channel</i>. Mr. Clyde Fitch had, at least, laudable ambitions in the
+direction of psychology. Becky in <i>The Truth</i>, and Jinny in <i>The Girl
+with the Green Eyes</i>, in so far as they are successfully drawn, really
+do mean a certain advance on our knowledge of feminine human nature.
+Unfortunately, owing to the author's over-facile and over-hasty method
+of work, they are now and then a little out of drawing. The most
+striking piece of psychology known to me in American drama is the Faith
+Healer in William Vaughn Moody's drama of that name. If the last act of
+<i>The Faith Healer</i> were as good as the rest of it, one might safely call
+it the finest play ever written, at any rate in the English language,
+beyond the Atlantic. The psychologists of the modern French stage, I
+take it, are M. de Curel and M. de Porto-Riche. MM. Brieux and Hervieu
+are, like Mr. Shaw, too much concerned with ideas to probe very deep
+into character. In Germany, Hauptmann, and, so far as I understand him,
+Wedekind, are psychologists, Sudermann, a vigorous character-drawer.</p>
+
+<p>It is pretty clear that, if this distinction were accepted, it would be
+of use to the critic, inasmuch as we should have two terms for two
+ideas, instead of one popular term with a rather pedantic synonym. But
+what would be its practical use to the artist, the craftsman? Simply
+this, that if the word &quot;psychology&quot; took on for him a clear and definite
+meaning, it might stimulate at once his imagination and his ambition.
+Messrs. Hichens and Fagan, for example, might have asked themselves--or
+each other--&quot;Are we getting beneath the surface of this woman's nature?
+Are we plucking the heart out of her mystery? Cannot we make the
+specific processes of a murderess's mind clearer to ourselves and to our
+audiences?&quot; Whether they would have been capable of rising to the
+opportunity, I cannot tell; but in the case of other authors one not
+infrequently feels: &quot;This man could have taken us deeper into this
+problem if he had only thought of it.&quot; I do not for a moment mean that
+every serious dramatist should always be aiming at psychological
+exploration. The character-drawer's appeal to common knowledge and
+instant recognition is often all that is required, or that would be in
+place. But there are also occasions not a few when the dramatist shows
+himself unequal to his opportunities if he does not at least attempt to
+bring hitherto unrecorded or unscrutinized phases of character within
+the scope of our understanding and our sympathies.</p>
+
+
+
+
+<br><br><hr style="width: 35%;"><br><br>
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_XXIII"></a>CHAPTER XXIII</h2>
+
+<p>DIALOGUE AND DETAILS</p>
+<br>
+
+<p>The extraordinary progress made by the drama of the English language
+during the past quarter of a century is in nothing more apparent than in
+the average quality of modern dialogue. Tolerably well-written dialogue
+is nowadays the rule rather than the exception. Thirty years ago, the
+idea that it was possible to combine naturalness with vivacity and
+vigour had scarcely dawned upon the playwright's mind. He passed and
+repassed from stilted pathos to strained and verbal wit (often mere
+punning); and when a reformer like T.W. Robertson tried to come a little
+nearer to the truth of life, he was apt to fall into babyish simplicity
+or flat commonness.</p>
+
+<p>Criticism has not given sufficient weight to the fact that English
+dramatic writing laboured for centuries--and still labours to some
+degree--under a historic misfortune. It has never wholly recovered from
+the euphuism--to use the word in its widest sense--of the late sixteenth
+century. The influence of John Lyly and his tribe is still traceable,
+despite a hundred metamorphoses, in some of the plays of to-day and in
+many of the plays of yesterday. From the very beginnings of English
+comedy, it was accepted as almost self-evident that &quot;wit&quot;--a factitious,
+supererogatory sparkle--was indispensable to all dialogue of a
+non-tragic order. Language was a newly discovered and irresistibly
+fascinating playground for the fancy. Conversation must be thick-strewn
+with verbal quibbles, similes, figures, and flourishes of every
+description, else it was unworthy to be spoken on the stage. We all know
+how freely Shakespeare yielded to this convention, and so helped to
+establish it. Sometimes, not always, his genius enabled him to render it
+delightful; but in most of the Elizabethans--though it be heresy to say
+so--it is an extremely tedious mannerism. After the Restoration, when
+modern light talk came into being in the coffee-houses, the fashion of
+the day, no doubt, favoured a straining after wit; so that the
+playwrights were in some measure following nature--that very small
+corner of nature which they called &quot;the town&quot;--in accepting and making a
+law of the Elizabethan convention. The leading characters of Restoration
+comedy, from Etherege to Vanbrugh, are consciously and almost
+professionally wits. Simile and repartee are as indispensable a part of
+a gentleman's social outfit as his wig or his rapier. In Congreve the
+word &quot;wit&quot; is almost as common as the thing. When Farquhar made some
+movement towards a return to nature, he was rewarded with Pope's line,
+which clings like a burr to his memory--</p>
+
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&quot;What pert, low dialogue has Farquhar writ.&quot;<br>
+
+<p>If eighteenth-century comedy, as a whole, is not brilliantly written, it
+is for lack of talent in the playwrights, not for lack of desire or
+intention. Goldsmith, like Farquhar and Steele, vaguely realized the
+superiority of humour to wit; but he died too early to exercise much
+influence on his successors. In Sheridan the convention of wit
+reasserted itself triumphantly, and the scene in which Lady Teazle, Mrs.
+Candour, and the rest of the scandalous college sit in a semicircle and
+cap malicious similes, came to be regarded as an unapproachable model of
+comedy dialogue. The convention maintained itself firmly down to the
+days of <i>Money</i> and <i>London Assurance</i>, the dullness of the intervening
+period being due, not to any change of theory, but to sheer impotence of
+practice. T.W. Robertson, as above mentioned, attempted a return to
+nature, with occasional and very partial success; but wit, with a dash
+of fanciful sentiment, reasserted itself in James Albery; while in H.J.
+Byron it degenerated into mere punning and verbal horse-play. I should
+not be surprised if the historian of the future were to find in the
+plays of Mr. Henry Arthur Jones the first marked symptoms of a
+reaction--of a tendency to reject extrinsic and fanciful ornament in
+dialogue, and to rely for its effect upon its vivid appropriateness to
+character and situation. In the early plays of Sir Arthur Pinero there
+is a great deal of extrinsic ornament; especially of that
+metaphor-hunting which was one of the characteristic forms of euphuism.
+Take this, for example, from <i>The Profligate</i>. Dunstan Renshaw has
+expressed to Hugh Murray the opinion that &quot;marriages of contentment are
+the reward of husbands who have taken the precaution to sow their wild
+oats rather thickly&quot;; whereupon the Scotch solicitor replies--</p>
+
+&nbsp;&nbsp;HUGH MURRAY: Contentment! Renshaw, do you imagine that there is no<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;autumn in the life of a profligate? Do you think there is no moment<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;when the accursed crop begins to rear its millions of heads above<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;ground; when the rich man would give his wealth to be able to tread<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;them back into the earth which rejects the foul load? To-day you<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;have robbed some honest man of a sweet companion!<br>
+
+&nbsp;&nbsp;DUNSTAN RENSHAW: Look here, Mr. Murray--!<br>
+
+&nbsp;&nbsp;HUGH MURRAY: To-morrow, next week, next month, you may be happy--but<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;what of the time when those wild oats thrust their ears through the<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;very seams of the floor trodden by the wife whose respect you will<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;have learned to covet! You may drag her into the crowded<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;streets--there is the same vile growth springing up from the chinks<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;of the pavement! In your house or in the open, the scent of the<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;mildewed grain always in your nostrils, and in your ears no music<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;but the wind's rustle amongst the fat sheaves! And, worst of all,<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;your wife's heart a granary bursting with the load of shame your<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;profligacy has stored there! I warn you--Mr. Lawrence Kenward!<br>
+
+<p>If we compare this passage with any page taken at random from
+<i>Mid-Channel</i>, we might think that a century of evolution lay between
+them, instead of barely twenty years.</p>
+
+<p>The convention of wit-at-any-price is, indeed, moribund; but it is
+perhaps not quite superfluous, even now, to emphasize the difference
+between what the French call the &quot;mot d'auteur&quot; and the &quot;mot de
+situation.&quot; The terms practically explain themselves; but a third class
+ought to be added--the &quot;mot de caract&egrave;re.&quot; The &quot;mot d'auteur&quot; is the
+distinguishing mark of the Congreve-Sheridan convention. It survives in
+full vigour--or, shall one say, it sings its swan-song?--in the works of
+Oscar Wilde. For instance, the scene of the five men in the third act of
+<i>Lady Windermere's Fan</i> is a veritable running-fire of epigrams wholly
+unconnected with the situation, and very slightly related, if at all, to
+the characters of the speakers. The mark of the &quot;mot d'auteur&quot; is that
+it can with perfect ease be detached from its context. I could fill this
+page with sayings from the scene in question, all perfectly
+comprehensible without any account of the situation. Among them would be
+one of those; profound sayings which Wilde now and then threw off in his
+lightest moods, like opals among soap-bubbles. &quot;In the world,&quot; says
+Dumby, &quot;there are two tragedies. One is not getting what one wants, and
+the other is getting it.&quot; This may rank with Lord Illingworth's speech
+in <i>A Woman of No Importance</i>: &quot;All thought is immoral. Its very essence
+is destruction. If you think of anything you kill it. Nothing survives
+being thought of.&quot; When we hear such sayings as these--or the immortal
+&quot;Vulgarity is the behaviour of other people&quot;--we do not enquire too
+curiously into their appropriateness to character or situation; but none
+the less do they belong to an antiquated conception of drama.</p>
+
+<p>It is useless to begin to give specimens of the &quot;mot de caract&egrave;re&quot; and
+&quot;mot de situation.&quot; All really dramatic dialogue falls under one head or
+the other. One could easily pick out a few brilliantly effective
+examples of each class: but as their characteristic is to fade when
+uprooted from the soil in which they grow, they would take up space to
+very little purpose.</p>
+
+<p>But there is another historic influence, besides that of euphuism, which
+has been hurtful, though in a minor degree, to the development of a
+sound style in dialogue. Some of the later Elizabethans, and notably
+Webster and Ford, cultivated a fashion of abrupt utterance, whereby an
+immensity of spiritual significance--generally tragic--was supposed to
+be concentrated into a few brief words. The classic example is
+Ferdinand's &quot;Cover her face. Mine eyes dazzle. She died young,&quot; in <i>The
+Duchess of Malfy</i>. Charles Lamb celebrated the virtues of this pregnant,
+staccato style with somewhat immoderate admiration, and thus helped to
+set a fashion of spasmodic pithiness in dialogue, which too often
+resulted in dense obscurity. Not many plays composed under this
+influence have reached the stage; not one has held it. But we find in
+some recent writing a qualified recrudescence of the spasmodic manner,
+with a touch of euphuism thrown in. This is mainly due, I think, to the
+influence of George Meredith, who accepted the convention of wit as the
+informing spirit of comedy dialogue, and whose abnormally rapid faculty
+of association led him to delight in a sort of intellectual shorthand
+which the normal mind finds very difficult to decipher. Meredith was a
+man of brilliant genius, which lent a fascination to his very
+mannerisms; but when these mannerisms are transferred by lesser men to a
+medium much less suited to them--that of the stage--the result is apt to
+be disastrous. I need not go into particulars; for no play of which the
+dialogue places a constant strain on the intellectual muscles of the
+audience ever has held, or ever will hold, a place in living dramatic
+literature. I will merely note the curious fact that English--my own
+language--is the only language out of the three or four known to me in
+which I have ever come across an entirely incomprehensible play. I could
+name English plays, both pre-Meredithian and post-Meredithian, which
+might almost as well be written in Chinese for all that I can make
+of them.</p>
+
+<p>Obscurity and precocity are generally symptoms of an exaggerated dread
+of the commonplace. The writer of dramatic prose has, indeed, a very
+difficult task if he is to achieve style without deserting nature.
+Perhaps it would be more accurate to say that the difficulty lies in
+getting criticism to give him credit for the possession of style,
+without incurring the reproach of mannerism. How is one to give
+concentration and distinction to ordinary talk, while making it still
+seem ordinary? Either the distinction will strike the critics, and they
+will call it pompous and unreal, or the ordinariness will come home to
+them, and they will deny the distinction. This is the dramatist's
+constant dilemma. One can only comfort him with the assurance that if he
+has given his dialogue the necessary concentration, and has yet kept it
+plausibly near to the language of life, he has achieved style, and may
+snap his fingers at the critics. Style, in prose drama, is the sifting
+of common speech.</p>
+
+<p>It is true, however, that, with equal concentration and equal
+naturalness, one man may give his work a beauty of cadence and phrasing
+which another man may entirely miss. Two recent writers of English
+dramatic prose have stood out from their fellows in respect of the sheer
+beauty of their style--I need scarcely name Oscar Wilde and J.M. Synge.
+But Wilde's dialogue can by no means be called free from mannerism,<a name="FNanchor111"></a><a href="#Footnote_111"><sup>[111]</sup></a>
+while Synge wrote in a language which had a music of its own, even
+before his genius took hold of it.</p>
+
+<p>It does not seem very profitable to try to concentrate into a definition
+the distinctive qualities of dramatic dialogue. The late Mrs. Craigie
+(&quot;John Oliver Hobbes&quot;) attempted to do so in the preface to a charming
+play, <i>The Ambassador</i>; and the result at any rate the sequel--was that
+her next play, <i>The Wisdom of the Wise</i>, was singularly self-conscious
+and artificial. She found in &quot;emotion&quot; the test of dramatic quality in
+any given utterance. &quot;Stage dialogue,&quot; she says, &quot;may or may not have
+many qualities, but it must be emotional.&quot; Here we have a statement
+which is true in a vague and general sense, untrue in the definite and
+particular sense in which alone it could afford any practical guidance.
+&quot;My lord, the carriage waits,&quot; may be, in its right place, a highly
+dramatic speech, even though it be uttered with no emotion, and arouse
+no emotion in the person addressed. What Mrs. Craigie meant, I take it,
+was that, to be really dramatic, every speech must have some bearing,
+direct or indirect, prospective, present, or retrospective, upon
+individual human destinies. The dull play, the dull scene, the dull
+speech, is that in which we do not perceive this connection; but when
+once we are interested in the individuals concerned, we are so quick to
+perceive the connection, even though it be exceedingly distant and
+indirect, that the dramatist who should always hold the fear of Mrs.
+Craigie's aphorism consciously before his eyes would unnecessarily
+fetter and restrict himself. Even the driest scientific proposition may,
+under special circumstances, become electrical with drama. The statement
+that the earth moves round the sun does not, in itself, stir our pulses;
+yet what playwright has ever invented a more dramatic utterance than
+that which some one invented for Galileo: &quot;E pur si muove!&quot;? In all
+this, to be sure, I am illustrating, not confuting, Mrs. Craigie's
+maxim. I have no wish to confute it, for, in the largest interpretation,
+it is true; but I suggest that it is true only when attenuated almost
+beyond recognition, and quite beyond the point at which it can be of any
+practical help to the practical dramatist. He must rely on his instinct,
+not numb and bewilder it by constantly subjecting it to the dictates of
+hard-and-fast aesthetic theory.</p>
+
+<p>We shall scarcely come much nearer to helpful truth than the point we
+have already reached, in the principle that all dialogue, except the
+merely mechanical parts--the connective tissue of the play--should
+consist either of &quot;mots de caract&egrave;re&quot; or of &quot;mots de situation.&quot; But if
+we go to French critics for this principle, do not let us go to French
+dramatists for models of practice. It is part of the abiding insularity
+of our criticism that the same writers who cannot forgive an English
+dramatist what they conceive to be a stilted turn of phrase, will pass
+without remark, if not with positive admiration, the outrageously
+rhetorical style which is still prevalent in French drama. Here, for
+instance, is a quite typical passage from <i>Le Duel</i>, by M. Henri
+Lavedan, an author of no small repute; and it would be easy to find even
+more magniloquent tirades in the works of almost any of his
+contemporaries. I translate from the concluding scene between the Abb&eacute;
+and the Duchess:</p>
+
+&nbsp;&nbsp;THE ABB&Eacute;: &quot;In our strange life, there are sometimes unexpected and<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;decisive moments, sovereign, though we know not why. We feel it,<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;that is all!--fulgurant moments, which throw, as it were, a flash of<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;lightning upon our destinies, like those meteors which shine forth<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;from time to time in the heavens, and of which none can say what<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;their purple signifies, whether it be a cataclysm or an apotheosis.<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;Well, it appears to me that we, you and I, are now face to face with<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;one of these moments!&quot;<br>
+
+&nbsp;&nbsp;THE DUCHESS: &quot;So I, too, believe.&quot;<br>
+
+&nbsp;&nbsp;THE ABB&Eacute;: &quot;We must take care, then, that it be an apotheosis. That<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;is why I want--Mon Dieu, madame! how shall I say it to you? Where<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;shall I go to find the chosen words, the words of pure gold, of<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;diamonds, the immaculate words that are worthy of us? All that you<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;are, all that you are worth, I know, and I alone know. You have<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;opened, that I might read it, the book of hours that is your mind. I<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;am in no wise disquieted about you or your future; yet, that I may<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;be fully reassured before we part, I wish, I wish you to tell me, to<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;declare to me, that you are at this very moment in absolute repose,<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;calm as a lake.&quot;<br>
+
+<p>And so Monsieur l'Abb&eacute; goes on for another page. If it be said that this
+ornate eloquence is merely professional, I reply that his brother, the
+atheist doctor, and the Duchess herself, are quite as copious in their
+rhetoric, and scarcely less ornate.</p>
+
+<p>It is a mistake to suppose that &quot;literary merit&quot; can be imparted to
+drama by such flagrant departures from nature; though some critics have
+not yet outgrown that superstition. Let the playwright take to heart an
+anecdote told by Professor Matthews in his <i>Inquiries and Opinions</i>--an
+anecdote of a New England farmer, who, being asked who was the architect
+of his house, replied: &quot;Oh, I built that house myself; but there's a man
+coming down from Boston next week to put on the architecture.&quot; Better no
+style at all than style thus plastered on.</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 25%;">
+
+<p>What is to be said of the possibilities of blank verse as a dramatic
+medium? This is a thorny question, to be handled with caution. One can
+say with perfect assurance, however, that its possibilities are
+problematical, its difficulties and dangers certain.</p>
+
+<p>To discuss the question whether drama in verse is in its very nature
+nobler than drama in prose would lead us away from craftsmanship into
+the realm of pure aesthetics. For my own part, I doubt it. I suspect
+that the drama, like all literature, took its rise in verse, for the
+simple reason that verse is easier to make--and to memorize--than prose.
+Primitive peoples felt with Goethe--though not quite in the same
+sense--that &quot;art is art because it is not nature.&quot; Not merely for
+emotional, but for all sorts of literary, expression, they demanded a
+medium clearly marked off from the speech of everyday life. The drama
+&quot;lisped in numbers, for the numbers came.&quot; Even of so modern a writer
+(comparatively) as Shakespeare, it would scarcely be true to say that he
+&quot;chose&quot; verse as his medium, in the same sense in which Ibsen chose
+prose. He accepted it just as he accepted the other traditions and
+methods of the theatre of his time. In familiar passages he broke away
+from it; but on the whole it provided (among other advantages) a
+convenient and even necessary means of differentiation between the mimic
+personage and the audience, from whom he was not marked off by the
+proscenium arch and the artificial lights which make a world apart of
+the modern stage.</p>
+
+<p>And Shakespeare so glorified this metrical medium as to give it an
+overwhelming prestige. It was extremely easy to write blank verse after
+a fashion; and playwrights who found it flow almost spontaneously from
+their pens were only too ready to overlook the world-wide difference
+between their verse and that of the really great Elizabethans. Just
+after the Restoration, there was an attempt to introduce the rhymed
+couplet as the medium for heroic plays; but that, on the other hand, was
+too difficult to establish itself in general use. Tragedy soon fell back
+upon the fatally facile unrhymed iambic, and a reign of stilted, stodgy
+mediocrity set in. There is nothing drearier in literature than the
+century-and-a-half of English tragedy, from Otway to Sheridan Knowles.
+One is lost in wonder at the genius of the actors who could infuse life
+and passion into those masterpieces of turgid conventionality. The
+worship of the minor Elizabethans, which began with Lamb and culminated
+in Swinburne, brought into fashion (as we have seen) a spasmodic rather
+than a smoothly rhetorical way of writing, but did not really put new
+life into the outworn form. It may almost be called an appalling fact
+that for at least two centuries--from 1700 to 1900--not a single
+blank-verse play was produced which lives, or deserves to live,<a name="FNanchor112"></a><a href="#Footnote_112"><sup>[112]</sup></a> on
+the stage of to-day.</p>
+
+<p>I have thus glanced at the history of the blank-verse play because I
+believe that it can never revive until we clearly realize and admit that
+it is, and has been for a century, thoroughly dead, while, for a century
+before that again, it was only galvanized into a semblance of life by a
+great school of rhetorical acting. The playwright who sets forth with
+the idea that, in writing a poetical drama, he is going to continue the
+great Elizabethan tradition, is starting on a wild-goose chase. The
+great Elizabethan tradition is an incubus to be exorcised. It was
+because Mr. Stephen Phillips was not Elizabethanizing, but clothing a
+vital and personal conception of drama in verse of very appealing
+lyrical quality, that some of us thought we saw in <i>Paolo and Francesca</i>
+the dawn of a new art. Apparently it was a false dawn; but I still
+believe that our orientation was right when we looked for the daybreak
+in the lyric quarter of the heavens. The very summits of Shakespeare's
+achievement are his glorious lyrical passages. Think of the exquisite
+elegiacs of Macbeth! Think of the immortal death-song of Cleopatra! If
+verse has any function on the stage, it is that of imparting lyric
+beauty to passionate speech. For the mere rhetorical &quot;elevation&quot; of
+blank verse we have no use whatever. It consists in saying simple things
+with verbose pomposity. But should there arise a man who combines
+highly-developed dramatic faculty with great lyric genius, it is quite
+possible that he may give us the new poetic drama for which our
+idealists are sighing. He will choose his themes, I take it, from
+legend, or from the domain of pure fantasy--themes which can be steeped
+from first to last in an atmosphere of poetry, as <i>Tristan und Isolde</i>
+is steeped in an atmosphere of music. Of historic themes, I would
+counsel this hypothetical genius to beware. If there are any which can
+fittingly be steeped in a lyric atmosphere, they are to be sought on the
+outskirts of history, or in the debatable land between history and
+legend. The formula of Schiller can no more be revived than the formula
+of Chapman or of Rowe. That a new historic drama awaits us in the
+future, I have little doubt; but it will be written in prose. The idea
+that the poetry of drama is to be sought specifically in verse has long
+ago been exploded by Ibsen and Maeterlinck and D'Annunzio and Synge. But
+there are, no doubt, themes which peculiarly lend themselves to
+lyrico-dramatic treatment, and we shall all welcome the poet who
+discovers and develops them.</p>
+
+<p>One warning let me add, in no uncertain voice. If you choose to write a
+blank-verse play, write it in blank verse, and not in some nondescript
+rhythm which is one long series of jolts and pitfalls to the sensitive
+ear. Many playwrights have thought by this means to escape from the
+monotony of blank verse; not one (that I ever heard of) has achieved
+even temporary success. If you cannot save your blank verse from
+monotony without breaking it on the wheel, that merely means that you
+cannot write blank verse, and had better let it alone. Again, in spite
+of Elizabethan precedent, there is nothing more irritating on the modern
+stage than a play which keeps on changing from verse to prose and back
+again. It gives the verse-passages an air of pompous self-consciousness.
+We seem to hear the author saying, as he shifts his gear, &quot;Look you now!
+I am going to be eloquent and impressive!&quot; The most destructive fault a
+dramatist can commit, in my judgment, is to pass, in the same work of
+art, from one plane of convention to another.<a name="FNanchor113"></a><a href="#Footnote_113"><sup>[113]</sup></a></p>
+
+<hr style="width: 25%;">
+
+<p>We must now consider for a moment the question--if question it can be
+called--of the soliloquy and the aside. The example of Ibsen has gone
+far towards expelling these slovenlinesses from the work of all
+self-respecting playwrights. But theorists spring up every now and then
+to defend them. &quot;The stage is the realm of convention,&quot; they argue. &quot;If
+you accept a room with its fourth wall removed, which nothing short of
+an earthquake could render possible in real life, why should you jib at
+the idea--in which, after all, there is nothing absolutely
+impossible--that a man should utter aloud the thoughts that are passing
+through his mind?&quot;</p>
+
+<p>It is all a question, once more, of planes of convention. No doubt there
+is an irreducible minimum of convention in all drama; but how strange is
+the logic which leaps from that postulate to the assertion that, if we
+admit a minimum, we cannot, or ought not to, exclude a maximum! There
+are plays which do not, and there are plays which do, set forth to give
+as nearly as possible an exact reproduction of the visual and auditory
+realities of life. In the Elizabethan theatre, with its platform stage
+under the open sky, any pictorial exactness of reproduction was clearly
+impossible. Its fundamental conditions necessitated very nearly<a name="FNanchor114"></a><a href="#Footnote_114"><sup>[114]</sup></a> a
+maximum of convention; therefore such conventions as blank verse and the
+soliloquy were simply of a piece with all the rest. In the theatre of
+the eighteenth century and early nineteenth, the proscenium arch--the
+frame of the picture--made pictorial realism theoretically possible. But
+no one recognized the possibility; and indeed, on a candle-lit stage, it
+would have been extremely difficult. As a matter of fact, the
+Elizabethan platform survived in the shape of a long &quot;apron,&quot; projecting
+in front of the proscenium, on which the most important parts of the
+action took place. The characters, that is to say, were constantly
+stepping out of the frame of the picture; and while this visual
+convention maintained itself, there was nothing inconsistent or jarring
+in the auditory convention of the soliloquy. Only in the last quarter of
+the nineteenth century did new methods of lighting, combined with new
+literary and artistic influences, complete the evolutionary process, and
+lead to the withdrawal of the whole stage--the whole dramatic
+domain--within the frame of the picture. It was thus possible to reduce
+visual convention to a minimum so trifling that in a well-set &quot;interior&quot;
+it needs a distinct effort of attention to be conscious of it at all. In
+fact, if we come to think of it, the removal of the fourth wall is
+scarcely to be classed as a convention; for in real life, as we do not
+happen to have eyes in the back of our heads, we are never visually
+conscious of all four walls of a room at once. If, then, in a room that
+is absolutely real, we see a man who (in all other respects) strives to
+be equally real, suddenly begin to expound himself aloud, in good, set
+terms, his own emotions, motives, or purposes, we instantly plump down
+from one plane of convention to another, and receive a disagreeable jar
+to our sense of reality. Up to that moment, all the efforts of author,
+producer, and actor have centred in begetting in us a particular order
+of illusion; and lo! the effort is suddenly abandoned, and the illusion
+shattered by a crying unreality. In modern serious drama, therefore, the
+soliloquy can only be regarded as a disturbing anachronism.<a name="FNanchor115"></a><a href="#Footnote_115"><sup>[115]</sup></a></p>
+
+<p>The physical conditions which tended to banish it from the stage were
+reinforced by the growing perception of its artistic slovenliness. It
+was found that the most delicate analyses could be achieved without its
+aid; and it became a point of honour with the self-respecting artist to
+accept a condition which rendered his material somewhat harder of
+manipulation, indeed, but all the more tempting to wrestle with and
+overcome. A drama with soliloquies and asides is like a picture with
+inscribed labels issuing from the mouths of the figures. In that way,
+any bungler can reveal what is passing in the minds of his personages.
+But the glorious problem of the modern playwright is to make his
+characters reveal the inmost workings of their souls without saying or
+doing anything that they would not say or do in the real world.<a name="FNanchor116"></a><a href="#Footnote_116"><sup>[116]</sup></a></p>
+
+<p>There are degrees, however, even in the makeshift and the slovenly; and
+not all lapses into anachronism are equally to be condemned. One thing
+is so patent as to call for no demonstration: to wit, that the aside is
+ten times worse than the soliloquy. It is always possible that a man
+might speak his thought, but it is glaringly impossible that he should
+speak it so as to be heard by the audience and not heard by others on
+the stage. In French light comedy and farce of the mid-nineteenth
+century, the aside is abused beyond even the license of fantasy. A man
+will speak an aside of several lines over the shoulder of another person
+whom he is embracing. Not infrequently in a conversation between two
+characters, each will comment aside on every utterance of the other,
+before replying to it. The convenience of this method of proceeding is
+manifest. It is as though the author stood by and delivered a running
+commentary on the secret motives and designs of his characters. But it
+is such a crying confession of unreality that, on the English-speaking
+stage, at any rate, it would scarcely be tolerated to-day, even in
+farce. In serious modern drama the aside is now practically unknown. It
+is so obsolete, indeed, that actors are puzzled how to handle it, and
+audiences what to make of it. In an ambitious play produced at a leading
+London theatre about ten years ago, a lady, on leaving the stage,
+announced, in an aside, her intention of drowning herself, and several
+critics, the next day, not understanding that she was speaking aside,
+severely blamed the gentleman who was on the stage with her for not
+frustrating her intention. About the same time, there occurred one of
+the most glaring instances within my recollection of inept
+conventionalism. The hero of the play was Eugene Aram. Alone in his room
+at dead of night, Aram heard Houseman breaking open the outside shutters
+of the window. Designing to entrap the robber, what did he do? He went
+up to the window and drew back the curtains, with a noise loud enough to
+be heard in the next parish. It was inaudible, however, to Houseman on
+the other side of the shutters. He proceeded with his work, opened the
+window, and slipped in, Aram hiding in the shadow. Then, while Houseman
+peered about him with his lantern, not six feet from Aram, and actually
+between him and the audience, Aram indulged in a long and loud monologue
+as to whether he should shoot Houseman or not, ending with a prayer to
+heaven to save him from more blood-guiltiness! Such are the childish
+excesses to which a playwright will presently descend when once he
+begins to dally with facile convention.</p>
+
+<p>An aside is intolerable because it is <i>not</i> heard by the other person on
+the stage: it outrages physical possibility. An overheard soliloquy, on
+the other hand, is intolerable because it <i>is</i> heard. It keeps within
+the bounds of physical possibility, but it stultifies the only logical
+excuse for the soliloquy, namely, that it is an externalization of
+thought which would in reality remain unuttered. This point is so clear
+that I need not insist upon it.</p>
+
+<p>Are there, in modern drama, any admissible soliloquies? A few brief
+ejaculations of joy, or despair, are, of course, natural enough, and no
+one will cavil at them. The approach of mental disease is often marked
+by a tendency to unrestrained loquacity, which goes on even while the
+sufferer is alone; and this distressing symptom may, on rare occasions,
+be put to artistic use. Short of actual derangement, however, there are
+certain states of nervous surexcitation which cause even healthy people
+to talk to themselves; and if an author has the skill to make us realize
+that his character is passing through such a crisis, he may risk a
+soliloquy, not only without reproach, but with conspicuous psychological
+justification. In the third act of Clyde Fitch's play, <i>The Girl with
+the Green Eyes</i>, there is a daring attempt at such a soliloquy, where
+Jinny says: &quot;Good Heavens! why am I maudling on like this to myself out
+loud? It's really nothing--Jack will explain once more that he can't
+explain&quot;--and so on. Whether the attempt justified itself or not would
+depend largely on the acting. In any case, it is clear that the author,
+though as a rule somewhat lax in his craftsmanship, was here aiming at
+psychological truth.</p>
+
+<p>A word must be said as to a special case of the soliloquy--the letter
+which a person speaks aloud as he writes it, or reads over to himself
+aloud. This is a convention to be employed as sparingly as possible; but
+it is not exactly on a level with the ordinary soliloquy. A letter has
+an actual objective existence. The words are formulated in the
+character's mind and are supposed to be externalized, even though the
+actor may not really write them on the paper. Thus the letter has, so to
+speak, the same right to come to the knowledge of the audience as any
+other utterance. It is, in fact, part of the dialogue of the play, only
+that it happens to be inaudible. A soliloquy, on the other hand, has no
+real existence. It is a purely artificial unravelling of motive or
+emotion, which, nine times out of ten, would not become articulate at
+all, even in the speaker's brain or heart. Thus it is by many degrees a
+greater infraction of the surface texture of life than the spoken
+letter, which we may call inadvisable rather than inadmissible.</p>
+
+<p>Some theorists carry their solicitude for surface reality to such an
+extreme as to object to any communication between two characters which
+is not audible to every one on the stage. This is a very idle pedantry.
+The difference between a conversation in undertones and a soliloquy or
+aside is abundantly plain: the one occurs every hour of the day, the
+other never occurs at all. When two people, or a group, are talking
+among themselves, unheard by the others on the stage, it requires a
+special effort to remember that, as a matter of fact, the others
+probably do hear them. Even if the scene be unskilfully arranged, it is
+not the audibility of one group, but the inaudibility of the others,
+that is apt to strike us as unreal.</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 25%;">
+
+<p>This is not the only form of technical pedantry that one occasionally
+encounters. Some years ago, a little band of playwrights and would-be
+playwrights, in fanatical reaction against the Sardou technique, tried
+to lay down a rule that no room on the stage must ever have more than
+one door, and that no letter must ever enter into the mechanism of a
+play. I do not know which contention was the more ridiculous.</p>
+
+<p>Nothing is commoner in modern house-planning than rooms which have at
+least two doors and a French window. We constantly see rooms or halls
+which, if transported to the stage, would provide three or four
+entrances and exits; and this is even more true of the &quot;central heated&quot;
+houses of America than of English houses. The technical purists used
+especially to despise the French window--a harmless, agreeable and very
+common device. Why the playwright should make &quot;one room one door&quot; an
+inexorable canon of art is more than human reason can divine. There are
+cases, no doubt, in which probability demands that the dramatist should
+be content with one practicable opening to his scene, and should plan
+his entrances and exits accordingly. This is no such great feat as might
+be imagined. Indeed a playwright will sometimes deliberately place a
+particular act in a room with one door, because it happens to facilitate
+the movement he desires. It is absurd to lay down any rule in the
+matter, other than that the scene should provide a probable locality for
+whatever action is to take place in it. I am the last to defend the old
+French farce with its ten or a dozen doors through which the characters
+kept scuttling in and out like rabbits in a warren. But the fact that we
+are tired of conventional laxity is no good reason for rushing to the
+other extreme of conventional and hampering austerity.</p>
+
+<p>Similarly, because the forged will and the lost &quot;marriage lines&quot; have
+been rightly relegated to melodrama, is there any reason why we should
+banish from the stage every form of written document? Mr. Bernard Shaw,
+in an article celebrating the advent of the new technique, once wrote,
+&quot;Nowadays an actor cannot open a letter or toss off somebody else's
+glass of poison without having to face a brutal outburst of jeering.&quot;
+What an extravagance to bracket as equally exploded absurdities the
+opening of a letter and the tossing off of the wrong glass of poison!
+Letters--more's the pity--play a gigantic part in the economy of modern
+life. The General Post Office is a vast mechanism for the distribution
+of tragedy, comedy, melodrama, and farce throughout the country and
+throughout the world. To whose door has not Destiny come in the disguise
+of a postman, and slipped its decree, with a double rat-tat, into the
+letter-box? Whose heart has not sickened as he heard the postman's
+footstep pass his door without pausing? Whose hand has not trembled as
+he opened a letter? Whose face has not blanched as he took in its
+import, almost without reading the words? Why, I would fain know, should
+our stage-picture of life be falsified by the banishment of the postman?
+Even the revelation brought about by the discovery of a forgotten letter
+or bundle of letters is not an infrequent incident of daily life. Why
+should it be tabu on the stage? Because the French dramatist, forty
+years ago, would sometimes construct a Chinese-puzzle play around some
+stolen letter or hidden document, are we to suffer no &quot;scrap of paper&quot;
+to play any part whatever in English drama? Even the Hebrew sense of
+justice would recoil from such a conclusion. It would be a case of &quot;The
+fathers have eaten sour grapes, and other people's children must pay the
+penalty.&quot; Against such whimsies of reactionary purism, the playwright's
+sole and sufficient safeguard is a moderate exercise of common sense.</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 25%;">
+
+<p><a name="Footnote_1"></a><a href="#FNanchor1">[1]</a><blockquote> It is against &quot;technic&quot; in this sense of the term that the
+hero of Mr. Howells's admirable novel, <i>The Story of a Play</i>, protests
+in vigorous and memorable terms. &quot;They talk,&quot; says Maxwell, &quot;about a
+knowledge of the stage as if it were a difficult science, instead of a
+very simple piece of mechanism whose limitations and possibilities
+anyone may see at a glance. All that their knowledge of it comes to is
+claptrap, pure and simple.... They think that their exits and entrances
+are great matters and that they must come on with such a speech, and go
+off with another; but it is not of the least importance how they come or
+go, if they have something interesting to say or do.&quot; Maxwell, it must
+be remembered, is speaking of technic as expounded by the star actor,
+who is shilly-shallying--as star actors will--over the production of his
+play. He would not, in his calmer moments, deny that it is of little use
+to have something interesting to say, unless you know how to say it
+interestingly. Such a denial would simply be the negation of the very
+idea of art.</blockquote>
+
+<p><a name="Footnote_2"></a><a href="#FNanchor2">[2]</a><blockquote> A dramatist of my acquaintance adds this footnote: &quot;But, by
+the Lord! They have to give advice. I believe I write more plays of
+other people's than I do of my own.&quot;</blockquote>
+
+<p><a name="Footnote_3"></a><a href="#FNanchor3">[3]</a><blockquote> It may be hoped, too, that even the accomplished dramatist
+may take some interest in considering the reasons for things which he
+does, or does not do, by instinct.</blockquote>
+
+<p><a name="Footnote_4"></a><a href="#FNanchor4">[4]</a><blockquote> This is not a phrase of contempt. The would-be intelligent
+playgoer is vastly to be preferred to the playgoer who makes a boast of
+his unintelligence.</blockquote>
+
+<p><a name="Footnote_5"></a><a href="#FNanchor5">[5]</a><blockquote> In all the arts, however, the very idea of craftsmanship
+implies some sort of external percipient, or, in other words, some sort
+of an audience. In point of sheer self-expression, a child's scrabblings
+with a box of crayons may deserve to rank with the most masterly canvas
+of Velasquez or Vermeer. The real difference between the dramatist and
+other artists, is that they can be <i>their own audience</i>, in a sense in
+which he cannot.</blockquote>
+
+<p><a name="Footnote_6"></a><a href="#FNanchor6">[6]</a><blockquote> Let me guard against the possibility that this might be
+interpreted as a sneer at <i>The Dynasts</i>--a great work by a great poet.</blockquote>
+
+<p><a name="Footnote_7"></a><a href="#FNanchor7">[7]</a><blockquote> For instance, <i>Il ne faut jurer de rien. Il faut qu'une
+porte soit ouverte où ferm&eacute;e. Un bienfait n'est jamais perdu.</i> There is
+also a large class of pieces of which the title, though not itself a
+proverb, makes direct allusion to some fable or proverbial saying: for
+example, <i>Les Brebis de Panurge, La Chasse aux Corbeaux, La Cigale chez
+les Fourmis</i>.</blockquote>
+
+<p><a name="Footnote_8"></a><a href="#FNanchor8">[8]</a><blockquote> I learn, on the best authority, that I am wrong, in point
+of fact, as to the origin of <i>Strife</i>. The play arose in Mr.
+Galsworthy's mind from his actually having seen in conflict the two men
+who were the prototypes of Anthony and Roberts, and thus noted the waste
+and inefficacy arising from the clash of strong characters unaccompanied
+by balance. It was accident that led him to place the two men in an
+environment of capital and labour. In reality, both of them were, if not
+capitalists, at any rate on the side of capital. This interesting
+correction of fact does not invalidate the theory above stated.</blockquote>
+
+<p><a name="Footnote_9"></a><a href="#FNanchor9">[9]</a><blockquote> Mr. Henry Arthur Jones writes to me: &quot;Sometimes I start
+with a scene only, sometimes with a complete idea. Sometimes a play
+splits into two plays, sometimes two or three ideas combine into a
+concrete whole. Always the final play is altered out of all knowledge
+from its first idea.&quot; An interesting account of the way in which two
+very different plays by M. de Curel: <i>L'Envers d'une Sainte</i> and
+<i>L'Invit&eacute;e</i>,--grew out of one and the same initial idea, may be found in
+<i>L'Ann&eacute;e Psychologique</i>, 1894, p. 121.</blockquote>
+
+<p><a name="Footnote_10"></a><a href="#FNanchor10">[10]</a><blockquote> In my discussion of this point, I have rather simplified
+Aristotle's position. He appears to make action the essential element in
+tragedy and not merely the necessary vehicle of character. &quot;In a play,&quot;
+he says, &quot;they do not act in order to portray the characters, they
+include the characters for the sake of the action. So that it is the
+action in it, <i>i.e.</i> its Fable or Plot, that is the end and purpose of
+the tragedy, and the end is everywhere the chief thing. Besides this, a
+tragedy is impossible without action, but there may be one without
+character.&quot; (Bywater's Translation.) The last sentence is, in my view,
+the gist of the matter; the preceding sentences greatly overstate the
+case. There was a lively controversy on the subject in the <i>Times</i>
+Literary Supplement in May, 1902. It arose from a review of Mr.
+Phillips's <i>Paolo and Francesco</i>, and Mr. Andrew Lang, Mr. Churton
+Collins, and Mr. A.B. Walkley took part in it.</blockquote>
+
+<p><a name="Footnote_11"></a><a href="#FNanchor11">[11]</a><blockquote> &quot;Are the first beginnings of imaginative conception
+directed by the will? Are they, indeed, conscious at all? Do they not
+rather emerge unbidden from the vague limbo of sub-consciousness?&quot; A.B.
+Walkley, <i>Drama and Life</i>, p. 85.</blockquote>
+
+<p><a name="Footnote_12"></a><a href="#FNanchor12">[12]</a><blockquote> Sardou kept a file of about fifty <i>dossiers</i>, each bearing
+the name of an unwritten play, and containing notes and sketches for it.
+Dumas, on the other hand, always finished one play before he began to
+think of another. See <i>L'Ann&eacute;e Psychologique</i>, 1894, pp. 67, 76.</blockquote>
+
+<p><a name="Footnote_13"></a><a href="#FNanchor13">[13]</a><blockquote> &quot;My experience is,&quot; a dramatist writes to me, &quot;that you
+never deliberately choose a theme. You lie awake, or you go walking, and
+suddenly there flashes into your mind a contrast, a piece of spiritual
+irony, an old incident carrying some general significance. Round this
+your mind broods, and there is the germ of your play.&quot; Again be writes:
+&quot;It is not advisable for a playwright to start out at all unless he has
+so felt or seen something, that he feels, as it matures in his mind,
+that he must express it, and in dramatic form.&quot;</blockquote>
+
+<p><a name="Footnote_14"></a><a href="#FNanchor14">[14]</a><blockquote> <i>Etudes Critiques</i>, vol. vii, pp. 153 and 207.</blockquote>
+
+<p><a name="Footnote_15"></a><a href="#FNanchor15">[15]</a><blockquote> In the most aggravated cases, the misunderstanding is
+maintained by a persevering use of pronouns in place of proper names:
+&quot;he&quot; and &quot;she&quot; being taken by the hearer to mean A. and B., when the
+speaker is in fact referring to X. and Y. This ancient trick becomes the
+more irritating the longer the <i>quiproquo</i> is dragged out.</blockquote>
+
+<p><a name="Footnote_16"></a><a href="#FNanchor16">[16]</a><blockquote> The Lowland Scottish villager. It is noteworthy that Mr.
+J.M. Barrie, who himself belongs to this race, has an almost unique gift
+of extracting dramatic effect out of taciturnity, and even out
+of silence.</blockquote>
+
+<p><a name="Footnote_17"></a><a href="#FNanchor17">[17]</a><blockquote> There is a somewhat similar incident in Clyde Fitch's play,
+<i>The Moth and the Flame</i>.</blockquote>
+
+<p><a name="Footnote_18"></a><a href="#FNanchor18">[18]</a><blockquote> <i>Les Corbeaux</i>, by Henri Becque, might perhaps be classed
+as a bankruptcy play, though the point of it is that the Vigneron family
+is not really bankrupt at all, but is unblushingly fleeced by the
+partner and the lawyer of the deceased Vigneron, who play into each
+other's hands.</blockquote>
+
+<p><a name="Footnote_19"></a><a href="#FNanchor19">[19]</a><blockquote> &quot;Dramatic&quot; has recently become one of the most overworked
+words in the vocabulary of journalism. It constantly appears, not only
+in the text of the picturesque reporter, but in head-lines and on
+bulletin-boards. When, on July 20, 1911, Mr. Asquith wrote to Mr.
+Balfour to inform him that the King had guaranteed the creation of
+peers, should it prove necessary for the passing of the Parliament Bill,
+one paper published the news under this headline: &quot;DRAMATIC ANNOUNCEMENT
+BY THE PRIME MINISTER,&quot; and the parliamentary correspondent of another
+paper wrote: &quot;With dramatic suddenness and swiftness, the Prime Minister
+hurled his thunderbolt at the wavering Tory party yesterday.&quot; As a
+matter of fact, the letter was probably not &quot;hurled&quot; more suddenly or
+swiftly than the most ordinary invitation to dinner: nor can its
+contents have been particularly surprising to any one. It was probably
+the conclusiveness, the finality, of the announcement that struck these
+writers as &quot;dramatic.&quot; The letter put an end to all dubiety with a
+&quot;short, sharp shock.&quot; It was, in fact, crisp. As a rule, however,
+&quot;dramatic&quot; is employed by the modern journalist simply as a rather
+pretentious synonym for the still more hackneyed &quot;startling.&quot;</blockquote>
+
+<p><a name="Footnote_20"></a><a href="#FNanchor20">[20]</a><blockquote> As a specimen, and a successful specimen, of this new
+technic, I may cite Miss Elizabeth Baker's very interesting play,
+<i>Chains</i>. There is absolutely no &quot;story&quot; in it, no complication of
+incidents, not even any emotional tension worth speaking of. Another
+recent play of something the same type, <i>The Way the Money Goes</i>, by
+Lady Bell, was quite thrilling by comparison. There we saw a workman's
+wife bowed down by a terrible secret which threatened to wreck her whole
+life--the secret that she had actually run into debt to the amount of
+&pound;30. Her situation was dramatic in the ordinary sense of the word, very
+much as Nora's situation is dramatic when she knows that Krogstad's
+letter is in Helmer's hands. But in <i>Chains</i> there is not even this
+simple form of excitement and suspense. A city clerk, oppressed by the
+deadly monotony and narrowness of his life, thinks of going to
+Australia--and doesn't go: that is the sum and substance of the action.
+Also, by way of underplot, a shopgirl, oppressed by the deadly monotony
+and narrowness of her life, thinks of escaping from it by marrying a
+middle-aged widower--and doesn't do it. If any one had told the late
+Francisque Sarcey, or the late Clement Scott, that a play could be made
+out of this slender material, which should hold an audience absorbed
+through four acts, and stir them to real enthusiasm, these eminent
+critics would have thought him a madman. Yet Miss Baker has achieved
+this feat, by the simple process of supplementing competent observation
+with a fair share of dramatic instinct.</blockquote>
+
+<p><a name="Footnote_21"></a><a href="#FNanchor21">[21]</a><blockquote> If the essence of drama is crisis, it follows that nothing
+can be more dramatic than a momentous choice which may make or mar both
+the character and the fortune of the chooser and of others. There is an
+element of choice in all action which is, or seems to be, the product of
+free will; but there is a peculiar crispness of effect when two
+alternatives are clearly formulated, and the choice is made after a
+mental struggle, accentuated, perhaps, by impassioned advocacy of the
+conflicting interests. Such scenes are <i>Coriolanus</i>, v. 3, the scene
+between Ellida, Wangel, and the Stranger in the last act of <i>The Lady
+from the Sea</i>, and the concluding scene of <i>Candida</i>.</blockquote>
+
+<p><a name="Footnote_22"></a><a href="#FNanchor22">[22]</a><blockquote> Sardou wrote careful and detailed scenarios, Dumas <i>fils</i>
+held it a waste of time to do so. Pailleron wrote &quot;enormous&quot; scenarios,
+Meilhac very brief ones, or none at all. Mr. Galsworthy, rather to my
+surprise, disdains, and even condemns, the scenario, holding that a
+theme becomes lifeless when you put down its skeleton on paper. Sir
+Arthur Pinero says: &quot;Before beginning to write a play, I always make
+sure, by means of a definite scheme, that there is <i>a</i> way of doing it;
+but whether I ultimately follow that way is a totally different matter.&quot;
+Mr. Alfred Sutro practically confesses to a scenario. He says: &quot;Before I
+start writing the dialogue of a play, I make sure that I shall have an
+absolutely free hand over the entrances and exits: in other words, that
+there is ample and legitimate reason for each character appearing in any
+particular scene, and ample motive for his leaving it.&quot; Mr. Granville
+Barker does not put on paper a detailed scenario. He says: &quot;I plan the
+general scheme, and particularly the balance of the play, in my head;
+but this, of course, does not depend entirely on entrances and exits.&quot;
+Mr. Henry Arthur Jones says: &quot;I know the leading scenes, and the general
+course of action in each act, before I write a line. When I have got the
+whole story clear, and divided into acts, I very carefully construct the
+first act, as a series of scenes between such and such of the
+characters. When the first act is written I carefully construct the
+second act in the same way--and so on. I sometimes draw up twenty
+scenarios for an act before I can get it to go straight.&quot;</blockquote>
+
+<p><a name="Footnote_23"></a><a href="#FNanchor23">[23]</a><blockquote> A friend of the late Clyde Fitch writes to me: &quot;Fitch was
+often astonished at the way in which his characters developed. He tried
+to make them do certain things: they did others.&quot;</blockquote>
+
+<p><a name="Footnote_24"></a><a href="#FNanchor24">[24]</a><blockquote> This account of the matter seems to find support in a
+statement, by M. Fran&ccedil;ois de Curel, an accomplished psychologist, to the
+effect that during the first few days of work at a play he is &quot;clearly
+conscious of creating,&quot; but that gradually he gets &quot;into the skin&quot; of
+his characters, and appears to work by instinct. No doubt some artists
+are actually subject to a sort of hallucination, during which they seem
+rather to record than to invent the doings of their characters. But this
+somewhat morbid condition should scarcely be cultivated by the
+dramatist, whose intelligence should always keep a light rein on his
+more instinctive mental processes. See <i>L'Ann&eacute;e Psychologique</i>, 1894.
+p. 120.</blockquote>
+
+<p><a name="Footnote_25"></a><a href="#FNanchor25">[25]</a><blockquote> Sir Arthur Pinero says: &quot;The beginning of a play to me is a
+little world of people. I live with them, get familiar with them, and
+<i>they</i> tell me the story.&quot; This may sound not unlike the remark of the
+novelist above quoted; but the intention was quite different. Sir Arthur
+simply meant that the story came to him as the characters took on life
+in his imagination. Mr. H.A. Jones writes: &quot;When you have a character or
+several characters you haven't a play. You may keep these in your mind
+and nurse them till they combine in a piece of action; but you haven't
+got your play till you have theme, characters, and action all fused. The
+process with me is as purely automatic and spontaneous as dreaming; in
+fact it is really dreaming while you are awake.&quot;</blockquote>
+
+<p><a name="Footnote_26"></a><a href="#FNanchor26">[26]</a><blockquote> &quot;Here,&quot; says a well-known playwright, &quot;is a common
+experience. You are struck by an idea with which you fall in love. 'Ha!'
+you say. 'What a superb scene where the man shall find the missing will
+under the sofa! If that doesn't make them sit up, what will?' You begin
+the play. The first act goes all right, and the second act goes all
+right. You come to the third act, and somehow it won't go at all. You
+battle with it for weeks in vain; and then it suddenly occurs to you,
+'Why, I see what's wrong! It's that confounded scene where the man finds
+the will under the sofa! Out it must come!' You cut it out, and at once
+all goes smooth again. But you have thrown overboard the great effect
+that first tempted you.&quot;</blockquote>
+
+<p><a name="Footnote_27"></a><a href="#FNanchor27">[27]</a><blockquote> The manuscripts of Dumas <i>fils</i> are said to contain, as a
+rule, about four times as much matter as the printed play! (Parigot:
+<i>G&eacute;nie et M&eacute;tier</i>, p. 243). This probably means, however, that he
+preserved tentative and ultimately rejected scenes, which most
+playwrights destroy as they go along.</blockquote>
+
+<p><a name="Footnote_28"></a><a href="#FNanchor28">[28]</a><blockquote> Lowell points out that this assertion of Heminge and
+Condell merely shows them to have been unfamiliar with the simple
+phenomenon known as a fair copy.</blockquote>
+
+<p><a name="Footnote_29"></a><a href="#FNanchor29">[29]</a><blockquote> Since writing this I have learnt that my conjecture is
+correct, at any rate as regards some of M. Hervieu's plays.</blockquote>
+
+<p><a name="Footnote_30"></a><a href="#FNanchor30">[30]</a><blockquote> See Chapters XIII and XVI.</blockquote>
+
+<p><a name="Footnote_31"></a><a href="#FNanchor31">[31]</a><blockquote> This view is expressed with great emphasis by Dumas <i>fils</i>
+in the preface to <i>La Princesse Georges</i>. &quot;You should not begin your
+work,&quot; he says, &quot;until you have your concluding scene, movement and
+speech clear in your mind. How can you tell what road you ought to take
+until you know where you are going?&quot; It is perhaps a more apparent than
+real contradiction of this rule that, until <i>Iris</i> was three parts
+finished, Sir Arthur Pinero intended the play to end with the throttling
+of Iris by Maldonado. The actual end is tantamount to a murder, though
+Iris is not actually killed.</blockquote>
+
+<p><a name="Footnote_32"></a><a href="#FNanchor32">[32]</a><blockquote> See Chapter XVIII.</blockquote>
+
+<p><a name="Footnote_33"></a><a href="#FNanchor33">[33]</a><blockquote> See Chapter XX.</blockquote>
+
+<p><a name="Footnote_34"></a><a href="#FNanchor34">[34]</a><blockquote> Most of the dramatists whom I have consulted are opposed
+to the principle of &quot;roughing out&quot; the big scenes first, and then
+imbedding them, as it were, in their context. Sir Arthur Pinero goes the
+length of saying: &quot;I can never go on to page 2 until I am sure that page
+1 is as right as I can make it. Indeed, when an act is finished, I send
+it at once to the printers, confident that I shall not have to go back
+upon it.&quot; Mr. Alfred Sutro says: &quot;I write a play straight ahead from
+beginning to end, taking practically as long over the first act as over
+the last three.&quot; And Mr. Granville Barker: &quot;I always write the beginning
+of a play first and the end last: but as to writing 'straight ahead'--it
+sounds like what one may be able to do in Heaven.&quot; But almost all
+dramatists, I take it, jot down brief passages of dialogue which they
+may or may not eventually work into the texture of their play.</blockquote>
+
+<p><a name="Footnote_35"></a><a href="#FNanchor35">[35]</a><blockquote> One is not surprised to learn that Sardou &quot;did his
+stage-management as he went along,&quot; and always knew exactly the position
+of his characters from moment to moment.</blockquote>
+
+<p><a name="Footnote_36"></a><a href="#FNanchor36">[36]</a><blockquote> And aurally, it may be added. Sarcey comments on the
+impossibility of a scene in Zola's <i>Pot Bouille</i> in which the so-called
+&quot;lovers,&quot; Octave Mouret and Blanche, throw open the window of the garret
+in which they are quarrelling, and hear the servants in the courtyard
+outside discussing their intrigue. In order that the comments of the
+servants might reach the ears of the audience, they had to be shouted in
+a way (says M. Sarcey) that was fatal to the desired illusion.</blockquote>
+
+<p><a name="Footnote_37"></a><a href="#FNanchor37">[37]</a><blockquote> Partially, too, they were under the influence of antiquity;
+but the ancients were very discreet in their use of significant names.
+Only in satyr-plays, in the comic epics, and for a few extravagant
+characters in comedy (such as the boastful soldier) were grotesque
+appellations employed. For the rest, the Greek habit of nomenclature
+made it possible to use significant names which were at the same time
+probable enough in daily life. For example, a slave might be called
+Onesimus, &quot;useful,&quot; or a soldier Polemon, to imply his warlike function;
+but both names would be familiar to the audience in actual use.</blockquote>
+
+<p><a name="Footnote_38"></a><a href="#FNanchor38">[38]</a><blockquote> Writing of <i>Le Supplice d'une Femme</i>, Alexandre Dumas
+<i>fils</i> said: &quot;This situation I declare to be one of the most dramatic
+and interesting in all drama. But a situation is not an idea. An idea,
+has a beginning, a middle and an end: an exposition, a development, a
+conclusion. Any one can relate a dramatic situation: the art lies in
+preparing it, getting it accepted, rendering it possible, especially in
+untying the knot.&quot;</blockquote>
+
+<p><a name="Footnote_39"></a><a href="#FNanchor39">[39]</a><blockquote> This is what we regard as peculiarly the method of Ibsen.
+There is, however, this essential difference, that, instead of narrating
+his preliminaries in cold blood, Ibsen, in his best work, <i>dramatizes</i>
+the narration.</blockquote>
+
+<p><a name="Footnote_40"></a><a href="#FNanchor40">[40]</a><blockquote> See Chapter XII.</blockquote>
+
+<p><a name="Footnote_41"></a><a href="#FNanchor41">[41]</a><blockquote> This must not be taken to imply that, in a good
+stage-version of the play, Fortinbras should be altogether omitted. Mr.
+Forbes Robertson, in his Lyceum revival of 1897, found several
+advantages in his retention. Among the rest, it permitted the retention
+of one of Hamlet's most characteristic soliloquies.</blockquote>
+
+<p><a name="Footnote_42"></a><a href="#FNanchor42">[42]</a><blockquote> I omit all speculation as to the form which the story
+assumed in the <i>Ur-Hamlet</i>. We have no evidence on the point; and, as
+the poet was no doubt free to remodel the material as he thought fit,
+even in following his original he was making a deliberate
+artistic choice.</blockquote>
+
+<p><a name="Footnote_43"></a><a href="#FNanchor43">[43]</a><blockquote> Shakespeare committed it in <i>Romeo and Juliet</i>, where he
+made Friar Laurence, in the concluding scene, retell the whole story of
+the tragedy. Even in so early a play, such a manifest redundancy seems
+unaccountable. A narrative of things already seen may, of course, be a
+trait of character in the person delivering it; but, in that case, it
+will generally be mendacious (for instance, Falstaff and the men in
+buckram). Or it may be introduced for the sake of its effect upon the
+characters to whom the narration is addressed. But in these cases its
+purpose is no longer to convey information to the audience--it belongs,
+not to the &quot;intelligence department,&quot; but to the department of
+analysis.</blockquote>
+
+<p><a name="Footnote_44"></a><a href="#FNanchor44">[44]</a><blockquote> I say &quot;variety&quot; rather than complexity because I take it
+that the emotions of all concerned are here too intense to be very
+complex. The effect of the scene would appear to lie in the rapidly
+increasing intensity of comparatively simple emotions in Hamlet, in the
+King, in the Queen, and in the amazed and bewildered courtiers.</blockquote>
+
+<p><a name="Footnote_45"></a><a href="#FNanchor45">[45]</a><blockquote> This excludes <i>Love's Comedy, Brand, Peer Gynt</i>, and
+<i>Emperor and Galilean</i>.</blockquote>
+
+<p><a name="Footnote_46"></a><a href="#FNanchor46">[46]</a><blockquote> See, for example, <i>King Henry VIII</i>, Act IV, and the
+opening scene of Tennyson's <i>Queen Mary</i>.</blockquote>
+
+<p><a name="Footnote_47"></a><a href="#FNanchor47">[47]</a><blockquote> This rule of economy does not necessarily exclude a group
+of characters performing something like the function of the antique
+Chorus; that is to say, commenting upon the action from a more or less
+disinterested point of view. The function of <i>Kaffee-Klatsch</i> in
+<i>Pillars of Society</i> is not at all that of the Chorus, but rather that
+of the Euripidean Prologue, somewhat thinly disguised.</blockquote>
+
+<p><a name="Footnote_48"></a><a href="#FNanchor48">[48]</a><blockquote> It is perhaps worth nothing that Gabriele d'Annunzio in
+<i>La Gioconda</i>, reverts to, and outdoes, the French classic convention,
+by giving us three actors and four confidants. The play consists of a
+crisis in three lives, passively, though sympathetically, contemplated
+by what is in effect a Chorus of two men and two women. It would be
+interesting to inquire why, in this particular play, such an abuse of
+the confidant seems quite admissible, if not conspicuously right.</blockquote>
+
+<p><a name="Footnote_49"></a><a href="#FNanchor49">[49]</a><blockquote> Dryden, in his <i>Essay of Dramatic Poesy</i>, represents this
+method as being characteristic of Greek tragedy as a whole. The tragic
+poet, he says, &quot;set the audience, as it were, at the post where the race
+is to be concluded; and, saving them the tedious expectation of seeing
+the poet set out and ride the beginning of the course, they suffer you
+not to behold him, till he is in sight of the goal and just upon you.&quot;
+Dryden seems to think that the method was forced upon them by &quot;the rule
+of time.&quot;</blockquote>
+
+<p><a name="Footnote_50"></a><a href="#FNanchor50">[50]</a><blockquote> It is a rash enterprise to reconstruct Ibsen, but one
+cannot help wondering how he would have planned <i>A Doll's House</i> had he
+written it in the 'eighties instead of the 'seventies. One can imagine a
+long opening scene between Helmer and Nora in which a great deal of the
+necessary information might have been conveyed; while it would have
+heightened by contrast the effect of the great final duologue as we now
+possess it. Such information as could not possibly have been conveyed in
+dialogue with Helmer might, one would think, have been left for Nora's
+first scene with Krogstad, the effect of which it would have enhanced.
+Perhaps Mrs. Linden might with advantage have been retained, though not
+in her present character of confidant, in order to show Nora in relation
+to another woman.</blockquote>
+
+<p><a name="Footnote_51"></a><a href="#FNanchor51">[51]</a><blockquote> See Chapter XXIII.</blockquote>
+
+<p><a name="Footnote_52"></a><a href="#FNanchor52">[52]</a><blockquote> Henri Becque's two best-known plays aptly exemplify the two
+types of opening. In <i>Les Corbeaux</i> we have almost an entire act of calm
+domesticity in which the only hint of coming trouble is an allusion to
+Vigneron's attacks of vertigo. In <i>La Parisienne</i> Clotilde and Lafont
+are in the thick of a vehement quarrel over a letter. It proceeds for
+ten minutes or so, at the end of which Clotilde says, &quot;Prenez garde,
+voil&agrave; mon mari!&quot;--and we find that the two are not husband and wife, but
+wife and lover.</blockquote>
+
+<p><a name="Footnote_53"></a><a href="#FNanchor53">[53]</a><blockquote> Mrs. Craigie (&quot;John Oliver Hobbes&quot;) opened her very
+successful play, <i>The Ambassador</i>, with a scene between Juliet
+Desborough and her sister Alice, a nun, who apparently left her convent
+specially to hear her sister's confession, and then returned to it for
+ever. This was certainly not an economical form of exposition, but it
+was not unsuited to the type of play.</blockquote>
+
+<p><a name="Footnote_54"></a><a href="#FNanchor54">[54]</a><blockquote> In that charming comedy, <i>Rosemary</i>, by Messrs. Parker and
+Carson, there is a gap of fifty years between the last act and its
+predecessor; but the so-called last act is only an &quot;epi-monologue.&quot;</blockquote>
+
+<p><a name="Footnote_55"></a><a href="#FNanchor55">[55]</a><blockquote> Or at most two closely connected characters: for instance,
+a husband and wife.</blockquote>
+
+<p><a name="Footnote_56"></a><a href="#FNanchor56">[56]</a><blockquote> There are several cases in Greek drama in which a hero
+leaves the stage to fight a battle and returns victorious in a few
+minutes. See, for example, the <i>Supplices</i> of Euripides.</blockquote>
+
+<p><a name="Footnote_57"></a><a href="#FNanchor57">[57]</a><blockquote> So far was Shakespeare from ignoring the act-division that
+it is a question whether his art did not sometimes suffer from the
+supposed necessity of letting a fourth act intervene between the
+culmination in the third act and the catastrophe in the fifth.</blockquote>
+
+<p><a name="Footnote_58"></a><a href="#FNanchor58">[58]</a><blockquote> I think it may be said that the majority of modern serious
+plays are in four acts. It is a favourite number with Sir Arthur Pinero,
+Mr. Henry Arthur Jones, Mr. Clyde Fitch, and Mr. Alfred Sutro.</blockquote>
+
+<p><a name="Footnote_59"></a><a href="#FNanchor59">[59]</a><blockquote> This must not be taken to mean that in no case is a change
+of scene within the act advisable. The point to be considered is whether
+the author does or does not want to give the audience time for
+reflection--time to return to the real world--between two episodes. If
+it is of great importance that they should not do so, then a rapid
+change of scene may be the less of two evils. In this case the lights
+should be kept lowered in order to show that no interact is intended;
+but the fashion of changing the scene on a pitch-dark stage, without
+dropping the curtain, is much to be deprecated. If the revolving stage
+should ever become a common institution in English-speaking countries,
+dramatists would doubtless be more tempted than they are at present to
+change their scenes within the act; but I doubt whether the tendency
+would be wholly advantageous. No absolute rule, however, can be laid
+down, and it may well be maintained that a true dramatic artist could
+only profit by the greater flexibility of his medium.</blockquote>
+
+<p><a name="Footnote_60"></a><a href="#FNanchor60">[60]</a><blockquote> He was, in the first draft; and Lona Hessel was only a
+distant relative of Bernick's.</blockquote>
+
+<p><a name="Footnote_61"></a><a href="#FNanchor61">[61]</a><blockquote> The Greeks, who knew most things, knew the value of
+manageable dimensions and simple structure in a work of art, and had a
+word to express that combination of qualities--the word <i>eusynopton</i>.</blockquote>
+
+<p><a name="Footnote_62"></a><a href="#FNanchor62">[62]</a><blockquote> The view that the dramatist has only to think of pleasing
+himself is elsewhere dealt with.</blockquote>
+
+<p><a name="Footnote_63"></a><a href="#FNanchor63">[63]</a><blockquote> Two dramatists who have read these pages in proof, exclaim
+at this passage. The one says, &quot;No, no!&quot; the other asks, &quot;Why?&quot; I can
+only reiterate that, where there exists a strong and generally accepted
+tradition, the dramatist not only runs counter to it at his peril, but
+goes outside the true domain of his art in so doing. New truth, in
+history, must be established either by new documents, or by a careful
+and detailed re-interpretation of old documents; but the stage is not
+the place either for the production of documents or for historical
+exegesis. It is needless to say that where the popular mind is unbiased,
+the dramatist's hands are free. For instance, I presume that one might,
+in England, take any view one pleased of the character of Mary. Queen of
+Scots; but a highly unfavourable view would scarcely be accepted by
+Scottish audiences. Similarly, it would be both dangerous and
+unprofitable to present on the English stage any very damaging &quot;scandal
+about Queen Elizabeth.&quot; Historical criticism, I understand, does not
+accept the view that Robespierre was mainly responsible for the Reign of
+Terror, and that his death betokened a general revolt against his
+sanguinary tyranny; but it would be very hard for any dramatist to
+secure general acceptance for a more accurate reading of his character
+and function. Some further remarks on this subject will be found in
+Chapter XIII.</blockquote>
+
+<p><a name="Footnote_64"></a><a href="#FNanchor64">[64]</a><blockquote> A malicious anecdote to a similar effect was current in the
+early days of Sir Henry Irving's career. It was said that at Bristol one
+night, when Mr. Irving, as Hamlet, &quot;took his call&quot; after the first act,
+a man turned to his neighbour in the pit and said, &quot;Can you tell me,
+sir, does that young man appear much in this play?&quot; His neighbour
+informed him that Hamlet was rather largely concerned in the action,
+whereupon the inquirer remarked, &quot;Oh! Then I'm off!&quot;</blockquote>
+
+<p><a name="Footnote_65"></a><a href="#FNanchor65">[65]</a><blockquote> If it be well done, it may remain highly effective in spite
+of being discounted by previous knowledge. For instance, the clock-trick
+in <i>Raffles</i> was none the less amusing because every one was on the
+look-out for it.</blockquote>
+
+<p><a name="Footnote_66"></a><a href="#FNanchor66">[66]</a><blockquote> The question whether it is ever politic for a playwright to
+keep a secret from his audience is discussed elsewhere. What I have here
+in mind is not an ordinary secret, but a more or less tricky effect of
+surprise.</blockquote>
+
+<p><a name="Footnote_67"></a><a href="#FNanchor67">[67]</a><blockquote> The pleasure received from exceptionally good acting is, of
+course, a different matter. I assume that the acting is merely competent
+enough to pass muster without irritating us, and so distracting our
+attention.</blockquote>
+
+<p><a name="Footnote_68"></a><a href="#FNanchor68">[68]</a><blockquote> I myself expressed it in slightly different terms nearly
+ten years ago. &quot;Curiosity,&quot; I said, &quot;is the accidental relish of a
+single night; whereas the essential and abiding pleasure of the theatre
+lies in foreknowledge. In relation to the characters in the drama, the
+audience are as gods looking before and after. Sitting in the theatre,
+we taste, for a moment, the glory of omniscience. With vision unsealed,
+we watch the gropings of purblind mortals after happiness, and smile at
+their stumblings, their blunders, their futile quests, their misplaced
+exultations, their groundless panics. To keep a secret from us is to
+reduce us to their level, and deprive us of our clairvoyant aloofness.
+There may be a pleasure in that too; we may join with zest in the game
+of blind-man's-buff; but the theatre is in its essence a place where we
+are privileged to take off the bandage we wear in daily life, and to
+contemplate, with laughter or with tears, the blindfold gambols of our
+neighbours.&quot;</blockquote>
+
+<p><a name="Footnote_69"></a><a href="#FNanchor69">[69]</a><blockquote> Here an acute critic writes: &quot;On the whole I agree; but I
+do think there is dramatic interest to be had out of curiosity, through
+the identification, so to speak, of the audience with the discovering
+persons on the stage. It is an interest of sympathy, not to be despised,
+rather than an interest of actual curiosity.&quot;</blockquote>
+
+<p><a name="Footnote_70"></a><a href="#FNanchor70">[70]</a><blockquote> That great story-teller, Alexandra Dumas <i>pere,</i> those a
+straightforward way of carrying forward the interest at the end of the
+first act of <i>Henri III et sa Cour.</i> The Due de Guise, insulted by
+Saint-M&eacute;grin, beckons to his henchman and says, as the curtain falls,
+<i>&quot;Qu'on me cherche les m&egrave;mes hommes qui ont assassin&eacute; Dugast!&quot;</i></blockquote>
+
+<p><a name="Footnote_71"></a><a href="#FNanchor71">[71]</a><blockquote> There are limits to the validity of this rule, as applied
+to minor incidents. For example, it may sometimes be a point of art to
+lead the audience to expect the appearance of one person, when in fact
+another is about to enter. But it is exceedingly dangerous to baffle the
+carefully fostered anticipation of an important scene. See Chapters
+XVII and XXI.</blockquote>
+
+<p><a name="Footnote_72"></a><a href="#FNanchor72">[72]</a><blockquote> This method of heightening the tension would have been
+somewhat analogous to that employed by Oscar Wilde in Lady Windermere's
+instructions to her butler, cited on p. 115.</blockquote>
+
+<p><a name="Footnote_73"></a><a href="#FNanchor73">[73]</a><blockquote> Dryden (<i>Of Dramatic Poesy</i>, p. 56, ed. Arnold, 1903) says:
+&quot;Our plays, besides the main design, have underplots or by-concernments,
+of less considerable persons and intrigues, which are carried on with
+the motion of the main plot; as they say the orb of the fixed stars, and
+those of the planets, though they have motions of their own, are whirled
+about by the motion of the <i>primum mobile</i>, in which they are
+contained.&quot; This is an admirable description of the ideal underplot, as
+conceived by our forefathers; but we find that two lines of tension jar
+with and weaken each other.</blockquote>
+
+<p><a name="Footnote_74"></a><a href="#FNanchor74">[74]</a><blockquote> <i>Of Dramatic Poesy,</i> ed. Arnold, 1903, p. 60.</blockquote>
+
+<p><a name="Footnote_75"></a><a href="#FNanchor75">[75]</a><blockquote> <i>The World</i>, December 20, 1899.</blockquote>
+
+<p><a name="Footnote_76"></a><a href="#FNanchor76">[76]</a><blockquote> At the end of the first act of <i>Lady Inger of Ostraat</i>,
+Ibsen evidently intends to produce a startling effect through the sudden
+appearance of Olaf Skaktavl in Lady Inger's hall. But as he has totally
+omitted to tell us who the strange man is, the incident has no meaning
+for us. In 1855 Ibsen had all his technical lessons yet to learn.</blockquote>
+
+<p><a name="Footnote_77"></a><a href="#FNanchor77">[77]</a><blockquote> The fact that Mr. Phillips should have deemed such a
+foreshadowing necessary shows how instinctively a dramatist feels that
+the logic of his art requires him to assume that his audience is
+ignorant of his fable. In reality, very few members of the first-night
+audience, or of any other, can have depended on old Angela's
+vaticination for the requisite foresight of events. But this does not
+prove Angela to be artistically superfluous.</blockquote>
+
+<p><a name="Footnote_78"></a><a href="#FNanchor78">[78]</a><blockquote> See pp. 118, 240.</blockquote>
+
+<p><a name="Footnote_79"></a><a href="#FNanchor79">[79]</a><blockquote> There is no special harm in this: the question of exits and
+entrances and their mechanism is discussed in Chapter XXIII.</blockquote>
+
+<p><a name="Footnote_80"></a><a href="#FNanchor80">[80]</a><blockquote> This might be said of the scene of the second act of <i>The
+Benefit of the Doubt</i>; but here the actual stage-topography is natural
+enough. The author, however, is rather over-anxious to emphasize the
+acoustic relations of the two rooms.</blockquote>
+
+<p><a name="Footnote_81"></a><a href="#FNanchor81">[81]</a><blockquote> For example, in his criticism of Becque's <i>La Parisienne
+(Quarante Ans de Th&eacute;&acirc;tre</i>, VI, p. 364), he tells how, at the end o&pound; the
+second act, one of his neighbours said to him, &quot;Eh! bien, vous voil&agrave;
+bien attrap&eacute;! O est la <i>sc&egrave;ne &agrave; faire</i>?&quot; &quot;I freely admit,&quot; he
+continues, &quot;that there is no <i>sc&egrave;ne &agrave; faire</i>; if there had been no third
+act I should not have been greatly astonished. When you make it your
+business to recite on the stage articles from the <i>Vie Parisienne</i>, it
+makes no difference whether you stop at the end of the second article or
+at the end of the third.&quot; This clearly implies that a play in which
+there is no <i>sc&egrave;ne &agrave; faire</i> is nothing but a series of newspaper
+sketches. Becque, one fancies, might have replied that the scene between
+Clotilde and Monsieur Simpson at the beginning of Act III was precisely
+the <i>sc&egrave;ne &agrave; faire</i> demanded by the logic of his cynicism.</blockquote>
+
+<p><a name="Footnote_82"></a><a href="#FNanchor82">[82]</a><blockquote> I need scarcely direct the reader's attention to Mr.
+Gilbert Murray's noble renderings of these speeches.</blockquote>
+
+<p><a name="Footnote_83"></a><a href="#FNanchor83">[83]</a><blockquote> Such a scene occurs in that very able play, <i>The Way the
+Money Goes</i>, by Lady Bell.</blockquote>
+
+<p><a name="Footnote_84"></a><a href="#FNanchor84">[84]</a><blockquote> In Mr. Stephen Phillips's play he does not actually play on
+the lyre, but he improvises and recites an ode to the conflagration.</blockquote>
+
+<p><a name="Footnote_85"></a><a href="#FNanchor85">[85]</a><blockquote> And, after all, Mr. Shaw does not run counter to the
+legend. He exhibits Caesar and Napoleon &quot;in their well-known attitudes&quot;:
+only, by an odd metempsychosis, the soul of Mr. Shaw has somehow entered
+into them.</blockquote>
+
+<p><a name="Footnote_86"></a><a href="#FNanchor86">[86]</a><blockquote> That great spiritual drama known as the Book of Job opens,
+after the Prologue in Heaven, with one of the most startling of
+peripeties.</blockquote>
+
+<p><a name="Footnote_87"></a><a href="#FNanchor87">[87]</a><blockquote> The first act of Mr. Gilbert Murray's <i>Carlyon Sahib</i>
+contains an incident of this nature; but it can scarcely be called a
+peripety, since the victim remains unconscious of his doom.</blockquote>
+
+<p><a name="Footnote_88"></a><a href="#FNanchor88">[88]</a><blockquote> For the benefit of American readers, it may be well to
+state that the person who changes a Bank of England note is often asked
+to write his or her name on the back of it. It must have been in a
+moment of sheer aberration that the lady in question wrote her
+own name.</blockquote>
+
+<p><a name="Footnote_89"></a><a href="#FNanchor89">[89]</a><blockquote> M. Bernstein, dishing up a similar theme with a piquant
+sauce of sensuality, made but a vulgar and trivial piece of work of it.</blockquote>
+
+<p><a name="Footnote_90"></a><a href="#FNanchor90">[90]</a><blockquote> One of the most striking peripeties in recent English drama
+occurs in the third act of The Builder of Bridges, by Mr. Alfred Sutro.</blockquote>
+
+<p><a name="Footnote_91"></a><a href="#FNanchor91">[91]</a><blockquote> The malignant caricature of Cromwell in W.G. Wills'
+<i>Charles</i> I did not, indeed, prevent the acceptance of the play by the
+mid-Victorian public; but it will certainly shorten the life of the one
+play which might have secured for its author a lasting place in dramatic
+literature. It is unimaginable that future generations should accept a
+representation of Cromwell as
+<br><br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&quot;A mouthing patriot, with an itching palm,<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;In one hand menace, in the other greed.&quot;</blockquote>
+
+<p><a name="Footnote_92"></a><a href="#FNanchor92">[92]</a><blockquote> It is only fair to say that Sarcey drew a distinction
+between antecedent <i>events</i> and what he calls &quot;postulates of character.&quot;
+He did not maintain that an audience ought to accept a psychological
+impossibility, merely because it was placed outside the frame of the
+picture. See <i>Quarante Ans de Th&eacute;&acirc;tre</i>, vii, p. 395.</blockquote>
+
+<p><a name="Footnote_93"></a><a href="#FNanchor93">[93]</a><blockquote> This phrase, which occurs in Mr. Haddon Chambers's romantic
+melodrama, <i>Captain Swift</i>, was greeted with a burst of laughter by the
+first-night audience; but little did we then think that Mr. Chambers was
+enriching the English language. It is not, on examination, a
+particularly luminous phrase: &quot;the three or four arms of coincidence&quot;
+would really be more to the point. But it is not always the most
+accurate expression that is fittest to survive.</blockquote>
+
+<p><a name="Footnote_94"></a><a href="#FNanchor94">[94]</a><blockquote> The abuse of coincidence is a legacy to modern drama from
+the Latin comedy, which, again, was founded on the Greek New Comedy. It
+is worth noting that in the days of Menander the world really was much
+smaller than it is to-day, when &quot;thalassic&quot; has grown into &quot;oceanic&quot;
+civilization. Travellers in those days followed a few main routes; half
+a dozen great seaports were rendezvous for all the world; the
+slave-trade was active, and kidnappings and abductions with the
+corresponding meetings and recognitions were no doubt frequent. Thus
+such a plot as that of the <i>Menaechmi</i> was by no means the sheer
+impossibility which Shakespeare made it by attaching indistinguishable
+Dromios to his indistinguishable Antipholuses. To reduplicate a
+coincidence is in fact to multiply it by a figure far beyond my
+mathematics. It may be noted, too, that the practice of exposing
+children, on which the <i>Oedipus</i>, and many plays of Menander, are
+founded, was common in historic Greece, and that the hapless children
+were generally provided with identification-tokens <i>gnorismata</i>.</blockquote>
+
+<p><a name="Footnote_95"></a><a href="#FNanchor95">[95]</a><blockquote> I am here writing from memory, having been unable to obtain
+a copy of <i>The City</i>; but my memory is pretty clear.</blockquote>
+
+<p><a name="Footnote_96"></a><a href="#FNanchor96">[96]</a><blockquote> For instance: &quot;If you can get a word with him by pretending
+that you are his wife, tell him to hold his tongue until morning; <i>that
+will give me all the start I need</i>.&quot;</blockquote>
+
+<p><a name="Footnote_97"></a><a href="#FNanchor97">[97]</a><blockquote> In <i>The Idyll</i>, by Herr Egge, of which some account is
+given in Chapter X, the author certainly does right in not allowing the
+audience for a moment to share the hero's doubts as to the heroine's
+past. It would have been very easy for him to have kept the secret; but
+he takes the earliest opportunity of assuring us that her relations with
+Ringve were quite innocent.</blockquote>
+
+<p><a name="Footnote_98"></a><a href="#FNanchor98">[98]</a><blockquote> The fact that a great poet can ignore such precepts with
+impunity is proved by the exquisite anticlimax of the third act of
+D'Annunzio's <i>La Gioconda</i>.</blockquote>
+
+<p><a name="Footnote_99"></a><a href="#FNanchor99">[99]</a><blockquote> <i>Of Dramatic Poesy</i>, ed. Arnold, 1903, p. 51.</blockquote>
+
+<p><a name="Footnote_100"></a><a href="#FNanchor100">[100]</a><blockquote> In Mr. Somerset Maugham's <i>Grace</i> the heroine undergoes a
+somewhat analogous change of heart, coming to love the husband whom she
+has previously despised. But we have no difficulty in accepting her
+conversion, partly because its reasons are clear and fairly adequate,
+partly because there is no question of convincing the husband, who has
+never realized her previous contempt for him.</blockquote>
+
+<p><a name="Footnote_101"></a><a href="#FNanchor101">[101]</a><blockquote> I have good reason for believing that, in M. Maeterlinck's
+original scheme, Prinzivalle imposed no such humiliating condition.
+Giovanna went of her own motive to appeal to his clemency; and her
+success was so complete that her husband, on her return, could not
+believe that it had been won by avowable means. This is a really fine
+conception--what a pity that the poet departed from it!</blockquote>
+
+<p><a name="Footnote_102"></a><a href="#FNanchor102">[102]</a><blockquote> Much has been made of the Censor's refusal to license
+<i>Monna Vanna</i>; but I think there is more to be said for his action in
+this than in many other cases. In those countries where the play has
+succeeded, I cannot but suspect that the appeal it made was not wholly
+to the higher instincts of the public.</blockquote>
+
+<p><a name="Footnote_103"></a><a href="#FNanchor103">[103]</a><blockquote> I am not sure what was the precise relationship of this
+play to the same author's <i>Beau Brummel</i>. D'Orsay's death scene was
+certainly a repetition of Brummel's.</blockquote>
+
+<p><a name="Footnote_104"></a><a href="#FNanchor104">[104]</a><blockquote> The reader who wishes to pursue the theme may do so to
+excellent advantage in Professor Bradley's <i>Shakespearean Tragedy</i>.</blockquote>
+
+<p><a name="Footnote_105"></a><a href="#FNanchor105">[105]</a><blockquote> It is true that in <i>A Doll's House</i>, Dr. Rank announces his
+approaching demise: but he does not actually die, nor is his fate an
+essential part of the action of the play.</blockquote>
+
+<p><a name="Footnote_106"></a><a href="#FNanchor106">[106]</a><blockquote> The duel, even in countries whose customs permit of it, is
+essentially an inartistic end; for it leaves the catastrophe to be
+decided either by Chance or Providence--two equally inadmissible
+arbiters in modern drama. Alexandre Dumas <i>fils</i>, in his preface to
+<i>H&eacute;lo&iuml;se Paranquet</i>, condemns the duel as a dramatic expedient. &quot;Not to
+mention,&quot; he says, &quot;the fact that it has been much over-done, we are
+bound to recognize that Providence, in a fit of absence of mind,
+sometimes suffers the rascal to kill the honest man. Let me recommend my
+young colleagues,&quot; he proceeds, &quot;never to end a piece which pretends to
+reproduce a phase of real life, by an intervention of chance.&quot; The
+recommendation came rather oddly from the dramatist who, in
+<i>L'Etrang&egrave;re</i>, had disposed of his &quot;vibrion,&quot; the Duc de Septmonts, by
+making Clarkson kill him in a duel. Perhaps he did not reckon
+<i>L'Etrang&egrave;re</i> as pretending to reproduce a phase of real life. A duel
+is, of course, perfectly admissible in a French or German play, simply
+as part of a picture of manners. Its stupid inconclusiveness may be the
+very point to be illustrated. It is only when represented as a moral
+arbitrament that it becomes an anachronism.</blockquote>
+
+<p><a name="Footnote_107"></a><a href="#FNanchor107">[107]</a><blockquote> I am glad to see, from Mr. Malcolm Salaman's introduction
+to the printed play, that, even in those days of our hot youth, my own
+aesthetic principles were less truculent.</blockquote>
+
+<p><a name="Footnote_108"></a><a href="#FNanchor108">[108]</a><blockquote> This image is sometimes suggested by an act-ending which
+leaves a marked situation obviously unresolved. The curtain should never
+be dropped at such a point as to leave the characters in a physical or
+mental attitude which cannot last for more than a moment, and must
+certainly be followed, then and there, by important developments. In
+other words, a situation ought not to be cut short at the very height of
+its tension, but only when it has reached a point of--at any rate
+momentary--relaxation.</blockquote>
+
+<p><a name="Footnote_109"></a><a href="#FNanchor109">[109]</a><blockquote> If this runs counter to the latest biological orthodoxy, I
+am sorry. Habits are at any rate transmissible by imitation, if not
+otherwise.</blockquote>
+
+<p><a name="Footnote_110"></a><a href="#FNanchor110">[110]</a><blockquote> Chapter XIX.</blockquote>
+
+<p><a name="Footnote_111"></a><a href="#FNanchor111">[111]</a><blockquote> So, too, with the style of Congreve. It is much, and
+justly, admired; but who does not feel more than a touch of mannerism in
+such a passage as this?--
+<br><br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;MILLAMANT: &quot;... Let us never visit together, nor go to a play<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;together; but let us be very strange and well-bred: let us be as<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;strange as if we had been married a great while; and as well-bred as<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;if we were not married at all.&quot;<br>
+<br><br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;MIRABELL: &quot;Have you any more conditions to offer? Hitherto your<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;demands are pretty reasonable.&quot;<br>
+<br><br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;MILLAMANT: &quot;Trifles!--as liberty to pay and receive visits to and<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;from whom I please; to write and receive letters, without<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;interrogatories or wry faces on your part; to wear what I please;<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;and choose conversation with regard only to my own taste; to have no<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;obligation upon me to converse with wits that I don't like because<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;they are your acquaintances; or to be intimate with fools because<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;they may be your relatives.... These articles subscribed, if I<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;continue to endure you a little longer, I may by degrees dwindle<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;into a wife.&quot;<br>
+<br><br>
+This is very pretty prose, granted; but it is the prose of literature,
+not of life.</blockquote>
+
+<p><a name="Footnote_112"></a><a href="#FNanchor112">[112]</a><blockquote> From the fact that I do not make an exception in favour of
+<i>The Blot in the Scutcheon</i> or <i>Stratford</i>, I must leave the reader to
+draw what inference he pleases. On the other hand, I believe that a
+reconstruction of Tennyson's <i>Queen Mary</i>, with a few connecting links
+written in, might take a permanent place in the theatre.</blockquote>
+
+<p><a name="Footnote_113"></a><a href="#FNanchor113">[113]</a><blockquote> Mr. Israel Zangwill, in his symbolic play, <i>The War-God</i>,
+has put blank verse to what I believe to be a new use, with noteworthy
+success. He writes in very strict measure, but without the least
+inversion or inflation, without a touch of Elizabethan, or
+conventionally poetic, diction. He is thus enabled to use the most
+modern expressions, and even slang, without incongruity; while at the
+same time he can give rhetorical movement to the speeches of his
+symbolic personages, and, in passages of argument, can achieve that
+clash of measured phrase against measured phrase which the Greeks called
+&quot;stichomythy,&quot; and which the French dramatist sometimes produces in
+rapid rapier play with the Alexandrine. Mr. Zangwill's practice is in
+absolute contradiction of the principle above suggested that blank
+verse, to be justified in drama, ought to be lyrical. His verse is a
+product of pure intellect and wit, without a single lyric accent. It is
+measured prose; if it ever tries to be more, it fails. I think, then,
+that he has shown a new use for blank verse, in rhetorico-symbolic
+drama. But it is no small literary feat to handle the measure as
+he does.</blockquote>
+
+<p><a name="Footnote_114"></a><a href="#FNanchor114">[114]</a><blockquote> Not quite. The drama of some Oriental peoples recognizes
+conventions which the Elizabethans did not admit.</blockquote>
+
+<p><a name="Footnote_115"></a><a href="#FNanchor115">[115]</a><blockquote> A conversation on the telephone often provides a convenient
+and up-to-date substitute for a soliloquy; but that is an expedient
+which ought not to be abused.</blockquote>
+
+<p><a name="Footnote_116"></a><a href="#FNanchor116">[116]</a><blockquote> The soliloquy is often not only slovenly, but a gratuitous
+and unnecessary slovenliness. In <i>Les Corbeaux</i>, by Henry Becque,
+produced in 1889, there occur two soliloquies--one by Teissier (Act ii,
+Scene 3), the other by Madame de Saint-Genis (Act in, Scene 10)--either
+or both of which could be omitted without leaving any sensible gap. The
+latter is wholly superfluous, the former conveys some information which
+might have been taken for granted, and could, in any case, have been
+conveyed without difficulty in some other way. Yet Becque was, in his
+day, regarded as a quite advanced technician.</blockquote>
+
+
+
+
+
+<br><br><hr style="width: 35%;"><br><br>
+
+<div>*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 10865 ***</div>
+</body>
+</html>
+
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+
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+Project Gutenberg (https://www.gutenberg.org) public repository for
+eBook #10865 (https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/10865)
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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of Play-Making, by William Archer
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: Play-Making
+       A Manual of Craftsmanship
+
+Author: William Archer
+
+Release Date: January 29, 2004 [EBook #10865]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK PLAY-MAKING ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Riikka Talonpoika, Ginny Brewer and PG Distributed
+Proofreaders
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+PLAY-MAKING
+
+_A Manual of Craftsmanship_
+
+by William Archer
+
+
+1912
+
+
+
+
+PREFATORY NOTE
+
+This book is, to all intents and purposes, entirely new. No considerable
+portion of it has already appeared, although here and there short
+passages and phrases from articles of bygone years are embedded
+--indistinguishably, I hope--in the text. I have tried, wherever
+it was possible, to select my examples from published plays, which the
+student may read for himself, and so check my observations. One reason,
+among others, which led me to go to Shakespeare and Ibsen for so many of
+my illustrations, was that they are the most generally accessible of
+playwrights.
+
+If the reader should feel that I have been over lavish in the use of
+footnotes, I have two excuses to allege. The first is that more than
+half of the following chapters were written on shipboard and in places
+where I had scarcely any books to refer to; so that a great deal had to
+be left to subsequent enquiry and revision. The second is that several
+of my friends, dramatists and others, have been kind enough to read my
+manuscript, and to suggest valuable afterthoughts.
+
+LONDON
+
+_January_, 1912
+
+
+To
+
+Brander Matthews
+
+Guide Philosopher and Friend
+
+
+
+CONTENTS
+
+  BOOK I
+
+  PROLOGUE
+
+  _CHAPTER I_ INTRODUCTORY
+  _CHAPTER II_ THE CHOICE OF A THEME
+  _CHAPTER III_ DRAMATIC AND UNDRAMATIC
+  _CHAPTER IV_ THE ROUTINE OF COMPOSITION
+  _CHAPTER V_ DRAMATIS PERSONAE
+
+
+  BOOK II
+
+  THE BEGINNING
+
+  _CHAPTER VI_ THE POINT OF ATTACK: SHAKESPEARE AND IBSEN
+  _CHAPTER VII_ EXPOSITION: ITS END AND ITS MEANS
+  _CHAPTER VIII_ THE FIRST ACT
+  _CHAPTER IX_ "CURIOSITY" AND "INTEREST"
+  _CHAPTER X_ FORESHADOWING, NOT FORESTALLING
+
+
+  BOOK III
+
+  THE MIDDLE
+
+  _CHAPTER XI_ TENSION AND ITS SUSPENSION
+  _CHAPTER XII_ PREPARATION: THE FINGER-POST
+  _CHAPTER XIII_ THE OBLIGATORY SCENE
+  _CHAPTER XIV_ THE PERIPETY
+  _CHAPTER XV_ PROBABILITY, CHANCE AND COINCIDENCE
+  _CHAPTER XVI_ LOGIC
+  _CHAPTER XVII_ KEEPING A SECRET
+
+
+  BOOK IV
+
+  THE END
+
+  _CHAPTER XVIII_ CLIMAX AND ANTICLIMAX
+  _CHAPTER XIX_ CONVERSION
+  _CHAPTER XX_ BLIND-ALLEY THEMES--AND OTHERS
+  _CHAPTER XXI_ THE FULL CLOSE
+
+
+  BOOK V
+
+  EPILOGUE
+
+  _CHAPTER XXII_ CHARACTER AND PSYCHOLOGY
+  _CHAPTER XXIII_ DIALOGUE AND DETAILS
+
+
+
+
+_BOOK I_
+
+PROLOGUE
+
+
+
+_CHAPTER I_
+
+INTRODUCTORY
+
+
+There are no rules for writing a play. It is easy, indeed, to lay down
+negative recommendations--to instruct the beginner how _not_ to do it.
+But most of these "don'ts" are rather obvious; and those which are not
+obvious are apt to be questionable. It is certain, for instance, that if
+you want your play to be acted, anywhere else than in China, you must
+not plan it in sixteen acts of an hour apiece; but where is the tyro who
+needs a text-book to tell him that? On the other hand, most theorists of
+to-day would make it an axiom that you must not let your characters
+narrate their circumstances, or expound their motives, in speeches
+addressed, either directly to the audience, or ostensibly to their
+solitary selves. But when we remember that, of all dramatic openings,
+there is none finer than that which shows Richard Plantagenet limping
+down the empty stage to say--
+
+  "Now is the winter of our discontent
+  Made glorious summer by this sun of York;
+  And all the clouds that lour'd upon our house
+  In the deep bosom of the ocean buried"--
+
+we feel that the axiom requires large qualifications. There are no
+absolute rules, in fact, except such as are dictated by the plainest
+common sense. Aristotle himself did not so much dogmatize as analyse,
+classify, and generalize from, the practices of the Attic dramatists. He
+said, "you had better" rather than "you must." It was Horace, in an age
+of deep dramatic decadence, who re-stated the pseudo-Aristotelian
+formulas of the Alexandrians as though they were unassailable dogmas
+of art.
+
+How comes it, then, that there is a constant demand for text-books of
+the art and craft of drama? How comes it that so many people--and I
+among the number--who could not write a play to save their lives, are
+eager to tell others how to do so? And, stranger still, how comes it
+that so many people are willing to sit at the feet of these instructors?
+It is not so with the novel. Popular as is that form of literature,
+guides to novel-writing, if they exist at all, are comparatively rare.
+Why are people possessed with the idea that the art of dramatic fiction
+differs from that of narrative fiction, in that it can and must
+be taught?
+
+The reason is clear, and is so far valid as to excuse, if not to
+justify, such works as the present. The novel, as soon as it is legibly
+written, exists, for what it is worth. The page of black and white is
+the sole intermediary between the creative and the perceptive brain.
+Even the act of printing merely widens the possible appeal: it does not
+alter its nature. But the drama, before it can make its proper appeal at
+all, must be run through a highly complex piece of mechanism--the
+theatre--the precise conditions of which are, to most beginners, a
+fascinating mystery. While they feel a strong inward conviction of their
+ability to master it, they are possessed with an idea, often exaggerated
+and superstitious, of its technical complexities. Having, as a rule,
+little or no opportunity of closely examining or experimenting with it,
+they are eager to "read it up," as they might any other machine. That is
+the case of the average aspirant, who has neither the instinct of the
+theatre fully developed in his blood, nor such a congenital lack of that
+instinct as to be wholly inapprehensive of any technical difficulties or
+problems. The intelligent novice, standing between these extremes,
+tends, as a rule, to overrate the efficacy of theoretical instruction,
+and to expect of analytic criticism more than it has to give.
+
+There is thus a fine opening for pedantry on the one side, and quackery
+on the other, to rush in. The pedant, in this context, is he who
+constructs a set of rules from metaphysical or psychological first
+principles, and professes to bring down a dramatic decalogue from the
+Sinai of some lecture-room in the University of Weissnichtwo. The quack,
+on the other hand, is he who generalizes from the worst practices of the
+most vulgar theatrical journeymen, and has no higher ambition than to
+interpret the oracles of the box-office. If he succeeded in so doing,
+his function would not be wholly despicable; but as he is generally
+devoid of insight, and as, moreover, the oracles of the box-office vary
+from season to season, if not from month to month, his lucubrations are
+about as valuable as those of Zadkiel or Old Moore.[1]
+
+What, then, is the excuse for such a discussion as is here attempted?
+Having admitted that there are no rules for dramatic composition, and
+that the quest of such rules is apt to result either in pedantry or
+quackery, why should I myself set forth upon so fruitless and foolhardy
+an enterprise? It is precisely because I am alive to its dangers that I
+have some hope of avoiding them. Rules there are none; but it does not
+follow that some of the thousands who are fascinated by the art of the
+playwright may not profit by having their attention called, in a plain
+and practical way, to some of its problems and possibilities. I have
+myself felt the need of some such handbook, when would-be dramatists
+have come to me for advice and guidance. It is easy to name excellent
+treatises on the drama; but the aim of such books is to guide the
+judgment of the critic rather than the creative impulse of the
+playwright. There are also valuable collections of dramatic criticisms;
+but any practical hints that they may contain are scattered and
+unsystematic. On the other hand, the advice one is apt to give to
+beginners--"Go to the theatre; study its conditions and mechanism for
+yourself"--is, in fact, of very doubtful value. It might, in many cases,
+be wiser to warn the aspirant to keep himself unspotted from the
+playhouse. To send him there is to imperil, on the one hand, his
+originality of vision, on the other, his individuality of method. He may
+fall under the influence of some great master, and see life only through
+his eyes; or he may become so habituated to the current tricks of the
+theatrical trade as to lose all sense of their conventionality and
+falsity, and find himself, in the end, better fitted to write what I
+have called a quack handbook than a living play. It would be ridiculous,
+of course, to urge an aspirant positively to avoid the theatre; but the
+common advice to steep himself in it is beset with dangers.
+
+It may be asked why, if I have any guidance and help to give, I do not
+take it myself, and write plays instead of instructing others in the
+art. This is a variant of an ancient and fallacious jibe against
+criticism in general. It is quite true that almost all critics who are
+worth their salt are "stickit" artists. Assuredly, if I had the power, I
+should write plays instead of writing about them; but one may have a
+great love for an art, and some insight into its principles and methods,
+without the innate faculty required for actual production. On the other
+hand, there is nothing to show that, if I were a creative artist, I
+should be a good mentor for beginners. An accomplished painter may be
+the best teacher of painters; but an accomplished dramatist is scarcely
+the best guide for dramatists. He cannot analyse his own practice, and
+discriminate between that in it which is of universal validity, and that
+which may be good for him, but would be bad for any one else. If he
+happened to be a great man, he would inevitably, even if unconsciously,
+seek to impose upon his disciples his individual attitude towards life;
+if he were a lesser man, he would teach them only his tricks. But
+dramatists do not, as a matter of fact, take pupils or write
+handbooks.[2] When they expound their principles of art, it is generally
+in answer to, or in anticipation of, criticism--with a view, in short,
+not to helping others, but to defending themselves. If beginners, then,
+are to find any systematic guidance, they must turn to the critics, not
+to the dramatists; and no person of common sense holds it a reproach to
+a critic to tell him that he is a "stickit" playwright.
+
+If questions are worth discussing at all, they are worth discussing
+gravely. When, in the following pages, I am found treating with all
+solemnity matters of apparently trivial detail, I beg the reader to
+believe that very possibly I do not in my heart overrate their
+importance. One thing is certain, and must be emphasized from the
+outset: namely, that if any part of the dramatist's art can be taught,
+it is only a comparatively mechanical and formal part--the art of
+structure. One may learn how to tell a story in good dramatic form: how
+to develop and marshal it in such a way as best to seize and retain the
+interest of a theatrical audience. But no teaching or study can enable a
+man to choose or invent a good story, and much less to do that which
+alone lends dignity to dramatic story-telling--to observe and portray
+human character. This is the aim and end of all serious drama; and it
+will be apt to appear as though, in the following pages, this aim and
+end were ignored. In reality it is not so. If I hold comparatively
+mechanical questions of pure craftsmanship to be worth discussing, it is
+because I believe that only by aid of competent craftsmanship can the
+greatest genius enable his creations to live and breathe upon the stage.
+The profoundest insight into human nature and destiny cannot find valid
+expression through the medium of the theatre without some understanding
+of the peculiar art of dramatic construction. Some people are born with
+such an instinct for this art, that a very little practice renders them
+masters of it. Some people are born with a hollow in their cranium where
+the bump of drama ought to be. But between these extremes, as I said
+before, there are many people with moderately developed and cultivable
+faculty; and it is these who, I trust, may find some profit in the
+following discussions.[3] Let them not forget, however, that the topics
+treated of are merely the indispensable rudiments of the art, and are
+not for a moment to be mistaken for its ultimate and incommunicable
+secrets. Beethoven could not have composed the Ninth Symphony without a
+mastery of harmony and counterpoint; but there are thousands of masters
+of harmony and counterpoint who could not compose the Ninth Symphony.
+
+The art of theatrical story-telling is necessarily relative to the
+audience to whom the story is to be told. One must assume an audience of
+a certain status and characteristics before one can rationally discuss
+the best methods of appealing to its intelligence and its sympathies.
+The audience I have throughout assumed is drawn from what may be called
+the ordinary educated public of London and New York. It is not an ideal
+or a specially selected audience; but it is somewhat above the average
+of the theatre-going public, that average being sadly pulled down by the
+myriad frequenters of musical farce and absolutely worthless melodrama.
+It is such an audience as assembles every night at, say, the half-dozen
+best theatres of each city. A peculiarly intellectual audience it
+certainly is not. I gladly admit that theatrical art owes much, in both
+countries, to voluntary organizations of intelligent or would-be
+intelligent[4] playgoers, who have combined to provide themselves with
+forms of drama which specially interest them, and do not attract the
+great public. But I am entirely convinced that the drama renounces its
+chief privilege and glory when it waives its claim to be a popular art,
+and is content to address itself to coteries, however "high-browed."
+Shakespeare did not write for a coterie: yet he produced some works of
+considerable subtlety and profundity. Molière was popular with the
+ordinary parterre of his day: yet his plays have endured for over two
+centuries, and the end of their vitality does not seem to be in sight.
+Ibsen did not write for a coterie, though special and regrettable
+circumstances have made him, in England, something of a coterie-poet. In
+Scandinavia, in Germany, even in America, he casts his spell over great
+audiences, if not through long runs (which are a vice of the merely
+commercial theatre), at any rate through frequently-repeated
+representations. So far as I know, history records no instance of a
+playwright failing to gain the ear of his contemporaries, and then being
+recognized and appreciated by posterity. Alfred de Musset might,
+perhaps, be cited as a case in point; but he did not write with a view
+to the stage, and made no bid for contemporary popularity. As soon as it
+occurred to people to produce his plays, they were found to be
+delightful. Let no playwright, then, make it his boast that he cannot
+disburden his soul within the three hours' limit, and cannot produce
+plays intelligible or endurable to any audience but a band of adepts. A
+popular audience, however, does not necessarily mean the mere riff-raff
+of the theatrical public. There is a large class of playgoers, both in
+England and America, which is capable of appreciating work of a high
+intellectual order, if only it does not ignore the fundamental
+conditions of theatrical presentation. It is an audience of this class
+that I have in mind throughout the following pages; and I believe that a
+playwright who despises such an audience will do so to the detriment,
+not only of his popularity and profits, but of the artistic quality
+of his work.
+
+Some people may exclaim: "Why should the dramatist concern himself about
+his audience? That may be all very well for the mere journeymen of the
+theatre, the hacks who write to an actor-manager's order--not for the
+true artist! He has a soul above all such petty considerations. Art, to
+him, is simply self-expression. He writes to please himself, and has no
+thought of currying favour with an audience, whether intellectual or
+idiotic." To this I reply simply that to an artist of this way of
+thinking I have nothing to say. He has a perfect right to express
+himself in a whole literature of so-called plays, which may possibly be
+studied, and even acted, by societies organized to that laudable end.
+But the dramatist who declares his end to be mere self-expression
+stultifies himself in that very phrase. The painter may paint, the
+sculptor model, the lyric poet sing, simply to please himself,[5] but
+the drama has no meaning except in relation to an audience. It is a
+portrayal of life by means of a mechanism so devised as to bring it home
+to a considerable number of people assembled in a given place. "The
+public," it has been well said, "constitutes the theatre." The moment a
+playwright confines his work within the two or three hours' limit
+prescribed by Western custom for a theatrical performance, he is
+currying favour with an audience. That limit is imposed simply by the
+physical endurance and power of sustained attention that can be demanded
+of Western human beings assembled in a theatre. Doubtless an author
+could express himself more fully and more subtly if he ignored these
+limitations; the moment he submits to them, he renounces the pretence
+that mere self-expression is his aim. I know that there are
+haughty-souls who make no such submission, and express themselves in
+dramas which, so far as their proportions are concerned, might as well
+be epic poems or historical romances.[6] To them, I repeat, I have
+nothing to say. The one and only subject of the following discussions is
+the best method of fitting a dramatic theme for representation before an
+audience assembled in a theatre. But this, be it noted, does not
+necessarily mean "writing down" to the audience in question. It is by
+obeying, not by ignoring, the fundamental conditions of his craft that
+the dramatist may hope to lead his audience upward to the highest
+intellectual level which he himself can attain.
+
+These pages, in short, are addressed to students of play-writing who
+sincerely desire to do sound, artistic work under the conditions and
+limitations of the actual, living playhouse. This does not mean, of
+course, that they ought always to be studying "what the public wants."
+The dramatist should give the public what he himself wants--but in such
+form as to make it comprehensible and interesting in a theatre.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+[Footnote 1: It is against "technic" in this sense of the term that the
+hero of Mr. Howells's admirable novel, _The Story of a Play_, protests
+in vigorous and memorable terms. "They talk," says Maxwell, "about a
+knowledge of the stage as if it were a difficult science, instead of a
+very simple piece of mechanism whose limitations and possibilities
+anyone may see at a glance. All that their knowledge of it comes to is
+claptrap, pure and simple.... They think that their exits and entrances
+are great matters and that they must come on with such a speech, and go
+off with another; but it is not of the least importance how they come or
+go, if they have something interesting to say or do." Maxwell, it must
+be remembered, is speaking of technic as expounded by the star actor,
+who is shilly-shallying--as star actors will--over the production of his
+play. He would not, in his calmer moments, deny that it is of little use
+to have something interesting to say, unless you know how to say it
+interestingly. Such a denial would simply be the negation of the very
+idea of art.]
+
+[Footnote 2: A dramatist of my acquaintance adds this footnote: "But, by
+the Lord! They have to give advice. I believe I write more plays of
+other people's than I do of my own."]
+
+[Footnote 3: It may be hoped, too, that even the accomplished dramatist
+may take some interest in considering the reasons for things which he
+does, or does not do, by instinct.]
+
+[Footnote 4: This is not a phrase of contempt. The would-be intelligent
+playgoer is vastly to be preferred to the playgoer who makes a boast of
+his unintelligence.]
+
+[Footnote 5: In all the arts, however, the very idea of craftsmanship
+implies some sort of external percipient, or, in other words, some sort
+of an audience. In point of sheer self-expression, a child's scrabblings
+with a box of crayons may deserve to rank with the most masterly canvas
+of Velasquez or Vermeer. The real difference between the dramatist and
+other artists, is that they can be _their own audience_, in a sense in
+which he cannot.]
+
+[Footnote 6: Let me guard against the possibility that this might be
+interpreted as a sneer at _The Dynasts_--a great work by a great poet.]
+
+
+
+
+_CHAPTER II_
+
+THE CHOICE OF A THEME
+
+
+The first step towards writing a play is manifestly to choose a theme.
+
+Even this simple statement, however, requires careful examination before
+we can grasp its full import. What, in the first place, do we mean by a
+"theme"? And, secondly, in what sense can we, or ought we to,
+"choose" one?
+
+"Theme" may mean either of two things: either the subject of a play, or
+its story. The former is, perhaps, its proper or more convenient sense.
+The theme of _Romeo and Juliet_ is youthful love crossed by ancestral
+hate; the theme of _Othello_ is jealousy; the theme of _Le Tartufe_ is
+hypocrisy; the theme of _Caste_ is fond hearts and coronets; the theme
+of _Getting Married_ is getting married; the theme of _Maternité_ is
+maternity. To every play it is possible, at a pinch, to assign a theme;
+but in many plays it is evident that no theme expressible in abstract
+terms was present to the author's mind. Nor are these always plays of a
+low class. It is only by a somewhat artificial process of abstraction
+that we can formulate a theme for _As You Like It_, for _The Way of the
+World_, or for _Hedda Gabler_.
+
+The question now arises: ought a theme, in its abstract form, to be the
+first germ of a play? Ought the dramatist to say, "Go to, I will write a
+play on temperance, or on woman's suffrage, or on capital and labour,"
+and then cast about for a story to illustrate his theme? This is a
+possible, but not a promising, method of procedure. A story made to the
+order of a moral concept is always apt to advertise its origin, to the
+detriment of its illusive quality. If a play is to be a moral apologue
+at all, it is well to say so frankly--probably in the title--and aim,
+not at verisimilitude, but at neatness and appositeness in the working
+out of the fable. The French _proverbe_ proceeds on this principle, and
+is often very witty and charming.[1] A good example in English is _A
+Pair of Spectacles_, by Mr. Sydney Grundy, founded on a play by Labiche.
+In this bright little comedy every incident and situation bears upon the
+general theme, and pleases us, not by its probability, but by its
+ingenious appropriateness. The dramatic fable, in fact, holds very much
+the same rank in drama as the narrative fable holds in literature at
+large. We take pleasure in them on condition that they be witty, and
+that they do not pretend to be what they are not.
+
+A play manifestly suggested by a theme of temporary interest will often
+have a great but no less temporary success. For instance, though there
+was a good deal of clever character-drawing in _An Englishman's Home_,
+by Major du Maurier, the theme was so evidently the source and
+inspiration of the play that it will scarcely bear revival. In America,
+where the theme was of no interest, the play failed.
+
+It is possible, no doubt, to name excellent plays in which the theme, in
+all probability, preceded both the story and the characters in the
+author's mind. Such plays are most of M. Brieux's; such plays are Mr.
+Galsworthy's _Strife_ and _Justice_. The French plays, in my judgment,
+suffer artistically from the obtrusive predominance of the theme--that
+is to say, the abstract element--over the human and concrete factors in
+the composition. Mr. Galsworthy's more delicate and unemphatic art
+eludes this danger, at any rate in _Strife_. We do not remember until
+all is over that his characters represent classes, and his action is,
+one might almost say, a sociological symbol. If, then, the theme does,
+as a matter of fact, come first in the author's conception, he will do
+well either to make it patently and confessedly dominant, as in the
+_proverbe_, or to take care that, as in _Strife_, it be not suffered to
+make its domination felt, except as an afterthought.[2] No outside force
+should appear to control the free rhythm of the action.
+
+The theme may sometimes be, not an idea, an abstraction or a principle,
+but rather an environment, a social phenomenon of one sort or another.
+The author's primary object in such a case is, not to portray any
+individual character or tell any definite story, but to transfer to the
+stage an animated picture of some broad aspect or phase of life, without
+concentrating the interest on any one figure or group. There are
+theorists who would, by definition, exclude from the domain of drama any
+such cinematograph-play, as they would probably call it; but we shall
+see cause, as we go on, to distrust definitions, especially when they
+seek to clothe themselves with the authority of laws. Tableau-plays of
+the type here in question may even claim classical precedent. What else
+is Ben Jonson's _Bartholomew Fair_? What else is Schiller's
+_Wallensteins Lager_? Amongst more recent plays, Hauptmann's _Die Weber_
+and Gorky's _Nachtasyl_ are perhaps the best examples of the type. The
+drawback of such themes is, not that they do not conform to this or that
+canon of art, but that it needs an exceptional amount of knowledge and
+dramaturgic skill to handle them successfully. It is far easier to tell
+a story on the stage than to paint a picture, and few playwrights can
+resist the temptation to foist a story upon their picture, thus marring
+it by an inharmonious intrusion of melodrama or farce. This has often
+been done upon deliberate theory, in the belief that no play can exist,
+or can attract playgoers, without a definite and more or less exciting
+plot. Thus the late James A. Herne inserted into a charming idyllic
+picture of rural life, entitled _Shore Acres_, a melodramatic scene in a
+lighthouse, which was hopelessly out of key with the rest of the play.
+The dramatist who knows any particular phase of life so thoroughly as to
+be able to transfer its characteristic incidents to the stage, may be
+advised to defy both critical and managerial prejudice, and give his
+tableau-play just so much of story as may naturally and inevitably fall
+within its limits.
+
+One of the most admirable and enthralling scenes I ever saw on any stage
+was that of the Trafalgar Square suffrage meeting in Miss Elizabeth
+Robins's _Votes for Women_. Throughout a whole act it held us
+spellbound, while the story of the play stood still, and we forgot its
+existence. It was only within a few minutes of the end, when the story
+was dragged in neck and crop, that the reality of the thing vanished,
+and the interest with it.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+If an abstract theme be not an advisable starting-point, what is? A
+character? A situation? Or a story? On this point it would be absurd to
+lay down any rule; the more so as, in many cases, a playwright is quite
+unable to say in what form the germ of a play first floated into his
+mind. The suggestion may come from a newspaper paragraph, from an
+incident seen in the street, from an emotional adventure or a comic
+misadventure, from a chance word dropped by an acquaintance, or from
+some flotsam or jetsam of phrase or fable that has drifted from the
+other end of history. Often, too, the original germ, whatever it may be,
+is transformed beyond recognition before a play is done.[3] In the mind
+of the playwright figs grow from thistles, and a silk purse--perhaps a
+Fortunatus' purse--may often be made from a sow's ear. The whole
+delicate texture of Ibsen's _Doll's House_ was woven from a commonplace
+story of a woman who forged a cheque in order to redecorate her
+drawing-room. Stevenson's romance of _Prince Otto_ (to take an example
+from fiction) grew out of a tragedy on the subject of Semiramis!
+
+One thing, however, we may say with tolerable confidence: whatever may
+be the germ of a play--whether it be an anecdote, a situation, or what
+not--the play will be of small account as a work of art unless
+character, at a very early point, enters into and conditions its
+development. The story which is independent of character--which can be
+carried through by a given number of ready-made puppets--is essentially
+a trivial thing. Unless, at an early stage of the organizing process,
+character begins to take the upper hand--unless the playwright finds
+himself thinking, "Oh, yes, George is just the man to do this," or,
+"That is quite foreign to Jane's temperament"--he may be pretty sure
+that it is a piece of mechanism he is putting together, not a drama with
+flesh and blood in it. The difference between a live play and a dead one
+is that in the former the characters control the plot, while in the
+latter the plot controls the characters. Which is not to say, of course,
+that there may not be clever and entertaining plays which are "dead" in
+this sense, and dull and unattractive plays which are "live."
+
+A great deal of ink has been wasted in controversy over a remark of
+Aristotle's that the action or _muthos_, not the character or _êthos_,
+is the essential element in drama. The statement is absolutely true and
+wholly unimportant. A play can exist without anything that can be called
+character, but not without some sort of action. This is implied in the
+very word "drama," which means a doing, not a mere saying or existing.
+It would be possible, no doubt, to place Don Quixote, or Falstaff, or
+Peer Gynt, on the stage, and let him develop his character in mere
+conversation, or even monologue, without ever moving from his chair. But
+it is a truism that deeds, not words, are the demonstration and test of
+character; wherefore, from time immemorial, it has been the recognized
+business of the theatre to exhibit character in action. Historically,
+too, we find that drama has everywhere originated in the portrayal of an
+action--some exploit or some calamity in the career of some demigod or
+hero. Thus story or plot is by definition, tradition, and practical
+reason, the fundamental element in drama; but does it therefore follow
+that it is the noblest element, or that by which its value should be
+measured? Assuredly not. The skeleton is, in a sense, the fundamental
+element in the human organism. It can exist, and, with a little
+assistance, retain its form, when stripped of muscle and blood and
+nerve; whereas a boneless man would be an amorphous heap, more helpless
+than a jelly-fish. But do we therefore account the skeleton man's
+noblest part? Scarcely. It is by his blood and nerve that he lives, not
+by his bones; and it is because his bones are, comparatively speaking,
+dead matter that they continue to exist when the flesh has fallen away
+from them. It is, therefore, if not a misreading of Aristotle,[4] at any
+rate a perversion of reason, to maintain that the drama lives by action,
+rather than by character. Action ought to exist for the sake of
+character: when the relation is reversed, the play may be an ingenious
+toy, but scarcely a vital work of art.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+It is time now to consider just what we mean when we say that the first
+step towards play-writing is the "choice" of a theme.
+
+In many cases, no doubt, it is the plain and literal fact that the
+impulse to write some play--any play--exists, so to speak, in the
+abstract, unassociated with any particular subject, and that the
+would-be playwright proceeds, as he thinks, to set his imagination to
+work, and invent a story. But this frame of mind is to be regarded with
+suspicion. Few plays of much value, one may guess, have resulted from
+such an abstract impulse. Invention, in these cases, is apt to be
+nothing but recollection in disguise, the shaking of a kaleidoscope
+formed of fragmentary reminiscences. I remember once, in some momentary
+access of ambition, trying to invent a play. I occupied several hours of
+a long country walk in, as I believed, creating out of nothing at all a
+dramatic story. When at last I had modelled it into some sort of
+coherency, I stepped back from it in my mind, as it were, and
+contemplated it as a whole. No sooner had I done so than it began to
+seem vaguely familiar. "Where have I seen this story before?" I asked
+myself; and it was only after cudgelling my brains for several minutes
+that I found I had re-invented Ibsen's _Hedda Gabler_. Thus, when we
+think we are choosing a plot out of the void, we are very apt to be, in
+fact, ransacking the store-house of memory. The plot which chooses us
+is much more to be depended upon--the idea which comes when we least
+expect it, perhaps from the most unlikely quarter, clamours at the gates
+of birth, and will not let us rest till it be clothed in dramatic flesh
+and blood.[5] It may very well happen, of course, that it has to
+wait--that it has to be pigeon-holed for a time, until its due turn
+comes.[6] Occasionally, perhaps, it may slip out of its pigeon-hole for
+an airing, only to be put back again in a slightly more developed form.
+Then at last its convenient season will arrive, and the play will be
+worked out, written, and launched into the struggle for life. In the
+sense of selecting from among a number of embryonic themes stored in his
+mind, the playwright has often to make a deliberate choice; but when,
+moved by a purely abstract impulse, he goes out of set purpose to look
+for a theme, it may be doubted whether he is likely to return with any
+very valuable treasure-trove.[7]
+
+The same principle holds good in the case of the ready-made poetic or
+historical themes, which are--rightly or wrongly--considered suitable
+for treatment in blank verse. Whether, and how far, the blank verse
+drama can nowadays be regarded as a vital and viable form is a question
+to be considered later. In the meantime it is sufficient to say that
+whatever principles of conception and construction apply to the modern
+prose drama, apply with equal cogency to the poetic drama. The
+verse-poet may perhaps take one or two licenses denied to the
+prose-poet. For instance, we may find reason to think the soliloquy more
+excusable in verse than in prose. But fundamentally, the two forms are
+ruled by the same set of conditions, which the verse-poet, no less than
+the prose-poet, can ignore only at his peril. Unless, indeed, he
+renounces from the outset all thought of the stage and chooses to
+produce that cumbrous nondescript, a "closet drama." Of such we do not
+speak, but glance and pass on. What laws, indeed, can apply to a form
+which has no proper element, but, like the amphibious animal described
+by the sailor, "cannot live on land and dies in the water"?
+
+To return to our immediate topic, the poet who essays dramatic
+composition on mere abstract impulse, because other poets have done so,
+or because he is told that it pays, is only too likely to produce
+willy-nilly a "closet drama." Let him beware of saying to himself, "I
+will gird up my loins and write a play. Shall it be a Phaedra, or a
+Semiramis, or a Sappho, or a Cleopatra? A Julian, or an Attila, or a
+Savanarola, or a Cromwell?" A drama conceived in this reach-me-down
+fashion will scarcely have the breath of life in it. If, on the other
+hand, in the course of his legendary, romantic, or historical reading,
+some character should take hold upon his imagination and demand to be
+interpreted, or some episode should, as it were, startle him by putting
+on vivid dramatic form before his mind's eye, then let him by all means
+yield to the inspiration, and try to mould the theme into a drama. The
+real labour of creation will still lie before him; but he may face it
+with the hope of producing a live play, not a long-drawn rhetorical
+anachronism, whether of the rotund or of the spasmodic type.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+[Footnote 1: For instance, _Il ne faut jurer de rien. Il faut qu'une
+porte soit ouverte ou fermée. Un bienfait n'est jamais perdu._ There is
+also a large class of pieces of which the title, though not itself a
+proverb, makes direct allusion to some fable or proverbial saying: for
+example, _Les Brebis de Panurge, La Chasse aux Corbeaux, La Cigale chez
+les Fourmis_.]
+
+[Footnote 2: I learn, on the best authority, that I am wrong, in point
+of fact, as to the origin of _Strife_. The play arose in Mr.
+Galsworthy's mind from his actually having seen in conflict the two men
+who were the prototypes of Anthony and Roberts, and thus noted the waste
+and inefficacy arising from the clash of strong characters unaccompanied
+by balance. It was accident that led him to place the two men in an
+environment of capital and labour. In reality, both of them were, if not
+capitalists, at any rate on the side of capital. This interesting
+correction of fact does not invalidate the theory above stated.]
+
+[Footnote 3: Mr. Henry Arthur Jones writes to me: "Sometimes I start
+with a scene only, sometimes with a complete idea. Sometimes a play
+splits into two plays, sometimes two or three ideas combine into a
+concrete whole. Always the final play is altered out of all knowledge
+from its first idea." An interesting account of the way in which two
+very different plays by M. de Curel: _L'Envers d'une Sainte_ and
+_L'Invitée_,--grew out of one and the same initial idea, may be found in
+_L'Année Psychologique_, 1894, p. 121.]
+
+[Footnote 4: In my discussion of this point, I have rather simplified
+Aristotle's position. He appears to make action the essential element in
+tragedy and not merely the necessary vehicle of character. "In a play,"
+he says, "they do not act in order to portray the characters, they
+include the characters for the sake of the action. So that it is the
+action in it, _i.e._ its Fable or Plot, that is the end and purpose of
+the tragedy, and the end is everywhere the chief thing. Besides this, a
+tragedy is impossible without action, but there may be one without
+character." (Bywater's Translation.) The last sentence is, in my view,
+the gist of the matter; the preceding sentences greatly overstate the
+case. There was a lively controversy on the subject in the _Times_
+Literary Supplement in May, 1902. It arose from a review of Mr.
+Phillips's _Paolo and Francesco_, and Mr. Andrew Lang, Mr. Churton
+Collins, and Mr. A.B. Walkley took part in it.]
+
+[Footnote 5: "Are the first beginnings of imaginative conception
+directed by the will? Are they, indeed, conscious at all? Do they not
+rather emerge unbidden from the vague limbo of sub-consciousness?" A.B.
+Walkley, _Drama and Life_, p. 85.]
+
+[Footnote 6: Sardou kept a file of about fifty _dossiers_, each bearing
+the name of an unwritten play, and containing notes and sketches for it.
+Dumas, on the other hand, always finished one play before he began to
+think of another. See _L'Année Psychologique_, 1894, pp. 67, 76.]
+
+[Footnote 7: "My experience is," a dramatist writes to me, "that you
+never deliberately choose a theme. You lie awake, or you go walking, and
+suddenly there flashes into your mind a contrast, a piece of spiritual
+irony, an old incident carrying some general significance. Round this
+your mind broods, and there is the germ of your play." Again be writes:
+"It is not advisable for a playwright to start out at all unless he has
+so felt or seen something, that he feels, as it matures in his mind,
+that he must express it, and in dramatic form."]
+
+
+
+
+_CHAPTER III_
+
+DRAMATIC AND UNDRAMATIC
+
+
+It may be well, at this point, to consider for a little what we mean
+when we use the term "dramatic." We shall probably not arrive at any
+definition which can be applied as an infallible touchstone to
+distinguish the dramatic from the undramatic. Perhaps, indeed, the
+upshot may rather be to place the student on his guard against troubling
+too much about the formal definitions of critical theorists.
+
+The orthodox opinion of the present time is that which is generally
+associated with the name of the late Ferdinand Brunetière. "The theatre
+in general," said that critic, "is nothing but the place for the
+development of the human will, attacking the obstacles opposed to it by
+destiny, fortune, or circumstances." And again: "Drama is a
+representation of the will of man in conflict with the mysterious powers
+or natural forces which limit and belittle us; it is one of us thrown
+living upon the stage, there to struggle against fatality, against
+social law, against one of his fellow-mortals, against himself, if need
+be, against the ambitions, the interests, the prejudices, the folly, the
+malevolence of those who surround him."[1]
+
+The difficulty about this definition is that, while it describes the
+matter of a good many dramas, it does not lay down any true
+differentia--any characteristic common to all drama, and possessed by no
+other form of fiction. Many of the greatest plays in the world can with
+difficulty be brought under the formula, while the majority of romances
+and other stories come under it with ease. Where, for instance, is the
+struggle in the _Agamemnon_? There is no more struggle between
+Clytemnestra and Agamemnon than there is between the spider and the fly
+who walks into his net. There is not even a struggle in Clytemnestra's
+mind. Agamemnon's doom is sealed from the outset, and she merely carries
+out a pre-arranged plot. There is contest indeed in the succeeding plays
+of the trilogy; but it will scarcely be argued that the _Agamemnon_,
+taken alone, is not a great drama. Even the _Oedipus_ of Sophocles,
+though it may at first sight seem a typical instance of a struggle
+against Destiny, does not really come under the definition. Oedipus, in
+fact, does not struggle at all. His struggles, in so far as that word
+can be applied to his misguided efforts to escape from the toils of
+fate, are all things of the past; in the actual course of the tragedy he
+simply writhes under one revelation after another of bygone error and
+unwitting crime. It would be a mere play upon words to recognize as a
+dramatic "struggle" the writhing of a worm on a hook. And does not this
+description apply very closely to the part played by another great
+protagonist--Othello to wit? There is no struggle, no conflict, between
+him and Iago. It is Iago alone who exerts any will; neither Othello nor
+Desdemona makes the smallest fight. From the moment when Iago sets his
+machination to work, they are like people sliding down an ice-slope to
+an inevitable abyss. Where is the conflict in _As You Like It_? No one,
+surely, will pretend that any part of the interest or charm of the play
+arises from the struggle between the banished Duke and the Usurper, or
+between Orlando and Oliver. There is not even the conflict, if so it can
+be called, which nominally brings so many hundreds of plays under the
+Brunetière canon--the conflict between an eager lover and a more or less
+reluctant maid. Or take, again, Ibsen's _Ghosts_--in what valid sense
+can it be said that that tragedy shows us will struggling against
+obstacles? Oswald, doubtless, wishes to live, and his mother desires
+that he should live; but this mere will for life cannot be the
+differentia that makes of _Ghosts_ a drama. If the reluctant descent of
+the "downward path to death" constituted drama, then Tolstoy's _Death of
+Ivan Ilytch_ would be one of the greatest dramas ever written--which it
+certainly is not. Yet again, if we want to see will struggling against
+obstacles, the classic to turn to is not _Hamlet_, not _Lear_, but
+_Robinson Crusoe_; yet no one, except a pantomime librettist, ever saw a
+drama in Defoe's narrative. In a Platonic dialogue, in _Paradise Lost_,
+in _John Gilpin_, there is a struggle of will against obstacles; there
+is none in _Hannele_, which, nevertheless, is a deeply-moving drama.
+Such a struggle is characteristic of all great fiction, from _Clarissa
+Harlowe_ to _The House with the Green Shutters_; whereas in many plays
+the struggle, if there be any at all, is the merest matter of form (for
+instance, a quite conventional love-story), while the real interest
+resides in something quite different.
+
+The plain truth seems to be that conflict is _one_ of the most dramatic
+elements in life, and that many dramas--perhaps most--do, as a matter
+of fact, turn upon strife of one sort or another. But it is clearly an
+error to make conflict indispensable to drama, and especially to
+insist--as do some of Brunetière's followers--that the conflict must be
+between will and will. A stand-up fight between will and will--such a
+fight as occurs in, say, the _Hippolytus_ of Euripides, or Racine's
+_Andromaque_, or Molière's _Tartufe_, or Ibsen's _Pretenders_, or
+Dumas's _Françillon_, or Sudermann's _Heimat_, or Sir Arthur Pinero's
+_Gay Lord Quex_, or Mr. Shaw's _Candida_, or Mr. Galsworthy's
+_Strife_--such a stand-up fight, I say, is no doubt one of the intensest
+forms of drama. But it is comparatively rare at any rate as the formula
+of a whole play. In individual scenes a conflict of will is frequent
+enough; but it is, after all, only one among a multitude of equally
+telling forms of drama. No one can say that the Balcony Scene in _Romeo
+and Juliet_ is undramatic, or the "Galeoto fú il libro" scene in Mr.
+Stephen Phillips's _Paolo and Francesca_; yet the point of these scenes
+is not a clash, but an ecstatic concordance, of wills. Is the
+death-scene of Cleopatra undramatic? Or the Banquet scene in _Macbeth_?
+Or the pastoral act in _The Winter's Tale_? Yet in none of these is
+there any conflict of wills. In the whole range of drama there is
+scarcely a passage which one would call more specifically dramatic than
+the Screen Scene in _The School for Scandal_; yet it would be the
+veriest quibbling to argue that any appreciable part of its effect
+arises from the clash of will against will. This whole comedy, indeed,
+suffices to show the emptiness of the theory. With a little strain it is
+possible to bring it within the letter of the formula; but who can
+pretend that any considerable part of the attraction or interest of the
+play is due to that possibility?
+
+The champions of the theory, moreover, place it on a metaphysical basis,
+finding in the will the essence of human personality, and therefore of
+the art which shows human personality raised to its highest power. It
+seems unnecessary, however, to apply to Schopenhauer for an explanation
+of whatever validity the theory may possess. For a sufficient account of
+the matter, we need go no further than the simple psychological
+observation that human nature loves a fight, whether it be with clubs or
+with swords, with tongues or with brains. One of the earliest forms of
+mediaeval drama was the "estrif" or "flyting"--the scolding-match
+between husband and wife, or between two rustic gossips. This motive is
+glorified in the quarrel between Brutus and Cassius, degraded in the
+patter of two "knockabout comedians." Certainly there is nothing more
+telling in drama than a piece of "cut-and-thrust" dialogue after the
+fashion of the ancient "stichomythia." When a whole theme involving
+conflict, or even a single scene of the nature described as a
+"passage-at-arms," comes naturally in the playwright's way, by all means
+let him seize the opportunity. But do not let him reject a theme or
+scene as undramatic merely because it has no room for a clash of
+warring wills.
+
+There is a variant of the "conflict" theory which underlines the word
+"obstacles" in the above-quoted dictum of Brunetière, and lays down the
+rule: "No obstacle, no drama." Though far from being universally valid,
+this form of the theory has a certain practical usefulness, and may well
+be borne in mind. Many a play would have remained unwritten if the
+author had asked himself, "Is there a sufficient obstacle between my two
+lovers?" or, in more general terms, "between my characters and the
+realization of their will?" There is nothing more futile than a play in
+which we feel that there is no real obstacle to the inevitable happy
+ending, and that the curtain might just as well fall in the middle of
+the first act as at the end of the third. Comedies abound (though they
+reach the stage only by accident) in which the obstacle between Corydon
+and Phyllis, between Lord Edwin and Lady Angelina, is not even a defect
+or peculiarity of character, but simply some trumpery
+misunderstanding[2] which can be kept afoot only so long as every one
+concerned holds his or her common sense in studious abeyance. "Pyramus
+and Thisbe without the wall" may be taken as the formula for the whole
+type of play. But even in plays of a much higher type, the author might
+often ask himself with advantage whether he could not strengthen his
+obstacle, and so accentuate the struggle which forms the matter of his
+play. Though conflict may not be essential to drama, yet, when you set
+forth to portray a struggle, you may as well make it as real and intense
+as possible.
+
+It seems to me that in the late William Vaughn Moody's drama, _The Great
+Divide_, the body of the play, after the stirring first act, is weakened
+by our sense that the happy ending is only being postponed by a violent
+effort. We have been assured from the very first--even before Ruth
+Jordan has set eyes on Stephen Ghent--that just such a rough diamond is
+the ideal of her dreams. It is true that, after their marriage, the
+rough diamond seriously misconducts himself towards her; and we have
+then to consider the rather unattractive question whether a single act
+of brutality on the part of a drunken husband ought to be held so
+unpardonable as to break up a union which otherwise promises to be quite
+satisfactory. But the author has taken such pains to emphasize the fact
+that these two people are really made for each other, that the answer to
+the question is not for a moment in doubt, and we become rather
+impatient of the obstinate sulkiness of Ruth's attitude. If there had
+been a real disharmony of character to be overcome, instead of, or in
+addition to, the sordid misadventure which is in fact the sole barrier
+between them, the play would certainly have been stronger, and perhaps
+more permanently popular.
+
+In a play by Mr. James Bernard Fagan, _The Prayer of the Sword_, we have
+a much clearer example of an inadequate obstacle. A youth named Andrea
+has been brought up in a monastery, and destined for the priesthood; but
+his tastes and aptitudes are all for a military career. He is, however,
+on the verge of taking his priestly vows, when accident calls him forth
+into the world, and he has the good fortune to quell a threatened
+revolution in a romantic Duchy, ruled over by a duchess of surpassing
+loveliness. With her he naturally falls in love; and the tragedy lies,
+or ought to lie, in the conflict between this earthly passion and his
+heavenly calling and election. But the author has taken pains to make
+the obstacle between Andrea and Ilaria absolutely unreal. The fact that
+Andrea has as yet taken no irrevocable vow is not the essence of the
+matter. Vow or no vow, there would have been a tragic conflict if Andrea
+had felt absolutely certain of his calling to the priesthood, and had
+defied Heaven, and imperilled his immortal soul, because of his
+overwhelming passion. That would have been a tragic situation; but the
+author had carefully avoided it. From the very first--before Andrea had
+ever seen Ilaria--it had been impressed upon us that he had no priestly
+vocation. There was no struggle in his soul between passion and duty;
+there was no struggle at all in his soul. His struggles are all with
+external forces and influences; wherefore the play, which a real
+obstacle might have converted into a tragedy, remained a sentimental
+romance--and is forgotten.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+What, then, is the essence of drama, if conflict be not it? What is the
+common quality of themes, scenes, and incidents, which we recognize as
+specifically dramatic? Perhaps we shall scarcely come nearer to a
+helpful definition than if we say that the essence of drama is _crisis_.
+A play is a more or less rapidly-developing crisis in destiny or
+circumstance, and a dramatic scene is a crisis within a crisis, clearly
+furthering the ultimate event. The drama may be called the art of
+crises, as fiction is the art of gradual developments. It is the
+slowness of its processes which differentiates the typical novel from
+the typical play. If the novelist does not take advantage of the
+facilities offered by his form for portraying gradual change, whether in
+the way of growth or of decay, he renounces his own birthright, in order
+to trespass on the domain of the dramatist. Most great novels embrace
+considerable segments of many lives; whereas the drama gives us only the
+culminating points--or shall we say the intersecting culminations?--two
+or three destinies. Some novelists have excelled precisely in the art
+with which they have made the gradations of change in character or
+circumstance so delicate as to be imperceptible from page to page, and
+measurable, as in real life, only when we look back over a considerable
+period. The dramatist, on the other hand, deals in rapid and startling
+changes, the "peripeties," as the Greeks called them, which may be the
+outcome of long, slow processes, but which actually occur in very brief
+spaces of time. Nor is this a merely mechanical consequence of the
+narrow limits of stage presentation. The crisis is as real, though not
+as inevitable, a part of human experience as the gradual development.
+Even if the material conditions of the theatre permitted the
+presentation of a whole _Middlemarch_ or _Anna Karénine_--as the
+conditions of the Chinese theatre actually do--some dramatists, we
+cannot doubt, would voluntarily renounce that license of prolixity, in
+order to cultivate an art of concentration and crisis. The Greek drama
+"subjected to the faithful eyes," as Horace phrases it, the culminating
+points of the Greek epic; the modern drama places under the lens of
+theatrical presentment the culminating points of modern experience.
+
+But, manifestly, it is not every crisis that is dramatic. A serious
+illness, a law-suit, a bankruptcy, even an ordinary prosaic marriage,
+may be a crisis in a man's life, without being necessarily, or even
+probably, material for drama. How, then, do we distinguish a dramatic
+from a non-dramatic crisis? Generally, I think, by the fact that it
+develops, or can be made naturally to develop, through a series of minor
+crises, involving more or less emotional excitement, and, if possible,
+the vivid manifestation of character. Take, for instance, the case of a
+bankruptcy. Most people, probably, who figure in the _Gazette_ do not go
+through any one, or two, or three critical moments of special tension,
+special humiliation, special agony. They gradually drift to leeward in
+their affairs, undergoing a series of small discouragements, small
+vicissitudes of hope and fear, small unpleasantnesses, which they take
+lightly or hardly according to their temperament, or the momentary state
+of their liver. In this average process of financial decline, there may
+be--there has been--matter for many excellent novels, but scarcely for a
+drama. That admirable chapter in _Little Dorrit,_ wherein Dickens
+describes the gradual degradation of the Father of the Marshalsea, shows
+how a master of fiction deals with such a subject; but it would be quite
+impossible to transfer this chapter to the stage. So, too, with the
+bankruptcy of Colonel Newcome--certain emotional crises arising from it
+have, indeed, been placed on the stage, but only after all Thackeray's
+knowledge of the world and fine gradations of art had been eliminated.
+Mr. Hardy's _Mayor of Casterbridge_ has, I think, been dramatized, but
+not, I think, with success. A somewhat similar story of financial ruin,
+the grimly powerful _House with the Green Shutters_, has not even
+tempted the dramatiser. There are, in this novel, indeed, many
+potentially dramatic crises; the trouble is that they are too numerous
+and individually too small to be suitable for theatrical presentment.
+Moreover, they are crises affecting a taciturn and inarticulate race,[3]
+a fact which places further difficulties in the way of the playwright.
+In all these cases, in short, the bankruptcy portrayed is a matter of
+slow development, with no great outstanding moments, and is consequently
+suited for treatment in fiction rather than in drama.
+
+But bankruptcy sometimes occurs in the form of one or more sudden, sharp
+crises, and has, therefore, been utilized again and again as a dramatic
+motive. In a hundred domestic dramas or melodramas, we have seen the
+head of a happy household open a newspaper or a telegram announcing the
+failure of some enterprise in which all his fortune is embarked. So
+obviously dramatic is this incident that it has become sadly hackneyed.
+Again, we have bankruptcy following upon a course of gambling, generally
+in stocks. Here there is evident opportunity, which has been frequently
+utilized, for a series of crises of somewhat violent and commonplace
+emotion. In American drama especially, the duels of Wall Street, the
+combats of bull and bear, form a very popular theme, which clearly falls
+under the Brunetière formula. Few American dramatists can resist the
+temptation of showing some masterful financier feverishly watching the
+"ticker" which proclaims him a millionaire or a beggar. The "ticker" had
+not been invented in the days when Ibsen wrote _The League of Youth_,
+otherwise he would doubtless have made use of it in the fourth act of
+that play. The most popular of all Björnson's plays is specifically
+entitled _A Bankruptcy_. Here the poet has had the art to select a
+typical phase of business life, which naturally presents itself in the
+form of an ascending curve, so to speak, of emotional crises. We see the
+energetic, active business man, with a number of irons in the fire,
+aware in his heart that he is insolvent, but not absolutely clear as to
+his position, and hoping against hope to retrieve it. We see him give a
+great dinner-party, in order to throw dust in the eyes of the world, and
+to secure the support of a financial magnate, who is the guest of
+honour. The financial magnate is inclined to "bite," and goes off,
+leaving the merchant under the impression that he is saved. This is an
+interesting and natural, but scarcely a thrilling, crisis. It does not,
+therefore, discount the supreme crisis of the play, in which a cold,
+clear-headed business man, who has been deputed by the banks to look
+into the merchant's affairs, proves to him, point by point, that it
+would be dishonest of him to flounder any longer in the swamp of
+insolvency, into which he can only sink deeper and drag more people down
+with him. Then the bankrupt produces a pistol and threatens murder and
+suicide if the arbiter of his fate will not consent to give him one more
+chance; but his frenzy breaks innocuous against the other's calm,
+relentless reason. Here we have, I repeat, a typically dramatic theme: a
+great crisis, bringing out vivid manifestations of character, not only
+in the bankrupt himself, but in those around him, and naturally
+unfolding itself through a series of those lesser crises, which we call
+interesting and moving scenes. The play is scarcely a great one, partly
+because its ending is perfunctory, partly because Björnson, poet though
+he was, had not Ibsen's art of "throwing in a little poetry" into his
+modern dramas. I have summarized it up to its culminating point, because
+it happened to illustrate the difference between a bankruptcy, dramatic
+in its nature and treatment, and those undramatic bankruptcies to which
+reference has been made. In _La Douloureuse_, by Maurice Donnay,
+bankruptcy is incidentally employed to bring about a crisis of a
+different order. A ball is proceeding at the house of a Parisian
+financier, when the whisper spreads that the host is ruined, and has
+committed suicide in a room above; whereupon the guests, after a moment
+of flustered consternation, go on supping and dancing![4] We are not at
+all deeply interested in the host or his fortunes. The author's purpose
+is to illustrate, rather crudely, the heartlessness of plutocratic
+Bohemia; and by means of the bankruptcy and suicide he brings about what
+may be called a crisis of collective character.[5]
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+As regards individual incidents, it may be said in general that the
+dramatic way of treating them is the crisp and staccato, as opposed to
+the smooth or legato, method. It may be thought a point of inferiority
+in dramatic art that it should deal so largely in shocks to the nerves,
+and should appeal by preference, wherever it is reasonably possible, to
+the cheap emotions of curiosity and surprise. But this is a criticism,
+not of dramatic art, but of human nature. We may wish that mankind took
+more pleasure in pure apprehension than in emotion; but so long as the
+fact is otherwise, that way of handling an incident by which the
+greatest variety of poignancy of emotion can be extracted from it will
+remain the specifically dramatic way.
+
+We shall have to consider later the relation between what may be called
+primary and secondary suspense or surprise--that is to say between
+suspense or surprise actually experienced by the spectator to whom the
+drama is new, and suspense or surprise experienced only sympathetically,
+on behalf of the characters, by a spectator who knows perfectly what is
+to follow. The two forms of emotion are so far similar that we need not
+distinguish between them in considering the general content of the term
+"dramatic." It is plain that the latter or secondary form of emotion
+must be by far the commoner, and the one to which the dramatist of any
+ambition must make his main appeal; for the longer his play endures, the
+larger will be the proportion of any given audience which knows it
+beforehand, in outline, if not in detail.
+
+As a typical example of a dramatic way of handling an incident, so as to
+make a supreme effect of what might else have been an anti-climax, one
+may cite the death of Othello. Shakespeare was faced by no easy problem.
+Desdemona was dead, Emilia dead, Iago wounded and doomed to the torture;
+how was Othello to die without merely satiating the audience with a glut
+of blood? How was his death to be made, not a foregone conclusion, a
+mere conventional suicide, but the culminating moment of the tragedy? In
+no single detail, perhaps, did Shakespeare ever show his dramatic genius
+more unmistakably than in his solution of this problem. We all remember
+how, as he is being led away, Othello stays his captors with a gesture,
+and thus addresses them:
+
+  "Soft you; a word or two, before you go.
+  I have done the state some service, and they know 't;
+  No more of that. I pray you, in your letters,
+  When you shall these unlucky deeds relate,
+  Speak of me as I am; nothing extenuate,
+  Nor set down aught in malice, then must you speak
+  Of one that loved not wisely but too well;
+  Of one not easily jealous, but, being wrought,
+  Perplex'd in the extreme; of one whose hand,
+  Like the base Indian, threw a pearl away
+  Richer than all his tribe; of one whose subdued eyes,
+  Albeit unused to the melting mood,
+  Drop tears as fast as the Arabian trees
+  Their medicinal gum. Set you down this;
+  And say besides, that in Aleppo once,
+  Where a malignant and a turban'd Turk
+  Beat a Venetian and traduced the state,
+  I took by the throat the circumcised dog,
+  And smote him--thus!"
+
+What is the essence of Shakespeare's achievement in this marvellous
+passage? What is it that he has done? He has thrown his audience, just
+as Othello has thrown his captors, off their guard, and substituted a
+sudden shock of surprise for a tedious fulfilment of expectation. In
+other words, he has handled the incident crisply instead of flaccidly,
+and so given it what we may call the specific accent of drama.
+
+Another consummate example of the dramatic handling of detail may be
+found in the first act of Ibsen's _Little Eyolf_. The lame boy, Eyolf,
+has followed the Rat-wife down to the wharf, has fallen into the water,
+and been drowned. This is the bare fact: how is it to be conveyed to the
+child's parents and to the audience?
+
+A Greek dramatist would probably have had recourse to a long and
+elaborately worked-up "messenger-speech," a pathetic recitation. That
+was the method best suited to the conditions, and to what may be called
+the prevailing tempo, of the Greek theatre. I am far from saying that it
+was a bad method: no method is bad which holds and moves an audience.
+But in this case it would have had the disadvantage of concentrating
+attention on the narrator instead of on the child's parents, on the mere
+event instead of on the emotions it engendered. In the modern theatre,
+with greater facilities for reproducing the actual movement of life, the
+dramatist naturally aims at conveying to the audience the growing
+anxiety, the suspense and the final horror, of the father and mother.
+The most commonplace playwright would have seen this opportunity and
+tried to make the most of it. Every one can think of a dozen commonplace
+ways in which the scene could be arranged and written; and some of them
+might be quite effective. The great invention by which Ibsen snatches
+the scene out of the domain of the commonplace, and raises it to the
+height of dramatic poetry, consists in leaving it doubtful to the father
+and mother what is the meaning of the excitement on the beach and the
+confused cries which reach their ears, until one cry comes home to them
+with terrible distinctness, "The crutch is floating!" It would be hard
+to name any single phrase in literature in which more dramatic effect is
+concentrated than in these four words--they are only two words in the
+original. However dissimilar in its nature and circumstances, this
+incident is comparable with the death of Othello, inasmuch as in each
+case the poet, by a supreme felicity of invention, has succeeded in
+doing a given thing in absolutely the most dramatic method conceivable.
+Here we recognize in a consummate degree what has been called the
+"fingering of the dramatist"; and I know not how better to express the
+common quality of the two incidents than in saying that each is touched
+with extraordinary crispness, so as to give to what in both cases has
+for some time been expected and foreseen a sudden thrill of novelty and
+unexpectedness. That is how to do a thing dramatically.[6]
+
+And now, after all this discussion of the "dramatic" in theme and
+incident, it remains to be said that the tendency of recent theory, and
+of some recent practice, has been to widen the meaning of the word,
+until it bursts the bonds of all definition. Plays have been written,
+and have found some acceptance, in which the endeavour of the dramatist
+has been to depict life, not in moments of crisis, but in its most level
+and humdrum phases, and to avoid any crispness of touch in the
+presentation of individual incidents. "Dramatic," in the eyes of writers
+of this school, has become a term of reproach, synonymous with
+"theatrical." They take their cue from Maeterlinck's famous essay on
+"The Tragic in Daily Life," in which he lays it down that: "An old man,
+seated in his armchair, waiting patiently, with his lamp beside
+him--submitting with bent head to the presence of his soul and his
+destiny--motionless as he is, does yet live in reality a deeper, more
+human, and more universal life than the lover who strangles his
+mistress, the captain who conquers in battle, or the husband who
+'avenges his honour.'" They do not observe that Maeterlinck, in his own
+practice, constantly deals with crises, and often with violent and
+startling ones.
+
+At the same time, I am far from suggesting that the reaction against the
+traditional "dramatic" is a wholly mistaken movement. It is a valuable
+corrective of conventional theatricalism; and it has, at some points,
+positively enlarged the domain of dramatic art. Any movement is good
+which helps to free art from the tyranny of a code of rules and
+definitions. The only really valid definition of the dramatic is: Any
+representation of imaginary personages which is capable of interesting
+an average audience assembled in a theatre. We must say "representation
+of imaginary personages" in order to exclude a lecture or a prize-fight;
+and we must say "an average audience" (or something to that effect) in
+order to exclude a dialogue of Plato or of Landor, the recitation of
+which might interest a specially selected public. Any further attempt to
+limit the content of the term "dramatic" is simply the expression of an
+opinion that such-and-such forms of representation will not be found to
+interest an audience; and this opinion may always be rebutted by
+experiment. In all that I have said, then, as to the dramatic and the
+non-dramatic, I must be taken as meaning: "Such-and-such forms and
+methods have been found to please, and will probably please again. They
+are, so to speak, safer and easier than other forms and methods. But it
+is the part of original genius to override the dictates of experience,
+and nothing in these pages is designed to discourage original genius
+from making the attempt." We have already seen, indeed, that in a
+certain type of play--the broad picture of a social phenomenon or
+environment--it is preferable that no attempt should be made to depict a
+marked crisis. There should be just enough story to afford a plausible
+excuse for raising and for lowering the curtain.[7]
+
+Let us not, however, seem to grant too much to the innovators and the
+quietists. To say that a drama should be, or tends to be, the
+presentation of a crisis in the life of certain characters, is by no
+means to insist on a mere arbitrary convention. It is to make at once an
+induction from the overwhelming majority of existing dramas, and a
+deduction from the nature and inherent conditions of theatrical
+presentation. The fact that theatrical conditions often encourage a
+violent exaggeration of the characteristically dramatic elements in life
+does not make these elements any the less real or any the less
+characteristically dramatic. It is true that crispness of handling may
+easily degenerate into the pursuit of mere picture-poster situation; but
+that is no reason why the artist should not seek to achieve crispness
+within the bounds prescribed by nature and common sense. There is a
+drama--I have myself seen it--in which the heroine, fleeing from the
+villain, is stopped by a yawning chasm. The pursuer is at her heels, and
+it seems as though she has no resource but to hurl herself into the
+abyss. But she is accompanied by three Indian servants, who happen, by
+the mercy of Providence, to be accomplished acrobats. The second climbs
+on the shoulders of the first, the third on the shoulders of the second;
+and then the whole trio falls forward across the chasm, the top one
+grasping some bush or creeper on the other side; so that a living bridge
+is formed, on which the heroine (herself, it would seem, something of an
+acrobat) can cross the dizzy gulf and bid defiance to the baffled
+villain. This is clearly a dramatic crisis within our definition; but,
+no less clearly, it is not a piece of rational or commendable drama. To
+say that such-and-such a factor is necessary, or highly desirable, in a
+dramatic scene, is by no means to imply that every scene which contains
+this factor is good drama. Let us take the case of another heroine--Nina
+in Sir Arthur Pinero's _His House in Order_. The second wife of Filmer
+Jesson, she is continually being offered up as a sacrifice on the altar
+dedicated to the memory of his adored first wife. Not only her husband,
+but the relatives of the sainted Annabel, make her life a burden to her.
+Then it comes to her knowledge--she obtains absolute proof--that
+Annabel was anything but the saint she was believed to be. By a single
+word she can overturn the altar of her martyrdom, and shatter the
+dearest illusion of her persecutors. Shall she speak that word, or shall
+she not? Here is a crisis which comes within our definition just as
+clearly as the other;[8] only it happens to be entirely natural and
+probable, and eminently illustrative of character. Ought we, then, to
+despise it because of the element it has in common with the
+picture-poster situation of preposterous melodrama? Surely not. Let
+those who have the art--the extremely delicate and difficult art--of
+making drama without the characteristically dramatic ingredients, do so
+by all means; but let them not seek to lay an embargo on the judicious
+use of these ingredients as they present themselves in life.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+[Footnote 1: _Etudes Critiques_, vol. vii, pp. 153 and 207.]
+
+[Footnote 2: In the most aggravated cases, the misunderstanding is
+maintained by a persevering use of pronouns in place of proper names:
+"he" and "she" being taken by the hearer to mean A. and B., when the
+speaker is in fact referring to X. and Y. This ancient trick becomes the
+more irritating the longer the _quiproquo_ is dragged out.]
+
+[Footnote 3: The Lowland Scottish villager. It is noteworthy that Mr.
+J.M. Barrie, who himself belongs to this race, has an almost unique gift
+of extracting dramatic effect out of taciturnity, and even out
+of silence.]
+
+[Footnote 4: There is a somewhat similar incident in Clyde Fitch's play,
+_The Moth and the Flame_.]
+
+[Footnote 5: _Les Corbeaux_, by Henri Becque, might perhaps be classed
+as a bankruptcy play, though the point of it is that the Vigneron family
+is not really bankrupt at all, but is unblushingly fleeced by the
+partner and the lawyer of the deceased Vigneron, who play into each
+other's hands.]
+
+[Footnote 6: "Dramatic" has recently become one of the most overworked
+words in the vocabulary of journalism. It constantly appears, not only
+in the text of the picturesque reporter, but in head-lines and on
+bulletin-boards. When, on July 20, 1911, Mr. Asquith wrote to Mr.
+Balfour to inform him that the King had guaranteed the creation of
+peers, should it prove necessary for the passing of the Parliament Bill,
+one paper published the news under this head-line: "DRAMATIC ANNOUNCEMENT
+BY THE PRIME MINISTER," and the parliamentary correspondent of another
+paper wrote: "With dramatic suddenness and swiftness, the Prime Minister
+hurled his thunderbolt at the wavering Tory party yesterday." As a
+matter of fact, the letter was probably not "hurled" more suddenly or
+swiftly than the most ordinary invitation to dinner: nor can its
+contents have been particularly surprising to any one. It was probably
+the conclusiveness, the finality, of the announcement that struck these
+writers as "dramatic." The letter put an end to all dubiety with a
+"short, sharp shock." It was, in fact, crisp. As a rule, however,
+"dramatic" is employed by the modern journalist simply as a rather
+pretentious synonym for the still more hackneyed "startling."]
+
+[Footnote 7: As a specimen, and a successful specimen, of this new
+technic, I may cite Miss Elizabeth Baker's very interesting play,
+_Chains_. There is absolutely no "story" in it, no complication of
+incidents, not even any emotional tension worth speaking of. Another
+recent play of something the same type, _The Way the Money Goes_, by
+Lady Bell, was quite thrilling by comparison. There we saw a workman's
+wife bowed down by a terrible secret which threatened to wreck her whole
+life--the secret that she had actually run into debt to the amount of
+£30. Her situation was dramatic in the ordinary sense of the word, very
+much as Nora's situation is dramatic when she knows that Krogstad's
+letter is in Helmer's hands. But in _Chains_ there is not even this
+simple form of excitement and suspense. A city clerk, oppressed by the
+deadly monotony and narrowness of his life, thinks of going to
+Australia--and doesn't go: that is the sum and substance of the action.
+Also, by way of underplot, a shopgirl, oppressed by the deadly monotony
+and narrowness of her life, thinks of escaping from it by marrying a
+middle-aged widower--and doesn't do it. If any one had told the late
+Francisque Sarcey, or the late Clement Scott, that a play could be made
+out of this slender material, which should hold an audience absorbed
+through four acts, and stir them to real enthusiasm, these eminent
+critics would have thought him a madman. Yet Miss Baker has achieved
+this feat, by the simple process of supplementing competent observation
+with a fair share of dramatic instinct.]
+
+[Footnote 8: If the essence of drama is crisis, it follows that nothing
+can be more dramatic than a momentous choice which may make or mar both
+the character and the fortune of the chooser and of others. There is an
+element of choice in all action which is, or seems to be, the product of
+free will; but there is a peculiar crispness of effect when two
+alternatives are clearly formulated, and the choice is made after a
+mental struggle, accentuated, perhaps, by impassioned advocacy of the
+conflicting interests. Such scenes are _Coriolanus_, v. 3, the scene
+between Ellida, Wangel, and the Stranger in the last act of _The Lady
+from the Sea_, and the concluding scene of _Candida_.]
+
+
+
+
+_CHAPTER IV_
+
+THE ROUTINE OF COMPOSITION
+
+
+As no two people, probably, ever did, or ever will, pursue the same
+routine in play-making, it is manifestly impossible to lay down any
+general rules on the subject. There are one or two considerations,
+however, which it may not be wholly superfluous to suggest to beginners.
+
+An invaluable insight into the methods of a master is provided by the
+scenarios and drafts of plays published in Henrik Ibsen's _Efterladte
+Skrifter_. The most important of these "fore-works," as he used to call
+them, have now been translated under the title of _From Ibsen's
+Workshop_ (Scribner), and may be studied with the greatest profit. Not
+that the student should mechanically imitate even Ibsen's routine of
+composition, which, indeed, varied considerably from play to play. The
+great lesson to be learnt from Ibsen's practice is that the play should
+be kept fluid or plastic as long as possible, and not suffered to become
+immutably fixed, either in the author's mind or on paper, before it has
+had time to grow and ripen. Many, if not most, of Ibsen's greatest
+individual inspirations came to him as afterthoughts, after the play had
+reached a point of development at which many authors would have held the
+process of gestation ended, and the work of art ripe for birth. Among
+these inspired afterthoughts may be reckoned Nora's great line,
+"Millions of women have done that"--the most crushing repartee in
+literature--Hedvig's threatened blindness, with all that ensues from it,
+and Little Eyolf's crutch, used to such purpose as we have already seen.
+
+This is not to say that the drawing-up of a tentative scenario ought not
+to be one of the playwright's first proceedings. Indeed, if he is able
+to dispense with a scenario on paper, it can only be because his mind is
+so clear, and so retentive of its own ideas, as to enable him to carry
+in his head, always ready for reference, a more or less detailed scheme.
+Go-as-you-please composition may be possible for the novelist, perhaps
+even for the writer of a one-act play, a mere piece of dialogue; but in
+a dramatic structure of any considerable extent, proportion, balance,
+and the interconnection of parts are so essential that a scenario is
+almost as indispensable to a dramatist as a set of plans to an
+architect. There is one dramatist of note whom one suspects of sometimes
+working without any definite scenario, and inventing as he goes along.
+That dramatist, I need scarcely say, is Mr. Bernard Shaw. I have no
+absolute knowledge of his method; but if he schemed out any scenario for
+_Getting Married_ or _Misalliance_, he has sedulously concealed the
+fact--to the detriment of the plays.[1]
+
+The scenario or skeleton is so manifestly the natural ground-work of a
+dramatic performance that the playwrights of the Italian _commedia dell'
+arte_ wrote nothing more than a scheme of scenes, and left the actors to
+do the rest. The same practice prevailed in early Elizabethan days, as
+one or two MS. "Plats," designed to be hung up in the wings, are extant
+to testify. The transition from extempore acting regulated by a scenario
+to the formal learning of parts falls within the historical period of
+the German stage. It seems probable that the romantic playwrights of the
+sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, both in England and in Spain, may
+have adopted a method not unlike that of the drama of improvisation,
+that is to say, they may have drawn out a scheme of entrances and exits,
+and then let their characters discourse (on paper) as their fancy
+prompted. So, at least, the copious fluency of their dialogue seems to
+suggest. But the typical modern play is a much more close-knit organism,
+in which every word has to be weighed far more carefully than it was by
+playwrights who stood near to the days of improvisation, and could
+indulge in "the large utterance of the early gods." Consequently it
+would seem that, until a play has been thought out very clearly and in
+great detail, any scheme of entrances and exits ought to be merely
+provisional and subject to indefinite modification. A modern play is not
+a framework of story loosely draped in a more or less gorgeous robe of
+language. There is, or ought to be, a close interdependence between
+action, character and dialogue, which forbids a playwright to tie his
+hands very far in advance.
+
+As a rule, then, it would seem to be an unfavourable sign when a drama
+presents itself at an early stage with a fixed and unalterable outline.
+The result may be a powerful, logical, well-knit piece of work; but the
+breath of life will scarcely be in it. Room should be left as long as
+possible for unexpected developments of character. If your characters
+are innocent of unexpected developments, the less characters they.[2]
+Not that I, personally, have any faith in those writers of fiction, be
+they playwrights or novelists, who contend that they do not speak
+through the mouths of their personages, but rather let their personages
+speak through them. "I do not invent or create" I have heard an eminent
+novelist say: "I simply record; my characters speak and act, and I write
+down their sayings and doings." This author may be a fine psychologist
+for purposes of fiction, but I question his insight into his own mental
+processes. The apparent spontaneity of a character's proceedings is a
+pure illusion. It means no more than that the imagination, once set in
+motion along a given line, moves along that line with an ease and
+freedom which seems to its possessor preternatural and almost
+uncanny.[3]
+
+Most authors, however, who have any real gift for character-creation
+probably fall more or less under this illusion, though they are sane
+enough and modest enough to realize that an illusion it is.[4] A
+character will every now and then seem to take the bit between his teeth
+and say and do things for which his creator feels himself hardly
+responsible. The playwright's scheme should not, then, until the latest
+possible moment, become so hard and fast as to allow his characters no
+elbow room for such manifestations of spontaneity. And this is only one
+of several forms of afterthought which may arise as the play develops.
+The playwright may all of a sudden see that a certain character is
+superfluous, or that a new character is needed, or that a new
+relationship between two characters would simplify matters, or that a
+scene that he has placed in the first act ought to be in the second, or
+that he can dispense with it altogether, or that it reveals too much to
+the audience and must be wholly recast.[5]
+
+These are only a few of the re-adjustments which have constantly to be
+made if a play is shaping itself by a process of vital growth; and that
+is why the playwright may be advised to keep his material fluid as long
+as he can. Ibsen had written large portions of the play now known to us
+as _Rosmersholm_ before he decided that Rebecca should not be married to
+Rosmer. He also, at a comparatively late stage, did away with two
+daughters whom he had at first given to Rosmer, and decided to make her
+childlessness the main cause of Beata's tragedy.
+
+Perhaps I insist too strongly on the advisability of treating a dramatic
+theme as clay to be modelled and remodelled, rather than as wood or
+marble to be carved unalterably and once for all. If so, it is because
+of a personal reminiscence. In my early youth, I had, like everybody
+else, ambitions in the direction of play-writing; and it was my
+inability to keep a theme plastic that convinced me of my lack of
+talent. It pleased me greatly to draw out a detailed scenario, working
+up duly to a situation at the end of each act; and, once made, that
+scenario was like a cast-iron mould into which the dialogue had simply
+to be poured. The result was that the play had all the merits of a
+logical, well-ordered essay. My situations worked out like the Q.E.D.'s
+of Euclid. My characters obstinately refused to come to life, or to take
+the bit between their teeth. They were simply cog-wheels in a
+pre-arranged mechanism. In one respect, my two or three plays were
+models--in respect of brevity and conciseness. I was never troubled by
+the necessity of cutting down--so cruel a necessity to many
+playwrights.[6] My difficulty was rather to find enough for my
+characters to say--for they never wanted to say anything that was not
+strictly germane to the plot. It was this that made me despair of
+play-writing, and realize that my mission was to teach other people how
+to write plays. And, similarly, the aspirant who finds that his people
+never want to say more than he can allow them to say--that they never
+rush headlong into blind alleys, or do things that upset the balance of
+the play and have to be resolutely undone--that aspirant will do well
+not to be over-confident of his dramatic calling and election. There may
+be authors who can write vital plays, as Shakespeare is said (on rather
+poor evidence)[7] to have done, without blotting a line; but I believe
+them to be rare. In our day, the great playwright is more likely to be
+he who does not shrink, on occasion, from blotting an act or two.
+
+There is a modern French dramatist who writes, with success, such plays
+as I might have written had I combined a strong philosophical faculty
+with great rhetorical force and fluency. The dramas of M. Paul Hervieu
+have all the neatness and cogency of a geometrical demonstration. One
+imagines that, for M. Hervieu, the act of composition means merely the
+careful filling in of a scenario as neat and complete as a schedule.[8]
+But for that very reason, despite their undoubted intellectual power, M.
+Hervieu's dramas command our respect rather than our enthusiasm. The
+dramatist should aim at _being_ logical without _seeming_ so.[9]
+
+It is sometimes said that a playwright ought to construct his play
+backwards, and even to write his last act first.[10] This doctrine
+belongs to the period of the well-made play, when climax was regarded as
+the one thing needful in dramatic art, and anticlimax as the
+unforgivable sin. Nowadays, we do not insist that every play should end
+with a tableau, or with an emphatic _mot de la fin_. We are more willing
+to accept a quiet, even an indecisive, ending.[11] Nevertheless it is
+and must ever be true that, at a very early period in the scheming of
+his play, the playwright ought to assure himself that his theme is
+capable of a satisfactory ending. Of course this phrase does not imply a
+"happy ending," but one which satisfies the author as being artistic,
+effective, inevitable (in the case of a serious play), or, in one word,
+"right." An obviously makeshift ending can never be desirable, either
+from the ideal or from the practical point of view. Many excellent plays
+have been wrecked on this rock. The very frequent complaint that "the
+last act is weak" is not always or necessarily a just reproach; but it
+is so when the author has clearly been at a loss for an ending, and has
+simply huddled his play up in a conventional and perfunctory fashion. It
+may even be said that some apparently promising themes are deceptive in
+their promise, since they are inherently incapable of a satisfactory
+ending. The playwright should by all means make sure that he has not run
+up against one of these blind-alley themes.[12] He should, at an early
+point, see clearly the end for which he is making, and be sure that it
+is an end which he actively desires, not merely one which satisfies
+convention, or which "will have to do."
+
+Some dramatists, when a play is provisionally mapped out, do not attempt
+to begin at the beginning and write it as a coherent whole, but make a
+dash first at the more salient and critical scenes, or those which
+specially attract their imagination. On such a point every author must
+obviously be a law unto himself. From the theoretical point of view, one
+can only approve the practice, since it certainly makes for plasticity.
+It is evident that a detached scene, written while those that lead up to
+it are as yet but vaguely conceived, must be subject to indefinite
+modification.[13] In several of Ibsen's very roughest drafts, we find
+short passages of dialogue sketched out even before the names have been
+assigned to the characters, showing that some of his earliest ideas came
+to him, as it were, ready dramatized. One would be tempted to hope much
+of an author who habitually and unaffectedly thus "lisped in dialogue
+for the dialogue came."
+
+Ought the playwright, at an early stage in the process of each act, to
+have the details of its scene clearly before him? Ought he to draw out a
+scene-plot, and know, from moment to moment, just where each character
+is, whether He is standing on the hearthrug and She sitting on the
+settee, or _vice versa_? There is no doubt that furniture, properties,
+accidents of environment, play a much larger part in modern drama than
+they did on the Elizabethan, the eighteenth century, or even the
+early-Victorian stage. Some of us, who are not yet centenarians, can
+remember to have seen rooms on the stage with no furniture at all except
+two or three chairs "painted on the flat." Under such conditions, it was
+clearly useless for the playwright to trouble his head about furniture,
+and even "positions" might well be left for arrangement at rehearsal.
+This carelessness of the environment, however, is no longer possible.
+Whether we like it or no (and some theorists do not like it at all),
+scenery has ceased to be a merely suggestive background against which
+the figures stand out in high relief. The stage now aims at presenting a
+complete picture, with the figures, not "a little out of the picture,"
+but completely in it. This being so, the playwright must evidently, at
+some point in the working out of his theme, visualize the stage-picture
+in considerable detail; and we find that almost all modern dramatists
+do, as a matter of fact, pay great attention to what may be called the
+topography of their scenes, and the shifting "positions" of their
+characters. The question is: at what stage of the process of composition
+ought this visualization to occur? Here, again, it would be absurd to
+lay down a general rule; but I am inclined to think, both theoretically
+and from what can be gathered of the practice of the best dramatists,
+that it is wisest to reserve it for a comparatively late stage. A
+playwright of my acquaintance, and a very remarkable playwright too,
+used to scribble the first drafts of his play in little notebooks, which
+he produced from his pocket whenever he had a moment to spare--often on
+the top of an omnibus. Only when the first draft was complete did he
+proceed to set the scenes, as it were, and map out the stage-management.
+On the other hand, one has heard of playwrights whose first step in
+setting to work upon a particular act was to construct a complete model
+of the scene, and people it with manikins to represent the characters.
+As a general practice, this is scarcely to be commended. It is wiser,
+one fancies, to have the matter of the scene pretty fully roughed-out
+before details of furniture, properties, and position are arranged.[14]
+It may happen, indeed, that some natural phenomenon, some property or
+piece of furniture, is the very pivot of the scene; in which case it
+must, of course, be posited from the first. From the very moment of his
+conceiving the fourth act of _Le Tartufe_, Molière must have had clearly
+in view the table under which Orgon hides; and Sheridan cannot have got
+very far with the Screen Scene before he had mentally placed the screen.
+But even where a great deal turns on some individual object, the
+detailed arrangements of the scene may in most cases be taken for
+granted until a late stage in its working out.
+
+One proviso, however, must be made; where any important effect depends
+upon a given object, or a particular arrangement of the scene, the
+playwright cannot too soon assure himself that the object comes well
+within the physical possibilities of the stage, and that the arrangement
+is optically[15] possible and effective. Few things, indeed, are quite
+impossible to the modern stage; but there are many that had much better
+not be attempted. It need scarcely be added that the more serious a play
+is, or aspires to be, the more carefully should the author avoid any
+such effects as call for the active collaboration of the
+stage-carpenter, machinist, or electrician. Even when a mechanical
+effect can be produced to perfection, the very fact that the audience
+cannot but admire the ingenuity displayed, and wonder "how it is done,"
+implies a failure of that single-minded attention to the essence of the
+matter in hand which the dramatist would strive to beget and maintain. A
+small but instructive example of a difficult effect, such as the prudent
+playwright will do well to avoid, occurs in the third act of Ibsen's
+_Little Eyolf_. During the greater part of the act, the flag in
+Allmers's garden is hoisted to half-mast in token of mourning; until at
+the end, when he and Rita attain a serener frame of mind, he runs it up
+to the truck. Now, from the poetic and symbolic point of view, this flag
+is all that can be desired; but from the practical point of view it
+presents grave difficulties. Nothing is so pitifully ineffective as a
+flag in a dead calm, drooping nervelessly against the mast; and though,
+no doubt, by an ingenious arrangement of electric fans, it might be
+possible to make this flag flutter in the breeze, the very fact of its
+doing so would tend to set the audience wondering by what mechanism the
+effect was produced, instead of attending to the soul-struggles of Rita
+and Allmers. It would be absurd to blame Ibsen for overriding theatrical
+prudence in such a case; I merely point out to beginners that it is
+wise, before relying on an effect of this order, to make sure that it
+is, not only possible, but convenient from the practical point of view.
+In one or two other cases Ibsen strained the resources of the stage. The
+illumination in the last act of _Pillars of Society_ cannot be carried
+out as he describes it; or rather, if it were carried out on some
+exceptionally large and well-equipped stage, the feat of the mechanician
+would eclipse the invention of the poet. On the other hand, the abode of
+the Wild Duck in the play of that name is a conception entirely
+consonant with the optics of the theatre; for no detail at all need be,
+or ought to be, visible, and a vague effect of light is all that is
+required. Only in his last melancholy effort did Ibsen, in a play
+designed for representation, demand scenic effects entirely beyond the
+resources of any theatre not specially fitted for spectacular drama, and
+possible, even in such a theatre, only in some ridiculously
+makeshift form.
+
+There are two points of routine on which I am compelled to speak in no
+uncertain voice--two practices which I hold to be almost equally
+condemnable. In the first place, no playwright who understands the
+evolution of the modern theatre can nowadays use in his stage-directions
+the abhorrent jargon of the early nineteenth century. When one comes
+across a manuscript bespattered with such cabalistic signs as "R.2.E.,"
+"R.C.," "L.C.," "L.U.E.," and so forth, one sees at a glance that the
+writer has neither studied dramatic literature nor thought out for
+himself the conditions of the modern theatre, but has found his dramatic
+education between the buff covers of _French's Acting Edition_. Some
+beginners imagine that a plentiful use of such abbreviations will be
+taken as a proof of their familiarity with the stage; whereas, in fact,
+it only shows their unfamiliarity with theatrical history. They might as
+well set forth to describe a modern battleship in the nautical
+terminology of Captain Marryat. "Right First Entrance," "Left Upper
+Entrance," and so forth, are terms belonging to the period when there
+were no "box" rooms or "set" exteriors on the stage, when the sides of
+each scene were composed of "wings" shoved on in grooves, and entrances
+could be made between each pair of wings. Thus, "R. 1 E." meant the
+entrance between the proscenium and the first "wing" on the right, "R. 2
+E." meant the entrance between the first pair of "wings," and so forth.
+"L.U.E." meant the entrance at the left between the last "wing" and the
+back cloth. Now grooves and "wings" have disappeared from the stage. The
+"box" room is entered, like any room in real life, by doors or French
+windows; and the only rational course is to state the position of your
+doors in your opening stage-direction, and thereafter to say in plain
+language by which door an entrance or an exit is to be made. In exterior
+scenes where, for example, trees or clumps of shrubbery answer in a
+measure to the old "wings," the old terminology may not be quite
+meaningless; but it is far better eschewed. It is a good general rule to
+avoid, so far as possible, expressions which show that the author has a
+stage scene, and not an episode of real life, before his eyes. Men of
+the theatre are the last to be impressed by theatrical jargon; and when
+the play comes to be printed, the general reader is merely bewildered
+and annoyed by technicalities, which tend, moreover, to disturb
+his illusion.
+
+A still more emphatic warning must be given against another and more
+recent abuse in the matter of stage-directions. The "L.U.E.'s," indeed,
+are bound very soon to die a natural death. The people who require to be
+warned against them are, as a rule, scarcely worth warning. But it is
+precisely the cleverest people (to use clever in a somewhat narrow
+sense) who are apt to be led astray by Mr. Bernard Shaw's practice of
+expanding his stage-directions into essays, disquisitions, monologues,
+pamphlets. This is a practice which goes far to justify the belief of
+some foreign critics that the English, or, since Mr. Shaw is in
+question, let us say the inhabitants of the British Islands, are
+congenitally incapable of producing a work of pure art. Our
+novelists--Fielding, Thackeray, George Eliot--have been sufficiently,
+though perhaps not unjustly, called over the coals for their habit of
+coming in front of their canvas, and either gossiping with the reader or
+preaching at him. But, if it be a sound maxim that the novelist should
+not obtrude his personality on his reader, how much more is this true of
+the dramatist! When the dramatist steps to the footlights and begins to
+lecture, all illusion is gone. It may be said that, as a matter of fact,
+this does not occur: that on the stage we hear no more of the
+disquisitions of Mr. Shaw and his imitators than we do of the curt, and
+often non-existent, stage-directions of Shakespeare and his
+contemporaries. To this the reply is twofold. First, the very fact that
+these disquisitions are written proves that the play is designed to be
+printed and read, and that we are, therefore, justified in applying to
+it the standard of what may be called literary illusion. Second, when a
+playwright gets into the habit of talking around his characters, he
+inevitably, even if unconsciously, slackens his endeavour to make them
+express themselves as completely as may be in their own proper medium of
+dramatic action and dialogue. You cannot with impunity mix up two
+distinct forms of art--the drama and the sociological essay or lecture.
+To Mr. Shaw, of course, much may, and must, be forgiven. His
+stage-directions are so brilliant that some one, some day, will
+assuredly have them spoken by a lecturer in the orchestra while the
+action stands still on the stage. Thus, he will have begotten a bastard,
+but highly entertaining, form of art. My protest has no practical
+application to him, for he is a standing exception to all rules. It is
+to the younger generation that I appeal not to be misled by his
+seductive example. They have little chance of rivalling him as
+sociological essayists; but if they treat their art seriously, and as a
+pure art, they may easily surpass him as dramatists. By adopting his
+practice they will tend to produce, not fine works of art, but inferior
+sociological documents. They will impair their originality and spoil
+their plays in order to do comparatively badly what Mr. Shaw has done
+incomparably well.
+
+The common-sense rule as to stage directions is absolutely plain; be
+they short, or be they long, they ought always to be _impersonal_. The
+playwright who cracks jokes in his stage-directions, or indulges in
+graces of style, is intruding himself between the spectator and the work
+of art, to the inevitable detriment of the illusion. In preparing a play
+for the press, the author should make his stage-directions as brief as
+is consistent with clearness. Few readers will burden their memory with
+long and detailed descriptions. When a new character of importance
+appears, a short description of his or her personal appearance and dress
+may be helpful to the reader; but even this should be kept impersonal.
+Moreover, as a play has always to be read before it can be rehearsed or
+acted, it is no bad plan to make the stage-directions, from the first,
+such as tend to bring the play home clearly to the reader's mental
+vision. And here I may mention a principle, based on more than mere
+convenience, which some playwrights observe with excellent results. Not
+merely in writing stage-directions, but in visualizing a scene, the idea
+of the stage should, as far as possible, be banished from the author's
+mind. He should see and describe the room, the garden, the sea-shore, or
+whatever the place of his action may be, not as a stage-scene, but as a
+room, garden, or sea-shore in the real world. The cultivation of this
+habit ought to be, and I believe is in some cases, a safeguard against
+theatricality.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+[Footnote 1: Sardou wrote careful and detailed scenarios, Dumas _fils_
+held it a waste of time to do so. Pailleron wrote "enormous" scenarios,
+Meilhac very brief ones, or none at all. Mr. Galsworthy, rather to my
+surprise, disdains, and even condemns, the scenario, holding that a
+theme becomes lifeless when you put down its skeleton on paper. Sir
+Arthur Pinero says: "Before beginning to write a play, I always make
+sure, by means of a definite scheme, that there is _a_ way of doing it;
+but whether I ultimately follow that way is a totally different matter."
+Mr. Alfred Sutro practically confesses to a scenario. He says: "Before I
+start writing the dialogue of a play, I make sure that I shall have an
+absolutely free hand over the entrances and exits: in other words, that
+there is ample and legitimate reason for each character appearing in any
+particular scene, and ample motive for his leaving it." Mr. Granville
+Barker does not put on paper a detailed scenario. He says: "I plan the
+general scheme, and particularly the balance of the play, in my head;
+but this, of course, does not depend entirely on entrances and exits."
+Mr. Henry Arthur Jones says: "I know the leading scenes, and the general
+course of action in each act, before I write a line. When I have got the
+whole story clear, and divided into acts, I very carefully construct the
+first act, as a series of scenes between such and such of the
+characters. When the first act is written I carefully construct the
+second act in the same way--and so on. I sometimes draw up twenty
+scenarios for an act before I can get it to go straight."]
+
+[Footnote 2: A friend of the late Clyde Fitch writes to me: "Fitch was
+often astonished at the way in which his characters developed. He tried
+to make them do certain things: they did others."]
+
+[Footnote 3: This account of the matter seems to find support in a
+statement, by M. François de Curel, an accomplished psychologist, to the
+effect that during the first few days of work at a play he is "clearly
+conscious of creating," but that gradually he gets "into the skin" of
+his characters, and appears to work by instinct. No doubt some artists
+are actually subject to a sort of hallucination, during which they seem
+rather to record than to invent the doings of their characters. But this
+somewhat morbid condition should scarcely be cultivated by the
+dramatist, whose intelligence should always keep a light rein on his
+more instinctive mental processes. See _L'Année Psychologique_, 1894.
+p. 120.]
+
+[Footnote 4: Sir Arthur Pinero says: "The beginning of a play to me is a
+little world of people. I live with them, get familiar with them, and
+_they_ tell me the story." This may sound not unlike the remark of the
+novelist above quoted; but the intention was quite different. Sir Arthur
+simply meant that the story came to him as the characters took on life
+in his imagination. Mr. H.A. Jones writes: "When you have a character or
+several characters you haven't a play. You may keep these in your mind
+and nurse them till they combine in a piece of action; but you haven't
+got your play till you have theme, characters, and action all fused. The
+process with me is as purely automatic and spontaneous as dreaming; in
+fact it is really dreaming while you are awake."]
+
+[Footnote 5: "Here," says a well-known playwright, "is a common
+experience. You are struck by an idea with which you fall in love. 'Ha!'
+you say. 'What a superb scene where the man shall find the missing will
+under the sofa! If that doesn't make them sit up, what will?' You begin
+the play. The first act goes all right, and the second act goes all
+right. You come to the third act, and somehow it won't go at all. You
+battle with it for weeks in vain; and then it suddenly occurs to you,
+'Why, I see what's wrong! It's that confounded scene where the man finds
+the will under the sofa! Out it must come!' You cut it out, and at once
+all goes smooth again. But you have thrown overboard the great effect
+that first tempted you."]
+
+[Footnote 6: The manuscripts of Dumas _fils_ are said to contain, as a
+rule, about four times as much matter as the printed play! (Parigot:
+_Génie et Métier_, p. 243). This probably means, however, that he
+preserved tentative and ultimately rejected scenes, which most
+playwrights destroy as they go along.]
+
+[Footnote 7: Lowell points out that this assertion of Heminge and
+Condell merely shows them to have been unfamiliar with the simple
+phenomenon known as a fair copy.]
+
+[Footnote 8: Since writing this I have learnt that my conjecture is
+correct, at any rate as regards some of M. Hervieu's plays.]
+
+[Footnote 9: See Chapters XIII and XVI.]
+
+[Footnote 10: This view is expressed with great emphasis by Dumas _fils_
+in the preface to _La Princesse Georges_. "You should not begin your
+work," he says, "until you have your concluding scene, movement and
+speech clear in your mind. How can you tell what road you ought to take
+until you know where you are going?" It is perhaps a more apparent than
+real contradiction of this rule that, until _Iris_ was three parts
+finished, Sir Arthur Pinero intended the play to end with the throttling
+of Iris by Maldonado. The actual end is tantamount to a murder, though
+Iris is not actually killed.]
+
+[Footnote 11: See Chapter XVIII.]
+
+[Footnote 12: See Chapter XX.]
+
+[Footnote 13: Most of the dramatists whom I have consulted are opposed
+to the principle of "roughing out" the big scenes first, and then
+imbedding them, as it were, in their context. Sir Arthur Pinero goes the
+length of saying: "I can never go on to page 2 until I am sure that page
+1 is as right as I can make it. Indeed, when an act is finished, I send
+it at once to the printers, confident that I shall not have to go back
+upon it." Mr. Alfred Sutro says: "I write a play straight ahead from
+beginning to end, taking practically as long over the first act as over
+the last three." And Mr. Granville Barker: "I always write the beginning
+of a play first and the end last: but as to writing 'straight ahead'--it
+sounds like what one may be able to do in Heaven." But almost all
+dramatists, I take it, jot down brief passages of dialogue which they
+may or may not eventually work into the texture of their play.]
+
+[Footnote 14: One is not surprised to learn that Sardou "did his
+stage-management as he went along," and always knew exactly the position
+of his characters from moment to moment.]
+
+[Footnote 15: And aurally, it may be added. Sarcey comments on the
+impossibility of a scene in Zola's _Pot Bouille_ in which the so-called
+"lovers," Octave Mouret and Blanche, throw open the window of the garret
+in which they are quarrelling, and hear the servants in the courtyard
+outside discussing their intrigue. In order that the comments of the
+servants might reach the ears of the audience, they had to be shouted in
+a way (says M. Sarcey) that was fatal to the desired illusion.]
+
+
+
+
+_CHAPTER V_
+
+DRAMATIS PERSONAE
+
+
+The theme being chosen, the next step will probably be to determine what
+characters shall be employed in developing it. Most playwrights, I take
+it, draw up a provisional Dramatis Personae before beginning the serious
+work of construction. Ibsen seems always to have done so; but, in some
+of his plays, the list of persons was at first considerably larger than
+it ultimately became. The frugal poet sometimes saved up the characters
+rejected from one play, and used them in another. Thus Boletta and Hilda
+Wangel were originally intended to have been the daughters of Rosmer and
+Beata; and the delightful Foldal of _John Gabriel Borkman_ was a
+character left over from _The Lady from the Sea_.
+
+The playwright cannot proceed far in planning out his work without
+determining, roughly at any rate, what auxiliary characters he means to
+employ. There are in every play essential characters, without whom the
+theme is unthinkable, and auxiliary characters, not indispensable to the
+theme, but simply convenient for filling in the canvas and carrying on
+the action. It is not always possible to decide whether a character is
+essential or auxiliary--it depends upon how we define the theme. In
+_Hamlet_, for example, Hamlet, Claudius, and Gertrude are manifestly
+essential: for the theme is the hesitancy of a young man of a certain
+temperament in taking vengeance upon the seducer of his mother and
+murderer of his father. But is Ophelia essential, or merely auxiliary?
+Essential, if we consider Hamlet's pessimistic feeling as to woman and
+the "breeding of sinners" a necessary part of his character; auxiliary,
+if we take the view that without this feeling he would still have been
+Hamlet, and the action, to all intents and purposes, the same. The
+remaining characters, on the other hand, are clearly auxiliary. This is
+true even of the Ghost: for Hamlet might have learnt of his father's
+murder in fifty other ways.
+
+Polonius, Laertes, Horatio, and the rest might all have been utterly
+different, or might never have existed at all, and yet the essence of
+the play might have remained intact.
+
+It would be perfectly possible to write a _Hamlet_ after the manner of
+Racine, in which there should be only six personages instead of
+Shakespeare's six-and-twenty: and in this estimate I assume Ophelia to
+be an essential character. The dramatis personae would be: Hamlet, his
+confidant; Ophelia, her confidant; and the King and Queen, who would
+serve as confidants to each other. Indeed, an economy of one person
+might be affected by making the Queen (as she naturally might) play the
+part of confidant to Ophelia.
+
+Shakespeare, to be sure, did not deliberately choose between his own
+method and that of Racine. Classic concentration was wholly unsuited to
+the physical conditions of the Elizabethan stage, on which external
+movement and bustle were imperatively demanded. But the modern
+playwright has a wide latitude of choice in this purely technical
+matter. He may work out his plot with the smallest possible number of
+characters, or he may introduce a crowd of auxiliary personages. The
+good craftsman will be guided by the nature of his theme. In a broad
+social study or a picturesque romance, you may have as many auxiliary
+figures as you please. In a subtle comedy, or a psychological tragedy,
+the essential characters should have the stage as much as possible to
+themselves. In Becque's _La Parisienne_ there are only four characters
+and a servant; in Rostand's _Cyrano de Bergerac_ there are fifty-four
+personages named in the playbill, to say nothing of supernumeraries. In
+_Peer Gynt_, a satiric phantasmagory, Ibsen introduces some fifty
+individual characters, with numberless supernumeraries; in _An Enemy of
+the People_, a social comedy, he has eleven characters and a crowd; for
+_Ghosts_ and _Rosmersholm_, psychological tragedies, six persons apiece
+are sufficient.
+
+It can scarcely be necessary, at this time of day, to say much on the
+subject of nomenclature. One does occasionally, in manuscripts of a
+quite hopeless type, find the millionaire's daughter figuring as "Miss
+Aurea Golden," and her poor but sprightly cousin as "Miss Lalage Gay";
+but the veriest tyro realizes, as a rule, that this sort of punning
+characterization went out with the eighteenth century, or survived into
+the nineteenth century only as a flagrant anachronism, like
+knee-breeches and hair-powder.
+
+A curious essay might be written on the reasons why such names as Sir
+John Brute, Sir Tunbelly Clumsy, Sir Peter Teazle, Sir Anthony Absolute,
+Sir Lucius O'Trigger, Lord Foppington, Lord Rake, Colonel Bully,
+Lovewell, Heartfree, Gripe, Shark and the rest were regarded as a matter
+of course in "the comedy of manners," but have become offensive to-day,
+except in deliberate imitations of the eighteenth-century style. The
+explanation does not lie merely in the contrast between "conventional"
+comedy and "realistic" drama. Our forefathers (whatever Lamb may say)
+did not consciously place their comedy in a realm of convention, but
+generally considered themselves, and sometimes were, realists. The
+fashion of label-names, if we may call them so, came down from the
+Elizabethans, who, again, borrowed it from the Mediaeval Moralities.[1]
+Shakespeare himself gave us Master Slender and Justice Shallow; but it
+was in the Jonsonian comedy of types that the practice of advertising a
+"humour" or "passion" in a name (English or Italian) established itself
+most firmly. Hence such strange appellatives as Sir Epicure Mammon, Sir
+Amorous La Foole, Morose, Wellbred, Downright, Fastidius Brisk, Volpone,
+Corbaccio, Sordido, and Fallace. After the Restoration, Jonson, Beaumont
+and Fletcher, and Massinger were, for a time, more popular than
+Shakespeare; so that the label-names seemed to have the sanction of the
+giants that were before the Flood. Even when comedy began to deal with
+individuals rather than mere incarnations of a single "humour," the
+practice of giving them obvious pseudonyms held its ground. Probably it
+was reinforced by the analogous practice which obtained in journalism,
+in which real persons were constantly alluded to (and libelled) under
+fictitious designations, more or less transparent to the initiated. Thus
+a label-name did not carry with it a sense of unreality, but rather,
+perhaps, a vague suggestion of covert reference to a real person. I must
+not here attempt to trace the stages by which the fashion went out. It
+could doubtless be shown that the process of change ran parallel to the
+shrinkage of the "apron" and the transformation of the platform-stage
+into the picture-stage. That transformation was completed about the
+middle of the nineteenth century; and it was about that time that
+label-names made their latest appearances in works of any artistic
+pretension--witness the Lady Gay Spanker of _London Assurance_, and the
+Captain Dudley (or "Deadly") Smooth of _Money_. Faint traces of the
+practice survive in T.W. Robertson, as in his master, Thackeray. But it
+was in his earliest play of any note that he called a journalist Stylus.
+In his later comedies the names are admirably chosen: they are
+characteristic without eccentricity or punning. One feels that Eccles in
+_Caste_ could not possibly have borne any other name. How much less
+living would he be had he been called Mr. Soaker or Mr. Tosspot!
+
+Characteristic without eccentricity--that is what a name ought to be. As
+the characteristic quality depends upon a hundred indefinable,
+subconscious associations, it is clearly impossible to suggest any
+principle of choice. The only general rule that can be laid down is that
+the key of the nomenclature, so to speak, may rightly vary with the key
+of the play--that farcical names are, within limits, admissible in
+farce, eccentric names in eccentric comedy, while soberly appropriate
+names are alone in place in serious plays. Some dramatists are
+habitually happy in their nomenclature, others much less so. Ibsen would
+often change a name three or four times in the course of writing a play,
+until at last he arrived at one which seemed absolutely to fit the
+character; but the appropriateness of his names is naturally lost upon
+foreign audiences.
+
+One word may perhaps be said on the recent fashion--not to say fad--of
+suppressing in the printed play the traditional list of "Dramatis
+Personae." Björnson, in some of his later plays, was, so far as I am
+aware, the first of the moderns to adopt this plan. I do not know
+whether his example has influenced certain English playwrights, or
+whether they arrived independently at the same austere principle, by
+sheer force of individual genius. The matter is a trifling one--so
+trifling that the departure from established practice has something of
+the air of a pedantry. It is not, on the whole, to be approved. It adds
+perceptibly to the difficulty which some readers experience in picking
+up the threads of a play; and it deprives other readers of a real and
+appreciable pleasure of anticipation. There is a peculiar and not
+irrational charm in looking down a list of quite unknown names, and
+thinking: "In the course of three hours, I shall know these people: I
+shall have read their hearts: I shall have lived with them through a
+great crisis in their lives: some of them may be my friends for ever."
+It is one of the glories and privileges of the dramatist's calling that
+he can arouse in us this eager and poignant expectation; and I cannot
+commend his wisdom in deliberately taking the edge off it, and making us
+feel as though we were not sitting down to a play, but to a sort of
+conversational novel. A list of characters, it is true, may also affect
+one with acute anticipations of boredom; but I have never yet found a
+play less tedious by reason of the suppression of the "Dramatis
+Personae."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+[Footnote 1: Partially, too, they were under the influence of antiquity;
+but the ancients were very discreet in their use of significant names.
+Only in satyr-plays, in the comic epics, and for a few extravagant
+characters in comedy (such as the boastful soldier) were grotesque
+appellations employed. For the rest, the Greek habit of nomenclature
+made it possible to use significant names which were at the same time
+probable enough in daily life. For example, a slave might be called
+Onesimus, "useful," or a soldier Polemon, to imply his warlike function;
+but both names would be familiar to the audience in actual use.]
+
+
+
+
+_BOOK II_
+
+THE BEGINNING
+
+
+
+
+_CHAPTER VI_
+
+THE POINT OF ATTACK: SHAKESPEARE AND IBSEN
+
+
+Though, as we have already noted, the writing of plays does not always
+follow the chronological sequence of events, in discussing the process
+of their evolution we are bound to assume that the playwright begins at
+the beginning, and proceeds in orderly fashion, by way of the middle, to
+the end. It was one of Aristotle's requirements that a play should have
+a beginning, middle and end; and though it may seem that it scarcely
+needed an Aristotle to lay down so self-evident a proposition, the fact
+is that playwrights are more than sufficiently apt to ignore or despise
+the rule.[1] Especially is there a tendency to rebel against the
+requirement that a play should have an end. We have seen a good many
+plays of late which do not end, but simply leave off: at their head we
+might perhaps place Ibsen's _Ghosts_. But let us not anticipate. For the
+moment, what we have to inquire is where, and how, a play ought
+to begin.
+
+In life there are no such things as beginnings. Even a man's birth is a
+quite arbitrary point at which to launch his biography; for the
+determining factors in his career are to be found in persons, events,
+and conditions that existed before he was ever thought of. For the
+biographer, however, and for the novelist as a writer of fictitious
+biography, birth forms a good conventional starting-point. He can give a
+chapter or so to "Ancestry," and then relate the adventures of his hero
+from the cradle onwards. But the dramatist, as we have seen, deals, not
+with protracted sequences of events, but with short, sharp crises. The
+question for him, therefore, is: at what moment of the crisis, or of its
+antecedents, he had better ring up his curtain? At this point he is like
+the photographer studying his "finder" in order to determine how much of
+a given prospect he can "get in."
+
+The answer to the question depends on many things, but chiefly on the
+nature of the crisis and the nature of the impression which the
+playwright desires to make upon his audience. If his play be a comedy,
+and if his object be gently and quietly to interest and entertain, the
+chances are that he begins by showing us his personages in their normal
+state, concisely indicates their characters, circumstances and
+relations, and then lets the crisis develop from the outset before our
+eyes. If, on the other hand, his play be of a more stirring description,
+and he wants to seize the spectator's attention firmly from the start,
+he will probably go straight at his crisis, plunging, perhaps, into the
+very middle of it, even at the cost of having afterwards to go back in
+order to put the audience in possession of the antecedent circumstances.
+In a third type of play, common of late years, and especially affected
+by Ibsen, the curtain rises on a surface aspect of profound peace, which
+is presently found to be but a thin crust over an absolutely volcanic
+condition of affairs, the origin of which has to be traced backwards, it
+may be for many years.
+
+Let us glance at a few of Shakespeare's openings, and consider at what
+points he attacks his various themes. Of his comedies, all except one
+begin with a simple conversation, showing a state of affairs from which
+the crisis develops with more or less rapidity, but in which it is as
+yet imperceptibly latent. In no case does he plunge into the middle of
+his subject, leaving its antecedents to be stated in what is technically
+called an "exposition." Neither in tragedy nor in comedy, indeed, was
+this Shakespeare's method. In his historical plays he relied to some
+extent on his hearers' knowledge of history, whether gathered from books
+or from previous plays of the historical series; and where such
+knowledge was not to be looked for, he would expound the situation in
+good set terms, like those of a Euripidean Prologue. But the
+chronicle-play is a species apart, and practically an extinct species:
+we need not pause to study its methods. In his fictitious plays, with
+two notable exceptions, it was Shakespeare's constant practice to bring
+the whole action within the frame of the picture, opening at such a
+point that no retrospect should be necessary, beyond what could be
+conveyed in a few casual words. The exceptions are _The Tempest_ and
+_Hamlet_, to which we shall return in due course.
+
+How does _The Merchant of Venice_ open? With a long conversation
+exhibiting the character of Antonio, the friendship between him and
+Bassanio, the latter's financial straits, and his purpose of wooing
+Portia. The second scene displays the character of Portia, and informs
+us of her father's device with regard to her marriage; but this
+information is conveyed in three or four lines. Not till the third scene
+do we see or hear of Shylock, and not until very near the end of the act
+is there any foreshadowing of what is to be the main crisis of the play.
+Not a single antecedent event has to be narrated to us; for the mere
+fact that Antonio has been uncivil to Shylock, and shown disapproval of
+his business methods, can scarcely be regarded as a preliminary outside
+the frame of the picture.
+
+In _As You Like It_ there are no preliminaries to be stated beyond the
+facts that Orlando is at enmity with his elder brother, and that Duke
+Frederick has usurped the coronet and dukedom of Rosalind's father.
+These facts being made apparent without any sort of formal exposition,
+the crisis of the play rapidly announces itself in the wrestling-match
+and its sequels. In _Much Ado About Nothing_ there is even less of
+antecedent circumstance to be imparted. We learn in the first scene,
+indeed, that Beatrice and Benedick have already met and crossed swords;
+but this is not in the least essential to the action; the play might
+have been to all intents and purposes the same had they never heard of
+each other until after the rise of the curtain. In _Twelfth Night_ there
+is a semblance of a retrospective exposition in the scene between Viola
+and the Captain; but it is of the simplest nature, and conveys no
+information beyond what, at a later period, would have been imparted on
+the playbill, thus--
+
+  "Orsino, Duke of Illyria, in love with Olivia.
+  Olivia, an heiress, in mourning for her brother,"
+
+and so forth. In _The Taming of the Shrew_ there are no antecedents
+whatever to be stated. It is true that Lucentio, in the opening speech,
+is good enough to inform Tranio who he is and what he is doing
+there--facts with which Tranio is already perfectly acquainted. But this
+was merely a conventional opening, excused by the fashion of the time;
+it was in no sense a necessary exposition. For the rest, the crisis of
+the play--the battle between Katherine and Petruchio--begins, develops,
+and ends before our very eyes. In _The Winter's Tale_, a brief
+conversation between Camillo and Archidamus informs us that the King of
+Bohemia is paying a visit to the King of Sicilia; and that is absolutely
+all we need to know. It was not even necessary that it should be
+conveyed to us in this way. The situation would be entirely
+comprehensible if the scene between Camillo and Archidamus were omitted.
+
+It is needless to go through the whole list of comedies. The broad fact
+is that in all the plays commonly so described, excepting only _The
+Tempest_, the whole action comes within the frame of the picture. In
+_The Tempest_ the poet employs a form of opening which otherwise he
+reserves for tragedies. The first scene is simply an animated tableau,
+calculated to arrest the spectator's attention, without conveying to him
+any knowledge either of situation or character. Such gleams of character
+as do, in fact, appear in the dialogue, are scarcely perceived in the
+hurly-burly of the storm. Then, in the calm which ensues, Prospero
+expounds to Miranda in great detail the antecedents of the crisis now
+developing. It might almost seem, indeed, that the poet, in this, his
+poetic last-will-and-testament, intended to warn his successors against
+the dangers of a long narrative exposition; for Prospero's story sends
+Miranda to sleep. Be this as it may, we have here a case in which
+Shakespeare deliberately adopted the plan of placing on the stage, not
+the whole crisis, but only its culmination, leaving its earlier stages
+to be conveyed in narrative.[2] It would have been very easy for him to
+have begun at the beginning and shown us in action the events narrated
+by Prospero. This course would have involved no greater leap, either in
+time or space, than he had perpetrated in the almost contemporary
+_Winter's Tale_; and it cannot be said that there would have been any
+difficulty in compressing into three acts, or even two, the essentials
+of the action of the play as we know it. His reasons for departing from
+his usual practice were probably connected with the particular occasion
+for which the play was written. He wanted to produce a masque rather
+than a drama. We must not, therefore, attach too much significance to
+the fact that in almost the only play in which Shakespeare seems to have
+built entirely out of his own head, with no previous play or novel to
+influence him, he adopted the plan of going straight to the catastrophe,
+in which he had been anticipated by Sophocles (_Oedipus Rex_), and was
+to be followed by Ibsen (_Ghosts_, _Rosmersholm_, etc.).
+
+Coming now to the five great tragedies, we find that in four of them
+Shakespeare began, as in _The Tempest_, with a picturesque and stirring
+episode calculated to arrest the spectator's attention and awaken his
+interest, while conveying to him little or no information. The opening
+scene of _Romeo and Juliet_ is simply a brawl, bringing home to us
+vividly the family feud which is the root of the tragedy, but informing
+us of nothing beyond the fact that such a feud exists. This is, indeed,
+absolutely all that we require to know. There is not a single
+preliminary circumstance, outside the limits of the play, that has to be
+explained to us. The whole tragedy germinates and culminates within what
+the prologue calls "the two hours' traffick of the stage." The opening
+colloquy of the Witches in _Macbeth_, strikes the eerie keynote, but
+does nothing more. Then, in the second scene, we learn that there has
+been a great battle and that a nobleman named Macbeth has won a victory
+which covers him with laurels. This can in no sense be called an
+exposition. It is the account of a single event, not of a sequence; and
+that event is contemporary, not antecedent. In the third scene, the
+meeting of Macbeth and Banquo with the Witches, we have what may be
+called an exposition reversed; not a narrative of the past, but a
+foreshadowing of the future. Here we touch on one of the subtlest of the
+playwright's problems--the art of arousing anticipation in just the
+right measure. But that is not the matter at present in hand.[3]
+
+In the opening scene of _Othello_ it is true that some talk passes
+between Iago and Roderigo before they raise the alarm and awaken
+Brabantio; but it is carefully non-expository talk; it expounds nothing
+but Iago's character. Far from being a real exception to the rule that
+Shakespeare liked to open his tragedies with a very crisply dramatic
+episode, _Othello_ may rather be called its most conspicuous example.
+The rousing of Brabantio is immediately followed by the encounter
+between his men and Othello's, which so finely brings out the lofty
+character of the Moor; and only in the third scene, that of the Doge's
+Council, do we pass from shouts and swords to quiet discussion and, in a
+sense, exposition. Othello's great speech, while a vital portion of the
+drama, is in so far an exposition that it refers to events which do not
+come absolutely within the frame of the picture. But they are very
+recent, very simple, events. If Othello's speech were omitted, or cut
+down to half a dozen lines, we should know much less of his character
+and Desdemona's, but the mere action of the play would remain perfectly
+comprehensible.
+
+_King Lear_ necessarily opens with a great act of state, the partition
+of the kingdom. A few words between Kent and Gloucester show us what is
+afoot, and then, at one plunge, we are in the thick of the drama. There
+was no opportunity here for one of those picturesque tableaux, exciting
+rather than informative, which initiate the other tragedies. It would
+have had to be artificially dragged in; and it was the less necessary,
+as the partition scene took on, in a very few lines, just that
+arresting, stimulating quality which the poet seems to have desired in
+the opening of a play of this class.
+
+Finally, when we turn to _Hamlet_, we find a consummate example of the
+crisply-touched opening tableau, making a nervous rather than an
+intellectual appeal, informing us of nothing, but exciting a vivid,
+though quite vague, anticipation. The silent transit of the Ghost,
+desiring to speak, yet tongue-tied, is certainly one of Shakespeare's
+unrivalled masterpieces of dramatic craftsmanship. One could pretty
+safely wager that if the _Ur-Hamlet_, on which Shakespeare worked, were
+to come to light to-morrow, this particular trait would not be found in
+it. But, oddly enough, into the middle of this admirable opening
+tableau, Shakespeare inserts a formal exposition, introduced in the most
+conventional way. Marcellus, for some unexplained reason, is ignorant of
+what is evidently common knowledge as to the affairs of the realm, and
+asks to be informed; whereupon Horatio, in a speech of some twenty-five
+lines, sets forth the past relations between Norway and Denmark, and
+prepares us for the appearance of Fortinbras in the fourth act. In
+modern stage versions all this falls away, and nobody who has not
+studied the printed text is conscious of its absence. The commentators,
+indeed, have proved that Fortinbras is an immensely valuable element in
+the moral scheme of the play; but from the point of view of pure drama,
+there is not the slightest necessity for this Norwegian-Danish
+embroilment or its consequences.[4] The real exposition--for _Hamlet_
+differs from the other tragedies in requiring an exposition--comes in
+the great speech of the Ghost in Scene V. The contrast between this
+speech and Horatio's lecture in the first scene, exemplifies the
+difference between a dramatized and an undramatized exposition. The
+crisis, as we now learn, began months or years before the rise of the
+curtain. It began when Claudius inveigled the affections of Gertrude;
+and it would have been possible for the poet to have started from this
+point, and shown us in action all that he in fact conveys to us by way
+of narration. His reason for choosing the latter course is abundantly
+obvious.[5] Hamlet the Younger was to be the protagonist: the interest
+of the play was to centre in his mental processes. To have awakened our
+interest in Hamlet the Elder would, therefore, have been a superfluity
+and an irrelevance. Moreover (to say nothing of the fact that the Ghost
+was doubtless a popular figure in the old play, and demanded by the
+public) it was highly desirable that Hamlet's knowledge of the usurper's
+crime should come to him from a supernatural witness, who could not be
+cross-questioned or called upon to give material proof. This was the
+readiest as well as the most picturesque method of begetting in him that
+condition of doubt, real or affected, which was necessary to account for
+his behaviour. But to have shown us in action the matter of the Ghost's
+revelation would have been hopelessly to ruin its effect. A repetition
+in narrative of matters already seen in action is the grossest of
+technical blunders.[6] Hamlet senior, in other words, being
+indispensable in the spirit, was superfluous in the flesh. But there was
+another and equally cogent reason for beginning the play after the
+commission of the initial crime or crimes. To have done otherwise would
+have been to discount, not only the Ghost, but the play-scene. By a
+piece of consummate ingenuity, which may, of course, have been conceived
+by the earlier playwright, the initial incidents of the story are in
+fact presented to us, in the guise of a play within the play, and as a
+means to the achievement of one of the greatest dramatic effects in all
+literature. The moment the idea of the play-scene presented itself to
+the author's mind, it became absolutely unthinkable that he should, to
+put it vulgarly, "queer the pitch" for the Players by showing us the
+real facts of which their performance was to be the counterfeit
+presentment. The dramatic effect of the incidents was incalculably
+heightened when they were presented, as in a looking-glass, before the
+guilty pair, with the eye of the avenger boring into their souls. And
+have we not here, perhaps, a clue to one of the most frequent and
+essential meanings of the word "dramatic"? May we not say that the
+dramatic quality of an incident is proportionate to the variety[7] and
+intensity of the emotions involved in it?
+
+All this may appear too obvious to be worth setting forth at such
+length. Very likely it never occurred to Shakespeare that it was
+possible to open the play at an earlier point; so that he can hardly be
+said to have exercised a deliberate choice in the matter. Nevertheless,
+the very obviousness of the considerations involved makes this a good
+example of the importance of discovering just the right point at which
+to raise the curtain. In the case of _The Tempest_, Shakespeare plunged
+into the middle of the crisis because his object was to produce a
+philosophico-dramatic entertainment rather than a play in the strict
+sense of the word. He wanted room for the enchantments of Ariel, the
+brutishnesses of Caliban, the humours of Stephano and Trinculo--all
+elements extrinsic to the actual story. But in _Hamlet_ he adopted a
+similar course for purely dramatic reasons--in order to concentrate his
+effects and present the dramatic elements of his theme at their
+highest potency.
+
+In sum, then, it was Shakespeare's usual practice, histories apart, to
+bring the whole action of his plays within the frame of the picture,
+leaving little or nothing to narrative exposition. The two notable
+exceptions to this rule are those we have just examined--_Hamlet_ and
+_The Tempest_. Furthermore, he usually opened his comedies with quiet
+conversational passages, presenting the antecedents of the crisis with
+great deliberation. In his tragedies, on the other hand, he was apt to
+lead off with a crisp, somewhat startling passage of more or less
+vehement action, appealing rather to the nerves than to the
+intelligence--such a passage as Gustav Freytag, in his _Technik des
+Dramas_, happily entitles an _einleitende Akkord_, an introductory
+chord. It may be added that this rule holds good both for _Coriolanus_
+and for _Julius Caesar_, in which the keynote is briskly struck in
+highly animated scenes of commotion among the Roman populace.
+
+Let us now look at the practice of Ibsen, which offers a sharp contrast
+to that of Shakespeare. To put it briefly, the plays in which Ibsen gets
+his whole action within the frame of the picture are as exceptional as
+those in which Shakespeare does not do so.
+
+Ibsen's practice in this matter has been compared with that of the Greek
+dramatists, who also were apt to attack their crisis in the middle, or
+even towards the end, rather than at the beginning. It must not be
+forgotten, however, that there is one great difference between his
+position and theirs. They could almost always rely upon a general
+knowledge, on the part of the audience, of the theme with which they
+were dealing. The purpose even of the Euripidean prologue is not so much
+to state unknown facts, as to recall facts vaguely remembered, to state
+the particular version of a legend which the poet proposes to adopt, and
+to define the point in the development of the legend at which he is
+about to set his figures in motion. Ibsen, on the other hand, drew upon
+no storehouse of tradition. He had to convey to his audience everything
+that he wanted them to know; and this was often a long and complex
+series of facts.
+
+The earliest play in which Ibsen can be said to show maturity of
+craftsmanship is _The Vikings at Helgeland_. It is curious to note that
+both in _The Vikings_ and in _The Pretenders_, two plays which are in
+some measure comparable with Shakespearean tragedies, he opens with a
+firmly-touched _einleitende Akkord_. In _The Vikings_, Ornulf and his
+sons encounter and fight with Sigurd and his men, very much after the
+fashion of the Montagues and Capulets in _Romeo and Juliet_. In _The
+Pretenders_ the rival factions of Haakon and Skule stand outside the
+cathedral of Bergen, intently awaiting the result of the ordeal which is
+proceeding within; and though they do not there and then come to blows,
+the air is electrical with their conflicting ambitions and passions. His
+modern plays, on the other hand, Ibsen opens quietly enough, though
+usually with some more or less arresting little incident, calculated to
+arouse immediate curiosity. One may cite as characteristic examples the
+hurried colloquy between Engstrand and Regina in _Ghosts_; Rebecca and
+Madam Helseth in _Rosmersholm_, watching to see whether Rosmer will
+cross the mill-race; and in _The Master Builder_, old Brovik's querulous
+outburst, immediately followed by the entrance of Solness and his
+mysterious behaviour towards Kaia. The opening of _Hedda Gabler_, with
+its long conversation between Miss Tesman and the servant Bertha, comes
+as near as Ibsen ever did to the conventional exposition of the French
+stage, conducted by a footman and a parlour-maid engaged in dusting the
+furniture. On the other hand, there never was a more masterly opening,
+in its sheer simplicity, than Nora's entrance in _A Doll's House_, and
+the little silent scene that precedes the appearance of Helmer.
+
+Regarding _The Vikings_ as Ibsen's first mature production, and
+surveying the whole series of his subsequent works in which he had stage
+presentation directly in view,[8] we find that in only two out of the
+fifteen plays does the whole action come within the frame of the
+picture. These two are _The League of Youth_ and _An Enemy of the
+People_. In neither of these have any antecedents to be stated; neither
+turns upon any disclosure of bygone events or emotions. We are, indeed,
+afforded brief glimpses into the past both of Stensgaard and of
+Stockmann; but the glimpses are incidental and inessential. It is
+certainly no mere coincidence that if one were asked to pick out the
+pieces of thinnest texture in all Ibsen's mature work, one would
+certainly select these two plays. Far be it from me to disparage _An
+Enemy of the People_; as a work of art it is incomparably greater than
+such a piece as _Pillars of Society_; but it is not so richly woven,
+not, as it were, so deep in pile. Written in half the time Ibsen usually
+devoted to a play, it is an outburst of humorous indignation, a _jeu
+d'esprit_, one might almost say, though the _jeu_ of a giant _esprit_.
+
+Observing the effect of comparative tenuity in these two plays, we
+cannot but surmise that the secret of the depth and richness of texture
+so characteristic of Ibsen's work, lay in his art of closely
+interweaving a drama of the present with a drama of the past. _An Enemy
+of the People_ is a straightforward, spirited melody; _The Wild Duck_
+and _Rosmersholm_ are subtly and intricately harmonized.
+
+Going a little more into detail, we find in Ibsen's work an
+extraordinary progress in the art of so unfolding the drama of the past
+as to make the gradual revelation no mere preface or prologue to the
+drama of the present, but an integral part of its action. It is true
+that in _The Vikings_ he already showed himself a master in this art.
+The great revelation--the disclosure of the fact that Sigurd, not
+Gunnar, did the deed of prowess which Hiördis demanded of the man who
+should be her mate--this crucial revelation is brought about in a scene
+of the utmost dramatic intensity. The whole drama of the past,
+indeed--both its facts and its emotions--may be said to be dragged to
+light in the very stress and pressure of the drama of the present. Not a
+single detail of it is narrated in cold blood, as, for example, Prospero
+relates to Miranda the story of their marooning, or Horatio expounds the
+Norwegian-Danish political situation. I am not holding up _The Vikings_
+as a great masterpiece; it has many weaknesses both of substance and of
+method; but in this particular art of indistinguishably blending the
+drama of the present with the drama of the past, it is already
+consummate. _The Pretenders_ scarcely comes into the comparison. It is
+Ibsen's one chronicle-play; and, like Shakespeare, he did not shrink
+from employing a good deal of narrative, though his narratives, it must
+be said, are always introduced under such circumstances as to make them
+a vital part of the drama. It is when we come to the modern plays that
+we find the poet falling back upon conventional and somewhat clumsy
+methods of exposition, which he only by degrees, though by rapid
+degrees, unlearns.
+
+_The League of Youth_, as we have seen, requires no exposition. All we
+have to learn is the existing relations of the characters, which appear
+quite naturally as the action proceeds. But let us look at _Pillars of
+Society_. Here we have to be placed in possession of a whole antecedent
+drama: the intrigue of Karsten Bernick with Dina Dorf's mother, the
+threatened scandal, Johan Tönnesen's vicarious acceptance of Bernick's
+responsibility, the subsidiary scandal of Lona Hessel's outburst on
+learning of Bernick's engagement to her half-sister, the report of an
+embezzlement committed by Johan before his departure for America. All
+this has to be conveyed to us in retrospect; or, rather, in the first
+place, we have to be informed of the false version of these incidents
+which is current in the little town, and on which Bernick's moral and
+commercial prestige is built up. What device, then, does Ibsen adopt to
+this end? He introduces a "sewing-bee" of tattling women, one of whom
+happens to be a stranger to the town, and unfamiliar with its gossip.
+Into her willing ear the others pour the popular version of the Bernick
+story; and, this impartment effected, the group of gossips disappears,
+to be heard of no more. These ladies perform the function, in fact, of
+the First, Second, and Third Gentlemen, so common in Elizabethan and
+pseudo-Elizabethan plays.[9] They are not quite so artless in their
+conventionality, for they bring with them the social atmosphere of the
+tattling little town, which is an essential factor in the drama.
+Moreover, their exposition is not a simple narrative of facts. It is to
+some extent subtilized by the circumstance that the facts are not facts,
+and that the gist of the drama is to lie in the gradual triumph of the
+truth over this tissue of falsehoods. Still, explain it as we may, the
+fact remains that in no later play does Ibsen initiate us into the
+preliminaries of his action by so hackneyed and unwieldy a device. It is
+no conventional canon, but a maxim of mere common sense, that the
+dramatist should be chary of introducing characters who have no personal
+share in the drama, and are mere mouthpieces for the conveyance of
+information. Nowhere else does Ibsen so flagrantly disregard so obvious
+a principle of dramatic economy.[10]
+
+When we turn to his next play, _A Doll's House_, we find that he has
+already made a great step in advance. He has progressed from the First,
+Second, and Third Gentlemen of the Elizabethans to the confidant[11] of
+the French classic drama. He even attempts, not very successfully, to
+disguise the confidant by giving her a personal interest, an effective
+share, in the drama. Nothing can really dissemble the fact that the long
+scene between Nora and Mrs. Linden, which occupies almost one-third of
+the first act, is simply a formal exposition, outside the action of the
+play. Just as it was providential that one of the house-wives of the
+sewing-bee in _Pillars of Society_ should have been a stranger to the
+town, so it was the luckiest of chances (for the dramatist's
+convenience) that an old school-friend should have dropped in from the
+clouds precisely half-an-hour before the entrance of Krogstad brings to
+a sudden head the great crisis of Nora's life. This happy conjuncture of
+events is manifestly artificial: a trick of the dramatist's trade: a
+point at which his art does not conceal his art. Mrs. Linden does not,
+like the dames of the sewing-bee, fade out of the saga; she even,
+through her influence on Krogstad, plays a determining part in the
+development of the action. But to all intents and purposes she remains a
+mere confidant, a pretext for Nora's review of the history of her
+married life. There are two other specimens of the genus confidant in
+Ibsen's later plays. Arnholm, in _The Lady from the Sea_, is little
+more; Dr. Herdal, in _The Master Builder_, is that and nothing else. It
+may be alleged in his defence that the family physician is the
+professional confidant of real life.
+
+In _Ghosts_, Ibsen makes a sudden leap to the extreme of his
+retrospective method. I am not one of those who consider this play
+Ibsen's masterpiece: I do not even place it, technically, in the first
+rank among his works. And why? Because there is here no reasonable
+equilibrium between the drama of the past and the drama of the present.
+The drama of the past is almost everything, the drama of the present
+next to nothing. As soon as we have probed to the depths the Alving
+marriage and its consequences, the play is over, and there is nothing
+left but for Regina to set off in pursuit of the joy of life, and for
+Oswald to collapse into imbecility. It is scarcely an exaggeration to
+call the play all exposition and no drama. Here for the first time,
+however, Ibsen perfected his peculiar gift of imparting tense dramatic
+interest to the unveiling of the past. While in one sense the play is
+all exposition, in another sense it may quite as truly be said to
+contain no exposition; for it contains no narrative delivered in cold
+blood, in mere calm retrospection, as a necessary preliminary to the
+drama which is in the meantime waiting at the door. In other words, the
+exposition is all drama, it _is_ the drama. The persons who are tearing
+the veils from the past, and for whom the veils are being torn, are
+intensely concerned in the process, which actually constitutes the
+dramatic crisis. The discovery of this method, or its rediscovery in
+modern drama,[12] was Ibsen's great technical achievement. In his best
+work, the progress of the unveiling occasions a marked development, or
+series of changes, in the actual and present relations of the
+characters. The drama of the past and the drama of the present proceed,
+so to speak, in interlacing rhythms, or, as I said before, in a rich,
+complex harmony. In _Ghosts_ this harmony is not so rich as in some
+later plays, because the drama of the present is disproportionately
+meagre. None the less, or all the more, is it a conspicuous example of
+Ibsen's method of raising his curtain, not at the beginning of the
+crisis, but rather at the beginning of the catastrophe.
+
+In _An Enemy of the People_, as already stated, he momentarily deserted
+that method, and gave us an action which begins, develops, and ends
+entirely within the frame of the picture. But in the two following
+plays, _The Wild Duck_ and _Rosmersholm_, he touched the highest point
+of technical mastery in his interweaving of the past with the present. I
+shall not attempt any analysis of the fabric of these plays. The process
+would be long, tedious, and unhelpful; for no one could hope to employ a
+method of such complexity without something of Ibsen's genius; and
+genius will evolve its methods for itself. Let me only ask the reader to
+compare the scene between old Werle and Gregers in the first act of _The
+Wild Duck_ with the scene between Nora and Mrs. Linden in the first act
+of _A Doll's House_, and mark the technical advance. Both scenes are, in
+a sense, scenes of exposition. Both are mainly designed to place us in
+possession of a sequence of bygone facts. But while the _Doll's House_
+scene is a piece of quiet gossip, brought about (as we have noted) by
+rather artificial means, and with no dramatic tension in it, the _Wild
+Duck_ scene is a piece of tense, one might almost say fierce, drama,
+fulfilling the Brunetière definition in that it shows us two characters,
+a father and son, at open war with each other. The one scene is outside
+the real action, the other is an integral part of it. The one belongs to
+Ibsen's tentative period, the other ushers in, one might almost say, his
+period of consummate mastery.[13]
+
+_Rosmersholm_ is so obviously nothing but the catastrophe of an
+antecedent drama that an attempt has actually been made to rectify
+Ibsen's supposed mistake, and to write the tragedy of the deceased
+Beata. It was made by an unskilful hand; but even a skilful hand would
+scarcely have done more than prove how rightly Ibsen judged that the
+recoil of Rebecca's crime upon herself and Rosmer would prove more
+interesting, and in a very real sense more dramatic, than the somewhat
+vulgar process of the crime itself. The play is not so profound in its
+humanity as _The Wild Duck_, but it is Ibsen's masterpiece in the art of
+withdrawing veil after veil. From the technical point of view, it will
+repay the closest study.
+
+We need not look closely at the remaining plays. _Hedda Gabler_ is
+perhaps that in which a sound proportion between the past and the
+present is most successfully preserved. The interest of the present
+action is throughout very vivid; but it is all rooted in facts and
+relations of the past, which are elicited under circumstances of high
+dramatic tension. Here again it is instructive to compare the scene
+between Hedda and Thea, in the first act, with the scene between Nora
+and Mrs. Linden. Both are scenes of exposition: and each is, in its way,
+character-revealing; but the earlier scene is a passage of quite
+unemotional narrative; the later is a passage of palpitating drama. In
+the plays subsequent to _Hedda Gabler_, it cannot be denied that the
+past took the upper hand of the present to a degree which could only be
+justified by the genius of an Ibsen. Three-fourths of the action of _The
+Master Builder_, _Little Eyolf_, _John Gabriel Borkman_, and _When We
+Dead Awaken_, consists of what may be called a passionate analysis of
+the past. Ibsen had the art of making such an analysis absorbingly
+interesting; but it is not a formula to be commended for the practical
+purposes of the everyday stage.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+[Footnote 1: Writing of _Le Supplice d'une Femme_, Alexandre Dumas
+_fils_ said: "This situation I declare to be one of the most dramatic
+and interesting in all drama. But a situation is not an idea. An idea,
+has a beginning, a middle and an end: an exposition, a development, a
+conclusion. Any one can relate a dramatic situation: the art lies in
+preparing it, getting it accepted, rendering it possible, especially in
+untying the knot."]
+
+[Footnote 2: This is what we regard as peculiarly the method of Ibsen.
+There is, however, this essential difference, that, instead of narrating
+his preliminaries in cold blood, Ibsen, in his best work, _dramatizes_
+the narration.]
+
+[Footnote 3: See Chapter XII.]
+
+[Footnote 4: This must not be taken to imply that, in a good
+stage-version of the play, Fortinbras should be altogether omitted. Mr.
+Forbes Robertson, in his Lyceum revival of 1897, found several
+advantages in his retention. Among the rest, it permitted the retention
+of one of Hamlet's most characteristic soliloquies.]
+
+[Footnote 5: I omit all speculation as to the form which the story
+assumed in the _Ur-Hamlet_. We have no evidence on the point; and, as
+the poet was no doubt free to remodel the material as he thought fit,
+even in following his original he was making a deliberate
+artistic choice.]
+
+[Footnote 6: Shakespeare committed it in _Romeo and Juliet_, where he
+made Friar Laurence, in the concluding scene, retell the whole story of
+the tragedy. Even in so early a play, such a manifest redundancy seems
+unaccountable. A narrative of things already seen may, of course, be a
+trait of character in the person delivering it; but, in that case, it
+will generally be mendacious (for instance, Falstaff and the men in
+buckram). Or it may be introduced for the sake of its effect upon the
+characters to whom the narration is addressed. But in these cases its
+purpose is no longer to convey information to the audience--it belongs,
+not to the "intelligence department," but to the department of
+analysis.]
+
+[Footnote 7: I say "variety" rather than complexity because I take it
+that the emotions of all concerned are here too intense to be very
+complex. The effect of the scene would appear to lie in the rapidly
+increasing intensity of comparatively simple emotions in Hamlet, in the
+King, in the Queen, and in the amazed and bewildered courtiers.]
+
+[Footnote 8: This excludes _Love's Comedy, Brand, Peer Gynt_, and
+_Emperor and Galilean_.]
+
+[Footnote 9: See, for example, _King Henry VIII_, Act IV, and the
+opening scene of Tennyson's _Queen Mary_.]
+
+[Footnote 10: This rule of economy does not necessarily exclude a group
+of characters performing something like the function of the antique
+Chorus; that is to say, commenting upon the action from a more or less
+disinterested point of view. The function of _Kaffee-Klatsch_ in
+_Pillars of Society_ is not at all that of the Chorus, but rather that
+of the Euripidean Prologue, somewhat thinly disguised.]
+
+[Footnote 11: It is perhaps worth nothing that Gabriele d'Annunzio in
+_La Gioconda_, reverts to, and outdoes, the French classic convention,
+by giving us three actors and four confidants. The play consists of a
+crisis in three lives, passively, though sympathetically, contemplated
+by what is in effect a Chorus of two men and two women. It would be
+interesting to inquire why, in this particular play, such an abuse of
+the confidant seems quite admissible, if not conspicuously right.]
+
+[Footnote 12: Dryden, in his _Essay of Dramatic Poesy_, represents this
+method as being characteristic of Greek tragedy as a whole. The tragic
+poet, he says, "set the audience, as it were, at the post where the race
+is to be concluded; and, saving them the tedious expectation of seeing
+the poet set out and ride the beginning of the course, they suffer you
+not to behold him, till he is in sight of the goal and just upon you."
+Dryden seems to think that the method was forced upon them by "the rule
+of time."]
+
+[Footnote 13: It is a rash enterprise to reconstruct Ibsen, but one
+cannot help wondering how he would have planned _A Doll's House_ had he
+written it in the 'eighties instead of the 'seventies. One can imagine a
+long opening scene between Helmer and Nora in which a great deal of the
+necessary information might have been conveyed; while it would have
+heightened by contrast the effect of the great final duologue as we now
+possess it. Such information as could not possibly have been conveyed in
+dialogue with Helmer might, one would think, have been left for Nora's
+first scene with Krogstad, the effect of which it would have enhanced.
+Perhaps Mrs. Linden might with advantage have been retained, though not
+in her present character of confidant, in order to show Nora in relation
+to another woman.]
+
+
+
+
+_CHAPTER VII_
+
+EXPOSITION: ITS END AND ITS MEANS
+
+
+We have passed in rapid survey the practices of Shakespeare and Ibsen in
+respect of their point and method of attack upon their themes. What
+practical lessons can we now deduce from this examination?
+
+One thing is clear: namely, that there is no inherent superiority in one
+method over another. There are masterpieces in which the whole crisis
+falls within the frame of the picture, and masterpieces in which the
+greater part of the crisis has to be conveyed to us in retrospect, only
+the catastrophe being transacted before our eyes. Genius can manifest
+itself equally in either form.
+
+But each form has its peculiar advantages. You cannot, in a
+retrospective play like _Rosmersholm_, attain anything like the
+magnificent onward rush of Othello, which moves--
+
+               "Like to the Pontick sea
+  Whose icy current and compulsive course
+  Ne'er feels retiring ebb, but keeps due on
+  To the Propontick and the Hellespont."
+
+The movement of _Rosmersholm_ is rather like that of a winding river,
+which flows with a full and steady current, but seems sometimes to be
+almost retracing its course. If, then, you aim at rapidity of movement,
+you will choose a theme which leaves little or nothing to retrospect;
+and conversely, if you have a theme the whole of which falls easily and
+conveniently within the frame of the picture, you will probably take
+advantage of the fact to give your play animated and rapid movement.
+
+There is an undeniable attraction in a play which constitutes, so to
+speak, one brisk and continuous adventure, begun, developed, and ended
+before our eyes. For light comedy in particular is this a desirable
+form, and for romantic plays in which no very searching character-study
+is attempted. _The Taming of the Shrew_ no doubt passed for a light
+comedy in Shakespeare's day, though we describe it by a briefer name.
+Its rapid, bustling action is possible because we are always ready to
+take the character of a shrew for granted. It would have been a very
+different play had the poet required to account for Katharine's
+peculiarities of temper by a retrospective study of her heredity and
+upbringing. Many eighteenth-century comedies are single-adventure plays,
+or dual-adventure plays, in the sense that the main action sometimes
+stands aside to let an underplot take the stage. Both _She Stoops to
+Conquer_ and _The Rivals_ are good examples of the rapid working-out of
+an intrigue, engendered, developed, and resolved all within the frame of
+the picture. Single-adventure plays of a more modern type are the elder
+Dumas's _Mademoiselle de Belle-Isle_, the younger Dumas's _Francillon_,
+Sardou's _Divorçons_, Sir Arthur Pinero's _Gay Lord Quex_, Mr. Shaw's
+_Devil's Disciple_, Oscar Wilde's _Importance of Being Earnest_, Mr.
+Galsworthy's _Silver Box_. Widely as these plays differ in type and
+tone, they are alike in this, that they do not attempt to present very
+complex character-studies, or to probe the deeps of human experience.
+The last play cited, _The Silver Box_, may perhaps be thought an
+exception to this rule; but, though the experience of the hapless
+charwoman is pitiful enough, hers is a simple soul, so inured to
+suffering that a little more or less is no such great matter. The play
+is an admirable genre-picture rather than a searching tragedy.
+
+The point to be observed is that, under modern conditions, it is
+difficult to produce a play of very complex psychological, moral, or
+emotional substance, in which the whole crisis comes within the frame of
+the picture. The method of attacking the crisis in the middle or towards
+the end is really a device for relaxing, in some measure, the narrow
+bounds of theatrical representation, and enabling the playwright to deal
+with a larger segment of human experience. It may be asked why modern
+conditions should in this respect differ from Elizabethan conditions,
+and why, if Shakespeare could produce such profound and complex
+tragedies as _Othello_ and _King Lear_ without a word of exposition or
+retrospect, the modern dramatist should not go and do likewise? The
+answer to this question is not simply that the modern dramatist is
+seldom a Shakespeare. That is true, but we must look deeper than that.
+There are, in fact, several points to be taken into consideration. For
+one thing--this is a minor point--Shakespeare had really far more
+elbow-room than the playwright of to-day. _Othello_ and _King Lear_, to
+say nothing of _Hamlet_, are exceedingly long plays. Something like a
+third of them is omitted in modern representation; and when we speak of
+their richness and complexity of characterization, we do not think
+simply of the plays as we see them compressed into acting limits, but of
+the plays as we know them in the study. It is possible, no doubt, for
+modern playwrights to let themselves go in the matter of length, and
+then print their plays with brackets or other marks to show the
+"passages omitted in representation." This is, however, essentially an
+inartistic practice, and one cannot regret that it has gone out of
+fashion. Another point to be considered is this: are Othello and Lear
+really very complex character-studies? They are extremely vivid: they
+are projected with enormous energy, in actions whose violence affords
+scope for the most vehement self-expression; but are they not, in
+reality, colossally simple rather than complex? It is true that in Lear
+the phenomena of insanity are reproduced with astonishing minuteness and
+truth; but this does not imply any elaborate analysis or demand any
+great space. Hamlet is complex; and were I "talking for victory," I
+should point out that _Hamlet_ is, of all the tragedies, precisely the
+one which does not come within the frame of the picture. But the true
+secret of the matter does not lie here: it lies in the fact that Hamlet
+unpacks his heart to us in a series of soliloquies--a device employed
+scarcely at all in the portrayal of Othello and Lear, and denied to the
+modern dramatist.[1] Yet again, the social position and environment of
+the great Shakespearean characters is taken for granted. No time is
+spent in "placing" them in a given stratum of society, or in
+establishing their heredity, traditions, education, and so forth. And,
+finally, the very copiousness of expression permitted by the rhetorical
+Elizabethan form came to Shakespeare's aid. The modern dramatist is
+hampered by all sorts of reticences. He has often to work rather in
+indirect suggestion than in direct expression. He has, in short, to
+submit to a hundred hampering conditions from which Shakespeare was
+exempt; wherefore, even if he had Shakespeare's genius, he would find it
+difficult to produce a very profound effect in a crisis worked out from
+first to last before the eyes of the audience.
+
+Nevertheless, as before stated, such a crisis has a charm of its own.
+There is a peculiar interest in watching the rise and development out of
+nothing, as it were, of a dramatic complication. For this class of play
+(despite the Shakespearean precedents) a quiet opening is often
+advisable, rather than a strong _einleitende Akkord_. "From calm,
+through storm, to calm," is its characteristic formula; whether the
+concluding calm be one of life and serenity or of despair and death. To
+my personal taste, one of the keenest forms of theatrical enjoyment is
+that of seeing the curtain go up on a picture of perfect tranquillity,
+wondering from what quarter the drama is going to arise, and then
+watching it gather on the horizon like a cloud no bigger than a man's
+hand. Of this type of opening, _An Enemy of the People_ provides us with
+a classic example; and among English plays we may cite Mr. Shaw's
+_Candida_, Mr. Barker's _Waste_, and Mr. Besier's _Don_, in which so
+sudden and unlooked-for a cyclone swoops down upon the calm of an
+English vicarage. An admirable instance of a fantastic type may be found
+in _Prunella_, by Messrs. Barker and Housman.[2]
+
+There is much to be said, however, in favour of the opening which does
+not present an aspect of delusive calm, but shows the atmosphere already
+charged with electricity. Compare, for instance, the opening of _The
+Case of Rebellious Susan_, by Mr. Henry Arthur Jones, with that of a
+French play of very similar theme--Dumas's _Francillon_. In the latter,
+we see the storm-cloud slowly gathering up on the horizon; in the
+former, it is already on the point of breaking, right overhead. Mr.
+Jones places us at the beginning, where Dumas leaves us at the end, of
+his first act. It is true that at the end of Mr. Jones's act he has not
+advanced any further than Dumas. The French author shows his heroine
+gradually working up to a nervous crisis, the English author introduces
+his heroine already at the height of her paroxysm, and the act consists
+of the unavailing efforts of her friends to smooth her down. The upshot
+is the same; but in Mr. Jones's act we are, as the French say, "in full
+drama" all the time, while in Dumas's we await the coming of the drama,
+and only by exerting all his wit, not to say over-exerting it, does he
+prevent our feeling impatient. I am not claiming superiority for either
+method; I merely point to a good example of two different ways of
+attacking the same problem.
+
+In _The Benefit of the Doubt_, by Sir Arthur Pinero, we have a crisply
+dramatic opening of the very best type. A few words from a contemporary
+criticism may serve to indicate the effect it produced on a first-night
+audience--
+
+  We are in the thick of the action at once, or at least in the thick
+  of the interest, so that the exposition, instead of being, so to
+  speak, a mere platform from which the train is presently to start,
+  becomes an inseparable part of the movement. The sense of dramatic
+  irony is strongly and yet delicately suggested. We foresee a
+  "peripety," apparent prosperity suddenly crumbling into disaster,
+  within the act itself; and, when it comes, it awakens our sympathy
+  and redoubles our interest.
+
+Almost the same words might be applied to the opening of _The Climbers_,
+by the late Clyde Fitch, one of the many individual scenes which make
+one deeply regret that Mr. Fitch did not live to do full justice to his
+remarkable talent.
+
+One of the ablest of recent openings is that of Mr. Galsworthy's _Silver
+Box_. The curtain rises upon a solid, dull, upper-middle-class
+dining-room, empty and silent, the electric lights burning, the tray
+with whiskey, siphon and cigarette-box marking the midnight hour. Then
+we have the stumbling, fumbling entrance of Jack Barthwick, beatifically
+drunk, his maudlin babble, and his ill-omened hospitality to the haggard
+loafer who follows at his heels. Another example of a high-pitched
+opening scene may be found in Mr. Perceval Landon's _The House
+Opposite_. Here we have a midnight parting between a married woman and
+her lover, in the middle of which the man, glancing at the lighted
+window of the house opposite, sees a figure moving in such a way as to
+suggest that a crime is being perpetrated. As a matter of fact, an old
+man is murdered, and his housekeeper is accused of the crime. The hero,
+if so he can be called, knows that it was a man, not a woman, who was in
+the victim's room that night; and the problem is: how can he give his
+evidence without betraying a woman's secret by admitting his presence in
+her house at midnight? I neither praise nor blame this class of story; I
+merely cite the play as one in which we plunge straight into the crisis,
+without any introductory period of tranquillity.
+
+The interest of Mr. Landon's play lay almost wholly in the story. There
+was just enough character in it to keep the story going, so to speak.
+The author might, on the other hand, have concentrated our attention on
+character, and made his play a soul-tragedy; but in that case it would
+doubtless have been necessary to take us some way backward in the
+heroine's antecedents and the history of her marriage. In other words,
+if the play had gone deeper into human nature, the preliminaries of the
+crisis would have had to be traced in some detail, possibly in a first
+act, introductory to the actual opening, but more probably, and better,
+in an exposition following the crisply touched _einleitende Akkord_.
+This brings us to the question how an exposition may best be managed.
+
+It may not unreasonably be contended, I think, that, when an exposition
+cannot be thoroughly dramatized--that is, wrung out, in the stress of
+the action, from the characters primarily concerned--it may best be
+dismissed, rapidly and even conventionally, by any not too improbable
+device. That is the principle on which Sir Arthur Pinero has always
+proceeded, and for which he has been unduly censured, by critics who
+make no allowances for the narrow limits imposed by custom and the
+constitution of the modern audience upon the playwrights of to-day. In
+_His House in Order_ (one of his greatest plays) Sir Arthur effects part
+of his exposition by the simple device of making Hilary Jesson a
+candidate for Parliament, and bringing on a reporter to interview his
+private secretary. The incident is perfectly natural and probable; all
+one can say of it is that it is perhaps an over-simplification of the
+dramatist's task.[3] _The Second Mrs. Tanqueray_ requires an unusual
+amount of preliminary retrospect. We have to learn the history of Aubrey
+Tanqueray's first marriage, with the mother of Ellean, as well as the
+history of Paula Ray's past life. The mechanism employed to this end has
+been much criticized, but seems to me admirable. Aubrey gives a farewell
+dinner-party to his intimate friends, Misquith and Jayne. Cayley
+Drummle, too, is expected, but has not arrived when the play opens.
+Without naming the lady, Aubrey announces to his guests his approaching
+marriage. He proposes to go out with them, and has one or two notes to
+write before doing so. Moreover, he is not sorry to give them an
+opportunity to talk over the announcement he has made; so he retires to
+a side-table in the same room, to do his writing. Misquith and Jayne
+exchange a few speeches in an undertone, and then Cayley Drummle comes
+in, bringing the story of George Orreyd's marriage to the unmentionable
+Miss Hervey. This story is so unpleasant to Tanqueray that, to get out
+of the conversation, he returns to his writing; but still he cannot help
+listening to Cayley's comments on George Orreyd's "disappearance"; and
+at last the situation becomes so intolerable to him that he purposely
+leaves the room, bidding the other two "Tell Cayley the news." The
+technical manipulation of all this seems to me above reproach
+--dramatically effective and yet life-like in every detail. If
+one were bound to raise an objection, it would be to the coincidence
+which brings to Cayley's knowledge, on one and the same evening, two
+such exactly similar misalliances in his own circle of acquaintance. But
+these are just the coincidences that do constantly happen. Every one
+knows that life is full of them.
+
+The exposition might, no doubt, have been more economically effected.
+Cayley Drummle might have figured as sole confidant and chorus; or even
+he might have been dispensed with, and all that was necessary might have
+appeared in colloquies between Aubrey and Paula on the one hand, Aubrey
+and Ellean on the other. But Cayley as sole confidant--the "Charles, his
+friend," of eighteenth-century comedy--would have been more plainly
+conventional than Cayley as one of a trio of Aubrey's old cronies,
+representing the society he is sacrificing in entering upon this
+experimental marriage; and to have conveyed the necessary information
+without any confidant or chorus at all would (one fancies) have strained
+probability, or, still worse, impaired consistency of character. Aubrey
+could not naturally discuss his late wife either with her successor or
+with her daughter; while, as for Paula's past, all he wanted was to
+avert his eyes from it. I do not say that these difficulties might not
+have been overcome; for, in the vocabulary of the truly ingenious
+dramatist there is no such word as impossible. But I do suggest that the
+result would scarcely have been worth the trouble, and that it is
+hyper-criticism which objects to an exposition so natural and probable
+as that of _The Second Mrs. Tanqueray_, simply on the ground that
+certain characters are introduced for the purpose of conveying certain
+information. It would be foolish to expect of every work of art an
+absolutely austere economy of means.
+
+Sometimes, however, Sir Arthur Pinero injudiciously emphasizes the
+artifices employed to bring about an exposition. In _The Thunderbolt_,
+for instance, in order that the Mortimores' family solicitor may without
+reproach ask for information on matters with which a family solicitor
+ought to be fully conversant, it has to be explained that the senior
+partner of the firm, who had the Mortimore business specially in hand,
+has been called away to London, and that a junior partner has taken his
+place. Such a rubbing-in, as it were, of an obvious device ought at all
+hazards to be avoided. If the information cannot be otherwise imparted
+(as in this case it surely could), the solicitor had better be allowed
+to ask one or two improbable questions--it is the lesser evil of
+the two.
+
+When the whole of a given subject cannot be got within the limits of
+presentation, is there any means of determining how much should be left
+for retrospect, and at what point the curtain ought to be raised? The
+principle would seem to be that slow and gradual processes, and
+especially separate lines of causation, should be left outside the frame
+of the picture, and that the curtain should be raised at the point where
+separate lines have converged, and where the crisis begins to move
+towards its solution with more or less rapidity and continuity. The
+ideas of rapidity and continuity may be conveniently summed up in the
+hackneyed and often misapplied term, unity of action. Though the unities
+of time and place are long ago exploded as binding principles--indeed,
+they never had any authority in English drama--yet it is true that a
+broken-backed action, whether in time or space, ought, so far as
+possible, to be avoided. An action with a gap of twenty years in it may
+be all very well in melodrama or romance, but scarcely in higher and
+more serious types of drama.[4] Especially is it to be desired that
+interest should be concentrated on one set of characters, and should not
+be frittered away on subsidiary or preliminary personages. Take, for
+instance, the case of _The Second Mrs. Tanqueray_. It would have been
+theoretically possible for Sir Arthur Pinero to have given us either (or
+both) of two preliminary scenes: he might have shown us the first Mrs.
+Tanqueray at home, and at the same time have introduced us more at large
+to the characters of Aubrey and Ellean; or he might have depicted for us
+one of the previous associations of Paula Ray--might perhaps have let us
+see her "keeping house" with Hugh Ardale. But either of these openings
+would have been disproportionate and superfluous. It would have excited,
+or tried to excite, our interest in something that was not the real
+theme of the play, and in characters which were to drop out before the
+real theme--the Aubrey-Paula marriage--was reached. Therefore the
+author, in all probability, never thought of beginning at either of
+these points. He passed instinctively to the point at which the two
+lines of causation converged, and from which the action could be carried
+continuously forward by one set of characters. He knew that we could
+learn in retrospect all that it was necessary for us to know of the
+first Mrs. Tanqueray, and that to introduce her in the flesh would be
+merely to lead the interest of the audience into a blind alley, and to
+break the back of his action. Again, in _His House in Order_ it may seem
+that the intrigue between Maurewarde and the immaculate Annabel, with
+its tragic conclusion, would have made a stirring introductory act. But
+to have presented such an act would have been to destroy the unity of
+the play, which centres in the character of Nina. Annabel is "another
+story"; and to have told, or rather shown us, more of it than was
+absolutely necessary, would have been to distract our attention from the
+real theme of the play, while at the same time fatally curtailing the
+all-too-brief time available for the working-out of that theme. There
+are cases, no doubt, when verbal exposition may advantageously be
+avoided by means of a dramatized "Prologue"--a single act, constituting
+a little drama in itself, and generally separated by a considerable
+space of time from the action proper. But this method is scarcely to be
+commended, except, as aforesaid, for purposes of melodrama and romance.
+A "Prologue" is for such plays as _The Prisoner of Zenda_ and _The Only
+Way_, not for such plays as _His House in Order_.
+
+The question whether a legato or a staccato opening be the more
+desirable must be decided in accordance with the nature and
+opportunities of each theme. The only rule that can be stated is that,
+when the attention of the audience is required for an exposition of any
+length, some attempt ought to be made to awaken in advance their general
+interest in the theme and characters. It is dangerous to plunge straight
+into narrative, or unemotional discussion, without having first made the
+audience actively desire the information to be conveyed to them.
+Especially is it essential that the audience should know clearly who are
+the subjects of the discussion or narrative--that they should not be
+mere names to them. It is a grave flaw in the construction of Mr.
+Granville Barker's otherwise admirable play _Waste_, that it should open
+with a long discussion, by people whom we scarcely know, of other people
+whom we do not know at all, whose names we may or may not have noted on
+the playbill.
+
+Trebell, Lord Charles Cantelupe, and Blackborough ought certainly to
+have been presented to us in the flesh, however briefly and summarily,
+before we were asked to interest ourselves in their characters and the
+political situation arising from them.
+
+There is, however, one limitation to this principle. A great effect is
+sometimes attained by retarding the entrance of a single leading figure
+for a whole act, or even two, while he is so constantly talked about as
+to beget in the audience a vivid desire to make his personal
+acquaintance. Thus Molière's Tartufe does not come on the stage until
+the third act of the comedy which bears his name. Ibsen's John Gabriel
+Borkman is unseen until the second act, though (through his wife's ears)
+we have already heard him pacing up and down his room like a wolf in his
+cage. Dubedat, in _The Doctor's Dilemma_, is not revealed to us in the
+flesh until the second act. But for this device to be successful, it is
+essential that only one leading character[5] should remain unseen, on
+whom the attention of the audience may, by that very fact, be riveted.
+In _Waste_, for instance, all would have been well had it suited Mr.
+Barker's purpose to leave Trebell invisible till the second act, while
+all the characters in the first act, clearly presented to us, canvassed
+him from their various points of view. Keen expectancy, in short, is the
+most desirable frame of mind in which an audience can be placed, so long
+as the expectancy be not ultimately disappointed. But there is no less
+desirable mental attitude than that of straining after gleams of
+guidance in an expository twilight.
+
+The advantage of a staccato opening--or, to vary the metaphor, a brisk,
+highly aerated introductory passage--is clearly exemplified in _A Doll's
+House_. It would have been quite possible for Ibsen to have sent up his
+curtain upon Nora and Mrs. Linden seated comfortably before the stove,
+and exchanging confidences as to their respective careers. Nothing
+indispensable would have been omitted; but how languid would have been
+the interest of the audience! As it is, a brief, bright scene has
+already introduced us, not only to Nora, but to Helmer, and aroused an
+eager desire for further insight into the affairs of this--to all
+appearance--radiantly happy household. Therefore, we settle down without
+impatience to listen to the fireside gossip of the two old
+school-fellows.
+
+The problem of how to open a play is complicated in the English theatre
+by considerations wholly foreign to art. Until quite recently, it used
+to be held impossible for a playwright to raise his curtain upon his
+leading character or characters, because the actor-manager would thus be
+baulked of his carefully arranged "entrance" and "reception," and,
+furthermore, because twenty-five per cent of the audience would probably
+arrive about a quarter of an hour late, and would thus miss the opening
+scene or scenes. It used at one time to be the fashion to add to the
+advertisement of a play an entreaty that the audience should be
+punctually in their seats, "as the interest began with the rise of the
+curtain." One has seen this assertion made with regard to plays in
+which, as a matter of fact, the interest had not begun at the fall of
+the curtain. Nowadays, managers, and even leading ladies, are a good
+deal less insistent on their "reception" than they used to be. They
+realize that it may be a distinct advantage to hold the stage from the
+very outset. There are few more effective openings than that of _The
+Second Mrs. Tanqueray_, where we find Aubrey Tanqueray seated squarely
+at his bachelor dinner-table with Misquith on his right and Jayne on his
+left. It may even be taken as a principle that, where it is desired to
+give to one character a special prominence and predominance, it ought,
+if possible, to be the first figure on which the eye of the audience
+falls. In a Sherlock Holmes play, for example, the curtain ought
+assuredly to rise on the great Sherlock enthroned in Baker Street, with
+Dr. Watson sitting at his feet. The solitary entrance of Richard III
+throws his figure into a relief which could by no other means have been
+attained. So, too, it would have been a mistake on Sophocles' part to
+let any one but the protagonist open the _Oedipus Rex_.
+
+So long as the fashion of late dinners continues, however, it must
+remain a measure of prudence to let nothing absolutely essential to the
+comprehension of a play be said or done during the first ten minutes
+after the rise of the curtain. Here, again, _A Doll's House_ may be
+cited as a model, though Ibsen, certainly, had no thought of the British
+dinner-hour in planning the play. The opening scene is just what the
+ideal opening scene ought to be--invaluable, yet not indispensable. The
+late-comer who misses it deprives himself of a preliminary glimpse into
+the characters of Nora and Helmer and the relation between them; but he
+misses nothing that is absolutely essential to his comprehension of the
+play as a whole. This, then, would appear to be a sound maxim both of
+art and prudence: let your first ten minutes by all means be crisp,
+arresting, stimulating, but do not let them embody any absolutely vital
+matter, ignorance of which would leave the spectator in the dark as to
+the general design and purport of the play.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+[Footnote 1: See Chapter XXIII.]
+
+[Footnote 2: Henri Becque's two best-known plays aptly exemplify the two
+types of opening. In _Les Corbeaux_ we have almost an entire act of calm
+domesticity in which the only hint of coming trouble is an allusion to
+Vigneron's attacks of vertigo. In _La Parisienne_ Clotilde and Lafont
+are in the thick of a vehement quarrel over a letter. It proceeds for
+ten minutes or so, at the end of which Clotilde says, "Prenez garde,
+voilà mon mari!"--and we find that the two are not husband and wife, but
+wife and lover.]
+
+[Footnote 3: Mrs. Craigie ("John Oliver Hobbes") opened her very
+successful play, _The Ambassador_, with a scene between Juliet
+Desborough and her sister Alice, a nun, who apparently left her convent
+specially to hear her sister's confession, and then returned to it for
+ever. This was certainly not an economical form of exposition, but it
+was not unsuited to the type of play.]
+
+[Footnote 4: In that charming comedy, _Rosemary_, by Messrs. Parker and
+Carson, there is a gap of fifty years between the last act and its
+predecessor; but the so-called last act is only an "epi-monologue."]
+
+[Footnote 5: Or at most two closely connected characters: for instance,
+a husband and wife.]
+
+
+
+
+_CHAPTER VIII_
+
+THE FIRST ACT
+
+
+Both in the theory and in practice, of late years, war has been declared
+in certain quarters against the division of a play into acts. Students
+of the Elizabethan stage have persuaded themselves, by what I believe to
+be a complete misreading of the evidence, that Shakespeare did not, as
+it were, "think in acts," but conceived his plays as continuous series
+of events, without any pause or intermission in their flow. It can, I
+think, be proved beyond any shadow of doubt that they are wrong in this;
+that the act division was perfectly familiar to Shakespeare, and was
+used by him to give to the action of his plays a rhythm which ought not,
+in representation, to be obscured or falsified. It is true that in the
+Elizabethan theatre there was no need of long interacts for the change
+of scenes, and that such interacts are an abuse that calls for remedy.
+But we have abundant evidence that the act division was sometimes marked
+on the Elizabethan stage, and have no reason to doubt that it was always
+more or less recognized, and was present to Shakespeare's mind no less
+than to Ibsen's or Pinero's.
+
+Influenced in part, perhaps, by the Elizabethan theorists, but mainly by
+the freakishness of his own genius, Mr. Bernard Shaw has taken to
+writing plays in one continuous gush of dialogue, and has put forward,
+more or less seriously, the claim that he is thereby reviving the
+practice of the Greeks. In a prefatory note to _Getting Married_,
+he says--
+
+  "There is a point of some technical interest to be noted in this
+  play. The customary division into acts and scenes has been disused,
+  and a return made to unity of time and place, as observed in the
+  ancient Greek drama. In the foregoing tragedy, _The Doctor's
+  Dilemma_, there are five acts; the place is altered five times; and
+  the time is spread over an undetermined period of more than a year.
+  No doubt the strain on the attention of the audience and on the
+  ingenuity of the playwright is much less; but I find in practice
+  that the Greek form is inevitable when the drama reaches a certain
+  point in poetic and intellectual evolution. Its adoption was not, on
+  my part, a deliberate display of virtuosity in form, but simply the
+  spontaneous falling of a play of ideas into the form most suitable
+  to it, which turned out to be the classical form."
+
+It is hard to say whether Mr. Shaw is here writing seriously or in a
+mood of solemn facetiousness. Perhaps he himself is not quite clear on
+the point. There can be no harm, at any rate, in assuming that he
+genuinely believes the unity of _Getting Married_ to be "a return to the
+unity observed in," say, the _Oedipus Rex_, and examining a little into
+so pleasant an illusion.
+
+It is, if I may so phrase it, a double-barrelled illusion. _Getting
+Married_ has not the unity of the Greek drama, and the Greek drama has
+not the unity of _Getting Married_. Whatever "unity" is predicable of
+either form of art is a wholly different thing from whatever "unity" is
+predicable of the other. Mr. Shaw, in fact, is, consciously or
+unconsciously, playing with words, very much as Lamb did when he said to
+the sportsman, "Is that your own hare or a wig?" There are, roughly
+speaking, three sorts of unity: the unity of a plum-pudding, the unity
+of a string or chain, and, the unity of the Parthenon. Let us call them,
+respectively, unity of concoction, unity of concatenation, and
+structural or organic unity. The second form of unity is that of most
+novels and some plays. They present a series of events, more or less
+closely intertwined or interlinked with one another, but not built up
+into any symmetrical interdependence. This unity of longitudinal
+extension does not here concern us, for it is not that of either Shaw or
+Sophocles. Plum-pudding unity, on the other hand--the unity of a number
+of ingredients stirred up together, put in a cloth, boiled to a certain
+consistency, and then served up in a blue flame of lambent humour--that
+is precisely the unity of _Getting Married_. A jumble of ideas,
+prejudices, points of view, and whimsicalities on the subject of
+marriage is tied up in a cloth and boiled into a sort of glutinous
+fusion or confusion, so that when the cloth is taken off they do not at
+once lose the coherent rotundity conferred upon them by pressure from
+without. In a quite real sense, the comparison does more than justice to
+the technical qualities of the play; for in a good plum-pudding the due
+proportions of the ingredients are carefully studied, whereas Mr. Shaw
+flings in recklessly whatever comes into his head. At the same time it
+is undeniably true that he shows us a number of people in one room,
+talking continuously and without a single pause, on different aspects of
+a given theme. If this be unity, then he has achieved it. In the
+theatre, as a matter of fact, the plum-pudding was served up in three
+chunks instead of one; but this was a mere concession to human weakness.
+The play had all the globular unity of a pill, though it happened to be
+too big a pill to be swallowed at one gulp.
+
+Turning now to the _Oedipus_--I choose that play as a typical example of
+Greek tragedy--what sort of unity do we find? It is the unity, not of a
+continuous mass or mash, but of carefully calculated proportion, order,
+interrelation of parts--the unity of a fine piece of architecture, or
+even of a living organism. The inorganic continuity of _Getting Married_
+it does not possess. If that be what we understand by unity, then Shaw
+has it and Sophocles has not. The _Oedipus_ is as clearly divided into
+acts as is _Hamlet_ or _Hedda Gabler_. In modern parlance, we should
+probably call it a play in five acts and an epilogue. It so happened
+that the Greek theatre did not possess a curtain, and did possess a
+Chorus; consequently, the Greek dramatist employed the Chorus, as we
+employ the curtain, to emphasize the successive stages of his action, to
+mark the rhythm of its progress, and, incidentally, to provide
+resting-places for the mind of the audience--intervals during which the
+strain upon their attention was relaxed, or at any rate varied. It is
+not even true that the Greeks habitually aimed at such continuity of
+time as we find in _Getting Married_. They treated time ideally, the
+imaginary duration of the story being, as a rule, widely different from
+the actual time of representation. In this respect the _Oedipus_ is
+something of an exception, since the events might, at a pinch, be
+conceived as passing within the "two hours' traffick of the stage"; but
+in many cases a whole day, or even more, must be understood to be
+compressed within these two hours. It is true that the continuous
+presence of the Chorus made it impossible for the Greeks to overleap
+months and years, as we do on the modern stage; but they did not aim at
+that strict coincidence of imaginary with actual time which Mr. Shaw
+believes himself to have achieved.[1] Even he, however, subjects the
+events which take place behind the scenes to a good deal of "ideal"
+compression.
+
+Of course, when Mr. Shaw protests that, in _Getting Married_, he did not
+indulge in a "deliberate display of virtuosity of form," that is only
+his fun. You cannot well have virtuosity of form where there is no form.
+What he did was to rely upon his virtuosity of dialogue to enable him to
+dispense with form. Whether he succeeded or not is a matter of opinion
+which does not at present concern us. The point to be noted is the
+essential difference between the formless continuity of _Getting
+Married_, and the sedulous ordering and balancing of clearly
+differentiated parts, which went to the structure of a Greek tragedy. A
+dramatist who can so develop his story as to bring it within the
+quasi-Aristotelean "unities" performs a curious but not particularly
+difficult or valuable feat; but this does not, or ought not to, imply
+the abandonment of the act-division, which is no mere convention, but a
+valuable means of marking the rhythm of the story. When, on the other
+hand, you have no story to tell, the act-division is manifestly
+superfluous; but it needs no "virtuosity" to dispense with it.
+
+It is a grave error, then, to suppose that the act is a mere division of
+convenience, imposed by the limited power of attention of the human
+mind, or by the need of the human body for occasional refreshment. A
+play with a well-marked, well-balanced act-structure is a higher
+artistic organism than a play with no act-structure, just as a
+vertebrate animal is higher than a mollusc. In every crisis of real life
+(unless it be so short as to be a mere incident) there is a rhythm of
+rise, progress, culmination and solution. We are not always, perhaps not
+often, conscious of these stages; but that is only because we do not
+reflect upon our experiences while they are passing, or map them out in
+memory when they are past. We do, however, constantly apply to real-life
+crises expressions borrowed more or less directly from the terminology
+of the drama. We say, somewhat incorrectly, "Things have come to a
+climax," meaning thereby a culmination; or we say, "The catastrophe is
+at hand," or, again, "What a fortunate _dénouement_!" Be this as it may,
+it is the business of the dramatist to analyse the crises with which he
+deals, and to present them to us in their rhythm of growth, culmination,
+solution. To this end the act-division is--not, perhaps, essential,
+since the rhythm may be marked even in a one-act play--but certainly of
+enormous and invaluable convenience. "Si l'acte n'existait pas, il
+faudrait l'inventer"; but as a matter of fact it has existed wherever,
+in the Western world, the drama has developed beyond its rudest
+beginnings.
+
+It was doubtless the necessity for marking this rhythm that Aristotle
+had in mind when he said that a dramatic action must have a beginning, a
+middle and an end. Taken in its simplicity, this principle would
+indicate the three-act division as the ideal scheme for a play. As a
+matter of fact, many of the best modern plays in all languages fall into
+three acts; one has only to note _Monsieur Alphonse, Françillon, La
+Parisienne, Amoureuse, A Doll's House, Ghosts, The Master Builder,
+Little Eyolf, Johannisfeuer, Caste, Candida, The Benefit of the Doubt,
+The Importance of Being Earnest, The Silver Box_; and, furthermore, many
+old plays which are nominally in five acts really fall into a triple
+rhythm, and might better have been divided into three. Alexandrian
+precept, handed on by Horace, gave to the five act division a purely
+arbitrary sanction, which induced playwrights to mask the natural rhythm
+of their themes beneath this artificial one.[2] But in truth the
+three-act division ought no more to be elevated into an absolute rule
+than the five-act division. We have seen that a play consists, or ought
+to consist, of a great crisis, worked out through a series of minor
+crises. An act, then, ought to consist either of a minor crisis, carried
+to its temporary solution, or of a well-marked group of such crises; and
+there can be no rule as to the number of such crises which ought to
+present themselves in the development of a given theme. On the modern
+stage, five acts may be regarded as the maximum, simply by reason of the
+time-limit imposed by social custom on a performance. But one frequently
+sees a melodrama divided into "five acts and eight tableaux," or even
+more; which practically means that the play is in eight, or nine, or ten
+acts, but that there will be only the four conventional interacts in the
+course of the evening. The playwright should not let himself be
+constrained by custom to force his theme into the arbitrary mould of a
+stated number of acts. Three acts is a good number, four acts is a good
+number,[3] there is no positive objection to five acts. Should he find
+himself hankering after more acts, he will do well to consider whether
+he be not, at one point or another, failing in the art of condensation
+and trespassing on the domain of the novelist.
+
+There is undoubted convenience in the rule of the modern stage: "One
+act, one scene." A change of scene in the middle of an act is not only
+materially difficult, but tends to impair the particular order of
+illusion at which the modern drama aims.[4] Roughly, indeed, an act may
+be defined as any part of a given crisis which works itself out at one
+time and in one place; but more fundamentally it is a segment of the
+action during which the author desires to hold the attention of his
+audience unbroken and unrelaxed. It is no mere convention, however,
+which decrees that the flight of time is best indicated by an interact.
+When the curtain is down, the action on the stage remains, as it were,
+in suspense. The audience lets its attention revert to the affairs of
+real life; and it is quite willing, when the mimic world is once more
+revealed, to suppose that any reasonable space of time has elapsed while
+its thoughts were occupied with other matters. It is much more difficult
+for it to accept a wholly imaginary lapse of time while its attention is
+centred on the mimic world. Some playwrights have of late years adopted
+the device of dropping their curtain once, or even twice, in the middle
+of an act, to indicate an interval of a few minutes, or even of an
+hour--for instance, of the time between "going in to dinner" and the
+return of the ladies to the drawing-room. Sir Arthur Pinero employs this
+device with good effect in _Iris_; so does Mr. Granville Barker in
+_Waste_, and Mr. Galsworthy in _The Silver Box_. It is certainly far
+preferable to that "ideal" treatment of time which was common in the
+French drama of the nineteenth century, and survives to this day in
+plays adapted or imitated from the French.
+
+I remember seeing in London, not very long ago, a one-act play on the
+subject of Rouget de l'Isle. In the space of about half-an-hour, he
+handed the manuscript of the "Marseillaise" to an opera-singer whom he
+adored, she took it away and sang it at the Opera, it caught the popular
+ear from that one performance, and the dying Rouget heard it sung by the
+passing multitude in the streets within about fifteen minutes of the
+moment when it first left his hands. (The whole piece, I repeat,
+occupied about half-an-hour; but as a good deal of that time was devoted
+to preliminaries, not more than fifteen minutes can have elapsed between
+the time when the cantatrice left Rouget's garret and the time when all
+Paris was singing the "Marseillaise.") This is perhaps an extreme
+instance of the ideal treatment of time; but one could find numberless
+cases in the works of Scribe, Labiche, and others, in which the
+transactions of many hours are represented as occurring within the
+limits of a single act. Our modern practice eschews such licenses. It
+will often compress into an act of half-an-hour more events than would
+probably happen in real life in a similar space of time, but not such a
+train of occurrences as to transcend the limits of possibility. It must
+be remembered, however, that the standard of verisimilitude naturally
+and properly varies with the seriousness of the theme under treatment.
+Improbabilities are admissible in light comedy, and still more in farce,
+which would wreck the fortunes of a drama purporting to present a sober
+and faithful picture of real life.
+
+Acts, then, mark the time-stages in the development of a given crisis;
+and each act ought to embody a minor crisis of its own, with a
+culmination and a temporary solution. It would be no gain, but a loss,
+if a whole two hours' or three hours' action could be carried through in
+one continuous movement, with no relaxation of the strain upon the
+attention of the audience, and without a single point at which the
+spectator might review what was past and anticipate what was to come.
+The act-division positively enhances the amount of pleasurable emotion
+through which the audience passes. Each act ought to stimulate and
+temporarily satisfy an interest of its own, while definitely advancing
+the main action. The psychological principle is evident enough; namely,
+that there is more sensation to be got out of three or four
+comparatively brief experiences, suited to our powers of perception,
+than out of one protracted experience, forced on us without relief,
+without contrast, in such a way as to fatigue and deaden our faculties.
+Who would not rather drink three, four, or five glasses of wine than put
+the bottle to his lips and let its contents pour down his throat in one
+long draught? Who would not rather see a stained-glass window broken
+into three, four, or five cunningly-proportioned "lights," than a great
+flat sheet of coloured glass, be its design never so effective?
+
+It used to be the fashion in mid Victorian melodramas to give each act a
+more or less alluring title of its own. I am far from recommending the
+revival of this practice; but it might be no bad plan for a beginner, in
+sketching out a play, to have in his mind, or in his private notes, a
+descriptive head-line for each act, thereby assuring himself that each
+had a character of its own, and at the same time contributed its due
+share to the advancement of the whole design. Let us apply this
+principle to a Shakespearean play--for example, to _Macbeth_. The act
+headings might run somewhat as follows--
+
+  ACT I.--TEMPTATION.
+
+  ACT II.--MURDER AND USURPATION.
+
+  ACT III.--THE FRENZY OF CRIME AND THE HAUNTING OF REMORSE.
+
+  ACT IV.--GATHERING RETRIBUTION.
+
+  ACT V.--RETRIBUTION CONSUMMATED.
+
+Can it be doubted that Shakespeare had in his mind the rhythm marked by
+this act-division? I do not mean, of course, that these phrases, or
+anything like them, were present to his consciousness, but merely that
+he "thought in acts," and mentally assigned to each act its definite
+share in the development of the crisis.
+
+Turning now to Ibsen, let us draw up an act-scheme for the simplest and
+most straightforward of his plays, _An Enemy of the People_. It might
+run as follows:
+
+  ACT I.--THE INCURABLE OPTIMIST.--Dr. Stockmann announces his
+  discovery of the insanitary condition of the Baths.
+
+  ACT II.--THE COMPACT MAJORITY.--Dr. Stockmann finds that he will
+  have to fight vested interests before the evils he has discovered
+  can be remedied, but is assured that the Compact Majority is at
+  his back.
+
+  ACT III.--THE TURN OF FORTUNE.--The Doctor falls from the pinnacle
+  of his optimistic confidence, and learns that he will have the
+  Compact Majority, not _at_, but _on_ his back.
+
+  ACT IV.--THE COMPACT MAJORITY ON THE WARPATH.--The crowd, finding
+  that its immediate interests are identical with those of the
+  privileged few, joins with the bureaucracy in shouting down the
+  truth, and organizing a conspiracy of silence.
+
+  ACT V.--OPTIMISM DISILLUSIONED BUT INDOMITABLE.--Dr. Stockmann,
+  gagged and thrown back into poverty, is tempted to take flight, but
+  determines to remain in his native place and fight for its moral, if
+  not for its physical, sanitation.
+
+Each of these acts is a little drama in itself, while each leads forward
+to the next, and marks a distinct phase in the development of
+the crisis.
+
+When the younger Dumas asked his father, that master of dramatic
+movement, to initiate him into the secret of dramatic craftsmanship, the
+great Alexandre replied in this concise formula: "Let your first act be
+clear, your last act brief, and the whole interesting." Of the wisdom of
+the first clause there can be no manner of doubt. Whether incidentally
+or by way of formal exposition, the first act ought to show us clearly
+who the characters are, what are their relations and relationships, and
+what is the nature of the gathering crisis. It is very important that
+the attention of the audience should not be overstrained in following
+out needlessly complex genealogies and kinships. How often, at the end
+of a first act, does one turn to one's neighbour and say, "Are Edith and
+Adela sisters or only half-sisters?" or, "Did you gather what was the
+villain's claim to the title?" If a story cannot be made clear without
+an elaborate study of one or more family trees, beware of it. In all
+probability, it is of very little use for dramatic purposes. But before
+giving it up, see whether the relationships, and other relations, cannot
+be simplified. Complexities which at first seemed indispensable will
+often prove to be mere useless encumbrances.
+
+In _Pillars of Society_ Ibsen goes as far as any playwright ought to go
+in postulating fine degrees of kinship--and perhaps a little further.
+Karsten Bernick has married into a family whose gradations put something
+of a strain on the apprehension and memory of an audience. We have to
+bear in mind that Mrs. Bernick has (_a_) a half-sister, Lona Hessel;
+(_b_) a full brother, Johan Tönnesen; (_c_) a cousin, Hilmar Tönnesen.
+Then Bernick has an unmarried sister, Martha; another relationship,
+however simple, to be borne in mind. And, finally, when we see Dina Dorf
+living in Bernick's house, and know that Bernick has had an intrigue
+with her mother, we are apt to fall into the error of supposing her to
+be Bernick's daughter. There is only one line which proves that this is
+not so--a remark to the effect that, when Madam Dorf came to the town.
+Dina was already old enough to run about and play angels in the theatre.
+Any one who does not happen to hear or notice this remark, is almost
+certain to misapprehend Dina's parentage. Taking one thing with another,
+then, the Bernick family group is rather more complex than is strictly
+desirable. Ibsen's reasons for making Lona Hessel a half-sister instead
+of a full sister of Mrs. Bernick are evident enough. He wanted her to be
+a considerably older woman, of a very different type of character; and
+it was necessary, in order to explain Karsten's desertion of Lona for
+Betty, that the latter should be an heiress, while the former was
+penniless. These reasons are clear and apparently adequate; yet it may
+be doubted whether the dramatist did not lose more than he gained by
+introducing even this small degree of complexity. It was certainly not
+necessary to explain the difference of age and character between Lona
+and Betty; while as for the money, there would have been nothing
+improbable in supposing that a wealthy uncle had marked his disapproval
+of Lona's strong-mindedness by bequeathing all his property to her
+younger sister. Again, there is no reason why Hilmar should not have
+been a brother of Johan and Betty;[5] in which case we should have had
+the simple family group of two brothers and two sisters, instead of the
+comparatively complex relationship of a brother and sister, a
+half-sister and a cousin.
+
+These may seem very trivial considerations: but nothing is really
+trivial when it comes to be placed under the powerful lens of theatrical
+presentation. Any given audience has only a certain measure of attention
+at command, and to claim attention for inessentials is to diminish the
+stock available for essentials. In only one other play does Ibsen
+introduce any complexity of relationship, and in that case it does not
+appear in the exposition, but is revealed at a critical moment towards
+the close. In _Little Eyolf_, Asta and Allmers are introduced to us at
+first as half-sister and half-brother; and only at the end of the second
+act does it appear that Asta's mother (Allmers' stepmother) was
+unfaithful to her husband, and that, Asta being the fruit of this
+infidelity, there is no blood kinship between her and Allmers. The
+danger of relying upon such complexities is shown by the fact that so
+acute a critic as M. Jules Lemaître, in writing of _Little Eyolf_,
+mistook the situation, and thought that Asta fled from Allmers because
+he was her brother, whereas in fact she fled because he was not. I had
+the honour of calling M. Lemaître's attention to this error, which he
+handsomely acknowledged.
+
+Complexities of kinship are, of course, not the only complexities which
+should, so far as possible, be avoided. Every complexity of relation or
+of antecedent circumstance is in itself a weakness, which, if it cannot
+be eliminated, must, so to speak, be lived down. No dramatic critic, I
+think, can have failed to notice that the good plays are those of which
+the story can be clearly indicated in ten lines; while it very often
+takes a column to give even a confused idea of the plot of a bad play.
+Here, then, is a preliminary test which may be commended to the would-be
+playwright, in order to ascertain whether the subject he is
+contemplating is or is not a good one: can he state the gist of it in a
+hundred words or so, like the "argument" of a Boccaccian novella? The
+test, of course, is far from being infallible; for a theme may err on
+the side of over-simplicity or emptiness, no less than on the side of
+over-complexity. But it is, at any rate, negatively useful: if the
+playwright finds that he cannot make his story comprehensible without a
+long explanation of an intricate network of facts, he may be pretty sure
+that he has got hold of a bad theme, or of one that stands sorely in
+need of simplification.[6]
+
+It is not sufficient, however, that a first act should fulfil Dumas's
+requirement by placing the situation clearly before us: it ought also to
+carry us some way towards the heart of the drama, or, at the very least,
+to point distinctly towards that quarter of the horizon where the clouds
+are gathering up. In a three-act play this is evidently demanded by the
+most elementary principles of proportion. It would be absurd to make
+one-third of the play merely introductory, and to compress the whole
+action into the remaining two-thirds. But even in a four- or five-act
+play, the interest of the audience ought to be strongly enlisted, and
+its anticipation headed in a definite direction, before the curtain
+falls for the first time. When we find a dramatist of repute neglecting
+this principle, we may suspect some reason with which art has no
+concern. Several of Sardou's social dramas begin with two acts of more
+or less smart and entertaining satire or caricature, and only at the end
+of the second or beginning of the third act (out of five) does the drama
+proper set in. What was the reason of this? Simply that under the system
+of royalties prevalent in France, it was greatly to the author's
+interest that his play should fill the whole evening. Sardou needed no
+more than three acts for the development of his drama; to have spread it
+out thinner would have been to weaken and injure it; wherefore he
+preferred to occupy an hour or so with clever dramatic journalism,
+rather than share the evening, and the fees, with another dramatist. So,
+at least, I have heard his practice explained; perhaps his own account
+of the matter may have been that he wanted to paint a broad social
+picture to serve as a background for his action.
+
+The question how far an audience ought to be carried towards the heart
+of a dramatic action in the course of the first act is always and
+inevitably one of proportion. It is clear that too much ought not to be
+told, so as to leave the remaining acts meagre and spun-out; nor should
+any one scene be so intense in its interest as to outshine all
+subsequent scenes, and give to the rest of the play an effect of
+anti-climax. If the strange and fascinating creations of Ibsen's last
+years were to be judged by ordinary dramaturgic canons, we should have
+to admit that in _Little Eyolf_ he was guilty of the latter fault, since
+in point of sheer "strength," in the common acceptation of the word, the
+situation at the end of the first act could scarcely be outdone, in that
+play or any other. The beginner, however, is far more likely to put too
+little than too much into his first act: he is more likely to leave our
+interest insufficiently stimulated than to carry us too far in the
+development of his theme. My own feeling is that, as a general rule,
+what Freytag calls the _erregende Moment_ ought by all means to fall
+within the first act. What is the _erregende Moment_? One is inclined to
+render it "the firing of the fuse." In legal parlance, it might be
+interpreted as the joining of issue. It means the point at which the
+drama, hitherto latent, plainly declares itself. It means the
+germination of the crisis, the appearance on the horizon of the cloud no
+bigger than a man's hand. I suggest, then, that this _erregende Moment_
+ought always to come within the first act--if it is to come at all There
+are plays, as we have seen, which depict life on so even a plane that it
+is impossible to say at any given point, "Here the drama sets in," or
+"The interest is heightened there."
+
+_Pillars of Society_ is, in a sense, Ibsen's prentice-work in the form
+of drama which he afterwards perfected; wherefore it affords us numerous
+illustrations of the problems we have to consider. Does he, or does he
+not, give us in the first act sufficient insight into his story? I am
+inclined to answer the question in the negative. The first act puts us
+in possession of the current version of the Bernick-Tönnesen family
+history, but it gives us no clear indication that this version is an
+elaborate tissue of falsehoods. It is true that Bernick's evident
+uneasiness and embarrassment at the mere idea of the reappearance of
+Lona and Johan may lead us to suspect that all is not as it seems; but
+simple annoyance at the inopportune arrival of the black sheep of the
+family might be sufficient to account for this. To all intents and
+purposes, we are completely in the dark as to the course the drama is
+about to take; and when, at the end of the first act, Lona Hessel
+marches in and flutters the social dovecote, we do not know in what
+light to regard her, or why we are supposed to sympathize with her. The
+fact that she is eccentric, and that she talks of "letting in fresh
+air," combines with our previous knowledge of the author's idiosyncrasy
+to assure us that she is his heroine; but so far as the evidence
+actually before us goes, we have no means of forming even the vaguest
+provisional judgment as to her true character. This is almost certainly
+a mistake in art. It is useless to urge that sympathy and antipathy are
+primitive emotions, and that we ought to be able to regard a character
+objectively, rating it as true or false, not as attractive or repellent.
+The answer to this is twofold. Firstly, the theatre has never been, and
+never will be, a moral dissecting room, nor has the theatrical audience
+anything in common with a class of students dispassionately following a
+professor's demonstration of cold scientific facts. Secondly, in the
+particular case in point, the dramatist makes a manifest appeal to our
+sympathies. There can be no doubt that we are intended to take Lona's
+part, as against the representatives of propriety and convention
+assembled at the sewing-bee; but we have been vouchsafed no rational
+reason for so doing. In other words, the author has not taken us far
+enough into his action to enable us to grasp the true import and
+significance of the situation. He relies for his effect either on the
+general principle that an eccentric character must be sympathetic, or on
+the knowledge possessed by those who have already seen or read the rest
+of the play. Either form of reliance is clearly inartistic. The former
+appeals to irrational prejudice; the latter ignores what we shall
+presently find to be a fundamental principle of the playwright's
+art--namely, that, with certain doubtful exceptions in the case of
+historical themes, he must never assume previous knowledge either of
+plot or character on the part of his public, but must always have in his
+mind's eye a first-night audience, which knows nothing but what he
+chooses to tell it.
+
+My criticism of the first act of _Pillars of Society_ may be summed up
+in saying that the author has omitted to place in it the _erregende
+Moment_. The issue is not joined, the true substance of the drama is not
+clear to us, until, in the second act, Bernick makes sure there are no
+listeners, and then holds out both hands to Johan, saying: "Johan, now
+we are alone; now you must give me leave to thank you," and so forth.
+Why should not this scene have occurred in the first act? Materially,
+there is no reason whatever. It would need only the change of a few
+words to lift the scene bodily out of the second act and transfer it to
+the first. Why did Ibsen not do so? His reason is not hard to divine; he
+wished to concentrate into two great scenes, with scarcely a moment's
+interval between them, the revelation of Bernick's treachery, first to
+Johan, second to Lona. He gained his point: the sledge-hammer effect of
+these two scenes is undeniable. But it remains a question whether he did
+not make a disproportionate sacrifice; whether he did not empty his
+first act in order to overfill his second. I do not say he did: I merely
+propound the question for the student's consideration. One thing we must
+recognize in dramatic art as in all other human affairs; namely, that
+perfection, if not unattainable, is extremely rare. We have often to
+make a deliberate sacrifice at one point in order to gain some greater
+advantage at another; to incur imperfection here that we may achieve
+perfection there. It is no disparagement to the great masters to admit
+that they frequently show us rather what to avoid than what to do.
+Negative instruction, indeed, is in its essence more desirable than
+positive. The latter tends to make us mere imitators, whereas the
+former, in saving us from dangers, leaves our originality unimpaired.
+
+It is curious to note that, in another play, Ibsen did actually transfer
+the _erregende Moment_, the joining of issue, from the second act to the
+first. In his early draft of _Rosmersholm_, the great scene in which
+Rosmer confesses to Kroll his change of views did not occur until the
+second act. There can be no doubt that the balance and proportion of the
+play gained enormously by the transference.
+
+After all, however, the essential question is not how much or how little
+is conveyed to us in the first act, but whether our interest is
+thoroughly aroused, and, what is of equal importance, skilfully carried
+forward. Before going more at large into this very important detail of
+the playwright's craft, it may be well to say something of the nature of
+dramatic interest in general.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+[Footnote 1: There are several cases in Greek drama in which a hero
+leaves the stage to fight a battle and returns victorious in a few
+minutes. See, for example, the _Supplices_ of Euripides.]
+
+[Footnote 2: So far was Shakespeare from ignoring the act-division that
+it is a question whether his art did not sometimes suffer from the
+supposed necessity of letting a fourth act intervene between the
+culmination in the third act and the catastrophe in the fifth.]
+
+[Footnote 3: I think it may be said that the majority of modern serious
+plays are in four acts. It is a favourite number with Sir Arthur Pinero,
+Mr. Henry Arthur Jones, Mr. Clyde Fitch, and Mr. Alfred Sutro.]
+
+[Footnote 4: This must not be taken to mean that in no case is a change
+of scene within the act advisable. The point to be considered is whether
+the author does or does not want to give the audience time for
+reflection--time to return to the real world--between two episodes. If
+it is of great importance that they should not do so, then a rapid
+change of scene may be the less of two evils. In this case the lights
+should be kept lowered in order to show that no interact is intended;
+but the fashion of changing the scene on a pitch-dark stage, without
+dropping the curtain, is much to be deprecated. If the revolving stage
+should ever become a common institution in English-speaking countries,
+dramatists would doubtless be more tempted than they are at present to
+change their scenes within the act; but I doubt whether the tendency
+would be wholly advantageous. No absolute rule, however, can be laid
+down, and it may well be maintained that a true dramatic artist could
+only profit by the greater flexibility of his medium.]
+
+[Footnote 5: He was, in the first draft; and Lona Hessel was only a
+distant relative of Bernick's.]
+
+[Footnote 6: The Greeks, who knew most things, knew the value of
+manageable dimensions and simple structure in a work of art, and had a
+word to express that combination of qualities--the word _eusynopton_.]
+
+
+
+
+_CHAPTER IX_
+
+"CURIOSITY" AND "INTEREST"
+
+
+The paradox of dramatic theory is this: while our aim is, of course, to
+write plays which shall achieve immortality, or shall at any rate become
+highly popular, and consequently familiar in advance to a considerable
+proportion of any given audience, we are all the time studying how to
+awaken and to sustain that interest, or, more precisely, that curiosity,
+which can be felt only by those who see the play for the first time,
+without any previous knowledge of its action. Under modern conditions
+especially, the spectators who come to the theatre with their minds an
+absolute blank as to what is awaiting them, are comparatively few; for
+newspaper criticism and society gossip very soon bruit abroad a general
+idea of the plot of any play which attains a reasonable measure of
+success. Why, then, should we assume, in the ideal spectator to whom we
+address ourselves, a state of mind which, we hope and trust, will not be
+the state of mind of the majority of actual spectators?
+
+To this question there are several answers. The first and most obvious
+is that to one audience, at any rate, every play must be absolutely new,
+and that it is this first-night audience which in great measure
+determines its success or failure. Many plays have survived a
+first-night failure, and still more have gone off in a rapid decline
+after a first-night success. But these caprices of fortune are not to be
+counted on. The only prudent course is for the dramatist to direct all
+his thought and care towards conciliating or dominating an audience to
+which his theme is entirely unknown,[1] and so coming triumphant through
+his first-night ordeal. This principle is subject to a certain
+qualification in the case of historic and legendary themes. In treating
+such subjects, the dramatist is not relieved of the necessity of
+developing his story clearly and interestingly, but has, on the
+contrary, an additional charge imposed upon him--that of not flagrantly
+defying or disappointing popular knowledge or prejudice. Charles I must
+not die in a green old age, Oliver Cromwell must not display the manners
+and graces of Sir Charles Grandison, Charles II must not be represented
+as a model of domestic virtue. Historians may indict a hero or whitewash
+a villain at their leisure; but to the dramatist a hero must be (more or
+less) a hero, a villain (more or less) a villain, if accepted tradition
+so decrees it.[2] Thus popular knowledge can scarcely be said to lighten
+a dramatist's task, but rather to impose a new limitation upon him. In
+some cases, however, he can rely on a general knowledge of the historic
+background of a given period, which may save him some exposition. An
+English audience, for instance, does not require to be told what was the
+difference between Cavaliers and Roundheads; nor does any audience, I
+imagine, look for a historical disquisition on the Reign of Terror. The
+dramatist has only to bring on some ruffianly characters in Phrygian
+caps, who address each other as "Citizen" and "Citizeness," and at once
+the imagination of the audience will supply the roll of the tumbrels and
+the silhouette of the guillotine in the background.
+
+To return to the general question: not only must the dramatist reckon
+with one all-important audience which is totally ignorant of the story
+he has to tell; he must also bear in mind that it is very easy to
+exaggerate the proportion of any given audience which will know his plot
+in advance, even when his play has been performed a thousand times.
+There are inexhaustible possibilities of ignorance in the theatrical
+public. A story is told, on pretty good authority, of a late eminent
+statesman who visited the Lyceum one night when Sir Henry Irving was
+appearing as Hamlet. After the third act he went to the actor's
+dressing-room, expressed great regret that duty called him back to
+Westminster, and begged Sir Henry to tell him how the play ended, as it
+had interested him greatly.[3] One of our most eminent novelists has
+assured me that he never saw or read _Macbeth_ until he was present at
+(I think) Mr. Forbes Robertson's revival of the play, he being then
+nearer fifty than forty. These, no doubt, are "freak" instances; but in
+any given audience, even at the most hackneyed classical plays, there
+will be a certain percentage of children (who contribute as much as
+their elders to the general temper of an audience), and also a
+percentage of adult ignoramuses. And if this be so in the case of plays
+which have held the stage for generations, are studied in schools, and
+are every day cited as matters of common knowledge, how much more
+certain may we be that even the most popular modern play will have to
+appeal night after night to a considerable number of people who have no
+previous acquaintance with either its story or its characters! The
+playwright may absolutely count on having to make such an appeal; but he
+must remember at the same time that he can by no means count on keeping
+any individual effect, more especially any notable trick or device, a
+secret from the generality of his audience. Mr. J.M. Barrie (to take a
+recent instance) sedulously concealed, throughout the greater part of
+_Little Mary_, what was meant by that ever-recurring expression, and
+probably relied to some extent on an effect of amused surprise when the
+disclosure was made. On the first night, the effect came off happily
+enough; but on subsequent nights, there would rarely be a score of
+people in the house who did not know the secret. The great majority
+might know nothing else about the play, but that they knew. Similarly,
+in the case of any mechanical _truc_, as the French call it, or feat of
+theatrical sleight-of-hand, it is futile to trust to its taking unawares
+any audience after the first. Nine-tenths of all subsequent audiences
+are sure to be on the look-out for it, and to know, or think they know,
+"how it's done."[4] These are the things which theatrical gossip,
+printed and oral, most industriously disseminates. The fine details of a
+plot are much less easily conveyed and less likely to be remembered.
+
+To sum up this branch of the argument: however oft-repeated and
+much-discussed a play may be, the playwright must assume that in every
+audience there will be an appreciable number of persons who know
+practically nothing about it, and whose enjoyment will depend, like that
+of the first-night audience, on the skill with which he develops his
+story. On the other hand, he can never rely on taking an audience by
+surprise at any particular point. The class of effect which depends on
+surprise is precisely the class of effect which is certain to be
+discounted.[5]
+
+We come now to a third reason why a playwright is bound to assume that
+the audience to which he addresses himself has no previous knowledge of
+his fable. It is simply that no other assumption has, or can have, any
+logical basis. If the audience is not to be conceived as ignorant, how
+much is it to be assumed to know? There is clearly no possible answer to
+this question, except a purely arbitrary one, having no relation to the
+facts. In any audience after the first, there will doubtless be a
+hundred degrees of knowledge and of ignorance. Many people will know
+nothing at all about the play; some people will have seen or read it
+yesterday, and will thus know all there is to know; while between these
+extremes there will be every variety of clearness or vagueness of
+knowledge. Some people will have read and remembered a detailed
+newspaper notice; others will have read the same notice and forgotten
+almost all of it. Some will have heard a correct and vivid account of
+the play, others a vague and misleading summary. It would be absolutely
+impossible to enumerate all the degrees of previous knowledge which are
+pretty certain to be represented in an average audience; and to which
+degree of knowledge is the playwright to address himself? If he is to
+have any firm ground under his feet, he must clearly adopt the only
+logical course, and address himself to a spectator assumed to have no
+previous knowledge whatever. To proceed on any other assumption would
+not only be to ignore the all-powerful first-night audience, but to
+plunge into a veritable morass of inconsistencies, dubieties and
+slovenlinesses.
+
+These considerations, however, have not yet taken us to the heart of the
+matter. We have seen that the dramatist has no rational course open to
+him but to assume complete ignorance in his audience; but we have also
+seen that, as a matter of fact, only one audience will be entirely in
+this condition, and that, the more successful the play is, the more
+widely will subsequent audiences tend to depart from it. Does it not
+follow that interest of plot, interest of curiosity as to coming events,
+is at best an evanescent factor in a play's attractiveness--of a certain
+importance, no doubt, on the first night, but less and less efficient
+the longer the play holds the stage?
+
+In a sense, this is undoubtedly true. We see every day that a mere
+story-play--a play which appeals to us solely by reason of the adroit
+stimulation and satisfaction of curiosity--very rapidly exhausts its
+success. No one cares to see it a second time; and spectators who happen
+to have read the plot in advance, find its attraction discounted even on
+a first hearing. But if we jump to the conclusion that the skilful
+marshalling and development of the story is an unimportant detail, which
+matters little when once the first-night ordeal is past, we shall go
+very far astray. Experience shows us that dramatic _interest_ is
+entirely distinct from mere _curiosity_, and survives when curiosity is
+dead. Though a skilfully-told story is not of itself enough to secure
+long life for a play, it materially and permanently enhances the
+attractions of a play which has other and higher claims to longevity.
+Character, poetry, philosophy, atmosphere, are all very good in their
+way; but they all show to greater advantage by aid of a well-ordered
+fable. In a picture, I take it, drawing is not everything; but drawing
+will always count for much.
+
+This separation of interest from curiosity is partly explicable by one
+very simple reflection. However well we may know a play beforehand, we
+seldom know it by heart or nearly by heart; so that, though we may
+anticipate a development in general outline, we do not clearly foresee
+the ordering of its details, which, therefore, may give us almost the
+same sort of pleasure that it gave us when the story was new to us. Most
+playgoers will, I think, bear me out in saying that we constantly find a
+great scene or act to be in reality richer in invention and more
+ingenious in arrangement than we remembered it to be.
+
+We come, now, to another point that must not be overlooked. It needs no
+subtle introspection to assure us that we, the audience, do our own
+little bit of acting, and instinctively place ourselves at the point of
+view of a spectator before whose eyes the drama is unrolling itself for
+the first time. If the play has any richness of texture, we have many
+sensations that he cannot have. We are conscious of ironies and
+subtleties which necessarily escape him, or which he can but dimly
+divine. But in regard to the actual development of the story, we imagine
+ourselves back into his condition of ignorance, with this difference,
+that we can more fully appreciate the dramatist's skill, and more
+clearly resent his clumsiness or slovenliness. Our sensations, in short,
+are not simply conditioned by our knowledge or ignorance of what is to
+come. The mood of dramatic receptivity is a complex one. We
+instinctively and without any effort remember that the dramatist is
+bound by the rules of the game, or, in other words, by the inherent
+conditions of his craft, to unfold his tale before an audience to which
+it is unknown; and it is with implicit reference to these conditions
+that we enjoy and appreciate his skill. Even the most unsophisticated
+audience realizes in some measure that the playwright is an artist
+presenting a picture of life under such-and-such assumptions and
+limitations, and appraises his skill by its own vague and instinctive
+standards. As our culture increases, we more and more consistently adopt
+this attitude, and take pleasure in a playwright's marshalling of
+material in proportion to its absolute skill, even if that skill no
+longer produces its direct and pristine effect upon us. In many cases,
+indeed, our pleasure consists of a delicate blending of surprise with
+realized anticipation. We foresaw, and are pleased to recognize, the art
+of the whole achievement, while details which had grown dim to us give
+us each its little thrill of fresh admiration. Regarded in this aspect,
+a great play is like a great piece of music: we can hear it again and
+again with ever-new realization of its subtle beauties, its complex
+harmonies, and with unfailing interest in the merits and demerits of
+each particular rendering.
+
+But we must look deeper than this if we would fully understand the true
+nature of dramatic interest. The last paragraph has brought us to the
+verge of the inmost secret, but we have yet to take the final step. We
+have yet to realize that, in truly great drama, the foreknowledge
+possessed by the audience is not a disadvantage with certain incidental
+mitigations and compensations, but is the source of the highest pleasure
+which the theatre is capable of affording us. In order to illustrate my
+meaning, I propose to analyse a particular scene, not, certainly, among
+the loftiest in dramatic literature, but particularly suited to my
+purpose, inasmuch as it is familiar to every one, and at the same time
+full of the essential qualities of drama. I mean the Screen Scene in
+_The School for Scandal_.
+
+In her "English Men of Letters" volume on Sheridan, Mrs. Oliphant
+discusses this scene. Speaking in particular of the moment at which the
+screen is overturned, revealing Lady Teazle behind it, she says--
+
+  "It would no doubt have been higher art could the dramatist have
+  deceived his audience as well as the personages of the play, and
+  made us also parties in the surprise of the discovery."
+
+There could scarcely be a completer reversal of the truth than this
+"hopeless comment," as Professor Brander Matthews has justly called it.
+The whole effect of the long and highly-elaborated scene depends upon
+our knowledge that Lady Teazle is behind the screen. Had the audience
+either not known that there was anybody there, or supposed it to be the
+"little French milliner," where would have been the breathless interest
+which has held us through a whole series of preceding scenes? When Sir
+Peter reveals to Joseph his generous intentions towards his wife, the
+point lies in the fact that Lady Teazle overhears; and this is doubly
+the case when he alludes to Joseph as a suitor for the hand of Maria.
+So, too, with the following scene between Joseph and Charles; in itself
+it would be flat enough; the fact that Sir Peter is listening lends it a
+certain piquancy; but this is ten times multiplied by the fact that Lady
+Teazle, too, hears all that passes. When Joseph is called from the room
+by the arrival of the pretended Old Stanley, there would be no interest
+in his embarrassment if we believed the person behind the screen to be
+the French milliner. And when Sir Peter yields to the temptation to let
+Charles into the secret of his brother's frailty, and we feel every
+moment more certain that the screen will be overthrown, where would be
+the excitement, the tension, if we did not know who was behind it? The
+real drama, in fact, passes behind the screen. It lies in the terror,
+humiliation, and disillusionment which we know to be coursing each other
+through Lady Teazle's soul. And all this Mrs. Oliphant would have
+sacrificed for a single moment of crude surprise!
+
+Now let us hear Professor Matthews's analysis of the effect of the
+scene. He says:
+
+"The playgoer's interest is really not so much as to what is to happen
+as the way in which this event is going to affect the characters
+involved. He thinks it likely enough that Sir Peter will discover that
+Lady Teazle is paying a visit to Joseph Surface; but what he is really
+anxious to learn is the way the husband will take it. What will Lady
+Teazle have to say when she is discovered where she has no business to
+be? How will Sir Peter receive her excuses? What will the effect be on
+the future conduct of both husband and wife? These are the questions
+which the spectators are eager to have answered."
+
+This is an admirable exposition of the frame of mind of the Drury Lane
+audience of May 8, 1777. who first saw the screen overturned. But in the
+thousands of audiences who have since witnessed the play, how many
+individuals, on an average, had any doubt as to what Lady Teazle would
+have to say, and how Sir Peter would receive her excuses? It would
+probably be safe to guess that, for a century past, two-thirds of every
+audience have clearly foreknown the outcome of the situation. Professor
+Matthews himself has edited Sheridan's plays, and probably knows _The
+School for Scandal_ almost by heart; yet we may be pretty sure that any
+reasonably good performance of the Screen Scene will to-day give him
+pleasure not so very much inferior to that which he felt the first time
+he saw it. In this pleasure, it is manifest that mere curiosity as to
+the immediate and subsequent conduct of Sir Peter and Lady Teazle can
+have no part. There is absolutely no question which Professor Matthews,
+or any playgoer who shares his point of view, is "eager to have
+answered."
+
+Assuming, then, that we are all familiar with the Screen Scene, and
+assuming that we, nevertheless, take pleasure in seeing it reasonably
+well acted,[6] let us try to discover of what elements that pleasure is
+composed. It is, no doubt, somewhat complex. For one thing, we have
+pleasure in meeting old friends. Sir Peter, Lady Teazle, Charles, even
+Joseph, are agreeable creatures who have all sorts of pleasant
+associations for us. Again, we love to encounter not only familiar
+characters but familiar jokes. Like Goldsmith's Diggory, we can never
+help laughing at the story of "ould Grouse in the gunroom." The best
+order of dramatic wit does not become stale, but rather grows upon us.
+We relish it at least as much at the tenth repetition as at the first.
+But while these considerations may partly account for the pleasure we
+take in seeing the play as a whole, they do not explain why the Screen
+Scene in particular should interest and excite us. Another source of
+pleasure, as before indicated, may be renewed recognition of the
+ingenuity with which the scene is pieced together. However familiar we
+may be with it, short of actually knowing it by heart, we do not recall
+the details of its dovetailing, and it is a delight to realize afresh
+the neatness of the manipulation by which the tension is heightened from
+speech to speech and from incident to incident. If it be objected that
+this is a pleasure which the critic alone is capable of experiencing, I
+venture to disagree. The most unsophisticated playgoer feels the effect
+of neat workmanship, though he may not be able to put his satisfaction
+into words. It is evident, however, that the mere intellectual
+recognition of fine workmanship is not sufficient to account for the
+emotions with which we witness the Screen Scene. A similar, though, of
+course, not quite identical, effect is produced by scenes of the utmost
+simplicity, in which there is no room for delicacy of dovetailing or
+neatness of manipulation.
+
+Where, then, are we to seek for the fundamental constituent in dramatic
+interest, as distinct from mere curiosity? Perhaps Mrs. Oliphant's
+glaring error may put us on the track of the truth. Mrs. Oliphant
+thought that Sheridan would have shown higher art had he kept the
+audience, as well as Sir Peter and Charles, ignorant of Lady Teazle's
+presence behind the screen. But this, as we saw, is precisely the
+reverse of the truth: the whole interest of the scene arises from our
+knowledge of Lady Teazle's presence. Had Sheridan fallen into Mrs.
+Oliphant's mistake, the little shock of surprise which the first-night
+audience would have felt when the screen was thrown down would have been
+no compensation at all for the comparative tameness and pointlessness of
+the preceding passages. Thus we see that the greater part of our
+pleasure arises precisely from the fact that we know what Sir Peter and
+Charles do not know, or, in other words, that we have a clear vision of
+all the circumstances, relations, and implications of a certain
+conjuncture of affairs, in which two, at least, of the persons concerned
+are ignorantly and blindly moving towards issues of which they do not
+dream. We are, in fact, in the position of superior intelligences
+contemplating, with miraculous clairvoyance, the stumblings and
+tumblings of poor blind mortals straying through the labyrinth of life.
+Our seat in the theatre is like a throne on the Epicurean Olympus,
+whence we can view with perfect intelligence, but without participation
+or responsibility, the intricate reactions of human destiny. And this
+sense of superiority does not pall upon us. When Othello comes on the
+scene, radiant and confident in Desdemona's love, our knowledge of the
+fate awaiting him makes him a hundred times more interesting than could
+any mere curiosity as to what was about to happen. It is our prevision
+of Nora's exit at the end of the last act that lends its dramatic
+poignancy to her entrance at the beginning of the first.
+
+There is nothing absolutely new in this theory.[7] "The irony of fate"
+has long been recognized as one of the main elements of dramatic effect.
+It has been especially dwelt upon in relation to Greek tragedy, of which
+the themes were all known in advance even to "first-day" audiences. We
+should take but little interest in seeing the purple carpet spread for
+Agamemnon's triumphal entry into his ancestral halls, if it were not for
+our foreknowledge of the net and the axe prepared for him. But, familiar
+as is this principle, I am not aware that it has hitherto been extended,
+as I suggest that it should be, to cover the whole field of dramatic
+interest. I suggest that the theorists have hitherto dwelt far too much
+on curiosity[8]--which may be defined as the interest of ignorance--and
+far too little on the feeling of superiority, of clairvoyance, with
+which we contemplate a foreknown action, whether of a comic or of a
+tragic cast. Of course the action must be, essentially if not in every
+detail, true to nature. We can derive no sense of superiority from our
+foreknowledge of an arbitrary or preposterous action; and that, I take
+it, is the reason why a good many plays have an initial success of
+curiosity, but cease to attract when their plot becomes familiar. Again,
+we take no pleasure in foreknowing the fate of wholly uninteresting
+people; which is as much as to say that character is indispensable to
+enduring interest in drama. With these provisos, I suggest a
+reconstruction of our theories of dramatic interest, in which mere
+first-night curiosity shall be relegated to the subordinate place which
+by right belongs to it.
+
+Nevertheless, we must come back to the point that there is always the
+ordeal of the first night to be faced, and that the plays are
+comparatively few which have lived-down a bad first-night. It is true
+that specifically first-night merit is a trivial matter compared with
+what may be called thousandth-performance merit; but it is equally true
+that there is no inconsistency between the two orders of merit, and that
+a play will never be less esteemed on its thousandth performance for
+having achieved a conspicuous first-night success. The practical lesson
+which seems to emerge from these considerations is that a wise
+theatrical policy would seek to diminish the all-importance of the
+first-night, and to give a play a greater chance of recovery than it has
+under present conditions, from the depressing effect of an inauspicious
+production. This is the more desirable as its initial misadventure may
+very likely be due to external and fortuitous circumstances, wholly
+unconnected with its inherent qualities.
+
+At the same time, we are bound to recognize that, from the very nature
+of the case, our present inquiry must be far more concerned with
+first-night than with thousandth-performance merit. Craftsmanship can,
+within limits, be acquired, genius cannot; and it is craftsmanship that
+pilots us through the perils of the first performance, genius that
+carries us on to the apotheosis of the thousandth. Therefore, our
+primary concern must be with the arousing and sustaining of curiosity,
+though we should never forget that it is only a means to the ultimate
+enlistment of the higher and more abiding forms of interest.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+[Footnote 1: The view that the dramatist has only to think of pleasing
+himself is elsewhere dealt with.]
+
+[Footnote 2: Two dramatists who have read these pages in proof, exclaim
+at this passage. The one says, "No, no!" the other asks, "Why?" I can
+only reiterate that, where there exists a strong and generally accepted
+tradition, the dramatist not only runs counter to it at his peril, but
+goes outside the true domain of his art in so doing. New truth, in
+history, must be established either by new documents, or by a careful
+and detailed re-interpretation of old documents; but the stage is not
+the place either for the production of documents or for historical
+exegesis. It is needless to say that where the popular mind is unbiased,
+the dramatist's hands are free. For instance, I presume that one might,
+in England, take any view one pleased of the character of Mary. Queen of
+Scots; but a highly unfavourable view would scarcely be accepted by
+Scottish audiences. Similarly, it would be both dangerous and
+unprofitable to present on the English stage any very damaging "scandal
+about Queen Elizabeth." Historical criticism, I understand, does not
+accept the view that Robespierre was mainly responsible for the Reign of
+Terror, and that his death betokened a general revolt against his
+sanguinary tyranny; but it would be very hard for any dramatist to
+secure general acceptance for a more accurate reading of his character
+and function. Some further remarks on this subject will be found in
+Chapter XIII.]
+
+[Footnote 3: A malicious anecdote to a similar effect was current in the
+early days of Sir Henry Irving's career. It was said that at Bristol one
+night, when Mr. Irving, as Hamlet, "took his call" after the first act,
+a man turned to his neighbour in the pit and said, "Can you tell me,
+sir, does that young man appear much in this play?" His neighbour
+informed him that Hamlet was rather largely concerned in the action,
+whereupon the inquirer remarked, "Oh! Then I'm off!"]
+
+[Footnote 4: If it be well done, it may remain highly effective in spite
+of being discounted by previous knowledge. For instance, the clock-trick
+in _Raffles_ was none the less amusing because every one was on the
+look-out for it.]
+
+[Footnote 5: The question whether it is ever politic for a playwright to
+keep a secret from his audience is discussed elsewhere. What I have here
+in mind is not an ordinary secret, but a more or less tricky effect of
+surprise.]
+
+[Footnote 6: The pleasure received from exceptionally good acting is, of
+course, a different matter. I assume that the acting is merely competent
+enough to pass muster without irritating us, and so distracting our
+attention.]
+
+[Footnote 7: I myself expressed it in slightly different terms nearly
+ten years ago. "Curiosity," I said, "is the accidental relish of a
+single night; whereas the essential and abiding pleasure of the theatre
+lies in foreknowledge. In relation to the characters in the drama, the
+audience are as gods looking before and after. Sitting in the theatre,
+we taste, for a moment, the glory of omniscience. With vision unsealed,
+we watch the gropings of purblind mortals after happiness, and smile at
+their stumblings, their blunders, their futile quests, their misplaced
+exultations, their groundless panics. To keep a secret from us is to
+reduce us to their level, and deprive us of our clairvoyant aloofness.
+There may be a pleasure in that too; we may join with zest in the game
+of blind-man's-buff; but the theatre is in its essence a place where we
+are privileged to take off the bandage we wear in daily life, and to
+contemplate, with laughter or with tears, the blindfold gambols of our
+neighbours."]
+
+[Footnote 8: Here an acute critic writes: "On the whole I agree; but I
+do think there is dramatic interest to be had out of curiosity, through
+the identification, so to speak, of the audience with the discovering
+persons on the stage. It is an interest of sympathy, not to be despised,
+rather than an interest of actual curiosity."]
+
+
+
+
+_CHAPTER X_
+
+FORESHADOWING, NOT FORESTALLING
+
+
+We return now to the point at which the foregoing disquisition--it is
+not a digression--became necessary. We had arrived at the general
+principle that the playwright's chief aim in his first act ought to be
+to arouse and carry forward the interest of the audience. This may seem
+a tolerably obvious statement; but it is worth while to examine a little
+more closely into its implications.
+
+As to arousing the interest of the audience, it is clear that very
+little specific advice can be given. One can only say, "Find an
+interesting theme, state its preliminaries clearly and crisply, and let
+issue be joined without too much delay." There can be no rules for
+finding an interesting theme, any more than for catching the Blue Bird.
+At a later stage we may perhaps attempt a summary enumeration of themes
+which are not interesting, which have exhausted any interest they ever
+possessed, and "repay careful avoidance." But such an enumeration would
+be out of place here, where we are studying principles of form apart
+from details of matter.
+
+The arousing of interest, however, is one thing, the carrying-forward of
+interest is another; and on the latter point there are one or two things
+that may profitably be said. Each act, as we have seen, should consist
+of, or at all events contain, a subordinate crisis, contributory to the
+main crisis of the play: and the art of act-construction lies in giving
+to each act an individuality and interest of its own, without so
+rounding it off as to obscure even for a moment its subsidiary, and, in
+the case of the first act, its introductory, relation to the whole. This
+is a point which many dramatists ignore or undervalue. Very often, when
+the curtain falls on a first or a second act, one says, "This is a
+fairly good act in itself; but whither does it lead? what is to come of
+it all?" It awakens no definite anticipation, and for two pins one would
+take up one's hat and go home. The author has neglected the art of
+carrying-forward the interest.
+
+It is curious to note that in the most unsophisticated forms of
+melodrama this art is deliberately ignored. In plays of the type of _The
+Worst Woman in London_, it appears to be an absolute canon of art that
+every act must have a "happy ending"--that the curtain must always fall
+on the hero, or, preferably, the comic man, in an attitude of triumph,
+while the villain and villainess cower before him in baffled impotence.
+We have perfect faith, of course, that the villain will come up smiling
+in the next act, and proceed with his nefarious practices; but, for the
+moment, virtue has it all its own way. This, however, is a very artless
+formula which has somehow developed of recent years; and it is doubtful
+whether even the audiences to which these plays appeal would not in
+reality prefer something a little less inept in the matter of
+construction. As soon as we get above this level, at all events, the
+fostering of anticipation becomes a matter of the first importance. The
+problem is, not to cut short the spectator's interest, or to leave it
+fluttering at a loose end, but to provide it either with a
+clearly-foreseen point in the next act towards which it can reach
+onwards, or with a definite enigma, the solution of which is impatiently
+awaited. In general terms, a bridge should be provided between one act
+and another, along which the spectator's mind cannot but travel with
+eager anticipation. And this is particularly important, or particularly
+apt to be neglected, at the end of the first act. At a later point, if
+the interest does not naturally and inevitably carry itself forward, the
+case is hopeless indeed.
+
+To illustrate what is meant by the carrying-forward of interest, let me
+cite one or two instances in which it is achieved with conspicuous
+success.
+
+In Oscar Wilde's first modern comedy, _Lady Windermere's Fan_, the
+heroine, Lady Windermere, has learnt that her husband has of late been
+seen to call very frequently at the house of a certain Mrs. Erlynne,
+whom nobody knows. Her suspicions thus aroused, she searches her
+husband's desk, discovers a private and locked bank-book, cuts it open,
+and finds that one large cheque after another has been drawn in favour
+of the lady in question. At this inopportune moment, Lord Windermere
+appears with a request that Mrs. Erlynne shall be invited to their
+reception that evening. Lady Windermere indignantly refuses, her husband
+insists, and, finally, with his own hand, fills in an invitation-card
+and sends it by messenger to Mrs. Erlynne. Here some playwrights might
+have been content to finish the act. It is sufficiently evident that
+Lady Windermere will not submit to the apparent insult, and that
+something exciting may be looked for at the reception in the following
+act. But Oscar Wilde was not content with this vague expectancy. He
+first defined it, and then he underlined the definition, in a perfectly
+natural and yet ingenious and skilful way. The day happens to be Lady
+Windermere's birthday, and at the beginning of the act her husband has
+given her a beautiful ostrich-feather fan. When he sends off the
+invitation, she turns upon him and says, "If that woman crosses my
+threshold, I shall strike her across the face with this fan." Here,
+again, many a dramatist might be content to bring down his curtain. The
+announcement of Lady Windermere's resolve carries forward the interest
+quite clearly enough for all practical purposes. But even this did not
+satisfy Wilde. He imagined a refinement, simple, probable, and yet
+immensely effective, which put an extraordinarily keen edge upon the
+expectancy of the audience. He made Lady Windermere ring for her butler,
+and say: "Parker, be sure you pronounce the names of the guests very
+distinctly to-night. Sometimes you speak so fast that I miss them. I am
+particularly anxious to hear the names quite clearly, so as to make no
+mistake." I well remember the effect which this little touch produced on
+the first night. The situation was, in itself, open to grave objections.
+There is no plausible excuse for Lord Windermere's obstinacy in forcing
+Mrs. Erlynne upon his wife, and risking a violent scandal in order to
+postpone an explanation which he must know to be ultimately inevitable.
+Though one had not as yet learnt the precise facts of the case, one felt
+pretty confident that his lordship's conduct would scarcely justify
+itself. But interest is largely independent of critical judgment, and,
+for my own part, I can aver that, when the curtain fell on the first
+act, a five-pound note would not have bribed me to leave the theatre
+without assisting at Lady Windermere's reception in the second act. That
+is the frame of mind which the author should try to beget in his
+audience; and Oscar Wilde, then almost a novice, had, in this one little
+passage between Lady Windermere and the butler, shown himself a master
+of the art of dramatic story-telling. The dramatist has higher functions
+than mere story-telling; but this is fundamental, and the true artist is
+the last to despise it.[1]
+
+For another example of a first act brought to what one may call a
+judiciously tantalizing conclusion, I turn to Mr. R.C. Carton's comedy
+_Wheels within Wheels._ Lord Eric Chantrell has just returned from
+abroad after many years' absence. He drives straight to the bachelor
+flat of his old chum, Egerton Vartrey. At the flat he finds only his
+friend's valet, Vartrey himself has been summoned to Scotland that very
+evening, and the valet is on the point of following him. He knows,
+however, that his master would wish his old friend to make himself at
+home in the flat; so he presently goes off, leaving the newcomer
+installed for the night. Lord Eric goes to the bedroom to change his
+clothes; and, the stage being thus left vacant, we hear a latch-key
+turning in the outer door. A lady in evening dress enters, goes up to
+the bureau at the back of the stage, and calmly proceeds to break it
+open and ransack it. While she is thus burglariously employed, Lord Eric
+enters, and cannot refrain from a slight expression of surprise. The
+lady takes the situation with humorous calmness, they fall into
+conversation, and it is manifest that at every word Lord Eric is more
+and more fascinated by the fair house-breaker. She learns who he is, and
+evidently knows all about him; but she is careful to give him no inkling
+of her own identity. At last she takes her leave, and he expresses such
+an eager hope of being allowed to renew their acquaintance, that it
+amounts to a declaration of a peculiar interest in her. Thereupon she
+addresses him to this effect: "Has it occurred to you to wonder how I
+got into your friend's rooms? I will show you how"--and, producing a
+latch-key, she holds it up, with all its questionable implications,
+before his eyes. Then she lays it on the table, says: "I leave you to
+draw your own conclusions" and departs. A better opening for a light
+social comedy could scarcely be devised. We have no difficulty in
+guessing that the lady, who is not quite young, and has clearly a strong
+sense of humour, is freakishly turning appearances against herself, by
+way of throwing a dash of cold water on Lord Eric's sudden flame of
+devotion. But we long for a clear explanation of the whole quaint little
+episode; and here, again, no reasonable offer would tempt us to leave
+the theatre before our curiosity is satisfied. The remainder of the
+play, though amusing, is unfortunately not up to the level of the first
+act; else _Wheels within Wheels_ would be a little classic of
+light comedy.
+
+For a third example of interest carefully carried forward, I turn to a
+recent Norwegian play, _The Idyll_, by Peter Egge. At the very rise of
+the curtain, we find Inga Gar, wife of an author and journalist, Dr.
+Gar, reading, with evident tokens of annoyance and distaste, a new book
+of poems by one Rolfe Ringve. Before her marriage, Inga was an actress
+of no great talent; Ringve made himself conspicuous by praising her far
+beyond her merits; and when, at last, an engagement between them was
+announced, people shrugged their shoulders and said: "They are going to
+regularize the situation." As a matter of fact (of this we have early
+assurance), though Ringve has been her ardent lover, Inga has neither
+loved him nor been his mistress. Ringve being called abroad, she has,
+during his absence, broken off her engagement to him, and has then,
+about a year before the play opens, married Dr. Gar, to whom she is
+devoted. While Gar is away on a short lecture tour, Ringve has published
+the book of love-poems which we find her reading. They are very
+remarkable poems; they have already made a great stir in the literary
+world; and interest is all the keener for the fact that they are
+evidently inspired by his passion for Inga, and are couched in such a
+tone of intimacy as to create a highly injurious impression of the
+relations between them. Gar, having just come home, has no suspicion of
+the nature of the book; and when an editor, who cherishes a grudge
+against him, conceives the malicious idea of asking him to review
+Ringve's masterpiece, he consents with alacrity. One or two small
+incidents have in the meantime shown us that there is a little rift in
+the idyllic happiness of Inga and Gar, arising from her inveterate habit
+of telling trifling fibs to avoid facing the petty annoyances of life.
+For instance, when Gar asks her casually whether she has read Ringve's
+poems, a foolish denial slips out, though she knows that the cut pages
+of the book will give her the lie. These incidents point to a state of
+unstable equilibrium in the relations between husband and wife;
+wherefore, when we see Gar, at the end of the act, preparing to read
+Ringve's poems, our curiosity is very keen as to how he will take them.
+We feel the next hour to be big with fate for these two people; and we
+long for the curtain to rise again upon the threatened household. The
+fuse has been fired; we are all agog for the explosion.
+
+In Herr Egge's place, I should have been inclined to have dropped my
+curtain upon Gar, with the light of the reading-lamp full upon him, in
+the act of opening the book, and then to have shown him, at the
+beginning of the second act, in exactly the same position. With more
+delicate art, perhaps, the author interposes a little domestic incident
+at the end of the first act, while leaving it clearly impressed on our
+minds that the reading of the poems is only postponed by a few minutes.
+That is the essential point: the actual moment upon which the curtain
+falls is of minor importance. What is of vast importance, on the other
+hand, is that the expectation of the audience should not be baffled, and
+that the curtain should rise upon the immediate sequel to the reading of
+the poems. This is, in the exact sense of the words, _a scène à
+faire_--an obligatory scene. The author has aroused in us a reasonable
+expectation of it, and should he choose to balk us--to raise his
+curtain, say, a week, or a month, later--we should feel that we had been
+trifled with. The general theory of the _scène à faire_ will presently
+come up for discussion. In the meantime, I merely make the obvious
+remark that it is worse than useless to awaken a definite expectation in
+the breast of the audience, and then to disappoint it.[2]
+
+The works of Sir Arthur Pinero afford many examples of interest very
+skilfully carried forward. In his farces--let no one despise the
+technical lessons to be learnt from a good farce--there is always an
+_adventure_ afoot, whose development we eagerly anticipate. When the
+curtain falls on the first act of _The Magistrate_, we foresee the
+meeting of all the characters at the Hôtel des Princes, and are
+impatient to assist at it. In _The Schoolmistress_, we would not for
+worlds miss Peggy Hesseltine's party, which we know awaits us in Act II.
+An excellent example, of a more serious order, is to be found in _The
+Benefit of the Doubt_. When poor Theo, rebuffed by her husband's chilly
+scepticism, goes off on some manifestly harebrained errand, we divine,
+as do her relatives, that she is about to commit social suicide by
+seeking out John Allingham; and we feel more than curiosity as to the
+event--we feel active concern, almost anxiety, as though our own
+personal interests were involved. Our anticipation is heightened, too,
+when we see Sir Fletcher Portwood and Mrs. Cloys set off upon her track.
+This gives us a definite point to which to look forward, while leaving
+the actual course of events entirely undefined. It fulfils one of the
+great ends of craftsmanship, in foreshadowing without forestalling an
+intensely interesting conjuncture of affairs.
+
+I have laid stress on the importance of carrying forward the interest of
+the audience because it is a detail that is often overlooked. There is,
+as a rule, no difficulty in the matter, always assuming that the theme
+be not inherently devoid of interest. One could mention many plays in
+which the author has, from sheer inadvertence, failed to carry forward
+the interest of the first act, though a very little readjustment, or a
+trifling exercise of invention, would have enabled him to do so.
+_Pillars of Society_, indeed, may be taken as an instance, though not a
+very flagrant one. Such interest as we feel at the end of the first act
+is vague and unfocused. We are sure that something is to come of the
+return of Lona and Johan, but we have no inkling as to what that
+something may be. If we guess that the so-called black sheep of the
+family will prove to be the white sheep, it is only because we know that
+it is Ibsen's habit to attack respectability and criticize accepted
+moral values--it is not because of anything that he has told us, or
+hinted to us, in the play itself. In no other case does he leave our
+interest at such a loose end as in this, his prentice-work in modern
+drama. In _The League of Youth_, an earlier play, but of an altogether
+lighter type, the interest is much more definitely carried forward at
+the end of the first act. Stensgaard has attacked Chamberlain Bratsberg
+in a rousing speech, and the Chamberlain has been induced to believe
+that the attack was directed not against himself, but against his enemy
+Monsen. Consequently he invites Stensgaard to his great dinner-party,
+and this invitation Stensgaard regards as a cowardly attempt at
+conciliation. We clearly see a crisis looming ahead, when this
+misunderstanding shall be cleared up; and we consequently look forward
+with lively interest to the dinner-party of the second act--which ends,
+as a matter of fact, in a brilliant scene of comedy.
+
+The principle, to recapitulate, is simply this: a good first act should
+never end in a blank wall. There should always be a window in it, with
+at least a glimpse of something attractive beyond. In _Pillars of
+Society_ there is a window, indeed; but it is of ground glass.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+[Footnote 1: That great story-teller, Alexandra Dumas _pere,_ those a
+straightforward way of carrying forward the interest at the end of the
+first act of _Henri III et sa Cour._ The Due de Guise, insulted by
+Saint-Mégrin, beckons to his henchman and says, as the curtain falls,
+_"Qu'on me cherche les mêmes hommes qui ont assassiné Dugast!"_]
+
+[Footnote 2: There are limits to the validity of this rule, as applied
+to minor incidents. For example, it may sometimes be a point of art to
+lead the audience to expect the appearance of one person, when in fact
+another is about to enter. But it is exceedingly dangerous to baffle the
+carefully fostered anticipation of an important scene. See Chapters
+XVII and XXI.]
+
+
+
+
+_BOOK III_
+
+THE MIDDLE
+
+
+
+
+_CHAPTER XI_
+
+TENSION AND ITS SUSPENSION
+
+
+In the days of the five-act dogma, each act was supposed to have its
+special and pre-ordained function. Freytag assigns to the second act, as
+a rule, the _Steigerung_ or heightening--the working-up, one might call
+it--of the interest. But the second act, in modern plays, has often to
+do all the work of the three middle acts under the older dispensation;
+wherefore the theory of their special functions has more of a historical
+than of a practical interest. For our present purposes, we may treat the
+interior section of a play as a unit, whether it consist of one, two, or
+three acts.
+
+The first act may be regarded as the porch or vestibule through which we
+pass into the main fabric--solemn or joyous, fantastic or austere--of
+the actual drama. Sometimes, indeed, the vestibule is reduced to a mere
+threshold which can be crossed in two strides; but normally the first
+act, or at any rate the greater part of it, is of an introductory
+character. Let us conceive, then, that we have passed the vestibule, and
+are now to study the principles on which the body of the structure
+is reared.
+
+In the first place, is the architectural metaphor a just one? Is there,
+or ought there to be, any analogy between a drama and a
+finely-proportioned building? The question has already been touched on
+in the opening paragraphs of Chapter VIII; but we may now look into it a
+little more closely.
+
+What is the characteristic of a fine piece of architecture? Manifestly
+an organic relation, a carefully-planned interdependence, between all
+its parts. A great building is a complete and rounded whole, just like a
+living organism. It is informed by an inner law of harmony and
+proportion, and cannot be run up at haphazard, with no definite and
+pre-determined design. Can we say the same of a great play?
+
+I think we can. Even in those plays which present a picture rather than
+an action, we ought to recognize a principle of selection, proportion,
+composition, which, if not absolutely organic, is at any rate the
+reverse of haphazard. We may not always be able to define the principle,
+to put it clearly in words; but if we feel that the author has been
+guided by no principle, that he has proceeded on mere hand-to-mouth
+caprice, that there is no "inner law of harmony and proportion" in his
+work, then we instinctively relegate it to a low place in our esteem.
+Hauptmann's _Weavers_ certainly cannot be called a piece of dramatic
+architecture, like _Rosmersholm_ or _Iris_; but that does not mean that
+it is a mere rambling series of tableaux. It is not easy to define the
+principle of unity in that brilliant comedy _The Madras House_; but we
+nevertheless feel that a principle of unity exists; or, if we do not, so
+much the worse for the play and its author.
+
+There is, indeed, a large class of plays, often popular, and sometimes
+meritorious, in relation to which the architectural metaphor entirely
+breaks down. They are what may be called "running fire" plays. We have
+all seen children setting a number of wooden blocks on end, at equal
+intervals, and then tilting over the first so that it falls against the
+second, which in turn falls against the third, and so on, till the whole
+row, with a rapid clack-clack-clack, lies flat upon the table. This is
+called a "running fire"; and this is the structural principle of a good
+many plays. We feel that the playwright is, so to speak, inventing as he
+goes along--that the action, like the child's fantastic serpentine of
+blocks, might at any moment take a turn in any possible direction
+without falsifying its antecedents or our expectations. No part of it is
+necessarily involved in any other part. If the play were found too long
+or too short, an act might be cut out or written in without
+necessitating any considerable readjustments in the other acts. The play
+is really a series of episodes,
+
+  "Which might, odd bobs, sir! in judicious hands,
+  Extend from here to Mesopotamy."
+
+The episodes may grow out of each other plausibly enough, but by no
+pre-ordained necessity, and with no far-reaching interdependence. We
+live, in such plays, from moment to moment, foreseeing nothing, desiring
+nothing; and though this frame of mind may be mildly agreeable, it
+involves none of that complexity of sensation with which we contemplate
+a great piece of architecture, or follow the development of a
+finely-constructed drama. To this order belong many cape-and-sword plays
+and detective dramas--plays like _The Adventure of Lady Ursula_, _The
+Red Robe_, the Musketeer romances that were at one time so popular, and
+most plays of the _Sherlock Holmes_ and _Raffles_ type. But pieces of a
+more ambitious order have been known to follow the same formula--some of
+the works, for instance, of Mr. Charles McEvoy, to say nothing of Mr.
+Bernard Shaw.
+
+We may take it, I think, that the architectural analogy holds good of
+every play which can properly be said to be "constructed." Construction
+means dramatic architecture, or in other words, a careful
+pre-arrangement of proportions and interdependencies. But to carry
+beyond this point the analogy between the two arts would be fantastic
+and unhelpful. The one exists in space, the other in time. The one seeks
+to beget in the spectator a state of placid, though it may be of
+aspiring, contemplation; the other, a state of more or less acute
+tension. The resemblances between music and architecture are, as is well
+known, much more extensive and illuminating. It might not be wholly
+fanciful to call music a sort of middle term between the two other arts.
+
+A great part of the secret of dramatic architecture lies in the one word
+"tension." To engender, maintain, suspend, heighten and resolve a state
+of tension--that is the main object of the dramatist's craft.
+
+What do we mean by tension? Clearly a stretching out, a stretching
+forward, of the mind. That is the characteristic mental attitude of the
+theatrical audience. If the mind is not stretching forward, the body
+will soon weary of its immobility and constraint. Attention may be
+called the momentary correlative of tension. When we are intent on what
+is to come, we are attentive to what is there and then happening. The
+term tension is sometimes applied, not to the mental state of the
+audience, but to the relation of the characters on the stage. "A scene
+of high tension" is primarily one in which the actors undergo a great
+emotional strain. But this is, after all, only a means towards
+heightening of the mental tension of the audience. In such a scene the
+mind stretches forward, no longer to something vague and distant, but to
+something instant and imminent.
+
+In discussing what Freytag calls the _erregende Moment,_ we might have
+defined it as the starting-point of the tension. A reasonable audience
+will, if necessary, endure a certain amount of exposition, a certain
+positing of character and circumstance, before the tension sets in; but
+when it once has set in, the playwright must on no account suffer it to
+relax until he deliberately resolves it just before the fall of the
+curtain. There are, of course, minor rhythms of tension and resolution,
+like the harmonic vibrations of a violin-string. That is implied when we
+say that a play consists of a great crisis worked out through a series
+of minor crises. But the main tension, once initiated, must never be
+relaxed. If it is, the play is over, though the author may have omitted
+to note the fact. Not infrequently, he begins a new play under the
+impression that he is finishing the old one. That is what Shakespeare
+did in _The Merchant of Venice._ The fifth act is an independent
+afterpiece, though its independence is slightly disguised by the fact
+that the _erregende Moment_ of the new play follows close upon the end
+of the old one, with no interact between. A very exacting technical
+criticism might accuse Ibsen of verging towards the same fault in _An
+Enemy of the People._ There the tension is practically resolved with Dr.
+Stockmann's ostracism at the end of the fourth act. At that point, if it
+did not know that there was another act to come, an audience might go
+home in perfect content. The fifth act is a sort of epilogue or sequel,
+built out of the materials of the preceding drama, but not forming an
+integral part of it. With a brief exposition to set forth the antecedent
+circumstances, it would be quite possible to present the fifth act as an
+independent comedietta.
+
+But here a point of great importance calls for our notice. Though the
+tension, once started, must never be relaxed: though it ought, on the
+contrary, to be heightened or tightened (as you choose to put it) from
+act to act; yet there are times when it may without disadvantage, or
+even with marked advantage, be temporarily suspended. In other words,
+the stretching-forward, without in any way slackening, may fall into the
+background of our consciousness, while other matters, the relevance of
+which may not be instantly apparent, are suffered to occupy the
+foreground. We know all too well, in everyday experience, that tension
+is not really relaxed by a temporary distraction. The dread of a coming
+ordeal in the witness-box or on the operating-table may be forcibly
+crushed down like a child's jack-in-the-box; but we are always conscious
+of the effort to compress it, and we know that it will spring up again
+the moment that effort ceases. Sir Arthur Pinero's play, _The
+Profligate,_ was written at a time when it was the fashion to give each
+act a sub-title; and one of its acts is headed "The Sword of Damocles."
+That is, indeed, the inevitable symbol of dramatic tension: we see a
+sword of Damocles (even though it be only a farcical blade of painted
+lathe) impending over someone's head: and when once we are confident
+that it will fall at the fated moment, we do not mind having our
+attention momentarily diverted to other matters. A rather flagrant
+example of suspended attention is afforded by Hamlet's advice to the
+Players. We know that Hamlet has hung a sword of Damocles over the
+King's head in the shape of the mimic murder-scene; and, while it is
+preparing, we are quite willing to have our attention switched off to
+certain abstract questions of dramatic criticism. The scene might have
+been employed to heighten the tension. Instead of giving the Players (in
+true princely fashion) a lesson in the general principles of their art,
+Hamlet might have specially "coached" them in the "business" of the
+scene to be enacted, and thus doubly impressed on the audience his
+resolve to "tent" the King "to the quick." I am far from suggesting that
+this would have been desirable; but it would obviously have been
+possible.[1] Shakespeare, as the experience of three centuries has
+shown, did right in judging that the audience was already sufficiently
+intent on the coming ordeal, and would welcome an interlude of
+aesthetic theory.
+
+There are times, moreover, when it is not only permissible to suspend
+the tension, but when, by so doing, a great artist can produce a
+peculiar and admirable effect. A sudden interruption, on the very brink
+of a crisis, may, as it were, whet the appetite of the audience for what
+is to come. We see in the Porter scene in Macbeth a suspension of this
+nature; but Shakespeare used it sparingly, unless, indeed, we are to
+consider as a deliberate point of art the retardation of movement
+commonly observable in the fourth acts of his tragedies. Ibsen, on the
+other hand, deliberately employed this device on three conspicuous
+occasions. The entrance of Dr. Rank in the last act of _A Doll's House_
+is a wholly unnecessary interruption to the development of the crisis
+between Nora and Helmer. The scene might be entirely omitted without
+leaving a perceptible hiatus in the action; yet who does not feel that
+this brief respite lends gathered impetus to the main action when it is
+resumed? The other instances are offered by the two apparitions of Ulric
+Brendel in _Rosmersholm._ The first occurs when Rosmer is on the very
+verge of his momentous confession to Kroll, the second when Rosmer and
+Rebecca are on the very verge of their last great resolve; and in each
+case we feel a distinct value (apart from the inherent quality of the
+Brendel scenes) in the very fact that the tension has been momentarily
+suspended. Such a _rallentando_ effect is like the apparent pause in the
+rush of a river before it thunders over a precipice.
+
+The possibility of suspending tension is of wider import than may at
+first sight appear. But for it, our dramas would have to be all bone and
+muscle, like the figures in an anatomical textbook. As it is, we are
+able, without relaxing tension, to shift it to various planes of
+consciousness, and thus find leisure to reproduce the surface aspects of
+life, with some of its accidents and irrelevances. For example, when the
+playwright has, at the end of his first act, succeeded in carrying
+onward the spectator's interest, and giving him something definite to
+look forward to, it does not at all follow that the expected scene,
+situation, revelation, or what not, should come at the beginning of the
+second act. In some cases it must do so; when, as in _The Idyll_ above
+cited, the spectator has been carefully induced to expect some imminent
+conjuncture which cannot be postponed. But this can scarcely be called a
+typical case. More commonly, when an author has enlisted the curiosity
+of his audience of some definite point, he will be in no great hurry to
+satisfy and dissipate it. He may devote the early part of the second act
+to working-up the same line of interest to a higher pitch; or he may
+hold it in suspense while he prepares some further development of the
+action. The closeness with which a line of interest, once started, ought
+to be followed up, must depend in some measure on the nature and tone of
+the play. If it be a serious play, in which character and action are
+very closely intertwined, any pause or break in the conjoint development
+is to be avoided. If, on the other hand, it is a play of light and
+graceful dialogue, in which the action is a pretext for setting the
+characters in motion rather than the chief means towards their
+manifestation, then the playwright can afford to relax the rate of his
+progress, and even to wander a little from the straight line of advance.
+In such a play, even the old institution of the "underplot" is not
+inadmissible; though the underplot ought scarcely to be a "plot," but
+only some very slight thread of interest, involving no strain on the
+attention.[2] It may almost be called an established practice, on the
+English stage, to let the dalliance of a pair of boy-and-girl lovers
+relieve the main interest of a more or less serious comedy; and there is
+no particular harm in such a convention, if it be not out of keeping
+with the general character of the play. In some plays the substance--the
+character-action, if one may so call it--is the main, and indeed the
+only, thing. In others the substance, though never unimportant, is in
+some degree subordinate to the embroideries; and it is for the
+playwright to judge how far this subordination may safely be carried.
+
+One principle, however, may be emphasized as almost universally valid,
+and that is that the end of an act should never leave the action just
+where it stood at the beginning. An audience has an instinctive sense
+of, and desire for, progress. It does not like to realize that things
+have been merely marking time. Even if it has been thoroughly
+entertained, from moment to moment, during the progress of an act, it
+does not like to feel at the end that nothing has really happened. The
+fall of the curtain gives time for reflection, and for the ordering of
+impressions which, while the action was afoot, were more or less vague
+and confused. It is therefore of great importance that each act should,
+to put it briefly, bear looking back upon--that it should appear to
+stand in due proportion to the general design of the play, and should
+not be felt to have been empty, or irrelevant, or disappointing. This
+is, indeed, a plain corollary from the principle of tension. Suspended
+it may be, sometimes with positive advantage; but it must not be
+suspended too long; and suspension for a whole act is equivalent to
+relaxation.
+
+To sum up: when once a play has begun to move, its movement ought to
+proceed continuously, and with gathering momentum; or, if it stands
+still for a space, the stoppage ought to be deliberate and purposeful.
+It is fatal when the author thinks it is moving, while in fact it is
+only revolving on its own axis.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+[Footnote 1: This method of heightening the tension would have been
+somewhat analogous to that employed by Oscar Wilde in Lady Windermere's
+instructions to her butler, cited on p. 115.]
+
+[Footnote 2: Dryden (_Of Dramatic Poesy_, p. 56, ed. Arnold, 1903) says:
+"Our plays, besides the main design, have underplots or by-concernments,
+of less considerable persons and intrigues, which are carried on with
+the motion of the main plot; as they say the orb of the fixed stars, and
+those of the planets, though they have motions of their own, are whirled
+about by the motion of the _primum mobile_, in which they are
+contained." This is an admirable description of the ideal underplot, as
+conceived by our forefathers; but we find that two lines of tension jar
+with and weaken each other.]
+
+
+
+
+_CHAPTER XII_
+
+PREPARATION: THE FINGER-POST
+
+
+We shall find, on looking into it, that most of the technical maxims
+that have any validity may be traced back, directly or indirectly, to
+the great principle of tension. The art of construction is summed up,
+first, in giving the mind of an audience something to which to stretch
+forward, and, secondly, in not letting it feel that it has stretched
+forward in vain. "You will find it infinitely pleasing," says Dryden,[1]
+"to be led in a labyrinth of design, where you see some of your way
+before you, yet discern not the end till you arrive at it." Or, he might
+have added, "if you foresee the end, but not the means by which it is to
+be reached." In drama, as in all art, the "how" is often more important
+than the "what."
+
+No technical maxim is more frequently cited than the remark of the
+younger Dumas: "The art of the theatre is the art of preparations." This
+is true in a larger sense than he intended; but at the same time there
+are limits to its truth, which we must not fail to observe.
+
+Dumas, as we know, was an inveterate preacher, using the stage as a
+pulpit for the promulgation of moral and social ideas which were, in
+their day, considered very advanced and daring. The primary meaning of
+his maxim, then, was that a startling idea, or a scene wherein such an
+idea was implied, ought not to be sprung upon an audience wholly
+unprepared to accept it. For instance, in _Monsieur Alphonse,_ a
+husband, on discovering that his wife has had an intrigue before their
+marriage, and that a little girl whom she wishes to adopt is really her
+daughter, instantly raises her from the ground where she lies grovelling
+at his feet, and says: "Créature de Dieu, toi qui as failli et te
+repens, relève toi, je te pardonne." This evangelical attitude on the
+part of Admiral de Montaiglin was in itself very surprising, and perhaps
+not wholly admirable, to the Parisian public of 1873; but Dumas had so
+"prepared" the _coup de théâtre_ that it passed with very slight
+difficulty on the first night, and with none at all at subsequent
+performances and revivals. How had he "prepared" it? Why, by playing, in
+a score of subtle ways, upon the sympathies and antipathies of the
+audience. For instance, as Sarcey points out, he had made M. de
+Montaiglin a sailor, "accustomed, during his distant voyages, to long
+reveries in view of the boundless ocean, whence he had acquired a
+mystical habit of mind.... Dumas certainly would never have placed this
+pardon in the mouth of a stockbroker." So far so good; but
+"preparation," in the sense of the word, is a device of rhetoric or of
+propaganda rather than of dramatic craftsmanship. It is a method of
+astutely undermining or outflanking prejudice. Desiring to enforce a
+general principle, you invent a case which is specially favourable to
+your argument, and insinuate it into the acceptance of the audience by
+every possible subtlety of adjustment. You trust, it would seem, that
+people who have applauded an act of pardon in an extreme case will be so
+much the readier to exercise that high prerogative in the less carefully
+"prepared" cases which present themselves in real life. This may or may
+not be a sound principle of persuasion; as we are not here considering
+the drama as an art of persuasion, we have not to decide between this
+and the opposite, or Shawesque, principle of shocking and startling an
+audience by the utmost violence of paradox. There is something to be
+said for both methods--for conversion by pill-and-jelly and for
+conversion by nitroglycerine.
+
+Reverting, now, to the domain of pure craftsmanship, can it be said that
+"the art of the theatre is the art of preparation"? Yes, it is very
+largely the art of delicate and unobtrusive preparation, of helping an
+audience to divine whither it is going, while leaving it to wonder how
+it is to get there. On the other hand, it is also the art of avoiding
+laborious, artificial and obvious preparations which lead to little or
+nothing. A due proportion must always be observed between the
+preparation and the result.
+
+To illustrate the meaning of preparation, as the word is here employed,
+I may perhaps be allowed to reprint a passage from a review of Mr.
+Israel Zangwill's play _Children of the Ghetto_.[2]
+
+  "... To those who have not read the novel, it must seem as though
+  the mere illustrations of Jewish life entirely overlaid and
+  overwhelmed the action. It is not so in reality. One who knows the
+  story beforehand can often see that it is progressing even in scenes
+  which seem purely episodic and unconnected either with each other or
+  with the general scheme. But Mr. Zangwill has omitted to provide
+  finger-posts, if I may so express it, to show those who do not know
+  the story beforehand whither he is leading them. He has neglected
+  the great art of forecasting, of keeping anticipation on the alert,
+  which is half the secret of dramatic construction. To forecast,
+  without discounting, your effects--that is all the Law and the
+  Prophets. In the first act of _Children of the Ghetto_, for
+  instance, we see the marriage in jest of Hannah to Sam Levine,
+  followed by the instant divorce with all its curious ceremonies.
+  This is amusing so far as it goes; but when the divorce is
+  completed, the whole thing seems to be over and done with. We have
+  seen some people, in whom as yet we take no particular interest,
+  enmeshed in a difficulty arising from a strange and primitive
+  formalism in the interpretation of law; and we have seen the meshes
+  cut to the satisfaction of all parties, and the incident to all
+  appearance closed. There is no finger-post to direct our
+  anticipation on the way it should go; and those who have not read
+  the book cannot possibly guess that this mock marriage, instantly
+  and ceremoniously dissolved, can have any ulterior effect upon the
+  fortunes of any one concerned. Thus, the whole scene, however
+  curious in itself, seems motiveless and resultless. How the
+  requisite finger-post was to be provided I cannot tell. That is not
+  my business; but a skilful dramatist would have made it his. Then,
+  in the second act, amid illustrations of social life in the Ghetto,
+  we have the meeting of Hannah with David Brandon, a prettily-written
+  scene of love-at-first-sight. But, so far as any one can see, there
+  is every prospect that the course of true love will run absolutely
+  smooth. Again we lack a finger-post to direct our interest forward;
+  nor do we see anything that seems to bring this act into vital
+  relation with its predecessor. Those who have read the book know
+  that David Brandon is a 'Cohen,' a priest, a descendant of Aaron,
+  and that a priest may not marry a divorced woman. Knowing this, we
+  have a sense of irony, of impending disaster, which renders the
+  love-scene of the second act dramatic. But to those, and they must
+  always be a majority in any given audience, who do not know this,
+  the scene has no more dramatic quality than lies in its actual
+  substance, which, although pretty enough, is entirely commonplace.
+  Not till the middle of the third act (out of four) is the obstacle
+  revealed, and we see that the mighty maze was not without a plan.
+  Here, then, the drama begins, after two acts and a half of
+  preparation, during which we were vouchsafed no inkling of what was
+  preparing. It is capital drama when we come to it, really human,
+  really tragic. The arbitrary prohibitions of the Mosaic law have no
+  religious or moral force either for David or for Hannah. They feel
+  it to be their right, almost their duty, to cast off their shackles.
+  In any community, save that of strict Judaism, they are perfectly
+  free to marry. But in thus flouting the letter of the law, Hannah
+  well knows that she will break her father's heart. Even as she
+  struggles to shake them off, the traditions of her race take firmer
+  hold on her; and in the highly dramatic last act (a not unskilful
+  adaptation to the stage of the crucial scene of the book) she bows
+  her neck beneath the yoke, and renounces love that the Law may be
+  fulfilled."
+
+To state the matter in other terms, we are conscious of no tension in
+the earlier acts of this play, because we have not been permitted to see
+the sword of Damocles hanging over the heads of Hannah and David
+Brandon. For lack of preparation, of pointing-forward, we feel none of
+that god-like superiority to the people of the mimic world which we have
+recognized as the characteristic privilege of the spectator. We know no
+more than they do of the implications of their acts, and the network of
+embarrassments in which they are involving themselves. Indeed, we know
+less than they do: for Hannah, as a well brought-up Jewess, is no doubt
+vaguely aware of the disabilities attaching to a divorced woman. A
+gentile audience, on the other hand, cannot possibly foresee how--
+
+  "Some consequence yet hanging in the stars
+  Shall bitterly begin his fearful date
+  With this night's revels."
+
+and, lacking that foreknowledge, it misses the specifically dramatic
+effect of the scenes. The author invites it to play at blind-man's-buff
+with the characters, instead of unsealing its eyes and enabling it to
+watch the game from its Olympian coign of vantage.
+
+Let the dramatist, then, never neglect to place the requisite
+finger-posts on the road he would have us follow. It is not, of course,
+necessary that we should be conscious of all the implications of any
+given scene or incident, but we must know enough of them not only to
+create the requisite tension, but to direct it towards the right quarter
+of the compass. Retrospective elucidations are valueless and sometimes
+irritating. It is in nowise to the author's interest that we should say,
+"Ah, if we had only known this, or foreseen that, in time, the effect of
+such-and-such a scene would have been entirely different!" We have no
+use for finger-posts that point backwards.[3]
+
+In the works of Sir Arthur Pinero I recall two cases in which the lack
+of a finger-post impairs the desired effect: slightly, in the one
+instance, in the other, very considerably. The third act of that
+delightful comedy _The Princess and the Butterfly_ contains no
+sufficient indication of Fay Zuliani's jealousy of the friendship
+between Sir George Lamorant and the Princess Pannonia. We are rather at
+a loss to account for the coldness of her attitude to the Princess, and
+her perverse naughtiness in going off to the Opera Ball. This renders
+the end of the act practically ineffective. We so little foresee what is
+to come of Fay's midnight escapade, that we take no particular interest
+in it, and are rather disconcerted by the care with which it is led up
+to, and the prominence assigned to it. This, however, is a trifling
+fault. Far different is the case in the last act of _The Benefit of the
+Doubt_, which goes near to ruining what is otherwise a very fine play.
+The defect, indeed, is not purely technical: on looking into it we find
+that the author is not in fact working towards an ending which can be
+called either inevitable or conspicuously desirable. His failure to
+point forward is no doubt partly due to his having nothing very
+satisfactory to point forward to. But it is only in retrospect that this
+becomes apparent. What we feel while the act is in progress is simply
+the lack of any finger-post to afford us an inkling of the end towards
+which we are proceeding. Through scene after scene we appear to be
+making no progress, but going round and round in a depressing circle.
+The tension, in a word, is fatally relaxed. It may perhaps be suggested
+as a maxim that when an author finds a difficulty in placing the
+requisite finger-posts, as he nears the end of his play, he will do well
+to suspect that the end he has in view is defective, and to try if he
+cannot amend it.
+
+In the ancient, and in the modern romantic, drama, oracles, portents,
+prophecies, horoscopes and such-like intromissions of the supernatural
+afforded a very convenient aid to the placing of the requisite
+finger-posts--"foreshadowing without forestalling." It has often been
+said that _Macbeth_ approaches the nearest of all Shakespeare's
+tragedies to the antique model: and in nothing is the resemblance
+clearer than in the employment of the Witches to point their skinny
+fingers into the fated future. In _Romeo and Juliet_, inward foreboding
+takes the place of outward prophecy. I have quoted above Romeo's
+prevision of "Some consequence yet hanging in the stars"; and beside it
+may be placed Juliet's--
+
+  "I have no joy of this contract to-night;
+  It is too rash, too unadvised, too sudden,
+  Too like the lightning which doth cease to be
+  Ere one can say it lightens."
+
+In _Othello,_ on the other hand, the most modern of all his plays,
+Shakespeare had recourse neither to outward boding, nor to inward
+foreboding, but planted a plain finger-post in the soil of human nature,
+when he made Brabantio say--
+
+  "Look to her, Moor, if thou hast eyes to see:
+  She has deceived her father, and may thee."
+
+Mr. Stephen Phillips, in the first act of _Paolo and Francesca,_ outdoes
+all his predecessors, ancient or modern, in his daring use of sibylline
+prophecy. He makes Giovanni's blind foster-mother, Angela, foretell the
+tragedy in almost every detail, save that, in her vision, she cannot see
+the face of Francesca's lover. Mr. Phillips, I take it, is here
+reinforcing ancient tradition by a reference to modern "psychical
+research." He trusts to our conceiving such clairvoyance to be not
+wholly impossible, and giving it what may be called provisional
+credence. Whether the device be artistic or not we need not here
+consider. I merely point to it as a conspicuous example of the use of
+the finger-post.[4]
+
+It need scarcely be said that a misleading finger-post is carefully to
+be avoided, except in the rare cases where it may be advisable to beget
+a momentary misapprehension on the part of the audience, which shall be
+almost instantly corrected in some pleasant or otherwise effective
+fashion.[5] It is naturally difficult to think of striking instances of
+the misleading finger-posts; for plays which contain such a blunder are
+not apt to survive, even in the memory. A small example occurs in a
+clever play named _A Modern Aspasia_ by Mr. Hamilton Fyfe. Edward
+Meredith has two households: a London house over which his lawful wife,
+Muriel, presides; and a country cottage where dwells his mistress,
+Margaret, with her two children. One day Muriel's automobile breaks down
+near Margaret's cottage, and, while the tyre is being repaired, Margaret
+gives her visitor tea, neither of them knowing the other. Throughout the
+scene we are naturally wondering whether a revelation is to occur; and
+when, towards the close, Muriel goes to Margaret's room, "to put her hat
+straight," we have no longer any doubt on the subject. It is practically
+inevitable that she should find in the room her husband's photograph, or
+some object which she should instantly recognize as his, and should
+return to the stage in full possession of the secret. This is so
+probable that nothing but a miracle can prevent it: we mentally give the
+author credit for bringing about his revelation in a very simple and
+natural way; and we are proportionately disappointed when we find that
+the miracle has occurred, and that Muriel returns to the sitting-room no
+wiser than she left it. Very possibly the general economy of the play
+demanded that the revelation should not take place at this juncture.
+That question does not here concern us. The point is that, having
+determined to reserve the revelation for his next act, the author ought
+not, by sending Muriel into Margaret's bedroom, to have awakened in us a
+confident anticipation of its occurring there and then. A romantic play
+by Mr. J. B. Fagan, entitled _Under Which King?_ offers another small
+instance of the same nature. The date is 1746; certain despatches of
+vast importance have to be carried by a Hanoverian officer from Moidart
+to Fort William. The Jacobites arrange to drug the officer; and, to make
+assurance doubly sure, in case the drug should fail to act, they post a
+Highland marksman in a narrow glen to pick him off as he passes. The
+drug does act; but his lady-love, to save his military honour, assumes
+male attire and rides off with the despatches. We hear her horse's hoofs
+go clattering down the road; and then, as the curtain falls, we hear a
+shot ring out into the night. This shot is a misleading finger-post.
+Nothing comes of it: we find in the next act that the marksman has
+missed! But marksmen, under such circumstances, have no business to
+miss. It is a breach of the dramatic proprieties. We feel that the
+author has been trifling with us in inflicting on us this purely
+mechanical and momentary "scare." The case would be different if the
+young lady knew that the marksman was lying in ambush, and determined to
+run the gantlet. In that case the incident would be a trait of
+character; but, unless my memory deceives me, that is not the case. On
+the stage, every bullet should have its billet--not necessarily in the
+person aimed at, but in the emotions or anticipations of the audience.
+This bullet may, indeed, give us a momentary thrill of alarm; but it is
+dearly bought at the expense of subsequent disillusionment.
+
+We have now to consider the subject of over-preparation, too obtrusive
+preparation, mountainous preparation leading only to a mouse-like
+effect. This is the characteristic error of the so-called "well-made
+play," the play of elaborate and ingenious intrigue. The trouble with
+the well-made play is that it is almost always, and of necessity,
+ill-made. Very rarely does the playwright succeed in weaving a web which
+is at once intricate, consistent, and clear. In nineteen cases out of
+twenty there are glaring flaws that have to be overlooked; or else the
+pattern is so involved that the mind's eye cannot follow it, and becomes
+bewildered and fatigued. A classical example of both faults may be found
+in Congreve's so-called comedy _The Double-Dealer_. This is, in fact, a
+powerful drama, somewhat in the Sardou manner; but Congreve had none of
+Sardou's deftness in manipulating an intrigue. Maskwell is not only a
+double-dealer, but a triple--or quadruple-dealer; so that the brain soon
+grows dizzy in the vortex of his villainies. The play, it may be noted,
+was a failure.
+
+There is a quite legitimate pleasure to be found, no doubt, in a complex
+intrigue which is also perspicuous. Plays such as Alexandre Dumas's
+_Mademoiselle de Belle-Isle_, or the pseudo-historical dramas of
+Scribe-_Adrienne Lecouvreur, Bertrand et Raton, Un Verre d'Eau, Les
+Trois Maupin,_ etc.--are amusing toys, like those social or military
+tableaux, the figures of which you can set in motion by dropping a penny
+in the slot. But the trick of this sort of "preparation" has long been
+found out, and even unsophisticated audiences are scarcely to be
+thrilled by it. We may accept it as a sound principle, based on common
+sense and justified by experience, that an audience should never be
+tempted to exclaim, "What a marvellously clever fellow is this
+playwright! How infinitely cleverer than the dramatist who constructs
+the tragi-comedy of life."
+
+This is what we inevitably exclaim as we watch Victorien Sardou, in whom
+French ingenuity culminated and caricatured itself, laying the
+foundations of one of his labyrinthine intrigues. The absurdities of
+"preparation" in this sense could scarcely be better satirized than in
+the following page from Francisque Sarcey's criticism of _Nos Intimes_
+(known in English as _Peril_)--a page which is intended, not as satire,
+but as eulogy--
+
+  At the sixth performance, I met, during the first interact, a man of
+  infinite taste who ... complained of the lengthiness of this first
+  act: "What a lot of details," he said, "which serve no purpose, and
+  had better have been omitted! What is the use of that long story
+  about the cactus with a flower that is unique in all the world? Why
+  trouble us with that dahlia-root, which M. Caussade's neighbour has
+  thrown over the garden wall? Was it necessary to inflict on us all
+  that talk about the fox that plays havoc in the garden? What have we
+  to do with that mischievous beast? And that Tolozan, with his
+  endless digressions! What do we care about his ideas on love, on
+  metempsychosis, on friendship, etc.? All this stuff only retards
+  the action."
+
+  "On the contrary," I replied, "all this is just what is going to
+  interest you. You are impatient of these details, because you are
+  looking out for the scenes of passion which have been promised you.
+  But reflect that, without these preparations, the scenes of passion
+  would not touch you. That cactus-flower will play its part, you may
+  be sure; that dahlia-root is not there for nothing; that fox to
+  which you object, and of which you will hear more talk during two
+  more acts, will bring about the solution of one of the most
+  entertaining situations in all drama."
+
+M. Sarcey does not tell us what his interlocutor replied; but he might
+have said, like the hero of _Le Réveillon_: "Are you sure there is no
+mistake? Are you defending Sardou, or attacking him?"
+
+For another example of ultra-complex preparation let me turn to a play
+by Mr. Sydney Grundy, entitled _The Degenerates_. Mr. Grundy, though an
+adept of the Scribe school, has done so much strong and original work
+that I apologize for exhuming a play in which he almost burlesqued his
+own method; but for that very reason it is difficult to find a more
+convincing or more deterrent example of misdirected ingenuity. The
+details of the plot need not be recited. It is sufficient to say that
+the curtain has not been raised ten minutes before our attention has
+been drawn to the fact that a certain Lady Saumarez has her monogram on
+everything she wears, even to her gloves: whence we at once foresee that
+she is destined to get into a compromising situation, to escape from it,
+but to leave a glove behind her. In due time the compromising situation
+arrives, and we find that it not only requires a room with three
+doors,[6] but that a locksmith has to be specially called in to provide
+two of these doors with peculiar locks, so that, when once shut, they
+cannot be opened from inside except with a key! What interest can we
+take in a situation turning on such contrivances? Sane technic laughs at
+locksmiths. And after all this preparation, the situation proves to be a
+familiar trick of theatrical thimble-rigging: you lift the thimble, and
+instead of Pea A, behold Pea B!--instead of Lady Saumarez it is Mrs.
+Trevelyan who is concealed in Isidore de Lorano's bedroom. Sir William
+Saumarez must be an exceedingly simple-minded person to accept the
+substitution, and exceedingly unfamiliar with the French drama of the
+'seventies and 'eighties. If he had his wits about him he would say: "I
+know this dodge: it comes from Sardou. Lady Saumarez has just slipped
+out by that door, up R., and if I look about I shall certainly find her
+fan, or her glove, or her handkerchief somewhere on the premises." The
+author may object that such criticism would end in paralysing the
+playwright, and that, if men always profited by the lessons of the
+stage, the world would long ago have become so wise that there would be
+no more room in it for drama, which lives on human folly. "You will tell
+me next," he may say, "that I must not make groundless jealousy the
+theme of a play, because every one who has seen Othello would at once
+detect the machinations of an Iago!" The retort is logically specious,
+but it mistakes the point. It would certainly be rash to put any limit
+to human gullibility, or to deny that Sir William Saumarez, in the given
+situation, might conceivably be hoodwinked. The question is not one of
+psychology but of theatrical expediency: and the point is that when a
+situation is at once highly improbable in real life and exceedingly
+familiar on the stage, we cannot help mentally caricaturing it as it
+proceeds, and are thus prevented from lending it the provisional
+credence on which interest and emotion depend.
+
+An instructive contrast to _The Degenerates_ may be found in a nearly
+contemporary play, _Mrs. Dane's Defence_, by Mr. Henry Arthur Jones. The
+first three acts of this play may be cited as an excellent example of
+dexterous preparation and development. Our interest in the sequence of
+events is aroused, sustained, and worked up to a high tension with
+consummate skill. There is no feverish overcrowding of incident, as is
+so often the case in the great French story-plays--_Adrienne
+Lecouvreur_, for example, or _Fédora_. The action moves onwards,
+unhasting, unresting, and the finger-posts are placed just where they
+are wanted.
+
+The observance of a due proportion between preparation and result is a
+matter of great moment. Even when the result achieved is in itself very
+remarkable, it may be dearly purchased by a too long and too elaborate
+process of preparation. A famous play which is justly chargeable with
+this fault is _The Gay Lord Quex_. The third act is certainly one of the
+most breathlessly absorbing scenes in modern drama; but by what long,
+and serpentine, and gritty paths do we not approach it! The elaborate
+series of trifling incidents by means of which Sophy Fullgarney is first
+brought from New Bond Street to Fauncey Court, and then substituted for
+the Duchess's maid, is at no point actually improbable; and yet we feel
+that a vast effort has been made to attain an end which, owing to the
+very length of the sequence of chances, at last assumes an air of
+improbability. There is little doubt that the substructure of the great
+scene might have been very much simpler. I imagine that Sir Arthur
+Pinero was betrayed into complexity and over-elaboration by his desire
+to use, as a background for his action, a study of that "curious phase
+of modern life," the manicurist's parlour. To those who find this study
+interesting, the disproportion between preliminaries and result may be
+less apparent. It certainly did not interfere with the success of the
+play in its novelty; but it may very probably curtail its lease of life.
+What should we know of _The School for Scandal_ to-day, if it consisted
+of nothing but the Screen Scene and two laborious acts of preparation?
+
+A too obvious preparation is very apt to defeat its end by begetting a
+perversely quizzical frame of mind in the audience. The desired effect
+is discounted, like a conjuring trick in which the mechanism is too
+transparent. Let me recall a trivial but instructive instance of this
+error. The occasion was the first performance of _Pillars of Society_ at
+the Gaiety Theatre, London--the first Ibsen performance ever given in
+England. At the end of the third act, Krap, Consul Bernick's clerk,
+knocks at the door of his master's office and says, "It is blowing up to
+a stiff gale. Is the _Indian Girl_ to sail in spite of it?" Whereupon
+Bernick, though he knows that the _Indian Girl_ is hopelessly
+unseaworthy, replies, "The _Indian Girl_ is to sail in spite of it." It
+had occurred to someone that the effect of this incident would be
+heightened if Krap, before knocking at the Consul's door, were to
+consult the barometer, and show by his demeanour that it was falling
+rapidly. A barometer had accordingly been hung, up stage, near the
+veranda entrance; and, as the scenic apparatus of a Gaiety matinée was
+in those days always of the scantiest, it was practically the one
+decoration of a room otherwise bare almost to indecency. It had stared
+the audience full in the face through three long acts; and when, at the
+end of the third, Krap went up to it and tapped it, a sigh of relief ran
+through the house, as much as to say, "At last! so _that_ was what it
+was for!"--to the no small detriment of the situation. Here the fault
+lay in the obtrusiveness of the preparation. Had the barometer passed
+practically unnoticed among the other details of a well-furnished hall,
+it would at any rate have been innocent, and perhaps helpful. As it was,
+it seemed to challenge the curiosity of the audience, saying, "I am
+evidently here with some intention; guess, now, what the intention can
+be!" The producer had failed in the art which conceals art.
+
+Another little trait from a play of those far-past days illustrates the
+same point. It was a drawing-room drama of the Scribe school. Near the
+beginning of an act, some one spilt a bottle of red ink, and mopped it
+up with his (or her) handkerchief, leaving the handkerchief on the
+escritoire. The act proceeded from scene to scene, and the handkerchief
+remained unnoticed; but every one in the audience who knew the rules of
+the game, kept his eye on the escritoire, and was certain that that ink
+had not been spilt for nothing. In due course a situation of great
+intensity was reached, wherein the villain produced a pistol and fired
+at the heroine, who fainted. As a matter of fact he had missed her; but
+her quick-witted friend seized the gory handkerchief, and, waving it in
+the air, persuaded the villain that the shot had taken deadly effect,
+and that he must flee for his life. Even in those days, such an
+unblushing piece of trickery was found more comic than impressive. It
+was a case of preparation "giving itself away."
+
+A somewhat later play, _The Mummy and the Humming Bird_, by Mr. Isaac
+Henderson, contains a good example of over-elaborate preparation. The
+Earl of Lumley, lost in his chemical studies with a more than Newtonian
+absorption, suffers his young wife to form a sentimental friendship with
+a scoundrel of an Italian novelist, Signor D'Orelli. Remaining at home
+one evening, when Lady Lumley and a party of friends, including
+D'Orelli, have gone off to dine at a restaurant, the Earl chances to
+look out of the window, and observes an organ-grinder making doleful
+music in the snow. His heart is touched, and he invites the music-monger
+to join him in his study and share his informal dinner. The conversation
+between them is carried on by means of signs, for the organ-grinder
+knows no English, and the Earl is painfully and improbably ignorant of
+Italian. He does not even know that Roma means Rome, and Londra, London.
+This ignorance, however, is part of the author's ingenuity. It leads to
+the establishment of a sort of object-speech, by aid of which the Earl
+learns that his guest has come to England to prosecute a vendetta
+against the man who ruined his happy Sicilian home. I need scarcely say
+that this villain is none other than D'Orelli; and when at last he and
+the Countess elope to Paris, the object-speech enables Giuseppe to
+convey to the Earl, by aid of a brandy-bottle, a siphon, a broken plate,
+and half-a-crown, not only the place of their destination, but the very
+hotel to which they are going. This is a fair example of that ingenuity
+for ingenuity's sake which was once thought the very essence of the
+playwright's craft, but has long ago lost all attraction for intelligent
+audiences.
+
+We may take it as a rule that any scene which requires an obviously
+purposeful scenic arrangement is thereby discounted. It may be strong
+enough to live down the disadvantage; but a disadvantage it is none the
+less. In a play of Mr. Carton's, _The Home Secretary_, a paper of great
+importance was known to be contained in an official despatch-box. When
+the curtain rose on the last act, it revealed this despatch-box on a
+table right opposite a French window, while at the other side of the
+room a high-backed arm-chair discreetly averted its face. Every one
+could see at a glance that the romantic Anarchist was going to sneak in
+at the window and attempt to abstract the despatch-box, while the
+heroine was to lie perdue in the high-backed chair; and when, at the
+fated moment, all this punctually occurred, one could scarcely repress
+an "Ah!" of sarcastic satisfaction. Similarly, in an able play named Mr.
+and Mrs. Daventry, Mr. Frank Harris had conceived a situation which
+required that the scene should be specially built for eavesdropping.[7]
+As soon as the curtain rose, and revealed a screen drawn halfway down
+the stage, with a sofa ensconced behind it, we knew what to expect. Of
+course Mrs. Daventry was to lie on the sofa and overhear a duologue
+between her husband and his mistress: the only puzzle was to understand
+why the guilty pair should neglect the precaution of looking behind the
+screen. As a matter of fact, Mrs. Daventry, before she lay down,
+switched off the lights, and Daventry and Lady Langham, finding the room
+dark, assumed it to be empty. With astounding foolhardiness, considering
+that the house was full of guests, and this a much frequented public
+room, Daventry proceeded to lock the door, and continue his conversation
+with Lady Langham in the firelight. Thus, when the lady's husband came
+knocking at the door, Mrs. Daventry was able to rescue the guilty pair
+from an apparently hopeless predicament, by calmly switching on the
+lights and opening the door to Sir John Langham. The situation was
+undoubtedly a "strong" one; but the tendency of modern technic is to
+hold "strength" too dearly purchased at such reckless expense of
+preparation.
+
+There are, then, very clear limits to the validity of the Dumas maxim
+that "The art of the theatre is the art of preparations." Certain it is
+that over-preparation is the most fatal of errors. The clumsiest thing a
+dramatist can possibly do is to lay a long and elaborate train for the
+ignition of a squib. We take pleasure in an event which has been
+"prepared" in the sense that we have been led to desire it, and have
+wondered how it was to be brought about. But we scoff at an occurrence
+which nothing but our knowledge of the tricks of the stage could
+possibly lead us to expect, yet which, knowing these tricks, we have
+foreseen from afar, and resented in advance.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+[Footnote 1: _Of Dramatic Poesy,_ ed. Arnold, 1903, p. 60.]
+
+[Footnote 2: _The World_, December 20, 1899.]
+
+[Footnote 3: At the end of the first act of _Lady Inger of Ostraat_,
+Ibsen evidently intends to produce a startling effect through the sudden
+appearance of Olaf Skaktavl in Lady Inger's hall. But as he has totally
+omitted to tell us who the strange man is, the incident has no meaning
+for us. In 1855 Ibsen had all his technical lessons yet to learn.]
+
+[Footnote 4: The fact that Mr. Phillips should have deemed such a
+foreshadowing necessary shows how instinctively a dramatist feels that
+the logic of his art requires him to assume that his audience is
+ignorant of his fable. In reality, very few members of the first-night
+audience, or of any other, can have depended on old Angela's
+vaticination for the requisite foresight of events. But this does not
+prove Angela to be artistically superfluous.]
+
+[Footnote 5: See pp. 118, 240.]
+
+[Footnote 6: There is no special harm in this: the question of exits and
+entrances and their mechanism is discussed in Chapter XXIII.]
+
+[Footnote 7: This might be said of the scene of the second act of _The
+Benefit of the Doubt_; but here the actual stage-topography is natural
+enough. The author, however, is rather over-anxious to emphasize the
+acoustic relations of the two rooms.]
+
+
+
+
+_CHAPTER XIII_
+
+THE OBLIGATORY SCENE
+
+
+I do not know whether it was Francisque Sarcey who invented the phrase
+_scène à faire_; but it certainly owes its currency to that valiant
+champion of the theatrical theatre, if I may so express it. Note that in
+this term I intend no disrespect. My conception of the theatrical
+theatre may not be exactly the same as M. Sarcey's; but at all events I
+share his abhorrence of the untheatrical theatre.
+
+What is the _scène à faire_? Sarcey has used the phrase so often, and in
+so many contexts, that it is impossible to tie him down to any strict
+definition. Instead of trying to do so, I will give a typical example of
+the way in which he usually employs the term.
+
+In _Les Fourchambault_, by Emile Augier, the first act introduces us to
+the household of a merchant, of Havre, who has married a wealthy, but
+extravagant woman, and has a son and daughter who are being gradually
+corrupted by their mother's worldliness. We learn that Fourchambault,
+senior, has, in his youth, betrayed a young woman who was a governess in
+his family. He wanted to marry her, but his relations maligned her
+character, and he cast her off; nor does he know what has become of her
+and her child. In the second act we pass to the house of an energetic
+and successful young shipowner named Bernard, who lives alone with his
+mother. Bernard, as we divine, is secretly devoted to a young lady named
+Marie Letellier, a guest in the Fourchambault house, to whom young
+Leopold Fourchambault is paying undesirable attentions. One day Bernard
+casually mentions to his mother that the house of Fourchambault is on
+the verge of bankruptcy; nothing less than a quarter of a million francs
+will enable it to tide over the crisis. Mme. Bernard, to her son's
+astonishment, begs him to lend the tottering firm the sum required. He
+objects that, unless the business is better managed, the loan will only
+postpone the inevitable disaster. "Well, then, my son," she replied,
+"you must go into partnership with M. Fourchambault." "I! with that
+imbecile!" he exclaims. "My son," she says gravely, and emphatically,
+"you must--it is your duty--I demand it of you!" "Ah!" cries Bernard. "I
+understand--he is my father!"
+
+After ecstatically lauding this situation and the scenes which have led
+up to it, M. Sarcey continues--
+
+  When the curtain falls upon the words "He is my father," I at once
+  see two _scènes à faire_, and I know that they will be _faites_: the
+  scene between the son and the father whom he is to save, the scene
+  between Bernard and his half-brother Leopold, who are in love with
+  the same woman, the one dishonourably and the other secretly and
+  nobly. What will they say to each other? I have no idea. But it is
+  precisely this _expectation mingled with uncertainly_ that is one of
+  the charms of the theatre. I say to myself, "Ah, they will have an
+  encounter! What will come of it?" And that this is the state of mind
+  of the whole audience is proved by the fact that when the two
+  characters of the _scènes à faire_ stand face to face, a thrill of
+  anticipation runs round the whole theatre.
+
+This, then, is the obligatory scene as Sarcey generally understands
+it--a scene which, for one reason or another, an audience expects and
+ardently desires. I have italicized the phrase "expectation mingled with
+uncertainty" because it expresses in other terms the idea which I have
+sought to convey in the formula "foreshadowing without forestalling."
+But before we can judge of the merits of M. Sarcey's theory, we must
+look into it a little more closely. I shall try, then, to state it in my
+own words, in what I believe to be its most rational and
+defensible form.
+
+An obligatory scene is one which the audience (more or less clearly and
+consciously) foresees and desires, and the absence of which it may with
+reason resent. On a rough analysis, it will appear, I think, that there
+are five ways in which a scene may become, in this sense, obligatory:
+
+(1) It may be necessitated by the inherent logic of the theme.
+
+(2) It may be demanded by the manifest exigencies of specifically
+dramatic effect.
+
+(3) The author himself may have rendered it obligatory by seeming
+unmistakably to lead up to it.
+
+(4) It may be required in order to justify some modification of
+character or alteration of will, too important to be taken for granted.
+
+(5) It may be imposed by history or legend.
+
+These five classes of obligatory scenes may be docketed, respectively,
+as the Logical, the Dramatic, the Structural, the Psychological, and the
+Historic. M. Sarcey generally employed the term in one of the first
+three senses, without clearly distinguishing between them. It is,
+indeed, not always easy to determine whether the compulsion (assuming it
+to exist at all) lies in the very essence of the theme or situation, or
+only in the author's manipulation of it.
+
+Was Sarcey right in assuming such a compulsion to be a constant and
+dominant factor in the playwright's craft? I think we shall see reason
+to believe him right in holding that it frequently arises, but wrong if
+he went the length of maintaining that there can be no good play without
+a definite _scène à faire_--as eighteenth-century landscape painters are
+said to have held that no one could be a master of his art till he knew
+where to place "the brown tree." I remember no passage in which Sarcey
+explicitly lays down so hard and fast a rule, but several in which he
+seems to take it for granted.[1]
+
+It may be asked whether--and if so, why--the theory of the obligatory
+scene holds good for the dramatist and not for the novelist? Perhaps it
+has more application to the novel than is commonly supposed; but in so
+far as it applies peculiarly to the drama, the reason is pretty clear.
+It lies in the strict concentration imposed on the dramatist, and the
+high mental tension which is, or ought to be, characteristic of the
+theatrical audience. The leisurely and comparatively passive
+novel-reader may never miss a scene which an audience, with its
+instincts of logic and of economy keenly alert, may feel to be
+inevitable. The dramatist is bound to extract from his material the last
+particle of that particular order of effect which the stage, and the
+stage alone, can give us. If he fails to do so, we feel that there has
+been no adequate justification for setting in motion all the complex
+mechanism of the theatre. His play is like a badly-designed engine in
+which a large part of the potential energy is dissipated to no purpose.
+The novelist, with a far wider range of effects at his command, and
+employing no special mechanism to bring them home to us, is much more
+free to select and to reject. He is exempt from the law of rigid economy
+to which the dramatist must submit. Far from being bound to do things in
+the most dramatic way, he often does wisely in rejecting that course, as
+unsuited to his medium. Fundamentally, no doubt, the same principle
+applies to both arts, but with a wholly different stringency in the case
+of the drama. "Advisable" in the novelist's vocabulary is translated by
+"imperative" in the dramatist's. The one is playing a long-drawn game,
+in which the loss of a trick or two need not prove fatal; the other has
+staked his all on a single rubber.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Obligatory scenes of the first type--those necessitated by the inherent
+logic of the theme--can naturally arise only in plays to which a
+definite theme can be assigned. If we say that woman's claim to possess
+a soul of her own, even in marriage, is the theme of _A Doll's House_,
+then evidently the last great balancing of accounts between Nora and
+Helmer is an obligatory scene. It would have been quite possible for
+Ibsen to have completed the play without any such scene: he might, for
+instance, have let Nora fulfil her intention of drowning herself; but in
+that case his play would have been merely a tragic anecdote with the
+point omitted. We should have felt vague intimations of a general idea
+hovering in the air, but it would have remained undefined and
+undeveloped. As we review, however, the series of Ibsen's plays, and
+notice how difficult it is to point to any individual scene and say,
+"This was clearly the _scène à faire_," we feel that, though the phrase
+may express a useful idea in a conveniently brief form, there is no
+possibility of making the presence or absence of a _scène à faire_ a
+general test of dramatic merit. In _The Wild Duck_, who would not say
+that, theoretically, the scene in which Gregers opens Hialmar's eyes to
+the true history of his marriage was obligatory in the highest degree?
+Yet Ibsen, as a matter of fact, does not present it to us: he sends the
+two men off for "a long walk" together: and who does not feel that this
+is a stroke of consummate art? In _Rosmersholm_, as we know, he has
+been accused of neglecting, not merely the scene, but the play, _à
+faire_; but who will now maintain that accusation? In _John Gabriel
+Borhman_, if we define the theme as the clash of two devouring egoisms,
+Ibsen has, in the third act, given us the obligatory scene; but he has
+done it, unfortunately, with an enfeebled hand; whereas the first and
+second acts, though largely expository, and even (in the Foldal scene)
+episodic, rank with his greatest achievements.
+
+For abundant examples of scenes rendered obligatory by the logic of the
+theme, we have only to turn to the works of those remorseless
+dialecticians, MM. Hervieu and Brieux. In such a play as _La Course du
+Flambeau_, there is scarcely a scene that may not be called an
+obligatory deduction from the thesis duly enunciated, with no small
+parade of erudition, in the first ten minutes of the play. It is that,
+in handing on the _vital lampada_, as Plato and "le bon poète Lucrèce"
+express it, the love of the parent for the child becomes a devouring
+mania, to which everything else is sacrificed, while the love of the
+child for the parent is a tame and essentially selfish emotion,
+absolutely powerless when it comes into competition with the passions
+which are concerned with the transmission of the vital flame. This
+theorem having been stated, what is the first obligatory scene?
+Evidently one in which a mother shall refuse a second marriage, with a
+man whom she loves, because it would injure the prospects and wound the
+feelings of her adored daughter. Then, when the adored daughter herself
+marries, the mother must make every possible sacrifice for her, and the
+daughter must accept them all with indifference, as mere matters of
+course. But what is the final, triumphant proof of the theorem? Why, of
+course, the mother must kill her mother to save the daughter's life! And
+this ultra-obligatory scene M. Hervieu duly serves up to us.
+Marie-Jeanne (the daughter) is ordered to the Engadine; Sabine (the
+mother) is warned that Madame Fontenais (the grandmother) must not go to
+that altitude on pain of death; but, by a series of violently artificial
+devices, things are so arranged that Marie-Jeanne cannot go unless
+Madame Fontenais goes too; and Sabine, rather than endanger her
+daughter's recovery, does not hesitate to let her mother set forth,
+unwittingly, to her doom. In the last scene of all, Marie-Jeanne
+light-heartedly prepares to leave her mother and go off with her husband
+to the ends of the earth; Sabine learns that the man she loved and
+rejected for Marie-Jeanne's sake is for ever lost to her; and, to
+complete the demonstration, Madame Fontenais falls dead at her feet.
+These scenes are unmistakably _scènes à faire_, dictated by the logic of
+the theme; but they belong to a conception of art in which the free
+rhythms of life are ruthlessly sacrificed to the needs of a
+demonstration. Obligatory scenes of this order are mere diagrams drawn
+with ruler and compass--the obligatory illustrations of an extravagantly
+over-systematic lecture.
+
+M. Brieux in some of his plays (not in all) is no less logic-ridden than
+M. Hervieu. Take, for instance, _Les Trois Filles de M. Dupont_: every
+character is a term in a syllogism, every scene is dictated by an
+imperious craving for symmetry. The main theorem may be stated in some
+such terms as these: "The French marriage system is immoral and
+abominable; yet the married woman is, on the whole, less pitiable than
+her unmarried sisters." In order to prove this thesis in due form, we
+begin at the beginning, and show how the marriage of Antonin Mairaut and
+Julie Dupont is brought about by the dishonest cupidity of the parents
+on both sides. The Duponts flatter themselves that they have cheated the
+Mairauts, the Mairauts that they have swindled the Duponts; while
+Antonin deliberately simulates artistic tastes to deceive Julie, and
+Julie as deliberately makes a show of business capacity in order to take
+in Antonin. Every scene between father and daughter is balanced by a
+corresponding scene between mother and son. Every touch of hypocrisy on
+the one side is scrupulously set off against a trait of dishonesty on
+the other. Julie's passion for children is emphasized, Antonin's
+aversion from them is underlined. But lest he should be accused of
+seeing everything in black, M. Brieux will not make the parents
+altogether detestable. Still holding the balance true, he lets M.
+Mairaut on the one side, and Madame Dupont on the other, develop amiable
+impulses, and protest, at a given moment, against the infamies committed
+and countenanced by their respective spouses. And in the second and
+third acts, the edifice of deception symmetrically built up in the first
+act is no less symmetrically demolished. The parents expose and denounce
+each other's villainies; Julie and Antonin, in a great scene of conjugal
+recrimination, lay bare the hypocrisies of allurement that have brought
+them together. Julie then determines to escape from the loathsome
+prison-house of her marriage; and this brings us to the second part of
+the theorem. The title shows that Julie has two sisters; but hitherto
+they have remained in the background. Why do they exist at all? Why has
+Providence blessed M. Dupont with "three fair daughters and no more"?
+Because Providence foresaw exactly the number M. Brieux would require
+for his demonstration. Are there not three courses open to a penniless
+woman in our social system--marriage, wage-earning industry, and
+wage-earning profligacy? Well, M. Dupont must have one daughter to
+represent each of these contingencies. Julie has illustrated the
+miseries of marriage; Caroline and Angèle shall illustrate respectively
+the still greater miseries of unmarried virtue and unmarried vice. When
+Julie declares her intention of breaking away from the house of bondage,
+her sisters rise up symmetrically, one on either hand, and implore her
+rather to bear the ills she has than to fly to others that she knows not
+of. "Symmetry of symmetries, all is symmetry" in the poetics of M.
+Brieux. But life does not fall into such obvious patterns. The
+obligatory scene which is imposed upon us, not by the logic of life, but
+by the logic of demonstration, is not a _scène à faire_, but a _scène
+à fuir_.
+
+Mr. Bernard Shaw, in some sense the Brieux of the English theatre, is
+not a man to be dominated by logic, or by anything else under the sun.
+He has, however, given us one or two excellent examples of the
+obligatory scene in the true and really artistic sense of the term. The
+scene of Candida's choice between Eugene and Morell crowns the edifice
+of _Candida_ as nothing else could. Given the characters and their
+respective attitudes towards life, this sententious thrashing-out of the
+situation was inevitable. So, too, in _Mrs. Warren's Profession_, the
+great scene of the second act between Vivie and her mother is a superb
+example of a scene imposed by the logic of the theme. On the other hand,
+in Mr. Henry Arthur Jones's finely conceived, though unequal, play,
+_Michael and his Lost Angel_, we miss what was surely an obligatory
+scene. The play is in fact a contest between the paganism of Audrie
+Lesden and the ascetic, sacerdotal idealism of Michael Feversham. In the
+second act, paganism snatches a momentary victory; and we confidently
+expect, in the third act, a set and strenuous effort on Audrie's part to
+break down in theory the ascetic ideal which has collapsed in practice.
+It is probable enough that she might not succeed in dragging her lover
+forth from what she regards as the prison-house of a superstition; but
+the logic of the theme absolutely demands that she should make the
+attempt. Mr. Jones has preferred to go astray after some comparatively
+irrelevant and commonplace matter, and has thus left his play
+incomplete. So, too, in _The Triumph of the Philistines_, Mr. Jones
+makes the mistake of expecting us to take a tender interest in a pair of
+lovers who have had never a love-scene to set our interest agoing. They
+are introduced to each other in the first act, and we shrewdly suspect
+(for in the theatre we are all inveterate match-makers) that they are
+going to fall in love; but we have not the smallest positive evidence of
+the fact before we find, in the second act, that misunderstandings have
+arisen, and the lady declines to look at the gentleman. The actress who
+played the part at the St. James's Theatre was blamed for failing to
+enlist our sympathies in this romance; but what actress can make much of
+a love part which, up to the very last moment, is all suspicion and
+jealousy? Fancy _Romeo and Juliet_ with the love-scenes omitted, "by
+special request!"
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+In a second class, according to our analysis, we place the obligatory
+scene which is imposed by "the manifest exigencies of specifically
+dramatic effect." Here it must of course be noted that the conception of
+"specifically dramatic effect" varies in some degree, from age to age,
+from generation to generation, and even, one may almost say, from
+theatre to theatre. Scenes of violence and slaughter were banished from
+the Greek theatre, mainly, no doubt, because rapid movement was rendered
+difficult by the hieratic trappings of the actors, and was altogether
+foreign to the spirit of tragedy; but it can scarcely be doubted that
+the tragic poets were the less inclined to rebel against this
+convention, because they extracted "specifically dramatic effects" of a
+very high order out of their "messenger-scenes." Even in the modern
+theatre we are thrilled by the description of Hippolytus dragged at his
+own chariot wheel, or Creusa and Creon devoured by Medea's veil of
+fire.[2] On the Elizabethan stage, the murder of Agamemnon would no
+doubt have been "subjected to our faithful eyes" like the blinding of
+Gloucester or the suffocation of Edward II; but who shall say that there
+is less "specifically dramatic effect" in Aeschylus's method of
+mirroring the scene in the clairvoyant ecstasy of Cassandra? I am much
+inclined to think that the dramatic effect of highly emotional narrative
+is underrated in the modern theatre.
+
+Again, at one class of theatre, the author of a sporting play--is bound
+to exhibit a horse-race on the stage, or he is held to have shirked his
+obligatory scene. At another class of theatre, we shall have a scene,
+perhaps, in a box in the Grand Stand, where some Lady Gay Spanker shall
+breathlessly depict, from start to finish, the race which is visible to
+her, but invisible to the audience. At a third class of the theatre, the
+"specifically dramatic effect" to be extracted from a horse-race is
+found in a scene in a Black-Country slum, where a group of working-men
+and women are feverishly awaiting the evening paper which shall bring
+them the result of the St. Leger, involving for some of them
+opulence--to the extent, perhaps, of a £5 note--and for others ruin.[3]
+
+The difficulty of deciding that any one form of scene is predestined by
+the laws of dramatic effect is illustrated in Tolstoy's grisly drama,
+_The Power of Darkness_. The scene in which Nikita kills Akoulina's
+child was felt to be too horrible for representation; whereupon the
+author wrote an alternative scene between Mitritch and Anna, which
+passes simultaneously with the murder scene, in an adjoining room. The
+two scenes fulfil exactly the same function in the economy of the play;
+it can be acted with either of them, it might be acted with both; and it
+is impossible to say which produces the intenser or more "specifically
+dramatic effect."
+
+The fact remains, however, that there is almost always a dramatic and
+undramatic, a more dramatic and a less dramatic, way of doing a thing;
+and an author who allows us to foresee and expect a dramatic way of
+attaining a given end, and then chooses an undramatic or less dramatic
+way, is guilty of having missed the obligatory scene. For a general
+discussion of what we mean by the terms "dramatic" and "undramatic" the
+reader may refer back to Chapter III. Here I need only give one or two
+particular illustrations.
+
+It will be remembered that one of the _scènes à faire_ which M. Sarcey
+foresaw in _Les Fourchambault_ was the encounter between the two
+brothers; the illegitimate Bernard and the legitimate Leopold. It would
+have been quite possible, and quite natural, to let the action of the
+play work itself out without any such encounter; or to let the encounter
+take place behind the scenes; but this would have been a patent ignoring
+of dramatic possibilities, and M. Sarcey would have had ample reason to
+pour the vials of his wrath on Augier's head. He was right, however, in
+his confidence that Augier would not fail to "make" the scene. And how
+did he "make" it? The one thing inevitable about it was that the truth
+should be revealed to Leopold; but there were a dozen different ways in
+which that might have been effected. Perhaps, in real life, Bernard
+would have said something to this effect: "Young man, you are making
+questionable advances to a lady in whom I am interested. I beg that you
+will cease to persecute her; and if you ask by what right I do so, I
+reply that I am in fact your elder brother, that I have saved our father
+from ruin, that I am henceforth the predominant partner in his business,
+and that, if you do not behave yourself, I shall see that your allowance
+is withdrawn, and that you have no longer the means to lead an idle and
+dissolute life." This would have been an ungracious but not unnatural
+way of going about the business. Had Augier chosen it, we should have
+had no right to complain on the score of probability; but it would have
+been evident to the least imaginative that he had left the specifically
+dramatic opportunities of the scene entirely undeveloped. Let us now see
+what he actually did. Marie Letellier, compromised by Leopold's conduct,
+has left the Fourchambault house and taken refuge with Mme. Bernard.
+Bernard loves her devotedly, but does not dream that she can see
+anything in his uncouth personality, and imagines that she loves
+Leopold. Accordingly, he determines that Leopold shall marry her, and
+tells him so. Leopold scoffs at the idea; Bernard insists; and little by
+little the conflict rises to a tone of personal altercation. At last
+Leopold says something slighting of Mile. Letellier, and Bernard--who,
+be it noted, has begun with no intention of revealing the kinship
+between them--loses his self-control and cries, "Ah, there speaks the
+blood of the man who slandered a woman in order to prevent his son from
+keeping his word to her. I recognize in you your grandfather, who was a
+miserable calumniator." "Repeat that word!" says Leopold. Bernard does
+so, and the other strikes him across the face with his glove. For a
+perceptible interval Bernard struggles with his rage in silence, and
+then: "It is well for you," he cries, "that you are my brother!"
+
+We need not follow the scene in the sentimental turning which it then
+takes, whereby it comes about, of course, that Bernard, not Leopold,
+marries Mile. Letellier. The point is that Augier has justified Sarcey's
+confidence by making the scene thoroughly and specifically dramatic; in
+other words, by charging it with emotion, and working up the tension to
+a very high pitch. And Sarcey was no doubt right in holding that this
+was what the whole audience instinctively expected, and that they would
+have been more or less consciously disappointed had the author baulked
+their expectation.
+
+An instructive example of the failure to "make" a dramatically
+obligatory scene may be found in _Agatha_ by Mrs. Humphry Ward and Mr.
+Louis Parker. Agatha is believed to be the child of Sir Richard and Lady
+Fancourt; but at a given point she learns that a gentleman whom she has
+known all her life as "Cousin Ralph" is in reality her father. She has a
+middle-aged suitor, Colonel Ford, whom she is very willing to marry; but
+at the end of the second act she refuses him, because she shrinks from
+the idea, on the one hand, of concealing the truth from him, on the
+other hand, of revealing her mother's trespass. This is not, in itself,
+a very strong situation, for we feel the barrier between the lovers to
+be unreal. Colonel Ford is a man of sense. The secret of Agatha's
+parentage can make no real difference to him. Nothing material--no point
+of law or of honour--depends on it. He will learn the truth, and all
+will come right between them. The only point on which our interest can
+centre is the question how he is to learn the truth; and here the
+authors go very far astray. There are two, and only two, really dramatic
+ways in which Colonel Ford can be enlightened. Lady Fancourt must
+realize that Agatha is wrecking her life to keep her mother's secret,
+and must either herself reveal it to Colonel Ford, or must encourage and
+enjoin Agatha to do so. Now, the authors choose neither of these ways:
+the secret slips out, through a chance misunderstanding in a
+conversation between Sir Richard Fancourt and the Colonel. This is a
+typical instance of an error of construction; and why?--because it
+leaves to chance what should be an act of will. Drama means a thing
+done, not merely a thing that happens; and the playwright who lets
+accident effect what might naturally and probably be a result of
+volition, or, in other words, of character, sins against the fundamental
+law of his craft. In the case before us, Lady Fancourt and Agatha--the
+two characters on whom our interest is centred--are deprived of all
+share in one of the crucial moments of the action. Whether the actual
+disclosure was made by the mother or by the daughter, there ought to
+have been a great scene between the two, in which the mother should have
+insisted that, by one or other, the truth must be told. It would have
+been a painful, a delicate, a difficult scene, but it was the obligatory
+scene of the play; and had we been allowed clearly to foresee it at the
+end of the second act, our interest would have been decisively carried
+forward. The scene, too, might have given the play a moral relevance
+which in fact it lacks. The readjustment of Agatha's scheme of things,
+so as to make room for her mother's history, might have been made
+explicit and partly intellectual, instead of implicit, inarticulate and
+wholly emotional.
+
+This case, then, clearly falls under our second heading. We cannot say
+that it is the logic of the theme which demands the scene, for no thesis
+or abstract idea is enunciated. Nor can we say that the course of events
+is unnatural or improbable; our complaint is that, without being at all
+less natural, they might have been highly dramatic, and that in fact
+they are not so.
+
+In a very different type of play, we find another example of the
+ignoring of a dramatically obligatory scene. The author of that charming
+fantasy, _The Passing of the Third Floor Back_, was long ago guilty of a
+play named _The Rise of Dick Halward_, chiefly memorable for having
+elicited from Mr. Bernard Shaw one of the most brilliant pages in
+English dramatic criticism. The hero of this play, after an adventurous
+youth in Mexico, has gone to the bar, but gets no briefs, and is
+therefore unable to marry a lady who announces that no suitor need apply
+who has less than £5000 a year. One fine day Dick receives from Mexico
+the will of an old comrade, which purports to leave to him, absolutely,
+half a million dollars, gold; but the will is accompanied by a letter,
+in which the old comrade states that the property is really left to him
+only in trust for the testator's long-lost son, whom Dick is enjoined to
+search out and endow with a capital which, at 5 per cent, represents
+accurately the desiderated £5000 a year. As a matter of fact (but this
+is not to our present purpose), the long-lost son is actually, at that
+moment, sharing Dick's chambers in the Temple. Dick, however, does not
+know this, and cannot resist the temptation to destroy the old miner's
+letter, and grab the property. We know, of course, that retribution is
+bound to descend upon him; but does not dramatic effect imperatively
+require that, for a brief space at any rate, he should be seen--with
+whatever qualms of conscience his nature might dictate--enjoying his
+ill-gotten wealth? Mr. Jerome, however, baulks us of this just
+expectation. In the very first scene of the second act we find that the
+game is up. The deceased miner wrote his letter to Dick seated in the
+doorway of a hut; a chance photographer took a snap-shot at him; and on
+returning to England, the chance photographer has nothing more pressing
+to do than to chance upon the one man who knows the long-lost son, and
+to show him the photograph of the dying miner, whom he at once
+recognizes. By aid of a microscope, the letter he is writing can be
+deciphered, and thus Dick's fraud is brought home to him. Now one would
+suppose that an author who had invented this monstrous and staggering
+concatenation of chances, must hope to justify it by some highly
+dramatic situation, in the obvious and commonplace sense of the word. It
+is not difficult, indeed, to foresee such a situation, in which Dick
+Halward should be confronted, as if by magic, with the very words of the
+letter he has so carefully destroyed. I am far from saying that this
+scene would, in fact, have justified its amazing antecedents; but it
+would have shown a realization on the author's part that he must at any
+rate attempt some effect proportionate to the strain he had placed upon
+our credulity. Mr. Jerome showed no such realization. He made the man
+who handed Dick the copy of the letter explain beforehand how it had
+been obtained; so that Dick, though doubtless surprised and disgusted,
+was not in the least thunderstruck, and manifested no emotion. Here,
+then, Mr. Jerome evidently missed a scene rendered obligatory by the law
+of the maximum of specifically dramatic effect.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The third, or structural, class of obligatory scenes may be more briefly
+dealt with, seeing that we have already, in the last chapter, discussed
+the principle involved. In this class we have placed, by definition,
+scenes which the author himself has rendered obligatory by seeming
+unmistakably to lead up to them--or, in other words, scenes indicated,
+or seeming to be indicated, by deliberately-planted finger-posts. It may
+appear as though the case of Dick Halward, which we have just been
+examining, in reality came under this heading. But it cannot actually be
+said that Mr. Jerome either did, or seemed to, point by finger-posts
+towards the obligatory scene. He rather appears to have been blankly
+unconscious of its possibility.
+
+We have noted in the foregoing chapter the unwisdom of planting
+misleading finger-posts; here we have only to deal with the particular
+case in which they seem to point to a definite and crucial scene. An
+example given by M. Sarcey himself will, I think, make the matter
+quite clear.
+
+M. Jules Lemaître's play, _Révoltée_, tells the story of a would-be
+intellectual, ill-conditioned young woman, married to a plain and
+ungainly professor of mathematics, whom she despises. We know that she
+is in danger of yielding to the fascinations of a seductive
+man-about-town; and having shown us this danger, the author proceeds to
+emphasize the manly and sterling character of the husband. He has the
+gentleness that goes with strength; but where his affections or his
+honour is concerned, he is not a man to be trifled with. This having
+been several times impressed upon us, we naturally expect that the wife
+is to be rescued by some striking manifestation of the husband's
+masterful virility. But no such matter! Rescued she is, indeed; but it
+is by the intervention of her half-brother, who fights a duel on her
+behalf, and is brought back wounded to restore peace to the
+mathematician's household: that man of science having been quite passive
+throughout, save for some ineffectual remonstrances. It happens that in
+this case we know just where the author went astray. Hélène (the wife)
+is the unacknowledged daughter of a great lady, Mme. de Voves; and the
+subject of the play, as the author first conceived it, was the relation
+between the mother, the illegitimate daughter, and the legitimate son;
+the daughter's husband taking only a subordinate place. But Lemaître
+chose as a model for the husband a man whom he had known and admired;
+and he allowed himself to depict in vivid colours his strong and
+sympathetic character, without noticing that he was thereby upsetting
+the economy of his play, and giving his audience reason to anticipate a
+line of development quite different from that which he had in mind.
+Inadvertently, in fact, he planted, not one, but two or three,
+misleading finger-posts.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+We come now to the fourth, or psychological, class of obligatory
+scenes--those which are "required in order to justify some modification
+of character or alteration of will, too important to be taken
+for granted."
+
+An obvious example of an obligatory scene of this class may be found in
+the third act of _Othello_. The poet is bound to show us the process by
+which Iago instils his poison into Othello's mind. He has backed
+himself, so to speak, to make this process credible to us; and, by a
+masterpiece of dexterity and daring, he wins his wager. Had he omitted
+this scene--had he shown us Othello at one moment full of serene
+confidence, and at his next appearance already convinced of Desdemona's
+guilt--he would have omitted the pivot and turning--point of the whole
+structure. It may seem fantastic to conceive that any dramatist could
+blunder so grossly; but there are not a few plays in which we observe a
+scarcely less glaring hiatus.
+
+A case in point may be found in Lord Tennyson's _Becket_. I am not one
+of those who hold Tennyson merely contemptible as a dramatist. I believe
+that, had he taken to playwriting nearly half-a-century earlier, and
+studied the root principles of craftsmanship, instead of blindly
+accepting the Elizabethan conventions, he might have done work as fine
+in the mass as are the best moments of _Queen Mary_ and _Harold_. As a
+whole, _Becket_ is one of his weakest productions; but the Prologue and
+the first act would have formed an excellent first and third act for a
+play of wholly different sequel, had he interposed, in a second act, the
+obligatory scene required to elucidate Becket's character. The historic
+and psychological problem of Thomas Becket is his startling
+transformation from an easy-going, luxurious, worldly statesman into a
+gaunt ecclesiastic, fanatically fighting for the rights of his see, of
+his order, and of Rome. In any drama which professes to deal (as this
+does) with his whole career, the intellectual interest cannot but centre
+in an analysis of the forces that brought about this seeming new-birth
+of his soul. It would have been open to the poet, no doubt, to take up
+his history at a later point, when he was already the full-fledged
+clerical and ultramontane. But this Tennyson does not do. He is at pains
+to present to us the magnificent Chancellor, the bosom friend of the
+King, and mild reprover of his vices; and then, without the smallest
+transition, hey presto! he is the intransigent priest, bitterly
+combating the Constitutions of Clarendon. It is true that in the
+Prologue the poet places one or two finger-posts--small, conventional
+foreshadowings of coming trouble. For instance, the game of chess
+between King and Chancellor ends with a victory for Becket, who says--
+
+  "You see my bishop
+  Hath brought your king to a standstill. You are beaten."
+
+The symbolical game of chess is a well-worn dramatic device. Becket,
+moreover, seems to feel some vague disquietude as to what may happen if
+he accepts the archbishopric; but there is nothing to show that he is
+conscious of any bias towards the intransigent clericalism of the later
+act. The character-problem, in fact, is not only not solved, but is
+ignored. The obligatory scene is skipped over, in the interval between
+the Prologue and the first act.
+
+One of the finest plays of our time--Sir Arthur Pinero's _Iris_--lacks,
+in my judgment, an obligatory scene. The character of Iris is admirably
+true, so far as it goes; but it is incomplete. The author seems to have
+evaded the crucial point of his play--the scene of her installation in
+Maldonado's flat. To perfect his psychological study, he was bound to
+bridge the chasm between the Iris of the third act and the Iris of the
+fourth. He builds two ends of the bridge, in the incident of the
+cheque-book at the close of the one act, and in the state of hebetude in
+which we find her at the opening of the other; but there remains a great
+gap at which the imagination boggles. The author has tried to throw a
+retrospective footway across it in Iris's confession to Trenwith in the
+fifth act; but I do not find that it quite meets the case. It would no
+doubt have been very difficult to keep the action within reasonable
+limits had a new act taken the place of the existing fourth; but Sir
+Arthur Pinero would probably have produced a completer work of art had
+he faced this difficulty, and contrived to compress into a single last
+act something like the matter of the existing fourth and fifth. It may
+be that he deliberately preferred that Iris should give in narrative the
+history of her decline; but I do not consider this a case in support of
+that slight plea for impassioned narrative which I ventured to put forth
+a few pages back. Her confession to Trenwith would have been far more
+dramatic and moving had it been about one-fourth part as long and
+one-fourth part as articulate.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Of the scene imposed by history or legend it is unnecessary to say very
+much. We saw in Chapter IX that the theatre is not the place for
+expounding the results of original research, which cast a new light on
+historic character. It is not the place for whitewashing Richard III, or
+representing him as a man of erect and graceful figure. It is not the
+place for proving that Guy Fawkes was an earnest Presbyterian, that Nell
+Gwynn was a lady of the strictest morals, or that George Washington was
+incapable of telling the truth. The playwright who deals with Henry VIII
+is bound to present him, in the schoolboy's phrase, as "a great
+widower." William the Silent must not be a chatterbox, Torquemada a
+humanitarian, Ivan the Terrible a conscientious opponent of capital
+punishment. And legend has its fixed points no less than history. In the
+theatre, indeed, there is little distinction between them: history is
+legend, and legend history. A dramatist may, if he pleases (though it is
+a difficult task), break wholly unfamiliar ground in the past; but where
+a historic legend exists he must respect it at his peril.
+
+From all this it is a simple deduction that where legend (historic or
+otherwise) associates a particular character with a particular scene
+that is by any means presentable on the stage, that scene becomes
+obligatory in a drama of which he is the leading figure. The fact that
+Shakespeare could write a play about King John, and say nothing about
+Runnymede and Magna Charta, shows that that incident in constitutional
+history had not yet passed into popular legend. When Sir Herbert Tree
+revived the play, he repaired the poet's omission by means of an
+inserted tableau. Even Shakespeare had not the hardihood to let Caesar
+fall without saying, "The Ides of March are come" and "Et tu, Brute!"
+Nero is bound to fiddle while Rome burns, or the audience will know the
+reason why.[4] Historic criticism will not hear of the "Thou hast
+conquered, Galilean!" which legend attributes to Julian the Apostate;
+yet Ibsen not only makes him say it, but may almost be said to find in
+the phrase the keynote of his world-historic drama. Tristram and Iseult
+must drink a love-philtre or they are not Tristram and Iseult. It would
+be the extreme of paradox to write a Paolo-and-Francesca play and omit
+the scene of "Quel giorno più non vi leggemmo avante."
+
+The cases are not very frequent, however, in which an individual
+incident is thus imposed by history or legend. The practical point to be
+noted is rather that, when an author introduces a strongly-marked
+historical character, he must be prepared to give him at least one good
+opportunity of acting up to the character which legend--the best of
+evidence in the theatre--assigns to him. When such a personage is
+presented to us, it ought to be at his highest potency. We do not
+want to see--
+
+  "From Marlborough's eyes the tears of dotage flow,
+  And Swift expire, a driveller and a show."
+
+If you deal with Napoleon, for instance, it is perfectly clear that he
+must dominate the stage. As soon as you bring in the name, the idea, of
+Napoleon Bonaparte, men have eyes and ears for nothing else; and they
+demand to see him, in a general way, acting up to their general
+conception of him. That was what Messrs. Lloyd Osbourne and Austin
+Strong forgot in their otherwise clever play, _The Exile_. It is useless
+to prove, historically, that at a given moment he was passive, supine,
+unconscious, while people around him were eagerly plotting his escape
+and restoration. That may have been so; but it is not what an audience
+wants to see. It wants to see Napoleon Napoleonizing. For anomalies and
+uncharacteristic episodes in Napoleon's career we must go to books; the
+playhouse is not the place for them. It is true that a dramatist like
+Mr. Bernard Shaw may, at his own risk and peril, set forth to give us a
+new reading of Caesar or of Napoleon, which may or may not be
+dramatically acceptable.[5] But this is not what Messrs. Osbourne and
+Strong tried to do. Their Napoleon was the Napoleon of tradition--only
+he failed to act "in a concatenation according."
+
+There are a few figures in history--and Napoleon is one of them--which
+so thrill the imagination that their mere name can dominate the stage,
+better, perhaps, than their bodily presence. In _L'Aiglon_, by M.
+Rostand, Napoleon is in fact the hero, though he lies dead in his
+far-off island, under the Southern Cross. Another such figure is Abraham
+Lincoln. In James Herne's sadly underrated play, _Griffith Davenport_,
+we were always conscious of "Mr. Lincoln" in the background; and the act
+in which Governor Morton of Indiana brought the President's instructions
+to Davenport might fairly be called an obligatory scene, inasmuch as it
+gave us the requisite sense of personal nearness to the master-spirit,
+without involving any risk of belittlement through imperfections of
+representation. There is a popular melodrama, passing in Palestine under
+the Romans, throughout the course of which we constantly feel the
+influence of a strange new prophet, unseen but wonder-working, who, if I
+remember rightly, is personally presented to us only in a final tableau,
+wherein he appears riding into Jerusalem amid the hosannas of the
+multitude. The execution of _Ben Hur_ is crude and commonplace, but the
+conception is by no means inartistic. Historical figures of the highest
+rank may perhaps be best adumbrated in this fashion, with or without one
+personal appearance, so brief that there shall be no danger of
+anti-climax.
+
+The last paragraph reminds us that the accomplished playwright shows his
+accomplishment quite as much in his recognition and avoidance of the
+_scène à ne pas faire_ as in his divination of the obligatory scene.
+There is always the chance that no one may miss a scene demanded by
+logic or psychology; but an audience knows too well when it has been
+bored or distressed by a superfluous, or inconsequent, or wantonly
+painful scene.
+
+Some twenty years ago, in criticizing a play named _Le Maître d'Armes_,
+M. Sarcey took the authors gravely to task, in the name of "Aristotle
+and common sense," for following the modern and reprehensible tendency
+to present "slices of life" rather than constructed and developed
+dramas. Especially he reproached them with deliberately omitting the
+_scène à faire_. A young lady is seduced, he says, and, for the sake of
+her child, implores her betrayer to keep his promise of marriage. He
+renews the promise, without the slightest intention of fulfilling it,
+and goes on board his yacht in order to make his escape. She discovers
+his purpose and follows him on board the yacht. "What is the scene,"
+asks M. Sarcey--here I translate literally--"which you expect, you, the
+public? It is the scene between the abandoned fair one and her seducer.
+The author may make it in a hundred ways, but make it he must!" Instead
+of which, the critic proceeds, we are fobbed off with a storm-scene, a
+rescue, and other sensational incidents, and hear no word of what passes
+between the villain and his victim. Here, I think, M. Sarcey is mistaken
+in his application of his pet principle. Words cannot express our
+unconcern as to what passes between the heroine and the villain on board
+the yacht--nay, more, our gratitude for being spared that painful and
+threadbare scene of recrimination. The plot demands, observe, that the
+villain shall not relent. We know quite well that he cannot, for if he
+did the play would fall to pieces. Why, then, should we expect or demand
+a sordid squabble which can lead to nothing? We--and by "we" I mean the
+public which relishes such plays--cannot possibly have any keen appetite
+for copious re-hashes of such very cold mutton as the appeals of the
+penitent heroine to the recalcitrant villain. And the moral seems to be
+that in this class of play--the drama, if one may call it so, of
+foregone character--the _scène à faire_ is precisely the scene to
+be omitted.
+
+In plays of a more ambitious class, skill is often shown by the
+indication, in place of the formal presentment, even of an important
+scene which the audience may, or might, have expected to witness in
+full. We have already noted such a case in _The Wild Duck_: Ibsen knew
+that what we really required to witness was not the actual process of
+Gregers's disclosure to Hialmar, but its effects. A small, but quite
+noticeable, example of a scene thus rightly left to the imagination
+occurred in Mr. Somerset Maugham's first play, _A Man of Honour_. In the
+first act, Jack Halliwell, his wife, and his sister-in-law call upon his
+friend Basil Kent. The sister-in-law, Hilda Murray, is a rich widow; and
+she and Kent presently go out on the balcony together and are lost to
+view. Then it appears, in a scene between the Halliwells, that they
+fully believe that Kent is in love with Mrs. Murray and is now proposing
+to her. But when the two re-enter from the balcony, it is evident from
+their mien that, whatever may have passed between them, they are not
+affianced lovers; and we presently learn that though Kent is in fact
+strongly attracted to Mrs. Murray, he considers himself bound in honour
+to marry a certain Jenny Bush, a Fleet Street barmaid, with whom he has
+become entangled. Many playwrights would, so to speak, have dotted the
+i's of the situation by giving us the scene between Kent and Mrs.
+Murray; but Mr. Maugham has done exactly right in leaving us to divine
+it. We know all that, at this point, we require to know of the relation
+between them; to have told us more would have been to anticipate and
+discount the course of events.
+
+A more striking instance of a scene rightly placed behind the scenes
+occurs in M. de Curel's terrible drama _Les Fossiles_. I need not go
+into the singularly unpleasing details of the plot. Suffice it to say
+that a very peculiar condition of things exists in the family of the Duc
+de Chantemelle. It has been fully discussed in the second act between
+the Duke and his daughter Claire, who has been induced to accept it for
+the sake of the family name. But a person more immediately concerned is
+Robert de Chantemelle, the only son of the house--will he also accept it
+quietly? A nurse, who is acquainted with the black secret, misbehaves
+herself, and is to be packed off. As she is a violent woman, Robert
+insists on dismissing her himself, and leaves the room to do so. The
+rest of the family are sure that, in her rage, she will blurt out the
+whole story; and they wait, in breathless anxiety, for Robert's return.
+What follows need not be told: the point is that this scene--the scene
+of tense expectancy as to the result of a crisis which is taking place
+in another room of the same house--is really far more dramatic than the
+crisis itself would be. The audience already knows all that the angry
+virago can say to her master; and of course no discussion of the merits
+of the case is possible between these two. Therefore M. de Curel is
+conspicuously right in sparing us the scene of vulgar violence, and
+giving us the scene of far higher tension in which Robert's father, wife
+and sister expect his return, their apprehension deepening with every
+moment that he delays.
+
+We see, then, that there is such a thing as a false _scène à faire_--a
+scene which at first sight seems obligatory, but is in fact much better
+taken for granted. It may be absolutely indispensable that it should be
+suggested to the mind of the audience, but neither indispensable nor
+advisable that it should be presented to their eyes. The judicious
+playwright will often ask himself, "Is it the actual substance of this
+scene that I require, or only its repercussion?"
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+[Footnote 1: For example, in his criticism of Becque's _La Parisienne
+(Quarante Ans de Théâtre_, VI, p. 364), he tells how, at the end of the
+second act, one of his neighbours said to him, "Eh! bien, vous voilà
+bien attrapé! Où est la _scène à faire_?" "I freely admit," he
+continues, "that there is no _scène à faire_; if there had been no third
+act I should not have been greatly astonished. When you make it your
+business to recite on the stage articles from the _Vie Parisienne_, it
+makes no difference whether you stop at the end of the second article or
+at the end of the third." This clearly implies that a play in which
+there is no _scène à faire_ is nothing but a series of newspaper
+sketches. Becque, one fancies, might have replied that the scene between
+Clotilde and Monsieur Simpson at the beginning of Act III was precisely
+the _scène à faire_ demanded by the logic of his cynicism.]
+
+[Footnote 2: I need scarcely direct the reader's attention to Mr.
+Gilbert Murray's noble renderings of these speeches.]
+
+[Footnote 3: Such a scene occurs in that very able play, _The Way the
+Money Goes_, by Lady Bell.]
+
+[Footnote 4: In Mr. Stephen Phillips's play he does not actually play on
+the lyre, but he improvises and recites an ode to the conflagration.]
+
+[Footnote 5: And, after all, Mr. Shaw does not run counter to the
+legend. He exhibits Caesar and Napoleon "in their well-known attitudes":
+only, by an odd metempsychosis, the soul of Mr. Shaw has somehow entered
+into them.]
+
+
+
+
+_CHAPTER XIV_
+
+THE PERIPETY
+
+
+In the Greek theatre, as every one knows, the _peripeteia_ or reversal
+of fortune--the turning of the tables, as we might say--was a
+clearly-defined and recognized portion of the dramatic organism. It was
+often associated with the _anagnorisis_ or recognition. Mr. Gilbert
+Murray has recently shown cause for believing that both these dramatic
+"forms" descended from the ritual in which Greek drama took its
+origin--the ritual celebrating the death and resurrection of the season
+of "mellow fruitfulness." If this theory be true, the _peripeteia_ was
+at first a change from sorrow to joy--joy in the rebirth of the
+beneficent powers of nature. And to this day a sudden change from gloom
+to exhilaration is a popular and effective incident--as when, at the end
+of a melodrama, the handcuffs are transferred from the wrists of the
+virtuous naval lieutenant to those of the wicked baronet, and, through
+the disclosure of a strawberry-mark on his left arm, the lieutenant is
+recognized as the long-lost heir to a dukedom and £50,000 a year.
+
+But when, as soon happened in Greece, the forms appropriate to a
+celebration of the death and resurrection of Dionysus came to be blent
+with the tomb-ritual of a hero, the term _peripeteia_ acquired a special
+association with a sudden decline from prosperity into adversity. In the
+Middle Ages, this was thought to be the very essence and meaning of
+tragedy, as we may see from Chaucer's lines:
+
+  "Tragedie is to seyn a certeyn storie,
+  As oldë bokës maken us memorie,
+  Of him that stood in gret prosperitee,
+  And is y-fallen out of heigh degree
+  Into miserie, and endeth wrecchedly."
+
+Aristotle cites a good instance of a peripety--to Anglicize the
+word--"where, in the _Lynceus_, the hero is led away to execution,
+followed by Danaus as executioner; but, as the effect of the
+antecedents, Danaus is executed and Lynceus escapes." But here, as in so
+many other contexts, we must turn for the classic example to the
+_Oedipus Rex_. Jocasta, hearing from the Corinthian stranger that
+Polybus, King of Corinth, the reputed father of Oedipus, is dead, sends
+for her husband to tell him that the oracle which doomed him to
+parricide is defeated, since Polybus has died a natural death. Oedipus
+exults in the news and triumphs over the oracles; but, as the scene
+proceeds, the further revelations made by the same stranger lead Jocasta
+to recognize in Oedipus her own child, who was exposed on Mount
+Kithairon; and, in the subsequent scene, the evidence of the old
+Shepherd brings Oedipus himself to the same crushing realization. No
+completer case of _anagnorisis_ and _peripeteia_ could well be
+conceived--whatever we may have to say of the means by which it is
+led up to.[1]
+
+Has the conception of the peripety, as an almost obligatory element in
+drama, any significance for the modern playwright? Obligatory, of
+course, it cannot be: it is easy to cite a hundred admirable plays in
+which it is impossible to discover anything that can reasonably be
+called a peripety. But this, I think, we may safely say: the dramatist
+is fortunate who finds in the development of his theme, without
+unnatural strain or too much preparation, opportunity for a great scene,
+highly-wrought, arresting, absorbing, wherein one or more of his
+characters shall experience a marked reversal either of inward
+soul-state or of outward fortune. The theory of the peripety, in short,
+practically resolves itself for us into the theory of the "great scene,"
+Plays there are, many and excellent plays, in which some one scene
+stands out from all the rest, impressing itself with peculiar vividness
+on the spectator's mind; and, nine times out of ten, this scene will be
+found to involve a peripety. It can do no harm, then, if the playwright
+should ask himself: "Can I, without any undue sacrifice, so develop my
+theme as to entail upon my leading characters, naturally and probably,
+an experience of this order?"
+
+The peripeties of real life are frequent, though they are apt to be too
+small in scale, or else too fatally conclusive, to provide material for
+drama. One of the commonest, perhaps, is that of the man who enters a
+physician's consulting-room to seek advice in some trifling ailment, and
+comes out again, half an hour later, doomed either to death or to some
+calamity worse than death. This situation has been employed, not
+ineffectively, by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, in the first act of a romantic
+drama, _The Fires of Fate_; but it is very difficult to find any
+dramatic sequel to a peripety involving mere physical disaster.[2] The
+moral peripety--the sudden dissipation of some illusion, or defeat of
+some imposture, or crumbling of some castle in the air--is a no less
+characteristic incident of real life, and much more amenable to the
+playwright's uses. Certainly there are few things more impressive in
+drama than to see a man or woman--or a man and woman--come upon the
+stage, radiant, confident, assured that
+
+  "God's in his heaven,
+   All's right with the world,"
+
+and leave it crushed and desperate, after a gradual and yet swift
+descent into Avernus. Such a scene is of the very marrow of drama. It is
+a play within a play; a concentrated, quintessentiated crisis.
+
+In the third act of _Othello_ we have a peripety handled with consummate
+theatrical skill. To me--I confess it with bated breath--the
+craftsmanship seems greatly superior to the psychology. Othello, when we
+look into it, succumbs with incredible facility to Iago's poisoned
+pin-pricks; but no audience dreams of looking into it; and there lies
+the proof of Shakespeare's technical mastery. In the Trial Scene in _The
+Merchant of Venice_ we have another great peripety. It illustrates the
+obvious principle that, where the drama consists in a conflict between
+two persons or parties, the peripety is generally a double one--the
+sudden collapse of Shylock's case implying an equally sudden restoration
+of Antonio's fortunes. Perhaps the most striking peripety in Ibsen is
+Stockmann's fall from jubilant self-confidence to defiant impotence in
+the third act of _An Enemy of the People_. Thinking that he has the
+"compact majority" at his back, he assumes the Burgomaster's insignia of
+office, and lords it over his incensed brother, only to learn, by blow
+on blow of disillusionment, that "the compact majority" has ratted, that
+he is to be deprived of his position and income, and that the commonest
+freedom of speech is to be denied him. In _A Doll's House_ there are two
+peripeties: Nora's fall from elation to despair in the first scene with
+Krogstad, and the collapse of Helmer's illusions in the last scene
+of all.
+
+A good instance of the "great scene" which involves a marked peripety
+occurs in Sardou's _Dora_, once famous in England under the title of
+_Diplomacy_. The "scene of the three men" shows how Tékli, a Hungarian
+exile, calls upon his old friend André de Maurillac, on the day of
+André's marriage, and congratulates him on having eluded the wiles of a
+dangerous adventuress, Dora de Rio-Zarès, by whom he had once seemed to
+be attracted. But it is precisely Dora whom André has married; and,
+learning this, Tékli tries to withdraw, or minimize, his imputation. For
+a moment a duel seems imminent; but André's friend, Favrolles, adjures
+him to keep his head; and the three men proceed to thrash the matter out
+as calmly as possible, with the result that, in the course of
+half-an-hour or so, it seems to be proved beyond all doubt that the
+woman André adores, and whom he has just married, is a treacherous spy,
+who sells to tyrannical foreign governments the lives of political
+exiles and the honour of the men who fall into her toils. The crushing
+suspicion is ultimately disproved, by one of the tricks in which Sardou
+delighted; but that does not here concern us. Artificial as are its
+causes and its consequences, the "scene of the three men," while it
+lasts, holds us breathless and absorbed; and André's fall from the
+pinnacle of happiness to the depth of misery, is a typical peripety.
+
+Equally typical and infinitely more tragic is another postnuptial
+peripety--the scene of the mutual confession of Angel Clare and Tess in
+Mr. Hardy's great novel. As it stands on the printed page, this scene is
+a superb piece of drama. Its greatness has been obscured in the English
+theatre by the general unskilfulness of the dramatic version presented.
+One magnificent scene does not make a play. In America, on the other
+hand, the fine acting of Mrs. Fiske secured popularity for a version
+which was, perhaps, rather better than that which we saw in England.
+
+I have said that dramatic peripeties are not infrequent in real life;
+and their scene, as is natural, is often laid in the law courts. It is
+unnecessary to recall the awful "reversal of fortune" that overtook one
+of the most brilliant of modern dramatists. About the same period,
+another drama of the English courts ended in a startling and terrible
+peripety. A young lady was staying as a guest with a half-pay officer
+and his wife. A valuable pearl belonging to the hostess disappeared; and
+the hostess accused her guest of having stolen it. The young lady, who
+had meanwhile married, brought an action for slander against her quondam
+friend. For several days the case continued, and everything seemed to be
+going in the plaintiff's favour. Major Blank, the defendant's husband,
+was ruthlessly cross-examined by Sir Charles Russell, afterwards Lord
+Chief Justice of England, with a view to showing that he was the real
+thief. He made a very bad witness, and things looked black against him.
+The end was nearing, and every one anticipated a verdict in the
+plaintiff's favour, when there came a sudden change of scene. The stolen
+pearl had been sold to a firm of jewellers, who had recorded the numbers
+of the Bank of England notes with which they paid for it. One of these
+notes was produced in court, and lo! it was endorsed with the name of
+the plaintiff.[3] In a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, the whole
+edifice of mendacity and perjury fell to pieces. The thief was arrested
+and imprisoned; but the peripety for her was less terrible than for her
+husband, who had married her in chivalrous faith in her innocence.
+
+Would it have been--or may it some day prove to be--possible to transfer
+this "well-made" drama of real life bodily to the stage? I am inclined
+to think not. It looks to me very much like one of those "blind alley"
+themes of which mention has been made. There is matter, indeed, for most
+painful drama in the relations of the husband and wife, both before and
+after the trial; but, from the psychological point of view, one can see
+nothing in the case but a distressing and inexplicable anomaly.[4] At
+the same time, the bare fact of the sudden and tremendous peripety is
+irresistibly dramatic; and Mr. Henry Arthur Jones has admitted that it
+suggested to him the great scene of the unmasking of Felicia Hindemarsh
+in _Mrs. Dane's Defence._
+
+It is instructive to note the delicate adjustment which Mr. Jones found
+necessary in order to adapt the theme to dramatic uses. In the first
+place, not wishing to plunge into the depths of tragedy, he left the
+heroine unmarried, though on the point of marriage. In the second place,
+he made the blot on her past, not a theft followed by an attempt to
+shift the guilt on to other shoulders, but an error of conduct, due to
+youth and inexperience, serious in itself, but rendered disastrous by
+tragic consequences over which she, Felicia, had no control. Thus Mr.
+Jones raised a real and fairly sufficient obstacle between his lovers,
+without rendering his heroine entirely unsympathetic, or presenting her
+in the guise of a bewildering moral anomaly. Thirdly, he transferred the
+scene of the peripety from a court of justice, with its difficult
+adjuncts and tedious procedure, to the private study of a great lawyer.
+At the opening of the scene between Mrs. Dane and Sir Daniel Carteret,
+she is, no doubt, still anxious and ill-at-ease, but reasonably
+confident of having averted all danger of exposure. Sir Daniel, too
+(like Sir Charles Russell in the pearl suit), is practically convinced
+of her innocence. He merely wants to get the case absolutely clear, for
+the final confounding of her accusers. At first, all goes smoothly. Mrs.
+Dane's answers to his questions are pat and plausible. Then she makes a
+single, almost imperceptible, slip of the tongue: she says, "We had
+governesses," instead of "I had governesses." Sir Daniel pricks up his
+ears: "We? You say you were an only child. Who's we?" "My cousin and I,"
+she answers. Sir Daniel thinks it odd that he has not heard of this
+cousin before; but he continues his interrogatory without serious
+suspicion. Then it occurs to him to look up, in a topographical
+dictionary, the little town of Tawhampton, where Mrs. Dane spent her
+youth. He reads the bald account of it, ending thus, "The living is a
+Vicarage, net yearly value £376, and has been held since 1875 by"--and
+he turns round upon her--"by the Rev. Francis Hindemarsh! Hindemarsh?"
+
+  Mrs. Dane: He was my uncle.
+
+  Sir Daniel: Your uncle?
+
+  Mrs. Dane: Sir Daniel, I've done wrong to hide from you that Felicia
+  Hindemarsh was my cousin.
+
+  Sir Daniel: Felicia Hindemarsh was your cousin!
+
+  Mrs. Dane: Can't you understand why I have hidden it? The whole
+  affair was so terrible.
+
+And so she stumbles on, from one inevitable admission to another, until
+the damning truth is clear that she herself is Felicia Hindemarsh, the
+central, though not the most guilty, figure in a horrible scandal.
+
+This scene is worthy of study as an excellent type of what may be called
+the judicial peripety, the crushing cross-examination, in which it is
+possible to combine the tension of the detective story with no small
+psychological subtlety. In Mr. Jones's scene, the psychology is obvious
+enough; but it is an admirable example of nice adjustment without any
+obtrusive ingenuity. The whole drama, in short, up to the last act is,
+in the exact sense of the word, a well-made play--complex yet clear,
+ingenious yet natural. In the comparative weakness of the last act we
+have a common characteristic of latter-day drama, which will have to be
+discussed in due course.
+
+In this case we have a peripety of external fortune. For a
+clearly-marked moral peripety we may turn to the great scene between
+Vivie and her mother in the second act of _Mrs. Warren's Profession._
+Whatever may be thought of the matter of this scene, its movement is
+excellent. After a short, sharp opening, which reveals to Mrs. Warren
+the unfilial dispositions of her daughter, and reduces her to whimpering
+dismay, the following little passage occurs:
+
+  Mrs. Warren: You're very rough with me, Vivie.
+
+  Vivie: Nonsense. What about bed? It's past ten.
+
+  Mrs. Warren (passionately): What's the use of my going to bed? Do
+  you think I could sleep?
+
+  Vivie: Why not? I shall.
+
+Then the mother turns upon the daughter's stony self-righteousness, and
+pours forth her sordid history in such a way as to throw a searchlight
+on the conditions which make such histories possible; until, exhausted
+by her outburst, she says, "Oh, dear! I do believe I am getting sleepy
+after all," and Vivie replies, "I believe it is I who will not be able
+to sleep now." Mr. Shaw, we see, is at pains to emphasize his peripety.
+
+Some "great scenes" consist, not of one decisive turning of the tables,
+but of a whole series of minor vicissitudes of fortune. Such a scene is
+the third act of _The Gay Lord Quex_, a prolonged and thrilling duel, in
+which Sophy Fullgarney passes by degrees from impertinent exultation to
+abject surrender and then springs up again to a mood of reckless
+defiance. In the "great scene" of _The Thunderbolt_, on the other
+hand--the scene of Thaddeus's false confession of having destroyed his
+brother's will--though there is, in fact, a great peripety, it is not
+that which attracts and absorbs our interest. All the greedy Mortimore
+family fall from the height of jubilant confidence in their new-found
+wealth to the depth of disappointment and exasperation. But this is not
+the aspect of the scene which grips and moves us. Our attention is
+centred on Thaddeus's struggle to take his wife's misdeed upon himself;
+and his failure cannot be described as a peripety, seeing that it sinks
+him only one degree lower in the slough of despair. Like the scene in
+Mrs. Dane's Defence, this is practically a piece of judicial drama--a
+hard-fought cross-examination. But as there is no reversal of fortune
+for the character in whom we are chiefly interested, it scarcely ranks
+as a scene of peripety.[5]
+
+Before leaving this subject, we may note that a favourite effect of
+romantic drama is an upward reversal of fortune through the
+recognition--the _anagnorisis_--of some great personage in disguise.
+Victor Hugo excelled in the superb gestures appropriate to such a scene:
+witness the passage in _Hernani_, before the tomb of Charlemagne, where
+the obscure bandit claims the right to take his place at the head of the
+princes and nobles whom the newly-elected Emperor has ordered off to
+execution:
+
+  Hernani:
+
+  Dieu qui donne le sceptre et qui te le donna
+  M'a fait duc de Segorbe et duc de Cardona,
+  Marquis de Monroy, comte Albatéra, vicomte
+  De Gor, seigneur de lieux dont j'ignore le compte.
+  Je suis Jean d'Aragon, grand maître d'Avis, né
+  Dans l'exil, fils proscrit d'un père assassiné
+  Par sentence du tien, roi Carlos de Castille.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+    (_Aux autres conjurés_)
+  Couvrons nous, grands d'Espagnol
+    (_Tous les Espagnols se couvrent_)
+      Oui, nos têtes, ô roi!
+  Ont le droit de tomber couvertes devant toi!
+
+An effective scene of this type occurs in _Monsieur Beaucaire_, where
+the supposed hairdresser is on the point of being ejected with contumely
+from the pump-room at Bath, when the French Ambassador enters, drops on
+his knee, kisses the young man's hand, and presents him to the astounded
+company as the Duc d'Orléans, Comte de Valois, and I know not what
+besides--a personage who immeasurably outshines the noblest of his
+insulters. Quieter, but not less telling, is the peripety in _The Little
+Father of the Wilderness_, by Messrs. Lloyd Osbourne and Austin Strong.
+The Père Marlotte, who, by his heroism and self-devotion, has added vast
+territories to the French possessions in America, is summoned to the
+court of Louis XV, and naturally concludes that the king has heard of
+his services and wishes to reward them. He finds, on the contrary, that
+he is wanted merely to decide a foolish bet; and he is treated with the
+grossest insolence and contempt. Just as he is departing in humiliation,
+the Governor-General of Canada arrives, with a suite of officers and
+Indians. The moment they are aware of Père Marlotte's presence, they all
+kneel to him and pay him deeper homage than they have paid to the king,
+who accepts the rebuke and joins in their demonstration.
+
+A famous peripety of the romantic order occurs in _H.M.S. Pinafore_,
+where, on the discovery that Captain Corcoran and Ralph Rackstraw have
+been changed at birth, Ralph instantly becomes captain of the ship,
+while the captain declines into an able-bodied seaman. This is one of
+the instances in which the idealism of art ekes out the imperfections
+of reality.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+[Footnote 1: That great spiritual drama known as the Book of Job opens,
+after the Prologue in Heaven, with one of the most startling of
+peripeties.]
+
+[Footnote 2: The first act of Mr. Gilbert Murray's _Carlyon Sahib_
+contains an incident of this nature; but it can scarcely be called a
+peripety, since the victim remains unconscious of his doom.]
+
+[Footnote 3: For the benefit of American readers, it may be well to
+state that the person who changes a Bank of England note is often asked
+to write his or her name on the back of it. It must have been in a
+moment of sheer aberration that the lady in question wrote her
+own name.]
+
+[Footnote 4: M. Bernstein, dishing up a similar theme with a piquant
+sauce of sensuality, made but a vulgar and trivial piece of work of it.]
+
+[Footnote 5: One of the most striking peripeties in recent English drama
+occurs in the third act of The Builder of Bridges, by Mr. Alfred Sutro.]
+
+
+
+
+_CHAPTER XV_
+
+PROBABILITY, CHANCE, AND COINCIDENCE
+
+
+Aristotle indulges in an often-quoted paradox to the effect that, in
+drama, the probable impossible is to be preferred to the improbable
+possible. With all respect, this seems to be a somewhat cumbrous way of
+stating the fact that plausibility is of more importance on the stage
+than what may be called demonstrable probability. There is no time, in
+the rush of a dramatic action, for a mathematical calculation of the
+chances for and against a given event, or for experimental proof that
+such and such a thing can or cannot be done. If a thing seem plausible,
+an audience will accept it without cavil; if it, seem incredible on the
+face of it, no evidence of its credibility will be of much avail. This
+is merely a corollary from the fundamental principle that the stage is
+the realm of appearances; not of realities, where paste jewels are at
+least as effective as real ones, and a painted forest is far more sylvan
+than a few wilted and drooping saplings, insecurely planted upon
+the boards.
+
+That is why an improbable or otherwise inacceptable incident cannot be
+validly defended on the plea that it actually happened: that it is on
+record in history or in the newspapers. In the first place, the
+dramatist can never put it on the stage as it happened. The bare fact
+may be historical, but it is not the bare fact that matters. The
+dramatist cannot restore it to its place in that intricate plexus of
+cause and effect, which is the essence and meaning of reality. He can
+only give his interpretation of the fact; and one knows not how to
+calculate the chances that his interpretation may be a false one. But
+even if this difficulty could be overcome; if the dramatist could prove
+that he had reproduced the event with photographic and cinematographic
+accuracy, his position would not thereby be improved. He would still
+have failed in his peculiar task, which is precisely that of
+interpretation. Not truth, but verisimilitude, is his aim; for the stage
+is the realm of appearances, in which intrusive realities become unreal.
+There are, as I have said, incalculable chances to one that the
+playwright's version of a given event will not coincide with that of the
+Recording Angel: but it may be true and convincing in relation to human
+nature in general, in which case it will belong to the sphere of great
+art; or, on a lower level, it may be agreeable and entertaining without
+being conspicuously false to human nature, in which case it will do no
+harm, since it makes no pretence to historic truth. It may be objected
+that the sixteenth-century public, and even, in the next century, the
+great Duke of Marlborough, got their knowledge of English history from
+Shakespeare, and the other writers of chronicle-plays. Well, I leave it
+to historians to determine whether this very defective and, in great
+measure, false vision of the past was better or worse than none. The
+danger at any rate, if danger there was, is now past and done with. Even
+our generals no longer go to the theatre or to the First Folio for their
+history. The dramatist may, with an easy conscience, interpret historic
+fact in the light of his general insight into human nature, so long as
+he does not so falsify the recorded event that common knowledge cries
+out against him.[1]
+
+Plausibility, then, not abstract or concrete probability, and still less
+literal faithfulness to recorded fact, is what the dramatist is bound to
+aim at. To understand this as a belittling of his art is to
+misunderstand the nature of art in general. The plausibility of bad art
+is doubtless contemptible and may be harmful. But to say that good art
+must be plausible is only to say that not every sort of truth, or every
+aspect of truth, is equally suitable for artistic representation--or, in
+more general terms, that the artist, without prejudice to his allegiance
+to nature, must respect the conditions of the medium in which he works.
+
+Our standards of plausibility, however, are far from being invariable.
+To each separate form of art, a different standard is applicable. In
+what may roughly be called realistic art, the terms plausible and
+probable are very nearly interchangeable. Where the dramatist appeals to
+the sanction of our own experience and knowledge, he must not introduce
+matter against which our experience and knowledge cry out. A very small
+inaccuracy in a picture which is otherwise photographic will often have
+a very disturbing effect. In plays of society in particular, the
+criticism "No one does such things," is held by a large class of
+playgoers to be conclusive and destructive. One has known people despise
+a play because Lady So-and-so's manner of speaking to her servants was
+not what they (the cavillers) were accustomed to. On the other hand, one
+has heard a whole production highly applauded because the buttons on a
+particular uniform were absolutely right. This merely means that when an
+effort after literal accuracy is apparent, the attention of the audience
+seizes on the most trifling details and is apt to magnify their
+importance. Niceties of language in especial are keenly, and often
+unjustly, criticized. If a particular expression does not happen to be
+current in the critic's own circle, he concludes that nobody uses it,
+and that the author is a pedant or a vulgarian. In view of this
+inevitable tendency, the prudent dramatist will try to keep out of his
+dialogue expressions that are peculiar to his own circle, and to use
+only what may be called everybody's English, or the language undoubtedly
+current throughout the whole class to which his personage belongs.
+
+It may be here pointed out that there are three different planes on
+which plausibility may or may not, be achieved. There is first the
+purely external plane, which concerns the producer almost as much as the
+playwright. On this plane we look for plausibility of costume, of
+manners, of dialect, of general environment. Then we have plausibility
+of what may be called uncharacteristic event--of such events as are
+independent of the will of the characters, and are not conditioned by
+their psychology. On this plane we have to deal with chance and
+accident, coincidence, and all "circumstances over which we have no
+control." For instance, the playwright who makes the "Marseillaise"
+become popular throughout Paris within half-an-hour of its having left
+the composer's desk, is guilty of a breach of plausibility on this
+plane. So, too, if I were to make my hero enter Parliament for the first
+time, and rise in a single session to be Prime Minister of
+England--there would be no absolute impossibility in the feat, but it
+would be a rather gross improbability of the second order. On the third
+plane we come to psychological plausibility, the plausibility of events
+dependent mainly or entirely on character. For example--to cite a much
+disputed instance--is it plausible that Nora, in _A Doll's House_,
+should suddenly develop the mastery of dialectics with which she crushes
+Helmer in the final scene, and should desert her husband and children,
+slamming the door behind her?
+
+It need scarcely be said that plausibility on the third plane is vastly
+the most important. A very austere criticism might even call it the one
+thing worth consideration. But, as a matter of fact, when we speak of
+plausibility, it is almost always the second plane--the plane of
+uncharacteristic circumstance--that we have in mind. To plausibility of
+the third order we give a more imposing name--we call it truth. We say
+that Nora's action is true--or untrue--to nature. We speak of the truth
+with which the madness of Lear, the malignity of Iago, the race hatred
+of Shylock, is portrayed. Truth, in fact, is the term which we use in
+cases where the tests to be applied are those of introspection,
+intuition, or knowledge sub-consciously garnered from spiritual
+experience. Where the tests are external, and matters of common
+knowledge or tangible evidence, we speak of plausibility.
+
+It would be a mistake, however, to imagine that because plausibility of
+the third degree, or truth, is the noblest attribute of drama, it is
+therefore the one thing needful. In some forms of drama it is greatly
+impaired, or absolutely nullified, if plausibility of the second degree,
+its necessary preliminary, be not carefully secured. In the case above
+imagined, for instance, of the young politician who should become Prime
+Minister immediately on entering Parliament: it would matter nothing
+with what profundity of knowledge or subtlety of skill the character was
+drawn: we should none the less decline to believe in him. Some
+dramatists, as a matter of fact, find it much easier to attain truth of
+character than plausibility of incident. Every one who is in the habit
+of reading manuscript plays, must have come across the would-be
+playwright who has a good deal of general ability and a considerable
+power of characterization, but seems to be congenitally deficient in the
+sense of external reality, so that the one thing he (or she) can by no
+means do is to invent or conduct an action that shall be in the least
+like any sequence of events in real life. It is naturally difficult to
+give examples, for the plays composed under this curious limitation are
+apt to remain in manuscript, or to be produced for one performance, and
+forgotten. There is, however, one recent play of this order which holds
+a certain place in dramatic literature. I do not know that Mr. Granville
+Barker was well-advised in printing _The Marrying of Anne Leete_ along
+with such immeasurably maturer and saner productions as _The Voysey
+Inheritance_ and _Waste_; but by doing so he has served my present purpose
+in providing me with a perfect example of a play as to which we cannot
+tell whether it possesses plausibility of the third degree, so
+absolutely does it lack that plausibility of the second degree which is
+its indispensable condition precedent.
+
+Francisque Sarcey was fond of insisting that an audience would generally
+accept without cavil any postulates in reason which an author chose to
+impose upon it, with regard to events supposed to have occurred before
+the rise of the curtain; always provided that the consequences deduced
+from them within the limits of the play were logical, plausible, and
+entertaining. The public will swallow a camel, he would maintain, in the
+past, though they will strain at a gnat in the present. A classical
+example of this principle is (once more) the _Oedipus Rex_, in which
+several of the initial postulates are wildly improbable: for instance,
+that Oedipus should never have inquired into the circumstances of the
+death of Laius, and that, having been warned by an oracle that he was
+doomed to marry his mother, he should not have been careful, before
+marrying any woman, to ascertain that she was younger than himself.
+There is at least so much justification for Sarcey's favourite
+principle, that we are less apt to scrutinize things merely narrated to
+us than events which take place before our eyes. It is simply a special
+instance of the well-worn
+
+  "Segnius irritant animos demissa per aurem
+  Quam quae sunt oculis subjecta fidelibus."
+
+But the principle is of very limited artistic validity. No one would
+nowadays think of justifying a gross improbability in the antecedents of
+a play by Ibsen or Sir Arthur Pinero, by Mr. Galsworthy or Mr. Granville
+Barker, on the plea that it occurred outside the frame of the picture.
+Such a plea might, indeed, secure a mitigation of sentence, but never a
+verdict of acquittal. Sarcey, on the other hand, brought up in the
+school of the "well-made" play, would rather have held it a feather in
+the playwright's cap that he should have known just where, and just how,
+he might safely outrage probability [2]. The inference is that we now
+take the dramatist's art more seriously than did the generation of the
+Second Empire in France.
+
+This brings us, however, to an important fact, which must by no means be
+overlooked. There is a large class of plays--or rather, there are
+several classes of plays, some of them not at all to be despised--the
+charm of which resides, not in probability, but in ingenious and
+delightful improbability. I am, of course, not thinking of sheer
+fantasies, like _A Midsummer Night's Dream_, or _Peter Pan_, or _The
+Blue Bird_. They may, indeed, possess plausibility of the third order,
+but plausibility of the second order has no application to them. Its
+writs do not run on their extramundane plane. The plays which appeal to
+us in virtue of their pleasant departures from probability are romances,
+farces, a certain order of light comedies and semi-comic melodramas--in
+short, the thousand and one plays in which the author, without
+altogether despising and abjuring truth, makes it on principle
+subsidiary to delightfulness. Plays of the _Prisoner of Zenda_ type
+would come under this head: so would Sir Arthur Pinero's farces, _The
+Magistrate_, _The Schoolmistress_, _Dandy Dick_; so would Mr. Carton's
+light comedies, _Lord and Lady Algy_, _Wheels within Wheels_, _Lady
+Huntworth's Experiment_; so would most of Mr. Barrie's comedies; so
+would Mr. Arnold Bennett's play, _The Honeymoon_. In a previous chapter
+I have sketched the opening act of Mr. Carton's _Wheels within Wheels_,
+which is a typical example of this style of work. Its charm lies in a
+subtle, all-pervading improbability, an infusion of fantasy so delicate
+that, while at no point can one say, "This is impossible," the total
+effect is far more entertaining than that of any probable sequence of
+events in real life. The whole atmosphere of such a play should be
+impregnated with humour, without reaching that gross supersaturation
+which we find in the lower order of farce-plays of the type of
+_Charlie's Aunt_ or _Niobe_.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Plausibility of development, as distinct from plausibility of theme or
+of character, depends very largely on the judicious handling of chance,
+and the exclusion, or very sparing employment, of coincidence. This is a
+matter of importance, into which we shall find it worth while to look
+somewhat closely.
+
+It is not always clearly recognized that chance and coincidence are by
+no means the same thing. Coincidence is a special and complex form of
+chance, which ought by no means to be confounded with the everyday
+variety. We need not here analyse chance, or discuss the philosophic
+value of the term. It is enough that we all know what we mean by it in
+common parlance. It may be well, however, to look into the etymology of
+the two words we are considering. They both come ultimately, from the
+Latin "cadere," to fall. Chance is a falling-out, like that of a die
+from the dice-box; and coincidence signifies one falling-out on the top
+of another, the concurrent happening of two or more chances which
+resemble or somehow fit into each other. If you rattle six dice in a box
+and throw them, and they turn up at haphazard--say, two aces, a deuce,
+two fours, and a six--there is nothing remarkable in this falling out.
+But if they all turn up sixes, you at once suspect that the dice are
+cogged; and if that be not so--if there be no sufficient cause behind
+the phenomenon--you say that this identical falling-out of six separate
+possibilities was a remarkable coincidence. Now, applying the
+illustration to drama, I should say that the playwright is perfectly
+justified in letting chance play its probable and even inevitable part
+in the affairs of his characters; but that, the moment we suspect him of
+cogging the dice, we feel that he is taking an unfair advantage of us,
+and our imagination either cries, "I won't play!" or continues the game
+under protest.
+
+Some critics have considered it a flaw in Shakespeare's art that the
+catastrophe of _Romeo and Juliet_ should depend upon a series of
+chances, and especially on the miscarriage of the Friar's letter to
+Romeo. This is not, I think, a valid criticism. We may, if we are so
+minded, pick to pieces the course of action which brought these chances
+into play. The device of the potion--even if such a drug were known to
+the pharmacopoeia--is certainly a very clumsy method of escape from the
+position in which Juliet is placed by her father's obstinacy. But when
+once we have accepted that integral part of the legend, the intervention
+of chance in the catastrophe is entirely natural and probable. Observe
+that there is no coincidence in the matter, no interlinking or
+dovetailing of chances. The catastrophe results from the hot-headed
+impetuosity of all the characters, which so hurries events that there is
+no time for the elimination of the results of chance. Letters do
+constantly go astray, even under our highly-organized system of
+conveyance; but their delay or disappearance seldom leads to tragic
+results, because most of us have learnt to take things calmly and wait
+for the next post. Yet if we could survey the world at large, it is
+highly probable that every day or every hour we should somewhere or
+other find some Romeo on the verge of committing suicide because of a
+chance misunderstanding with regard to his Juliet; and in a certain
+percentage of cases the explanatory letter or telegram would doubtless
+arrive too late.
+
+We all remember how, in Mr. Hardy's _Tess_, the main trouble arises from
+the fact that the letter pushed under Angel Clare's door slips also
+under the carpet of his room, and so is never discovered. This is an
+entirely probable chance; and the sternest criticism would hardly call
+it a flaw in the structure of the fable. But take another case: Madame X
+has had a child, of whom she has lost sight for more than twenty years,
+during which she has lived abroad. She returns to France, and
+immediately on landing at Bordeaux she kills a man who accompanies her.
+The court assigns her defence to a young advocate, and this young
+advocate happens to be her son. We have here a piling of chance upon
+chance, in which the long arm of coincidence[3] is very apparent. The
+coincidence would have been less startling had she returned to the place
+where she left her son and where she believed him to be. But no! she
+left him in Paris, and it is only by a series of pure chances that he
+happens to be in Bordeaux, where she happens to land, and happens to
+shoot a man. For the sake of a certain order of emotional effect, a
+certain order of audience is willing to accept this piling up of
+chances; but it relegates the play to a low and childish plane of art.
+The _Oedipus Rex_, indeed--which meets us at every turn--is founded on
+an absolutely astounding series of coincidences; but here the conception
+of fate comes in, and we vaguely figure to ourselves some malignant
+power deliberately pulling the strings which guide its puppets into such
+abhorrent tangles. On the modern view that "character is destiny," the
+conception of supernatural wire-pulling is excluded. It is true that
+amazing coincidences do occur in life; but when they are invented to
+serve an artist's purposes, we feel that he is simplifying his task
+altogether beyond reason, and substituting for normal and probable
+development an irrelevant plunge into the merely marvellous.
+
+Of the abuse of coincidence, I have already given a specimen in speaking
+of _The Rise of Dick Halward_ (Chapter XII). One or two more examples
+may not be out of place. I need not dwell on the significance of the
+fact that most of them occur in forgotten plays.
+
+In _The Man of Forty_, by Mr. Walter Frith, we find the following
+conjuncture of circumstances: Mr. Lewis Dunster has a long-lost wife and
+a long-lost brother. He has been for years in South Africa; they have
+meanwhile lived in London, but they do not know each other, and have
+held no communication. Lewis, returning from Africa, arrives in London.
+He does not know where to find either wife or brother, and has not the
+slightest wish to look for them; yet in the first house he goes to, the
+home of a lady whose acquaintance he chanced to make on the voyage, he
+encounters both his wife and his brother! Not quite so startling is the
+coincidence on which _Mrs. Willoughby's Kiss_, by Mr. Frank Stayton, is
+founded. An upper and lower flat in West Kensington are inhabited,
+respectively, by Mrs. Brandram and Mrs. Willoughby, whose husbands have
+both been many years absent in India. By pure chance the two husbands
+come home in the same ship; the two wives go to Plymouth to meet them,
+and by pure chance, for they are totally unacquainted with each other,
+they go to the same hotel; whence it happens that Mrs. Willoughby,
+meeting Mr. Brandram in a half-lighted room, takes him for her husband,
+flies to his arms and kisses him. More elaborate than either of these is
+the tangle of coincidences in Mr. Stuart Ogilvie's play, _The
+White Knight_--
+
+Giulietta, the ward of David Pennycuick, goes to study singing at Milan.
+Mr. Harry Rook, Pennycuick's most intimate friend, meets her by chance
+in Milan, and she becomes his mistress, neither having the least idea
+that the other knows Pennycuick. Then Viscount Hintlesham, like
+Pennycuick, a dupe of Rook's, meets her by chance at Monte Carlo and
+falls in love with her. He does not know that she knows Rook or
+Pennycuick, and she does not know that he knows them. Arriving in
+England, she finds in the manager, the promoter, and the chairman of the
+Electric White Lead Company her guardian, her seducer, and her lover.
+When she comes to see her guardian, the first person she meets is her
+seducer, and she learns that her lover has just left the house. Up to
+that moment, I repeat, she did not know that any one of these men knew
+any other; yet she does not even say, "How small the world is!"[4]
+Surely some such observation was obligatory under the circumstances.
+
+Let us turn now to a more memorable piece of work; that interesting play
+of Sir Arthur Pinero's transition period, _The Profligate_. Here the
+great situation of the third act is brought about by a chain of
+coincidences which would be utterly unthinkable in the author's maturer
+work. Leslie Brudenell, the heroine, is the ward of Mr. Cheal, a
+solicitor. She is to be married to Dunstan Renshaw; and, as she has no
+home, the bridal party meets at Mr. Cheal's office before proceeding to
+the registrar's. No sooner have they departed than Janet Preece, who has
+been betrayed and deserted by Dunstan Renshaw (under an assumed name)
+comes to the office to state her piteous case. This is not in itself a
+pure coincidence; for Janet happened to come to London in the same train
+with Leslie Brudenell and her brother Wilfrid; and Wilfrid, seeing in
+her a damsel in distress, recommended her to lay her troubles before a
+respectable solicitor, giving her Mr. Cheal's address. So far, then, the
+coincidence is not startling. It is natural enough that Renshaw's
+mistress and his betrothed should live in the same country town; and it
+is not improbable that they should come to London by the same train, and
+that Wilfrid Brudenell should give the bewildered and weeping young
+woman a commonplace piece of advice. The concatenation of circumstances
+is remarkable rather than improbable. But when, in the next act, not a
+month later, Janet Preece, by pure chance, drops in at the Florentine
+villa where Renshaw and Leslie are spending their honeymoon, we feel
+that the long arm of coincidence is stretched to its uttermost, and that
+even the thrilling situation which follows is very dearly bought. It
+would not have been difficult to attenuate the coincidence. What has
+actually happened is this: Janet has (we know not how) become a sort of
+maid-companion to a Mrs. Stonehay, whose daughter was a school-friend of
+Leslie's; the Stonehays have come to Florence, knowing nothing of
+Leslie's presence there; and they happen to visit the villa in order to
+see a fresco which it contains. If, now, we had been told that Janet's
+engagement by the Stonehays had resulted from her visit to Mr. Cheal,
+and that the Stonehays had come to Florence knowing Leslie to be there,
+and eager to find her, several links would have been struck off the
+chain of coincidence; or, to put it more exactly, a fairly coherent
+sequence of events would have been substituted for a series of
+incoherent chances. The same result might no doubt have been achieved in
+many other and neater ways. I merely indicate, by way of illustration, a
+quite obvious method of reducing the element of coincidence in the case.
+
+The coincidence in _The Second Mrs. Tanqueray_, by which Ellean meets
+and falls in love with one of Paula's ex-lovers, has been very severely
+criticized. It is certainly not one of the strong points of the play;
+but, unlike the series of chances we have just been examining, it places
+no excessive strain on our credulity. Such coincidences do occur in real
+life; we have all of us seen or heard of them; the worst we can say of
+this one is that it is neither positively good nor positively bad--a
+piece of indifferent craftsmanship. On the other hand, if we turn to
+_Letty_, the chance which, in the third act, leads Letchmere's party and
+Mandeville's party to choose the same restaurant, seems to me entirely
+justified. It is not really a coincidence at all, but one of those
+everyday happenings which are not only admissible in drama, but
+positively desirable, as part of the ordinary surface-texture of life.
+Entirely to eliminate chance from our representation of life would be a
+very unreasonable austerity. Strictly speaking, indeed, it is
+impossible; for even when we have worked out an unbroken chain of
+rational and commensurate causes and effects, it remains a chance, and
+an unlikely chance, that chance should not have interfered with it.
+
+All the plays touched upon in the last four paragraphs are in intention
+realistic. They aim, that is to say, at a literal and sober
+representation of life. In the other class of plays, which seek their
+effect, not in plodding probability, but in delightful improbability,
+the long arm of coincidence has its legitimate functions. Yet even here
+it is not quite unfettered. One of the most agreeable coincidences in
+fiction, I take it, is the simultaneous arrival in Bagdad, from
+different quarters of the globe, of three one-eyed calenders, all blind
+of the right eye, and all, in reality, the sons of kings. But it is to
+be noted that this coincidence is not a crucial occurrence in a story,
+but only a part of the story-teller's framework or mechanism--a device
+for introducing fresh series of adventures. This illustrates the
+Sarceyan principle above referred to, which Professor Brander Matthews
+has re-stated in what seems to me an entirely acceptable form--namely,
+that improbabilities which may be admitted on the outskirts of an
+action, must be rigidly excluded when the issue is joined and we are in
+the thick of things. Coincidences, in fact, become the more improbable
+in the direct ratio of their importance. We have all, in our own
+experience, met with amazing coincidences; but how few of us have ever
+gained or lost, been made happy or unhappy, by a coincidence, as
+distinct from a chance! It is not precisely probable that three
+brothers, who have separated in early life, and have not heard of one
+another for twenty years, should find themselves seated side by side at
+an Italian _table-d'hôte_; yet such coincidences have occurred, and are
+creditable enough so long as nothing particular comes of them. But if a
+dramatist were to make these three brothers meet in Messina on the eve
+of the earthquake, in order that they might all be killed, and thus
+enable his hero (their cousin) to succeed to a peerage and marry the
+heroine, we should say that his use of coincidence was not strictly
+artistic. A coincidence, in short, which coincides with a crisis is
+thereby raised to the _n_th power, and is wholly inacceptable in serious
+art. Mr. Bernard Shaw has based the action of _You Never Can Tell_ on
+the amazing coincidence that Mrs. Clandon and her children, coming to
+England after eighteen years' absence, should by pure chance run
+straight into the arms, or rather into the teeth, of the husband and
+father whom the mother, at any rate, only wishes to avoid. This is no
+bad starting-point for an extravaganza; but even Mr. Shaw, though a
+despiser of niceties of craftsmanship, introduces no coincidences into
+serious plays such as _Candida_ or _The Doctor's Dilemma_.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+[Footnote 1: The malignant caricature of Cromwell in W.G. Wills'
+_Charles_ I did not, indeed, prevent the acceptance of the play by the
+mid-Victorian public; but it will certainly shorten the life of the one
+play which might have secured for its author a lasting place in dramatic
+literature. It is unimaginable that future generations should accept a
+representation of Cromwell as
+
+  "A mouthing patriot, with an itching palm,
+  In one hand menace, in the other greed."]
+
+[Footnote 2: It is only fair to say that Sarcey drew a distinction
+between antecedent _events_ and what he calls "postulates of character."
+He did not maintain that an audience ought to accept a psychological
+impossibility, merely because it was placed outside the frame of the
+picture. See _Quarante Ans de Théâtre_, vii, p. 395.]
+
+[Footnote 3: This phrase, which occurs in Mr. Haddon Chambers's romantic
+melodrama, _Captain Swift_, was greeted with a burst of laughter by the
+first-night audience; but little did we then think that Mr. Chambers was
+enriching the English language. It is not, on examination, a
+particularly luminous phrase: "the three or four arms of coincidence"
+would really be more to the point. But it is not always the most
+accurate expression that is fittest to survive.]
+
+[Footnote 4: The abuse of coincidence is a legacy to modern drama from
+the Latin comedy, which, again, was founded on the Greek New Comedy. It
+is worth noting that in the days of Menander the world really was much
+smaller than it is to-day, when "thalassic" has grown into "oceanic"
+civilization. Travellers in those days followed a few main routes; half
+a dozen great seaports were rendezvous for all the world; the
+slave-trade was active, and kidnappings and abductions with the
+corresponding meetings and recognitions were no doubt frequent. Thus
+such a plot as that of the _Menaechmi_ was by no means the sheer
+impossibility which Shakespeare made it by attaching indistinguishable
+Dromios to his indistinguishable Antipholuses. To reduplicate a
+coincidence is in fact to multiply it by a figure far beyond my
+mathematics. It may be noted, too, that the practice of exposing
+children, on which the _Oedipus_, and many plays of Menander, are
+founded, was common in historic Greece, and that the hapless children
+were generally provided with identification-tokens _gnorismata_.]
+
+
+
+
+_CHAPTER XVI_
+
+LOGIC
+
+
+The term logic is often very vaguely used in relation to drama. French
+writers especially, who regard logic as one of the peculiar faculties of
+their national genius, are apt to insist upon it in and out of season.
+But, as we have already seen, logic is a gift which may easily be
+misapplied. It too often leads such writers as M. Brieux and M. Hervieu
+to sacrifice the undulant and diverse rhythms of life to a stiff and
+symmetrical formalism. The conception of a play as the exhaustive
+demonstration of a thesis has never taken a strong hold on the
+Anglo-Saxon mind; and, though some of M. Brieux's plays are much more
+than mere dramatic arguments, we need not, in the main, envy the French
+their logician-dramatists.
+
+But, though the presence of logic should never be forced upon the
+spectator's attention, still less should he be disturbed and baffled by
+its conspicuous absence. If the playwright announces a theme at all: if
+he lets it be seen that some general idea underlies his work: he is
+bound to present and develop that idea in a logical fashion, not to
+shift his ground, whether inadvertently or insidiously, and not to
+wander off into irrelevant side-issues. He must face his problem
+squarely. If he sets forth to prove anything at all, he must prove that
+thing and not some totally different thing. He must beware of the
+red-herring across the trail.
+
+For a clear example of defective logic, I turn to a French
+play--Sardou's _Spiritisme_. Both from internal and from external
+evidence, it is certain that M. Sardou was a believer in
+spiritualism--in the existence of disembodied intelligences, and their
+power of communicating with the living. Yet he had not the courage to
+assign to them an essential part in his drama. The spirits hover round
+the outskirts of the action, but do not really or effectually intervene
+in it. The hero's _belief_ in them, indeed, helps to bring about the
+conclusion; but the apparition which so potently works upon him is an
+admitted imposture, a pious fraud. Earlier in the play, two or three
+trivial and unnecessary miracles are introduced--just enough to hint at
+the author's faith without decisively affirming it. For instance:
+towards the close of Act I Madame d'Aubenas has gone off, nominally to
+take the night train for Poitiers, in reality to pay a visit to her
+lover, M. de Stoudza. When she has gone, her husband and his guests
+arrange a séance and evoke a spirit. No sooner have preliminaries been
+settled than the spirit spells out the word "O-u-v-r-e-z." They open the
+window, and behold! the sky is red with a glare which proves to proceed
+from the burning of the train in which Madame d'Aubenas is supposed to
+have started. The incident is effective enough, and a little creepy; but
+its effect is quite incommensurate with the strain upon our powers of
+belief. The thing is supposed to be a miracle, of that there can be no
+doubt; but it has not the smallest influence on the course of the play,
+except to bring on the hurry-scurry and alarm a few minutes earlier than
+might otherwise have been the case. Now, if the spirit, instead of
+merely announcing the accident, had informed M. d'Aubenas that his wife
+was not in it--if, for example, it had rapped out "Gilberte chez
+Stoudza"--it would have been an honest ghost (though indiscreet), and we
+should not have felt that our credulity had been taxed to no purpose. As
+it is, the logical deduction from M. Sardou's fable is that, though
+spirit communications are genuine enough, they are never of the
+slightest use; but we can scarcely suppose that that was what he
+intended to convey.
+
+It may be said, and perhaps with truth, that what Sardou lacked in this
+instance was not logic, but courage: he felt that an audience would
+accept episodic miracles, but would reject supernatural interference at
+a determining crisis in the play. In that case he would have done better
+to let the theme alone: for the manifest failure of logic leaves the
+play neither good drama nor good argument. This is a totally different
+matter from Ibsen's treatment of the supernatural in such plays as _The
+Lady from the Sea_, _The Master Builder_ and _Little Eyolf_. Ibsen, like
+Hawthorne, suggests without affirming the action of occult powers. He
+shows us nothing that is not capable of a perfectly natural explanation;
+but he leaves us to imagine, if we are so disposed, that there may be
+influences at work that are not yet formally recognized in physics and
+psychology. In this there is nothing illogical. The poet is merely
+appealing to a mood, familiar to all of us, in which we wonder whether
+there may not be more things in heaven and earth than are crystallized
+in our scientific formulas.
+
+It is a grave defect of logic to state, or hint at, a problem, and then
+illustrate it in such terms of character that it is solved in advance.
+In _The Liars_, by Mr. Henry Arthur Jones, there is an evident
+suggestion of the problem whether a man is ever justified in rescuing a
+woman, by means of the Divorce Court, from marital bondage which her
+soul abhors. The sententious Sir Christopher Deering argues the matter
+at great length: but all the time we are hungering for him to say the
+one thing demanded by the logic of the situation: to wit: "Whatever the
+abstract rights and wrongs of the case, this man would be an imbecile to
+elope with this woman, who is an empty-headed, empty-hearted creature,
+incapable either of the passion or of the loathing which alone could
+lend any semblance of reason to a breach of social law." Similarly, in
+_The Profligate_, Sir Arthur Pinero no doubt intended us to reflect upon
+the question whether, in entering upon marriage, a woman has a right to
+assume in her husband the same purity of antecedent conduct which he
+demands of her. That is an arguable question, and it has been argued
+often enough; but in this play it does not really arise, for the husband
+presented to us is no ordinary loose-liver, but (it would seem--for the
+case is not clearly stated) a particularly base and heartless seducer,
+whom it is evidently a misfortune for any woman to have married. The
+authors of these two plays have committed an identical error of logic:
+namely, that of suggesting a broad issue, and then stating such a set of
+circumstances that the issue does not really arise. In other words, they
+have from the outset begged the question. The plays, it may be said,
+were both successful in their day. Yes; but had they been logical their
+day might have lasted a century. A somewhat similar defect of logic
+constitutes a fatal blemish in _The Ideal Husband_, by Oscar Wilde.
+Intentionally or otherwise, the question suggested is whether a single
+flaw of conduct (the betrayal to financiers of a state secret) ought to
+blast a political career. Here, again, is an arguable point, on the
+assumption that the statesman is penitent and determined never to repeat
+his misdeed; but when we find that this particular statesman is prepared
+to go on betraying his country indefinitely, in order to save his own
+skin, the question falls to the ground--the answer is too obvious.
+
+It happened some years ago that two plays satirizing "yellow journalism"
+were produced almost simultaneously in London--_The Earth_ by Mr. James
+B. Fagan, and _What the Public Wants_ by Mr. Arnold Bennett. In point of
+intellectual grasp, or power of characterization, there could be no
+comparison between the two writers; yet I hold that, from the point of
+view of dramatic composition, _The Earth_ was the better play of the
+two, simply because it dealt logically with the theme announced, instead
+of wandering away into all sorts of irrelevances. Mr. Bennett, to begin
+with, could not resist making his Napoleon of the Press a native of the
+"Five Towns," and exhibiting him at large in provincial middle-class
+surroundings. All this is sheer irrelevance; for the type of journalism
+in question is not characteristically an outcome of any phase of
+provincial life. Mr. Bennett may allege that Sir Charles Worgan had to
+be born somewhere, and might as well be born in Bursley as anywhere
+else. I reply that, for the purposes of the play, he need not have been
+born anywhere. His birthplace and the surroundings of his boyhood have
+nothing to do with what may be called his journalistic psychology, which
+is, or ought to be, the theme of the play. Then, again, Mr. Bennett
+shows him dabbling in theatrical management and falling in
+love--irrelevances both. As a manager, no doubt, he insists on doing
+"what the public wants" (it is nothing worse than a revival of _The
+Merchant of Venice_) and thus offers another illustration of the results
+of obeying that principle. But all this is beside the real issue. The
+true gravamen of the charge against a Napoleon of the Press is not that
+he gives the public what it wants, but that he can make the public want
+what _he_ wants, think what _he_ thinks, believe what _he_ wants them to
+believe, and do what _he_ wants them to do. By dint of assertion,
+innuendo, and iteration in a hundred papers, he can create an apparent
+public opinion, or public emotion, which may be directed towards the
+most dangerous ends. This point Mr. Bennett entirely missed. What he
+gave us was in reality a comedy of middle-class life with a number of
+incidental allusions to "yellow" journalism and kindred topics. Mr.
+Fagan, working in broader outlines, and, it must be owned, in cruder
+colours, never strayed from the logical line of development, and took us
+much nearer the heart of his subject.
+
+A somewhat different, and very common, fault of logic was exemplified in
+Mr. Clyde Fitch's last play, _The City_. His theme, as announced in his
+title and indicated in his exposition, was the influence of New York
+upon a family which migrates thither from a provincial town. But the
+action is not really shaped by the influence of "the city." It might
+have taken practically the same course if the family had remained at
+home. The author had failed to establish a logical connection between
+his theme and the incidents supposed to illustrate it.[1]
+
+Fantastic plays, which assume an order of things more or less exempt
+from the limitations of physical reality, ought, nevertheless, to be
+logically faithful to their own assumptions. Some fantasies, indeed,
+which sinned against this principle, have had no small success. In
+_Pygmalion and Galatea_, for example, there is a conspicuous lack of
+logic. The following passage from a criticism of thirty years ago puts
+my point so clearly that I am tempted to copy it:
+
+  As we have no scientific record of a statue coming to life, the
+  probable moral and intellectual condition of a being so created is
+  left to the widest conjecture. The playwright may assume for it any
+  stage of development he pleases, and his audience will readily grant
+  his assumption. But if his work is to have any claim to artistic
+  value, he must not assume all sorts of different stages of
+  development at every second word his creation utters. He must not
+  make her a child in one speech, a woman of the world in the next,
+  and an idiot in the next again. Of course, it would be an extremely
+  difficult task clearly to define in all its bearings and details the
+  particular intellectual condition assumed at the outset, and then
+  gradually to indicate the natural growth of a fuller consciousness.
+  Difficult it would be, but by no means impossible; nay, it would be
+  this very problem which would tempt the true dramatist to adopt such
+  a theme. Mr. Gilbert has not essayed the task. He regulates
+  Galatea's state of consciousness by the fluctuating exigencies of
+  dialogue whose humour is levelled straight at the heads of the old
+  Haymarket pit.
+
+To indicate the nature of the inconsistencies which abound in every
+scene, I may say that, in the first act, Galatea does not know that she
+is a woman, but understands the word "beauty," knows (though Pygmalion
+is the only living creature she has ever seen) the meaning of agreement
+and difference of taste, and is alive to the distinction between an
+original and a copy. In the second act she has got the length of knowing
+the enormity of taking life, and appreciating the fine distinction
+between taking it of one's own motive, and taking it for money. Yet the
+next moment, when Leucippe enters with a fawn he has killed, it appears
+that she does not realize the difference between man and the brute
+creation. Thus we are for ever shifting from one plane of convention to
+another. There is no fixed starting-point for our imagination, no
+logical development of a clearly-stated initial condition. The play, it
+is true, enjoyed some five-and-twenty years of life; but it certainly
+cannot claim an enduring place either in literature or on the stage. It
+is still open to the philosophic dramatist to write a logical _Pygmalion
+and Galatea_.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+[Footnote 1: I am here writing from memory, having been unable to obtain
+a copy of _The City_; but my memory is pretty clear.]
+
+
+
+
+_CHAPTER XVII_
+
+KEEPING A SECRET
+
+
+It has been often and authoritatively laid down that a dramatist must on
+no account keep a secret from his audience. Like most authoritative
+maxims, this one seems to require a good deal of qualification. Let us
+look into the matter a little more closely.
+
+So far as I can see, the strongest reason against keeping a secret is
+that, try as you may, you cannot do it. This point has already been
+discussed in Chapter IX, where we saw that from only one audience can a
+secret be really hidden, a considerable percentage of any subsequent
+audience being certain to know all about it in advance. The more
+striking and successful is the first-night effect of surprise, the more
+certainly and rapidly will the report of it circulate through all strata
+of the theatrical public. But for this fact, one could quite well
+conceive a fascinating melodrama constructed, like a detective story,
+with a view to keeping the audience in the dark as long as possible. A
+pistol shot might ring out just before the rise of the curtain: a man
+(or woman) might be discovered in an otherwise empty room, weltering in
+his (or her) gore: and the remainder of the play might consist in the
+tracking down of the murderer, who would, of course, prove to be the
+very last person to be suspected. Such a play might make a great
+first-night success; but the more the author relied upon the mystery for
+his effect, the more fatally would that effect be discounted at each
+successive repetition.
+
+One author of distinction, M. Hervieu, has actually made the experiment
+of presenting an enigma--he calls the play _L'Enigme_--and reserving the
+solution to the very end. We know from the outset that one of two
+sisters-in-law is unfaithful to her husband, and the question is--which?
+The whole ingenuity of the author is centred on keeping the secret, and
+the spectator who does not know it in advance is all the time in the
+attitude of a detective questing for clues. He is challenged to guess
+which of the ladies is the frail one; and he is far too intent on this
+game to think or care about the emotional process of the play. I myself
+(I remember) guessed right, mainly because the name Giselle seemed to me
+more suggestive of flightiness than the staid and sober Leonore,
+wherefore I suspected that M. Hervieu, in order to throw dust in our
+eyes, had given it to the virtuous lady. But whether we guess right or
+wrong, this clue-hunting is an intellectual sport, not an artistic
+enjoyment. If there is any aesthetic quality in the play, it can only
+come home to us when we know the secret. And the same dilemma will
+present itself to any playwright who seeks to imitate M. Hervieu.
+
+The actual keeping of a secret, then--the appeal to the primary
+curiosity of actual ignorance--may be ruled out as practically
+impossible, and, when possible, unworthy of serious art. But there is
+also, as we have seen, the secondary curiosity of the audience which,
+though more or less cognizant of the essential facts, instinctively
+assumes ignorance, and judges the development of a play from that point
+of view. We all realize that a dramatist has no right to trust to our
+previous knowledge, acquired from outside sources. We know that a play,
+like every other work of art, ought to be self-sufficient, and even if,
+at any given moment, we have, as a matter of fact, knowledge which
+supplements what the playwright has told us, we feel that he ought not
+to have taken for granted our possession of any such external and
+fortuitous information. To put it briefly, the dramatist must formally
+_assume_ ignorance in his audience, though he must not practically _rely
+upon_ it. Therefore it becomes a point of real importance to determine
+how long a secret may be kept from an audience, assumed to have no
+outside knowledge, and at what point it ought to be revealed.
+
+When _Lady Windermere's Fan_ was first produced, no hint was given in
+the first act of the fact that Mrs. Erlynne was Lady Windermere's
+mother; so that Lord Windermere's insistence on inviting her to his
+wife's birthday reception remained wholly unexplained. But after a few
+nights the author made Lord Windermere exclaim, just as the curtain
+fell, "My God! What shall I do? I dare not tell her who this woman
+really is. The shame would kill her." It was, of course, said that this
+change had been made in deference to newspaper criticism; and Oscar
+Wilde, in a characteristic letter to the _St. James's Gazette_, promptly
+repelled this calumny. At a first-night supper-party, he said--
+
+  "All of my friends without exception were of the opinion that the
+  psychological interest of the second act would be greatly increased
+  by the disclosure of the actual relationship existing between Lady
+  Windermere and Mrs. Erlynne--an opinion, I may add, that had
+  previously been strongly held and urged by Mr. Alexander.... I
+  determined, consequently, to make a change in the precise moment of
+  revelation."
+
+It is impossible to say whether Wilde seriously believed that
+"psychology" entered into the matter at all, or whether he was laughing
+in his sleeve in putting forward this solemn plea. The truth is, I
+think, that this example cannot be cited either for or against the
+keeping of a secret, the essential fact being that the secret was such a
+bad and inacceptable one--inacceptable, I mean, as an explanation of
+Lord Windermere's conduct--that it was probably wise to make a clean
+breast of it as soon as possible, and get it over. It may be said with
+perfect confidence that it is useless to keep a secret which, when
+revealed, is certain to disappoint the audience, and to make it feel
+that it has been trifled with. That is an elementary dictate of
+prudence. But if the reason for Lord Windermere's conduct had been
+adequate, ingenious, such as to give us, when revealed, a little shock
+of pleasant surprise, the author need certainly have been in no hurry to
+disclose it. It is not improbable (though my memory is not clear on the
+point) that part of the strong interest we undoubtedly felt on the first
+night arose from the hope that Lord Windermere's seemingly unaccountable
+conduct might be satisfactorily accounted for. As this hope was futile,
+there was no reason, at subsequent performances, to keep up the pretence
+of preserving a secret which was probably known, as a matter of fact, to
+most of the audience, and which was worthless when revealed.
+
+In the second act of _The Devil's Disciple_, by Mr. Bernard Shaw, we
+have an instance of wholly inartistic secrecy, which would certainly be
+condemned in the work of any author who was not accepted in advance as a
+law unto himself. Richard Dudgeon has been arrested by the British
+soldiers, who mistake him for the Reverend Anthony Anderson. When
+Anderson comes home, it takes a very long time for his silly wife,
+Judith, to acquaint him with a situation that might have been explained
+in three words; and when, at last, he does understand it, he calls for a
+horse and his boots, and rushes off in mad haste, as though his one
+desire were to escape from the British and leave Dudgeon to his fate. In
+reality his purpose is to bring up a body of Continental troops to the
+rescue of Dudgeon; and this also he might (and certainly would) have
+conveyed in three words. But Mr. Shaw was so bent on letting Judith
+continue to conduct herself idiotically, that he made her sensible
+husband act no less idiotically, in order to throw dust in her eyes, and
+(incidentally) in the eyes of the audience. In the work of any other
+man, we should call this not only an injudicious, but a purposeless and
+foolish, keeping of a secret. Mr. Shaw may say that in order to develop
+the character of Judith as he had conceived it, he was forced to make
+her misunderstand her husband's motives. A development of character
+obtained by such artificial means cannot be of much worth; but even
+granting this plea, one cannot but point out that it would have been
+easy to keep Judith in the dark as to Anderson's purpose, without
+keeping the audience also in the dark, and making him behave like a
+fool. All that was required was to get Judith off the stage for a few
+moments, just before the true state of matters burst upon Anthony. It
+would then have been perfectly natural and probable that, not foreseeing
+her misunderstanding, he should hurry off without waiting to explain
+matters to her. But that he should deliberately leave her in her
+delusion, and even use phrases carefully calculated to deceive both her
+and the audience,[1] would be, in a writer who professed to place reason
+above caprice, a rather gross fault of art.
+
+Mr. Henry Arthur Jones's light comedy, _Whitewashing Julia_, proves that
+it is possible, without incurring disaster, to keep a secret throughout
+a play, and never reveal it at all. More accurately, what Mr. Jones does
+is to pretend that there is some explanation of Mrs. Julia Wren's
+relations with the Duke of Savona, other than the simple explanation
+that she was his mistress, and to keep us waiting for this
+"whitewashing" disclosure, when in fact he has nothing of the sort up
+his sleeve, and the plain truth is precisely what the gossips of
+Shanctonbury surmise. Julia does not even explain or justify her conduct
+from her own point of view. She gives out that "an explanation will be
+forthcoming at the right moment"; but the right moment never arrives.
+All we are told is that she, Julia, considers that there was never
+anything degrading in her conduct; and this we are asked to accept as
+sufficient. It was a daring policy to dangle before our eyes an
+explanation, which always receded as we advanced towards it, and proved
+in the end to be wholly unexplanatory. The success of the play, however,
+was sufficient to show that, in light comedy, at any rate, a secret may
+with impunity be kept, even to the point of tantalization.[2]
+
+Let us now look at a couple of cases in which the keeping of a secret
+seems pretty clearly wrong, inasmuch as it diminishes tension, and
+deprives the audience of that superior knowledge in which lies the irony
+of drama. In a play named _Her Advocate_, by Mr. Walter Frith (founded
+on one of Grenville Murray's _French Pictures in English Chalk_), a K.C.
+has fallen madly in love with a woman whose defence he has undertaken.
+He believes passionately in her innocence, and, never doubting that she
+loves him in return, he is determined to secure for her a triumphant
+acquittal. Just at the crucial moment, however, he learns that she loves
+another man; and, overwhelmed by this disillusion, he has still to face
+the ordeal and plead her cause. The conjuncture would be still more
+dramatic if the revelation of this love were to put a different
+complexion on the murder, and, by introducing a new motive, shake the
+advocate's faith in his client's innocence. But that is another matter;
+the question here to be considered is whether the author did right in
+reserving the revelation to the last possible moment. In my opinion he
+would have done better to have given us an earlier inkling of the true
+state of affairs. To keep the secret, in this case, was to place the
+audience as well as the advocate on a false trail, and to deprive it of
+the sense of superiority it would have felt in seeing him marching
+confidently towards a happiness which it knew to be illusory.
+
+The second case is that of _La Douloureuse_, by M. Maurice Donnay.
+Through two acts out of the four an important secret is so carefully
+kept that there seems to be no obstacle between the lovers with whom
+(from the author's point of view) we are supposed to sympathize. The
+first act is devoted to an elaborate painting of a somewhat revolting
+phase of parvenu society in Paris. Towards the end of the act we learn
+that the sculptor, Philippe Lauberthie, is the lover of Hélène Ardan, a
+married woman; and at the very end her husband, Ardan, commits suicide.
+This act, therefore, is devoted, not, as the orthodox formula goes, to
+raising an obstacle between the lovers, but rather to destroying one. In
+the second act there still seems to be no obstacle of any sort. Hélène's
+year of widowhood is nearly over; she and Philippe are presently to be
+married; all is harmony, adoration, and security. In the last scene of
+the act, a cloud no bigger than a man's hand appears on the horizon. We
+find that Gotte des Trembles, Hélène's bosom friend, is also in love
+with Philippe, and is determined to let him know it. But Philippe
+resists her blandishments with melancholy austerity, and when the
+curtain falls on the second act, things seem to be perfectly safe and in
+order. Hélène a widow, and Philippe austere--what harm can Gotte
+possibly do?
+
+The fact is, M. Donnay is carefully keeping a secret from us. Philippe
+is not Hélène's first lover; her son, Georges, is not the child of her
+late husband; and Gotte, and Gotte alone, knows the truth. Had we also
+been initiated from the outset (and nothing would have been easier or
+more natural--three words exchanged between Gotte and Hélène would have
+done it) we should have been at no loss to foresee the impending drama,
+and the sense of irony would have tripled the interest of the
+intervening scenes. The effect of M. Donnay's third act is not a whit
+more forcible because it comes upon us unprepared. We learn at the
+beginning that Philippe's austerity has not after all been proof against
+Gotte's seductions; but it has now returned upon him embittered by
+remorse, and he treats Gotte with sternness approaching to contumely.
+She takes her revenge by revealing Hélène's secret; he tells Hélène that
+he knows it; and she, putting two and two together, divines how it has
+come to his knowledge. This long scene of mutual reproach and remorseful
+misery is, in reality, the whole drama, and might have been cited in
+Chapter XIV as a fine example of a peripety. Hélène enters Philippe's
+studio happy and serene, she leaves it broken-hearted; but the effect of
+the scene is not a whit greater because, in the two previous acts, we
+have been studiously deprived of the information that would have led us
+vaguely to anticipate it.
+
+To sum up this question of secrecy: the current maxim, "Never keep a
+secret from your audience," would appear to be an over-simplification of
+a somewhat difficult question of craftsmanship. We may agree that it is
+often dangerous and sometimes manifestly foolish to keep a secret; but,
+on the other hand, there is certainly no reason why the playwright
+should blurt out all his secrets at the first possible opportunity. The
+true art lies in knowing just how long to keep silent, and just the
+right time to speak. In the first act of _Letty_, Sir Arthur Pinero
+gains a memorable effect by keeping a secret, not very long, indeed, but
+long enough and carefully enough to show that he knew very clearly what
+he was doing. We are introduced to Nevill Letchmere's bachelor
+apartments. Animated scenes occur between Letchmere and his
+brother-in-law, Letchmere and his sister, Letchmere and Letty, Marion
+and Hilda Gunning. It is evident that Letty dreams of marriage with
+Letchmere; and for aught that we see or hear, there is no just cause or
+impediment to the contrary. It is only, at the end of the very admirable
+scene between Letchmere and Mandeville that the following little
+passage occurs:
+
+  MANDEVILLE: ... At all events I _am_ qualified to tell her I'm
+  fairly gone on her--honourably gone on her--if I choose to do it.
+
+  LETCHMERE: Qualified?
+
+  MANDEVILLE: Which is more than you are, Mr. Letchmere. I _am_ a
+  single man; you ain't, bear in mind.
+
+  LETCHMERE: (_imperturbably_): Very true.
+
+This one little touch is a masterpiece of craftsmanship. It would have
+been the most natural thing in the world for either the sister or the
+brother-in-law, concerned about their own matrimonial difficulties, to
+let fall some passing allusion to Letchmere's separation from his wife;
+but the author carefully avoided this, carefully allowed us to make our
+first acquaintance with Letty in ignorance of the irony of her position,
+and then allowed the truth to slip out just in time to let us feel the
+whole force of that irony during the last scene of the act and the
+greater part of the second act. A finer instance of the delicate grading
+of tension it would be difficult to cite.
+
+One thing is certain; namely, that if a secret is to be kept at all, it
+must be worth the keeping; if a riddle is propounded, its answer must be
+pleasing and ingenious, or the audience will resent having been led to
+cudgel its brains for nothing. This is simply a part of the larger
+principle, before insisted on, that when a reasonable expectation is
+aroused, it can be baffled only at the author's peril. If the crux of a
+scene or of a whole play lie in the solution of some material difficulty
+or moral problem, it must on no account be solved by a mere trick or
+evasion. The dramatist is very ill-advised who sets forth with pomp and
+circumstance to perform some intellectual or technical feat, and then
+merely skirts round it or runs away from it. A fair proportion should
+always be observed between effort and effect, between promise and
+performance.
+
+"But if the audience happens to misread the playwright's design, and
+form exaggerated and irrational expectations?" That merely means that
+the playwright does not know his business, or, at any rate, does not
+know his audience. It is his business to play upon the collective mind
+of his audience as upon a keyboard--to arouse just the right order and
+measure of anticipation, and fulfil it, or outdo it, in just the right
+way at just the right time. The skill of the dramatist, as distinct from
+his genius or inspiration, lies in the correctness of his insight into
+the mind of his audience.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+[Footnote 1: For instance: "If you can get a word with him by pretending
+that you are his wife, tell him to hold his tongue until morning; _that
+will give me all the start I need_."]
+
+[Footnote 2: In _The Idyll_, by Herr Egge, of which some account is
+given in Chapter X, the author certainly does right in not allowing the
+audience for a moment to share the hero's doubts as to the heroine's
+past. It would have been very easy for him to have kept the secret; but
+he takes the earliest opportunity of assuring us that her relations with
+Ringve were quite innocent.]
+
+
+
+
+_BOOK IV_
+
+
+THE END
+
+
+
+
+_CHAPTER XVIII_
+
+CLIMAX AND ANTICLIMAX
+
+
+If it were as easy to write a good last act as a good first act, we
+should be able to reckon three masterpieces for every one that we can
+name at present. The reason why the last act should offer special
+difficulties is not far to seek. We have agreed to regard a play as
+essentially a crisis in the lives of one or more persons; and we all
+know that crises are much more apt to have a definite beginning than a
+definite end. We can almost always put our finger upon the moment--not,
+indeed, when the crisis began--but when we clearly realized its presence
+or its imminence. A chance meeting, the receipt of a letter or a
+telegram, a particular turn given to a certain conversation, even the
+mere emergence into consciousness of a previously latent feeling or
+thought, may mark quite definitely the moment of germination, so to
+speak, of a given crisis; and it is comparatively easy to dramatize such
+a moment. But how few crises come to a definite or dramatic conclusion!
+Nine times out of ten they end in some petty compromise, or do not end
+at all, but simply subside, like the waves of the sea when the storm has
+blown itself out. It is the playwright's chief difficulty to find a
+crisis with an ending which satisfies at once his artistic conscience
+and the requirements of dramatic effect.
+
+And the difficulty becomes greater the nearer we approach to reality. In
+the days when tragedy and comedy were cast in fixed, conventional
+moulds, the playwright's task was much simpler. It was thoroughly
+understood that a tragedy ended with one or more deaths, a comedy with
+one or more marriages; so that the question of a strong or a weak ending
+did not arise. The end might be strongly or weakly led up to, but, in
+itself, it was fore-ordained. Now that these moulds are broken, and both
+marriage and death may be said to have lost their prestige as the be-all
+and end-all of drama, the playwright's range of choice is unlimited, and
+the difficulty of choosing has become infinitely greater. Our comedies
+are much more apt to begin than to end with marriage, and death has come
+to be regarded as a rather cheap and conventional expedient for cutting
+the knots of life.
+
+From the fact that "the difficulty becomes greater the nearer we
+approach to reality," it further follows that the higher the form of
+drama, the more probable is it that the demands of truth and the
+requirements of dramatic effect may be found to clash. In melodrama, the
+curtain falls of its own accord, so to speak, when the handcuffs are
+transferred from the hero's wrists to the villain's. In an
+adventure-play, whether farcical or romantic, when the adventure is over
+the play is done. The author's task is merely to keep the interest of
+the adventure afoot until he is ready to drop his curtain. This is a
+point of craftsmanship in which playwrights often fail; but it is a
+point of craftsmanship only. In plays of a higher order, on the other
+hand, the difficulty is often inherent in the theme, and not to be
+overcome by any feat of craftsmanship. If the dramatist were to eschew
+all crises that could not be made to resolve themselves with
+specifically dramatic crispness and decisiveness, he would very
+seriously limit the domain of his art. Many excellent themes would be
+distorted and ruined by having an emphatic ending forced upon them. It
+is surely much better that they should be brought to their natural
+unemphatic ending, than that they should be either falsified or ignored.
+
+I suggest, then, that the modern tendency to take lightly Aristotle's
+demand that the drama should have a "beginning, a middle, _and an end_,"
+arises from the nature of things, and implies, not necessarily, nor even
+probably, a decline in craftsmanship, but a new intimacy of relation to
+life, and a new sincerity of artistic conscience. I suggest that the
+"weak last act," of which critics so often complain, is a natural
+development from which authors ought not, on occasion, to shrink, and of
+which critics ought, on occasion, to recognize the necessity. To elevate
+it into a system is absurd. There is certainly no more reason for
+deliberately avoiding an emphatic ending than for mechanically forcing
+one. But authors and critics alike should learn to distinguish the
+themes which do, from the themes which do not, call for a definite,
+trenchant solution, and should handle them, and judge them, in
+accordance with their inherent quality.
+
+Let us, however, define our terms, and be sure that we know what we are
+talking about. By an "unemphatic ending" I am far from meaning a
+makeshift ending, an ending carelessly and conventionally huddled up.
+Nor do I mean an indecisive ending, where the curtain falls, as the
+saying goes, on a note of interrogation. An unemphatic ending, as I
+understand it, is a deliberate anticlimax, an idyllic, or elegiac, or
+philosophic last act, following upon a penultimate act of very much
+higher tension. The disposition to condemn such an ending off-hand is
+what I am here pleading against. It is sometimes assumed that the
+playwright ought always to make his action conclude within five minutes
+of its culmination; but for such a hard-and-fast rule I can find no
+sufficient reason. The consequences of a great emotional or spiritual
+crisis cannot always be worked out, or even foreshadowed, within so
+brief a space of time. If, after such a crisis, we are unwilling to keep
+our seats for another half-hour, in order to learn "what came of it
+all," the author has evidently failed to awaken in us any real interest
+in his characters.
+
+A good instance of the unemphatic ending is the last act of Sir Arthur
+Pinero's _Letty_. This "epilogue"--so the author calls it--has been
+denounced as a concession to popular sentimentality, and an unpardonable
+anticlimax. An anticlimax it is, beyond all doubt; but it does not
+follow that it is an artistic blemish. Nothing would have been easier
+than not to write it--to make the play end with Letty's awakening from
+her dream, and her flight from Letchmere's rooms. But the author has set
+forth, not merely to interest us in an adventure, but to draw a
+character; and it was essential to our full appreciation of Letty's
+character that we should know what, after all, she made of her life.
+When Iris, most hapless of women, went out into the dark, there was
+nothing more that we needed to know of her. We could guess the sequel
+only too easily. But the case of Letty was wholly different. Her exit
+was an act of will, triumphing over a form of temptation peculiarly
+alluring to her temperament. There was in her character precisely that
+grit which Iris lacked; and we wanted to know what it would do for her.
+This was not a case for an indecisive ending, a note of interrogation.
+The author felt no doubt as to Letty's destiny, and he wanted to leave
+his audience in no doubt. From Iris's fate we were only too willing to
+avert our eyes; but it would have been a sensible discomfort to us to be
+left in the dark about Letty's.
+
+This, then, I regard as a typical instance of justified anticlimax.
+Another is the idyllic last act of _The Princess and the Butterfly_, in
+which, moreover, despite its comparatively subdued tone, the tension is
+maintained to the end. A very different matter is the third act of _The
+Benefit of the Doubt_, already alluded to. This is a pronounced case of
+the makeshift ending, inspired (to all appearance) simply by the fact
+that the play must end somehow, and that no better idea happens to
+present itself. Admirable as are the other acts, one is almost inclined
+to agree with Dumas that an author ought not to embark upon a theme
+unless he foresees a better way out of it than this. It should be noted,
+too, that _The Benefit of the Doubt_ is a three-act play, and that, in a
+play laid out on this scale, a whole act of anticlimax is necessarily
+disproportionate. It is one thing to relax the tension in the last act
+out of four or five; quite another thing in the last act out of three.
+In other words, the culminating point of a four-or five-act play may be
+placed in the penultimate act; in a three-act play, it should come, at
+earliest, in the penultimate scene.[1]
+
+In the works of Mr. Henry Arthur Jones we find several instances of the
+unemphatic last act--some clearly justified, others much less so. Among
+the former I unhesitatingly reckon the fourth act of _Mrs. Dane's
+Defence_. It would not have been difficult, but surely most inartistic,
+to huddle up the action in five minutes after Mrs. Dane's tragic
+collapse under Sir Daniel Carteret's cross-examination. She might have
+taken poison and died in picturesque contortions on the sofa; or Lionel
+might have defied all counsels of prudence and gone off with her in
+spite of her past; or she might have placed Lionel's hand in Janet's,
+saying: "The game is up. Bless you, my children. I am going into the
+nearest nunnery." As a matter of fact, Mr. Jones brought his action to
+its natural close in a quiet, sufficiently adroit, last act; and I do
+not see that criticism has any just complaint to make.
+
+In recent French drama, _La Douloureuse_, already cited, affords an
+excellent instance of a quiet last act. After the violent and
+heartrending rupture between the lovers in the third act, we feel that,
+though this paroxysm of pain is justified by the circumstances, it will
+not last for ever, and Philippe and Hélène will come together again.
+This is also M. Donnay's view; and he devotes his whole last act, quite
+simply, to a duologue of reconciliation. It seems to me a fault of
+proportion, however, that he should shift his locality from Paris to the
+Riviera, and should place the brief duologue in a romantic woodland
+scene. An act of anticlimax should be treated, so to speak, as
+unpretentiously as possible. To invent an elaborate apparatus for it is
+to emphasize the anticlimax by throwing it into unnecessary relief.
+
+This may be a convenient place for a few words on the modern fashion of
+eschewing emphasis, not only in last acts, but at every point where the
+old French dramaturgy demanded it, and especially in act-endings.
+_Punch_ has a pleasant allusion to this tendency in two suggested
+examination-papers for an "Academy of Dramatists":
+
+  A--FOR THE CLASSICAL SIDE ONLY.
+    1. What is a "curtain"; and how should it be led up to?
+
+  B--FOR THE MODERN SIDE ONLY.
+    1. What is a "curtain"; and how can it be avoided?
+
+Some modern playwrights have fled in a sort of panic from the old
+"picture-poster situation" to the other extreme of always dropping their
+curtain when the audience least expects it. This is not a practice to be
+commended. One has often seen an audience quite unnecessarily chilled by
+a disconcerting "curtain." There should be moderation even in the
+shrinking from theatricality.
+
+This shrinking is particularly marked, though I do not say it is carried
+too far, in the plays of Mr. Galsworthy. Even the most innocent tricks
+of emphasis are to him snares of the Evil One. He would sooner die than
+drop his curtain on a particularly effective line. It is his chief
+ambition that you should never discern any arrangement, any intention,
+in his work. As a rule, the only reason you can see for his doing thus
+or thus is his desire that you should see no reason for it. He does not
+carry this tendency, as some do, to the point of eccentricity; but he
+certainly goes as far as any one should be advised to follow. A little
+further, and you incur the danger of becoming affectedly unaffected,
+artificially inartificial.
+
+I am far from pleading for the conventional tableau at the end of each
+act, with all the characters petrified, as it were, in
+penny-plain-twopence-coloured attitudes. But it is certainly desirable
+that the fall of the curtain should not take an audience entirely by
+surprise, and even that the spectator should feel the moment to be
+rightly chosen, though he might be unable to give any reason for his
+feeling. Moreover--this may seem a super-subtlety, but one has seen it
+neglected with notably bad effect--a playwright should never let his
+audience expect the fall of a curtain at a given point, and then balk
+their expectancy, unless he is sure that he holds in reserve a more than
+adequate compensation. There is nothing so dangerous as to let a play,
+or an act, drag on when the audience feels in its heart that it is
+really over, and that "the rest is silence"--or ought to be. The end of
+Mr. Granville Barker's fine play, _The Voysey Inheritance_, was injured
+by the fact that, several minutes before the curtain actually fell, he
+had given what seemed an obvious "cue for curtain." I do not say that
+what followed was superfluous; what I do say is that the author ought to
+have been careful not to let us imagine that the colloquy between Edward
+and Alice was over when in fact it had still some minutes to run. An
+even more remarkable play, _The Madras House_, was ruined, on its first
+night, by a long final anticlimax. Here, however, the fault did not lie
+in awakening a premature expectation of the close, but in the fact that
+we somehow were more interested in the other characters of the play than
+in the pair who held the stage throughout the long concluding scene.
+
+Once more I turn to _La Douloureuse_ for an instance of an admirable
+act-ending of the quiet modern type. The third act--the terrible
+peripety in the love of Philippe and Hélène--has run its agonizing
+course, and worked itself out. The old dramaturgy would certainly have
+ended the scene with a bang, so to speak--a swoon or a scream, a tableau
+of desolation, or, at the very least, a piece of tearful rhetoric. M.
+Donnay does nothing of the sort. He lets his lovers unpack their hearts
+with words until they are exhausted, broken, dazed with misery, and have
+nothing more to say. Then Hélène asks: "What o'clock is it?" Philippe
+looks at his watch: "Nearly seven." "I must be going"--and she dries her
+eyes, smoothes her hair, pulls herself together, in a word, to face the
+world again. The mechanical round of life re-asserts its hold upon them.
+"Help me with my cloak," she says; and he holds her mantle for her, and
+tucks in the puffed sleeves of her blouse. Then he takes up the lamp and
+lights her out--and the curtain falls. A model "curtain"!
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+[Footnote 1: The fact that a great poet can ignore such precepts with
+impunity is proved by the exquisite anticlimax of the third act of
+D'Annunzio's _La Gioconda_.]
+
+
+
+
+_CHAPTER XIX_
+
+CONVERSION
+
+
+The reader may have noticed, possibly with surprise, that some of the
+stock terms of dramatic criticism occur but rarely in these pages, or
+not at all. One of them is _dénouement_. According to orthodox theory, I
+ought to have made the _dénouement_ the subject of a whole chapter, if
+not of a whole book. Why have I not done so?
+
+For two reasons. The lesser, but not negligible, reason is that we
+possess no convenient English word for the unknotting or disentangling
+of a complication. Dénouement itself cannot be plausibly Anglicized, and
+no native word has as yet, by common consent, been accepted as its
+equivalent. I sometimes wish we could adopt, and print without italics,
+the excellent and expressive Greek word "lusis"; but I cannot, on my own
+responsibility, attempt so daring an innovation. The second and
+determining reason for not making the _dénouement_ one of the heads of
+my argument, is that, the play of intrigue being no longer the dominant
+dramatic form, the image of disentangling has lost some of its special
+fitness. It is only in a somewhat strained and conventional sense that
+the term _nodus_, or knot, can be applied to the sort of crisis with
+which the modern drama normally deals; and if we do not naturally think
+of the crisis as a knot, we naturally do not think of its close as an
+unknotting.
+
+Nevertheless, there are frequent cases in which the end of a play
+depends on something very like the unravelling of a tangled skein; and
+still more often, perhaps, is it brought about through the loosening of
+some knot in the mind of one or more of the characters. This was the
+characteristic end of the old comedy. The heavy father, or cantankerous
+guardian, who for four acts and a half had stood between the lovers,
+suddenly changed his mind, and all was well. Even by our ancestors this
+was reckoned a rather too simple method of disentanglement. Lisideius,
+in Dryden's dialogue,[1] in enumerating the points in which the French
+drama is superior to the English notes that--
+
+  You never see any of their plays end with a conversion, or simple
+  change of will, which is the ordinary way which our poets use to end
+  theirs. It shew little art in the conclusion of a dramatick poem,
+  when they who have hindered the felicity during the four acts,
+  desist from it in the fifth, without some powerful cause to take
+  them off their design.
+
+The remark of Lisideius is suggested by a passage in Corneille, who
+instances, as an apt and artistic method of bringing about the
+conversion of a heavy father, that his daughter's lover should earn his
+gratitude by rescuing him from assassination!
+
+Conversions, closely examined, will be found to fall into two classes:
+changes in volition, and changes in sentiment. It was the former class
+that Dryden had in mind; and, with reference to this class, the
+principle he indicates remains a sound one. A change of resolve should
+never be due to a mere lapse of time--to the necessity for bringing the
+curtain down and letting the audience go home. It must always be
+rendered plausible by some new fact or new motive: some hitherto untried
+appeal to reason or emotion. This rule, however, is too obvious to
+require enforcement. It was not quite superfluous so long as the old
+convention of comedy endured. For a century and a half after Dryden's
+time, hard-hearted parents were apt to withdraw their opposition to
+their children's "felicity" for no better reason than that the fifth act
+was drawing to a close. But this formula is practically obsolete.
+Changes of will, on the modern stage, are not always adequately motived;
+but that is because of individual inexpertness, not because of any
+failure to recognize theoretically the necessity for adequate
+motivation.
+
+Changes of sentiment are much more important and more difficult to
+handle. A change of will can always manifest itself in action but it is
+very difficult to externalize convincingly a mere change of heart. When
+the conclusion of a play hinges (as it frequently does) on a conversion
+of this nature, it becomes a matter of the first moment that it should
+not merely be asserted, but proved. Many a promising play has gone wrong
+because of the author's neglect, or inability, to comply with this
+condition.
+
+It has often been observed that of all Ibsen's thoroughly mature works,
+from _A Doll's House_ to _John Gabriel Borkman_, _The Lady from the Sea_
+is the loosest in texture, the least masterly in construction. The fact
+that it leaves this impression on the mind is largely due, I think, to a
+single fault. The conclusion of the play--Ellida's clinging to Wangel
+and rejection of the Stranger--depends entirely on a change in Wangel's
+mental attitude, _of which we have no proof whatever beyond his bare
+assertion_. Ellida, in her overwrought mood, is evidently inclining to
+yield to the uncanny allurement of the Stranger's claim upon her, when
+Wangel, realizing that her sanity is threatened, says:
+
+  WANGEL: It shall not come to that. There is no other way of
+  deliverance for you--at least I see none. And therefore--therefore
+  I--cancel our bargain on the spot. Now you can choose your own path,
+  in full--full freedom.
+
+  ELLIDA (_Gazes at him awhile, as if speechless_): Is this
+  true--true--what you say? Do you mean it--from your inmost heart?
+
+  WANGEL: Yes--from the inmost depths of my tortured heart, I mean
+  it.... Now your own true life can return to its--its right groove
+  again. For now you can choose in freedom; and on your own
+  responsibility, Ellida.
+
+  ELLIDA: In freedom--and on my own responsibility? Responsibility?
+  This--this transforms everything.
+
+--and she promptly gives the Stranger his dismissal. Now this is
+inevitably felt to be a weak conclusion, because it turns entirely on a
+condition of Wangel's mind of which he gives no positive and convincing
+evidence. Nothing material is changed by his change of heart. He could
+not in any case have restrained Ellida by force; or, if the law gave him
+the abstract right to do so, he certainly never had the slightest
+intention of exercising it. Psychologically, indeed, the incident is
+acceptable enough. The saner part of Ellida's will was always on
+Wangel's side; and a merely verbal undoing of the "bargain" with which
+she reproached herself might quite naturally suffice to turn the scale
+decisively in his favour. But what may suffice for Ellida is not enough
+for the audience. Too much is made to hang upon a verbally announced
+conversion. The poet ought to have invented some material--or, at the
+very least, some impressively symbolic--proof of Wangel's change of
+heart. Had he done so, _The Lady from the Sea_ would assuredly have
+taken a higher rank among his works.
+
+Let me further illustrate my point by comparing a very small thing with
+a very great. The late Captain Marshall wrote a "farcical romance" named
+_The Duke of Killiecrankie_, in which that nobleman, having been again
+and again rejected by the Lady Henrietta Addison, kidnapped the obdurate
+fair one, and imprisoned her in a crag-castle in the Highlands. Having
+kept her for a week in deferential durance, and shown her that he was
+not the inefficient nincompoop she had taken him for, he threw open the
+prison gate, and said to her: "Go! I set you free!" The moment she saw
+the gate unlocked, and realized that she could indeed go when and where
+she pleased, she also realized that she had not the least wish to go,
+and flung herself into her captor's arms. Here we have Ibsen's situation
+transposed into the key of fantasy, and provided with the material
+"guarantee of good faith" which is lacking in _The Lady from the Sea_.
+The Duke's change of mind, his will to set the Lady Henrietta free, is
+visibly demonstrated by the actual opening of the prison gate, so that
+we believe in it, and believe that she believes in it. The play was a
+trivial affair, and is deservedly forgotten; but the situation was
+effective because it obeyed the law that a change of will or of feeling,
+occurring at a crucial point in a dramatic action, must be certified by
+some external evidence, on pain of leaving the audience unimpressed.
+
+This is a more important matter than it may at first sight appear. How
+to bring home to the audience a decisive change of heart is one of the
+ever-recurring problems of the playwright's craft. In _The Lady from the
+Sea_, Ibsen failed to solve it: in _Rosmersholm_ he solved it by heroic
+measures. The whole catastrophe is determined by Rosmer's inability to
+accept without proof Rebecca's declaration that Rosmersholm has
+"ennobled" her, and that she is no longer the same woman whose
+relentless egoism drove Beata into the mill-race. Rebecca herself puts
+it to him: "How can you believe me on my bare word after to-day?" There
+is only one proof she can give--that of "going the way Beata went." She
+gives it: and Rosmer, who cannot believe her if she lives, and will not
+survive her if she dies, goes with her to her end. But the cases are not
+very frequent, fortunately, in which such drastic methods of proof are
+appropriate or possible. The dramatist must, as a rule, attain his end
+by less violent means; and often he fails to attain it at all.
+
+A play by Mr. Haddon Chambers, _The Awakening_, turned on a sudden
+conversion--the "awakening," in fact, referred to in the title. A
+professional lady-killer, a noted Don Juan, has been idly making love to
+a country maiden, whose heart is full of innocent idealisms. She
+discovers his true character, or, at any rate, his reputation, and is
+horror-stricken, while practically at the same moment, he "awakens" to
+the error of his ways, and is seized with a passion for her as single
+minded and idealistic as hers for him. But how are the heroine and the
+audience to be assured of the fact? That is just the difficulty; and the
+author takes no effectual measures to overcome it. The heroine, of
+course, is ultimately convinced; but the audience remains sceptical, to
+the detriment of the desired effect. "Sceptical," perhaps, is not quite
+the right word. The state of mind of a fictitious character is not a
+subject for actual belief or disbelief. We are bound to accept
+theoretically what the author tells us; but in this case he has failed
+to make us intimately feel and know that it is true.[2]
+
+In Mr. Alfred Sutro's play _The Builder of Bridges_, Dorothy Faringay,
+in her devotion to her forger brother, has conceived the rather
+disgraceful scheme of making one of his official superiors fall in love
+with her, in order to induce him to become practically an accomplice in
+her brother's crime. She succeeds beyond her hopes. Edward Thursfield
+does fall in love with her, and, at a great sacrifice, replaces the
+money the brother has stolen. But, in a very powerful peripety-scene in
+the third act, Thursfield learns that Dorothy has been deliberately
+beguiling him, while in fact she was engaged to another man. The truth
+is, however, that she has really come to love Thursfield passionately,
+and has broken her engagement with the other, for whom she never truly
+cared. So the author tells us, and so we are willing enough to
+believe--if he can devise any adequate method of making Thursfield
+believe it. Mr. Sutro's handling of the difficulty seems to me fairly,
+but not conspicuously, successful. I cite the case as a typical instance
+of the problem, apart from the merits or demerits of the solution.
+
+It may be said that the difficulty of bringing home to us the reality of
+a revulsion of feeling, or a radical change of mental attitude, is only
+a particular case of the playwright's general problem of convincingly
+externalizing inward conditions and processes. That is true: but the
+special importance of a conversion which unties the knot and brings the
+curtain down seemed to render it worthy of special consideration.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+[Footnote 1: _Of Dramatic Poesy_, ed. Arnold, 1903, p. 51.]
+
+[Footnote 2: In Mr. Somerset Maugham's _Grace_ the heroine undergoes a
+somewhat analogous change of heart, coming to love the husband whom she
+has previously despised. But we have no difficulty in accepting her
+conversion, partly because its reasons are clear and fairly adequate,
+partly because there is no question of convincing the husband, who has
+never realized her previous contempt for him.]
+
+
+
+
+_CHAPTER XX_
+
+BLIND-ALLEY THEMES--AND OTHERS
+
+
+A blind-alley theme, as its name imports, is one from which there is no
+exit. It is a problem incapable of solution, or, rather, of which all
+possible solutions are equally unsatisfactory and undesirable. The
+playwright cannot too soon make sure that he has not strayed into such a
+no-thoroughfare. Whether an end be comic or tragic, romantic or ironic,
+happy or disastrous, it should satisfy something within us--our sense of
+truth, or of beauty, or of sublimity, or of justice, or of humour, or,
+at the least or lowest, our cynical sense of the baseness of human
+nature, and the vanity of human aspirations. But a play which satisfies
+neither our higher nor our lower instincts, baffles our sympathies, and
+leaves our desires at fault between equally inacceptable
+alternatives--such a play, whatever beauties of detail it may possess,
+is a weariness of the spirit, and an artistic blunder.
+
+There are in literature two conspicuous examples of the blind-alley
+theme--two famous plays, wherein two heroines are placed in somewhat
+similar dilemmas, which merely paralyse our sympathies and inhibit our
+moral judgment. The first of these is _Measure for Measure_. If ever
+there was an insoluble problem in casuistry, it is that which
+Shakespeare has here chosen to present to us. Isabella is forced to
+choose between what we can only describe as two detestable evils. If she
+resists Angelo, and lets her brother die, she recoils from an act of
+self-sacrifice; and, although we may coldly approve, we cannot admire or
+take pleasure in her action. If, on the other hand, she determines at
+all costs to save her brother's life, her sacrifice is a thing from
+which we want only to avert the mind: it belongs to the region of what
+Aristotle calls to _miaron_, the odious and intolerable. Shakespeare,
+indeed, confesses the problem insoluble in the fact that he leaves it
+unsolved--evading it by means of a mediaeval trick. But where, then, was
+the use of presenting it? What is the artistic profit of letting the
+imagination play around a problem which merely baffles and repels it?
+Sardou, indeed, presented the same problem, not as the theme of a whole
+play, but only of a single act; and he solved it by making Floria Tosca
+kill Scarpia. This is a solution which, at any rate, satisfies our
+craving for crude justice, and is melodramatically effective.
+Shakespeare probably ignored it, partly because it was not in his
+sources, partly because, for some obscure reason, he supposed himself to
+be writing a comedy. The result is that, though the play contains some
+wonderful poetry, and has been from time to time revived, it has never
+taken any real hold upon popular esteem.
+
+The second glaring instance of a blind-alley theme is that of _Monna
+Vanna_. We have all of us, I suppose, stumbled, either as actors or
+onlookers, into painful situations, which not even a miracle of tact
+could possibly save. As a rule, of course, they are comic, and the agony
+they cause may find a safety-valve in laughter. But sometimes there
+occurs some detestable incident, over which it is equally impossible to
+laugh and to weep. The wisest words, the most graceful acts, are of no
+avail. One longs only to sink into the earth, or vanish into thin air.
+Such a situation, on the largest possible scale, is that presented in
+_Monna Vanna_. It differs from that of _Measure for Measure_ in the fact
+that there can be no doubt as to the moral aspect of the case. It is
+quite clear that Giovanna ought to sacrifice herself to save, not one
+puling Claudio, but a whole city full of men, women, and children. What
+she does is absolutely right; but the conjuncture is none the less a
+grotesque and detestable one, which ought to be talked about and thought
+about as little as possible. Every word that is uttered is a failure in
+tact. Guido, the husband, behaves, in the first act, with a violent
+egoism, which is certainly lacking in dignity; but will any one tell me
+what would be a dignified course for him to pursue under the
+circumstances? The sage old Marco, too--that fifteenth-century
+Renan--flounders just as painfully as the hot-headed Guido. It is the
+fatality of the case that "he cannot open his mouth without putting his
+foot in it"; and a theme which exposes a well-meaning old gentleman to
+this painful necessity is one by all means to be avoided. The fact that
+it is a false alarm, and that there is no rational explanation for
+Prinzivalle's wanton insult to a woman whom he reverently idolizes, in
+no way makes matters better.[1] Not the least grotesque thing in the
+play is Giovanna's expectation that Guido will receive Prinzivalle with
+open arms because he has--changed his mind. We can feel neither approval
+nor disapproval, sympathy nor antipathy, in such a deplorable
+conjunction of circumstances. All we wish is that we had not been called
+upon to contemplate it.[2] Maeterlinck, like Shakespeare, was simply
+dallying with the idea of a squalid heroism--so squalid, indeed, that
+neither he nor his predecessor had the courage to carry it through.
+
+Pray observe that the defect of these two themes is not merely that they
+are "unpleasant." It is that there is no possible way out of them which
+is not worse than unpleasant: humiliating, and distressing. Let the
+playwright, then, before embarking on a theme, make sure that he has
+some sort of satisfaction to offer us at the end, if it be only the
+pessimistic pleasure of realizing some part of "the bitter, old and
+wrinkled truth" about life. The crimes of destiny there is some profit
+in contemplating; but its stupid vulgarities minister neither to profit
+nor delight.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+It may not be superfluous to give at this point a little list of
+subjects which, though not blind-alley themes, are equally to be
+avoided. Some of them, indeed, are the reverse of blind-alley themes,
+their drawback lying in the fact that the way out of them is too
+tediously apparent.
+
+At the head of this list I would place what may be called the "white
+marriage" theme: not because it is ineffective, but because its
+effectiveness is very cheap and has been sadly overdone. It occurs in
+two varieties: either a proud but penniless damsel is married to a
+wealthy parvenu, or a woman of culture and refinement is married to a
+"rough diamond." In both cases the action consists of the transformation
+of a nominal into a real marriage; and it is almost impossible, in these
+days, to lend any novelty to the process. In the good old _Lady of
+Lyons_ the theme was decked in trappings of romantic absurdity, which
+somehow harmonized with it. One could hear in it a far-off echo of
+revolutionary rodomontade. The social aspect of the matter was
+emphasized, and the satire on middle-class snobbery was cruelly
+effective. The personal aspect, on the other hand--the unfulfilment of
+the nominal marriage--was lightly and discreetly handled, according to
+early-Victorian convention. In later days--from the time of M. George
+Ohnet's _Maître de Forges_ onwards--this is the aspect on which
+playwrights have preferred to dwell. Usually, the theme shades off into
+the almost equally hackneyed _Still Waters Run Deep_ theme; for there is
+apt to be an aristocratic lover whom the unpolished but formidable
+husband threatens to shoot or horsewhip, and thereby overcomes the last
+remnant of repugnance in the breast of his haughty spouse. In _The
+Ironmaster_ the lover was called the Duc de Bligny, or, more commonly,
+the Dook de Bleeny; but he has appeared under many aliases. In the chief
+American version of the theme, Mr. Vaughn Moody's _Great Divide_, the
+lover is dispensed with altogether, being inconsistent, no doubt, with
+the austere manners of Milford Corners, Mass. In one of the recent
+French versions, on the other hand--M. Bernstein's _Samson_--the
+aristocratic lover is almost as important a character as the virile,
+masterful, plebeian husband. It appears from this survey--which might be
+largely extended--that there are several ways of handling the theme; but
+there is no way of renewing and deconventionalizing it. No doubt it has
+a long life before it on the plane of popular melodrama, but scarcely,
+one hopes, on any higher plane.
+
+Another theme which ought to be relegated to the theatrical lumber-room
+is that of patient, inveterate revenge. This form of vindictiveness is,
+from a dramatic point of view, an outworn passion. It is too obviously
+irrational and anti-social to pass muster in modern costume. The actual
+vendetta may possibly survive in some semi-barbarous regions, and
+Grangerfords and Shepherdsons (as in Mark Twain's immortal romance) may
+still be shooting each other at sight. But these things are relics of
+the past; they do not belong to the normal, typical life of our time. It
+is useless to say that human nature is the same in all ages. That is one
+of the facile axioms of psychological incompetence. Far be it from me to
+deny that malice, hatred, spite, and the spirit of retaliation are, and
+will be until the millennium, among the most active forces in human
+nature. But most people are coming to recognize that life is too short
+for deliberate, elaborate, cold-drawn revenge. They will hit back when
+they conveniently can; they will cherish for half a lifetime a passive,
+an obstructive, ill-will; they will even await for years an opportunity
+of "getting their knife into" an enemy. But they have grown chary of
+"cutting off their nose to spite their face"; they will very rarely
+sacrifice their own comfort in life to the mere joy of protracted,
+elaborate reprisals. Vitriol and the revolver--an outburst of rage,
+culminating in a "short, sharp shock"--these belong, if you will, to
+modern life. But long-drawn, unhasting, unresting machination, with no
+end in view beyond an ultimate unmasking, a turn of the tables--in a
+word, a strong situation--this, I take it, belongs to a phase of
+existence more leisurely than ours. There is no room in our crowded
+century for such large and sustained passions. One could mention
+plays--but they are happily forgotten--in which retribution was delayed
+for some thirty or forty years, during which the unconscious object of
+it enjoyed a happy and prosperous existence. These, no doubt, are
+extreme instances; but cold-storage revenge, as a whole, ought to be as
+rare on the stage as it is in real life. The serious playwright will do
+well to leave it to the melodramatists.
+
+A third theme to be handled with the greatest caution, if at all, is
+that of heroic self-sacrifice. Not that self-sacrifice, like revenge, is
+an outworn passion. It still rages in daily life; but no audience of
+average intelligence will to-day accept it with the uncritical
+admiration which it used to excite in the sentimental dramas of last
+century. Even then--even in 1869--Meilhac and Halévy, in their
+ever-memorable _Froufrou_, showed what disasters often result from it;
+but it retained its prestige with the average playwright--and with some
+who were above the average--for many a day after that. I can recall a
+play, by a living English author, in which a Colonel in the Indian Army
+pleaded guilty to a damning charge of cowardice rather than allow a lady
+whom he chivalrously adored to learn that it was her husband who was the
+real coward and traitor. He knew that the lady detested her husband; he
+knew that they had no children to suffer by the husband's disgrace; he
+knew that there was a quite probable way by which he might have cleared
+his own character without casting any imputation on the other man. But
+in a sheer frenzy of self-sacrifice he blasted his own career, and
+thereby inflicted far greater pain upon the woman he loved than if he
+had told the truth or suffered it to be told. And twenty years
+afterwards, when the villain was dead, the hero still resolutely refused
+to clear his own character, lest the villain's widow should learn the
+truth about her wholly unlamented husband. This was an extravagant and
+childish case; but the superstition of heroic self-sacrifice still
+lingers in certain quarters, and cannot be too soon eradicated. I do not
+mean, of course, that self-sacrifice is never admirable, but only that
+it can no longer be accepted as a thing inherently noble, apart from its
+circumstances and its consequences. An excellent play might be written
+with the express design of placing the ethics of self-sacrifice in their
+true light. Perhaps the upshot might be the recognition of the simple
+principle that it is immoral to make a sacrifice which the person
+supposed to benefit by it has no right to accept.
+
+Another motive against which it is perhaps not quite superfluous to warn
+the aspiring playwright is the "voix du sang." It is only a few years
+since this miraculous voice was heard speaking loud and long in His
+Majesty's Theatre, London, and in a play by a no less modern-minded
+author than the late Clyde Fitch. It was called _The Last of the
+Dandies_,[3] and its hero was Count D'Orsay. At a given moment, D'Orsay
+learned that a young man known as Lord Raoul Ardale was in reality his
+son. Instantly the man of the world, the squire of dames, went off into
+a deliquium of tender emotion. For "my bo-ô-oy" he would do anything and
+everything. He would go down to Crockford's and win a pot of money to
+pay "my boy's" debts--Fortune could not but be kind to a doting parent.
+In the beautiful simplicity of his soul, he looked forward with eager
+delight to telling Raoul that the mother he adored was no better than
+she should be, and that he had no right to his name or title. Not for a
+moment did he doubt that the young man would share his transports. When
+the mother opposed his purpose of betraying her secret, he wept with
+disappointment. "All day," he said, "I have been saying to myself: When
+that sun sets, I shall hear him say, 'Good-night, Father!'" He
+postulated in so many words the "voix du sang," trusting that, even if
+the revelation were not formally made, "Nature would send the boy some
+impulse" of filial affection. It is hard to believe--but it is the
+fact--that, well within the present century, such ingenuous nonsense as
+this was gravely presented to the public of a leading theatre, by an
+author of keen intelligence, who, but for an unhappy accident, would now
+be at the zenith of his career. There are few more foolish conventions
+than that of the "voix du sang." Perhaps, however, the rising generation
+of playwrights has more need to be warned against the opposite or
+Shawesque convention, that kinship utters itself mainly in wrangling and
+mutual dislike.
+
+Among inherently feeble and greatly overdone expedients may be reckoned
+the oath or promise of secrecy, exacted for no sufficient reason, and
+kept in defiance of common sense and common humanity. Lord Windermere's
+conduct in Oscar Wilde's play is a case in point, though he has not even
+an oath to excuse his insensate secretiveness. A still clearer instance
+is afforded by Clyde Fitch's play _The Girl with the Green Eyes_. In
+other respects a very able play, it is vitiated by the certainty that
+Austin ought to have, and would have, told the truth ten times over,
+rather than subject his wife's jealous disposition to the strain he
+puts upon it.
+
+It would not be difficult to prolong this catalogue of themes and
+motives that have come down in the world, and are no longer presentable
+in any society that pretends to intelligence. But it is needless to
+enter into further details. There is a general rule, of sovereign
+efficacy, for avoiding such anachronisms: "Go to life for your themes,
+and not to the theatre." Observe that rule, and you are safe. But it is
+easier said than done.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+[Footnote 1: I have good reason for believing that, in M. Maeterlinck's
+original scheme, Prinzivalle imposed no such humiliating condition.
+Giovanna went of her own motive to appeal to his clemency; and her
+success was so complete that her husband, on her return, could not
+believe that it had been won by avowable means. This is a really fine
+conception--what a pity that the poet departed from it!]
+
+[Footnote 2: Much has been made of the Censor's refusal to license
+_Monna Vanna_; but I think there is more to be said for his action in
+this than in many other cases. In those countries where the play has
+succeeded, I cannot but suspect that the appeal it made was not wholly
+to the higher instincts of the public.]
+
+[Footnote 3: I am not sure what was the precise relationship of this
+play to the same author's _Beau Brummel_. D'Orsay's death scene was
+certainly a repetition of Brummel's.]
+
+
+
+
+_CHAPTER XXI_
+
+THE FULL CLOSE
+
+
+In an earlier chapter, I have tried to show that a certain tolerance for
+anticlimax, for a fourth or fifth act of calm after the storm of the
+penultimate act, is consonant with right reason, and is a practically
+inevitable result of a really intimate relation between drama and life.
+But it would be a complete misunderstanding of my argument to suppose
+that I deny the practical, and even the artistic, superiority of those
+themes in which the tension can be maintained and heightened to the
+very end.
+
+The fact that tragedy has from of old been recognized as a higher form
+than comedy is partly due, no doubt, to the tragic poet's traditional
+right to round off a human destiny in death. "Call no man happy till his
+life be ended," said Sophocles, quoting from an earlier sage; and it
+needed no profundity of wisdom to recognize in the "happy ending" of
+comedy a conventional, ephemeral thing. But when, after all the
+peripeties of life, the hero "home has gone and ta'en his wages," we
+feel that, at any rate, we have looked destiny squarely in the face,
+without evasion or subterfuge. Perhaps the true justification of tragedy
+as a form of art is that, after this experience, we should feel life to
+be, not less worth living, but greater and more significant than before.
+
+This is no place, however, for a discussion of the aesthetic basis of
+tragedy in general.[1] What is here required, from the point of view of
+craftsmanship, is not so much a glorification of the tragic ending, as a
+warning against its facile misuse. A very great play may, and often
+must, end in death; but you cannot make a play great by simply killing
+off your protagonist. Death is, after all, a very inexpensive means of
+avoiding anticlimax. Tension, as we saw, is symbolized in the sword of
+Damocles; and it can always be maintained, in a mechanical way, by
+letting your hero play about with a revolver, or placing an overdose of
+chloral well within your heroine's reach. At the time when the English
+drama was awaking from the lethargy of the 'seventies, an idea got
+abroad that a non-sanguinary ending was always and necessarily
+inartistic, and that a self-respecting playwright must at all hazards
+kill somebody before dropping his curtain. This was an extravagant
+reaction against the purely commercial principle that the public would
+not, on any terms, accept a tragic ending. As a matter of fact, the
+mortality was not very great; for managers were resolute in the old
+belief, and few dramatists had the courage or authority to stand up
+against them. But I have often heard playwrights lamenting their
+inability to massacre the luckless children of their fancy, who, nine
+times out of ten, had done nothing to incur such a doom. The real
+trouble was that death seemed to be the only method of avoiding
+anticlimax.
+
+It is a very sound rule that, before you determine to write a tragedy,
+you should make sure that you have a really tragic theme: that you can
+place your hero at such odds with life that reconciliation, or mere
+endurance, would be morally base or psychologically improbable.
+Moreover, you must strike deep into character before you are justified
+in passing capital sentence on your personages. Death is a
+disproportionate close for a commonplace and superficially-studied life.
+It is true that quite commonplace people do die; indeed, they
+preponderate in the bills of mortality; but death on the stage confers a
+sort of distinction which ought not to be accorded without due and
+sufficient cause. To one god in particular we may apply the Horatian
+maxim, "Nec deus intersit, nisi dignus vindice nodus."
+
+In German aesthetic theory, the conception _tragische Schuld_--"tragic
+guilt"--plays a large part. It descends, no doubt, from the Aristotelian
+maxim that a tragic hero must neither be too good nor too bad; but it
+also belongs to a moralizing conception, which tacitly or explicitly
+assumes that the dramatist's aim ought to be "to justify the ways of God
+to man." In these days we look at drama more objectively, and do not
+insist on deciding in what degree a man has deserved death, if only we
+feel that he has necessarily or probably incurred it. But in order that
+we may be satisfied of this, we must know him intimately and feel with
+him intensely. We must, in other words, believe that he dies because he
+cannot live, and not merely to suit the playwright's convenience and
+help him to an effective "curtain."
+
+As we review the series of Ibsen's modern plays, we cannot but feel
+that, though he did not shrink from death, he never employed it, except
+perhaps in his last melancholy effort, as a mere way of escape from a
+difficulty. In five out of his thirteen modern plays, no one dies at
+all.[2] One might even say six: for Oswald, in _Ghosts_, may live for
+years; but I hold it as only fair to count the death of his mind as more
+than equivalent to bodily death. Solness, on the plane of literal fact,
+dies by an accident; on the plane of symbolic interpretation, he dies of
+the over-great demands which Hilda makes upon his "sickly conscience."
+Little Eyolf's death can also be regarded from a symbolic point of view;
+but there is no substantial reason to think of it otherwise than as an
+accident. John Gabriel Borkman dies of heart seizure, resulting from
+sudden exposure to extreme cold. In the case of Solness and Borkman,
+death is a quite natural and probable result of the antecedent
+conditions; and in the case of Eyolf, it is not a way out of the action,
+but rather the way into it. There remain the three cases of suicide:
+Rebecca and Rosmer, Hedda Gabler, and Hedvig. I have already, in Chapter
+XIX, shown how the death of Rebecca was the inevitable outcome of the
+situation--the one conclusive proof of her "ennoblement"--and how it was
+almost equally inevitable that Rosmer should accompany her to her end.
+Hedda Gabler was constitutionally fated to suicide: a woman of low
+vitality, overmastering egoism, and acute supersensitiveness, placed in
+a predicament which left her nothing to expect from life but tedium and
+humiliation. The one case left--that of Hedvig--is the only one in which
+Ibsen can possibly be accused of wanton bloodshed. Björnson, in a very
+moving passage in his novel, _The Paths of God_, did actually, though
+indirectly, make that accusation. Certainly, there is no more
+heartrending incident in fiction; and certainly it is a thing that only
+consummate genius can justify. Ibsen happened to possess that genius,
+and I am not far from agreeing with those who hold _The Wild Duck_ to be
+his greatest work. But for playwrights who are tempted to seek for
+effects of pathos by similar means, one may without hesitation lay down
+this maxim: Be sure you are an Ibsen before you kill your Hedvig.
+
+This analysis of Ibsen's practice points to the fact--for such I believe
+it to be--that what the modern playwright has chiefly to guard against
+is the temptation to overdo suicide as a means of cutting the dramatic
+knot. In France and Germany there is another temptation, that of the
+duel;[3] but in Anglo-Saxon countries it scarcely presents itself.
+Death, other than self-inflicted, is much less tempting, and less apt to
+be resorted to in and out of season. The heroine, whether virtuous or
+erring, who dies of consumption, has gone greatly out of vogue. A broken
+heart is no longer held to be necessarily fatal. The veriest tyro
+realizes that death by crude accident is inadmissible as a determining
+factor in serious drama; and murder is practically (though not
+absolutely) relegated to the melodramatic domain. The one urgent
+question, then, is that of the artistic use and abuse of suicide.
+
+The principle is pretty plain, I think, that it ought to be the
+artist's, as it is the man's, last resort. We know that, in most
+civilized countries, suicide is greatly on the increase. It cannot be
+called an infrequent incident in daily life. It is certain, too, that
+the motives impelling to it are apt to be of a dramatic nature, and
+therefore suited to the playwright's purposes. But it is, on the other
+hand, such a crude and unreasoning means of exit from the tangle of
+existence that a playwright of delicate instincts will certainly employ
+it only under the strongest compulsion from his artistic conscience.
+
+Sir Arthur Pinero has three suicides on his record, though one of them
+was, so to speak, nipped in the bud. In _The Profligate_, as presented
+on the stage, Dunstan Renshaw changed his mind before draining the fatal
+goblet; and in this case the stage version was surely the right one. The
+suicide, to which the author still clings in the printed text,
+practically dates the play as belonging to the above-mentioned period of
+rebellion against the conventional "happy ending," when the ambitious
+British dramatist felt that honour required him to kill his man on the
+smallest provocation.[4] Nearly a quarter of a century has passed since
+then, and the disproportion between such a play and such a catastrophe
+is now apparent to everyone. It is not that we judge Renshaw's
+delinquencies to be over-punished by death--that is not the question.
+The fact is simply that the characters are not large enough, true
+enough, living enough--that the play does not probe deep enough into
+human experience--to make the august intervention of death seem other
+than an incongruity. The suicide of Paula Tanqueray, though it, too, has
+been much criticized, is a very different matter. Inevitable it cannot
+be called: if the play had been written within the past ten years, Sir
+Arthur would very likely have contrived to do without it. But it is, in
+itself, probable enough: both the good and the bad in Paula's character
+might easily make her feel that only the dregs of life remained to her,
+and they not worth drinking. The worst one can say of it is that it sins
+against the canon of practical convenience which enjoins on the prudent
+dramatist strict economy in suicide. The third case, Zoe Blundell's leap
+to nothingness, in that harsh and ruthless masterpiece, _Mid-Channel_,
+is as inevitable as anything can well be in human destiny. Zoe has made
+a miserable and hopeless muddle of her life. In spite of her goodness of
+heart, she has no interests and no ideals, apart from the personal
+satisfactions which have now been poisoned at their source. She has
+intervened disastrously in the destinies of others. She is ill; her
+nerves are all on edge; and she is, as it were, driven into a corner,
+from which there is but one easy and rapid exit. Here is a case, if ever
+there was one, where the end is imposed upon the artist by the whole
+drift of his action. It may be said that chance plays a large part in
+the concatenation of events--that, for instance, if Leonard Ferris had
+not happened to live at the top of a very high building, Zoe would not
+have encountered the sudden temptation to which she yields. But this, as
+I have tried to show above, is a baseless complaint. Chance is a
+constant factor in life, now aiding, now thwarting, the will. To
+eliminate it altogether would be to produce a most unlifelike world. It
+is only when the playwright so manipulates and reduplicates chance as to
+make it seem no longer chance, but purposeful arrangement, that we have
+the right to protest.
+
+Another instance of indisputably justified suicide may be found in Mr.
+Galsworthy's _Justice_. The whole theme of the play is nothing but the
+hounding to his end of a luckless youth, who has got on the wrong side
+of the law, and finds all the forces of society leagued against him. In
+Mr. Granville Barker's _Waste_, the artistic justification for Trebell's
+self-effacement is less clear and compulsive. It is true that the play
+was suggested by the actual suicide, not of a politician, but of a
+soldier, who found his career ruined by some pitiful scandal. But the
+author has made no attempt to reproduce the actual circumstances of that
+case; and even if he had reproduced the external circumstances, the
+psychological conditions would clearly have eluded him. Thus the appeal
+to fact is, as it always must be, barred. In two cases, indeed, much
+more closely analogous to Trebell's than that which actually suggested
+it--two famous cases in which a scandal cut short a brilliant political
+career--suicide played no part in the catastrophe. These real-life
+instances are, I repeat, irrelevant. The only question is whether Mr.
+Barker has made us feel that a man of Trebell's character would
+certainly not survive the paralysing of his energies; and that question
+every spectator must answer for himself. I am far from answering it in
+the negative. I merely suggest that the playwright may one day come
+across a theme for which there is no conceivable ending but suicide, and
+may wish that he had let Trebell live, lest people should come to regard
+him as a spendthrift of self-slaughter.
+
+The suicide which brings to a close Mr. Clyde Fitch's very able play,
+_The Climbers_, stands on a somewhat different level. Here it is not the
+protagonist who makes away with himself, nor is his destiny the main
+theme of the play. Mr. Fitch has painted a broad social picture, in
+which, if there is any concentration of interest, it is upon Blanche and
+Warden. Sterling's suicide, then, though it does in fact cut the chief
+knot of the play, is to be regarded rather as a characteristic and
+probable incident of a certain phase of life, than as the culmination of
+a spiritual tragedy. It has not the artistic significance, either good
+or bad, that it would have if the character and destiny of Sterling were
+our main concernment.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The happy playwright, one may say, is he whose theme does not force upon
+him either a sanguinary or a tame last act, but enables him, without
+troubling the coroner, to sustain and increase the tension up to the
+very close. Such themes are not too common, but they do occur. Dumas
+found one in _Denise_, and another in _Francillon_, where the famous "Il
+en a menti!" comes within two minutes of the fall of the curtain. In
+_Heimat_ (Magda) and in _Johannisfeuer_, Sudermann keeps the tension at
+its height up to the fall of the curtain. Sir Arthur Pinero's _Iris_ is
+a case in point; so are Mr. Shaw's _Candida_ and _The Devil's Disciple_;
+so is Mr. Galsworthy's _Strife_. Other instances will no doubt occur to
+the reader; yet he will probably be surprised to find that it is not
+very easy to recall them.
+
+For this is not, in fact, the typical modern formula. In plays which do
+not end in death, it will generally be found that the culminating scene
+occurs in the penultimate act, and that, if anticlimax is avoided, it is
+not by the maintenance of an unbroken tension, by its skilful renewal
+and reinforcement in the last act. This is a resource which the
+playwright will do well to bear in mind. Where he cannot place his
+"great scene" in his last act, he should always consider whether it be
+not possible to hold some development in reserve whereby the tension may
+be screwed up again--if unexpectedly, so much the better. Some of the
+most successful plays within my recollection have been those in which
+the last act came upon us as a pleasant surprise. An anticlimax had
+seemed inevitable; and behold! the author had found a way out of it.
+
+_An Enemy of the People_ may perhaps be placed in this class, though, as
+before remarked, the last act is almost an independent comedy. Had the
+play ended with the fourth act, no one would have felt that anything was
+lacking; so that in his fifth act, Ibsen was not so much grappling with
+an urgent technical problem, as amusing himself by wringing the last
+drop of humour out of the given situation. A more strictly apposite
+example may be found in Sir Arthur Pinero's play, _His House in Order_.
+Here the action undoubtedly culminates in the great scene between Nina
+and Hilary Jesson in the third act; yet we await with eager anticipation
+the discomfiture of the Ridgeley family; and when we realize that it is
+to be brought about by the disclosure to Filmer of Annabel's secret, the
+manifest rightness of the proceeding gives us a little shock of
+pleasure. Mr. Somerset Maugham, again, in the last act of _Grace_,
+employs an ingenious device to keep the tension at a high pitch. The
+matter of the act consists mainly of a debate as to whether Grace Insole
+ought, or ought not, to make a certain painful avowal to her husband. As
+the negative opinion was to carry the day, Mr. Maugham saw that there
+was grave danger that the final scene might appear an almost ludicrous
+anticlimax. To obviate this, he made Grace, at the beginning of the act,
+write a letter of confession, and address it to Claude; so that all
+through the discussion we had at the back of our mind the question "Will
+the letter reach his hands? Will the sword of Damocles fall?" This may
+seem like a leaf from the book of Sardou; but in reality it was a
+perfectly natural and justified expedient. It kept the tension alive
+throughout a scene of ethical discussion, interesting in itself, but
+pretty clearly destined to lead up to the undramatic alternative--a
+policy of silence and inaction. Mr. Clyde Fitch, in the last act of _The
+Truth_, made an elaborate and daring endeavour to relieve the
+mawkishness of the clearly-foreseen reconciliation between Warder and
+Becky. He let Becky fall in with her father's mad idea of working upon
+Warder's compassion by pretending that she had tried to kill herself.
+Only at the last moment did she abandon the sordid comedy, and so prove
+herself (as we are asked to suppose) cured for ever of the habit of
+fibbing. Mr. Fitch here showed good technical insight marred by
+over-hasty execution. That Becky should be tempted to employ her old
+methods, and should overcome the temptation, was entirely right; but the
+actual deception attempted was so crude and hopeless that there was no
+plausibility in her consenting to it, and no merit in her desisting
+from it.
+
+In light comedy and farce it is even more desirable than in serious
+drama to avoid a tame and perfunctory last act. Very often a seemingly
+trivial invention will work wonders in keeping the interest afoot. In
+Mr. Anstey's delightful farce, _The Brass Bottle_, one looked forward
+rather dolefully to a flat conclusion; but by the simple device of
+letting the Jinny omit to include Pringle in his "act of oblivion," the
+author is enabled to make his last scene quite as amusing as any of its
+predecessors. Mr. Arnold Bennett, in _The Honeymoon_, had the audacity
+to play a deliberate trick on the audience, in order to evade an
+anticlimax. Seeing that his third act could not at best be very good, he
+purposely put the audience on a false scent, made it expect an
+absolutely commonplace ending (the marriage of Flora to Charles Haslam),
+and then substituted one which, if not very brilliant, was at least
+ingenious and unforeseen. Thus, by defeating the expectation of a
+superlatively bad act, he made a positively insignificant act seem
+comparatively good. Such feats of craftsmanship are entertaining, but
+too dangerous to be commended for imitation.
+
+In some modern plays a full close is achieved by the simple expedient of
+altogether omitting the last act, or last scene, and leaving the end of
+the play to the imagination. This method is boldly and (I understand)
+successfully employed by Mr. Edward Sheldon in his powerful play, _The
+Nigger_. Philip Morrow, the popular Governor of one of the Southern
+States, has learnt that his grandmother was a quadroon, and that
+consequently he has in him a much-attenuated strain of African blood. In
+the Southern States, attenuation matters nothing: if the remotest
+filament of a man's ancestry runs back to Africa, he is "a nigger all
+right." Philip has just suppressed a race-riot in the city, and, from
+the balcony of the State Capitol, is to address the troops who have
+aided him, and the assembled multitude. Having resolutely parted from
+the woman he adores, but can no longer marry, he steps out upon the
+balcony to announce that he is a negro, that he resigns the
+Governorship, and that henceforth he casts in his lot with his black
+brethren. The stage-direction runs thus--
+
+  The afternoon sun strikes his figure. At his appearance a shout goes
+  up--long, steady, enthusiastic cheering; and, after a moment, the
+  big regimental band begins playing, very slowly, "My Country, 'tis
+  of Thee." ... All the people in the room are smiling and applauding
+  enthusiastically; and--as Phil in vain raises his hand for silence,
+  and the band crashes through the National Anthem, and the roar of
+  voices still rises from below--
+
+  THE CURTAIN FALLS.
+
+One does not know whether to praise Mr. Sheldon for having adroitly
+avoided an anticlimax, or to reproach him with having unblushingly
+shirked a difficulty. To my sense, the play has somewhat the air of a
+hexameter line with the spondee cut off.[5] One _does_ want to see the
+peripety through. But if the audience is content to imagine the sequel,
+Mr. Sheldon's craftsmanship is justified, and there is no more to be
+said. M. Brieux experienced some difficulty in bringing his early play,
+_Blanchette_, to a satisfactory close. The third act which he originally
+wrote was found unendurably cynical; a more agreeable third act was
+condemned as an anticlimax; and for some time the play was presented
+with no third act at all. It did not end, but simply left off. No doubt
+it is better that a play should stop in the middle than that it should
+drag on tediously and ineffectually. But it would be foolish to make a
+system of such an expedient. It is, after all, an evasion, not a
+solution, of the artist's problem.
+
+An incident which occurred during the rehearsals for the first
+production of _A Doll's House_, at the Novelty Theatre, London,
+illustrates the difference between the old, and what was then the new,
+fashion of ending a play. The business manager of the company, a man of
+ripe theatrical experience, happened to be present one day when Miss
+Achurch and Mr. Waring were rehearsing the last great scene between Nora
+and Helmar. At the end of it, he came up to me, in a state of high
+excitement. "This is a fine play!" he said. "This is sure to be a big
+thing!" I was greatly pleased. "If this scene, of all others," I
+thought, "carries a man like Mr. Smith off his feet, it cannot fail to
+hold the British public." But I was somewhat dashed when, a day or two
+later, Mr. Smith came up to me again, in much less buoyant spirits. "I
+made a mistake about that scene," he said. "They tell me it's the end of
+the _last_ act--I thought it was the end of the _first_!"
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+[Footnote 1: The reader who wishes to pursue the theme may do so to
+excellent advantage in Professor Bradley's _Shakespearean Tragedy_.]
+
+[Footnote 2: It is true that in _A Doll's House_, Dr. Rank announces his
+approaching demise: but he does not actually die, nor is his fate an
+essential part of the action of the play.]
+
+[Footnote 3: The duel, even in countries whose customs permit of it, is
+essentially an inartistic end; for it leaves the catastrophe to be
+decided either by Chance or Providence--two equally inadmissible
+arbiters in modern drama. Alexandre Dumas _fils_, in his preface to
+_Héloïse Paranquet_, condemns the duel as a dramatic expedient. "Not to
+mention," he says, "the fact that it has been much over-done, we are
+bound to recognize that Providence, in a fit of absence of mind,
+sometimes suffers the rascal to kill the honest man. Let me recommend my
+young colleagues," he proceeds, "never to end a piece which pretends to
+reproduce a phase of real life, by an intervention of chance." The
+recommendation came rather oddly from the dramatist who, in
+_L'Etrangère_, had disposed of his "vibrion," the Duc de Septmonts, by
+making Clarkson kill him in a duel. Perhaps he did not reckon
+_L'Etrangère_ as pretending to reproduce a phase of real life. A duel
+is, of course, perfectly admissible in a French or German play, simply
+as part of a picture of manners. Its stupid inconclusiveness may be the
+very point to be illustrated. It is only when represented as a moral
+arbitrament that it becomes an anachronism.]
+
+[Footnote 4: I am glad to see, from Mr. Malcolm Salaman's introduction
+to the printed play, that, even in those days of our hot youth, my own
+aesthetic principles were less truculent.]
+
+[Footnote 5: This image is sometimes suggested by an act-ending which
+leaves a marked situation obviously unresolved. The curtain should never
+be dropped at such a point as to leave the characters in a physical or
+mental attitude which cannot last for more than a moment, and must
+certainly be followed, then and there, by important developments. In
+other words, a situation ought not to be cut short at the very height of
+its tension, but only when it has reached a point of--at any rate
+momentary--relaxation.]
+
+
+
+
+_BOOK V_
+
+EPILOGUE
+
+
+
+
+_CHAPTER XXII_
+
+CHARACTER AND PSYCHOLOGY
+
+
+For the invention and ordering of incident it is possible, if not to lay
+down rules, at any rate to make plausible recommendations; but the power
+to observe, to penetrate, and to reproduce character can neither be
+acquired nor regulated by theoretical recommendations. Indirectly, of
+course, all the technical discussions of the previous chapters tend, or
+ought to tend, towards the effective presentment of character; for
+construction, in drama of any intellectual quality, has no other end.
+But specific directions for character-drawing would be like rules for
+becoming six feet high. Either you have it in you, or you have it not.
+
+Under the heading of character, however, two points arise which may be
+worth a brief discussion: first, ought we always to aim at development
+in character? second, what do we, or ought we to, mean by "psychology"?
+
+It is a frequent critical complaint that in such-and-such a character
+there is "no development": that it remains the same throughout a play;
+or (so the reproach is sometimes worded) that it is not a character but
+an invariable attitude. A little examination will show us, I think,
+that, though the critic may in these cases be pointing to a real fault,
+he does not express himself quite accurately.
+
+What is character? For the practical purposes of the dramatist, it may
+be defined as a complex of intellectual, emotional, and nervous habits.
+Some of these habits are innate and temperamental--habits formed, no
+doubt, by far-off ancestors.[1] But this distinction does not here
+concern us. Temperamental bias is a habit, like another, only somewhat
+older, and, therefore, harder to deflect or eradicate. What do we imply,
+then, when we complain that, in a given character, no development has
+taken place? We imply that he ought, within the limits of the play, to
+have altered the mental habits underlying his speech and actions. But is
+this a reasonable demand? Is it consistent with the usual and desirable
+time-limits of drama? In the long process of a novel, there may be time
+for the gradual alteration of habits: in the drama, which normally
+consists of a single crisis, any real change of character would have to
+be of a catastrophic nature, in which experience does not encourage us
+to put much faith. It was, indeed--as Dryden pointed out in a passage
+quoted above[2]--one of the foibles of our easy-going ancestors to treat
+character as practically reversible when the time approached for ringing
+down the curtain. The same convention survives to this day in certain
+forms of drama. Even Ibsen, in his earlier work, had not shaken it off;
+witness the sudden ennoblement of Bernick in _Pillars of Society_. But
+it can scarcely be that sort of "development" which the critics consider
+indispensable. What is it, then, that they have in mind?
+
+By "development" of character, I think they mean, not change, but rather
+unveiling, disclosure. They hold, not unreasonably, that a dramatic
+crisis ought to disclose latent qualities in the persons chiefly
+concerned in it, and involve, not, indeed, a change, but, as it were, an
+exhaustive manifestation of character. The interest of the highest order
+of drama should consist in the reaction of character to a series of
+crucial experiences. We should, at the end of a play, know more of the
+protagonist's character than he himself, or his most intimate friend,
+could know at the beginning; for the action should have been such as to
+put it to some novel and searching test. The word "development" might be
+very aptly used in the photographic sense. A drama ought to bring out
+character as the photographer's chemicals "bring out" the forms latent
+in the negative. But this is quite a different thing from development in
+the sense of growth or radical change. In all modern drama, there is
+perhaps no character who "develops," in the ordinary sense of the word,
+so startlingly as Ibsen's Nora; and we cannot but feel that the poet has
+compressed into a week an evolution which, in fact, would have demanded
+many months.
+
+The complaint that a character preserves the same attitude throughout
+means (if it be justified) that it is not a human being at all, but a
+mere embodiment of two or three characteristics which are fully
+displayed within the first ten minutes, and then keep on repeating
+themselves, like a recurrent decimal. Strong theatrical effects can be
+produced by this method, which is that of the comedy of types, or of
+"humors." But it is now generally, and rightly, held that a character
+should be primarily an individual, and only incidentally (if at all)
+capable of classification under this type or that. It is a little
+surprising to find Sarcey, so recently as 1889, laying it down that "a
+character is a master faculty or passion, which absorbs all the rest....
+To study and paint a character is, therefore, by placing a man in a
+certain number of situations, to show how this principal motive force in
+his nature annihilates or directs all those which, if he had been
+another man, would probably have come into action." This dogma of the
+"ruling passion" belongs rather to the eighteenth century than to the
+close of the nineteenth.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+We come now to the second of the questions above propounded, which I
+will state more definitely in this form: Is "psychology" simply a more
+pedantic term for "character-drawing"? Or can we establish a distinction
+between the two ideas? I do not think that, as a matter of fact, any
+difference is generally and clearly recognized; but I suggest that it is
+possible to draw a distinction which might, if accepted, prove
+serviceable both to critics and to playwrights.
+
+Let me illustrate my meaning by an example. In _Bella Donna_, by Messrs.
+Robert Hichens and James B. Fagan, we have a murder-story of a not
+uncommon or improbable type. A woman of very shady reputation marries an
+amiable idealist who is infatuated with her. She naturally finds his
+idealism incomprehensible and his amiability tedious. His position as
+heir-presumptive to a peerage is shattered by the birth of an
+heir-apparent. She becomes passionately enamoured of an Egyptian
+millionaire; and she sets to work to poison her husband with
+sugar-of-lead, provided by her oriental lover. How her criminal purpose
+is thwarted by a wise Jewish physician is nothing to the present
+purpose. In intent she is a murderess, no less than Lucrezia Borgia or
+the Marquise de Brinvilliers. And the authors have drawn her character
+cleverly enough. They have shown her in the first act as a
+shallow-souled materialist, and in the later acts as a vain, irritable,
+sensual, unscrupulous creature. But have they given us any insight into
+her psychology? No, that is just what they have not done. They have
+assigned to her certain characteristics without which cruel and
+cold-blooded murder would be inconceivable; but they have afforded us no
+insight into the moral conditions and, mental processes which make it,
+not only conceivable, but almost an everyday occurrence. For the average
+human mind, I suppose, the psychology of crime, and especially of
+fiendish, hypocritical murder-by-inches, has an undeniable fascination.
+To most of us it seems an abhorrent miracle; and it would interest us
+greatly to have it brought more or less within the range of our
+comprehension, and co-ordinated with other mental phenomena which we can
+and do understand. But of such illumination we find nothing in _Bella
+Donna_. It leaves the working of a poisoner's mind as dark to us as
+ever. So far as that goes, we might just as well have read the report of
+a murder-trial, wherein the facts are stated with, perhaps, some
+superficial speculation as to motive, but no attempt is made to
+penetrate to underlying soul-states. Yet this is surely the highest
+privilege of art--to take us behind and beneath those surfaces of things
+which are apparent to the detective and the reporter, the juryman and
+the judge.
+
+Have we not here, then, the distinction between character-drawing and
+psychology? Character-drawing is the presentment of human nature in its
+commonly-recognized, understood, and accepted aspects; psychology is, as
+it were, the exploration of character, the bringing of hitherto
+unsurveyed tracts within the circle of our knowledge and comprehension.
+In other words, character-drawing is synthetic, psychology analytic.
+This does not mean that the one is necessarily inferior to the other.
+Some of the greatest masterpieces of creative art have been achieved by
+the synthesis of known elements. Falstaff, for example--there is no more
+brilliant or more living character in all fiction; yet it is impossible
+to say that Shakespeare has here taken us into previously unplumbed
+depths of human nature, as he has in Hamlet, or in Lear. No doubt it is
+often very hard to decide whether a given personage is a mere projection
+of the known or a divination of the unknown. What are we to say, for
+example, of Cleopatra, or of Shylock, or of Macbeth? Richard II, on the
+other hand, is as clearly a piece of psychology as the Nurse in _Romeo
+and Juliet_ is a piece of character-drawing. The comedy of types
+necessarily tends to keep within the limits of the known, and
+Molière--in spite of Alceste and Don Juan--is characteristically a
+character-drawer, as Racine is characteristically a psychologist. Ibsen
+is a psychologist or he is nothing. Earl Skule and Bishop Nicholas,
+Hedda Gabler and John Gabriel Borkman are daring explorations of
+hitherto uncharted regions of the human soul. But Ibsen, too, was a
+character-drawer when it suited him. One is tempted to say that there is
+no psychology in Brand--he is a mere incarnation of intransigent
+idealism--while Peer Gynt is as brilliant a psychological inspiration as
+Don Quixote. Dr. Stockmann is a vigorously-projected character, Hialmar
+Ekdal a piece of searching psychology. Finally, my point could scarcely
+be better illustrated than by a comparison--cruel but instructive
+--between Rebecca in _Rosmersholm_ and the heroine in _Bella
+Donna_. Each is, in effect, a murderess, though it was a moral, not a
+mineral, poison that Rebecca employed. But while we know nothing
+whatever of Mrs. Armine's mental processes, Rebecca's temptations,
+struggles, sophistries, hesitations, resolves, and revulsions of feeling
+are all laid bare to us, so that we feel her to be no monster, but a
+living woman, comprehensible to our intelligence, and, however
+blameworthy, not wholly beyond the range of our sympathies. There are
+few greater achievements of psychology.
+
+Among the playwrights of to-day, I should call Mr. Granville Barker
+above all things a psychologist. It is his instinct to venture into
+untrodden fields of character, or, at any rate, to probe deeply into
+phenomena which others have noted but superficially, if at all. Hence
+the occasional obscurity of his dialogue. Mr. Shaw is not, primarily,
+either a character-drawer or a psychologist, but a dealer in personified
+ideas. His leading figures are, as a rule, either his mouthpieces or his
+butts. When he gives us a piece of real character-drawing, it is
+generally in some subordinate personage. Mr. Galsworthy, I should say,
+shows himself a psychologist in _Strife_, a character-drawer in _The
+Silver Box_ and _Justice_. Sir Arthur Pinero, a character-drawer of
+great versatility, becomes a psychologist in some of his studies of
+feminine types--in Iris, in Letty, in the luckless heroine of
+_Mid-Channel_. Mr. Clyde Fitch had, at least, laudable ambitions in the
+direction of psychology. Becky in _The Truth_, and Jinny in _The Girl
+with the Green Eyes_, in so far as they are successfully drawn, really
+do mean a certain advance on our knowledge of feminine human nature.
+Unfortunately, owing to the author's over-facile and over-hasty method
+of work, they are now and then a little out of drawing. The most
+striking piece of psychology known to me in American drama is the Faith
+Healer in William Vaughn Moody's drama of that name. If the last act of
+_The Faith Healer_ were as good as the rest of it, one might safely call
+it the finest play ever written, at any rate in the English language,
+beyond the Atlantic. The psychologists of the modern French stage, I
+take it, are M. de Curel and M. de Porto-Riche. MM. Brieux and Hervieu
+are, like Mr. Shaw, too much concerned with ideas to probe very deep
+into character. In Germany, Hauptmann, and, so far as I understand him,
+Wedekind, are psychologists, Sudermann, a vigorous character-drawer.
+
+It is pretty clear that, if this distinction were accepted, it would be
+of use to the critic, inasmuch as we should have two terms for two
+ideas, instead of one popular term with a rather pedantic synonym. But
+what would be its practical use to the artist, the craftsman? Simply
+this, that if the word "psychology" took on for him a clear and definite
+meaning, it might stimulate at once his imagination and his ambition.
+Messrs. Hichens and Fagan, for example, might have asked themselves--or
+each other--"Are we getting beneath the surface of this woman's nature?
+Are we plucking the heart out of her mystery? Cannot we make the
+specific processes of a murderess's mind clearer to ourselves and to our
+audiences?" Whether they would have been capable of rising to the
+opportunity, I cannot tell; but in the case of other authors one not
+infrequently feels: "This man could have taken us deeper into this
+problem if he had only thought of it." I do not for a moment mean that
+every serious dramatist should always be aiming at psychological
+exploration. The character-drawer's appeal to common knowledge and
+instant recognition is often all that is required, or that would be in
+place. But there are also occasions not a few when the dramatist shows
+himself unequal to his opportunities if he does not at least attempt to
+bring hitherto unrecorded or unscrutinized phases of character within
+the scope of our understanding and our sympathies.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+[Footnote 1: If this runs counter to the latest biological orthodoxy, I
+am sorry. Habits are at any rate transmissible by imitation, if not
+otherwise.]
+
+[Footnote 2: Chapter XIX.]
+
+
+
+
+_CHAPTER XXIII_
+
+DIALOGUE AND DETAILS
+
+
+The extraordinary progress made by the drama of the English language
+during the past quarter of a century is in nothing more apparent than in
+the average quality of modern dialogue. Tolerably well-written dialogue
+is nowadays the rule rather than the exception. Thirty years ago, the
+idea that it was possible to combine naturalness with vivacity and
+vigour had scarcely dawned upon the playwright's mind. He passed and
+repassed from stilted pathos to strained and verbal wit (often mere
+punning); and when a reformer like T.W. Robertson tried to come a little
+nearer to the truth of life, he was apt to fall into babyish simplicity
+or flat commonness.
+
+Criticism has not given sufficient weight to the fact that English
+dramatic writing laboured for centuries--and still labours to some
+degree--under a historic misfortune. It has never wholly recovered from
+the euphuism--to use the word in its widest sense--of the late sixteenth
+century. The influence of John Lyly and his tribe is still traceable,
+despite a hundred metamorphoses, in some of the plays of to-day and in
+many of the plays of yesterday. From the very beginnings of English
+comedy, it was accepted as almost self-evident that "wit"--a factitious,
+supererogatory sparkle--was indispensable to all dialogue of a
+non-tragic order. Language was a newly discovered and irresistibly
+fascinating playground for the fancy. Conversation must be thick-strewn
+with verbal quibbles, similes, figures, and flourishes of every
+description, else it was unworthy to be spoken on the stage. We all know
+how freely Shakespeare yielded to this convention, and so helped to
+establish it. Sometimes, not always, his genius enabled him to render it
+delightful; but in most of the Elizabethans--though it be heresy to say
+so--it is an extremely tedious mannerism. After the Restoration, when
+modern light talk came into being in the coffee-houses, the fashion of
+the day, no doubt, favoured a straining after wit; so that the
+playwrights were in some measure following nature--that very small
+corner of nature which they called "the town"--in accepting and making a
+law of the Elizabethan convention. The leading characters of Restoration
+comedy, from Etherege to Vanbrugh, are consciously and almost
+professionally wits. Simile and repartee are as indispensable a part of
+a gentleman's social outfit as his wig or his rapier. In Congreve the
+word "wit" is almost as common as the thing. When Farquhar made some
+movement towards a return to nature, he was rewarded with Pope's line,
+which clings like a burr to his memory--
+
+  "What pert, low dialogue has Farquhar writ."
+
+If eighteenth-century comedy, as a whole, is not brilliantly written, it
+is for lack of talent in the playwrights, not for lack of desire or
+intention. Goldsmith, like Farquhar and Steele, vaguely realized the
+superiority of humour to wit; but he died too early to exercise much
+influence on his successors. In Sheridan the convention of wit
+reasserted itself triumphantly, and the scene in which Lady Teazle, Mrs.
+Candour, and the rest of the scandalous college sit in a semicircle and
+cap malicious similes, came to be regarded as an unapproachable model of
+comedy dialogue. The convention maintained itself firmly down to the
+days of _Money_ and _London Assurance_, the dullness of the intervening
+period being due, not to any change of theory, but to sheer impotence of
+practice. T.W. Robertson, as above mentioned, attempted a return to
+nature, with occasional and very partial success; but wit, with a dash
+of fanciful sentiment, reasserted itself in James Albery; while in H.J.
+Byron it degenerated into mere punning and verbal horse-play. I should
+not be surprised if the historian of the future were to find in the
+plays of Mr. Henry Arthur Jones the first marked symptoms of a
+reaction--of a tendency to reject extrinsic and fanciful ornament in
+dialogue, and to rely for its effect upon its vivid appropriateness to
+character and situation. In the early plays of Sir Arthur Pinero there
+is a great deal of extrinsic ornament; especially of that
+metaphor-hunting which was one of the characteristic forms of euphuism.
+Take this, for example, from _The Profligate_. Dunstan Renshaw has
+expressed to Hugh Murray the opinion that "marriages of contentment are
+the reward of husbands who have taken the precaution to sow their wild
+oats rather thickly"; whereupon the Scotch solicitor replies--
+
+  HUGH MURRAY: Contentment! Renshaw, do you imagine that there is no
+  autumn in the life of a profligate? Do you think there is no moment
+  when the accursed crop begins to rear its millions of heads above
+  ground; when the rich man would give his wealth to be able to tread
+  them back into the earth which rejects the foul load? To-day you
+  have robbed some honest man of a sweet companion!
+
+  DUNSTAN RENSHAW: Look here, Mr. Murray--!
+
+  HUGH MURRAY: To-morrow, next week, next month, you may be happy--but
+  what of the time when those wild oats thrust their ears through the
+  very seams of the floor trodden by the wife whose respect you will
+  have learned to covet! You may drag her into the crowded
+  streets--there is the same vile growth springing up from the chinks
+  of the pavement! In your house or in the open, the scent of the
+  mildewed grain always in your nostrils, and in your ears no music
+  but the wind's rustle amongst the fat sheaves! And, worst of all,
+  your wife's heart a granary bursting with the load of shame your
+  profligacy has stored there! I warn you--Mr. Lawrence Kenward!
+
+If we compare this passage with any page taken at random from
+_Mid-Channel_, we might think that a century of evolution lay between
+them, instead of barely twenty years.
+
+The convention of wit-at-any-price is, indeed, moribund; but it is
+perhaps not quite superfluous, even now, to emphasize the difference
+between what the French call the "mot d'auteur" and the "mot de
+situation." The terms practically explain themselves; but a third class
+ought to be added--the "mot de caractère." The "mot d'auteur" is the
+distinguishing mark of the Congreve-Sheridan convention. It survives in
+full vigour--or, shall one say, it sings its swan-song?--in the works of
+Oscar Wilde. For instance, the scene of the five men in the third act of
+_Lady Windermere's Fan_ is a veritable running-fire of epigrams wholly
+unconnected with the situation, and very slightly related, if at all, to
+the characters of the speakers. The mark of the "mot d'auteur" is that
+it can with perfect ease be detached from its context. I could fill this
+page with sayings from the scene in question, all perfectly
+comprehensible without any account of the situation. Among them would be
+one of those; profound sayings which Wilde now and then threw off in his
+lightest moods, like opals among soap-bubbles. "In the world," says
+Dumby, "there are two tragedies. One is not getting what one wants, and
+the other is getting it." This may rank with Lord Illingworth's speech
+in _A Woman of No Importance_: "All thought is immoral. Its very essence
+is destruction. If you think of anything you kill it. Nothing survives
+being thought of." When we hear such sayings as these--or the immortal
+"Vulgarity is the behaviour of other people"--we do not enquire too
+curiously into their appropriateness to character or situation; but none
+the less do they belong to an antiquated conception of drama.
+
+It is useless to begin to give specimens of the "mot de caractère" and
+"mot de situation." All really dramatic dialogue falls under one head or
+the other. One could easily pick out a few brilliantly effective
+examples of each class: but as their characteristic is to fade when
+uprooted from the soil in which they grow, they would take up space to
+very little purpose.
+
+But there is another historic influence, besides that of euphuism, which
+has been hurtful, though in a minor degree, to the development of a
+sound style in dialogue. Some of the later Elizabethans, and notably
+Webster and Ford, cultivated a fashion of abrupt utterance, whereby an
+immensity of spiritual significance--generally tragic--was supposed to
+be concentrated into a few brief words. The classic example is
+Ferdinand's "Cover her face. Mine eyes dazzle. She died young," in _The
+Duchess of Malfy_. Charles Lamb celebrated the virtues of this pregnant,
+staccato style with somewhat immoderate admiration, and thus helped to
+set a fashion of spasmodic pithiness in dialogue, which too often
+resulted in dense obscurity. Not many plays composed under this
+influence have reached the stage; not one has held it. But we find in
+some recent writing a qualified recrudescence of the spasmodic manner,
+with a touch of euphuism thrown in. This is mainly due, I think, to the
+influence of George Meredith, who accepted the convention of wit as the
+informing spirit of comedy dialogue, and whose abnormally rapid faculty
+of association led him to delight in a sort of intellectual shorthand
+which the normal mind finds very difficult to decipher. Meredith was a
+man of brilliant genius, which lent a fascination to his very
+mannerisms; but when these mannerisms are transferred by lesser men to a
+medium much less suited to them--that of the stage--the result is apt to
+be disastrous. I need not go into particulars; for no play of which the
+dialogue places a constant strain on the intellectual muscles of the
+audience ever has held, or ever will hold, a place in living dramatic
+literature. I will merely note the curious fact that English--my own
+language--is the only language out of the three or four known to me in
+which I have ever come across an entirely incomprehensible play. I could
+name English plays, both pre-Meredithian and post-Meredithian, which
+might almost as well be written in Chinese for all that I can make
+of them.
+
+Obscurity and precocity are generally symptoms of an exaggerated dread
+of the commonplace. The writer of dramatic prose has, indeed, a very
+difficult task if he is to achieve style without deserting nature.
+Perhaps it would be more accurate to say that the difficulty lies in
+getting criticism to give him credit for the possession of style,
+without incurring the reproach of mannerism. How is one to give
+concentration and distinction to ordinary talk, while making it still
+seem ordinary? Either the distinction will strike the critics, and they
+will call it pompous and unreal, or the ordinariness will come home to
+them, and they will deny the distinction. This is the dramatist's
+constant dilemma. One can only comfort him with the assurance that if he
+has given his dialogue the necessary concentration, and has yet kept it
+plausibly near to the language of life, he has achieved style, and may
+snap his fingers at the critics. Style, in prose drama, is the sifting
+of common speech.
+
+It is true, however, that, with equal concentration and equal
+naturalness, one man may give his work a beauty of cadence and phrasing
+which another man may entirely miss. Two recent writers of English
+dramatic prose have stood out from their fellows in respect of the sheer
+beauty of their style--I need scarcely name Oscar Wilde and J.M. Synge.
+But Wilde's dialogue can by no means be called free from mannerism,[1]
+while Synge wrote in a language which had a music of its own, even
+before his genius took hold of it.
+
+It does not seem very profitable to try to concentrate into a definition
+the distinctive qualities of dramatic dialogue. The late Mrs. Craigie
+("John Oliver Hobbes") attempted to do so in the preface to a charming
+play, _The Ambassador_; and the result at any rate the sequel--was that
+her next play, _The Wisdom of the Wise_, was singularly self-conscious
+and artificial. She found in "emotion" the test of dramatic quality in
+any given utterance. "Stage dialogue," she says, "may or may not have
+many qualities, but it must be emotional." Here we have a statement
+which is true in a vague and general sense, untrue in the definite and
+particular sense in which alone it could afford any practical guidance.
+"My lord, the carriage waits," may be, in its right place, a highly
+dramatic speech, even though it be uttered with no emotion, and arouse
+no emotion in the person addressed. What Mrs. Craigie meant, I take it,
+was that, to be really dramatic, every speech must have some bearing,
+direct or indirect, prospective, present, or retrospective, upon
+individual human destinies. The dull play, the dull scene, the dull
+speech, is that in which we do not perceive this connection; but when
+once we are interested in the individuals concerned, we are so quick to
+perceive the connection, even though it be exceedingly distant and
+indirect, that the dramatist who should always hold the fear of Mrs.
+Craigie's aphorism consciously before his eyes would unnecessarily
+fetter and restrict himself. Even the driest scientific proposition may,
+under special circumstances, become electrical with drama. The statement
+that the earth moves round the sun does not, in itself, stir our pulses;
+yet what playwright has ever invented a more dramatic utterance than
+that which some one invented for Galileo: "E pur si muove!"? In all
+this, to be sure, I am illustrating, not confuting, Mrs. Craigie's
+maxim. I have no wish to confute it, for, in the largest interpretation,
+it is true; but I suggest that it is true only when attenuated almost
+beyond recognition, and quite beyond the point at which it can be of any
+practical help to the practical dramatist. He must rely on his instinct,
+not numb and bewilder it by constantly subjecting it to the dictates of
+hard-and-fast aesthetic theory.
+
+We shall scarcely come much nearer to helpful truth than the point we
+have already reached, in the principle that all dialogue, except the
+merely mechanical parts--the connective tissue of the play--should
+consist either of "mots de caractère" or of "mots de situation." But if
+we go to French critics for this principle, do not let us go to French
+dramatists for models of practice. It is part of the abiding insularity
+of our criticism that the same writers who cannot forgive an English
+dramatist what they conceive to be a stilted turn of phrase, will pass
+without remark, if not with positive admiration, the outrageously
+rhetorical style which is still prevalent in French drama. Here, for
+instance, is a quite typical passage from _Le Duel_, by M. Henri
+Lavedan, an author of no small repute; and it would be easy to find even
+more magniloquent tirades in the works of almost any of his
+contemporaries. I translate from the concluding scene between the Abbé
+and the Duchess:
+
+  THE ABBÉ: "In our strange life, there are sometimes unexpected and
+  decisive moments, sovereign, though we know not why. We feel it,
+  that is all!--fulgurant moments, which throw, as it were, a flash of
+  lightning upon our destinies, like those meteors which shine forth
+  from time to time in the heavens, and of which none can say what
+  their purple signifies, whether it be a cataclysm or an apotheosis.
+  Well, it appears to me that we, you and I, are now face to face with
+  one of these moments!"
+
+  THE DUCHESS: "So I, too, believe."
+
+  THE ABBÉ: "We must take care, then, that it be an apotheosis. That
+  is why I want--Mon Dieu, madame! how shall I say it to you? Where
+  shall I go to find the chosen words, the words of pure gold, of
+  diamonds, the immaculate words that are worthy of us? All that you
+  are, all that you are worth, I know, and I alone know. You have
+  opened, that I might read it, the book of hours that is your mind. I
+  am in no wise disquieted about you or your future; yet, that I may
+  be fully reassured before we part, I wish, I wish you to tell me, to
+  declare to me, that you are at this very moment in absolute repose,
+  calm as a lake."
+
+And so Monsieur l'Abbé goes on for another page. If it be said that this
+ornate eloquence is merely professional, I reply that his brother, the
+atheist doctor, and the Duchess herself, are quite as copious in their
+rhetoric, and scarcely less ornate.
+
+It is a mistake to suppose that "literary merit" can be imparted to
+drama by such flagrant departures from nature; though some critics have
+not yet outgrown that superstition. Let the playwright take to heart an
+anecdote told by Professor Matthews in his _Inquiries and Opinions_--an
+anecdote of a New England farmer, who, being asked who was the architect
+of his house, replied: "Oh, I built that house myself; but there's a man
+coming down from Boston next week to put on the architecture." Better no
+style at all than style thus plastered on.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+What is to be said of the possibilities of blank verse as a dramatic
+medium? This is a thorny question, to be handled with caution. One can
+say with perfect assurance, however, that its possibilities are
+problematical, its difficulties and dangers certain.
+
+To discuss the question whether drama in verse is in its very nature
+nobler than drama in prose would lead us away from craftsmanship into
+the realm of pure aesthetics. For my own part, I doubt it. I suspect
+that the drama, like all literature, took its rise in verse, for the
+simple reason that verse is easier to make--and to memorize--than prose.
+Primitive peoples felt with Goethe--though not quite in the same
+sense--that "art is art because it is not nature." Not merely for
+emotional, but for all sorts of literary, expression, they demanded a
+medium clearly marked off from the speech of everyday life. The drama
+"lisped in numbers, for the numbers came." Even of so modern a writer
+(comparatively) as Shakespeare, it would scarcely be true to say that he
+"chose" verse as his medium, in the same sense in which Ibsen chose
+prose. He accepted it just as he accepted the other traditions and
+methods of the theatre of his time. In familiar passages he broke away
+from it; but on the whole it provided (among other advantages) a
+convenient and even necessary means of differentiation between the mimic
+personage and the audience, from whom he was not marked off by the
+proscenium arch and the artificial lights which make a world apart of
+the modern stage.
+
+And Shakespeare so glorified this metrical medium as to give it an
+overwhelming prestige. It was extremely easy to write blank verse after
+a fashion; and playwrights who found it flow almost spontaneously from
+their pens were only too ready to overlook the world-wide difference
+between their verse and that of the really great Elizabethans. Just
+after the Restoration, there was an attempt to introduce the rhymed
+couplet as the medium for heroic plays; but that, on the other hand, was
+too difficult to establish itself in general use. Tragedy soon fell back
+upon the fatally facile unrhymed iambic, and a reign of stilted, stodgy
+mediocrity set in. There is nothing drearier in literature than the
+century-and-a-half of English tragedy, from Otway to Sheridan Knowles.
+One is lost in wonder at the genius of the actors who could infuse life
+and passion into those masterpieces of turgid conventionality. The
+worship of the minor Elizabethans, which began with Lamb and culminated
+in Swinburne, brought into fashion (as we have seen) a spasmodic rather
+than a smoothly rhetorical way of writing, but did not really put new
+life into the outworn form. It may almost be called an appalling fact
+that for at least two centuries--from 1700 to 1900--not a single
+blank-verse play was produced which lives, or deserves to live,[2] on
+the stage of to-day.
+
+I have thus glanced at the history of the blank-verse play because I
+believe that it can never revive until we clearly realize and admit that
+it is, and has been for a century, thoroughly dead, while, for a century
+before that again, it was only galvanized into a semblance of life by a
+great school of rhetorical acting. The playwright who sets forth with
+the idea that, in writing a poetical drama, he is going to continue the
+great Elizabethan tradition, is starting on a wild-goose chase. The
+great Elizabethan tradition is an incubus to be exorcised. It was
+because Mr. Stephen Phillips was not Elizabethanizing, but clothing a
+vital and personal conception of drama in verse of very appealing
+lyrical quality, that some of us thought we saw in _Paolo and Francesca_
+the dawn of a new art. Apparently it was a false dawn; but I still
+believe that our orientation was right when we looked for the daybreak
+in the lyric quarter of the heavens. The very summits of Shakespeare's
+achievement are his glorious lyrical passages. Think of the exquisite
+elegiacs of Macbeth! Think of the immortal death-song of Cleopatra! If
+verse has any function on the stage, it is that of imparting lyric
+beauty to passionate speech. For the mere rhetorical "elevation" of
+blank verse we have no use whatever. It consists in saying simple things
+with verbose pomposity. But should there arise a man who combines
+highly-developed dramatic faculty with great lyric genius, it is quite
+possible that he may give us the new poetic drama for which our
+idealists are sighing. He will choose his themes, I take it, from
+legend, or from the domain of pure fantasy--themes which can be steeped
+from first to last in an atmosphere of poetry, as _Tristan und Isolde_
+is steeped in an atmosphere of music. Of historic themes, I would
+counsel this hypothetical genius to beware. If there are any which can
+fittingly be steeped in a lyric atmosphere, they are to be sought on the
+outskirts of history, or in the debatable land between history and
+legend. The formula of Schiller can no more be revived than the formula
+of Chapman or of Rowe. That a new historic drama awaits us in the
+future, I have little doubt; but it will be written in prose. The idea
+that the poetry of drama is to be sought specifically in verse has long
+ago been exploded by Ibsen and Maeterlinck and D'Annunzio and Synge. But
+there are, no doubt, themes which peculiarly lend themselves to
+lyrico-dramatic treatment, and we shall all welcome the poet who
+discovers and develops them.
+
+One warning let me add, in no uncertain voice. If you choose to write a
+blank-verse play, write it in blank verse, and not in some nondescript
+rhythm which is one long series of jolts and pitfalls to the sensitive
+ear. Many playwrights have thought by this means to escape from the
+monotony of blank verse; not one (that I ever heard of) has achieved
+even temporary success. If you cannot save your blank verse from
+monotony without breaking it on the wheel, that merely means that you
+cannot write blank verse, and had better let it alone. Again, in spite
+of Elizabethan precedent, there is nothing more irritating on the modern
+stage than a play which keeps on changing from verse to prose and back
+again. It gives the verse-passages an air of pompous self-consciousness.
+We seem to hear the author saying, as he shifts his gear, "Look you now!
+I am going to be eloquent and impressive!" The most destructive fault a
+dramatist can commit, in my judgment, is to pass, in the same work of
+art, from one plane of convention to another.[3]
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+We must now consider for a moment the question--if question it can be
+called--of the soliloquy and the aside. The example of Ibsen has gone
+far towards expelling these slovenlinesses from the work of all
+self-respecting playwrights. But theorists spring up every now and then
+to defend them. "The stage is the realm of convention," they argue. "If
+you accept a room with its fourth wall removed, which nothing short of
+an earthquake could render possible in real life, why should you jib at
+the idea--in which, after all, there is nothing absolutely
+impossible--that a man should utter aloud the thoughts that are passing
+through his mind?"
+
+It is all a question, once more, of planes of convention. No doubt there
+is an irreducible minimum of convention in all drama; but how strange is
+the logic which leaps from that postulate to the assertion that, if we
+admit a minimum, we cannot, or ought not to, exclude a maximum! There
+are plays which do not, and there are plays which do, set forth to give
+as nearly as possible an exact reproduction of the visual and auditory
+realities of life. In the Elizabethan theatre, with its platform stage
+under the open sky, any pictorial exactness of reproduction was clearly
+impossible. Its fundamental conditions necessitated very nearly[4] a
+maximum of convention; therefore such conventions as blank verse and the
+soliloquy were simply of a piece with all the rest. In the theatre of
+the eighteenth century and early nineteenth, the proscenium arch--the
+frame of the picture--made pictorial realism theoretically possible. But
+no one recognized the possibility; and indeed, on a candle-lit stage, it
+would have been extremely difficult. As a matter of fact, the
+Elizabethan platform survived in the shape of a long "apron," projecting
+in front of the proscenium, on which the most important parts of the
+action took place. The characters, that is to say, were constantly
+stepping out of the frame of the picture; and while this visual
+convention maintained itself, there was nothing inconsistent or jarring
+in the auditory convention of the soliloquy. Only in the last quarter of
+the nineteenth century did new methods of lighting, combined with new
+literary and artistic influences, complete the evolutionary process, and
+lead to the withdrawal of the whole stage--the whole dramatic
+domain--within the frame of the picture. It was thus possible to reduce
+visual convention to a minimum so trifling that in a well-set "interior"
+it needs a distinct effort of attention to be conscious of it at all. In
+fact, if we come to think of it, the removal of the fourth wall is
+scarcely to be classed as a convention; for in real life, as we do not
+happen to have eyes in the back of our heads, we are never visually
+conscious of all four walls of a room at once. If, then, in a room that
+is absolutely real, we see a man who (in all other respects) strives to
+be equally real, suddenly begin to expound himself aloud, in good, set
+terms, his own emotions, motives, or purposes, we instantly plump down
+from one plane of convention to another, and receive a disagreeable jar
+to our sense of reality. Up to that moment, all the efforts of author,
+producer, and actor have centred in begetting in us a particular order
+of illusion; and lo! the effort is suddenly abandoned, and the illusion
+shattered by a crying unreality. In modern serious drama, therefore, the
+soliloquy can only be regarded as a disturbing anachronism.[5]
+
+The physical conditions which tended to banish it from the stage were
+reinforced by the growing perception of its artistic slovenliness. It
+was found that the most delicate analyses could be achieved without its
+aid; and it became a point of honour with the self-respecting artist to
+accept a condition which rendered his material somewhat harder of
+manipulation, indeed, but all the more tempting to wrestle with and
+overcome. A drama with soliloquies and asides is like a picture with
+inscribed labels issuing from the mouths of the figures. In that way,
+any bungler can reveal what is passing in the minds of his personages.
+But the glorious problem of the modern playwright is to make his
+characters reveal the inmost workings of their souls without saying or
+doing anything that they would not say or do in the real world.[6]
+
+There are degrees, however, even in the makeshift and the slovenly; and
+not all lapses into anachronism are equally to be condemned. One thing
+is so patent as to call for no demonstration: to wit, that the aside is
+ten times worse than the soliloquy. It is always possible that a man
+might speak his thought, but it is glaringly impossible that he should
+speak it so as to be heard by the audience and not heard by others on
+the stage. In French light comedy and farce of the mid-nineteenth
+century, the aside is abused beyond even the license of fantasy. A man
+will speak an aside of several lines over the shoulder of another person
+whom he is embracing. Not infrequently in a conversation between two
+characters, each will comment aside on every utterance of the other,
+before replying to it. The convenience of this method of proceeding is
+manifest. It is as though the author stood by and delivered a running
+commentary on the secret motives and designs of his characters. But it
+is such a crying confession of unreality that, on the English-speaking
+stage, at any rate, it would scarcely be tolerated to-day, even in
+farce. In serious modern drama the aside is now practically unknown. It
+is so obsolete, indeed, that actors are puzzled how to handle it, and
+audiences what to make of it. In an ambitious play produced at a leading
+London theatre about ten years ago, a lady, on leaving the stage,
+announced, in an aside, her intention of drowning herself, and several
+critics, the next day, not understanding that she was speaking aside,
+severely blamed the gentleman who was on the stage with her for not
+frustrating her intention. About the same time, there occurred one of
+the most glaring instances within my recollection of inept
+conventionalism. The hero of the play was Eugene Aram. Alone in his room
+at dead of night, Aram heard Houseman breaking open the outside shutters
+of the window. Designing to entrap the robber, what did he do? He went
+up to the window and drew back the curtains, with a noise loud enough to
+be heard in the next parish. It was inaudible, however, to Houseman on
+the other side of the shutters. He proceeded with his work, opened the
+window, and slipped in, Aram hiding in the shadow. Then, while Houseman
+peered about him with his lantern, not six feet from Aram, and actually
+between him and the audience, Aram indulged in a long and loud monologue
+as to whether he should shoot Houseman or not, ending with a prayer to
+heaven to save him from more blood-guiltiness! Such are the childish
+excesses to which a playwright will presently descend when once he
+begins to dally with facile convention.
+
+An aside is intolerable because it is _not_ heard by the other person on
+the stage: it outrages physical possibility. An overheard soliloquy, on
+the other hand, is intolerable because it _is_ heard. It keeps within
+the bounds of physical possibility, but it stultifies the only logical
+excuse for the soliloquy, namely, that it is an externalization of
+thought which would in reality remain unuttered. This point is so clear
+that I need not insist upon it.
+
+Are there, in modern drama, any admissible soliloquies? A few brief
+ejaculations of joy, or despair, are, of course, natural enough, and no
+one will cavil at them. The approach of mental disease is often marked
+by a tendency to unrestrained loquacity, which goes on even while the
+sufferer is alone; and this distressing symptom may, on rare occasions,
+be put to artistic use. Short of actual derangement, however, there are
+certain states of nervous surexcitation which cause even healthy people
+to talk to themselves; and if an author has the skill to make us realize
+that his character is passing through such a crisis, he may risk a
+soliloquy, not only without reproach, but with conspicuous psychological
+justification. In the third act of Clyde Fitch's play, _The Girl with
+the Green Eyes_, there is a daring attempt at such a soliloquy, where
+Jinny says: "Good Heavens! why am I maudling on like this to myself out
+loud? It's really nothing--Jack will explain once more that he can't
+explain"--and so on. Whether the attempt justified itself or not would
+depend largely on the acting. In any case, it is clear that the author,
+though as a rule somewhat lax in his craftsmanship, was here aiming at
+psychological truth.
+
+A word must be said as to a special case of the soliloquy--the letter
+which a person speaks aloud as he writes it, or reads over to himself
+aloud. This is a convention to be employed as sparingly as possible; but
+it is not exactly on a level with the ordinary soliloquy. A letter has
+an actual objective existence. The words are formulated in the
+character's mind and are supposed to be externalized, even though the
+actor may not really write them on the paper. Thus the letter has, so to
+speak, the same right to come to the knowledge of the audience as any
+other utterance. It is, in fact, part of the dialogue of the play, only
+that it happens to be inaudible. A soliloquy, on the other hand, has no
+real existence. It is a purely artificial unravelling of motive or
+emotion, which, nine times out of ten, would not become articulate at
+all, even in the speaker's brain or heart. Thus it is by many degrees a
+greater infraction of the surface texture of life than the spoken
+letter, which we may call inadvisable rather than inadmissible.
+
+Some theorists carry their solicitude for surface reality to such an
+extreme as to object to any communication between two characters which
+is not audible to every one on the stage. This is a very idle pedantry.
+The difference between a conversation in undertones and a soliloquy or
+aside is abundantly plain: the one occurs every hour of the day, the
+other never occurs at all. When two people, or a group, are talking
+among themselves, unheard by the others on the stage, it requires a
+special effort to remember that, as a matter of fact, the others
+probably do hear them. Even if the scene be unskilfully arranged, it is
+not the audibility of one group, but the inaudibility of the others,
+that is apt to strike us as unreal.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+This is not the only form of technical pedantry that one occasionally
+encounters. Some years ago, a little band of playwrights and would-be
+playwrights, in fanatical reaction against the Sardou technique, tried
+to lay down a rule that no room on the stage must ever have more than
+one door, and that no letter must ever enter into the mechanism of a
+play. I do not know which contention was the more ridiculous.
+
+Nothing is commoner in modern house-planning than rooms which have at
+least two doors and a French window. We constantly see rooms or halls
+which, if transported to the stage, would provide three or four
+entrances and exits; and this is even more true of the "central heated"
+houses of America than of English houses. The technical purists used
+especially to despise the French window--a harmless, agreeable and very
+common device. Why the playwright should make "one room one door" an
+inexorable canon of art is more than human reason can divine. There are
+cases, no doubt, in which probability demands that the dramatist should
+be content with one practicable opening to his scene, and should plan
+his entrances and exits accordingly. This is no such great feat as might
+be imagined. Indeed a playwright will sometimes deliberately place a
+particular act in a room with one door, because it happens to facilitate
+the movement he desires. It is absurd to lay down any rule in the
+matter, other than that the scene should provide a probable locality for
+whatever action is to take place in it. I am the last to defend the old
+French farce with its ten or a dozen doors through which the characters
+kept scuttling in and out like rabbits in a warren. But the fact that we
+are tired of conventional laxity is no good reason for rushing to the
+other extreme of conventional and hampering austerity.
+
+Similarly, because the forged will and the lost "marriage lines" have
+been rightly relegated to melodrama, is there any reason why we should
+banish from the stage every form of written document? Mr. Bernard Shaw,
+in an article celebrating the advent of the new technique, once wrote,
+"Nowadays an actor cannot open a letter or toss off somebody else's
+glass of poison without having to face a brutal outburst of jeering."
+What an extravagance to bracket as equally exploded absurdities the
+opening of a letter and the tossing off of the wrong glass of poison!
+Letters--more's the pity--play a gigantic part in the economy of modern
+life. The General Post Office is a vast mechanism for the distribution
+of tragedy, comedy, melodrama, and farce throughout the country and
+throughout the world. To whose door has not Destiny come in the disguise
+of a postman, and slipped its decree, with a double rat-tat, into the
+letter-box? Whose heart has not sickened as he heard the postman's
+footstep pass his door without pausing? Whose hand has not trembled as
+he opened a letter? Whose face has not blanched as he took in its
+import, almost without reading the words? Why, I would fain know, should
+our stage-picture of life be falsified by the banishment of the postman?
+Even the revelation brought about by the discovery of a forgotten letter
+or bundle of letters is not an infrequent incident of daily life. Why
+should it be tabu on the stage? Because the French dramatist, forty
+years ago, would sometimes construct a Chinese-puzzle play around some
+stolen letter or hidden document, are we to suffer no "scrap of paper"
+to play any part whatever in English drama? Even the Hebrew sense of
+justice would recoil from such a conclusion. It would be a case of "The
+fathers have eaten sour grapes, and other people's children must pay the
+penalty." Against such whimsies of reactionary purism, the playwright's
+sole and sufficient safeguard is a moderate exercise of common sense.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+[Footnote 1: So, too, with the style of Congreve. It is much, and
+justly, admired; but who does not feel more than a touch of mannerism in
+such a passage as this?--
+
+  MILLAMANT: "... Let us never visit together, nor go to a play
+  together; but let us be very strange and well-bred: let us be as
+  strange as if we had been married a great while; and as well-bred as
+  if we were not married at all."
+
+  MIRABELL: "Have you any more conditions to offer? Hitherto your
+  demands are pretty reasonable."
+
+  MILLAMANT: "Trifles!--as liberty to pay and receive visits to and
+  from whom I please; to write and receive letters, without
+  interrogatories or wry faces on your part; to wear what I please;
+  and choose conversation with regard only to my own taste; to have no
+  obligation upon me to converse with wits that I don't like because
+  they are your acquaintances; or to be intimate with fools because
+  they may be your relatives.... These articles subscribed, if I
+  continue to endure you a little longer, I may by degrees dwindle
+  into a wife."
+
+This is very pretty prose, granted; but it is the prose of literature,
+not of life.]
+
+[Footnote 2: From the fact that I do not make an exception in favour of
+_The Blot in the Scutcheon_ or _Stratford_, I must leave the reader to
+draw what inference he pleases. On the other hand, I believe that a
+reconstruction of Tennyson's _Queen Mary_, with a few connecting links
+written in, might take a permanent place in the theatre.]
+
+[Footnote 3: Mr. Israel Zangwill, in his symbolic play, _The War-God_,
+has put blank verse to what I believe to be a new use, with noteworthy
+success. He writes in very strict measure, but without the least
+inversion or inflation, without a touch of Elizabethan, or
+conventionally poetic, diction. He is thus enabled to use the most
+modern expressions, and even slang, without incongruity; while at the
+same time he can give rhetorical movement to the speeches of his
+symbolic personages, and, in passages of argument, can achieve that
+clash of measured phrase against measured phrase which the Greeks called
+"stichomythy," and which the French dramatist sometimes produces in
+rapid rapier play with the Alexandrine. Mr. Zangwill's practice is in
+absolute contradiction of the principle above suggested that blank
+verse, to be justified in drama, ought to be lyrical. His verse is a
+product of pure intellect and wit, without a single lyric accent. It is
+measured prose; if it ever tries to be more, it fails. I think, then,
+that he has shown a new use for blank verse, in rhetorico-symbolic
+drama. But it is no small literary feat to handle the measure as
+he does.]
+
+[Footnote 4: Not quite. The drama of some Oriental peoples recognizes
+conventions which the Elizabethans did not admit.]
+
+[Footnote 5: A conversation on the telephone often provides a convenient
+and up-to-date substitute for a soliloquy; but that is an expedient
+which ought not to be abused.]
+
+[Footnote 6: The soliloquy is often not only slovenly, but a gratuitous
+and unnecessary slovenliness. In _Les Corbeaux_, by Henry Becque,
+produced in 1889, there occur two soliloquies--one by Teissier (Act ii,
+Scene 3), the other by Madame de Saint-Genis (Act in, Scene 10)--either
+or both of which could be omitted without leaving any sensible gap. The
+latter is wholly superfluous, the former conveys some information which
+might have been taken for granted, and could, in any case, have been
+conveyed without difficulty in some other way. Yet Becque was, in his
+day, regarded as a quite advanced technician.]
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Play-Making, by William Archer
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+      The Project Gutenberg eBook of A Manual of Craftsmanship
+    </title>
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+<pre>
+
+The Project Gutenberg EBook of Play-Making, by William Archer
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: Play-Making
+       A Manual of Craftsmanship
+
+Author: William Archer
+
+Release Date: January 29, 2004 [EBook #10865]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK PLAY-MAKING ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Riikka Talonpoika, Ginny Brewer and PG Distributed
+Proofreaders
+
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+
+
+</pre>
+
+<h1>PLAY-MAKING</h1>
+
+<center><h2><i>A Manual of Craftsmanship</i></h2></center>
+
+<center><h2>by William Archer</h2></center>
+<br>
+
+<h2><i>With a New Introduction to the Dover Edition</i></h2>
+
+<center><h2>by John Gassner</h2></center>
+
+<h3><i>Sterling Professor of Playwriting and Dramatic Literature, Yale
+University</i></h3>
+
+
+
+<br><br><hr style="width: 35%;"><br><br>
+<h2>PREFATORY NOTE</h2>
+
+<p>This book is, to all intents and purposes, entirely new. No considerable
+portion of it has already appeared, although here and there short
+passages and phrases from articles of bygone years are
+embedded--indistinguishably, I hope--in the text. I have tried, wherever
+it was possible, to select my examples from published plays, which the
+student may read for himself, and so check my observations. One reason,
+among others, which led me to go to Shakespeare and Ibsen for so many of
+my illustrations, was that they are the most generally accessible of
+playwrights.</p>
+
+<p>If the reader should feel that I have been over lavish in the use of
+footnotes, I have two excuses to allege. The first is that more than
+half of the following chapters were written on shipboard and in places
+where I had scarcely any books to refer to; so that a great deal had to
+be left to subsequent enquiry and revision. The second is that several
+of my friends, dramatists and others, have been kind enough to read my
+manuscript, and to suggest valuable afterthoughts.</p>
+
+<p>LONDON</p>
+
+<p><i>January</i>, 1912</p>
+<br>
+
+<p>To</p>
+
+<p>Brander Matthews</p>
+
+<p>Guide Philosopher and Friend</p>
+
+
+<br><br><hr style="width: 35%;"><br><br>
+<h2>CONTENTS</h2>
+
+&nbsp;&nbsp;<a href="#BOOK_I">BOOK I</a><br>
+<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;PROLOGUE<br>
+<br>
+<table><tr><td>&nbsp;&nbsp;<a href="#CHAPTER_I">CHAPTER I</a></td><td>INTRODUCTORY</td></tr>
+<tr><td>&nbsp;&nbsp;<a href="#CHAPTER_II">CHAPTER II</a></td><td>THE CHOICE OF A THEME</td></tr>
+<tr><td>&nbsp;&nbsp;<a href="#CHAPTER_III">CHAPTER III</a>&nbsp;</td><td>DRAMATIC AND UNDRAMATIC</td></tr>
+<tr><td>&nbsp;&nbsp;<a href="#CHAPTER_IV">CHAPTER IV</a></td><td>THE ROUTINE OF COMPOSITION</td></tr>
+<tr><td>&nbsp;&nbsp;<a href="#CHAPTER_V">CHAPTER V</a></td><td>DRAMATIS PERSONAE</td></tr></table>
+<br>
+<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;<a href="#BOOK_II">BOOK II</a><br>
+<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;THE BEGINNING<br>
+<br>
+<table><tr><td>&nbsp;&nbsp;<a href="#CHAPTER_VI">CHAPTER VI</a></td><td>THE POINT OF ATTACK: SHAKESPEARE AND IBSEN</td></tr>
+<tr><td>&nbsp;&nbsp;<a href="#CHAPTER_VII">CHAPTER VII</a></td><td>EXPOSITION: ITS END AND ITS MEANS</td></tr>
+<tr><td>&nbsp;&nbsp;<a href="#CHAPTER_VIII">CHAPTER VIII</a>&nbsp;</td><td>THE FIRST ACT</td></tr>
+<tr><td>&nbsp;&nbsp;<a href="#CHAPTER_IX">CHAPTER IX</a></td><td>CURIOSITY&quot; AND &quot;INTEREST&quot;</td></tr>
+<tr><td>&nbsp;&nbsp;<a href="#CHAPTER_X">CHAPTER X</a></td><td>FORESHADOWING, NOT FORESTALLING</td></tr></table>
+<br>
+<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;<a href="#BOOK_III">BOOK III</a><br>
+<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;THE MIDDLE<br>
+<br>
+<table><tr><td>&nbsp;&nbsp;<a href="#CHAPTER_XI">CHAPTER XI</a></td><td>TENSION AND ITS SUSPENSION</td></tr>
+<tr><td>&nbsp;&nbsp;<a href="#CHAPTER_XII">CHAPTER XII</a></td><td>PREPARATION: THE FINGER-POST</td></tr>
+<tr><td>&nbsp;&nbsp;<a href="#CHAPTER_XIII">CHAPTER XIII</a>&nbsp;</td><td>THE OBLIGATORY SCENE</td></tr>
+<tr><td>&nbsp;&nbsp;<a href="#CHAPTER_XIV">CHAPTER XIV</a></td><td>THE PERIPETY</td></tr>
+<tr><td>&nbsp;&nbsp;<a href="#CHAPTER_XV">CHAPTER XV</a></td><td>PROBABILITY, CHANCE AND COINCIDENCE</td></tr>
+<tr><td>&nbsp;&nbsp;<a href="#CHAPTER_XVI">CHAPTER XVI</a></td><td>LOGIC</td></tr>
+<tr><td>&nbsp;&nbsp;<a href="#CHAPTER_XVII">CHAPTER XVII</a></td><td>KEEPING A SECRET</td></tr></table>
+<br>
+<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;<a href="#BOOK_IV">BOOK IV</a><br>
+<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;THE END<br>
+<br>
+<table><tr><td>&nbsp;&nbsp;<a href="#CHAPTER_XVIII">CHAPTER XVIII</a></td><td>CLIMAX AND ANTICLIMAX</td></tr>
+<tr><td>&nbsp;&nbsp;<a href="#CHAPTER_XIX">CHAPTER XIX</a></td><td>CONVERSION</td></tr>
+<tr><td>&nbsp;&nbsp;<a href="#CHAPTER_XX">CHAPTER XX</a></td><td>BLIND-ALLEY THEMES--AND OTHERS</td></tr>
+<tr><td>&nbsp;&nbsp;<a href="#CHAPTER_XXI">CHAPTER XXI</a></td><td>THE FULL CLOSE</td></tr></table>
+<br>
+<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;<a href="#BOOK_V">BOOK V</a><br>
+<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;EPILOGUE<br>
+<br>
+<table><tr><td>&nbsp;&nbsp;<a href="#CHAPTER_XXII">CHAPTER XXII</a></td><td>CHARACTER AND PSYCHOLOGY</td></tr>
+<tr><td>&nbsp;&nbsp;<a href="#CHAPTER_XXIII">CHAPTER XXIII</a></td><td>DIALOGUE AND DETAILS</td></tr></table>
+
+
+
+<br><br><hr style="width: 35%;"><br><br>
+<h2><a name="BOOK_I"></a>BOOK I</h2>
+
+<p>PROLOGUE</p>
+
+
+<br><br><hr style="width: 35%;"><br><br>
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_I"></a>CHAPTER I</h2>
+
+<p>INTRODUCTORY</p>
+<br>
+
+<p>There are no rules for writing a play. It is easy, indeed, to lay down
+negative recommendations--to instruct the beginner how <i>not</i> to do it.
+But most of these &quot;don'ts&quot; are rather obvious; and those which are not
+obvious are apt to be questionable. It is certain, for instance, that if
+you want your play to be acted, anywhere else than in China, you must
+not plan it in sixteen acts of an hour apiece; but where is the tyro who
+needs a text-book to tell him that? On the other hand, most theorists of
+to-day would make it an axiom that you must not let your characters
+narrate their circumstances, or expound their motives, in speeches
+addressed, either directly to the audience, or ostensibly to their
+solitary selves. But when we remember that, of all dramatic openings,
+there is none finer than that which shows Richard Plantagenet limping
+down the empty stage to say--<br>
+<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&quot;Now is the winter of our discontent<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;Made glorious summer by this sun of York;<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;And all the clouds that lour'd upon our house<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;In the deep bosom of the ocean buried&quot;--<br>
+<br>
+we feel that the axiom requires large qualifications. There are no
+absolute rules, in fact, except such as are dictated by the plainest
+common sense. Aristotle himself did not so much dogmatize as analyse,
+classify, and generalize from, the practices of the Attic dramatists. He
+said, &quot;you had better&quot; rather than &quot;you must.&quot; It was Horace, in an age
+of deep dramatic decadence, who re-stated the pseudo-Aristotelian
+formulas of the Alexandrians as though they were unassailable dogmas
+of art.</p>
+
+<p>How comes it, then, that there is a constant demand for text-books of
+the art and craft of drama? How comes it that so many people--and I
+among the number--who could not write a play to save their lives, are
+eager to tell others how to do so? And, stranger still, how comes it
+that so many people are willing to sit at the feet of these instructors?
+It is not so with the novel. Popular as is that form of literature,
+guides to novel-writing, if they exist at all, are comparatively rare.
+Why are people possessed with the idea that the art of dramatic fiction
+differs from that of narrative fiction, in that it can and must
+be taught?</p>
+
+<p>The reason is clear, and is so far valid as to excuse, if not to
+justify, such works as the present. The novel, as soon as it is legibly
+written, exists, for what it is worth. The page of black and white is
+the sole intermediary between the creative and the perceptive brain.
+Even the act of printing merely widens the possible appeal: it does not
+alter its nature. But the drama, before it can make its proper appeal at
+all, must be run through a highly complex piece of mechanism--the
+theatre--the precise conditions of which are, to most beginners, a
+fascinating mystery. While they feel a strong inward conviction of their
+ability to master it, they are possessed with an idea, often exaggerated
+and superstitious, of its technical complexities. Having, as a rule,
+little or no opportunity of closely examining or experimenting with it,
+they are eager to &quot;read it up,&quot; as they might any other machine. That is
+the case of the average aspirant, who has neither the instinct of the
+theatre fully developed in his blood, nor such a congenital lack of that
+instinct as to be wholly inapprehensive of any technical difficulties or
+problems. The intelligent novice, standing between these extremes,
+tends, as a rule, to overrate the efficacy of theoretical instruction,
+and to expect of analytic criticism more than it has to give.</p>
+
+<p>There is thus a fine opening for pedantry on the one side, and quackery
+on the other, to rush in. The pedant, in this context, is he who
+constructs a set of rules from metaphysical or psychological first
+principles, and professes to bring down a dramatic decalogue from the
+Sinai of some lecture-room in the University of Weissnichtwo. The quack,
+on the other hand, is he who generalizes from the worst practices of the
+most vulgar theatrical journeymen, and has no higher ambition than to
+interpret the oracles of the box-office. If he succeeded in so doing,
+his function would not be wholly despicable; but as he is generally
+devoid of insight, and as, moreover, the oracles of the box-office vary
+from season to season, if not from month to month, his lucubrations are
+about as valuable as those of Zadkiel or Old Moore.<a name="FNanchor1"></a><a href="#Footnote_1"><sup>[1]</sup></a></p>
+
+<p>What, then, is the excuse for such a discussion as is here attempted?
+Having admitted that there are no rules for dramatic composition, and
+that the quest of such rules is apt to result either in pedantry or
+quackery, why should I myself set forth upon so fruitless and foolhardy
+an enterprise? It is precisely because I am alive to its dangers that I
+have some hope of avoiding them. Rules there are none; but it does not
+follow that some of the thousands who are fascinated by the art of the
+playwright may not profit by having their attention called, in a plain
+and practical way, to some of its problems and possibilities. I have
+myself felt the need of some such handbook, when would-be dramatists
+have come to me for advice and guidance. It is easy to name excellent
+treatises on the drama; but the aim of such books is to guide the
+judgment of the critic rather than the creative impulse of the
+playwright. There are also valuable collections of dramatic criticisms;
+but any practical hints that they may contain are scattered and
+unsystematic. On the other hand, the advice one is apt to give to
+beginners--&quot;Go to the theatre; study its conditions and mechanism for
+yourself&quot;--is, in fact, of very doubtful value. It might, in many cases,
+be wiser to warn the aspirant to keep himself unspotted from the
+playhouse. To send him there is to imperil, on the one hand, his
+originality of vision, on the other, his individuality of method. He may
+fall under the influence of some great master, and see life only through
+his eyes; or he may become so habituated to the current tricks of the
+theatrical trade as to lose all sense of their conventionality and
+falsity, and find himself, in the end, better fitted to write what I
+have called a quack handbook than a living play. It would be ridiculous,
+of course, to urge an aspirant positively to avoid the theatre; but the
+common advice to steep himself in it is beset with dangers.</p>
+
+<p>It may be asked why, if I have any guidance and help to give, I do not
+take it myself, and write plays instead of instructing others in the
+art. This is a variant of an ancient and fallacious jibe against
+criticism in general. It is quite true that almost all critics who are
+worth their salt are &quot;stickit&quot; artists. Assuredly, if I had the power, I
+should write plays instead of writing about them; but one may have a
+great love for an art, and some insight into its principles and methods,
+without the innate faculty required for actual production. On the other
+hand, there is nothing to show that, if I were a creative artist, I
+should be a good mentor for beginners. An accomplished painter may be
+the best teacher of painters; but an accomplished dramatist is scarcely
+the best guide for dramatists. He cannot analyse his own practice, and
+discriminate between that in it which is of universal validity, and that
+which may be good for him, but would be bad for any one else. If he
+happened to be a great man, he would inevitably, even if unconsciously,
+seek to impose upon his disciples his individual attitude towards life;
+if he were a lesser man, he would teach them only his tricks. But
+dramatists do not, as a matter of fact, take pupils or write
+handbooks.<a name="FNanchor2"></a><a href="#Footnote_2"><sup>[2]</sup></a> When they expound their principles of art, it is generally
+in answer to, or in anticipation of, criticism--with a view, in short,
+not to helping others, but to defending themselves. If beginners, then,
+are to find any systematic guidance, they must turn to the critics, not
+to the dramatists; and no person of common sense holds it a reproach to
+a critic to tell him that he is a &quot;stickit&quot; playwright.</p>
+
+<p>If questions are worth discussing at all, they are worth discussing
+gravely. When, in the following pages, I am found treating with all
+solemnity matters of apparently trivial detail, I beg the reader to
+believe that very possibly I do not in my heart overrate their
+importance. One thing is certain, and must be emphasized from the
+outset: namely, that if any part of the dramatist's art can be taught,
+it is only a comparatively mechanical and formal part--the art of
+structure. One may learn how to tell a story in good dramatic form: how
+to develop and marshal it in such a way as best to seize and retain the
+interest of a theatrical audience. But no teaching or study can enable a
+man to choose or invent a good story, and much less to do that which
+alone lends dignity to dramatic story-telling--to observe and portray
+human character. This is the aim and end of all serious drama; and it
+will be apt to appear as though, in the following pages, this aim and
+end were ignored. In reality it is not so. If I hold comparatively
+mechanical questions of pure craftsmanship to be worth discussing, it is
+because I believe that only by aid of competent craftsmanship can the
+greatest genius enable his creations to live and breathe upon the stage.
+The profoundest insight into human nature and destiny cannot find valid
+expression through the medium of the theatre without some understanding
+of the peculiar art of dramatic construction. Some people are born with
+such an instinct for this art, that a very little practice renders them
+masters of it. Some people are born with a hollow in their cranium where
+the bump of drama ought to be. But between these extremes, as I said
+before, there are many people with moderately developed and cultivable
+faculty; and it is these who, I trust, may find some profit in the
+following discussions.<a name="FNanchor3"></a><a href="#Footnote_3"><sup>[3]</sup></a> Let them not forget, however, that the topics
+treated of are merely the indispensable rudiments of the art, and are
+not for a moment to be mistaken for its ultimate and incommunicable
+secrets. Beethoven could not have composed the Ninth Symphony without a
+mastery of harmony and counterpoint; but there are thousands of masters
+of harmony and counterpoint who could not compose the Ninth Symphony.</p>
+
+<p>The art of theatrical story-telling is necessarily relative to the
+audience to whom the story is to be told. One must assume an audience of
+a certain status and characteristics before one can rationally discuss
+the best methods of appealing to its intelligence and its sympathies.
+The audience I have throughout assumed is drawn from what may be called
+the ordinary educated public of London and New York. It is not an ideal
+or a specially selected audience; but it is somewhat above the average
+of the theatre-going public, that average being sadly pulled down by the
+myriad frequenters of musical farce and absolutely worthless melodrama.
+It is such an audience as assembles every night at, say, the half-dozen
+best theatres of each city. A peculiarly intellectual audience it
+certainly is not. I gladly admit that theatrical art owes much, in both
+countries, to voluntary organizations of intelligent or would-be
+intelligent<a name="FNanchor4"></a><a href="#Footnote_4"><sup>[4]</sup></a> playgoers, who have combined to provide themselves with
+forms of drama which specially interest them, and do not attract the
+great public. But I am entirely convinced that the drama renounces its
+chief privilege and glory when it waives its claim to be a popular art,
+and is content to address itself to coteries, however &quot;high-browed.&quot;
+Shakespeare did not write for a coterie: yet he produced some works of
+considerable subtlety and profundity. Moli&egrave;re was popular with the
+ordinary parterre of his day: yet his plays have endured for over two
+centuries, and the end of their vitality does not seem to be in sight.
+Ibsen did not write for a coterie, though special and regrettable
+circumstances have made him, in England, something of a coterie-poet. In
+Scandinavia, in Germany, even in America, he casts his spell over great
+audiences, if not through long runs (which are a vice of the merely
+commercial theatre), at any rate through frequently-repeated
+representations. So far as I know, history records no instance of a
+playwright failing to gain the ear of his contemporaries, and then being
+recognized and appreciated by posterity. Alfred de Musset might,
+perhaps, be cited as a case in point; but he did not write with a view
+to the stage, and made no bid for contemporary popularity. As soon as it
+occurred to people to produce his plays, they were found to be
+delightful. Let no playwright, then, make it his boast that he cannot
+disburden his soul within the three hours' limit, and cannot produce
+plays intelligible or endurable to any audience but a band of adepts. A
+popular audience, however, does not necessarily mean the mere riff-raff
+of the theatrical public. There is a large class of playgoers, both in
+England and America, which is capable of appreciating work of a high
+intellectual order, if only it does not ignore the fundamental
+conditions of theatrical presentation. It is an audience of this class
+that I have in mind throughout the following pages; and I believe that a
+playwright who despises such an audience will do so to the detriment,
+not only of his popularity and profits, but of the artistic quality
+of his work.</p>
+
+<p>Some people may exclaim: &quot;Why should the dramatist concern himself about
+his audience? That may be all very well for the mere journeymen of the
+theatre, the hacks who write to an actor-manager's order--not for the
+true artist! He has a soul above all such petty considerations. Art, to
+him, is simply self-expression. He writes to please himself, and has no
+thought of currying favour with an audience, whether intellectual or
+idiotic.&quot; To this I reply simply that to an artist of this way of
+thinking I have nothing to say. He has a perfect right to express
+himself in a whole literature of so-called plays, which may possibly be
+studied, and even acted, by societies organized to that laudable end.
+But the dramatist who declares his end to be mere self-expression
+stultifies himself in that very phrase. The painter may paint, the
+sculptor model, the lyric poet sing, simply to please himself,<a name="FNanchor5"></a><a href="#Footnote_5"><sup>[5]</sup></a> but
+the drama has no meaning except in relation to an audience. It is a
+portrayal of life by means of a mechanism so devised as to bring it home
+to a considerable number of people assembled in a given place. &quot;The
+public,&quot; it has been well said, &quot;constitutes the theatre.&quot; The moment a
+playwright confines his work within the two or three hours' limit
+prescribed by Western custom for a theatrical performance, he is
+currying favour with an audience. That limit is imposed simply by the
+physical endurance and power of sustained attention that can be demanded
+of Western human beings assembled in a theatre. Doubtless an author
+could express himself more fully and more subtly if he ignored these
+limitations; the moment he submits to them, he renounces the pretence
+that mere self-expression is his aim. I know that there are
+haughty-souls who make no such submission, and express themselves in
+dramas which, so far as their proportions are concerned, might as well
+be epic poems or historical romances.<a name="FNanchor6"></a><a href="#Footnote_6"><sup>[6]</sup></a> To them, I repeat, I have
+nothing to say. The one and only subject of the following discussions is
+the best method of fitting a dramatic theme for representation before an
+audience assembled in a theatre. But this, be it noted, does not
+necessarily mean &quot;writing down&quot; to the audience in question. It is by
+obeying, not by ignoring, the fundamental conditions of his craft that
+the dramatist may hope to lead his audience upward to the highest
+intellectual level which he himself can attain.</p>
+
+<p>These pages, in short, are addressed to students of play-writing who
+sincerely desire to do sound, artistic work under the conditions and
+limitations of the actual, living playhouse. This does not mean, of
+course, that they ought always to be studying &quot;what the public wants.&quot;
+The dramatist should give the public what he himself wants--but in such
+form as to make it comprehensible and interesting in a theatre.</p>
+
+
+
+<br><br><hr style="width: 35%;"><br><br>
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_II"></a>CHAPTER II</h2>
+
+<p>THE CHOICE OF A THEME</p>
+<br>
+
+<p>The first step towards writing a play is manifestly to choose a theme.</p>
+
+<p>Even this simple statement, however, requires careful examination before
+we can grasp its full import. What, in the first place, do we mean by a
+&quot;theme&quot;? And, secondly, in what sense can we, or ought we to,
+&quot;choose&quot; one?</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Theme&quot; may mean either of two things: either the subject of a play, or
+its story. The former is, perhaps, its proper or more convenient sense.
+The theme of <i>Romeo and Juliet</i> is youthful love crossed by ancestral
+hate; the theme of <i>Othello</i> is jealousy; the theme of <i>Le Tartufe</i> is
+hypocrisy; the theme of <i>Caste</i> is fond hearts and coronets; the theme
+of <i>Getting Married</i> is getting married; the theme of <i>Maternit&eacute;</i> is
+maternity. To every play it is possible, at a pinch, to assign a theme;
+but in many plays it is evident that no theme expressible in abstract
+terms was present to the author's mind. Nor are these always plays of a
+low class. It is only by a somewhat artificial process of abstraction
+that we can formulate a theme for <i>As You Like It</i>, for <i>The Way of the
+World</i>, or for <i>Hedda Gabler</i>.</p>
+
+<p>The question now arises: ought a theme, in its abstract form, to be the
+first germ of a play? Ought the dramatist to say, &quot;Go to, I will write a
+play on temperance, or on woman's suffrage, or on capital and labour,&quot;
+and then cast about for a story to illustrate his theme? This is a
+possible, but not a promising, method of procedure. A story made to the
+order of a moral concept is always apt to advertise its origin, to the
+detriment of its illusive quality. If a play is to be a moral apologue
+at all, it is well to say so frankly--probably in the title--and aim,
+not at verisimilitude, but at neatness and appositeness in the working
+out of the fable. The French <i>proverbe</i> proceeds on this principle, and
+is often very witty and charming.<a name="FNanchor7"></a><a href="#Footnote_7"><sup>[7]</sup></a> A good example in English is <i>A
+Pair of Spectacles</i>, by Mr. Sydney Grundy, founded on a play by Labiche.
+In this bright little comedy every incident and situation bears upon the
+general theme, and pleases us, not by its probability, but by its
+ingenious appropriateness. The dramatic fable, in fact, holds very much
+the same rank in drama as the narrative fable holds in literature at
+large. We take pleasure in them on condition that they be witty, and
+that they do not pretend to be what they are not.</p>
+
+<p>A play manifestly suggested by a theme of temporary interest will often
+have a great but no less temporary success. For instance, though there
+was a good deal of clever character-drawing in <i>An Englishman's Home</i>,
+by Major du Maurier, the theme was so evidently the source and
+inspiration of the play that it will scarcely bear revival. In America,
+where the theme was of no interest, the play failed.</p>
+
+<p>It is possible, no doubt, to name excellent plays in which the theme, in
+all probability, preceded both the story and the characters in the
+author's mind. Such plays are most of M. Brieux's; such plays are Mr.
+Galsworthy's <i>Strife</i> and <i>Justice</i>. The French plays, in my judgment,
+suffer artistically from the obtrusive predominance of the theme--that
+is to say, the abstract element--over the human and concrete factors in
+the composition. Mr. Galsworthy's more delicate and unemphatic art
+eludes this danger, at any rate in <i>Strife</i>. We do not remember until
+all is over that his characters represent classes, and his action is,
+one might almost say, a sociological symbol. If, then, the theme does,
+as a matter of fact, come first in the author's conception, he will do
+well either to make it patently and confessedly dominant, as in the
+<i>proverbe</i>, or to take care that, as in <i>Strife</i>, it be not suffered to
+make its domination felt, except as an afterthought.<a name="FNanchor8"></a><a href="#Footnote_8"><sup>[8]</sup></a> No outside force
+should appear to control the free rhythm of the action.</p>
+
+<p>The theme may sometimes be, not an idea, an abstraction or a principle,
+but rather an environment, a social phenomenon of one sort or another.
+The author's primary object in such a case is, not to portray any
+individual character or tell any definite story, but to transfer to the
+stage an animated picture of some broad aspect or phase of life, without
+concentrating the interest on any one figure or group. There are
+theorists who would, by definition, exclude from the domain of drama any
+such cinematograph-play, as they would probably call it; but we shall
+see cause, as we go on, to distrust definitions, especially when they
+seek to clothe themselves with the authority of laws. Tableau-plays of
+the type here in question may even claim classical precedent. What else
+is Ben Jonson's <i>Bartholomew Fair</i>? What else is Schiller's
+<i>Wallensteins Lager</i>? Amongst more recent plays, Hauptmann's <i>Die Weber</i>
+and Gorky's <i>Nachtasyl</i> are perhaps the best examples of the type. The
+drawback of such themes is, not that they do not conform to this or that
+canon of art, but that it needs an exceptional amount of knowledge and
+dramaturgic skill to handle them successfully. It is far easier to tell
+a story on the stage than to paint a picture, and few playwrights can
+resist the temptation to foist a story upon their picture, thus marring
+it by an inharmonious intrusion of melodrama or farce. This has often
+been done upon deliberate theory, in the belief that no play can exist,
+or can attract playgoers, without a definite and more or less exciting
+plot. Thus the late James A. Herne inserted into a charming idyllic
+picture of rural life, entitled <i>Shore Acres</i>, a melodramatic scene in a
+lighthouse, which was hopelessly out of key with the rest of the play.
+The dramatist who knows any particular phase of life so thoroughly as to
+be able to transfer its characteristic incidents to the stage, may be
+advised to defy both critical and managerial prejudice, and give his
+tableau-play just so much of story as may naturally and inevitably fall
+within its limits.</p>
+
+<p>One of the most admirable and enthralling scenes I ever saw on any stage
+was that of the Trafalgar Square suffrage meeting in Miss Elizabeth
+Robins's <i>Votes for Women</i>. Throughout a whole act it held us
+spellbound, while the story of the play stood still, and we forgot its
+existence. It was only within a few minutes of the end, when the story
+was dragged in neck and crop, that the reality of the thing vanished,
+and the interest with it.</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 25%;">
+
+<p>If an abstract theme be not an advisable starting-point, what is? A
+character? A situation? Or a story? On this point it would be absurd to
+lay down any rule; the more so as, in many cases, a playwright is quite
+unable to say in what form the germ of a play first floated into his
+mind. The suggestion may come from a newspaper paragraph, from an
+incident seen in the street, from an emotional adventure or a comic
+misadventure, from a chance word dropped by an acquaintance, or from
+some flotsam or jetsam of phrase or fable that has drifted from the
+other end of history. Often, too, the original germ, whatever it may be,
+is transformed beyond recognition before a play is done.<a name="FNanchor9"></a><a href="#Footnote_9"><sup>[9]</sup></a> In the mind
+of the playwright figs grow from thistles, and a silk purse--perhaps a
+Fortunatus' purse--may often be made from a sow's ear. The whole
+delicate texture of Ibsen's <i>Doll's House</i> was woven from a commonplace
+story of a woman who forged a cheque in order to redecorate her
+drawing-room. Stevenson's romance of <i>Prince Otto</i> (to take an example
+from fiction) grew out of a tragedy on the subject of Semiramis!</p>
+
+<p>One thing, however, we may say with tolerable confidence: whatever may
+be the germ of a play--whether it be an anecdote, a situation, or what
+not--the play will be of small account as a work of art unless
+character, at a very early point, enters into and conditions its
+development. The story which is independent of character--which can be
+carried through by a given number of ready-made puppets--is essentially
+a trivial thing. Unless, at an early stage of the organizing process,
+character begins to take the upper hand--unless the playwright finds
+himself thinking, &quot;Oh, yes, George is just the man to do this,&quot; or,
+&quot;That is quite foreign to Jane's temperament&quot;--he may be pretty sure
+that it is a piece of mechanism he is putting together, not a drama with
+flesh and blood in it. The difference between a live play and a dead one
+is that in the former the characters control the plot, while in the
+latter the plot controls the characters. Which is not to say, of course,
+that there may not be clever and entertaining plays which are &quot;dead&quot; in
+this sense, and dull and unattractive plays which are &quot;live.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>A great deal of ink has been wasted in controversy over a remark of
+Aristotle's that the action or <i>muthos</i>, not the character or <i>&ecirc;thos</i>,
+is the essential element in drama. The statement is absolutely true and
+wholly unimportant. A play can exist without anything that can be called
+character, but not without some sort of action. This is implied in the
+very word &quot;drama,&quot; which means a doing, not a mere saying or existing.
+It would be possible, no doubt, to place Don Quixote, or Falstaff, or
+Peer Gynt, on the stage, and let him develop his character in mere
+conversation, or even monologue, without ever moving from his chair. But
+it is a truism that deeds, not words, are the demonstration and test of
+character; wherefore, from time immemorial, it has been the recognized
+business of the theatre to exhibit character in action. Historically,
+too, we find that drama has everywhere originated in the portrayal of an
+action--some exploit or some calamity in the career of some demigod or
+hero. Thus story or plot is by definition, tradition, and practical
+reason, the fundamental element in drama; but does it therefore follow
+that it is the noblest element, or that by which its value should be
+measured? Assuredly not. The skeleton is, in a sense, the fundamental
+element in the human organism. It can exist, and, with a little
+assistance, retain its form, when stripped of muscle and blood and
+nerve; whereas a boneless man would be an amorphous heap, more helpless
+than a jelly-fish. But do we therefore account the skeleton man's
+noblest part? Scarcely. It is by his blood and nerve that he lives, not
+by his bones; and it is because his bones are, comparatively speaking,
+dead matter that they continue to exist when the flesh has fallen away
+from them. It is, therefore, if not a misreading of Aristotle,<a name="FNanchor10"></a><a href="#Footnote_10"><sup>[10]</sup></a> at any
+rate a perversion of reason, to maintain that the drama lives by action,
+rather than by character. Action ought to exist for the sake of
+character: when the relation is reversed, the play may be an ingenious
+toy, but scarcely a vital work of art.</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 25%;">
+
+<p>It is time now to consider just what we mean when we say that the first
+step towards play-writing is the &quot;choice&quot; of a theme.</p>
+
+<p>In many cases, no doubt, it is the plain and literal fact that the
+impulse to write some play--any play--exists, so to speak, in the
+abstract, unassociated with any particular subject, and that the
+would-be playwright proceeds, as he thinks, to set his imagination to
+work, and invent a story. But this frame of mind is to be regarded with
+suspicion. Few plays of much value, one may guess, have resulted from
+such an abstract impulse. Invention, in these cases, is apt to be
+nothing but recollection in disguise, the shaking of a kaleidoscope
+formed of fragmentary reminiscences. I remember once, in some momentary
+access of ambition, trying to invent a play. I occupied several hours of
+a long country walk in, as I believed, creating out of nothing at all a
+dramatic story. When at last I had modelled it into some sort of
+coherency, I stepped back from it in my mind, as it were, and
+contemplated it as a whole. No sooner had I done so than it began to
+seem vaguely familiar. &quot;Where have I seen this story before?&quot; I asked
+myself; and it was only after cudgelling my brains for several minutes
+that I found I had re-invented Ibsen's <i>Hedda Gabler</i>. Thus, when we
+think we are choosing a plot out of the void, we are very apt to be, in
+fact, ransacking the store-house of memory. The plot which chooses us
+is much more to be depended upon--the idea which comes when we least
+expect it, perhaps from the most unlikely quarter, clamours at the gates
+of birth, and will not let us rest till it be clothed in dramatic flesh
+and blood.<a name="FNanchor11"></a><a href="#Footnote_11"><sup>[11]</sup></a> It may very well happen, of course, that it has to
+wait--that it has to be pigeon-holed for a time, until its due turn
+comes.<a name="FNanchor12"></a><a href="#Footnote_12"><sup>[12]</sup></a> Occasionally, perhaps, it may slip out of its pigeon-hole for
+an airing, only to be put back again in a slightly more developed form.
+Then at last its convenient season will arrive, and the play will be
+worked out, written, and launched into the struggle for life. In the
+sense of selecting from among a number of embryonic themes stored in his
+mind, the playwright has often to make a deliberate choice; but when,
+moved by a purely abstract impulse, he goes out of set purpose to look
+for a theme, it may be doubted whether he is likely to return with any
+very valuable treasure-trove.<a name="FNanchor13"></a><a href="#Footnote_13"><sup>[13]</sup></a></p>
+
+<p>The same principle holds good in the case of the ready-made poetic or
+historical themes, which are--rightly or wrongly--considered suitable
+for treatment in blank verse. Whether, and how far, the blank verse
+drama can nowadays be regarded as a vital and viable form is a question
+to be considered later. In the meantime it is sufficient to say that
+whatever principles of conception and construction apply to the modern
+prose drama, apply with equal cogency to the poetic drama. The
+verse-poet may perhaps take one or two licenses denied to the
+prose-poet. For instance, we may find reason to think the soliloquy more
+excusable in verse than in prose. But fundamentally, the two forms are
+ruled by the same set of conditions, which the verse-poet, no less than
+the prose-poet, can ignore only at his peril. Unless, indeed, he
+renounces from the outset all thought of the stage and chooses to
+produce that cumbrous nondescript, a &quot;closet drama.&quot; Of such we do not
+speak, but glance and pass on. What laws, indeed, can apply to a form
+which has no proper element, but, like the amphibious animal described
+by the sailor, &quot;cannot live on land and dies in the water&quot;?</p>
+
+<p>To return to our immediate topic, the poet who essays dramatic
+composition on mere abstract impulse, because other poets have done so,
+or because he is told that it pays, is only too likely to produce
+willy-nilly a &quot;closet drama.&quot; Let him beware of saying to himself, &quot;I
+will gird up my loins and write a play. Shall it be a Phaedra, or a
+Semiramis, or a Sappho, or a Cleopatra? A Julian, or an Attila, or a
+Savanarola, or a Cromwell?&quot; A drama conceived in this reach-me-down
+fashion will scarcely have the breath of life in it. If, on the other
+hand, in the course of his legendary, romantic, or historical reading,
+some character should take hold upon his imagination and demand to be
+interpreted, or some episode should, as it were, startle him by putting
+on vivid dramatic form before his mind's eye, then let him by all means
+yield to the inspiration, and try to mould the theme into a drama. The
+real labour of creation will still lie before him; but he may face it
+with the hope of producing a live play, not a long-drawn rhetorical
+anachronism, whether of the rotund or of the spasmodic type.</p>
+
+
+
+<br><br><hr style="width: 35%;"><br><br>
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_III"></a>CHAPTER III</h2>
+
+<p>DRAMATIC AND UNDRAMATIC</p>
+<br>
+
+<p>It may be well, at this point, to consider for a little what we mean
+when we use the term &quot;dramatic.&quot; We shall probably not arrive at any
+definition which can be applied as an infallible touchstone to
+distinguish the dramatic from the undramatic. Perhaps, indeed, the
+upshot may rather be to place the student on his guard against troubling
+too much about the formal definitions of critical theorists.</p>
+
+<p>The orthodox opinion of the present time is that which is generally
+associated with the name of the late Ferdinand Bruneti&egrave;re. &quot;The theatre
+in general,&quot; said that critic, &quot;is nothing but the place for the
+development of the human will, attacking the obstacles opposed to it by
+destiny, fortune, or circumstances.&quot; And again: &quot;Drama is a
+representation of the will of man in conflict with the mysterious powers
+or natural forces which limit and belittle us; it is one of us thrown
+living upon the stage, there to struggle against fatality, against
+social law, against one of his fellow-mortals, against himself, if need
+be, against the ambitions, the interests, the prejudices, the folly, the
+malevolence of those who surround him.&quot;<a name="FNanchor14"></a><a href="#Footnote_14"><sup>[14]</sup></a></p>
+
+<p>The difficulty about this definition is that, while it describes the
+matter of a good many dramas, it does not lay down any true
+differentia--any characteristic common to all drama, and possessed by no
+other form of fiction. Many of the greatest plays in the world can with
+difficulty be brought under the formula, while the majority of romances
+and other stories come under it with ease. Where, for instance, is the
+struggle in the <i>Agamemnon</i>? There is no more struggle between
+Clytemnestra and Agamemnon than there is between the spider and the fly
+who walks into his net. There is not even a struggle in Clytemnestra's
+mind. Agamemnon's doom is sealed from the outset, and she merely carries
+out a pre-arranged plot. There is contest indeed in the succeeding plays
+of the trilogy; but it will scarcely be argued that the <i>Agamemnon</i>,
+taken alone, is not a great drama. Even the <i>Oedipus</i> of Sophocles,
+though it may at first sight seem a typical instance of a struggle
+against Destiny, does not really come under the definition. Oedipus, in
+fact, does not struggle at all. His struggles, in so far as that word
+can be applied to his misguided efforts to escape from the toils of
+fate, are all things of the past; in the actual course of the tragedy he
+simply writhes under one revelation after another of bygone error and
+unwitting crime. It would be a mere play upon words to recognize as a
+dramatic &quot;struggle&quot; the writhing of a worm on a hook. And does not this
+description apply very closely to the part played by another great
+protagonist--Othello to wit? There is no struggle, no conflict, between
+him and Iago. It is Iago alone who exerts any will; neither Othello nor
+Desdemona makes the smallest fight. From the moment when Iago sets his
+machination to work, they are like people sliding down an ice-slope to
+an inevitable abyss. Where is the conflict in <i>As You Like It</i>? No one,
+surely, will pretend that any part of the interest or charm of the play
+arises from the struggle between the banished Duke and the Usurper, or
+between Orlando and Oliver. There is not even the conflict, if so it can
+be called, which nominally brings so many hundreds of plays under the
+Bruneti&egrave;re canon--the conflict between an eager lover and a more or less
+reluctant maid. Or take, again, Ibsen's <i>Ghosts</i>--in what valid sense
+can it be said that that tragedy shows us will struggling against
+obstacles? Oswald, doubtless, wishes to live, and his mother desires
+that he should live; but this mere will for life cannot be the
+differentia that makes of <i>Ghosts</i> a drama. If the reluctant descent of
+the &quot;downward path to death&quot; constituted drama, then Tolstoy's <i>Death of
+Ivan Ilytch</i> would be one of the greatest dramas ever written--which it
+certainly is not. Yet again, if we want to see will struggling against
+obstacles, the classic to turn to is not <i>Hamlet</i>, not <i>Lear</i>, but
+<i>Robinson Crusoe</i>; yet no one, except a pantomime librettist, ever saw a
+drama in Defoe's narrative. In a Platonic dialogue, in <i>Paradise Lost</i>,
+in <i>John Gilpin</i>, there is a struggle of will against obstacles; there
+is none in <i>Hannele</i>, which, nevertheless, is a deeply-moving drama.
+Such a struggle is characteristic of all great fiction, from <i>Clarissa
+Harlowe</i> to <i>The House with the Green Shutters</i>; whereas in many plays
+the struggle, if there be any at all, is the merest matter of form (for
+instance, a quite conventional love-story), while the real interest
+resides in something quite different.</p>
+
+<p>The plain truth seems to be that conflict is <i>one</i> of the most dramatic
+elements in life, and that many dramas--perhaps most--do, as a matter
+of fact, turn upon strife of one sort or another. But it is clearly an
+error to make conflict indispensable to drama, and especially to
+insist--as do some of Bruneti&egrave;re's followers--that the conflict must be
+between will and will. A stand-up fight between will and will--such a
+fight as occurs in, say, the <i>Hippolytus</i> of Euripides, or Racine's
+<i>Andromaque</i>, or Moli&egrave;re's <i>Tartufe</i>, or Ibsen's <i>Pretenders</i>, or
+Dumas's <i>Fran&ccedil;illon</i>, or Sudermann's <i>Heimat</i>, or Sir Arthur Pinero's
+<i>Gay Lord Quex</i>, or Mr. Shaw's <i>Candida</i>, or Mr. Galsworthy's
+<i>Strife</i>--such a stand-up fight, I say, is no doubt one of the intensest
+forms of drama. But it is comparatively rare at any rate as the formula
+of a whole play. In individual scenes a conflict of will is frequent
+enough; but it is, after all, only one among a multitude of equally
+telling forms of drama. No one can say that the Balcony Scene in <i>Romeo
+and Juliet</i> is undramatic, or the &quot;Galeoto f&uacute; il libro&quot; scene in Mr.
+Stephen Phillips's <i>Paolo and Francesca</i>; yet the point of these scenes
+is not a clash, but an ecstatic concordance, of wills. Is the
+death-scene of Cleopatra undramatic? Or the Banquet scene in <i>Macbeth</i>?
+Or the pastoral act in <i>The Winter's Tale</i>? Yet in none of these is
+there any conflict of wills. In the whole range of drama there is
+scarcely a passage which one would call more specifically dramatic than
+the Screen Scene in <i>The School for Scandal</i>; yet it would be the
+veriest quibbling to argue that any appreciable part of its effect
+arises from the clash of will against will. This whole comedy, indeed,
+suffices to show the emptiness of the theory. With a little strain it is
+possible to bring it within the letter of the formula; but who can
+pretend that any considerable part of the attraction or interest of the
+play is due to that possibility?</p>
+
+<p>The champions of the theory, moreover, place it on a metaphysical basis,
+finding in the will the essence of human personality, and therefore of
+the art which shows human personality raised to its highest power. It
+seems unnecessary, however, to apply to Schopenhauer for an explanation
+of whatever validity the theory may possess. For a sufficient account of
+the matter, we need go no further than the simple psychological
+observation that human nature loves a fight, whether it be with clubs or
+with swords, with tongues or with brains. One of the earliest forms of
+mediaeval drama was the &quot;estrif&quot; or &quot;flyting&quot;--the scolding-match
+between husband and wife, or between two rustic gossips. This motive is
+glorified in the quarrel between Brutus and Cassius, degraded in the
+patter of two &quot;knockabout comedians.&quot; Certainly there is nothing more
+telling in drama than a piece of &quot;cut-and-thrust&quot; dialogue after the
+fashion of the ancient &quot;stichomythia.&quot; When a whole theme involving
+conflict, or even a single scene of the nature described as a
+&quot;passage-at-arms,&quot; comes naturally in the playwright's way, by all means
+let him seize the opportunity. But do not let him reject a theme or
+scene as undramatic merely because it has no room for a clash of
+warring wills.</p>
+
+<p>There is a variant of the &quot;conflict&quot; theory which underlines the word
+&quot;obstacles&quot; in the above-quoted dictum of Bruneti&egrave;re, and lays down the
+rule: &quot;No obstacle, no drama.&quot; Though far from being universally valid,
+this form of the theory has a certain practical usefulness, and may well
+be borne in mind. Many a play would have remained unwritten if the
+author had asked himself, &quot;Is there a sufficient obstacle between my two
+lovers?&quot; or, in more general terms, &quot;between my characters and the
+realization of their will?&quot; There is nothing more futile than a play in
+which we feel that there is no real obstacle to the inevitable happy
+ending, and that the curtain might just as well fall in the middle of
+the first act as at the end of the third. Comedies abound (though they
+reach the stage only by accident) in which the obstacle between Corydon
+and Phyllis, between Lord Edwin and Lady Angelina, is not even a defect
+or peculiarity of character, but simply some trumpery
+misunderstanding<a name="FNanchor15"></a><a href="#Footnote_15"><sup>[15]</sup></a> which can be kept afoot only so long as every one
+concerned holds his or her common sense in studious abeyance. &quot;Pyramus
+and Thisbe without the wall&quot; may be taken as the formula for the whole
+type of play. But even in plays of a much higher type, the author might
+often ask himself with advantage whether he could not strengthen his
+obstacle, and so accentuate the struggle which forms the matter of his
+play. Though conflict may not be essential to drama, yet, when you set
+forth to portray a struggle, you may as well make it as real and intense
+as possible.</p>
+
+<p>It seems to me that in the late William Vaughn Moody's drama, <i>The Great
+Divide</i>, the body of the play, after the stirring first act, is weakened
+by our sense that the happy ending is only being postponed by a violent
+effort. We have been assured from the very first--even before Ruth
+Jordan has set eyes on Stephen Ghent--that just such a rough diamond is
+the ideal of her dreams. It is true that, after their marriage, the
+rough diamond seriously misconducts himself towards her; and we have
+then to consider the rather unattractive question whether a single act
+of brutality on the part of a drunken husband ought to be held so
+unpardonable as to break up a union which otherwise promises to be quite
+satisfactory. But the author has taken such pains to emphasize the fact
+that these two people are really made for each other, that the answer to
+the question is not for a moment in doubt, and we become rather
+impatient of the obstinate sulkiness of Ruth's attitude. If there had
+been a real disharmony of character to be overcome, instead of, or in
+addition to, the sordid misadventure which is in fact the sole barrier
+between them, the play would certainly have been stronger, and perhaps
+more permanently popular.</p>
+
+<p>In a play by Mr. James Bernard Fagan, <i>The Prayer of the Sword</i>, we have
+a much clearer example of an inadequate obstacle. A youth named Andrea
+has been brought up in a monastery, and destined for the priesthood; but
+his tastes and aptitudes are all for a military career. He is, however,
+on the verge of taking his priestly vows, when accident calls him forth
+into the world, and he has the good fortune to quell a threatened
+revolution in a romantic Duchy, ruled over by a duchess of surpassing
+loveliness. With her he naturally falls in love; and the tragedy lies,
+or ought to lie, in the conflict between this earthly passion and his
+heavenly calling and election. But the author has taken pains to make
+the obstacle between Andrea and Ilaria absolutely unreal. The fact that
+Andrea has as yet taken no irrevocable vow is not the essence of the
+matter. Vow or no vow, there would have been a tragic conflict if Andrea
+had felt absolutely certain of his calling to the priesthood, and had
+defied Heaven, and imperilled his immortal soul, because of his
+overwhelming passion. That would have been a tragic situation; but the
+author had carefully avoided it. From the very first--before Andrea had
+ever seen Ilaria--it had been impressed upon us that he had no priestly
+vocation. There was no struggle in his soul between passion and duty;
+there was no struggle at all in his soul. His struggles are all with
+external forces and influences; wherefore the play, which a real
+obstacle might have converted into a tragedy, remained a sentimental
+romance--and is forgotten.</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 25%;">
+
+<p>What, then, is the essence of drama, if conflict be not it? What is the
+common quality of themes, scenes, and incidents, which we recognize as
+specifically dramatic? Perhaps we shall scarcely come nearer to a
+helpful definition than if we say that the essence of drama is <i>crisis</i>.
+A play is a more or less rapidly-developing crisis in destiny or
+circumstance, and a dramatic scene is a crisis within a crisis, clearly
+furthering the ultimate event. The drama may be called the art of
+crises, as fiction is the art of gradual developments. It is the
+slowness of its processes which differentiates the typical novel from
+the typical play. If the novelist does not take advantage of the
+facilities offered by his form for portraying gradual change, whether in
+the way of growth or of decay, he renounces his own birthright, in order
+to trespass on the domain of the dramatist. Most great novels embrace
+considerable segments of many lives; whereas the drama gives us only the
+culminating points--or shall we say the intersecting culminations?--two
+or three destinies. Some novelists have excelled precisely in the art
+with which they have made the gradations of change in character or
+circumstance so delicate as to be imperceptible from page to page, and
+measurable, as in real life, only when we look back over a considerable
+period. The dramatist, on the other hand, deals in rapid and startling
+changes, the &quot;peripeties,&quot; as the Greeks called them, which may be the
+outcome of long, slow processes, but which actually occur in very brief
+spaces of time. Nor is this a merely mechanical consequence of the
+narrow limits of stage presentation. The crisis is as real, though not
+as inevitable, a part of human experience as the gradual development.
+Even if the material conditions of the theatre permitted the
+presentation of a whole <i>Middlemarch</i> or <i>Anna Kar&eacute;nine</i>--as the
+conditions of the Chinese theatre actually do--some dramatists, we
+cannot doubt, would voluntarily renounce that license of prolixity, in
+order to cultivate an art of concentration and crisis. The Greek drama
+&quot;subjected to the faithful eyes,&quot; as Horace phrases it, the culminating
+points of the Greek epic; the modern drama places under the lens of
+theatrical presentment the culminating points of modern experience.</p>
+
+<p>But, manifestly, it is not every crisis that is dramatic. A serious
+illness, a law-suit, a bankruptcy, even an ordinary prosaic marriage,
+may be a crisis in a man's life, without being necessarily, or even
+probably, material for drama. How, then, do we distinguish a dramatic
+from a non-dramatic crisis? Generally, I think, by the fact that it
+develops, or can be made naturally to develop, through a series of minor
+crises, involving more or less emotional excitement, and, if possible,
+the vivid manifestation of character. Take, for instance, the case of a
+bankruptcy. Most people, probably, who figure in the <i>Gazette</i> do not go
+through any one, or two, or three critical moments of special tension,
+special humiliation, special agony. They gradually drift to leeward in
+their affairs, undergoing a series of small discouragements, small
+vicissitudes of hope and fear, small unpleasantnesses, which they take
+lightly or hardly according to their temperament, or the momentary state
+of their liver. In this average process of financial decline, there may
+be--there has been--matter for many excellent novels, but scarcely for a
+drama. That admirable chapter in <i>Little Dorrit,</i> wherein Dickens
+describes the gradual degradation of the Father of the Marshalsea, shows
+how a master of fiction deals with such a subject; but it would be quite
+impossible to transfer this chapter to the stage. So, too, with the
+bankruptcy of Colonel Newcome--certain emotional crises arising from it
+have, indeed, been placed on the stage, but only after all Thackeray's
+knowledge of the world and fine gradations of art had been eliminated.
+Mr. Hardy's <i>Mayor of Casterbridge</i> has, I think, been dramatized, but
+not, I think, with success. A somewhat similar story of financial ruin,
+the grimly powerful <i>House with the Green Shutters</i>, has not even
+tempted the dramatiser. There are, in this novel, indeed, many
+potentially dramatic crises; the trouble is that they are too numerous
+and individually too small to be suitable for theatrical presentment.
+Moreover, they are crises affecting a taciturn and inarticulate race,<a name="FNanchor16"></a><a href="#Footnote_16"><sup>[16]</sup></a>
+a fact which places further difficulties in the way of the playwright.
+In all these cases, in short, the bankruptcy portrayed is a matter of
+slow development, with no great outstanding moments, and is consequently
+suited for treatment in fiction rather than in drama.</p>
+
+<p>But bankruptcy sometimes occurs in the form of one or more sudden, sharp
+crises, and has, therefore, been utilized again and again as a dramatic
+motive. In a hundred domestic dramas or melodramas, we have seen the
+head of a happy household open a newspaper or a telegram announcing the
+failure of some enterprise in which all his fortune is embarked. So
+obviously dramatic is this incident that it has become sadly hackneyed.
+Again, we have bankruptcy following upon a course of gambling, generally
+in stocks. Here there is evident opportunity, which has been frequently
+utilized, for a series of crises of somewhat violent and commonplace
+emotion. In American drama especially, the duels of Wall Street, the
+combats of bull and bear, form a very popular theme, which clearly falls
+under the Bruneti&egrave;re formula. Few American dramatists can resist the
+temptation of showing some masterful financier feverishly watching the
+&quot;ticker&quot; which proclaims him a millionaire or a beggar. The &quot;ticker&quot; had
+not been invented in the days when Ibsen wrote <i>The League of Youth</i>,
+otherwise he would doubtless have made use of it in the fourth act of
+that play. The most popular of all Bj&ouml;rnson's plays is specifically
+entitled <i>A Bankruptcy</i>. Here the poet has had the art to select a
+typical phase of business life, which naturally presents itself in the
+form of an ascending curve, so to speak, of emotional crises. We see the
+energetic, active business man, with a number of irons in the fire,
+aware in his heart that he is insolvent, but not absolutely clear as to
+his position, and hoping against hope to retrieve it. We see him give a
+great dinner-party, in order to throw dust in the eyes of the world, and
+to secure the support of a financial magnate, who is the guest of
+honour. The financial magnate is inclined to &quot;bite,&quot; and goes off,
+leaving the merchant under the impression that he is saved. This is an
+interesting and natural, but scarcely a thrilling, crisis. It does not,
+therefore, discount the supreme crisis of the play, in which a cold,
+clear-headed business man, who has been deputed by the banks to look
+into the merchant's affairs, proves to him, point by point, that it
+would be dishonest of him to flounder any longer in the swamp of
+insolvency, into which he can only sink deeper and drag more people down
+with him. Then the bankrupt produces a pistol and threatens murder and
+suicide if the arbiter of his fate will not consent to give him one more
+chance; but his frenzy breaks innocuous against the other's calm,
+relentless reason. Here we have, I repeat, a typically dramatic theme: a
+great crisis, bringing out vivid manifestations of character, not only
+in the bankrupt himself, but in those around him, and naturally
+unfolding itself through a series of those lesser crises, which we call
+interesting and moving scenes. The play is scarcely a great one, partly
+because its ending is perfunctory, partly because Bj&ouml;rnson, poet though
+he was, had not Ibsen's art of &quot;throwing in a little poetry&quot; into his
+modern dramas. I have summarized it up to its culminating point, because
+it happened to illustrate the difference between a bankruptcy, dramatic
+in its nature and treatment, and those undramatic bankruptcies to which
+reference has been made. In <i>La Douloureuse</i>, by Maurice Donnay,
+bankruptcy is incidentally employed to bring about a crisis of a
+different order. A ball is proceeding at the house of a Parisian
+financier, when the whisper spreads that the host is ruined, and has
+committed suicide in a room above; whereupon the guests, after a moment
+of flustered consternation, go on supping and dancing!<a name="FNanchor17"></a><a href="#Footnote_17"><sup>[17]</sup></a> We are not at
+all deeply interested in the host or his fortunes. The author's purpose
+is to illustrate, rather crudely, the heartlessness of plutocratic
+Bohemia; and by means of the bankruptcy and suicide he brings about what
+may be called a crisis of collective character.<a name="FNanchor18"></a><a href="#Footnote_18"><sup>[18]</sup></a></p>
+
+<hr style="width: 25%;">
+
+<p>As regards individual incidents, it may be said in general that the
+dramatic way of treating them is the crisp and staccato, as opposed to
+the smooth or legato, method. It may be thought a point of inferiority
+in dramatic art that it should deal so largely in shocks to the nerves,
+and should appeal by preference, wherever it is reasonably possible, to
+the cheap emotions of curiosity and surprise. But this is a criticism,
+not of dramatic art, but of human nature. We may wish that mankind took
+more pleasure in pure apprehension than in emotion; but so long as the
+fact is otherwise, that way of handling an incident by which the
+greatest variety of poignancy of emotion can be extracted from it will
+remain the specifically dramatic way.</p>
+
+<p>We shall have to consider later the relation between what may be called
+primary and secondary suspense or surprise--that is to say between
+suspense or surprise actually experienced by the spectator to whom the
+drama is new, and suspense or surprise experienced only sympathetically,
+on behalf of the characters, by a spectator who knows perfectly what is
+to follow. The two forms of emotion are so far similar that we need not
+distinguish between them in considering the general content of the term
+&quot;dramatic.&quot; It is plain that the latter or secondary form of emotion
+must be by far the commoner, and the one to which the dramatist of any
+ambition must make his main appeal; for the longer his play endures, the
+larger will be the proportion of any given audience which knows it
+beforehand, in outline, if not in detail.</p>
+
+<p>As a typical example of a dramatic way of handling an incident, so as to
+make a supreme effect of what might else have been an anti-climax, one
+may cite the death of Othello. Shakespeare was faced by no easy problem.
+Desdemona was dead, Emilia dead, Iago wounded and doomed to the torture;
+how was Othello to die without merely satiating the audience with a glut
+of blood? How was his death to be made, not a foregone conclusion, a
+mere conventional suicide, but the culminating moment of the tragedy? In
+no single detail, perhaps, did Shakespeare ever show his dramatic genius
+more unmistakably than in his solution of this problem. We all remember
+how, as he is being led away, Othello stays his captors with a gesture,
+and thus addresses them:</p>
+
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&quot;Soft you; a word or two, before you go.<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;I have done the state some service, and they know 't;<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;No more of that. I pray you, in your letters,<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;When you shall these unlucky deeds relate,<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;Speak of me as I am; nothing extenuate,<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;Nor set down aught in malice, then must you speak<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;Of one that loved not wisely but too well;<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;Of one not easily jealous, but, being wrought,<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;Perplex'd in the extreme; of one whose hand,<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;Like the base Indian, threw a pearl away<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;Richer than all his tribe; of one whose subdued eyes,<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;Albeit unused to the melting mood,<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;Drop tears as fast as the Arabian trees<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;Their medicinal gum. Set you down this;<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;And say besides, that in Aleppo once,<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;Where a malignant and a turban'd Turk<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;Beat a Venetian and traduced the state,<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;I took by the throat the circumcised dog,<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;And smote him--thus!&quot;<br>
+
+<p>What is the essence of Shakespeare's achievement in this marvellous
+passage? What is it that he has done? He has thrown his audience, just
+as Othello has thrown his captors, off their guard, and substituted a
+sudden shock of surprise for a tedious fulfilment of expectation. In
+other words, he has handled the incident crisply instead of flaccidly,
+and so given it what we may call the specific accent of drama.</p>
+
+<p>Another consummate example of the dramatic handling of detail may be
+found in the first act of Ibsen's <i>Little Eyolf</i>. The lame boy, Eyolf,
+has followed the Rat-wife down to the wharf, has fallen into the water,
+and been drowned. This is the bare fact: how is it to be conveyed to the
+child's parents and to the audience?</p>
+
+<p>A Greek dramatist would probably have had recourse to a long and
+elaborately worked-up &quot;messenger-speech,&quot; a pathetic recitation. That
+was the method best suited to the conditions, and to what may be called
+the prevailing tempo, of the Greek theatre. I am far from saying that it
+was a bad method: no method is bad which holds and moves an audience.
+But in this case it would have had the disadvantage of concentrating
+attention on the narrator instead of on the child's parents, on the mere
+event instead of on the emotions it engendered. In the modern theatre,
+with greater facilities for reproducing the actual movement of life, the
+dramatist naturally aims at conveying to the audience the growing
+anxiety, the suspense and the final horror, of the father and mother.
+The most commonplace playwright would have seen this opportunity and
+tried to make the most of it. Every one can think of a dozen commonplace
+ways in which the scene could be arranged and written; and some of them
+might be quite effective. The great invention by which Ibsen snatches
+the scene out of the domain of the commonplace, and raises it to the
+height of dramatic poetry, consists in leaving it doubtful to the father
+and mother what is the meaning of the excitement on the beach and the
+confused cries which reach their ears, until one cry comes home to them
+with terrible distinctness, &quot;The crutch is floating!&quot; It would be hard
+to name any single phrase in literature in which more dramatic effect is
+concentrated than in these four words--they are only two words in the
+original. However dissimilar in its nature and circumstances, this
+incident is comparable with the death of Othello, inasmuch as in each
+case the poet, by a supreme felicity of invention, has succeeded in
+doing a given thing in absolutely the most dramatic method conceivable.
+Here we recognize in a consummate degree what has been called the
+&quot;fingering of the dramatist&quot;; and I know not how better to express the
+common quality of the two incidents than in saying that each is touched
+with extraordinary crispness, so as to give to what in both cases has
+for some time been expected and foreseen a sudden thrill of novelty and
+unexpectedness. That is how to do a thing dramatically.<a name="FNanchor19"></a><a href="#Footnote_19"><sup>[19]</sup></a></p>
+
+<p>And now, after all this discussion of the &quot;dramatic&quot; in theme and
+incident, it remains to be said that the tendency of recent theory, and
+of some recent practice, has been to widen the meaning of the word,
+until it bursts the bonds of all definition. Plays have been written,
+and have found some acceptance, in which the endeavour of the dramatist
+has been to depict life, not in moments of crisis, but in its most level
+and humdrum phases, and to avoid any crispness of touch in the
+presentation of individual incidents. &quot;Dramatic,&quot; in the eyes of writers
+of this school, has become a term of reproach, synonymous with
+&quot;theatrical.&quot; They take their cue from Maeterlinck's famous essay on
+&quot;The Tragic in Daily Life,&quot; in which he lays it down that: &quot;An old man,
+seated in his armchair, waiting patiently, with his lamp beside
+him--submitting with bent head to the presence of his soul and his
+destiny--motionless as he is, does yet live in reality a deeper, more
+human, and more universal life than the lover who strangles his
+mistress, the captain who conquers in battle, or the husband who
+'avenges his honour.'&quot; They do not observe that Maeterlinck, in his own
+practice, constantly deals with crises, and often with violent and
+startling ones.</p>
+
+<p>At the same time, I am far from suggesting that the reaction against the
+traditional &quot;dramatic&quot; is a wholly mistaken movement. It is a valuable
+corrective of conventional theatricalism; and it has, at some points,
+positively enlarged the domain of dramatic art. Any movement is good
+which helps to free art from the tyranny of a code of rules and
+definitions. The only really valid definition of the dramatic is: Any
+representation of imaginary personages which is capable of interesting
+an average audience assembled in a theatre. We must say &quot;representation
+of imaginary personages&quot; in order to exclude a lecture or a prize-fight;
+and we must say &quot;an average audience&quot; (or something to that effect) in
+order to exclude a dialogue of Plato or of Landor, the recitation of
+which might interest a specially selected public. Any further attempt to
+limit the content of the term &quot;dramatic&quot; is simply the expression of an
+opinion that such-and-such forms of representation will not be found to
+interest an audience; and this opinion may always be rebutted by
+experiment. In all that I have said, then, as to the dramatic and the
+non-dramatic, I must be taken as meaning: &quot;Such-and-such forms and
+methods have been found to please, and will probably please again. They
+are, so to speak, safer and easier than other forms and methods. But it
+is the part of original genius to override the dictates of experience,
+and nothing in these pages is designed to discourage original genius
+from making the attempt.&quot; We have already seen, indeed, that in a
+certain type of play--the broad picture of a social phenomenon or
+environment--it is preferable that no attempt should be made to depict a
+marked crisis. There should be just enough story to afford a plausible
+excuse for raising and for lowering the curtain.<a name="FNanchor20"></a><a href="#Footnote_20"><sup>[20]</sup></a></p>
+
+<p>Let us not, however, seem to grant too much to the innovators and the
+quietists. To say that a drama should be, or tends to be, the
+presentation of a crisis in the life of certain characters, is by no
+means to insist on a mere arbitrary convention. It is to make at once an
+induction from the overwhelming majority of existing dramas, and a
+deduction from the nature and inherent conditions of theatrical
+presentation. The fact that theatrical conditions often encourage a
+violent exaggeration of the characteristically dramatic elements in life
+does not make these elements any the less real or any the less
+characteristically dramatic. It is true that crispness of handling may
+easily degenerate into the pursuit of mere picture-poster situation; but
+that is no reason why the artist should not seek to achieve crispness
+within the bounds prescribed by nature and common sense. There is a
+drama--I have myself seen it--in which the heroine, fleeing from the
+villain, is stopped by a yawning chasm. The pursuer is at her heels, and
+it seems as though she has no resource but to hurl herself into the
+abyss. But she is accompanied by three Indian servants, who happen, by
+the mercy of Providence, to be accomplished acrobats. The second climbs
+on the shoulders of the first, the third on the shoulders of the second;
+and then the whole trio falls forward across the chasm, the top one
+grasping some bush or creeper on the other side; so that a living bridge
+is formed, on which the heroine (herself, it would seem, something of an
+acrobat) can cross the dizzy gulf and bid defiance to the baffled
+villain. This is clearly a dramatic crisis within our definition; but,
+no less clearly, it is not a piece of rational or commendable drama. To
+say that such-and-such a factor is necessary, or highly desirable, in a
+dramatic scene, is by no means to imply that every scene which contains
+this factor is good drama. Let us take the case of another heroine--Nina
+in Sir Arthur Pinero's <i>His House in Order</i>. The second wife of Filmer
+Jesson, she is continually being offered up as a sacrifice on the altar
+dedicated to the memory of his adored first wife. Not only her husband,
+but the relatives of the sainted Annabel, make her life a burden to her.
+Then it comes to her knowledge--she obtains absolute proof--that
+Annabel was anything but the saint she was believed to be. By a single
+word she can overturn the altar of her martyrdom, and shatter the
+dearest illusion of her persecutors. Shall she speak that word, or shall
+she not? Here is a crisis which comes within our definition just as
+clearly as the other;<a name="FNanchor21"></a><a href="#Footnote_21"><sup>[21]</sup></a> only it happens to be entirely natural and
+probable, and eminently illustrative of character. Ought we, then, to
+despise it because of the element it has in common with the
+picture-poster situation of preposterous melodrama? Surely not. Let
+those who have the art--the extremely delicate and difficult art--of
+making drama without the characteristically dramatic ingredients, do so
+by all means; but let them not seek to lay an embargo on the judicious
+use of these ingredients as they present themselves in life.</p>
+
+
+
+<br><br><hr style="width: 35%;"><br><br>
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_IV"></a>CHAPTER IV</h2>
+
+<p>THE ROUTINE OF COMPOSITION</p>
+<br>
+
+<p>As no two people, probably, ever did, or ever will, pursue the same
+routine in play-making, it is manifestly impossible to lay down any
+general rules on the subject. There are one or two considerations,
+however, which it may not be wholly superfluous to suggest to beginners.</p>
+
+<p>An invaluable insight into the methods of a master is provided by the
+scenarios and drafts of plays published in Henrik Ibsen's <i>Efterladte
+Skrifter</i>. The most important of these &quot;fore-works,&quot; as he used to call
+them, have now been translated under the title of <i>From Ibsen's
+Workshop</i> (Scribner), and may be studied with the greatest profit. Not
+that the student should mechanically imitate even Ibsen's routine of
+composition, which, indeed, varied considerably from play to play. The
+great lesson to be learnt from Ibsen's practice is that the play should
+be kept fluid or plastic as long as possible, and not suffered to become
+immutably fixed, either in the author's mind or on paper, before it has
+had time to grow and ripen. Many, if not most, of Ibsen's greatest
+individual inspirations came to him as afterthoughts, after the play had
+reached a point of development at which many authors would have held the
+process of gestation ended, and the work of art ripe for birth. Among
+these inspired afterthoughts may be reckoned Nora's great line,
+&quot;Millions of women have done that&quot;--the most crushing repartee in
+literature--Hedvig's threatened blindness, with all that ensues from it,
+and Little Eyolf's crutch, used to such purpose as we have already seen.</p>
+
+<p>This is not to say that the drawing-up of a tentative scenario ought not
+to be one of the playwright's first proceedings. Indeed, if he is able
+to dispense with a scenario on paper, it can only be because his mind is
+so clear, and so retentive of its own ideas, as to enable him to carry
+in his head, always ready for reference, a more or less detailed scheme.
+Go-as-you-please composition may be possible for the novelist, perhaps
+even for the writer of a one-act play, a mere piece of dialogue; but in
+a dramatic structure of any considerable extent, proportion, balance,
+and the interconnection of parts are so essential that a scenario is
+almost as indispensable to a dramatist as a set of plans to an
+architect. There is one dramatist of note whom one suspects of sometimes
+working without any definite scenario, and inventing as he goes along.
+That dramatist, I need scarcely say, is Mr. Bernard Shaw. I have no
+absolute knowledge of his method; but if he schemed out any scenario for
+<i>Getting Married</i> or <i>Misalliance</i>, he has sedulously concealed the
+fact--to the detriment of the plays.<a name="FNanchor22"></a><a href="#Footnote_22"><sup>[22]</sup></a></p>
+
+<p>The scenario or skeleton is so manifestly the natural ground-work of a
+dramatic performance that the playwrights of the Italian <i>commedia dell'
+arte</i> wrote nothing more than a scheme of scenes, and left the actors to
+do the rest. The same practice prevailed in early Elizabethan days, as
+one or two MS. &quot;Plats,&quot; designed to be hung up in the wings, are extant
+to testify. The transition from extempore acting regulated by a scenario
+to the formal learning of parts falls within the historical period of
+the German stage. It seems probable that the romantic playwrights of the
+sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, both in England and in Spain, may
+have adopted a method not unlike that of the drama of improvisation,
+that is to say, they may have drawn out a scheme of entrances and exits,
+and then let their characters discourse (on paper) as their fancy
+prompted. So, at least, the copious fluency of their dialogue seems to
+suggest. But the typical modern play is a much more close-knit organism,
+in which every word has to be weighed far more carefully than it was by
+playwrights who stood near to the days of improvisation, and could
+indulge in &quot;the large utterance of the early gods.&quot; Consequently it
+would seem that, until a play has been thought out very clearly and in
+great detail, any scheme of entrances and exits ought to be merely
+provisional and subject to indefinite modification. A modern play is not
+a framework of story loosely draped in a more or less gorgeous robe of
+language. There is, or ought to be, a close interdependence between
+action, character and dialogue, which forbids a playwright to tie his
+hands very far in advance.</p>
+
+<p>As a rule, then, it would seem to be an unfavourable sign when a drama
+presents itself at an early stage with a fixed and unalterable outline.
+The result may be a powerful, logical, well-knit piece of work; but the
+breath of life will scarcely be in it. Room should be left as long as
+possible for unexpected developments of character. If your characters
+are innocent of unexpected developments, the less characters they.<a name="FNanchor23"></a><a href="#Footnote_23"><sup>[23]</sup></a>
+Not that I, personally, have any faith in those writers of fiction, be
+they playwrights or novelists, who contend that they do not speak
+through the mouths of their personages, but rather let their personages
+speak through them. &quot;I do not invent or create&quot; I have heard an eminent
+novelist say: &quot;I simply record; my characters speak and act, and I write
+down their sayings and doings.&quot; This author may be a fine psychologist
+for purposes of fiction, but I question his insight into his own mental
+processes. The apparent spontaneity of a character's proceedings is a
+pure illusion. It means no more than that the imagination, once set in
+motion along a given line, moves along that line with an ease and
+freedom which seems to its possessor preternatural and almost
+uncanny.<a name="FNanchor24"></a><a href="#Footnote_24"><sup>[24]</sup></a></p>
+
+<p>Most authors, however, who have any real gift for character-creation
+probably fall more or less under this illusion, though they are sane
+enough and modest enough to realize that an illusion it is.<a name="FNanchor25"></a><a href="#Footnote_25"><sup>[25]</sup></a> A
+character will every now and then seem to take the bit between his teeth
+and say and do things for which his creator feels himself hardly
+responsible. The playwright's scheme should not, then, until the latest
+possible moment, become so hard and fast as to allow his characters no
+elbow room for such manifestations of spontaneity. And this is only one
+of several forms of afterthought which may arise as the play develops.
+The playwright may all of a sudden see that a certain character is
+superfluous, or that a new character is needed, or that a new
+relationship between two characters would simplify matters, or that a
+scene that he has placed in the first act ought to be in the second, or
+that he can dispense with it altogether, or that it reveals too much to
+the audience and must be wholly recast.<a name="FNanchor26"></a><a href="#Footnote_26"><sup>[26]</sup></a></p>
+
+<p>These are only a few of the re-adjustments which have constantly to be
+made if a play is shaping itself by a process of vital growth; and that
+is why the playwright may be advised to keep his material fluid as long
+as he can. Ibsen had written large portions of the play now known to us
+as <i>Rosmersholm</i> before he decided that Rebecca should not be married to
+Rosmer. He also, at a comparatively late stage, did away with two
+daughters whom he had at first given to Rosmer, and decided to make her
+childlessness the main cause of Beata's tragedy.</p>
+
+<p>Perhaps I insist too strongly on the advisability of treating a dramatic
+theme as clay to be modelled and remodelled, rather than as wood or
+marble to be carved unalterably and once for all. If so, it is because
+of a personal reminiscence. In my early youth, I had, like everybody
+else, ambitions in the direction of play-writing; and it was my
+inability to keep a theme plastic that convinced me of my lack of
+talent. It pleased me greatly to draw out a detailed scenario, working
+up duly to a situation at the end of each act; and, once made, that
+scenario was like a cast-iron mould into which the dialogue had simply
+to be poured. The result was that the play had all the merits of a
+logical, well-ordered essay. My situations worked out like the Q.E.D.'s
+of Euclid. My characters obstinately refused to come to life, or to take
+the bit between their teeth. They were simply cog-wheels in a
+pre-arranged mechanism. In one respect, my two or three plays were
+models--in respect of brevity and conciseness. I was never troubled by
+the necessity of cutting down--so cruel a necessity to many
+playwrights.<a name="FNanchor27"></a><a href="#Footnote_27"><sup>[27]</sup></a> My difficulty was rather to find enough for my
+characters to say--for they never wanted to say anything that was not
+strictly germane to the plot. It was this that made me despair of
+play-writing, and realize that my mission was to teach other people how
+to write plays. And, similarly, the aspirant who finds that his people
+never want to say more than he can allow them to say--that they never
+rush headlong into blind alleys, or do things that upset the balance of
+the play and have to be resolutely undone--that aspirant will do well
+not to be over-confident of his dramatic calling and election. There may
+be authors who can write vital plays, as Shakespeare is said (on rather
+poor evidence)<a name="FNanchor28"></a><a href="#Footnote_28"><sup>[28]</sup></a> to have done, without blotting a line; but I believe
+them to be rare. In our day, the great playwright is more likely to be
+he who does not shrink, on occasion, from blotting an act or two.</p>
+
+<p>There is a modern French dramatist who writes, with success, such plays
+as I might have written had I combined a strong philosophical faculty
+with great rhetorical force and fluency. The dramas of M. Paul Hervieu
+have all the neatness and cogency of a geometrical demonstration. One
+imagines that, for M. Hervieu, the act of composition means merely the
+careful filling in of a scenario as neat and complete as a schedule.<a name="FNanchor29"></a><a href="#Footnote_29"><sup>[29]</sup></a>
+But for that very reason, despite their undoubted intellectual power, M.
+Hervieu's dramas command our respect rather than our enthusiasm. The
+dramatist should aim at <i>being</i> logical without <i>seeming</i> so.<a name="FNanchor30"></a><a href="#Footnote_30"><sup>[30]</sup></a></p>
+
+<p>It is sometimes said that a playwright ought to construct his play
+backwards, and even to write his last act first.<a name="FNanchor31"></a><a href="#Footnote_31"><sup>[31]</sup></a> This doctrine
+belongs to the period of the well-made play, when climax was regarded as
+the one thing needful in dramatic art, and anticlimax as the
+unforgivable sin. Nowadays, we do not insist that every play should end
+with a tableau, or with an emphatic <i>mot de la fin</i>. We are more willing
+to accept a quiet, even an indecisive, ending.<a name="FNanchor32"></a><a href="#Footnote_32"><sup>[32]</sup></a> Nevertheless it is
+and must ever be true that, at a very early period in the scheming of
+his play, the playwright ought to assure himself that his theme is
+capable of a satisfactory ending. Of course this phrase does not imply a
+&quot;happy ending,&quot; but one which satisfies the author as being artistic,
+effective, inevitable (in the case of a serious play), or, in one word,
+&quot;right.&quot; An obviously makeshift ending can never be desirable, either
+from the ideal or from the practical point of view. Many excellent plays
+have been wrecked on this rock. The very frequent complaint that &quot;the
+last act is weak&quot; is not always or necessarily a just reproach; but it
+is so when the author has clearly been at a loss for an ending, and has
+simply huddled his play up in a conventional and perfunctory fashion. It
+may even be said that some apparently promising themes are deceptive in
+their promise, since they are inherently incapable of a satisfactory
+ending. The playwright should by all means make sure that he has not run
+up against one of these blind-alley themes.<a name="FNanchor33"></a><a href="#Footnote_33"><sup>[33]</sup></a> He should, at an early
+point, see clearly the end for which he is making, and be sure that it
+is an end which he actively desires, not merely one which satisfies
+convention, or which &quot;will have to do.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>Some dramatists, when a play is provisionally mapped out, do not attempt
+to begin at the beginning and write it as a coherent whole, but make a
+dash first at the more salient and critical scenes, or those which
+specially attract their imagination. On such a point every author must
+obviously be a law unto himself. From the theoretical point of view, one
+can only approve the practice, since it certainly makes for plasticity.
+It is evident that a detached scene, written while those that lead up to
+it are as yet but vaguely conceived, must be subject to indefinite
+modification.<a name="FNanchor34"></a><a href="#Footnote_34"><sup>[34]</sup></a> In several of Ibsen's very roughest drafts, we find
+short passages of dialogue sketched out even before the names have been
+assigned to the characters, showing that some of his earliest ideas came
+to him, as it were, ready dramatized. One would be tempted to hope much
+of an author who habitually and unaffectedly thus &quot;lisped in dialogue
+for the dialogue came.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>Ought the playwright, at an early stage in the process of each act, to
+have the details of its scene clearly before him? Ought he to draw out a
+scene-plot, and know, from moment to moment, just where each character
+is, whether He is standing on the hearthrug and She sitting on the
+settee, or <i>vice versa</i>? There is no doubt that furniture, properties,
+accidents of environment, play a much larger part in modern drama than
+they did on the Elizabethan, the eighteenth century, or even the
+early-Victorian stage. Some of us, who are not yet centenarians, can
+remember to have seen rooms on the stage with no furniture at all except
+two or three chairs &quot;painted on the flat.&quot; Under such conditions, it was
+clearly useless for the playwright to trouble his head about furniture,
+and even &quot;positions&quot; might well be left for arrangement at rehearsal.
+This carelessness of the environment, however, is no longer possible.
+Whether we like it or no (and some theorists do not like it at all),
+scenery has ceased to be a merely suggestive background against which
+the figures stand out in high relief. The stage now aims at presenting a
+complete picture, with the figures, not &quot;a little out of the picture,&quot;
+but completely in it. This being so, the playwright must evidently, at
+some point in the working out of his theme, visualize the stage-picture
+in considerable detail; and we find that almost all modern dramatists
+do, as a matter of fact, pay great attention to what may be called the
+topography of their scenes, and the shifting &quot;positions&quot; of their
+characters. The question is: at what stage of the process of composition
+ought this visualization to occur? Here, again, it would be absurd to
+lay down a general rule; but I am inclined to think, both theoretically
+and from what can be gathered of the practice of the best dramatists,
+that it is wisest to reserve it for a comparatively late stage. A
+playwright of my acquaintance, and a very remarkable playwright too,
+used to scribble the first drafts of his play in little notebooks, which
+he produced from his pocket whenever he had a moment to spare--often on
+the top of an omnibus. Only when the first draft was complete did he
+proceed to set the scenes, as it were, and map out the stage-management.
+On the other hand, one has heard of playwrights whose first step in
+setting to work upon a particular act was to construct a complete model
+of the scene, and people it with manikins to represent the characters.
+As a general practice, this is scarcely to be commended. It is wiser,
+one fancies, to have the matter of the scene pretty fully roughed-out
+before details of furniture, properties, and position are arranged.<a name="FNanchor35"></a><a href="#Footnote_35"><sup>[35]</sup></a>
+It may happen, indeed, that some natural phenomenon, some property or
+piece of furniture, is the very pivot of the scene; in which case it
+must, of course, be posited from the first. From the very moment of his
+conceiving the fourth act of <i>Le Tartufe</i>, Moli&egrave;re must have had clearly
+in view the table under which Orgon hides; and Sheridan cannot have got
+very far with the Screen Scene before he had mentally placed the screen.
+But even where a great deal turns on some individual object, the
+detailed arrangements of the scene may in most cases be taken for
+granted until a late stage in its working out.</p>
+
+<p>One proviso, however, must be made; where any important effect depends
+upon a given object, or a particular arrangement of the scene, the
+playwright cannot too soon assure himself that the object comes well
+within the physical possibilities of the stage, and that the arrangement
+is optically<a name="FNanchor36"></a><a href="#Footnote_36"><sup>[36]</sup></a> possible and effective. Few things, indeed, are quite
+impossible to the modern stage; but there are many that had much better
+not be attempted. It need scarcely be added that the more serious a play
+is, or aspires to be, the more carefully should the author avoid any
+such effects as call for the active collaboration of the
+stage-carpenter, machinist, or electrician. Even when a mechanical
+effect can be produced to perfection, the very fact that the audience
+cannot but admire the ingenuity displayed, and wonder &quot;how it is done,&quot;
+implies a failure of that single-minded attention to the essence of the
+matter in hand which the dramatist would strive to beget and maintain. A
+small but instructive example of a difficult effect, such as the prudent
+playwright will do well to avoid, occurs in the third act of Ibsen's
+<i>Little Eyolf</i>. During the greater part of the act, the flag in
+Allmers's garden is hoisted to half-mast in token of mourning; until at
+the end, when he and Rita attain a serener frame of mind, he runs it up
+to the truck. Now, from the poetic and symbolic point of view, this flag
+is all that can be desired; but from the practical point of view it
+presents grave difficulties. Nothing is so pitifully ineffective as a
+flag in a dead calm, drooping nervelessly against the mast; and though,
+no doubt, by an ingenious arrangement of electric fans, it might be
+possible to make this flag flutter in the breeze, the very fact of its
+doing so would tend to set the audience wondering by what mechanism the
+effect was produced, instead of attending to the soul-struggles of Rita
+and Allmers. It would be absurd to blame Ibsen for overriding theatrical
+prudence in such a case; I merely point out to beginners that it is
+wise, before relying on an effect of this order, to make sure that it
+is, not only possible, but convenient from the practical point of view.
+In one or two other cases Ibsen strained the resources of the stage. The
+illumination in the last act of <i>Pillars of Society</i> cannot be carried
+out as he describes it; or rather, if it were carried out on some
+exceptionally large and well-equipped stage, the feat of the mechanician
+would eclipse the invention of the poet. On the other hand, the abode of
+the Wild Duck in the play of that name is a conception entirely
+consonant with the optics of the theatre; for no detail at all need be,
+or ought to be, visible, and a vague effect of light is all that is
+required. Only in his last melancholy effort did Ibsen, in a play
+designed for representation, demand scenic effects entirely beyond the
+resources of any theatre not specially fitted for spectacular drama, and
+possible, even in such a theatre, only in some ridiculously
+makeshift form.</p>
+
+<p>There are two points of routine on which I am compelled to speak in no
+uncertain voice--two practices which I hold to be almost equally
+condemnable. In the first place, no playwright who understands the
+evolution of the modern theatre can nowadays use in his stage-directions
+the abhorrent jargon of the early nineteenth century. When one comes
+across a manuscript bespattered with such cabalistic signs as &quot;R.2.E.,&quot;
+&quot;R.C.,&quot; &quot;L.C.,&quot; &quot;L.U.E.,&quot; and so forth, one sees at a glance that the
+writer has neither studied dramatic literature nor thought out for
+himself the conditions of the modern theatre, but has found his dramatic
+education between the buff covers of <i>French's Acting Edition</i>. Some
+beginners imagine that a plentiful use of such abbreviations will be
+taken as a proof of their familiarity with the stage; whereas, in fact,
+it only shows their unfamiliarity with theatrical history. They might as
+well set forth to describe a modern battleship in the nautical
+terminology of Captain Marryat. &quot;Right First Entrance,&quot; &quot;Left Upper
+Entrance,&quot; and so forth, are terms belonging to the period when there
+were no &quot;box&quot; rooms or &quot;set&quot; exteriors on the stage, when the sides of
+each scene were composed of &quot;wings&quot; shoved on in grooves, and entrances
+could be made between each pair of wings. Thus, &quot;R. 1 E.&quot; meant the
+entrance between the proscenium and the first &quot;wing&quot; on the right, &quot;R. 2
+E.&quot; meant the entrance between the first pair of &quot;wings,&quot; and so forth.
+&quot;L.U.E.&quot; meant the entrance at the left between the last &quot;wing&quot; and the
+back cloth. Now grooves and &quot;wings&quot; have disappeared from the stage. The
+&quot;box&quot; room is entered, like any room in real life, by doors or French
+windows; and the only rational course is to state the position of your
+doors in your opening stage-direction, and thereafter to say in plain
+language by which door an entrance or an exit is to be made. In exterior
+scenes where, for example, trees or clumps of shrubbery answer in a
+measure to the old &quot;wings,&quot; the old terminology may not be quite
+meaningless; but it is far better eschewed. It is a good general rule to
+avoid, so far as possible, expressions which show that the author has a
+stage scene, and not an episode of real life, before his eyes. Men of
+the theatre are the last to be impressed by theatrical jargon; and when
+the play comes to be printed, the general reader is merely bewildered
+and annoyed by technicalities, which tend, moreover, to disturb
+his illusion.</p>
+
+<p>A still more emphatic warning must be given against another and more
+recent abuse in the matter of stage-directions. The &quot;L.U.E.'s,&quot; indeed,
+are bound very soon to die a natural death. The people who require to be
+warned against them are, as a rule, scarcely worth warning. But it is
+precisely the cleverest people (to use clever in a somewhat narrow
+sense) who are apt to be led astray by Mr. Bernard Shaw's practice of
+expanding his stage-directions into essays, disquisitions, monologues,
+pamphlets. This is a practice which goes far to justify the belief of
+some foreign critics that the English, or, since Mr. Shaw is in
+question, let us say the inhabitants of the British Islands, are
+congenitally incapable of producing a work of pure art. Our
+novelists--Fielding, Thackeray, George Eliot--have been sufficiently,
+though perhaps not unjustly, called over the coals for their habit of
+coming in front of their canvas, and either gossiping with the reader or
+preaching at him. But, if it be a sound maxim that the novelist should
+not obtrude his personality on his reader, how much more is this true of
+the dramatist! When the dramatist steps to the footlights and begins to
+lecture, all illusion is gone. It may be said that, as a matter of fact,
+this does not occur: that on the stage we hear no more of the
+disquisitions of Mr. Shaw and his imitators than we do of the curt, and
+often non-existent, stage-directions of Shakespeare and his
+contemporaries. To this the reply is twofold. First, the very fact that
+these disquisitions are written proves that the play is designed to be
+printed and read, and that we are, therefore, justified in applying to
+it the standard of what may be called literary illusion. Second, when a
+playwright gets into the habit of talking around his characters, he
+inevitably, even if unconsciously, slackens his endeavour to make them
+express themselves as completely as may be in their own proper medium of
+dramatic action and dialogue. You cannot with impunity mix up two
+distinct forms of art--the drama and the sociological essay or lecture.
+To Mr. Shaw, of course, much may, and must, be forgiven. His
+stage-directions are so brilliant that some one, some day, will
+assuredly have them spoken by a lecturer in the orchestra while the
+action stands still on the stage. Thus, he will have begotten a bastard,
+but highly entertaining, form of art. My protest has no practical
+application to him, for he is a standing exception to all rules. It is
+to the younger generation that I appeal not to be misled by his
+seductive example. They have little chance of rivalling him as
+sociological essayists; but if they treat their art seriously, and as a
+pure art, they may easily surpass him as dramatists. By adopting his
+practice they will tend to produce, not fine works of art, but inferior
+sociological documents. They will impair their originality and spoil
+their plays in order to do comparatively badly what Mr. Shaw has done
+incomparably well.</p>
+
+<p>The common-sense rule as to stage directions is absolutely plain; be
+they short, or be they long, they ought always to be <i>impersonal</i>. The
+playwright who cracks jokes in his stage-directions, or indulges in
+graces of style, is intruding himself between the spectator and the work
+of art, to the inevitable detriment of the illusion. In preparing a play
+for the press, the author should make his stage-directions as brief as
+is consistent with clearness. Few readers will burden their memory with
+long and detailed descriptions. When a new character of importance
+appears, a short description of his or her personal appearance and dress
+may be helpful to the reader; but even this should be kept impersonal.
+Moreover, as a play has always to be read before it can be rehearsed or
+acted, it is no bad plan to make the stage-directions, from the first,
+such as tend to bring the play home clearly to the reader's mental
+vision. And here I may mention a principle, based on more than mere
+convenience, which some playwrights observe with excellent results. Not
+merely in writing stage-directions, but in visualizing a scene, the idea
+of the stage should, as far as possible, be banished from the author's
+mind. He should see and describe the room, the garden, the sea-shore, or
+whatever the place of his action may be, not as a stage-scene, but as a
+room, garden, or sea-shore in the real world. The cultivation of this
+habit ought to be, and I believe is in some cases, a safeguard against
+theatricality.</p>
+
+
+
+<br><br><hr style="width: 35%;"><br><br>
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_V"></a>CHAPTER V</h2>
+
+<p>DRAMATIS PERSONAE</p>
+<br>
+
+<p>The theme being chosen, the next step will probably be to determine what
+characters shall be employed in developing it. Most playwrights, I take
+it, draw up a provisional Dramatis Personae before beginning the serious
+work of construction. Ibsen seems always to have done so; but, in some
+of his plays, the list of persons was at first considerably larger than
+it ultimately became. The frugal poet sometimes saved up the characters
+rejected from one play, and used them in another. Thus Boletta and Hilda
+Wangel were originally intended to have been the daughters of Rosmer and
+Beata; and the delightful Foldal of <i>John Gabriel Borkman</i> was a
+character left over from <i>The Lady from the Sea</i>.</p>
+
+<p>The playwright cannot proceed far in planning out his work without
+determining, roughly at any rate, what auxiliary characters he means to
+employ. There are in every play essential characters, without whom the
+theme is unthinkable, and auxiliary characters, not indispensable to the
+theme, but simply convenient for filling in the canvas and carrying on
+the action. It is not always possible to decide whether a character is
+essential or auxiliary--it depends upon how we define the theme. In
+<i>Hamlet</i>, for example, Hamlet, Claudius, and Gertrude are manifestly
+essential: for the theme is the hesitancy of a young man of a certain
+temperament in taking vengeance upon the seducer of his mother and
+murderer of his father. But is Ophelia essential, or merely auxiliary?
+Essential, if we consider Hamlet's pessimistic feeling as to woman and
+the &quot;breeding of sinners&quot; a necessary part of his character; auxiliary,
+if we take the view that without this feeling he would still have been
+Hamlet, and the action, to all intents and purposes, the same. The
+remaining characters, on the other hand, are clearly auxiliary. This is
+true even of the Ghost: for Hamlet might have learnt of his father's
+murder in fifty other ways.</p>
+
+<p>Polonius, Laertes, Horatio, and the rest might all have been utterly
+different, or might never have existed at all, and yet the essence of
+the play might have remained intact.</p>
+
+<p>It would be perfectly possible to write a <i>Hamlet</i> after the manner of
+Racine, in which there should be only six personages instead of
+Shakespeare's six-and-twenty: and in this estimate I assume Ophelia to
+be an essential character. The dramatis personae would be: Hamlet, his
+confidant; Ophelia, her confidant; and the King and Queen, who would
+serve as confidants to each other. Indeed, an economy of one person
+might be affected by making the Queen (as she naturally might) play the
+part of confidant to Ophelia.</p>
+
+<p>Shakespeare, to be sure, did not deliberately choose between his own
+method and that of Racine. Classic concentration was wholly unsuited to
+the physical conditions of the Elizabethan stage, on which external
+movement and bustle were imperatively demanded. But the modern
+playwright has a wide latitude of choice in this purely technical
+matter. He may work out his plot with the smallest possible number of
+characters, or he may introduce a crowd of auxiliary personages. The
+good craftsman will be guided by the nature of his theme. In a broad
+social study or a picturesque romance, you may have as many auxiliary
+figures as you please. In a subtle comedy, or a psychological tragedy,
+the essential characters should have the stage as much as possible to
+themselves. In Becque's <i>La Parisienne</i> there are only four characters
+and a servant; in Rostand's <i>Cyrano de Bergerac</i> there are fifty-four
+personages named in the playbill, to say nothing of supernumeraries. In
+<i>Peer Gynt</i>, a satiric phantasmagory, Ibsen introduces some fifty
+individual characters, with numberless supernumeraries; in <i>An Enemy of
+the People</i>, a social comedy, he has eleven characters and a crowd; for
+<i>Ghosts</i> and <i>Rosmersholm</i>, psychological tragedies, six persons apiece
+are sufficient.</p>
+
+<p>It can scarcely be necessary, at this time of day, to say much on the
+subject of nomenclature. One does occasionally, in manuscripts of a
+quite hopeless type, find the millionaire's daughter figuring as &quot;Miss
+Aurea Golden,&quot; and her poor but sprightly cousin as &quot;Miss Lalage Gay&quot;;
+but the veriest tyro realizes, as a rule, that this sort of punning
+characterization went out with the eighteenth century, or survived into
+the nineteenth century only as a flagrant anachronism, like
+knee-breeches and hair-powder.</p>
+
+<p>A curious essay might be written on the reasons why such names as Sir
+John Brute, Sir Tunbelly Clumsy, Sir Peter Teazle, Sir Anthony Absolute,
+Sir Lucius O'Trigger, Lord Foppington, Lord Rake, Colonel Bully,
+Lovewell, Heartfree, Gripe, Shark and the rest were regarded as a matter
+of course in &quot;the comedy of manners,&quot; but have become offensive to-day,
+except in deliberate imitations of the eighteenth-century style. The
+explanation does not lie merely in the contrast between &quot;conventional&quot;
+comedy and &quot;realistic&quot; drama. Our forefathers (whatever Lamb may say)
+did not consciously place their comedy in a realm of convention, but
+generally considered themselves, and sometimes were, realists. The
+fashion of label-names, if we may call them so, came down from the
+Elizabethans, who, again, borrowed it from the Mediaeval Moralities.<a name="FNanchor37"></a><a href="#Footnote_37"><sup>[37]</sup></a>
+Shakespeare himself gave us Master Slender and Justice Shallow; but it
+was in the Jonsonian comedy of types that the practice of advertising a
+&quot;humour&quot; or &quot;passion&quot; in a name (English or Italian) established itself
+most firmly. Hence such strange appellatives as Sir Epicure Mammon, Sir
+Amorous La Foole, Morose, Wellbred, Downright, Fastidius Brisk, Volpone,
+Corbaccio, Sordido, and Fallace. After the Restoration, Jonson, Beaumont
+and Fletcher, and Massinger were, for a time, more popular than
+Shakespeare; so that the label-names seemed to have the sanction of the
+giants that were before the Flood. Even when comedy began to deal with
+individuals rather than mere incarnations of a single &quot;humour,&quot; the
+practice of giving them obvious pseudonyms held its ground. Probably it
+was reinforced by the analogous practice which obtained in journalism,
+in which real persons were constantly alluded to (and libelled) under
+fictitious designations, more or less transparent to the initiated. Thus
+a label-name did not carry with it a sense of unreality, but rather,
+perhaps, a vague suggestion of covert reference to a real person. I must
+not here attempt to trace the stages by which the fashion went out. It
+could doubtless be shown that the process of change ran parallel to the
+shrinkage of the &quot;apron&quot; and the transformation of the platform-stage
+into the picture-stage. That transformation was completed about the
+middle of the nineteenth century; and it was about that time that
+label-names made their latest appearances in works of any artistic
+pretension--witness the Lady Gay Spanker of <i>London Assurance</i>, and the
+Captain Dudley (or &quot;Deadly&quot;) Smooth of <i>Money</i>. Faint traces of the
+practice survive in T.W. Robertson, as in his master, Thackeray. But it
+was in his earliest play of any note that he called a journalist Stylus.
+In his later comedies the names are admirably chosen: they are
+characteristic without eccentricity or punning. One feels that Eccles in
+<i>Caste</i> could not possibly have borne any other name. How much less
+living would he be had he been called Mr. Soaker or Mr. Tosspot!</p>
+
+<p>Characteristic without eccentricity--that is what a name ought to be. As
+the characteristic quality depends upon a hundred indefinable,
+subconscious associations, it is clearly impossible to suggest any
+principle of choice. The only general rule that can be laid down is that
+the key of the nomenclature, so to speak, may rightly vary with the key
+of the play--that farcical names are, within limits, admissible in
+farce, eccentric names in eccentric comedy, while soberly appropriate
+names are alone in place in serious plays. Some dramatists are
+habitually happy in their nomenclature, others much less so. Ibsen would
+often change a name three or four times in the course of writing a play,
+until at last he arrived at one which seemed absolutely to fit the
+character; but the appropriateness of his names is naturally lost upon
+foreign audiences.</p>
+
+<p>One word may perhaps be said on the recent fashion--not to say fad--of
+suppressing in the printed play the traditional list of &quot;Dramatis
+Personae.&quot; Bj&ouml;rnson, in some of his later plays, was, so far as I am
+aware, the first of the moderns to adopt this plan. I do not know
+whether his example has influenced certain English playwrights, or
+whether they arrived independently at the same austere principle, by
+sheer force of individual genius. The matter is a trifling one--so
+trifling that the departure from established practice has something of
+the air of a pedantry. It is not, on the whole, to be approved. It adds
+perceptibly to the difficulty which some readers experience in picking
+up the threads of a play; and it deprives other readers of a real and
+appreciable pleasure of anticipation. There is a peculiar and not
+irrational charm in looking down a list of quite unknown names, and
+thinking: &quot;In the course of three hours, I shall know these people: I
+shall have read their hearts: I shall have lived with them through a
+great crisis in their lives: some of them may be my friends for ever.&quot;
+It is one of the glories and privileges of the dramatist's calling that
+he can arouse in us this eager and poignant expectation; and I cannot
+commend his wisdom in deliberately taking the edge off it, and making us
+feel as though we were not sitting down to a play, but to a sort of
+conversational novel. A list of characters, it is true, may also affect
+one with acute anticipations of boredom; but I have never yet found a
+play less tedious by reason of the suppression of the &quot;Dramatis
+Personae.&quot;</p>
+
+
+
+<br><br><hr style="width: 35%;"><br><br>
+<h2><a name="BOOK_II"></a>BOOK II</h2>
+
+<p>THE BEGINNING</p>
+
+
+
+<br><br><hr style="width: 35%;"><br><br>
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_VI"></a>CHAPTER VI</h2>
+
+<p>THE POINT OF ATTACK: SHAKESPEARE AND IBSEN</p>
+<br>
+
+<p>Though, as we have already noted, the writing of plays does not always
+follow the chronological sequence of events, in discussing the process
+of their evolution we are bound to assume that the playwright begins at
+the beginning, and proceeds in orderly fashion, by way of the middle, to
+the end. It was one of Aristotle's requirements that a play should have
+a beginning, middle and end; and though it may seem that it scarcely
+needed an Aristotle to lay down so self-evident a proposition, the fact
+is that playwrights are more than sufficiently apt to ignore or despise
+the rule.<a name="FNanchor38"></a><a href="#Footnote_38"><sup>[38]</sup></a> Especially is there a tendency to rebel against the
+requirement that a play should have an end. We have seen a good many
+plays of late which do not end, but simply leave off: at their head we
+might perhaps place Ibsen's <i>Ghosts</i>. But let us not anticipate. For the
+moment, what we have to inquire is where, and how, a play ought
+to begin.</p>
+
+<p>In life there are no such things as beginnings. Even a man's birth is a
+quite arbitrary point at which to launch his biography; for the
+determining factors in his career are to be found in persons, events,
+and conditions that existed before he was ever thought of. For the
+biographer, however, and for the novelist as a writer of fictitious
+biography, birth forms a good conventional starting-point. He can give a
+chapter or so to &quot;Ancestry,&quot; and then relate the adventures of his hero
+from the cradle onwards. But the dramatist, as we have seen, deals, not
+with protracted sequences of events, but with short, sharp crises. The
+question for him, therefore, is: at what moment of the crisis, or of its
+antecedents, he had better ring up his curtain? At this point he is like
+the photographer studying his &quot;finder&quot; in order to determine how much of
+a given prospect he can &quot;get in.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>The answer to the question depends on many things, but chiefly on the
+nature of the crisis and the nature of the impression which the
+playwright desires to make upon his audience. If his play be a comedy,
+and if his object be gently and quietly to interest and entertain, the
+chances are that he begins by showing us his personages in their normal
+state, concisely indicates their characters, circumstances and
+relations, and then lets the crisis develop from the outset before our
+eyes. If, on the other hand, his play be of a more stirring description,
+and he wants to seize the spectator's attention firmly from the start,
+he will probably go straight at his crisis, plunging, perhaps, into the
+very middle of it, even at the cost of having afterwards to go back in
+order to put the audience in possession of the antecedent circumstances.
+In a third type of play, common of late years, and especially affected
+by Ibsen, the curtain rises on a surface aspect of profound peace, which
+is presently found to be but a thin crust over an absolutely volcanic
+condition of affairs, the origin of which has to be traced backwards, it
+may be for many years.</p>
+
+<p>Let us glance at a few of Shakespeare's openings, and consider at what
+points he attacks his various themes. Of his comedies, all except one
+begin with a simple conversation, showing a state of affairs from which
+the crisis develops with more or less rapidity, but in which it is as
+yet imperceptibly latent. In no case does he plunge into the middle of
+his subject, leaving its antecedents to be stated in what is technically
+called an &quot;exposition.&quot; Neither in tragedy nor in comedy, indeed, was
+this Shakespeare's method. In his historical plays he relied to some
+extent on his hearers' knowledge of history, whether gathered from books
+or from previous plays of the historical series; and where such
+knowledge was not to be looked for, he would expound the situation in
+good set terms, like those of a Euripidean Prologue. But the
+chronicle-play is a species apart, and practically an extinct species:
+we need not pause to study its methods. In his fictitious plays, with
+two notable exceptions, it was Shakespeare's constant practice to bring
+the whole action within the frame of the picture, opening at such a
+point that no retrospect should be necessary, beyond what could be
+conveyed in a few casual words. The exceptions are <i>The Tempest</i> and
+<i>Hamlet</i>, to which we shall return in due course.</p>
+
+<p>How does <i>The Merchant of Venice</i> open? With a long conversation
+exhibiting the character of Antonio, the friendship between him and
+Bassanio, the latter's financial straits, and his purpose of wooing
+Portia. The second scene displays the character of Portia, and informs
+us of her father's device with regard to her marriage; but this
+information is conveyed in three or four lines. Not till the third scene
+do we see or hear of Shylock, and not until very near the end of the act
+is there any foreshadowing of what is to be the main crisis of the play.
+Not a single antecedent event has to be narrated to us; for the mere
+fact that Antonio has been uncivil to Shylock, and shown disapproval of
+his business methods, can scarcely be regarded as a preliminary outside
+the frame of the picture.</p>
+
+<p>In <i>As You Like It</i> there are no preliminaries to be stated beyond the
+facts that Orlando is at enmity with his elder brother, and that Duke
+Frederick has usurped the coronet and dukedom of Rosalind's father.
+These facts being made apparent without any sort of formal exposition,
+the crisis of the play rapidly announces itself in the wrestling-match
+and its sequels. In <i>Much Ado About Nothing</i> there is even less of
+antecedent circumstance to be imparted. We learn in the first scene,
+indeed, that Beatrice and Benedick have already met and crossed swords;
+but this is not in the least essential to the action; the play might
+have been to all intents and purposes the same had they never heard of
+each other until after the rise of the curtain. In <i>Twelfth Night</i> there
+is a semblance of a retrospective exposition in the scene between Viola
+and the Captain; but it is of the simplest nature, and conveys no
+information beyond what, at a later period, would have been imparted on
+the playbill, thus--<br>
+<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&quot;Orsino, Duke of Illyria, in love with Olivia.<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;Olivia, an heiress, in mourning for her brother,&quot;<br>
+<br>
+and so forth. In <i>The Taming of the Shrew</i> there are no antecedents
+whatever to be stated. It is true that Lucentio, in the opening speech,
+is good enough to inform Tranio who he is and what he is doing
+there--facts with which Tranio is already perfectly acquainted. But this
+was merely a conventional opening, excused by the fashion of the time;
+it was in no sense a necessary exposition. For the rest, the crisis of
+the play--the battle between Katherine and Petruchio--begins, develops,
+and ends before our very eyes. In <i>The Winter's Tale</i>, a brief
+conversation between Camillo and Archidamus informs us that the King of
+Bohemia is paying a visit to the King of Sicilia; and that is absolutely
+all we need to know. It was not even necessary that it should be
+conveyed to us in this way. The situation would be entirely
+comprehensible if the scene between Camillo and Archidamus were omitted.</p>
+
+<p>It is needless to go through the whole list of comedies. The broad fact
+is that in all the plays commonly so described, excepting only <i>The
+Tempest</i>, the whole action comes within the frame of the picture. In
+<i>The Tempest</i> the poet employs a form of opening which otherwise he
+reserves for tragedies. The first scene is simply an animated tableau,
+calculated to arrest the spectator's attention, without conveying to him
+any knowledge either of situation or character. Such gleams of character
+as do, in fact, appear in the dialogue, are scarcely perceived in the
+hurly-burly of the storm. Then, in the calm which ensues, Prospero
+expounds to Miranda in great detail the antecedents of the crisis now
+developing. It might almost seem, indeed, that the poet, in this, his
+poetic last-will-and-testament, intended to warn his successors against
+the dangers of a long narrative exposition; for Prospero's story sends
+Miranda to sleep. Be this as it may, we have here a case in which
+Shakespeare deliberately adopted the plan of placing on the stage, not
+the whole crisis, but only its culmination, leaving its earlier stages
+to be conveyed in narrative.<a name="FNanchor39"></a><a href="#Footnote_39"><sup>[39]</sup></a> It would have been very easy for him to
+have begun at the beginning and shown us in action the events narrated
+by Prospero. This course would have involved no greater leap, either in
+time or space, than he had perpetrated in the almost contemporary
+<i>Winter's Tale</i>; and it cannot be said that there would have been any
+difficulty in compressing into three acts, or even two, the essentials
+of the action of the play as we know it. His reasons for departing from
+his usual practice were probably connected with the particular occasion
+for which the play was written. He wanted to produce a masque rather
+than a drama. We must not, therefore, attach too much significance to
+the fact that in almost the only play in which Shakespeare seems to have
+built entirely out of his own head, with no previous play or novel to
+influence him, he adopted the plan of going straight to the catastrophe,
+in which he had been anticipated by Sophocles (<i>Oedipus Rex</i>), and was
+to be followed by Ibsen (<i>Ghosts</i>, <i>Rosmersholm</i>, etc.).</p>
+
+<p>Coming now to the five great tragedies, we find that in four of them
+Shakespeare began, as in <i>The Tempest</i>, with a picturesque and stirring
+episode calculated to arrest the spectator's attention and awaken his
+interest, while conveying to him little or no information. The opening
+scene of <i>Romeo and Juliet</i> is simply a brawl, bringing home to us
+vividly the family feud which is the root of the tragedy, but informing
+us of nothing beyond the fact that such a feud exists. This is, indeed,
+absolutely all that we require to know. There is not a single
+preliminary circumstance, outside the limits of the play, that has to be
+explained to us. The whole tragedy germinates and culminates within what
+the prologue calls &quot;the two hours' traffick of the stage.&quot; The opening
+colloquy of the Witches in <i>Macbeth</i>, strikes the eerie keynote, but
+does nothing more. Then, in the second scene, we learn that there has
+been a great battle and that a nobleman named Macbeth has won a victory
+which covers him with laurels. This can in no sense be called an
+exposition. It is the account of a single event, not of a sequence; and
+that event is contemporary, not antecedent. In the third scene, the
+meeting of Macbeth and Banquo with the Witches, we have what may be
+called an exposition reversed; not a narrative of the past, but a
+foreshadowing of the future. Here we touch on one of the subtlest of the
+playwright's problems--the art of arousing anticipation in just the
+right measure. But that is not the matter at present in hand.<a name="FNanchor40"></a><a href="#Footnote_40"><sup>[40]</sup></a></p>
+
+<p>In the opening scene of <i>Othello</i> it is true that some talk passes
+between Iago and Roderigo before they raise the alarm and awaken
+Brabantio; but it is carefully non-expository talk; it expounds nothing
+but Iago's character. Far from being a real exception to the rule that
+Shakespeare liked to open his tragedies with a very crisply dramatic
+episode, <i>Othello</i> may rather be called its most conspicuous example.
+The rousing of Brabantio is immediately followed by the encounter
+between his men and Othello's, which so finely brings out the lofty
+character of the Moor; and only in the third scene, that of the Doge's
+Council, do we pass from shouts and swords to quiet discussion and, in a
+sense, exposition. Othello's great speech, while a vital portion of the
+drama, is in so far an exposition that it refers to events which do not
+come absolutely within the frame of the picture. But they are very
+recent, very simple, events. If Othello's speech were omitted, or cut
+down to half a dozen lines, we should know much less of his character
+and Desdemona's, but the mere action of the play would remain perfectly
+comprehensible.</p>
+
+<p><i>King Lear</i> necessarily opens with a great act of state, the partition
+of the kingdom. A few words between Kent and Gloucester show us what is
+afoot, and then, at one plunge, we are in the thick of the drama. There
+was no opportunity here for one of those picturesque tableaux, exciting
+rather than informative, which initiate the other tragedies. It would
+have had to be artificially dragged in; and it was the less necessary,
+as the partition scene took on, in a very few lines, just that
+arresting, stimulating quality which the poet seems to have desired in
+the opening of a play of this class.</p>
+
+<p>Finally, when we turn to <i>Hamlet</i>, we find a consummate example of the
+crisply-touched opening tableau, making a nervous rather than an
+intellectual appeal, informing us of nothing, but exciting a vivid,
+though quite vague, anticipation. The silent transit of the Ghost,
+desiring to speak, yet tongue-tied, is certainly one of Shakespeare's
+unrivalled masterpieces of dramatic craftsmanship. One could pretty
+safely wager that if the <i>Ur-Hamlet</i>, on which Shakespeare worked, were
+to come to light to-morrow, this particular trait would not be found in
+it. But, oddly enough, into the middle of this admirable opening
+tableau, Shakespeare inserts a formal exposition, introduced in the most
+conventional way. Marcellus, for some unexplained reason, is ignorant of
+what is evidently common knowledge as to the affairs of the realm, and
+asks to be informed; whereupon Horatio, in a speech of some twenty-five
+lines, sets forth the past relations between Norway and Denmark, and
+prepares us for the appearance of Fortinbras in the fourth act. In
+modern stage versions all this falls away, and nobody who has not
+studied the printed text is conscious of its absence. The commentators,
+indeed, have proved that Fortinbras is an immensely valuable element in
+the moral scheme of the play; but from the point of view of pure drama,
+there is not the slightest necessity for this Norwegian-Danish
+embroilment or its consequences.<a name="FNanchor41"></a><a href="#Footnote_41"><sup>[41]</sup></a> The real exposition--for <i>Hamlet</i>
+differs from the other tragedies in requiring an exposition--comes in
+the great speech of the Ghost in Scene V. The contrast between this
+speech and Horatio's lecture in the first scene, exemplifies the
+difference between a dramatized and an undramatized exposition. The
+crisis, as we now learn, began months or years before the rise of the
+curtain. It began when Claudius inveigled the affections of Gertrude;
+and it would have been possible for the poet to have started from this
+point, and shown us in action all that he in fact conveys to us by way
+of narration. His reason for choosing the latter course is abundantly
+obvious.<a name="FNanchor42"></a><a href="#Footnote_42"><sup>[42]</sup></a> Hamlet the Younger was to be the protagonist: the interest
+of the play was to centre in his mental processes. To have awakened our
+interest in Hamlet the Elder would, therefore, have been a superfluity
+and an irrelevance. Moreover (to say nothing of the fact that the Ghost
+was doubtless a popular figure in the old play, and demanded by the
+public) it was highly desirable that Hamlet's knowledge of the usurper's
+crime should come to him from a supernatural witness, who could not be
+cross-questioned or called upon to give material proof. This was the
+readiest as well as the most picturesque method of begetting in him that
+condition of doubt, real or affected, which was necessary to account for
+his behaviour. But to have shown us in action the matter of the Ghost's
+revelation would have been hopelessly to ruin its effect. A repetition
+in narrative of matters already seen in action is the grossest of
+technical blunders.<a name="FNanchor43"></a><a href="#Footnote_43"><sup>[43]</sup></a> Hamlet senior, in other words, being
+indispensable in the spirit, was superfluous in the flesh. But there was
+another and equally cogent reason for beginning the play after the
+commission of the initial crime or crimes. To have done otherwise would
+have been to discount, not only the Ghost, but the play-scene. By a
+piece of consummate ingenuity, which may, of course, have been conceived
+by the earlier playwright, the initial incidents of the story are in
+fact presented to us, in the guise of a play within the play, and as a
+means to the achievement of one of the greatest dramatic effects in all
+literature. The moment the idea of the play-scene presented itself to
+the author's mind, it became absolutely unthinkable that he should, to
+put it vulgarly, &quot;queer the pitch&quot; for the Players by showing us the
+real facts of which their performance was to be the counterfeit
+presentment. The dramatic effect of the incidents was incalculably
+heightened when they were presented, as in a looking-glass, before the
+guilty pair, with the eye of the avenger boring into their souls. And
+have we not here, perhaps, a clue to one of the most frequent and
+essential meanings of the word &quot;dramatic&quot;? May we not say that the
+dramatic quality of an incident is proportionate to the variety<a name="FNanchor44"></a><a href="#Footnote_44"><sup>[44]</sup></a> and
+intensity of the emotions involved in it?</p>
+
+<p>All this may appear too obvious to be worth setting forth at such
+length. Very likely it never occurred to Shakespeare that it was
+possible to open the play at an earlier point; so that he can hardly be
+said to have exercised a deliberate choice in the matter. Nevertheless,
+the very obviousness of the considerations involved makes this a good
+example of the importance of discovering just the right point at which
+to raise the curtain. In the case of <i>The Tempest</i>, Shakespeare plunged
+into the middle of the crisis because his object was to produce a
+philosophico-dramatic entertainment rather than a play in the strict
+sense of the word. He wanted room for the enchantments of Ariel, the
+brutishnesses of Caliban, the humours of Stephano and Trinculo--all
+elements extrinsic to the actual story. But in <i>Hamlet</i> he adopted a
+similar course for purely dramatic reasons--in order to concentrate his
+effects and present the dramatic elements of his theme at their
+highest potency.</p>
+
+<p>In sum, then, it was Shakespeare's usual practice, histories apart, to
+bring the whole action of his plays within the frame of the picture,
+leaving little or nothing to narrative exposition. The two notable
+exceptions to this rule are those we have just examined--<i>Hamlet</i> and
+<i>The Tempest</i>. Furthermore, he usually opened his comedies with quiet
+conversational passages, presenting the antecedents of the crisis with
+great deliberation. In his tragedies, on the other hand, he was apt to
+lead off with a crisp, somewhat startling passage of more or less
+vehement action, appealing rather to the nerves than to the
+intelligence--such a passage as Gustav Freytag, in his <i>Technik des
+Dramas</i>, happily entitles an <i>einleitende Akkord</i>, an introductory
+chord. It may be added that this rule holds good both for <i>Coriolanus</i>
+and for <i>Julius Caesar</i>, in which the keynote is briskly struck in
+highly animated scenes of commotion among the Roman populace.</p>
+
+<p>Let us now look at the practice of Ibsen, which offers a sharp contrast
+to that of Shakespeare. To put it briefly, the plays in which Ibsen gets
+his whole action within the frame of the picture are as exceptional as
+those in which Shakespeare does not do so.</p>
+
+<p>Ibsen's practice in this matter has been compared with that of the Greek
+dramatists, who also were apt to attack their crisis in the middle, or
+even towards the end, rather than at the beginning. It must not be
+forgotten, however, that there is one great difference between his
+position and theirs. They could almost always rely upon a general
+knowledge, on the part of the audience, of the theme with which they
+were dealing. The purpose even of the Euripidean prologue is not so much
+to state unknown facts, as to recall facts vaguely remembered, to state
+the particular version of a legend which the poet proposes to adopt, and
+to define the point in the development of the legend at which he is
+about to set his figures in motion. Ibsen, on the other hand, drew upon
+no storehouse of tradition. He had to convey to his audience everything
+that he wanted them to know; and this was often a long and complex
+series of facts.</p>
+
+<p>The earliest play in which Ibsen can be said to show maturity of
+craftsmanship is <i>The Vikings at Helgeland</i>. It is curious to note that
+both in <i>The Vikings</i> and in <i>The Pretenders</i>, two plays which are in
+some measure comparable with Shakespearean tragedies, he opens with a
+firmly-touched <i>einleitende Akkord</i>. In <i>The Vikings</i>, Ornulf and his
+sons encounter and fight with Sigurd and his men, very much after the
+fashion of the Montagues and Capulets in <i>Romeo and Juliet</i>. In <i>The
+Pretenders</i> the rival factions of Haakon and Skule stand outside the
+cathedral of Bergen, intently awaiting the result of the ordeal which is
+proceeding within; and though they do not there and then come to blows,
+the air is electrical with their conflicting ambitions and passions. His
+modern plays, on the other hand, Ibsen opens quietly enough, though
+usually with some more or less arresting little incident, calculated to
+arouse immediate curiosity. One may cite as characteristic examples the
+hurried colloquy between Engstrand and Regina in <i>Ghosts</i>; Rebecca and
+Madam Helseth in <i>Rosmersholm</i>, watching to see whether Rosmer will
+cross the mill-race; and in <i>The Master Builder</i>, old Brovik's querulous
+outburst, immediately followed by the entrance of Solness and his
+mysterious behaviour towards Kaia. The opening of <i>Hedda Gabler</i>, with
+its long conversation between Miss Tesman and the servant Bertha, comes
+as near as Ibsen ever did to the conventional exposition of the French
+stage, conducted by a footman and a parlour-maid engaged in dusting the
+furniture. On the other hand, there never was a more masterly opening,
+in its sheer simplicity, than Nora's entrance in <i>A Doll's House</i>, and
+the little silent scene that precedes the appearance of Helmer.</p>
+
+<p>Regarding <i>The Vikings</i> as Ibsen's first mature production, and
+surveying the whole series of his subsequent works in which he had stage
+presentation directly in view,<a name="FNanchor45"></a><a href="#Footnote_45"><sup>[45]</sup></a> we find that in only two out of the
+fifteen plays does the whole action come within the frame of the
+picture. These two are <i>The League of Youth</i> and <i>An Enemy of the
+People</i>. In neither of these have any antecedents to be stated; neither
+turns upon any disclosure of bygone events or emotions. We are, indeed,
+afforded brief glimpses into the past both of Stensgaard and of
+Stockmann; but the glimpses are incidental and inessential. It is
+certainly no mere coincidence that if one were asked to pick out the
+pieces of thinnest texture in all Ibsen's mature work, one would
+certainly select these two plays. Far be it from me to disparage <i>An
+Enemy of the People</i>; as a work of art it is incomparably greater than
+such a piece as <i>Pillars of Society</i>; but it is not so richly woven,
+not, as it were, so deep in pile. Written in half the time Ibsen usually
+devoted to a play, it is an outburst of humorous indignation, a <i>jeu
+d'esprit</i>, one might almost say, though the <i>jeu</i> of a giant <i>esprit</i>.</p>
+
+<p>Observing the effect of comparative tenuity in these two plays, we
+cannot but surmise that the secret of the depth and richness of texture
+so characteristic of Ibsen's work, lay in his art of closely
+interweaving a drama of the present with a drama of the past. <i>An Enemy
+of the People</i> is a straightforward, spirited melody; <i>The Wild Duck</i>
+and <i>Rosmersholm</i> are subtly and intricately harmonized.</p>
+
+<p>Going a little more into detail, we find in Ibsen's work an
+extraordinary progress in the art of so unfolding the drama of the past
+as to make the gradual revelation no mere preface or prologue to the
+drama of the present, but an integral part of its action. It is true
+that in <i>The Vikings</i> he already showed himself a master in this art.
+The great revelation--the disclosure of the fact that Sigurd, not
+Gunnar, did the deed of prowess which Hi&ouml;rdis demanded of the man who
+should be her mate--this crucial revelation is brought about in a scene
+of the utmost dramatic intensity. The whole drama of the past,
+indeed--both its facts and its emotions--may be said to be dragged to
+light in the very stress and pressure of the drama of the present. Not a
+single detail of it is narrated in cold blood, as, for example, Prospero
+relates to Miranda the story of their marooning, or Horatio expounds the
+Norwegian-Danish political situation. I am not holding up <i>The Vikings</i>
+as a great masterpiece; it has many weaknesses both of substance and of
+method; but in this particular art of indistinguishably blending the
+drama of the present with the drama of the past, it is already
+consummate. <i>The Pretenders</i> scarcely comes into the comparison. It is
+Ibsen's one chronicle-play; and, like Shakespeare, he did not shrink
+from employing a good deal of narrative, though his narratives, it must
+be said, are always introduced under such circumstances as to make them
+a vital part of the drama. It is when we come to the modern plays that
+we find the poet falling back upon conventional and somewhat clumsy
+methods of exposition, which he only by degrees, though by rapid
+degrees, unlearns.</p>
+
+<p><i>The League of Youth</i>, as we have seen, requires no exposition. All we
+have to learn is the existing relations of the characters, which appear
+quite naturally as the action proceeds. But let us look at <i>Pillars of
+Society</i>. Here we have to be placed in possession of a whole antecedent
+drama: the intrigue of Karsten Bernick with Dina Dorf's mother, the
+threatened scandal, Johan T&ouml;nnesen's vicarious acceptance of Bernick's
+responsibility, the subsidiary scandal of Lona Hessel's outburst on
+learning of Bernick's engagement to her half-sister, the report of an
+embezzlement committed by Johan before his departure for America. All
+this has to be conveyed to us in retrospect; or, rather, in the first
+place, we have to be informed of the false version of these incidents
+which is current in the little town, and on which Bernick's moral and
+commercial prestige is built up. What device, then, does Ibsen adopt to
+this end? He introduces a &quot;sewing-bee&quot; of tattling women, one of whom
+happens to be a stranger to the town, and unfamiliar with its gossip.
+Into her willing ear the others pour the popular version of the Bernick
+story; and, this impartment effected, the group of gossips disappears,
+to be heard of no more. These ladies perform the function, in fact, of
+the First, Second, and Third Gentlemen, so common in Elizabethan and
+pseudo-Elizabethan plays.<a name="FNanchor46"></a><a href="#Footnote_46"><sup>[46]</sup></a> They are not quite so artless in their
+conventionality, for they bring with them the social atmosphere of the
+tattling little town, which is an essential factor in the drama.
+Moreover, their exposition is not a simple narrative of facts. It is to
+some extent subtilized by the circumstance that the facts are not facts,
+and that the gist of the drama is to lie in the gradual triumph of the
+truth over this tissue of falsehoods. Still, explain it as we may, the
+fact remains that in no later play does Ibsen initiate us into the
+preliminaries of his action by so hackneyed and unwieldy a device. It is
+no conventional canon, but a maxim of mere common sense, that the
+dramatist should be chary of introducing characters who have no personal
+share in the drama, and are mere mouthpieces for the conveyance of
+information. Nowhere else does Ibsen so flagrantly disregard so obvious
+a principle of dramatic economy.<a name="FNanchor47"></a><a href="#Footnote_47"><sup>[47]</sup></a></p>
+
+<p>When we turn to his next play, <i>A Doll's House</i>, we find that he has
+already made a great step in advance. He has progressed from the First,
+Second, and Third Gentlemen of the Elizabethans to the confidant<a name="FNanchor48"></a><a href="#Footnote_48"><sup>[48]</sup></a> of
+the French classic drama. He even attempts, not very successfully, to
+disguise the confidant by giving her a personal interest, an effective
+share, in the drama. Nothing can really dissemble the fact that the long
+scene between Nora and Mrs. Linden, which occupies almost one-third of
+the first act, is simply a formal exposition, outside the action of the
+play. Just as it was providential that one of the house-wives of the
+sewing-bee in <i>Pillars of Society</i> should have been a stranger to the
+town, so it was the luckiest of chances (for the dramatist's
+convenience) that an old school-friend should have dropped in from the
+clouds precisely half-an-hour before the entrance of Krogstad brings to
+a sudden head the great crisis of Nora's life. This happy conjuncture of
+events is manifestly artificial: a trick of the dramatist's trade: a
+point at which his art does not conceal his art. Mrs. Linden does not,
+like the dames of the sewing-bee, fade out of the saga; she even,
+through her influence on Krogstad, plays a determining part in the
+development of the action. But to all intents and purposes she remains a
+mere confidant, a pretext for Nora's review of the history of her
+married life. There are two other specimens of the genus confidant in
+Ibsen's later plays. Arnholm, in <i>The Lady from the Sea</i>, is little
+more; Dr. Herdal, in <i>The Master Builder</i>, is that and nothing else. It
+may be alleged in his defence that the family physician is the
+professional confidant of real life.</p>
+
+<p>In <i>Ghosts</i>, Ibsen makes a sudden leap to the extreme of his
+retrospective method. I am not one of those who consider this play
+Ibsen's masterpiece: I do not even place it, technically, in the first
+rank among his works. And why? Because there is here no reasonable
+equilibrium between the drama of the past and the drama of the present.
+The drama of the past is almost everything, the drama of the present
+next to nothing. As soon as we have probed to the depths the Alving
+marriage and its consequences, the play is over, and there is nothing
+left but for Regina to set off in pursuit of the joy of life, and for
+Oswald to collapse into imbecility. It is scarcely an exaggeration to
+call the play all exposition and no drama. Here for the first time,
+however, Ibsen perfected his peculiar gift of imparting tense dramatic
+interest to the unveiling of the past. While in one sense the play is
+all exposition, in another sense it may quite as truly be said to
+contain no exposition; for it contains no narrative delivered in cold
+blood, in mere calm retrospection, as a necessary preliminary to the
+drama which is in the meantime waiting at the door. In other words, the
+exposition is all drama, it <i>is</i> the drama. The persons who are tearing
+the veils from the past, and for whom the veils are being torn, are
+intensely concerned in the process, which actually constitutes the
+dramatic crisis. The discovery of this method, or its rediscovery in
+modern drama,<a name="FNanchor49"></a><a href="#Footnote_49"><sup>[49]</sup></a> was Ibsen's great technical achievement. In his best
+work, the progress of the unveiling occasions a marked development, or
+series of changes, in the actual and present relations of the
+characters. The drama of the past and the drama of the present proceed,
+so to speak, in interlacing rhythms, or, as I said before, in a rich,
+complex harmony. In <i>Ghosts</i> this harmony is not so rich as in some
+later plays, because the drama of the present is disproportionately
+meagre. None the less, or all the more, is it a conspicuous example of
+Ibsen's method of raising his curtain, not at the beginning of the
+crisis, but rather at the beginning of the catastrophe.</p>
+
+<p>In <i>An Enemy of the People</i>, as already stated, he momentarily deserted
+that method, and gave us an action which begins, develops, and ends
+entirely within the frame of the picture. But in the two following
+plays, <i>The Wild Duck</i> and <i>Rosmersholm</i>, he touched the highest point
+of technical mastery in his interweaving of the past with the present. I
+shall not attempt any analysis of the fabric of these plays. The process
+would be long, tedious, and unhelpful; for no one could hope to employ a
+method of such complexity without something of Ibsen's genius; and
+genius will evolve its methods for itself. Let me only ask the reader to
+compare the scene between old Werle and Gregers in the first act of <i>The
+Wild Duck</i> with the scene between Nora and Mrs. Linden in the first act
+of <i>A Doll's House</i>, and mark the technical advance. Both scenes are, in
+a sense, scenes of exposition. Both are mainly designed to place us in
+possession of a sequence of bygone facts. But while the <i>Doll's House</i>
+scene is a piece of quiet gossip, brought about (as we have noted) by
+rather artificial means, and with no dramatic tension in it, the <i>Wild
+Duck</i> scene is a piece of tense, one might almost say fierce, drama,
+fulfilling the Brunetiere definition in that it shows us two characters,
+a father and son, at open war with each other. The one scene is outside
+the real action, the other is an integral part of it. The one belongs to
+Ibsen's tentative period, the other ushers in, one might almost say, his
+period of consummate mastery.<a name="FNanchor50"></a><a href="#Footnote_50"><sup>[50]</sup></a></p>
+
+<p><i>Rosmersholm</i> is so obviously nothing but the catastrophe of an
+antecedent drama that an attempt has actually been made to rectify
+Ibsen's supposed mistake, and to write the tragedy of the deceased
+Beata. It was made by an unskilful hand; but even a skilful hand would
+scarcely have done more than prove how rightly Ibsen judged that the
+recoil of Rebecca's crime upon herself and Rosmer would prove more
+interesting, and in a very real sense more dramatic, than the somewhat
+vulgar process of the crime itself. The play is not so profound in its
+humanity as <i>The Wild Duck</i>, but it is Ibsen's masterpiece in the art of
+withdrawing veil after veil. From the technical point of view, it will
+repay the closest study.</p>
+
+<p>We need not look closely at the remaining plays. <i>Hedda Gabler</i> is
+perhaps that in which a sound proportion between the past and the
+present is most successfully preserved. The interest of the present
+action is throughout very vivid; but it is all rooted in facts and
+relations of the past, which are elicited under circumstances of high
+dramatic tension. Here again it is instructive to compare the scene
+between Hedda and Thea, in the first act, with the scene between Nora
+and Mrs. Linden. Both are scenes of exposition: and each is, in its way,
+character-revealing; but the earlier scene is a passage of quite
+unemotional narrative; the later is a passage of palpitating drama. In
+the plays subsequent to <i>Hedda Gabler</i>, it cannot be denied that the
+past took the upper hand of the present to a degree which could only be
+justified by the genius of an Ibsen. Three-fourths of the action of <i>The
+Master Builder</i>, <i>Little Eyolf</i>, <i>John Gabriel Borkman</i>, and <i>When We
+Dead Awaken</i>, consists of what may be called a passionate analysis of
+the past. Ibsen had the art of making such an analysis absorbingly
+interesting; but it is not a formula to be commended for the practical
+purposes of the everyday stage.</p>
+
+
+
+
+<br><br><hr style="width: 35%;"><br><br>
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_VII"></a>CHAPTER VII</h2>
+
+<p>EXPOSITION: ITS END AND ITS MEANS</p>
+<br>
+
+<p>We have passed in rapid survey the practices of Shakespeare and Ibsen in
+respect of their point and method of attack upon their themes. What
+practical lessons can we now deduce from this examination?</p>
+
+<p>One thing is clear: namely, that there is no inherent superiority in one
+method over another. There are masterpieces in which the whole crisis
+falls within the frame of the picture, and masterpieces in which the
+greater part of the crisis has to be conveyed to us in retrospect, only
+the catastrophe being transacted before our eyes. Genius can manifest
+itself equally in either form.</p>
+
+<p>But each form has its peculiar advantages. You cannot, in a
+retrospective play like <i>Rosmersholm</i>, attain anything like the
+magnificent onward rush of Othello, which moves--</p>
+
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&quot;Like to the Pontick sea<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;Whose icy current and compulsive course<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;Ne'er feels retiring ebb, but keeps due on<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;To the Propontick and the Hellespont.&quot;<br>
+
+<p>The movement of <i>Rosmersholm</i> is rather like that of a winding river,
+which flows with a full and steady current, but seems sometimes to be
+almost retracing its course. If, then, you aim at rapidity of movement,
+you will choose a theme which leaves little or nothing to retrospect;
+and conversely, if you have a theme the whole of which falls easily and
+conveniently within the frame of the picture, you will probably take
+advantage of the fact to give your play animated and rapid movement.</p>
+
+<p>There is an undeniable attraction in a play which constitutes, so to
+speak, one brisk and continuous adventure, begun, developed, and ended
+before our eyes. For light comedy in particular is this a desirable
+form, and for romantic plays in which no very searching character-study
+is attempted. <i>The Taming of the Shrew</i> no doubt passed for a light
+comedy in Shakespeare's day, though we describe it by a briefer name.
+Its rapid, bustling action is possible because we are always ready to
+take the character of a shrew for granted. It would have been a very
+different play had the poet required to account for Katharine's
+peculiarities of temper by a retrospective study of her heredity and
+upbringing. Many eighteenth-century comedies are single-adventure plays,
+or dual-adventure plays, in the sense that the main action sometimes
+stands aside to let an underplot take the stage. Both <i>She Stoops to
+Conquer</i> and <i>The Rivals</i> are good examples of the rapid working-out of
+an intrigue, engendered, developed, and resolved all within the frame of
+the picture. Single-adventure plays of a more modern type are the elder
+Dumas's <i>Mademoiselle de Belle-Isle</i>, the younger Dumas's <i>Francillon</i>,
+Sardou's <i>Divor&ccedil;ons</i>, Sir Arthur Pinero's <i>Gay Lord Quex</i>, Mr. Shaw's
+<i>Devil's Disciple</i>, Oscar Wilde's <i>Importance of Being Earnest</i>, Mr.
+Galsworthy's <i>Silver Box</i>. Widely as these plays differ in type and
+tone, they are alike in this, that they do not attempt to present very
+complex character-studies, or to probe the deeps of human experience.
+The last play cited, <i>The Silver Box</i>, may perhaps be thought an
+exception to this rule; but, though the experience of the hapless
+charwoman is pitiful enough, hers is a simple soul, so inured to
+suffering that a little more or less is no such great matter. The play
+is an admirable genre-picture rather than a searching tragedy.</p>
+
+<p>The point to be observed is that, under modern conditions, it is
+difficult to produce a play of very complex psychological, moral, or
+emotional substance, in which the whole crisis comes within the frame of
+the picture. The method of attacking the crisis in the middle or towards
+the end is really a device for relaxing, in some measure, the narrow
+bounds of theatrical representation, and enabling the playwright to deal
+with a larger segment of human experience. It may be asked why modern
+conditions should in this respect differ from Elizabethan conditions,
+and why, if Shakespeare could produce such profound and complex
+tragedies as <i>Othello</i> and <i>King Lear</i> without a word of exposition or
+retrospect, the modern dramatist should not go and do likewise? The
+answer to this question is not simply that the modern dramatist is
+seldom a Shakespeare. That is true, but we must look deeper than that.
+There are, in fact, several points to be taken into consideration. For
+one thing--this is a minor point--Shakespeare had really far more
+elbow-room than the playwright of to-day. <i>Othello</i> and <i>King Lear</i>, to
+say nothing of <i>Hamlet</i>, are exceedingly long plays. Something like a
+third of them is omitted in modern representation; and when we speak of
+their richness and complexity of characterization, we do not think
+simply of the plays as we see them compressed into acting limits, but of
+the plays as we know them in the study. It is possible, no doubt, for
+modern playwrights to let themselves go in the matter of length, and
+then print their plays with brackets or other marks to show the
+&quot;passages omitted in representation.&quot; This is, however, essentially an
+inartistic practice, and one cannot regret that it has gone out of
+fashion. Another point to be considered is this: are Othello and Lear
+really very complex character-studies? They are extremely vivid: they
+are projected with enormous energy, in actions whose violence affords
+scope for the most vehement self-expression; but are they not, in
+reality, colossally simple rather than complex? It is true that in Lear
+the phenomena of insanity are reproduced with astonishing minuteness and
+truth; but this does not imply any elaborate analysis or demand any
+great space. Hamlet is complex; and were I &quot;talking for victory,&quot; I
+should point out that <i>Hamlet</i> is, of all the tragedies, precisely the
+one which does not come within the frame of the picture. But the true
+secret of the matter does not lie here: it lies in the fact that Hamlet
+unpacks his heart to us in a series of soliloquies--a device employed
+scarcely at all in the portrayal of Othello and Lear, and denied to the
+modern dramatist.<a name="FNanchor51"></a><a href="#Footnote_51"><sup>[51]</sup></a> Yet again, the social position and environment of
+the great Shakespearean characters is taken for granted. No time is
+spent in &quot;placing&quot; them in a given stratum of society, or in
+establishing their heredity, traditions, education, and so forth. And,
+finally, the very copiousness of expression permitted by the rhetorical
+Elizabethan form came to Shakespeare's aid. The modern dramatist is
+hampered by all sorts of reticences. He has often to work rather in
+indirect suggestion than in direct expression. He has, in short, to
+submit to a hundred hampering conditions from which Shakespeare was
+exempt; wherefore, even if he had Shakespeare's genius, he would find it
+difficult to produce a very profound effect in a crisis worked out from
+first to last before the eyes of the audience.</p>
+
+<p>Nevertheless, as before stated, such a crisis has a charm of its own.
+There is a peculiar interest in watching the rise and development out of
+nothing, as it were, of a dramatic complication. For this class of play
+(despite the Shakespearean precedents) a quiet opening is often
+advisable, rather than a strong <i>einleitende Akkord</i>. &quot;From calm,
+through storm, to calm,&quot; is its characteristic formula; whether the
+concluding calm be one of life and serenity or of despair and death. To
+my personal taste, one of the keenest forms of theatrical enjoyment is
+that of seeing the curtain go up on a picture of perfect tranquillity,
+wondering from what quarter the drama is going to arise, and then
+watching it gather on the horizon like a cloud no bigger than a man's
+hand. Of this type of opening, <i>An Enemy of the People</i> provides us with
+a classic example; and among English plays we may cite Mr. Shaw's
+<i>Candida</i>, Mr. Barker's <i>Waste</i>, and Mr. Besier's <i>Don</i>, in which so
+sudden and unlooked-for a cyclone swoops down upon the calm of an
+English vicarage. An admirable instance of a fantastic type may be found
+in <i>Prunella</i>, by Messrs. Barker and Housman.<a name="FNanchor52"></a><a href="#Footnote_52"><sup>[52]</sup></a></p>
+
+<p>There is much to be said, however, in favour of the opening which does
+not present an aspect of delusive calm, but shows the atmosphere already
+charged with electricity. Compare, for instance, the opening of <i>The
+Case of Rebellious Susan</i>, by Mr. Henry Arthur Jones, with that of a
+French play of very similar theme--Dumas's <i>Francillon</i>. In the latter,
+we see the storm-cloud slowly gathering up on the horizon; in the
+former, it is already on the point of breaking, right overhead. Mr.
+Jones places us at the beginning, where Dumas leaves us at the end, of
+his first act. It is true that at the end of Mr. Jones's act he has not
+advanced any further than Dumas. The French author shows his heroine
+gradually working up to a nervous crisis, the English author introduces
+his heroine already at the height of her paroxysm, and the act consists
+of the unavailing efforts of her friends to smooth her down. The upshot
+is the same; but in Mr. Jones's act we are, as the French say, &quot;in full
+drama&quot; all the time, while in Dumas's we await the coming of the drama,
+and only by exerting all his wit, not to say over-exerting it, does he
+prevent our feeling impatient. I am not claiming superiority for either
+method; I merely point to a good example of two different ways of
+attacking the same problem.</p>
+
+<p>In <i>The Benefit of the Doubt</i>, by Sir Arthur Pinero, we have a crisply
+dramatic opening of the very best type. A few words from a contemporary
+criticism may serve to indicate the effect it produced on a first-night
+audience--</p>
+
+&nbsp;&nbsp;We are in the thick of the action at once, or at least in the thick<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;of the interest, so that the exposition, instead of being, so to<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;speak, a mere platform from which the train is presently to start,<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;becomes an inseparable part of the movement. The sense of dramatic<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;irony is strongly and yet delicately suggested. We foresee a<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&quot;peripety,&quot; apparent prosperity suddenly crumbling into disaster,<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;within the act itself; and, when it comes, it awakens our sympathy<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;and redoubles our interest.<br>
+
+<p>Almost the same words might be applied to the opening of <i>The Climbers</i>,
+by the late Clyde Fitch, one of the many individual scenes which make
+one deeply regret that Mr. Fitch did not live to do full justice to his
+remarkable talent.</p>
+
+<p>One of the ablest of recent openings is that of Mr. Galsworthy's <i>Silver
+Box</i>. The curtain rises upon a solid, dull, upper-middle-class
+dining-room, empty and silent, the electric lights burning, the tray
+with whiskey, siphon and cigarette-box marking the midnight hour. Then
+we have the stumbling, fumbling entrance of Jack Barthwick, beatifically
+drunk, his maudlin babble, and his ill-omened hospitality to the haggard
+loafer who follows at his heels. Another example of a high-pitched
+opening scene may be found in Mr. Perceval Landon's <i>The House
+Opposite</i>. Here we have a midnight parting between a married woman and
+her lover, in the middle of which the man, glancing at the lighted
+window of the house opposite, sees a figure moving in such a way as to
+suggest that a crime is being perpetrated. As a matter of fact, an old
+man is murdered, and his housekeeper is accused of the crime. The hero,
+if so he can be called, knows that it was a man, not a woman, who was in
+the victim's room that night; and the problem is: how can he give his
+evidence without betraying a woman's secret by admitting his presence in
+her house at midnight? I neither praise nor blame this class of story; I
+merely cite the play as one in which we plunge straight into the crisis,
+without any introductory period of tranquillity.</p>
+
+<p>The interest of Mr. Landon's play lay almost wholly in the story. There
+was just enough character in it to keep the story going, so to speak.
+The author might, on the other hand, have concentrated our attention on
+character, and made his play a soul-tragedy; but in that case it would
+doubtless have been necessary to take us some way backward in the
+heroine's antecedents and the history of her marriage. In other words,
+if the play had gone deeper into human nature, the preliminaries of the
+crisis would have had to be traced in some detail, possibly in a first
+act, introductory to the actual opening, but more probably, and better,
+in an exposition following the crisply touched <i>einleitende Akkord</i>.
+This brings us to the question how an exposition may best be managed.</p>
+
+<p>It may not unreasonably be contended, I think, that, when an exposition
+cannot be thoroughly dramatized--that is, wrung out, in the stress of
+the action, from the characters primarily concerned--it may best be
+dismissed, rapidly and even conventionally, by any not too improbable
+device. That is the principle on which Sir Arthur Pinero has always
+proceeded, and for which he has been unduly censured, by critics who
+make no allowances for the narrow limits imposed by custom and the
+constitution of the modern audience upon the playwrights of to-day. In
+<i>His House in Order</i> (one of his greatest plays) Sir Arthur effects part
+of his exposition by the simple device of making Hilary Jesson a
+candidate for Parliament, and bringing on a reporter to interview his
+private secretary. The incident is perfectly natural and probable; all
+one can say of it is that it is perhaps an over-simplification of the
+dramatist's task.<a name="FNanchor53"></a><a href="#Footnote_53"><sup>[53]</sup></a> <i>The Second Mrs. Tanqueray</i> requires an unusual
+amount of preliminary retrospect. We have to learn the history of Aubrey
+Tanqueray's first marriage, with the mother of Ellean, as well as the
+history of Paula Ray's past life. The mechanism employed to this end has
+been much criticized, but seems to me admirable. Aubrey gives a farewell
+dinner-party to his intimate friends, Misquith and Jayne. Cayley
+Drummle, too, is expected, but has not arrived when the play opens.
+Without naming the lady, Aubrey announces to his guests his approaching
+marriage. He proposes to go out with them, and has one or two notes to
+write before doing so. Moreover, he is not sorry to give them an
+opportunity to talk over the announcement he has made; so he retires to
+a side-table in the same room, to do his writing. Misquith and Jayne
+exchange a few speeches in an undertone, and then Cayley Drummle comes
+in, bringing the story of George Orreyd's marriage to the unmentionable
+Miss Hervey. This story is so unpleasant to Tanqueray that, to get out
+of the conversation, he returns to his writing; but still he cannot help
+listening to Cayley's comments on George Orreyd's &quot;disappearance&quot;; and
+at last the situation becomes so intolerable to him that he purposely
+leaves the room, bidding the other two &quot;Tell Cayley the news.&quot; The
+technical manipulation of all this seems to me above
+reproach--dramatically effective and yet life-like in every detail. If
+one were bound to raise an objection, it would be to the coincidence
+which brings to Cayley's knowledge, on one and the same evening, two
+such exactly similar misalliances in his own circle of acquaintance. But
+these are just the coincidences that do constantly happen. Every one
+knows that life is full of them.</p>
+
+<p>The exposition might, no doubt, have been more economically effected.
+Cayley Drummle might have figured as sole confidant and chorus; or even
+he might have been dispensed with, and all that was necessary might have
+appeared in colloquies between Aubrey and Paula on the one hand, Aubrey
+and Ellean on the other. But Cayley as sole confidant--the &quot;Charles, his
+friend,&quot; of eighteenth-century comedy--would have been more plainly
+conventional than Cayley as one of a trio of Aubrey's old cronies,
+representing the society he is sacrificing in entering upon this
+experimental marriage; and to have conveyed the necessary information
+without any confidant or chorus at all would (one fancies) have strained
+probability, or, still worse, impaired consistency of character. Aubrey
+could not naturally discuss his late wife either with her successor or
+with her daughter; while, as for Paula's past, all he wanted was to
+avert his eyes from it. I do not say that these difficulties might not
+have been overcome; for, in the vocabulary of the truly ingenious
+dramatist there is no such word as impossible. But I do suggest that the
+result would scarcely have been worth the trouble, and that it is
+hyper-criticism which objects to an exposition so natural and probable
+as that of <i>The Second Mrs. Tanqueray</i>, simply on the ground that
+certain characters are introduced for the purpose of conveying certain
+information. It would be foolish to expect of every work of art an
+absolutely austere economy of means.</p>
+
+<p>Sometimes, however, Sir Arthur Pinero injudiciously emphasizes the
+artifices employed to bring about an exposition. In <i>The Thunderbolt</i>,
+for instance, in order that the Mortimores' family solicitor may without
+reproach ask for information on matters with which a family solicitor
+ought to be fully conversant, it has to be explained that the senior
+partner of the firm, who had the Mortimore business specially in hand,
+has been called away to London, and that a junior partner has taken his
+place. Such a rubbing-in, as it were, of an obvious device ought at all
+hazards to be avoided. If the information cannot be otherwise imparted
+(as in this case it surely could), the solicitor had better be allowed
+to ask one or two improbable questions--it is the lesser evil of
+the two.</p>
+
+<p>When the whole of a given subject cannot be got within the limits of
+presentation, is there any means of determining how much should be left
+for retrospect, and at what point the curtain ought to be raised? The
+principle would seem to be that slow and gradual processes, and
+especially separate lines of causation, should be left outside the frame
+of the picture, and that the curtain should be raised at the point where
+separate lines have converged, and where the crisis begins to move
+towards its solution with more or less rapidity and continuity. The
+ideas of rapidity and continuity may be conveniently summed up in the
+hackneyed and often misapplied term, unity of action. Though the unities
+of time and place are long ago exploded as binding principles--indeed,
+they never had any authority in English drama--yet it is true that a
+broken-backed action, whether in time or space, ought, so far as
+possible, to be avoided. An action with a gap of twenty years in it may
+be all very well in melodrama or romance, but scarcely in higher and
+more serious types of drama.<a name="FNanchor54"></a><a href="#Footnote_54"><sup>[54]</sup></a> Especially is it to be desired that
+interest should be concentrated on one set of characters, and should not
+be frittered away on subsidiary or preliminary personages. Take, for
+instance, the case of <i>The Second Mrs. Tanqueray</i>. It would have been
+theoretically possible for Sir Arthur Pinero to have given us either (or
+both) of two preliminary scenes: he might have shown us the first Mrs.
+Tanqueray at home, and at the same time have introduced us more at large
+to the characters of Aubrey and Ellean; or he might have depicted for us
+one of the previous associations of Paula Ray--might perhaps have let us
+see her &quot;keeping house&quot; with Hugh Ardale. But either of these openings
+would have been disproportionate and superfluous. It would have excited,
+or tried to excite, our interest in something that was not the real
+theme of the play, and in characters which were to drop out before the
+real theme--the Aubrey-Paula marriage--was reached. Therefore the
+author, in all probability, never thought of beginning at either of
+these points. He passed instinctively to the point at which the two
+lines of causation converged, and from which the action could be carried
+continuously forward by one set of characters. He knew that we could
+learn in retrospect all that it was necessary for us to know of the
+first Mrs. Tanqueray, and that to introduce her in the flesh would be
+merely to lead the interest of the audience into a blind alley, and to
+break the back of his action. Again, in <i>His House in Order</i> it may seem
+that the intrigue between Maurewarde and the immaculate Annabel, with
+its tragic conclusion, would have made a stirring introductory act. But
+to have presented such an act would have been to destroy the unity of
+the play, which centres in the character of Nina. Annabel is &quot;another
+story&quot;; and to have told, or rather shown us, more of it than was
+absolutely necessary, would have been to distract our attention from the
+real theme of the play, while at the same time fatally curtailing the
+all-too-brief time available for the working-out of that theme. There
+are cases, no doubt, when verbal exposition may advantageously be
+avoided by means of a dramatized &quot;Prologue&quot;--a single act, constituting
+a little drama in itself, and generally separated by a considerable
+space of time from the action proper. But this method is scarcely to be
+commended, except, as aforesaid, for purposes of melodrama and romance.
+A &quot;Prologue&quot; is for such plays as <i>The Prisoner of Zenda</i> and <i>The Only
+Way</i>, not for such plays as <i>His House in Order</i>.</p>
+
+<p>The question whether a legato or a staccato opening be the more
+desirable must be decided in accordance with the nature and
+opportunities of each theme. The only rule that can be stated is that,
+when the attention of the audience is required for an exposition of any
+length, some attempt ought to be made to awaken in advance their general
+interest in the theme and characters. It is dangerous to plunge straight
+into narrative, or unemotional discussion, without having first made the
+audience actively desire the information to be conveyed to them.
+Especially is it essential that the audience should know clearly who are
+the subjects of the discussion or narrative--that they should not be
+mere names to them. It is a grave flaw in the construction of Mr.
+Granville Barker's otherwise admirable play <i>Waste</i>, that it should open
+with a long discussion, by people whom we scarcely know, of other people
+whom we do not know at all, whose names we may or may not have noted on
+the playbill.</p>
+
+<p>Trebell, Lord Charles Cantelupe, and Blackborough ought certainly to
+have been presented to us in the flesh, however briefly and summarily,
+before we were asked to interest ourselves in their characters and the
+political situation arising from them.</p>
+
+<p>There is, however, one limitation to this principle. A great effect is
+sometimes attained by retarding the entrance of a single leading figure
+for a whole act, or even two, while he is so constantly talked about as
+to beget in the audience a vivid desire to make his personal
+acquaintance. Thus Moli&egrave;re's Tartufe does not come on the stage until
+the third act of the comedy which bears his name. Ibsen's John Gabriel
+Borkman is unseen until the second act, though (through his wife's ears)
+we have already heard him pacing up and down his room like a wolf in his
+cage. Dubedat, in <i>The Doctor's Dilemma</i>, is not revealed to us in the
+flesh until the second act. But for this device to be successful, it is
+essential that only one leading character<a name="FNanchor55"></a><a href="#Footnote_55"><sup>[55]</sup></a> should remain unseen, on
+whom the attention of the audience may, by that very fact, be riveted.
+In <i>Waste</i>, for instance, all would have been well had it suited Mr.
+Barker's purpose to leave Trebell invisible till the second act, while
+all the characters in the first act, clearly presented to us, canvassed
+him from their various points of view. Keen expectancy, in short, is the
+most desirable frame of mind in which an audience can be placed, so long
+as the expectancy be not ultimately disappointed. But there is no less
+desirable mental attitude than that of straining after gleams of
+guidance in an expository twilight.</p>
+
+<p>The advantage of a staccato opening--or, to vary the metaphor, a brisk,
+highly aerated introductory passage--is clearly exemplified in <i>A Doll's
+House</i>. It would have been quite possible for Ibsen to have sent up his
+curtain upon Nora and Mrs. Linden seated comfortably before the stove,
+and exchanging confidences as to their respective careers. Nothing
+indispensable would have been omitted; but how languid would have been
+the interest of the audience! As it is, a brief, bright scene has
+already introduced us, not only to Nora, but to Helmer, and aroused an
+eager desire for further insight into the affairs of this--to all
+appearance--radiantly happy household. Therefore, we settle down without
+impatience to listen to the fireside gossip of the two old
+school-fellows.</p>
+
+<p>The problem of how to open a play is complicated in the English theatre
+by considerations wholly foreign to art. Until quite recently, it used
+to be held impossible for a playwright to raise his curtain upon his
+leading character or characters, because the actor-manager would thus be
+baulked of his carefully arranged &quot;entrance&quot; and &quot;reception,&quot; and,
+furthermore, because twenty-five per cent of the audience would probably
+arrive about a quarter of an hour late, and would thus miss the opening
+scene or scenes. It used at one time to be the fashion to add to the
+advertisement of a play an entreaty that the audience should be
+punctually in their seats, &quot;as the interest began with the rise of the
+curtain.&quot; One has seen this assertion made with regard to plays in
+which, as a matter of fact, the interest had not begun at the fall of
+the curtain. Nowadays, managers, and even leading ladies, are a good
+deal less insistent on their &quot;reception&quot; than they used to be. They
+realize that it may be a distinct advantage to hold the stage from the
+very outset. There are few more effective openings than that of <i>The
+Second Mrs. Tanqueray</i>, where we find Aubrey Tanqueray seated squarely
+at his bachelor dinner-table with Misquith on his right and Jayne on his
+left. It may even be taken as a principle that, where it is desired to
+give to one character a special prominence and predominance, it ought,
+if possible, to be the first figure on which the eye of the audience
+falls. In a Sherlock Holmes play, for example, the curtain ought
+assuredly to rise on the great Sherlock enthroned in Baker Street, with
+Dr. Watson sitting at his feet. The solitary entrance of Richard III
+throws his figure into a relief which could by no other means have been
+attained. So, too, it would have been a mistake on Sophocles' part to
+let any one but the protagonist open the <i>Oedipus Rex</i>.</p>
+
+<p>So long as the fashion of late dinners continues, however, it must
+remain a measure of prudence to let nothing absolutely essential to the
+comprehension of a play be said or done during the first ten minutes
+after the rise of the curtain. Here, again, <i>A Doll's House</i> may be
+cited as a model, though Ibsen, certainly, had no thought of the British
+dinner-hour in planning the play. The opening scene is just what the
+ideal opening scene ought to be--invaluable, yet not indispensable. The
+late-comer who misses it deprives himself of a preliminary glimpse into
+the characters of Nora and Helmer and the relation between them; but he
+misses nothing that is absolutely essential to his comprehension of the
+play as a whole. This, then, would appear to be a sound maxim both of
+art and prudence: let your first ten minutes by all means be crisp,
+arresting, stimulating, but do not let them embody any absolutely vital
+matter, ignorance of which would leave the spectator in the dark as to
+the general design and purport of the play.</p>
+
+
+
+
+<br><br><hr style="width: 35%;"><br><br>
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_VIII"></a>CHAPTER VIII</h2>
+
+<p>THE FIRST ACT</p>
+<br>
+
+<p>Both in the theory and in practice, of late years, war has been declared
+in certain quarters against the division of a play into acts. Students
+of the Elizabethan stage have persuaded themselves, by what I believe to
+be a complete misreading of the evidence, that Shakespeare did not, as
+it were, &quot;think in acts,&quot; but conceived his plays as continuous series
+of events, without any pause or intermission in their flow. It can, I
+think, be proved beyond any shadow of doubt that they are wrong in this;
+that the act division was perfectly familiar to Shakespeare, and was
+used by him to give to the action of his plays a rhythm which ought not,
+in representation, to be obscured or falsified. It is true that in the
+Elizabethan theatre there was no need of long interacts for the change
+of scenes, and that such interacts are an abuse that calls for remedy.
+But we have abundant evidence that the act division was sometimes marked
+on the Elizabethan stage, and have no reason to doubt that it was always
+more or less recognized, and was present to Shakespeare's mind no less
+than to Ibsen's or Pinero's.</p>
+
+<p>Influenced in part, perhaps, by the Elizabethan theorists, but mainly by
+the freakishness of his own genius, Mr. Bernard Shaw has taken to
+writing plays in one continuous gush of dialogue, and has put forward,
+more or less seriously, the claim that he is thereby reviving the
+practice of the Greeks. In a prefatory note to <i>Getting Married</i>,
+he says--</p>
+
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&quot;There is a point of some technical interest to be noted in this<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;play. The customary division into acts and scenes has been disused,<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;and a return made to unity of time and place, as observed in the<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;ancient Greek drama. In the foregoing tragedy, <i>The Doctor's<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;Dilemma</i>, there are five acts; the place is altered five times; and<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;the time is spread over an undetermined period of more than a year.<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;No doubt the strain on the attention of the audience and on the<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;ingenuity of the playwright is much less; but I find in practice<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;that the Greek form is inevitable when the drama reaches a certain<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;point in poetic and intellectual evolution. Its adoption was not, on<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;my part, a deliberate display of virtuosity in form, but simply the<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;spontaneous falling of a play of ideas into the form most suitable<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;to it, which turned out to be the classical form.&quot;<br>
+
+<p>It is hard to say whether Mr. Shaw is here writing seriously or in a
+mood of solemn facetiousness. Perhaps he himself is not quite clear on
+the point. There can be no harm, at any rate, in assuming that he
+genuinely believes the unity of <i>Getting Married</i> to be &quot;a return to the
+unity observed in,&quot; say, the <i>Oedipus Rex</i>, and examining a little into
+so pleasant an illusion.</p>
+
+<p>It is, if I may so phrase it, a double-barrelled illusion. <i>Getting
+Married</i> has not the unity of the Greek drama, and the Greek drama has
+not the unity of <i>Getting Married</i>. Whatever &quot;unity&quot; is predicable of
+either form of art is a wholly different thing from whatever &quot;unity&quot; is
+predicable of the other. Mr. Shaw, in fact, is, consciously or
+unconsciously, playing with words, very much as Lamb did when he said to
+the sportsman, &quot;Is that your own hare or a wig?&quot; There are, roughly
+speaking, three sorts of unity: the unity of a plum-pudding, the unity
+of a string or chain, and, the unity of the Parthenon. Let us call them,
+respectively, unity of concoction, unity of concatenation, and
+structural or organic unity. The second form of unity is that of most
+novels and some plays. They present a series of events, more or less
+closely intertwined or interlinked with one another, but not built up
+into any symmetrical interdependence. This unity of longitudinal
+extension does not here concern us, for it is not that of either Shaw or
+Sophocles. Plum-pudding unity, on the other hand--the unity of a number
+of ingredients stirred up together, put in a cloth, boiled to a certain
+consistency, and then served up in a blue flame of lambent humour--that
+is precisely the unity of <i>Getting Married</i>. A jumble of ideas,
+prejudices, points of view, and whimsicalities on the subject of
+marriage is tied up in a cloth and boiled into a sort of glutinous
+fusion or confusion, so that when the cloth is taken off they do not at
+once lose the coherent rotundity conferred upon them by pressure from
+without. In a quite real sense, the comparison does more than justice to
+the technical qualities of the play; for in a good plum-pudding the due
+proportions of the ingredients are carefully studied, whereas Mr. Shaw
+flings in recklessly whatever comes into his head. At the same time it
+is undeniably true that he shows us a number of people in one room,
+talking continuously and without a single pause, on different aspects of
+a given theme. If this be unity, then he has achieved it. In the
+theatre, as a matter of fact, the plum-pudding was served up in three
+chunks instead of one; but this was a mere concession to human weakness.
+The play had all the globular unity of a pill, though it happened to be
+too big a pill to be swallowed at one gulp.</p>
+
+<p>Turning now to the <i>Oedipus</i>--I choose that play as a typical example of
+Greek tragedy--what sort of unity do we find? It is the unity, not of a
+continuous mass or mash, but of carefully calculated proportion, order,
+interrelation of parts--the unity of a fine piece of architecture, or
+even of a living organism. The inorganic continuity of <i>Getting Married</i>
+it does not possess. If that be what we understand by unity, then Shaw
+has it and Sophocles has not. The <i>Oedipus</i> is as clearly divided into
+acts as is <i>Hamlet</i> or <i>Hedda Gabler</i>. In modern parlance, we should
+probably call it a play in five acts and an epilogue. It so happened
+that the Greek theatre did not possess a curtain, and did possess a
+Chorus; consequently, the Greek dramatist employed the Chorus, as we
+employ the curtain, to emphasize the successive stages of his action, to
+mark the rhythm of its progress, and, incidentally, to provide
+resting-places for the mind of the audience--intervals during which the
+strain upon their attention was relaxed, or at any rate varied. It is
+not even true that the Greeks habitually aimed at such continuity of
+time as we find in <i>Getting Married</i>. They treated time ideally, the
+imaginary duration of the story being, as a rule, widely different from
+the actual time of representation. In this respect the <i>Oedipus</i> is
+something of an exception, since the events might, at a pinch, be
+conceived as passing within the &quot;two hours' traffick of the stage&quot;; but
+in many cases a whole day, or even more, must be understood to be
+compressed within these two hours. It is true that the continuous
+presence of the Chorus made it impossible for the Greeks to overleap
+months and years, as we do on the modern stage; but they did not aim at
+that strict coincidence of imaginary with actual time which Mr. Shaw
+believes himself to have achieved.<a name="FNanchor56"></a><a href="#Footnote_56"><sup>[56]</sup></a> Even he, however, subjects the
+events which take place behind the scenes to a good deal of &quot;ideal&quot;
+compression.</p>
+
+<p>Of course, when Mr. Shaw protests that, in <i>Getting Married</i>, he did not
+indulge in a &quot;deliberate display of virtuosity of form,&quot; that is only
+his fun. You cannot well have virtuosity of form where there is no form.
+What he did was to rely upon his virtuosity of dialogue to enable him to
+dispense with form. Whether he succeeded or not is a matter of opinion
+which does not at present concern us. The point to be noted is the
+essential difference between the formless continuity of <i>Getting
+Married</i>, and the sedulous ordering and balancing of clearly
+differentiated parts, which went to the structure of a Greek tragedy. A
+dramatist who can so develop his story as to bring it within the
+quasi-Aristotelean &quot;unities&quot; performs a curious but not particularly
+difficult or valuable feat; but this does not, or ought not to, imply
+the abandonment of the act-division, which is no mere convention, but a
+valuable means of marking the rhythm of the story. When, on the other
+hand, you have no story to tell, the act-division is manifestly
+superfluous; but it needs no &quot;virtuosity&quot; to dispense with it.</p>
+
+<p>It is a grave error, then, to suppose that the act is a mere division of
+convenience, imposed by the limited power of attention of the human
+mind, or by the need of the human body for occasional refreshment. A
+play with a well-marked, well-balanced act-structure is a higher
+artistic organism than a play with no act-structure, just as a
+vertebrate animal is higher than a mollusc. In every crisis of real life
+(unless it be so short as to be a mere incident) there is a rhythm of
+rise, progress, culmination and solution. We are not always, perhaps not
+often, conscious of these stages; but that is only because we do not
+reflect upon our experiences while they are passing, or map them out in
+memory when they are past. We do, however, constantly apply to real-life
+crises expressions borrowed more or less directly from the terminology
+of the drama. We say, somewhat incorrectly, &quot;Things have come to a
+climax,&quot; meaning thereby a culmination; or we say, &quot;The catastrophe is
+at hand,&quot; or, again, &quot;What a fortunate <i>d&eacute;nouement</i>!&quot; Be this as it may,
+it is the business of the dramatist to analyse the crises with which he
+deals, and to present them to us in their rhythm of growth, culmination,
+solution. To this end the act-division is--not, perhaps, essential,
+since the rhythm may be marked even in a one-act play--but certainly of
+enormous and invaluable convenience. &quot;Si l'acte n'existait pas, il
+faudrait l'inventer&quot;; but as a matter of fact it has existed wherever,
+in the Western world, the drama has developed beyond its rudest
+beginnings.</p>
+
+<p>It was doubtless the necessity for marking this rhythm that Aristotle
+had in mind when he said that a dramatic action must have a beginning, a
+middle and an end. Taken in its simplicity, this principle would
+indicate the three-act division as the ideal scheme for a play. As a
+matter of fact, many of the best modern plays in all languages fall into
+three acts; one has only to note <i>Monsieur Alphonse, Francillon, La
+Parisienne, Amoureuse, A Doll's House, Ghosts, The Master Builder,
+Little Eyolf, Johannisfeuer, Caste, Candida, The Benefit of the Doubt,
+The Importance of Being Earnest, The Silver Box</i>; and, furthermore, many
+old plays which are nominally in five acts really fall into a triple
+rhythm, and might better have been divided into three. Alexandrian
+precept, handed on by Horace, gave to the five act division a purely
+arbitrary sanction, which induced playwrights to mask the natural rhythm
+of their themes beneath this artificial one.<a name="FNanchor57"></a><a href="#Footnote_57"><sup>[57]</sup></a> But in truth the
+three-act division ought no more to be elevated into an absolute rule
+than the five-act division. We have seen that a play consists, or ought
+to consist, of a great crisis, worked out through a series of minor
+crises. An act, then, ought to consist either of a minor crisis, carried
+to its temporary solution, or of a well-marked group of such crises; and
+there can be no rule as to the number of such crises which ought to
+present themselves in the development of a given theme. On the modern
+stage, five acts may be regarded as the maximum, simply by reason of the
+time-limit imposed by social custom on a performance. But one frequently
+sees a melodrama divided into &quot;five acts and eight tableaux,&quot; or even
+more; which practically means that the play is in eight, or nine, or ten
+acts, but that there will be only the four conventional interacts in the
+course of the evening. The playwright should not let himself be
+constrained by custom to force his theme into the arbitrary mould of a
+stated number of acts. Three acts is a good number, four acts is a good
+number,<a name="FNanchor58"></a><a href="#Footnote_58"><sup>[58]</sup></a> there is no positive objection to five acts. Should he find
+himself hankering after more acts, he will do well to consider whether
+he be not, at one point or another, failing in the art of condensation
+and trespassing on the domain of the novelist.</p>
+
+<p>There is undoubted convenience in the rule of the modern stage: &quot;One
+act, one scene.&quot; A change of scene in the middle of an act is not only
+materially difficult, but tends to impair the particular order of
+illusion at which the modern drama aims.<a name="FNanchor59"></a><a href="#Footnote_59"><sup>[59]</sup></a> Roughly, indeed, an act may
+be defined as any part of a given crisis which works itself out at one
+time and in one place; but more fundamentally it is a segment of the
+action during which the author desires to hold the attention of his
+audience unbroken and unrelaxed. It is no mere convention, however,
+which decrees that the flight of time is best indicated by an interact.
+When the curtain is down, the action on the stage remains, as it were,
+in suspense. The audience lets its attention revert to the affairs of
+real life; and it is quite willing, when the mimic world is once more
+revealed, to suppose that any reasonable space of time has elapsed while
+its thoughts were occupied with other matters. It is much more difficult
+for it to accept a wholly imaginary lapse of time while its attention is
+centred on the mimic world. Some playwrights have of late years adopted
+the device of dropping their curtain once, or even twice, in the middle
+of an act, to indicate an interval of a few minutes, or even of an
+hour--for instance, of the time between &quot;going in to dinner&quot; and the
+return of the ladies to the drawing-room. Sir Arthur Pinero employs this
+device with good effect in <i>Iris</i>; so does Mr. Granville Barker in
+<i>Waste</i>, and Mr. Galsworthy in <i>The Silver Box</i>. It is certainly far
+preferable to that &quot;ideal&quot; treatment of time which was common in the
+French drama of the nineteenth century, and survives to this day in
+plays adapted or imitated from the French.</p>
+
+<p>I remember seeing in London, not very long ago, a one-act play on the
+subject of Rouget de l'Isle. In the space of about half-an-hour, he
+handed the manuscript of the &quot;Marseillaise&quot; to an opera-singer whom he
+adored, she took it away and sang it at the Opera, it caught the popular
+ear from that one performance, and the dying Rouget heard it sung by the
+passing multitude in the streets within about fifteen minutes of the
+moment when it first left his hands. (The whole piece, I repeat,
+occupied about half-an-hour; but as a good deal of that time was devoted
+to preliminaries, not more than fifteen minutes can have elapsed between
+the time when the cantatrice left Rouget's garret and the time when all
+Paris was singing the &quot;Marseillaise.&quot;) This is perhaps an extreme
+instance of the ideal treatment of time; but one could find numberless
+cases in the works of Scribe, Labiche, and others, in which the
+transactions of many hours are represented as occurring within the
+limits of a single act. Our modern practice eschews such licenses. It
+will often compress into an act of half-an-hour more events than would
+probably happen in real life in a similar space of time, but not such a
+train of occurrences as to transcend the limits of possibility. It must
+be remembered, however, that the standard of verisimilitude naturally
+and properly varies with the seriousness of the theme under treatment.
+Improbabilities are admissible in light comedy, and still more in farce,
+which would wreck the fortunes of a drama purporting to present a sober
+and faithful picture of real life.</p>
+
+<p>Acts, then, mark the time-stages in the development of a given crisis;
+and each act ought to embody a minor crisis of its own, with a
+culmination and a temporary solution. It would be no gain, but a loss,
+if a whole two hours' or three hours' action could be carried through in
+one continuous movement, with no relaxation of the strain upon the
+attention of the audience, and without a single point at which the
+spectator might review what was past and anticipate what was to come.
+The act-division positively enhances the amount of pleasurable emotion
+through which the audience passes. Each act ought to stimulate and
+temporarily satisfy an interest of its own, while definitely advancing
+the main action. The psychological principle is evident enough; namely,
+that there is more sensation to be got out of three or four
+comparatively brief experiences, suited to our powers of perception,
+than out of one protracted experience, forced on us without relief,
+without contrast, in such a way as to fatigue and deaden our faculties.
+Who would not rather drink three, four, or five glasses of wine than put
+the bottle to his lips and let its contents pour down his throat in one
+long draught? Who would not rather see a stained-glass window broken
+into three, four, or five cunningly-proportioned &quot;lights,&quot; than a great
+flat sheet of coloured glass, be its design never so effective?</p>
+
+<p>It used to be the fashion in mid Victorian melodramas to give each act a
+more or less alluring title of its own. I am far from recommending the
+revival of this practice; but it might be no bad plan for a beginner, in
+sketching out a play, to have in his mind, or in his private notes, a
+descriptive head-line for each act, thereby assuring himself that each
+had a character of its own, and at the same time contributed its due
+share to the advancement of the whole design. Let us apply this
+principle to a Shakespearean play--for example, to <i>Macbeth</i>. The act
+headings might run somewhat as follows--<br>
+
+<table><tr><td>&nbsp;&nbsp;ACT I.</td><td>--</td><td>TEMPTATION.</td></tr>
+
+<tr><td>&nbsp;&nbsp;ACT II.</td><td>--</td><td>MURDER AND USURPATION.</td></tr>
+
+<tr><td>&nbsp;&nbsp;ACT III.</td><td>--</td><td>THE FRENZY OF CRIME AND THE HAUNTING OF REMORSE.</td></tr>
+
+<tr><td>&nbsp;&nbsp;ACT IV.</td><td>--</td><td>GATHERING RETRIBUTION.</td></tr>
+
+<tr><td>&nbsp;&nbsp;ACT V.</td><td>--</td><td>RETRIBUTION CONSUMMATED.</td></tr></table>
+
+<p>Can it be doubted that Shakespeare had in his mind the rhythm marked by
+this act-division? I do not mean, of course, that these phrases, or
+anything like them, were present to his consciousness, but merely that
+he &quot;thought in acts,&quot; and mentally assigned to each act its definite
+share in the development of the crisis.</p>
+
+<p>Turning now to Ibsen, let us draw up an act-scheme for the simplest and
+most straightforward of his plays, <i>An Enemy of the People</i>. It might
+run as follows:</p>
+
+&nbsp;&nbsp;ACT I.--THE INCURABLE OPTIMIST.--Dr. Stockmann announces his<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;discovery of the insanitary condition of the Baths.<br>
+<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;ACT II.--THE COMPACT MAJORITY.--Dr. Stockmann finds that he will<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;have to fight vested interests before the evils he has discovered<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;can be remedied, but is assured that the Compact Majority is at<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;his back.<br>
+<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;ACT III.--THE TURN OF FORTUNE.--The Doctor falls from the pinnacle<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;of his optimistic confidence, and learns that he will have the<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;Compact Majority, not <i>at</i>, but <i>on</i> his back.<br>
+<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;ACT IV.--THE COMPACT MAJORITY ON THE WARPATH.--The crowd, finding<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;that its immediate interests are identical with those of the<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;privileged few, joins with the bureaucracy in shouting down the<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;truth, and organizing a conspiracy of silence.<br>
+<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;ACT V.--OPTIMISM DISILLUSIONED BUT INDOMITABLE.--Dr. Stockmann,<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;gagged and thrown back into poverty, is tempted to take flight, but<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;determines to remain in his native place and fight for its moral, if<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;not for its physical, sanitation.<br>
+
+<p>Each of these acts is a little drama in itself, while each leads forward
+to the next, and marks a distinct phase in the development of
+the crisis.</p>
+
+<p>When the younger Dumas asked his father, that master of dramatic
+movement, to initiate him into the secret of dramatic craftsmanship, the
+great Alexandre replied in this concise formula: &quot;Let your first act be
+clear, your last act brief, and the whole interesting.&quot; Of the wisdom of
+the first clause there can be no manner of doubt. Whether incidentally
+or by way of formal exposition, the first act ought to show us clearly
+who the characters are, what are their relations and relationships, and
+what is the nature of the gathering crisis. It is very important that
+the attention of the audience should not be overstrained in following
+out needlessly complex genealogies and kinships. How often, at the end
+of a first act, does one turn to one's neighbour and say, &quot;Are Edith and
+Adela sisters or only half-sisters?&quot; or, &quot;Did you gather what was the
+villain's claim to the title?&quot; If a story cannot be made clear without
+an elaborate study of one or more family trees, beware of it. In all
+probability, it is of very little use for dramatic purposes. But before
+giving it up, see whether the relationships, and other relations, cannot
+be simplified. Complexities which at first seemed indispensable will
+often prove to be mere useless encumbrances.</p>
+
+<p>In <i>Pillars of Society</i> Ibsen goes as far as any playwright ought to go
+in postulating fine degrees of kinship--and perhaps a little further.
+Karsten Bernick has married into a family whose gradations put something
+of a strain on the apprehension and memory of an audience. We have to
+bear in mind that Mrs. Bernick has (<i>a</i>) a half-sister, Lona Hessel;
+(<i>b</i>) a full brother, Johan T&ouml;nnesen; (<i>c</i>) a cousin, Hilmar T&ouml;nnesen.
+Then Bernick has an unmarried sister, Martha; another relationship,
+however simple, to be borne in mind. And, finally, when we see Dina Dorf
+living in Bernick's house, and know that Bernick has had an intrigue
+with her mother, we are apt to fall into the error of supposing her to
+be Bernick's daughter. There is only one line which proves that this is
+not so--a remark to the effect that, when Madam Dorf came to the town.
+Dina was already old enough to run about and play angels in the theatre.
+Any one who does not happen to hear or notice this remark, is almost
+certain to misapprehend Dina's parentage. Taking one thing with another,
+then, the Bernick family group is rather more complex than is strictly
+desirable. Ibsen's reasons for making Lona Hessel a half-sister instead
+of a full sister of Mrs. Bernick are evident enough. He wanted her to be
+a considerably older woman, of a very different type of character; and
+it was necessary, in order to explain Karsten's desertion of Lona for
+Betty, that the latter should be an heiress, while the former was
+penniless. These reasons are clear and apparently adequate; yet it may
+be doubted whether the dramatist did not lose more than he gained by
+introducing even this small degree of complexity. It was certainly not
+necessary to explain the difference of age and character between Lona
+and Betty; while as for the money, there would have been nothing
+improbable in supposing that a wealthy uncle had marked his disapproval
+of Lona's strong-mindedness by bequeathing all his property to her
+younger sister. Again, there is no reason why Hilmar should not have
+been a brother of Johan and Betty;<a name="FNanchor60"></a><a href="#Footnote_60"><sup>[60]</sup></a> in which case we should have had
+the simple family group of two brothers and two sisters, instead of the
+comparatively complex relationship of a brother and sister, a
+half-sister and a cousin.</p>
+
+<p>These may seem very trivial considerations: but nothing is really
+trivial when it comes to be placed under the powerful lens of theatrical
+presentation. Any given audience has only a certain measure of attention
+at command, and to claim attention for inessentials is to diminish the
+stock available for essentials. In only one other play does Ibsen
+introduce any complexity of relationship, and in that case it does not
+appear in the exposition, but is revealed at a critical moment towards
+the close. In <i>Little Eyolf</i>, Asta and Allmers are introduced to us at
+first as half-sister and half-brother; and only at the end of the second
+act does it appear that Asta's mother (Allmers' stepmother) was
+unfaithful to her husband, and that, Asta being the fruit of this
+infidelity, there is no blood kinship between her and Allmers. The
+danger of relying upon such complexities is shown by the fact that so
+acute a critic as M. Jules Lema&icirc;tre, in writing of <i>Little Eyolf</i>,
+mistook the situation, and thought that Asta fled from Allmers because
+he was her brother, whereas in fact she fled because he was not. I had
+the honour of calling M. Lema&icirc;tre's attention to this error, which he
+handsomely acknowledged.</p>
+
+<p>Complexities of kinship are, of course, not the only complexities which
+should, so far as possible, be avoided. Every complexity of relation or
+of antecedent circumstance is in itself a weakness, which, if it cannot
+be eliminated, must, so to speak, be lived down. No dramatic critic, I
+think, can have failed to notice that the good plays are those of which
+the story can be clearly indicated in ten lines; while it very often
+takes a column to give even a confused idea of the plot of a bad play.
+Here, then, is a preliminary test which may be commended to the would-be
+playwright, in order to ascertain whether the subject he is
+contemplating is or is not a good one: can he state the gist of it in a
+hundred words or so, like the &quot;argument&quot; of a Boccaccian novella? The
+test, of course, is far from being infallible; for a theme may err on
+the side of over-simplicity or emptiness, no less than on the side of
+over-complexity. But it is, at any rate, negatively useful: if the
+playwright finds that he cannot make his story comprehensible without a
+long explanation of an intricate network of facts, he may be pretty sure
+that he has got hold of a bad theme, or of one that stands sorely in
+need of simplification.<a name="FNanchor61"></a><a href="#Footnote_61"><sup>[61]</sup></a></p>
+
+<p>It is not sufficient, however, that a first act should fulfil Dumas's
+requirement by placing the situation clearly before us: it ought also to
+carry us some way towards the heart of the drama, or, at the very least,
+to point distinctly towards that quarter of the horizon where the clouds
+are gathering up. In a three-act play this is evidently demanded by the
+most elementary principles of proportion. It would be absurd to make
+one-third of the play merely introductory, and to compress the whole
+action into the remaining two-thirds. But even in a four- or five-act
+play, the interest of the audience ought to be strongly enlisted, and
+its anticipation headed in a definite direction, before the curtain
+falls for the first time. When we find a dramatist of repute neglecting
+this principle, we may suspect some reason with which art has no
+concern. Several of Sardou's social dramas begin with two acts of more
+or less smart and entertaining satire or caricature, and only at the end
+of the second or beginning of the third act (out of five) does the drama
+proper set in. What was the reason of this? Simply that under the system
+of royalties prevalent in France, it was greatly to the author's
+interest that his play should fill the whole evening. Sardou needed no
+more than three acts for the development of his drama; to have spread it
+out thinner would have been to weaken and injure it; wherefore he
+preferred to occupy an hour or so with clever dramatic journalism,
+rather than share the evening, and the fees, with another dramatist. So,
+at least, I have heard his practice explained; perhaps his own account
+of the matter may have been that he wanted to paint a broad social
+picture to serve as a background for his action.</p>
+
+<p>The question how far an audience ought to be carried towards the heart
+of a dramatic action in the course of the first act is always and
+inevitably one of proportion. It is clear that too much ought not to be
+told, so as to leave the remaining acts meagre and spun-out; nor should
+any one scene be so intense in its interest as to outshine all
+subsequent scenes, and give to the rest of the play an effect of
+anti-climax. If the strange and fascinating creations of Ibsen's last
+years were to be judged by ordinary dramaturgic canons, we should have
+to admit that in <i>Little Eyolf</i> he was guilty of the latter fault, since
+in point of sheer &quot;strength,&quot; in the common acceptation of the word, the
+situation at the end of the first act could scarcely be outdone, in that
+play or any other. The beginner, however, is far more likely to put too
+little than too much into his first act: he is more likely to leave our
+interest insufficiently stimulated than to carry us too far in the
+development of his theme. My own feeling is that, as a general rule,
+what Freytag calls the <i>erregende Moment</i> ought by all means to fall
+within the first act. What is the <i>erregende Moment</i>? One is inclined to
+render it &quot;the firing of the fuse.&quot; In legal parlance, it might be
+interpreted as the joining of issue. It means the point at which the
+drama, hitherto latent, plainly declares itself. It means the
+germination of the crisis, the appearance on the horizon of the cloud no
+bigger than a man's hand. I suggest, then, that this <i>erregende Moment</i>
+ought always to come within the first act--if it is to come at all There
+are plays, as we have seen, which depict life on so even a plane that it
+is impossible to say at any given point, &quot;Here the drama sets in,&quot; or
+&quot;The interest is heightened there.&quot;</p>
+
+<p><i>Pillars of Society</i> is, in a sense, Ibsen's prentice-work in the form
+of drama which he afterwards perfected; wherefore it affords us numerous
+illustrations of the problems we have to consider. Does he, or does he
+not, give us in the first act sufficient insight into his story? I am
+inclined to answer the question in the negative. The first act puts us
+in possession of the current version of the Bernick-T&ouml;nnesen family
+history, but it gives us no clear indication that this version is an
+elaborate tissue of falsehoods. It is true that Bernick's evident
+uneasiness and embarrassment at the mere idea of the reappearance of
+Lona and Johan may lead us to suspect that all is not as it seems; but
+simple annoyance at the inopportune arrival of the black sheep of the
+family might be sufficient to account for this. To all intents and
+purposes, we are completely in the dark as to the course the drama is
+about to take; and when, at the end of the first act, Lona Hessel
+marches in and flutters the social dovecote, we do not know in what
+light to regard her, or why we are supposed to sympathize with her. The
+fact that she is eccentric, and that she talks of &quot;letting in fresh
+air,&quot; combines with our previous knowledge of the author's idiosyncrasy
+to assure us that she is his heroine; but so far as the evidence
+actually before us goes, we have no means of forming even the vaguest
+provisional judgment as to her true character. This is almost certainly
+a mistake in art. It is useless to urge that sympathy and antipathy are
+primitive emotions, and that we ought to be able to regard a character
+objectively, rating it as true or false, not as attractive or repellent.
+The answer to this is twofold. Firstly, the theatre has never been, and
+never will be, a moral dissecting room, nor has the theatrical audience
+anything in common with a class of students dispassionately following a
+professor's demonstration of cold scientific facts. Secondly, in the
+particular case in point, the dramatist makes a manifest appeal to our
+sympathies. There can be no doubt that we are intended to take Lona's
+part, as against the representatives of propriety and convention
+assembled at the sewing-bee; but we have been vouchsafed no rational
+reason for so doing. In other words, the author has not taken us far
+enough into his action to enable us to grasp the true import and
+significance of the situation. He relies for his effect either on the
+general principle that an eccentric character must be sympathetic, or on
+the knowledge possessed by those who have already seen or read the rest
+of the play. Either form of reliance is clearly inartistic. The former
+appeals to irrational prejudice; the latter ignores what we shall
+presently find to be a fundamental principle of the playwright's
+art--namely, that, with certain doubtful exceptions in the case of
+historical themes, he must never assume previous knowledge either of
+plot or character on the part of his public, but must always have in his
+mind's eye a first-night audience, which knows nothing but what he
+chooses to tell it.</p>
+
+<p>My criticism of the first act of <i>Pillars of Society</i> may be summed up
+in saying that the author has omitted to place in it the <i>erregende
+Moment</i>. The issue is not joined, the true substance of the drama is not
+clear to us, until, in the second act, Bernick makes sure there are no
+listeners, and then holds out both hands to Johan, saying: &quot;Johan, now
+we are alone; now you must give me leave to thank you,&quot; and so forth.
+Why should not this scene have occurred in the first act? Materially,
+there is no reason whatever. It would need only the change of a few
+words to lift the scene bodily out of the second act and transfer it to
+the first. Why did Ibsen not do so? His reason is not hard to divine; he
+wished to concentrate into two great scenes, with scarcely a moment's
+interval between them, the revelation of Bernick's treachery, first to
+Johan, second to Lona. He gained his point: the sledge-hammer effect of
+these two scenes is undeniable. But it remains a question whether he did
+not make a disproportionate sacrifice; whether he did not empty his
+first act in order to overfill his second. I do not say he did: I merely
+propound the question for the student's consideration. One thing we must
+recognize in dramatic art as in all other human affairs; namely, that
+perfection, if not unattainable, is extremely rare. We have often to
+make a deliberate sacrifice at one point in order to gain some greater
+advantage at another; to incur imperfection here that we may achieve
+perfection there. It is no disparagement to the great masters to admit
+that they frequently show us rather what to avoid than what to do.
+Negative instruction, indeed, is in its essence more desirable than
+positive. The latter tends to make us mere imitators, whereas the
+former, in saving us from dangers, leaves our originality unimpaired.</p>
+
+<p>It is curious to note that, in another play, Ibsen did actually transfer
+the <i>erregende Moment</i>, the joining of issue, from the second act to the
+first. In his early draft of <i>Rosmersholm</i>, the great scene in which
+Rosmer confesses to Kroll his change of views did not occur until the
+second act. There can be no doubt that the balance and proportion of the
+play gained enormously by the transference.</p>
+
+<p>After all, however, the essential question is not how much or how little
+is conveyed to us in the first act, but whether our interest is
+thoroughly aroused, and, what is of equal importance, skilfully carried
+forward. Before going more at large into this very important detail of
+the playwright's craft, it may be well to say something of the nature of
+dramatic interest in general.</p>
+
+
+<br><br><hr style="width: 35%;"><br><br>
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_IX"></a>CHAPTER IX</h2>
+
+<p>&quot;CURIOSITY&quot; AND &quot;INTEREST&quot;</p>
+<br>
+
+<p>The paradox of dramatic theory is this: while our aim is, of course, to
+write plays which shall achieve immortality, or shall at any rate become
+highly popular, and consequently familiar in advance to a considerable
+proportion of any given audience, we are all the time studying how to
+awaken and to sustain that interest, or, more precisely, that curiosity,
+which can be felt only by those who see the play for the first time,
+without any previous knowledge of its action. Under modern conditions
+especially, the spectators who come to the theatre with their minds an
+absolute blank as to what is awaiting them, are comparatively few; for
+newspaper criticism and society gossip very soon bruit abroad a general
+idea of the plot of any play which attains a reasonable measure of
+success. Why, then, should we assume, in the ideal spectator to whom we
+address ourselves, a state of mind which, we hope and trust, will not be
+the state of mind of the majority of actual spectators?</p>
+
+<p>To this question there are several answers. The first and most obvious
+is that to one audience, at any rate, every play must be absolutely new,
+and that it is this first-night audience which in great measure
+determines its success or failure. Many plays have survived a
+first-night failure, and still more have gone off in a rapid decline
+after a first-night success. But these caprices of fortune are not to be
+counted on. The only prudent course is for the dramatist to direct all
+his thought and care towards conciliating or dominating an audience to
+which his theme is entirely unknown,<a name="FNanchor62"></a><a href="#Footnote_62"><sup>[62]</sup></a> and so coming triumphant through
+his first-night ordeal. This principle is subject to a certain
+qualification in the case of historic and legendary themes. In treating
+such subjects, the dramatist is not relieved of the necessity of
+developing his story clearly and interestingly, but has, on the
+contrary, an additional charge imposed upon him--that of not flagrantly
+defying or disappointing popular knowledge or prejudice. Charles I must
+not die in a green old age, Oliver Cromwell must not display the manners
+and graces of Sir Charles Grandison, Charles II must not be represented
+as a model of domestic virtue. Historians may indict a hero or whitewash
+a villain at their leisure; but to the dramatist a hero must be (more or
+less) a hero, a villain (more or less) a villain, if accepted tradition
+so decrees it.<a name="FNanchor63"></a><a href="#Footnote_63"><sup>[63]</sup></a> Thus popular knowledge can scarcely be said to lighten
+a dramatist's task, but rather to impose a new limitation upon him. In
+some cases, however, he can rely on a general knowledge of the historic
+background of a given period, which may save him some exposition. An
+English audience, for instance, does not require to be told what was the
+difference between Cavaliers and Roundheads; nor does any audience, I
+imagine, look for a historical disquisition on the Reign of Terror. The
+dramatist has only to bring on some ruffianly characters in Phrygian
+caps, who address each other as &quot;Citizen&quot; and &quot;Citizeness,&quot; and at once
+the imagination of the audience will supply the roll of the tumbrels and
+the silhouette of the guillotine in the background.</p>
+
+<p>To return to the general question: not only must the dramatist reckon
+with one all-important audience which is totally ignorant of the story
+he has to tell; he must also bear in mind that it is very easy to
+exaggerate the proportion of any given audience which will know his plot
+in advance, even when his play has been performed a thousand times.
+There are inexhaustible possibilities of ignorance in the theatrical
+public. A story is told, on pretty good authority, of a late eminent
+statesman who visited the Lyceum one night when Sir Henry Irving was
+appearing as Hamlet. After the third act he went to the actor's
+dressing-room, expressed great regret that duty called him back to
+Westminster, and begged Sir Henry to tell him how the play ended, as it
+had interested him greatly.<a name="FNanchor64"></a><a href="#Footnote_64"><sup>[64]</sup></a> One of our most eminent novelists has
+assured me that he never saw or read <i>Macbeth</i> until he was present at
+(I think) Mr. Forbes Robertson's revival of the play, he being then
+nearer fifty than forty. These, no doubt, are &quot;freak&quot; instances; but in
+any given audience, even at the most hackneyed classical plays, there
+will be a certain percentage of children (who contribute as much as
+their elders to the general temper of an audience), and also a
+percentage of adult ignoramuses. And if this be so in the case of plays
+which have held the stage for generations, are studied in schools, and
+are every day cited as matters of common knowledge, how much more
+certain may we be that even the most popular modern play will have to
+appeal night after night to a considerable number of people who have no
+previous acquaintance with either its story or its characters! The
+playwright may absolutely count on having to make such an appeal; but he
+must remember at the same time that he can by no means count on keeping
+any individual effect, more especially any notable trick or device, a
+secret from the generality of his audience. Mr. J.M. Barrie (to take a
+recent instance) sedulously concealed, throughout the greater part of
+<i>Little Mary</i>, what was meant by that ever-recurring expression, and
+probably relied to some extent on an effect of amused surprise when the
+disclosure was made. On the first night, the effect came off happily
+enough; but on subsequent nights, there would rarely be a score of
+people in the house who did not know the secret. The great majority
+might know nothing else about the play, but that they knew. Similarly,
+in the case of any mechanical <i>truc</i>, as the French call it, or feat of
+theatrical sleight-of-hand, it is futile to trust to its taking unawares
+any audience after the first. Nine-tenths of all subsequent audiences
+are sure to be on the look-out for it, and to know, or think they know,
+&quot;how it's done.&quot;<a name="FNanchor65"></a><a href="#Footnote_65"><sup>[65]</sup></a> These are the things which theatrical gossip,
+printed and oral, most industriously disseminates. The fine details of a
+plot are much less easily conveyed and less likely to be remembered.</p>
+
+<p>To sum up this branch of the argument: however oft-repeated and
+much-discussed a play may be, the playwright must assume that in every
+audience there will be an appreciable number of persons who know
+practically nothing about it, and whose enjoyment will depend, like that
+of the first-night audience, on the skill with which he develops his
+story. On the other hand, he can never rely on taking an audience by
+surprise at any particular point. The class of effect which depends on
+surprise is precisely the class of effect which is certain to be
+discounted.<a name="FNanchor66"></a><a href="#Footnote_66"><sup>[66]</sup></a></p>
+
+<p>We come now to a third reason why a playwright is bound to assume that
+the audience to which he addresses himself has no previous knowledge of
+his fable. It is simply that no other assumption has, or can have, any
+logical basis. If the audience is not to be conceived as ignorant, how
+much is it to be assumed to know? There is clearly no possible answer to
+this question, except a purely arbitrary one, having no relation to the
+facts. In any audience after the first, there will doubtless be a
+hundred degrees of knowledge and of ignorance. Many people will know
+nothing at all about the play; some people will have seen or read it
+yesterday, and will thus know all there is to know; while between these
+extremes there will be every variety of clearness or vagueness of
+knowledge. Some people will have read and remembered a detailed
+newspaper notice; others will have read the same notice and forgotten
+almost all of it. Some will have heard a correct and vivid account of
+the play, others a vague and misleading summary. It would be absolutely
+impossible to enumerate all the degrees of previous knowledge which are
+pretty certain to be represented in an average audience; and to which
+degree of knowledge is the playwright to address himself? If he is to
+have any firm ground under his feet, he must clearly adopt the only
+logical course, and address himself to a spectator assumed to have no
+previous knowledge whatever. To proceed on any other assumption would
+not only be to ignore the all-powerful first-night audience, but to
+plunge into a veritable morass of inconsistencies, dubieties and
+slovenlinesses.</p>
+
+<p>These considerations, however, have not yet taken us to the heart of the
+matter. We have seen that the dramatist has no rational course open to
+him but to assume complete ignorance in his audience; but we have also
+seen that, as a matter of fact, only one audience will be entirely in
+this condition, and that, the more successful the play is, the more
+widely will subsequent audiences tend to depart from it. Does it not
+follow that interest of plot, interest of curiosity as to coming events,
+is at best an evanescent factor in a play's attractiveness--of a certain
+importance, no doubt, on the first night, but less and less efficient
+the longer the play holds the stage?</p>
+
+<p>In a sense, this is undoubtedly true. We see every day that a mere
+story-play--a play which appeals to us solely by reason of the adroit
+stimulation and satisfaction of curiosity--very rapidly exhausts its
+success. No one cares to see it a second time; and spectators who happen
+to have read the plot in advance, find its attraction discounted even on
+a first hearing. But if we jump to the conclusion that the skilful
+marshalling and development of the story is an unimportant detail, which
+matters little when once the first-night ordeal is past, we shall go
+very far astray. Experience shows us that dramatic <i>interest</i> is
+entirely distinct from mere <i>curiosity</i>, and survives when curiosity is
+dead. Though a skilfully-told story is not of itself enough to secure
+long life for a play, it materially and permanently enhances the
+attractions of a play which has other and higher claims to longevity.
+Character, poetry, philosophy, atmosphere, are all very good in their
+way; but they all show to greater advantage by aid of a well-ordered
+fable. In a picture, I take it, drawing is not everything; but drawing
+will always count for much.</p>
+
+<p>This separation of interest from curiosity is partly explicable by one
+very simple reflection. However well we may know a play beforehand, we
+seldom know it by heart or nearly by heart; so that, though we may
+anticipate a development in general outline, we do not clearly foresee
+the ordering of its details, which, therefore, may give us almost the
+same sort of pleasure that it gave us when the story was new to us. Most
+playgoers will, I think, bear me out in saying that we constantly find a
+great scene or act to be in reality richer in invention and more
+ingenious in arrangement than we remembered it to be.</p>
+
+<p>We come, now, to another point that must not be overlooked. It needs no
+subtle introspection to assure us that we, the audience, do our own
+little bit of acting, and instinctively place ourselves at the point of
+view of a spectator before whose eyes the drama is unrolling itself for
+the first time. If the play has any richness of texture, we have many
+sensations that he cannot have. We are conscious of ironies and
+subtleties which necessarily escape him, or which he can but dimly
+divine. But in regard to the actual development of the story, we imagine
+ourselves back into his condition of ignorance, with this difference,
+that we can more fully appreciate the dramatist's skill, and more
+clearly resent his clumsiness or slovenliness. Our sensations, in short,
+are not simply conditioned by our knowledge or ignorance of what is to
+come. The mood of dramatic receptivity is a complex one. We
+instinctively and without any effort remember that the dramatist is
+bound by the rules of the game, or, in other words, by the inherent
+conditions of his craft, to unfold his tale before an audience to which
+it is unknown; and it is with implicit reference to these conditions
+that we enjoy and appreciate his skill. Even the most unsophisticated
+audience realizes in some measure that the playwright is an artist
+presenting a picture of life under such-and-such assumptions and
+limitations, and appraises his skill by its own vague and instinctive
+standards. As our culture increases, we more and more consistently adopt
+this attitude, and take pleasure in a playwright's marshalling of
+material in proportion to its absolute skill, even if that skill no
+longer produces its direct and pristine effect upon us. In many cases,
+indeed, our pleasure consists of a delicate blending of surprise with
+realized anticipation. We foresaw, and are pleased to recognize, the art
+of the whole achievement, while details which had grown dim to us give
+us each its little thrill of fresh admiration. Regarded in this aspect,
+a great play is like a great piece of music: we can hear it again and
+again with ever-new realization of its subtle beauties, its complex
+harmonies, and with unfailing interest in the merits and demerits of
+each particular rendering.</p>
+
+<p>But we must look deeper than this if we would fully understand the true
+nature of dramatic interest. The last paragraph has brought us to the
+verge of the inmost secret, but we have yet to take the final step. We
+have yet to realize that, in truly great drama, the foreknowledge
+possessed by the audience is not a disadvantage with certain incidental
+mitigations and compensations, but is the source of the highest pleasure
+which the theatre is capable of affording us. In order to illustrate my
+meaning, I propose to analyse a particular scene, not, certainly, among
+the loftiest in dramatic literature, but particularly suited to my
+purpose, inasmuch as it is familiar to every one, and at the same time
+full of the essential qualities of drama. I mean the Screen Scene in
+<i>The School for Scandal</i>.</p>
+
+<p>In her &quot;English Men of Letters&quot; volume on Sheridan, Mrs. Oliphant
+discusses this scene. Speaking in particular of the moment at which the
+screen is overturned, revealing Lady Teazle behind it, she says--</p>
+
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&quot;It would no doubt have been higher art could the dramatist have<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;deceived his audience as well as the personages of the play, and<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;made us also parties in the surprise of the discovery.&quot;<br>
+
+<p>There could scarcely be a completer reversal of the truth than this
+&quot;hopeless comment,&quot; as Professor Brander Matthews has justly called it.
+The whole effect of the long and highly-elaborated scene depends upon
+our knowledge that Lady Teazle is behind the screen. Had the audience
+either not known that there was anybody there, or supposed it to be the
+&quot;little French milliner,&quot; where would have been the breathless interest
+which has held us through a whole series of preceding scenes? When Sir
+Peter reveals to Joseph his generous intentions towards his wife, the
+point lies in the fact that Lady Teazle overhears; and this is doubly
+the case when he alludes to Joseph as a suitor for the hand of Maria.
+So, too, with the following scene between Joseph and Charles; in itself
+it would be flat enough; the fact that Sir Peter is listening lends it a
+certain piquancy; but this is ten times multiplied by the fact that Lady
+Teazle, too, hears all that passes. When Joseph is called from the room
+by the arrival of the pretended Old Stanley, there would be no interest
+in his embarrassment if we believed the person behind the screen to be
+the French milliner. And when Sir Peter yields to the temptation to let
+Charles into the secret of his brother's frailty, and we feel every
+moment more certain that the screen will be overthrown, where would be
+the excitement, the tension, if we did not know who was behind it? The
+real drama, in fact, passes behind the screen. It lies in the terror,
+humiliation, and disillusionment which we know to be coursing each other
+through Lady Teazle's soul. And all this Mrs. Oliphant would have
+sacrificed for a single moment of crude surprise!</p>
+
+<p>Now let us hear Professor Matthews's analysis of the effect of the
+scene. He says:</p>
+
+<p>&quot;The playgoer's interest is really not so much as to what is to happen
+as the way in which this event is going to affect the characters
+involved. He thinks it likely enough that Sir Peter will discover that
+Lady Teazle is paying a visit to Joseph Surface; but what he is really
+anxious to learn is the way the husband will take it. What will Lady
+Teazle have to say when she is discovered where she has no business to
+be? How will Sir Peter receive her excuses? What will the effect be on
+the future conduct of both husband and wife? These are the questions
+which the spectators are eager to have answered.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>This is an admirable exposition of the frame of mind of the Drury Lane
+audience of May 8, 1777. who first saw the screen overturned. But in the
+thousands of audiences who have since witnessed the play, how many
+individuals, on an average, had any doubt as to what Lady Teazle would
+have to say, and how Sir Peter would receive her excuses? It would
+probably be safe to guess that, for a century past, two-thirds of every
+audience have clearly foreknown the outcome of the situation. Professor
+Matthews himself has edited Sheridan's plays, and probably knows <i>The
+School for Scandal</i> almost by heart; yet we may be pretty sure that any
+reasonably good performance of the Screen Scene will to-day give him
+pleasure not so very much inferior to that which he felt the first time
+he saw it. In this pleasure, it is manifest that mere curiosity as to
+the immediate and subsequent conduct of Sir Peter and Lady Teazle can
+have no part. There is absolutely no question which Professor Matthews,
+or any playgoer who shares his point of view, is &quot;eager to have
+answered.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>Assuming, then, that we are all familiar with the Screen Scene, and
+assuming that we, nevertheless, take pleasure in seeing it reasonably
+well acted,<a name="FNanchor67"></a><a href="#Footnote_67"><sup>[67]</sup></a> let us try to discover of what elements that pleasure is
+composed. It is, no doubt, somewhat complex. For one thing, we have
+pleasure in meeting old friends. Sir Peter, Lady Teazle, Charles, even
+Joseph, are agreeable creatures who have all sorts of pleasant
+associations for us. Again, we love to encounter not only familiar
+characters but familiar jokes. Like Goldsmith's Diggory, we can never
+help laughing at the story of &quot;ould Grouse in the gunroom.&quot; The best
+order of dramatic wit does not become stale, but rather grows upon us.
+We relish it at least as much at the tenth repetition as at the first.
+But while these considerations may partly account for the pleasure we
+take in seeing the play as a whole, they do not explain why the Screen
+Scene in particular should interest and excite us. Another source of
+pleasure, as before indicated, may be renewed recognition of the
+ingenuity with which the scene is pieced together. However familiar we
+may be with it, short of actually knowing it by heart, we do not recall
+the details of its dovetailing, and it is a delight to realize afresh
+the neatness of the manipulation by which the tension is heightened from
+speech to speech and from incident to incident. If it be objected that
+this is a pleasure which the critic alone is capable of experiencing, I
+venture to disagree. The most unsophisticated playgoer feels the effect
+of neat workmanship, though he may not be able to put his satisfaction
+into words. It is evident, however, that the mere intellectual
+recognition of fine workmanship is not sufficient to account for the
+emotions with which we witness the Screen Scene. A similar, though, of
+course, not quite identical, effect is produced by scenes of the utmost
+simplicity, in which there is no room for delicacy of dovetailing or
+neatness of manipulation.</p>
+
+<p>Where, then, are we to seek for the fundamental constituent in dramatic
+interest, as distinct from mere curiosity? Perhaps Mrs. Oliphant's
+glaring error may put us on the track of the truth. Mrs. Oliphant
+thought that Sheridan would have shown higher art had he kept the
+audience, as well as Sir Peter and Charles, ignorant of Lady Teazle's
+presence behind the screen. But this, as we saw, is precisely the
+reverse of the truth: the whole interest of the scene arises from our
+knowledge of Lady Teazle's presence. Had Sheridan fallen into Mrs.
+Oliphant's mistake, the little shock of surprise which the first-night
+audience would have felt when the screen was thrown down would have been
+no compensation at all for the comparative tameness and pointlessness of
+the preceding passages. Thus we see that the greater part of our
+pleasure arises precisely from the fact that we know what Sir Peter and
+Charles do not know, or, in other words, that we have a clear vision of
+all the circumstances, relations, and implications of a certain
+conjuncture of affairs, in which two, at least, of the persons concerned
+are ignorantly and blindly moving towards issues of which they do not
+dream. We are, in fact, in the position of superior intelligences
+contemplating, with miraculous clairvoyance, the stumblings and
+tumblings of poor blind mortals straying through the labyrinth of life.
+Our seat in the theatre is like a throne on the Epicurean Olympus,
+whence we can view with perfect intelligence, but without participation
+or responsibility, the intricate reactions of human destiny. And this
+sense of superiority does not pall upon us. When Othello comes on the
+scene, radiant and confident in Desdemona's love, our knowledge of the
+fate awaiting him makes him a hundred times more interesting than could
+any mere curiosity as to what was about to happen. It is our prevision
+of Nora's exit at the end of the last act that lends its dramatic
+poignancy to her entrance at the beginning of the first.</p>
+
+<p>There is nothing absolutely new in this theory.<a name="FNanchor68"></a><a href="#Footnote_68"><sup>[68]</sup></a> &quot;The irony of fate&quot;
+has long been recognized as one of the main elements of dramatic effect.
+It has been especially dwelt upon in relation to Greek tragedy, of which
+the themes were all known in advance even to &quot;first-day&quot; audiences. We
+should take but little interest in seeing the purple carpet spread for
+Agamemnon's triumphal entry into his ancestral halls, if it were not for
+our foreknowledge of the net and the axe prepared for him. But, familiar
+as is this principle, I am not aware that it has hitherto been extended,
+as I suggest that it should be, to cover the whole field of dramatic
+interest. I suggest that the theorists have hitherto dwelt far too much
+on curiosity<a name="FNanchor69"></a><a href="#Footnote_69"><sup>[69]</sup></a>--which may be defined as the interest of ignorance--and
+far too little on the feeling of superiority, of clairvoyance, with
+which we contemplate a foreknown action, whether of a comic or of a
+tragic cast. Of course the action must be, essentially if not in every
+detail, true to nature. We can derive no sense of superiority from our
+foreknowledge of an arbitrary or preposterous action; and that, I take
+it, is the reason why a good many plays have an initial success of
+curiosity, but cease to attract when their plot becomes familiar. Again,
+we take no pleasure in foreknowing the fate of wholly uninteresting
+people; which is as much as to say that character is indispensable to
+enduring interest in drama. With these provisos, I suggest a
+reconstruction of our theories of dramatic interest, in which mere
+first-night curiosity shall be relegated to the subordinate place which
+by right belongs to it.</p>
+
+<p>Nevertheless, we must come back to the point that there is always the
+ordeal of the first night to be faced, and that the plays are
+comparatively few which have lived-down a bad first-night. It is true
+that specifically first-night merit is a trivial matter compared with
+what may be called thousandth-performance merit; but it is equally true
+that there is no inconsistency between the two orders of merit, and that
+a play will never be less esteemed on its thousandth performance for
+having achieved a conspicuous first-night success. The practical lesson
+which seems to emerge from these considerations is that a wise
+theatrical policy would seek to diminish the all-importance of the
+first-night, and to give a play a greater chance of recovery than it has
+under present conditions, from the depressing effect of an inauspicious
+production. This is the more desirable as its initial misadventure may
+very likely be due to external and fortuitous circumstances, wholly
+unconnected with its inherent qualities.</p>
+
+<p>At the same time, we are bound to recognize that, from the very nature
+of the case, our present inquiry must be far more concerned with
+first-night than with thousandth-performance merit. Craftsmanship can,
+within limits, be acquired, genius cannot; and it is craftsmanship that
+pilots us through the perils of the first performance, genius that
+carries us on to the apotheosis of the thousandth. Therefore, our
+primary concern must be with the arousing and sustaining of curiosity,
+though we should never forget that it is only a means to the ultimate
+enlistment of the higher and more abiding forms of interest.</p>
+
+
+<br><br><hr style="width: 35%;"><br><br>
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_X"></a>CHAPTER X</h2>
+
+<p>FORESHADOWING, NOT FORESTALLING</p>
+<br>
+
+<p>We return now to the point at which the foregoing disquisition--it is
+not a digression--became necessary. We had arrived at the general
+principle that the playwright's chief aim in his first act ought to be
+to arouse and carry forward the interest of the audience. This may seem
+a tolerably obvious statement; but it is worth while to examine a little
+more closely into its implications.</p>
+
+<p>As to arousing the interest of the audience, it is clear that very
+little specific advice can be given. One can only say, &quot;Find an
+interesting theme, state its preliminaries clearly and crisply, and let
+issue be joined without too much delay.&quot; There can be no rules for
+finding an interesting theme, any more than for catching the Blue Bird.
+At a later stage we may perhaps attempt a summary enumeration of themes
+which are not interesting, which have exhausted any interest they ever
+possessed, and &quot;repay careful avoidance.&quot; But such an enumeration would
+be out of place here, where we are studying principles of form apart
+from details of matter.</p>
+
+<p>The arousing of interest, however, is one thing, the carrying-forward of
+interest is another; and on the latter point there are one or two things
+that may profitably be said. Each act, as we have seen, should consist
+of, or at all events contain, a subordinate crisis, contributory to the
+main crisis of the play: and the art of act-construction lies in giving
+to each act an individuality and interest of its own, without so
+rounding it off as to obscure even for a moment its subsidiary, and, in
+the case of the first act, its introductory, relation to the whole. This
+is a point which many dramatists ignore or undervalue. Very often, when
+the curtain falls on a first or a second act, one says, &quot;This is a
+fairly good act in itself; but whither does it lead? what is to come of
+it all?&quot; It awakens no definite anticipation, and for two pins one would
+take up one's hat and go home. The author has neglected the art of
+carrying-forward the interest.</p>
+
+<p>It is curious to note that in the most unsophisticated forms of
+melodrama this art is deliberately ignored. In plays of the type of <i>The
+Worst Woman in London</i>, it appears to be an absolute canon of art that
+every act must have a &quot;happy ending&quot;--that the curtain must always fall
+on the hero, or, preferably, the comic man, in an attitude of triumph,
+while the villain and villainess cower before him in baffled impotence.
+We have perfect faith, of course, that the villain will come up smiling
+in the next act, and proceed with his nefarious practices; but, for the
+moment, virtue has it all its own way. This, however, is a very artless
+formula which has somehow developed of recent years; and it is doubtful
+whether even the audiences to which these plays appeal would not in
+reality prefer something a little less inept in the matter of
+construction. As soon as we get above this level, at all events, the
+fostering of anticipation becomes a matter of the first importance. The
+problem is, not to cut short the spectator's interest, or to leave it
+fluttering at a loose end, but to provide it either with a
+clearly-foreseen point in the next act towards which it can reach
+onwards, or with a definite enigma, the solution of which is impatiently
+awaited. In general terms, a bridge should be provided between one act
+and another, along which the spectator's mind cannot but travel with
+eager anticipation. And this is particularly important, or particularly
+apt to be neglected, at the end of the first act. At a later point, if
+the interest does not naturally and inevitably carry itself forward, the
+case is hopeless indeed.</p>
+
+<p>To illustrate what is meant by the carrying-forward of interest, let me
+cite one or two instances in which it is achieved with
+conspicuous success.</p>
+
+<p>In Oscar Wilde's first modern comedy, <i>Lady Windermere's Fan</i>, the
+heroine, Lady Windermere, has learnt that her husband has of late been
+seen to call very frequently at the house of a certain Mrs. Erlynne,
+whom nobody knows. Her suspicions thus aroused, she searches her
+husband's desk, discovers a private and locked bank-book, cuts it open,
+and finds that one large cheque after another has been drawn in favour
+of the lady in question. At this inopportune moment, Lord Windermere
+appears with a request that Mrs. Erlynne shall be invited to their
+reception that evening. Lady Windermere indignantly refuses, her husband
+insists, and, finally, with his own hand, fills in an invitation-card
+and sends it by messenger to Mrs. Erlynne. Here some playwrights might
+have been content to finish the act. It is sufficiently evident that
+Lady Windermere will not submit to the apparent insult, and that
+something exciting may be looked for at the reception in the following
+act. But Oscar Wilde was not content with this vague expectancy. He
+first defined it, and then he underlined the definition, in a perfectly
+natural and yet ingenious and skilful way. The day happens to be Lady
+Windermere's birthday, and at the beginning of the act her husband has
+given her a beautiful ostrich-feather fan. When he sends off the
+invitation, she turns upon him and says, &quot;If that woman crosses my
+threshold, I shall strike her across the face with this fan.&quot; Here,
+again, many a dramatist might be content to bring down his curtain. The
+announcement of Lady Windermere's resolve carries forward the interest
+quite clearly enough for all practical purposes. But even this did not
+satisfy Wilde. He imagined a refinement, simple, probable, and yet
+immensely effective, which put an extraordinarily keen edge upon the
+expectancy of the audience. He made Lady Windermere ring for her butler,
+and say: &quot;Parker, be sure you pronounce the names of the guests very
+distinctly to-night. Sometimes you speak so fast that I miss them. I am
+particularly anxious to hear the names quite clearly, so as to make no
+mistake.&quot; I well remember the effect which this little touch produced on
+the first night. The situation was, in itself, open to grave objections.
+There is no plausible excuse for Lord Windermere's obstinacy in forcing
+Mrs. Erlynne upon his wife, and risking a violent scandal in order to
+postpone an explanation which he must know to be ultimately inevitable.
+Though one had not as yet learnt the precise facts of the case, one felt
+pretty confident that his lordship's conduct would scarcely justify
+itself. But interest is largely independent of critical judgment, and,
+for my own part, I can aver that, when the curtain fell on the first
+act, a five-pound note would not have bribed me to leave the theatre
+without assisting at Lady Windermere's reception in the second act. That
+is the frame of mind which the author should try to beget in his
+audience; and Oscar Wilde, then almost a novice, had, in this one little
+passage between Lady Windermere and the butler, shown himself a master
+of the art of dramatic story-telling. The dramatist has higher functions
+than mere story-telling; but this is fundamental, and the true artist is
+the last to despise it.<a name="FNanchor70"></a><a href="#Footnote_70"><sup>[70]</sup></a></p>
+
+<p>For another example of a first act brought to what one may call a
+judiciously tantalizing conclusion, I turn to Mr. R.C. Carton's comedy
+<i>Wheels within Wheels.</i> Lord Eric Chantrell has just returned from
+abroad after many years' absence. He drives straight to the bachelor
+flat of his old chum, Egerton Vartrey. At the flat he finds only his
+friend's valet, Vartrey himself has been summoned to Scotland that very
+evening, and the valet is on the point of following him. He knows,
+however, that his master would wish his old friend to make himself at
+home in the flat; so he presently goes off, leaving the newcomer
+installed for the night. Lord Eric goes to the bedroom to change his
+clothes; and, the stage being thus left vacant, we hear a latch-key
+turning in the outer door. A lady in evening dress enters, goes up to
+the bureau at the back of the stage, and calmly proceeds to break it
+open and ransack it. While she is thus burglariously employed, Lord Eric
+enters, and cannot refrain from a slight expression of surprise. The
+lady takes the situation with humorous calmness, they fall into
+conversation, and it is manifest that at every word Lord Eric is more
+and more fascinated by the fair house-breaker. She learns who he is, and
+evidently knows all about him; but she is careful to give him no inkling
+of her own identity. At last she takes her leave, and he expresses such
+an eager hope of being allowed to renew their acquaintance, that it
+amounts to a declaration of a peculiar interest in her. Thereupon she
+addresses him to this effect: &quot;Has it occurred to you to wonder how I
+got into your friend's rooms? I will show you how&quot;--and, producing a
+latch-key, she holds it up, with all its questionable implications,
+before his eyes. Then she lays it on the table, says: &quot;I leave you to
+draw your own conclusions&quot; and departs. A better opening for a light
+social comedy could scarcely be devised. We have no difficulty in
+guessing that the lady, who is not quite young, and has clearly a strong
+sense of humour, is freakishly turning appearances against herself, by
+way of throwing a dash of cold water on Lord Eric's sudden flame of
+devotion. But we long for a clear explanation of the whole quaint little
+episode; and here, again, no reasonable offer would tempt us to leave
+the theatre before our curiosity is satisfied. The remainder of the
+play, though amusing, is unfortunately not up to the level of the first
+act; else <i>Wheels within Wheels</i> would be a little classic of
+light comedy.</p>
+
+<p>For a third example of interest carefully carried forward, I turn to a
+recent Norwegian play, <i>The Idyll</i>, by Peter Egge. At the very rise of
+the curtain, we find Inga Gar, wife of an author and journalist, Dr.
+Gar, reading, with evident tokens of annoyance and distaste, a new book
+of poems by one Rolfe Ringve. Before her marriage, Inga was an actress
+of no great talent; Ringve made himself conspicuous by praising her far
+beyond her merits; and when, at last, an engagement between them was
+announced, people shrugged their shoulders and said: &quot;They are going to
+regularize the situation.&quot; As a matter of fact (of this we have early
+assurance), though Ringve has been her ardent lover, Inga has neither
+loved him nor been his mistress. Ringve being called abroad, she has,
+during his absence, broken off her engagement to him, and has then,
+about a year before the play opens, married Dr. Gar, to whom she is
+devoted. While Gar is away on a short lecture tour, Ringve has published
+the book of love-poems which we find her reading. They are very
+remarkable poems; they have already made a great stir in the literary
+world; and interest is all the keener for the fact that they are
+evidently inspired by his passion for Inga, and are couched in such a
+tone of intimacy as to create a highly injurious impression of the
+relations between them. Gar, having just come home, has no suspicion of
+the nature of the book; and when an editor, who cherishes a grudge
+against him, conceives the malicious idea of asking him to review
+Ringve's masterpiece, he consents with alacrity. One or two small
+incidents have in the meantime shown us that there is a little rift in
+the idyllic happiness of Inga and Gar, arising from her inveterate habit
+of telling trifling fibs to avoid facing the petty annoyances of life.
+For instance, when Gar asks her casually whether she has read Ringve's
+poems, a foolish denial slips out, though she knows that the cut pages
+of the book will give her the lie. These incidents point to a state of
+unstable equilibrium in the relations between husband and wife;
+wherefore, when we see Gar, at the end of the act, preparing to read
+Ringve's poems, our curiosity is very keen as to how he will take them.
+We feel the next hour to be big with fate for these two people; and we
+long for the curtain to rise again upon the threatened household. The
+fuse has been fired; we are all agog for the explosion.</p>
+
+<p>In Herr Egge's place, I should have been inclined to have dropped my
+curtain upon Gar, with the light of the reading-lamp full upon him, in
+the act of opening the book, and then to have shown him, at the
+beginning of the second act, in exactly the same position. With more
+delicate art, perhaps, the author interposes a little domestic incident
+at the end of the first act, while leaving it clearly impressed on our
+minds that the reading of the poems is only postponed by a few minutes.
+That is the essential point: the actual moment upon which the curtain
+falls is of minor importance. What is of vast importance, on the other
+hand, is that the expectation of the audience should not be baffled, and
+that the curtain should rise upon the immediate sequel to the reading of
+the poems. This is, in the exact sense of the words, <i>a sc&egrave;ne &agrave;
+faire</i>--an obligatory scene. The author has aroused in us a reasonable
+expectation of it, and should he choose to balk us--to raise his
+curtain, say, a week, or a month, later--we should feel that we had been
+trifled with. The general theory of the <i>sc&egrave;ne &agrave; faire</i> will presently
+come up for discussion. In the meantime, I merely make the obvious
+remark that it is worse than useless to awaken a definite expectation in
+the breast of the audience, and then to disappoint it.<a name="FNanchor71"></a><a href="#Footnote_71"><sup>[71]</sup></a></p>
+
+<p>The works of Sir Arthur Pinero afford many examples of interest very
+skilfully carried forward. In his farces--let no one despise the
+technical lessons to be learnt from a good farce--there is always an
+<i>adventure</i> afoot, whose development we eagerly anticipate. When the
+curtain falls on the first act of <i>The Magistrate</i>, we foresee the
+meeting of all the characters at the H&ocirc;tel des Princes, and are
+impatient to assist at it. In <i>The Schoolmistress</i>, we would not for
+worlds miss Peggy Hesseltine's party, which we know awaits us in Act II.
+An excellent example, of a more serious order, is to be found in <i>The
+Benefit of the Doubt</i>. When poor Theo, rebuffed by her husband's chilly
+scepticism, goes off on some manifestly harebrained errand, we divine,
+as do her relatives, that she is about to commit social suicide by
+seeking out John Allingham; and we feel more than curiosity as to the
+event--we feel active concern, almost anxiety, as though our own
+personal interests were involved. Our anticipation is heightened, too,
+when we see Sir Fletcher Portwood and Mrs. Cloys set off upon her track.
+This gives us a definite point to which to look forward, while leaving
+the actual course of events entirely undefined. It fulfils one of the
+great ends of craftsmanship, in foreshadowing without forestalling an
+intensely interesting conjuncture of affairs.</p>
+
+<p>I have laid stress on the importance of carrying forward the interest of
+the audience because it is a detail that is often overlooked. There is,
+as a rule, no difficulty in the matter, always assuming that the theme
+be not inherently devoid of interest. One could mention many plays in
+which the author has, from sheer inadvertence, failed to carry forward
+the interest of the first act, though a very little readjustment, or a
+trifling exercise of invention, would have enabled him to do so.
+<i>Pillars of Society</i>, indeed, may be taken as an instance, though not a
+very flagrant one. Such interest as we feel at the end of the first act
+is vague and unfocused. We are sure that something is to come of the
+return of Lona and Johan, but we have no inkling as to what that
+something may be. If we guess that the so-called black sheep of the
+family will prove to be the white sheep, it is only because we know that
+it is Ibsen's habit to attack respectability and criticize accepted
+moral values--it is not because of anything that he has told us, or
+hinted to us, in the play itself. In no other case does he leave our
+interest at such a loose end as in this, his prentice-work in modern
+drama. In <i>The League of Youth</i>, an earlier play, but of an altogether
+lighter type, the interest is much more definitely carried forward at
+the end of the first act. Stensgaard has attacked Chamberlain Bratsberg
+in a rousing speech, and the Chamberlain has been induced to believe
+that the attack was directed not against himself, but against his enemy
+Monsen. Consequently he invites Stensgaard to his great dinner-party,
+and this invitation Stensgaard regards as a cowardly attempt at
+conciliation. We clearly see a crisis looming ahead, when this
+misunderstanding shall be cleared up; and we consequently look forward
+with lively interest to the dinner-party of the second act--which ends,
+as a matter of fact, in a brilliant scene of comedy.</p>
+
+<p>The principle, to recapitulate, is simply this: a good first act should
+never end in a blank wall. There should always be a window in it, with
+at least a glimpse of something attractive beyond. In <i>Pillars of
+Society</i> there is a window, indeed; but it is of ground glass.</p>
+
+
+
+<br><br><hr style="width: 35%;"><br><br>
+<h2><a name="BOOK_III"></a>BOOK III</h2>
+
+<p>THE MIDDLE</p>
+
+
+
+<br><br><hr style="width: 35%;"><br><br>
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_XI"></a>CHAPTER XI</h2>
+
+<p>TENSION AND ITS SUSPENSION</p>
+<br>
+
+<p>In the days of the five-act dogma, each act was supposed to have its
+special and pre-ordained function. Freytag assigns to the second act, as
+a rule, the <i>Steigerung</i> or heightening--the working-up, one might call
+it--of the interest. But the second act, in modern plays, has often to
+do all the work of the three middle acts under the older dispensation;
+wherefore the theory of their special functions has more of a historical
+than of a practical interest. For our present purposes, we may treat the
+interior section of a play as a unit, whether it consist of one, two, or
+three acts.</p>
+
+<p>The first act may be regarded as the porch or vestibule through which we
+pass into the main fabric--solemn or joyous, fantastic or austere--of
+the actual drama. Sometimes, indeed, the vestibule is reduced to a mere
+threshold which can be crossed in two strides; but normally the first
+act, or at any rate the greater part of it, is of an introductory
+character. Let us conceive, then, that we have passed the vestibule, and
+are now to study the principles on which the body of the structure
+is reared.</p>
+
+<p>In the first place, is the architectural metaphor a just one? Is there,
+or ought there to be, any analogy between a drama and a
+finely-proportioned building? The question has already been touched on
+in the opening paragraphs of Chapter VIII; but we may now look into it a
+little more closely.</p>
+
+<p>What is the characteristic of a fine piece of architecture? Manifestly
+an organic relation, a carefully-planned interdependence, between all
+its parts. A great building is a complete and rounded whole, just like a
+living organism. It is informed by an inner law of harmony and
+proportion, and cannot be run up at haphazard, with no definite and
+pre-determined design. Can we say the same of a great play?</p>
+
+<p>I think we can. Even in those plays which present a picture rather than
+an action, we ought to recognize a principle of selection, proportion,
+composition, which, if not absolutely organic, is at any rate the
+reverse of haphazard. We may not always be able to define the principle,
+to put it clearly in words; but if we feel that the author has been
+guided by no principle, that he has proceeded on mere hand-to-mouth
+caprice, that there is no &quot;inner law of harmony and proportion&quot; in his
+work, then we instinctively relegate it to a low place in our esteem.
+Hauptmann's <i>Weavers</i> certainly cannot be called a piece of dramatic
+architecture, like <i>Rosmersholm</i> or <i>Iris</i>; but that does not mean that
+it is a mere rambling series of tableaux. It is not easy to define the
+principle of unity in that brilliant comedy <i>The Madras House</i>; but we
+nevertheless feel that a principle of unity exists; or, if we do not, so
+much the worse for the play and its author.</p>
+
+<p>There is, indeed, a large class of plays, often popular, and sometimes
+meritorious, in relation to which the architectural metaphor entirely
+breaks down. They are what may be called &quot;running fire&quot; plays. We have
+all seen children setting a number of wooden blocks on end, at equal
+intervals, and then tilting over the first so that it falls against the
+second, which in turn falls against the third, and so on, till the whole
+row, with a rapid clack-clack-clack, lies flat upon the table. This is
+called a &quot;running fire&quot;; and this is the structural principle of a good
+many plays. We feel that the playwright is, so to speak, inventing as he
+goes along--that the action, like the child's fantastic serpentine of
+blocks, might at any moment take a turn in any possible direction
+without falsifying its antecedents or our expectations. No part of it is
+necessarily involved in any other part. If the play were found too long
+or too short, an act might be cut out or written in without
+necessitating any considerable readjustments in the other acts. The play
+is really a series of episodes,</p>
+
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&quot;Which might, odd bobs, sir! in judicious hands,<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;Extend from here to Mesopotamy.&quot;<br>
+
+<p>The episodes may grow out of each other plausibly enough, but by no
+pre-ordained necessity, and with no far-reaching interdependence. We
+live, in such plays, from moment to moment, foreseeing nothing, desiring
+nothing; and though this frame of mind may be mildly agreeable, it
+involves none of that complexity of sensation with which we contemplate
+a great piece of architecture, or follow the development of a
+finely-constructed drama. To this order belong many cape-and-sword plays
+and detective dramas--plays like <i>The Adventure of Lady Ursula</i>, <i>The
+Red Robe</i>, the Musketeer romances that were at one time so popular, and
+most plays of the <i>Sherlock Holmes</i> and <i>Raffles</i> type. But pieces of a
+more ambitious order have been known to follow the same formula--some of
+the works, for instance, of Mr. Charles McEvoy, to say nothing of Mr.
+Bernard Shaw.</p>
+
+<p>We may take it, I think, that the architectural analogy holds good of
+every play which can properly be said to be &quot;constructed.&quot; Construction
+means dramatic architecture, or in other words, a careful
+pre-arrangement of proportions and interdependencies. But to carry
+beyond this point the analogy between the two arts would be fantastic
+and unhelpful. The one exists in space, the other in time. The one seeks
+to beget in the spectator a state of placid, though it may be of
+aspiring, contemplation; the other, a state of more or less acute
+tension. The resemblances between music and architecture are, as is well
+known, much more extensive and illuminating. It might not be wholly
+fanciful to call music a sort of middle term between the two other arts.</p>
+
+<p>A great part of the secret of dramatic architecture lies in the one word
+&quot;tension.&quot; To engender, maintain, suspend, heighten and resolve a state
+of tension--that is the main object of the dramatist's craft.</p>
+
+<p>What do we mean by tension? Clearly a stretching out, a stretching
+forward, of the mind. That is the characteristic mental attitude of the
+theatrical audience. If the mind is not stretching forward, the body
+will soon weary of its immobility and constraint. Attention may be
+called the momentary correlative of tension. When we are intent on what
+is to come, we are attentive to what is there and then happening. The
+term tension is sometimes applied, not to the mental state of the
+audience, but to the relation of the characters on the stage. &quot;A scene
+of high tension&quot; is primarily one in which the actors undergo a great
+emotional strain. But this is, after all, only a means towards
+heightening of the mental tension of the audience. In such a scene the
+mind stretches forward, no longer to something vague and distant, but to
+something instant and imminent.</p>
+
+<p>In discussing what Freytag calls the <i>erregende Moment,</i> we might have
+defined it as the starting-point of the tension. A reasonable audience
+will, if necessary, endure a certain amount of exposition, a certain
+positing of character and circumstance, before the tension sets in; but
+when it once has set in, the playwright must on no account suffer it to
+relax until he deliberately resolves it just before the fall of the
+curtain. There are, of course, minor rhythms of tension and resolution,
+like the harmonic vibrations of a violin-string. That is implied when we
+say that a play consists of a great crisis worked out through a series
+of minor crises. But the main tension, once initiated, must never be
+relaxed. If it is, the play is over, though the author may have omitted
+to note the fact. Not infrequently, he begins a new play under the
+impression that he is finishing the old one. That is what Shakespeare
+did in <i>The Merchant of Venice.</i> The fifth act is an independent
+afterpiece, though its independence is slightly disguised by the fact
+that the <i>erregende Moment</i> of the new play follows close upon the end
+of the old one, with no interact between. A very exacting technical
+criticism might accuse Ibsen of verging towards the same fault in <i>An
+Enemy of the People.</i> There the tension is practically resolved with Dr.
+Stockmann's ostracism at the end of the fourth act. At that point, if it
+did not know that there was another act to come, an audience might go
+home in perfect content. The fifth act is a sort of epilogue or sequel,
+built out of the materials of the preceding drama, but not forming an
+integral part of it. With a brief exposition to set forth the antecedent
+circumstances, it would be quite possible to present the fifth act as an
+independent comedietta.</p>
+
+<p>But here a point of great importance calls for our notice. Though the
+tension, once started, must never be relaxed: though it ought, on the
+contrary, to be heightened or tightened (as you choose to put it) from
+act to act; yet there are times when it may without disadvantage, or
+even with marked advantage, be temporarily suspended. In other words,
+the stretching-forward, without in any way slackening, may fall into the
+background of our consciousness, while other matters, the relevance of
+which may not be instantly apparent, are suffered to occupy the
+foreground. We know all too well, in everyday experience, that tension
+is not really relaxed by a temporary distraction. The dread of a coming
+ordeal in the witness-box or on the operating-table may be forcibly
+crushed down like a child's jack-in-the-box; but we are always conscious
+of the effort to compress it, and we know that it will spring up again
+the moment that effort ceases. Sir Arthur Pinero's play, <i>The
+Profligate,</i> was written at a time when it was the fashion to give each
+act a sub-title; and one of its acts is headed &quot;The Sword of Damocles.&quot;
+That is, indeed, the inevitable symbol of dramatic tension: we see a
+sword of Damocles (even though it be only a farcical blade of painted
+lathe) impending over someone's head: and when once we are confident
+that it will fall at the fated moment, we do not mind having our
+attention momentarily diverted to other matters. A rather flagrant
+example of suspended attention is afforded by Hamlet's advice to the
+Players. We know that Hamlet has hung a sword of Damocles over the
+King's head in the shape of the mimic murder-scene; and, while it is
+preparing, we are quite willing to have our attention switched off to
+certain abstract questions of dramatic criticism. The scene might have
+been employed to heighten the tension. Instead of giving the Players (in
+true princely fashion) a lesson in the general principles of their art,
+Hamlet might have specially &quot;coached&quot; them in the &quot;business&quot; of the
+scene to be enacted, and thus doubly impressed on the audience his
+resolve to &quot;tent&quot; the King &quot;to the quick.&quot; I am far from suggesting that
+this would have been desirable; but it would obviously have been
+possible.<a name="FNanchor72"></a><a href="#Footnote_72"><sup>[72]</sup></a> Shakespeare, as the experience of three centuries has
+shown, did right in judging that the audience was already sufficiently
+intent on the coming ordeal, and would welcome an interlude of
+aesthetic theory.</p>
+
+<p>There are times, moreover, when it is not only permissible to suspend
+the tension, but when, by so doing, a great artist can produce a
+peculiar and admirable effect. A sudden interruption, on the very brink
+of a crisis, may, as it were, whet the appetite of the audience for what
+is to come. We see in the Porter scene in Macbeth a suspension of this
+nature; but Shakespeare used it sparingly, unless, indeed, we are to
+consider as a deliberate point of art the retardation of movement
+commonly observable in the fourth acts of his tragedies. Ibsen, on the
+other hand, deliberately employed this device on three conspicuous
+occasions. The entrance of Dr. Rank in the last act of <i>A Doll's House</i>
+is a wholly unnecessary interruption to the development of the crisis
+between Nora and Helmer. The scene might be entirely omitted without
+leaving a perceptible hiatus in the action; yet who does not feel that
+this brief respite lends gathered impetus to the main action when it is
+resumed? The other instances are offered by the two apparitions of Ulric
+Brendel in <i>Rosmersholm.</i> The first occurs when Rosmer is on the very
+verge of his momentous confession to Kroll, the second when Rosmer and
+Rebecca are on the very verge of their last great resolve; and in each
+case we feel a distinct value (apart from the inherent quality of the
+Brendel scenes) in the very fact that the tension has been momentarily
+suspended. Such a <i>rallentando</i> effect is like the apparent pause in the
+rush of a river before it thunders over a precipice.</p>
+
+<p>The possibility of suspending tension is of wider import than may at
+first sight appear. But for it, our dramas would have to be all bone and
+muscle, like the figures in an anatomical textbook. As it is, we are
+able, without relaxing tension, to shift it to various planes of
+consciousness, and thus find leisure to reproduce the surface aspects of
+life, with some of its accidents and irrelevances. For example, when the
+playwright has, at the end of his first act, succeeded in carrying
+onward the spectator's interest, and giving him something definite to
+look forward to, it does not at all follow that the expected scene,
+situation, revelation, or what not, should come at the beginning of the
+second act. In some cases it must do so; when, as in <i>The Idyll</i> above
+cited, the spectator has been carefully induced to expect some imminent
+conjuncture which cannot be postponed. But this can scarcely be called a
+typical case. More commonly, when an author has enlisted the curiosity
+of his audience of some definite point, he will be in no great hurry to
+satisfy and dissipate it. He may devote the early part of the second act
+to working-up the same line of interest to a higher pitch; or he may
+hold it in suspense while he prepares some further development of the
+action. The closeness with which a line of interest, once started, ought
+to be followed up, must depend in some measure on the nature and tone of
+the play. If it be a serious play, in which character and action are
+very closely intertwined, any pause or break in the conjoint development
+is to be avoided. If, on the other hand, it is a play of light and
+graceful dialogue, in which the action is a pretext for setting the
+characters in motion rather than the chief means towards their
+manifestation, then the playwright can afford to relax the rate of his
+progress, and even to wander a little from the straight line of advance.
+In such a play, even the old institution of the &quot;underplot&quot; is not
+inadmissible; though the underplot ought scarcely to be a &quot;plot,&quot; but
+only some very slight thread of interest, involving no strain on the
+attention.<a name="FNanchor73"></a><a href="#Footnote_73"><sup>[73]</sup></a> It may almost be called an established practice, on the
+English stage, to let the dalliance of a pair of boy-and-girl lovers
+relieve the main interest of a more or less serious comedy; and there is
+no particular harm in such a convention, if it be not out of keeping
+with the general character of the play. In some plays the substance--the
+character-action, if one may so call it--is the main, and indeed the
+only, thing. In others the substance, though never unimportant, is in
+some degree subordinate to the embroideries; and it is for the
+playwright to judge how far this subordination may safely be carried.</p>
+
+<p>One principle, however, may be emphasized as almost universally valid,
+and that is that the end of an act should never leave the action just
+where it stood at the beginning. An audience has an instinctive sense
+of, and desire for, progress. It does not like to realize that things
+have been merely marking time. Even if it has been thoroughly
+entertained, from moment to moment, during the progress of an act, it
+does not like to feel at the end that nothing has really happened. The
+fall of the curtain gives time for reflection, and for the ordering of
+impressions which, while the action was afoot, were more or less vague
+and confused. It is therefore of great importance that each act should,
+to put it briefly, bear looking back upon--that it should appear to
+stand in due proportion to the general design of the play, and should
+not be felt to have been empty, or irrelevant, or disappointing. This
+is, indeed, a plain corollary from the principle of tension. Suspended
+it may be, sometimes with positive advantage; but it must not be
+suspended too long; and suspension for a whole act is equivalent to
+relaxation.</p>
+
+<p>To sum up: when once a play has begun to move, its movement ought to
+proceed continuously, and with gathering momentum; or, if it stands
+still for a space, the stoppage ought to be deliberate and purposeful.
+It is fatal when the author thinks it is moving, while in fact it is
+only revolving on its own axis.</p>
+
+
+
+<br><br><hr style="width: 35%;"><br><br>
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_XII"></a>CHAPTER XII</h2>
+
+<p>PREPARATION: THE FINGER-POST</p>
+<br>
+
+<p>We shall find, on looking into it, that most of the technical maxims
+that have any validity may be traced back, directly or indirectly, to
+the great principle of tension. The art of construction is summed up,
+first, in giving the mind of an audience something to which to stretch
+forward, and, secondly, in not letting it feel that it has stretched
+forward in vain. &quot;You will find it infinitely pleasing,&quot; says Dryden,<a name="FNanchor74"></a><a href="#Footnote_74"><sup>[74]</sup></a>
+&quot;to be led in a labyrinth of design, where you see some of your way
+before you, yet discern not the end till you arrive at it.&quot; Or, he might
+have added, &quot;if you foresee the end, but not the means by which it is to
+be reached.&quot; In drama, as in all art, the &quot;how&quot; is often more important
+than the &quot;what.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>No technical maxim is more frequently cited than the remark of the
+younger Dumas: &quot;The art of the theatre is the art of preparations.&quot; This
+is true in a larger sense than he intended; but at the same time there
+are limits to its truth, which we must not fail to observe.</p>
+
+<p>Dumas, as we know, was an inveterate preacher, using the stage as a
+pulpit for the promulgation of moral and social ideas which were, in
+their day, considered very advanced and daring. The primary meaning of
+his maxim, then, was that a startling idea, or a scene wherein such an
+idea was implied, ought not to be sprung upon an audience wholly
+unprepared to accept it. For instance, in <i>Monsieur Alphonse,</i> a
+husband, on discovering that his wife has had an intrigue before their
+marriage, and that a little girl whom she wishes to adopt is really her
+daughter, instantly raises her from the ground where she lies grovelling
+at his feet, and says: &quot;Cr&eacute;ature de Dieu, toi qui as failli et te
+repens, rel&egrave;ve toi, je te pardonne.&quot; This evangelical attitude on the
+part of Admiral de Montaiglin was in itself very surprising, and perhaps
+not wholly admirable, to the Parisian public of 1873; but Dumas had so
+&quot;prepared&quot; the <i>coup de th&eacute;&acirc;tre</i> that it passed with very slight
+difficulty on the first night, and with none at all at subsequent
+performances and revivals. How had he &quot;prepared&quot; it? Why, by playing, in
+a score of subtle ways, upon the sympathies and antipathies of the
+audience. For instance, as Sarcey points out, he had made M. de
+Montaiglin a sailor, &quot;accustomed, during his distant voyages, to long
+reveries in view of the boundless ocean, whence he had acquired a
+mystical habit of mind.... Dumas certainly would never have placed this
+pardon in the mouth of a stockbroker.&quot; So far so good; but
+&quot;preparation,&quot; in the sense of the word, is a device of rhetoric or of
+propaganda rather than of dramatic craftsmanship. It is a method of
+astutely undermining or outflanking prejudice. Desiring to enforce a
+general principle, you invent a case which is specially favourable to
+your argument, and insinuate it into the acceptance of the audience by
+every possible subtlety of adjustment. You trust, it would seem, that
+people who have applauded an act of pardon in an extreme case will be so
+much the readier to exercise that high prerogative in the less carefully
+&quot;prepared&quot; cases which present themselves in real life. This may or may
+not be a sound principle of persuasion; as we are not here considering
+the drama as an art of persuasion, we have not to decide between this
+and the opposite, or Shawesque, principle of shocking and startling an
+audience by the utmost violence of paradox. There is something to be
+said for both methods--for conversion by pill-and-jelly and for
+conversion by nitroglycerine.</p>
+
+<p>Reverting, now, to the domain of pure craftsmanship, can it be said that
+&quot;the art of the theatre is the art of preparation&quot;? Yes, it is very
+largely the art of delicate and unobtrusive preparation, of helping an
+audience to divine whither it is going, while leaving it to wonder how
+it is to get there. On the other hand, it is also the art of avoiding
+laborious, artificial and obvious preparations which lead to little or
+nothing. A due proportion must always be observed between the
+preparation and the result.</p>
+
+<p>To illustrate the meaning of preparation, as the word is here employed,
+I may perhaps be allowed to reprint a passage from a review of Mr.
+Israel Zangwill's play <i>Children of the Ghetto</i>.<a name="FNanchor75"></a><a href="#Footnote_75"><sup>[75]</sup></a></p>
+
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&quot; ... To those who have not read the novel, it must seem as though<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;the mere illustrations of Jewish life entirely overlaid and<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;overwhelmed the action. It is not so in reality. One who knows the<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;story beforehand can often see that it is progressing even in scenes<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;which seem purely episodic and unconnected either with each other or<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;with the general scheme. But Mr. Zangwill has omitted to provide<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;finger-posts, if I may so express it, to show those who do not know<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;the story beforehand whither he is leading them. He has neglected<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;the great art of forecasting, of keeping anticipation on the alert,<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;which is half the secret of dramatic construction. To forecast,<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;without discounting, your effects--that is all the Law and the<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;Prophets. In the first act of <i>Children of the Ghetto</i>, for<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;instance, we see the marriage in jest of Hannah to Sam Levine,<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;followed by the instant divorce with all its curious ceremonies.<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;This is amusing so far as it goes; but when the divorce is<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;completed, the whole thing seems to be over and done with. We have<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;seen some people, in whom as yet we take no particular interest,<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;enmeshed in a difficulty arising from a strange and primitive<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;formalism in the interpretation of law; and we have seen the meshes<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;cut to the satisfaction of all parties, and the incident to all<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;appearance closed. There is no finger-post to direct our<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;anticipation on the way it should go; and those who have not read<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;the book cannot possibly guess that this mock marriage, instantly<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;and ceremoniously dissolved, can have any ulterior effect upon the<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;fortunes of any one concerned. Thus, the whole scene, however<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;curious in itself, seems motiveless and resultless. How the<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;requisite finger-post was to be provided I cannot tell. That is not<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;my business; but a skilful dramatist would have made it his. Then,<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;in the second act, amid illustrations of social life in the Ghetto,<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;we have the meeting of Hannah with David Brandon, a prettily-written<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;scene of love-at-first-sight. But, so far as any one can see, there<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;is every prospect that the course of true love will run absolutely<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;smooth. Again we lack a finger-post to direct our interest forward;<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;nor do we see anything that seems to bring this act into vital<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;relation with its predecessor. Those who have read the book know<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;that David Brandon is a 'Cohen,' a priest, a descendant of Aaron,<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;and that a priest may not marry a divorced woman. Knowing this, we<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;have a sense of irony, of impending disaster, which renders the<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;love-scene of the second act dramatic. But to those, and they must<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;always be a majority in any given audience, who do not know this,<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;the scene has no more dramatic quality than lies in its actual<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;substance, which, although pretty enough, is entirely commonplace.<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;Not till the middle of the third act (out of four) is the obstacle<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;revealed, and we see that the mighty maze was not without a plan.<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;Here, then, the drama begins, after two acts and a half of<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;preparation, during which we were vouchsafed no inkling of what was<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;preparing. It is capital drama when we come to it, really human,<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;really tragic. The arbitrary prohibitions of the Mosaic law have no<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;religious or moral force either for David or for Hannah. They feel<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;it to be their right, almost their duty, to cast off their shackles.<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;In any community, save that of strict Judaism, they are perfectly<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;free to marry. But in thus flouting the letter of the law, Hannah<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;well knows that she will break her father's heart. Even as she<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;struggles to shake them off, the traditions of her race take firmer<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;hold on her; and in the highly dramatic last act (a not unskilful<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;adaptation to the stage of the crucial scene of the book) she bows<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;her neck beneath the yoke, and renounces love that the Law may be<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;fulfilled.&quot;<br>
+
+<p>To state the matter in other terms, we are conscious of no tension in
+the earlier acts of this play, because we have not been permitted to see
+the sword of Damocles hanging over the heads of Hannah and David
+Brandon. For lack of preparation, of pointing-forward, we feel none of
+that god-like superiority to the people of the mimic world which we have
+recognized as the characteristic privilege of the spectator. We know no
+more than they do of the implications of their acts, and the network of
+embarrassments in which they are involving themselves. Indeed, we know
+less than they do: for Hannah, as a well brought-up Jewess, is no doubt
+vaguely aware of the disabilities attaching to a divorced woman. A
+gentile audience, on the other hand, cannot possibly foresee how--<br>
+<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&quot;Some consequence yet hanging in the stars<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;Shall bitterly begin his fearful date<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;With this night's revels.&quot;<br>
+<br>
+and, lacking that foreknowledge, it misses the specifically dramatic
+effect of the scenes. The author invites it to play at blind-man's-buff
+with the characters, instead of unsealing its eyes and enabling it to
+watch the game from its Olympian coign of vantage.</p>
+
+<p>Let the dramatist, then, never neglect to place the requisite
+finger-posts on the road he would have us follow. It is not, of course,
+necessary that we should be conscious of all the implications of any
+given scene or incident, but we must know enough of them not only to
+create the requisite tension, but to direct it towards the right quarter
+of the compass. Retrospective elucidations are valueless and sometimes
+irritating. It is in nowise to the author's interest that we should say,
+&quot;Ah, if we had only known this, or foreseen that, in time, the effect of
+such-and-such a scene would have been entirely different!&quot; We have no
+use for finger-posts that point backwards.<a name="FNanchor76"></a><a href="#Footnote_76"><sup>[76]</sup></a></p>
+
+<p>In the works of Sir Arthur Pinero I recall two cases in which the lack
+of a finger-post impairs the desired effect: slightly, in the one
+instance, in the other, very considerably. The third act of that
+delightful comedy <i>The Princess and the Butterfly</i> contains no
+sufficient indication of Fay Zuliani's jealousy of the friendship
+between Sir George Lamorant and the Princess Pannonia. We are rather at
+a loss to account for the coldness of her attitude to the Princess, and
+her perverse naughtiness in going off to the Opera Ball. This renders
+the end of the act practically ineffective. We so little foresee what is
+to come of Fay's midnight escapade, that we take no particular interest
+in it, and are rather disconcerted by the care with which it is led up
+to, and the prominence assigned to it. This, however, is a trifling
+fault. Far different is the case in the last act of <i>The Benefit of the
+Doubt</i>, which goes near to ruining what is otherwise a very fine play.
+The defect, indeed, is not purely technical: on looking into it we find
+that the author is not in fact working towards an ending which can be
+called either inevitable or conspicuously desirable. His failure to
+point forward is no doubt partly due to his having nothing very
+satisfactory to point forward to. But it is only in retrospect that this
+becomes apparent. What we feel while the act is in progress is simply
+the lack of any finger-post to afford us an inkling of the end towards
+which we are proceeding. Through scene after scene we appear to be
+making no progress, but going round and round in a depressing circle.
+The tension, in a word, is fatally relaxed. It may perhaps be suggested
+as a maxim that when an author finds a difficulty in placing the
+requisite finger-posts, as he nears the end of his play, he will do well
+to suspect that the end he has in view is defective, and to try if he
+cannot amend it.</p>
+
+<p>In the ancient, and in the modern romantic, drama, oracles, portents,
+prophecies, horoscopes and such-like intromissions of the supernatural
+afforded a very convenient aid to the placing of the requisite
+finger-posts--&quot;foreshadowing without forestalling.&quot; It has often been
+said that <i>Macbeth</i> approaches the nearest of all Shakespeare's
+tragedies to the antique model: and in nothing is the resemblance
+clearer than in the employment of the Witches to point their skinny
+fingers into the fated future. In <i>Romeo and Juliet</i>, inward foreboding
+takes the place of outward prophecy. I have quoted above Romeo's
+prevision of &quot;Some consequence yet hanging in the stars&quot;; and beside it
+may be placed Juliet's--</p>
+
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&quot;I have no joy of this contract to-night;<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;It is too rash, too unadvised, too sudden,<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;Too like the lightning which doth cease to be<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;Ere one can say it lightens.&quot;<br>
+
+<p>In <i>Othello,</i> on the other hand, the most modern of all his plays,
+Shakespeare had recourse neither to outward boding, nor to inward
+foreboding, but planted a plain finger-post in the soil of human nature,
+when he made Brabantio say--</p>
+
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&quot;Look to her, Moor, if thou hast eyes to see:<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;She has deceived her father, and may thee.&quot;<br>
+
+<p>Mr. Stephen Phillips, in the first act of <i>Paolo and Francesca,</i> outdoes
+all his predecessors, ancient or modern, in his daring use of sibylline
+prophecy. He makes Giovanni's blind foster-mother, Angela, foretell the
+tragedy in almost every detail, save that, in her vision, she cannot see
+the face of Francesca's lover. Mr. Phillips, I take it, is here
+reinforcing ancient tradition by a reference to modern &quot;psychical
+research.&quot; He trusts to our conceiving such clairvoyance to be not
+wholly impossible, and giving it what may be called provisional
+credence. Whether the device be artistic or not we need not here
+consider. I merely point to it as a conspicuous example of the use of
+the finger-post.<a name="FNanchor77"></a><a href="#Footnote_77"><sup>[77]</sup></a></p>
+
+<p>It need scarcely be said that a misleading finger-post is carefully to
+be avoided, except in the rare cases where it may be advisable to beget
+a momentary misapprehension on the part of the audience, which shall be
+almost instantly corrected in some pleasant or otherwise effective
+fashion.<a name="FNanchor78"></a><a href="#Footnote_78"><sup>[78]</sup></a> It is naturally difficult to think of striking instances of
+the misleading finger-posts; for plays which contain such a blunder are
+not apt to survive, even in the memory. A small example occurs in a
+clever play named <i>A Modern Aspasia</i> by Mr. Hamilton Fyfe. Edward
+Meredith has two households: a London house over which his lawful wife,
+Muriel, presides; and a country cottage where dwells his mistress,
+Margaret, with her two children. One day Muriel's automobile breaks down
+near Margaret's cottage, and, while the tyre is being repaired, Margaret
+gives her visitor tea, neither of them knowing the other. Throughout the
+scene we are naturally wondering whether a revelation is to occur; and
+when, towards the close, Muriel goes to Margaret's room, &quot;to put her hat
+straight,&quot; we have no longer any doubt on the subject. It is practically
+inevitable that she should find in the room her husband's photograph, or
+some object which she should instantly recognize as his, and should
+return to the stage in full possession of the secret. This is so
+probable that nothing but a miracle can prevent it: we mentally give the
+author credit for bringing about his revelation in a very simple and
+natural way; and we are proportionately disappointed when we find that
+the miracle has occurred, and that Muriel returns to the sitting-room no
+wiser than she left it. Very possibly the general economy of the play
+demanded that the revelation should not take place at this juncture.
+That question does not here concern us. The point is that, having
+determined to reserve the revelation for his next act, the author ought
+not, by sending Muriel into Margaret's bedroom, to have awakened in us a
+confident anticipation of its occurring there and then. A romantic play
+by Mr. J. B. Fagan, entitled <i>Under Which King?</i> offers another small
+instance of the same nature. The date is 1746; certain despatches of
+vast importance have to be carried by a Hanoverian officer from Moidart
+to Fort William. The Jacobites arrange to drug the officer; and, to make
+assurance doubly sure, in case the drug should fail to act, they post a
+Highland marksman in a narrow glen to pick him off as he passes. The
+drug does act; but his lady-love, to save his military honour, assumes
+male attire and rides off with the despatches. We hear her horse's hoofs
+go clattering down the road; and then, as the curtain falls, we hear a
+shot ring out into the night. This shot is a misleading fingerpost.
+Nothing comes of it: we find in the next act that the marksman has
+missed! But marksmen, under such circumstances, have no business to
+miss. It is a breach of the dramatic proprieties. We feel that the
+author has been trifling with us in inflicting on us this purely
+mechanical and momentary &quot;scare.&quot; The case would be different if the
+young lady knew that the marksman was lying in ambush, and determined to
+run the gantlet. In that case the incident would be a trait of
+character; but, unless my memory deceives me, that is not the case. On
+the stage, every bullet should have its billet--not necessarily in the
+person aimed at, but in the emotions or anticipations of the audience.
+This bullet may, indeed, give us a momentary thrill of alarm; but it is
+dearly bought at the expense of subsequent disillusionment.</p>
+
+<p>We have now to consider the subject of over-preparation, too obtrusive
+preparation, mountainous preparation leading only to a mouse-like
+effect. This is the characteristic error of the so-called &quot;well-made
+play,&quot; the play of elaborate and ingenious intrigue. The trouble with
+the well-made play is that it is almost always, and of necessity,
+ill-made. Very rarely does the playwright succeed in weaving a web which
+is at once intricate, consistent, and clear. In nineteen cases out of
+twenty there are glaring flaws that have to be overlooked; or else the
+pattern is so involved that the mind's eye cannot follow it, and becomes
+bewildered and fatigued. A classical example of both faults may be found
+in Congreve's so-called comedy <i>The Double-Dealer</i>. This is, in fact, a
+powerful drama, somewhat in the Sardou manner; but Congreve had none of
+Sardou's deftness in manipulating an intrigue. Maskwell is not only a
+double-dealer, but a triple--or quadruple-dealer; so that the brain soon
+grows dizzy in the vortex of his villainies. The play, it may be noted,
+was a failure.</p>
+
+<p>There is a quite legitimate pleasure to be found, no doubt, in a complex
+intrigue which is also perspicuous. Plays such as Alexandre Dumas's
+<i>Mademoiselle de Belle-Isle</i>, or the pseudo-historical dramas of
+Scribe-<i>Adrienne Lecouvreur, Bertrand et Raton, Un Verre d'Eau, Les
+Trois Maupin,</i> etc.--are amusing toys, like those social or military
+tableaux, the figures of which you can set in motion by dropping a penny
+in the slot. But the trick of this sort of &quot;preparation&quot; has long been
+found out, and even unsophisticated audiences are scarcely to be
+thrilled by it. We may accept it as a sound principle, based on common
+sense and justified by experience, that an audience should never be
+tempted to exclaim, &quot;What a marvellously clever fellow is this
+playwright! How infinitely cleverer than the dramatist who constructs
+the tragi-comedy of life.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>This is what we inevitably exclaim as we watch Victorien Sardou, in whom
+French ingenuity culminated and caricatured itself, laying the
+foundations of one of his labyrinthine intrigues. The absurdities of
+&quot;preparation&quot; in this sense could scarcely be better satirized than in
+the following page from Francisque Sarcey's criticism of <i>Nos Intimes</i>
+(known in English as <i>Peril</i>)--a page which is intended, not as satire,
+but as eulogy--</p>
+
+&nbsp;&nbsp;At the sixth performance, I met, during the first interact, a man of<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;infinite taste who ... complained of the lengthiness of this first<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;act: &quot;What a lot of details,&quot; he said, &quot;which serve no purpose, and<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;had better have been omitted! What is the use of that long story<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;about the cactus with a flower that is unique in all the world? Why<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;trouble us with that dahlia-root, which M. Caussade's neighbour has<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;thrown over the garden wall? Was it necessary to inflict on us all<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;that talk about the fox that plays havoc in the garden? What have we<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;to do with that mischievous beast? And that Tolozan, with his<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;endless digressions! What do we care about his ideas on love, on<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;metempsychosis, on friendship, etc.? All this stuff only retards<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;the action.&quot;<br>
+
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&quot;On the contrary,&quot; I replied, &quot;all this is just what is going to<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;interest you. You are impatient of these details, because you are<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;looking out for the scenes of passion which have been promised you.<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;But reflect that, without these preparations, the scenes of passion<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;would not touch you. That cactus-flower will play its part, you may<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;be sure; that dahlia-root is not there for nothing; that fox to<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;which you object, and of which you will hear more talk during two<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;more acts, will bring about the solution of one of the most<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;entertaining situations in all drama.&quot;<br>
+
+<p>M. Sarcey does not tell us what his interlocutor replied; but he might
+have said, like the hero of <i>Le R&eacute;veillon</i>: &quot;Are you sure there is no
+mistake? Are you defending Sardou, or attacking him?&quot;</p>
+
+<p>For another example of ultra-complex preparation let me turn to a play
+by Mr. Sydney Grundy, entitled <i>The Degenerates</i>. Mr. Grundy, though an
+adept of the Scribe school, has done so much strong and original work
+that I apologize for exhuming a play in which he almost burlesqued his
+own method; but for that very reason it is difficult to find a more
+convincing or more deterrent example of misdirected ingenuity. The
+details of the plot need not be recited. It is sufficient to say that
+the curtain has not been raised ten minutes before our attention has
+been drawn to the fact that a certain Lady Saumarez has her monogram on
+everything she wears, even to her gloves: whence we at once foresee that
+she is destined to get into a compromising situation, to escape from it,
+but to leave a glove behind her. In due time the compromising situation
+arrives, and we find that it not only requires a room with three
+doors,<a name="FNanchor79"></a><a href="#Footnote_79"><sup>[79]</sup></a> but that a locksmith has to be specially called in to provide
+two of these doors with peculiar locks, so that, when once shut, they
+cannot be opened from inside except with a key! What interest can we
+take in a situation turning on such contrivances? Sane technic laughs at
+locksmiths. And after all this preparation, the situation proves to be a
+familiar trick of theatrical thimble-rigging: you lift the thimble, and
+instead of Pea A, behold Pea B!--instead of Lady Saumarez it is Mrs.
+Trevelyan who is concealed in Isidore de Lorano's bedroom. Sir William
+Saumarez must be an exceedingly simple-minded person to accept the
+substitution, and exceedingly unfamiliar with the French drama of the
+'seventies and 'eighties. If he had his wits about him he would say: &quot;I
+know this dodge: it comes from Sardou. Lady Saumarez has just slipped
+out by that door, up R., and if I look about I shall certainly find her
+fan, or her glove, or her handkerchief somewhere on the premises.&quot; The
+author may object that such criticism would end in paralysing the
+playwright, and that, if men always profited by the lessons of the
+stage, the world would long ago have become so wise that there would be
+no more room in it for drama, which lives on human folly. &quot;You will tell
+me next,&quot; he may say, &quot;that I must not make groundless jealousy the
+theme of a play, because every one who has seen Othello would at once
+detect the machinations of an Iago!&quot; The retort is logically specious,
+but it mistakes the point. It would certainly be rash to put any limit
+to human gullibility, or to deny that Sir William Saumarez, in the given
+situation, might conceivably be hoodwinked. The question is not one of
+psychology but of theatrical expediency: and the point is that when a
+situation is at once highly improbable in real life and exceedingly
+familiar on the stage, we cannot help mentally caricaturing it as it
+proceeds, and are thus prevented from lending it the provisional
+credence on which interest and emotion depend.</p>
+
+<p>An instructive contrast to <i>The Degenerates</i> may be found in a nearly
+contemporary play, <i>Mrs. Dane's Defence</i>, by Mr. Henry Arthur Jones. The
+first three acts of this play may be cited as an excellent example of
+dexterous preparation and development. Our interest in the sequence of
+events is aroused, sustained, and worked up to a high tension with
+consummate skill. There is no feverish overcrowding of incident, as is
+so often the case in the great French story-plays--<i>Adrienne
+Lecouvreur</i>, for example, or <i>F&eacute;dora</i>. The action moves onwards,
+unhasting, unresting, and the finger-posts are placed just where they
+are wanted.</p>
+
+<p>The observance of a due proportion between preparation and result is a
+matter of great moment. Even when the result achieved is in itself very
+remarkable, it may be dearly purchased by a too long and too elaborate
+process of preparation. A famous play which is justly chargeable with
+this fault is <i>The Gay Lord Quex</i>. The third act is certainly one of the
+most breathlessly absorbing scenes in modern drama; but by what long,
+and serpentine, and gritty paths do we not approach it! The elaborate
+series of trifling incidents by means of which Sophy Fullgarney is first
+brought from New Bond Street to Fauncey Court, and then substituted for
+the Duchess's maid, is at no point actually improbable; and yet we feel
+that a vast effort has been made to attain an end which, owing to the
+very length of the sequence of chances, at last assumes an air of
+improbability. There is little doubt that the substructure of the great
+scene might have been very much simpler. I imagine that Sir Arthur
+Pinero was betrayed into complexity and over-elaboration by his desire
+to use, as a background for his action, a study of that &quot;curious phase
+of modern life,&quot; the manicurist's parlour. To those who find this study
+interesting, the disproportion between preliminaries and result may be
+less apparent. It certainly did not interfere with the success of the
+play in its novelty; but it may very probably curtail its lease of life.
+What should we know of <i>The School for Scandal</i> to-day, if it consisted
+of nothing but the Screen Scene and two laborious acts of preparation?</p>
+
+<p>A too obvious preparation is very apt to defeat its end by begetting a
+perversely quizzical frame of mind in the audience. The desired effect
+is discounted, like a conjuring trick in which the mechanism is too
+transparent. Let me recall a trivial but instructive instance of this
+error. The occasion was the first performance of <i>Pillars of Society</i> at
+the Gaiety Theatre, London--the first Ibsen performance ever given in
+England. At the end of the third act, Krap, Consul Bernick's clerk,
+knocks at the door of his master's office and says, &quot;It is blowing up to
+a stiff gale. Is the <i>Indian Girl</i> to sail in spite of it?&quot; Whereupon
+Bernick, though he knows that the <i>Indian Girl</i> is hopelessly
+unseaworthy, replies, &quot;The <i>Indian Girl</i> is to sail in spite of it.&quot; It
+had occurred to someone that the effect of this incident would be
+heightened if Krap, before knocking at the Consul's door, were to
+consult the barometer, and show by his demeanour that it was falling
+rapidly. A barometer had accordingly been hung, up stage, near the
+veranda entrance; and, as the scenic apparatus of a Gaiety matin&eacute;e was
+in those days always of the scantiest, it was practically the one
+decoration of a room otherwise bare almost to indecency. It had stared
+the audience full in the face through three long acts; and when, at the
+end of the third, Krap went up to it and tapped it, a sigh of relief ran
+through the house, as much as to say, &quot;At last! so <i>that</i> was what it
+was for!&quot;--to the no small detriment of the situation. Here the fault
+lay in the obtrusiveness of the preparation. Had the barometer passed
+practically unnoticed among the other details of a well-furnished hall,
+it would at any rate have been innocent, and perhaps helpful. As it was,
+it seemed to challenge the curiosity of the audience, saying, &quot;I am
+evidently here with some intention; guess, now, what the intention can
+be!&quot; The producer had failed in the art which conceals art.</p>
+
+<p>Another little trait from a play of those far-past days illustrates the
+same point. It was a drawing-room drama of the Scribe school. Near the
+beginning of an act, some one spilt a bottle of red ink, and mopped it
+up with his (or her) handkerchief, leaving the handkerchief on the
+escritoire. The act proceeded from scene to scene, and the handkerchief
+remained unnoticed; but every one in the audience who knew the rules of
+the game, kept his eye on the escritoire, and was certain that that ink
+had not been spilt for nothing. In due course a situation of great
+intensity was reached, wherein the villain produced a pistol and fired
+at the heroine, who fainted. As a matter of fact he had missed her; but
+her quick-witted friend seized the gory handkerchief, and, waving it in
+the air, persuaded the villain that the shot had taken deadly effect,
+and that he must flee for his life. Even in those days, such an
+unblushing piece of trickery was found more comic than impressive. It
+was a case of preparation &quot;giving itself away.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>A somewhat later play, <i>The Mummy and the Humming Bird</i>, by Mr. Isaac
+Henderson, contains a good example of over-elaborate preparation. The
+Earl of Lumley, lost in his chemical studies with a more than Newtonian
+absorption, suffers his young wife to form a sentimental friendship with
+a scoundrel of an Italian novelist, Signor D'Orelli. Remaining at home
+one evening, when Lady Lumley and a party of friends, including
+D'Orelli, have gone off to dine at a restaurant, the Earl chances to
+look out of the window, and observes an organ-grinder making doleful
+music in the snow. His heart is touched, and he invites the music-monger
+to join him in his study and share his informal dinner. The conversation
+between them is carried on by means of signs, for the organ-grinder
+knows no English, and the Earl is painfully and improbably ignorant of
+Italian. He does not even know that Roma means Rome, and Londra, London.
+This ignorance, however, is part of the author's ingenuity. It leads to
+the establishment of a sort of object-speech, by aid of which the Earl
+learns that his guest has come to England to prosecute a vendetta
+against the man who ruined his happy Sicilian home. I need scarcely say
+that this villain is none other than D'Orelli; and when at last he and
+the Countess elope to Paris, the object-speech enables Giuseppe to
+convey to the Earl, by aid of a brandy-bottle, a siphon, a broken plate,
+and half-a-crown, not only the place of their destination, but the very
+hotel to which they are going. This is a fair example of that ingenuity
+for ingenuity's sake which was once thought the very essence of the
+playwright's craft, but has long ago lost all attraction for intelligent
+audiences.</p>
+
+<p>We may take it as a rule that any scene which requires an obviously
+purposeful scenic arrangement is thereby discounted. It may be strong
+enough to live down the disadvantage; but a disadvantage it is none the
+less. In a play of Mr. Carton's, <i>The Home Secretary</i>, a paper of great
+importance was known to be contained in an official despatch-box. When
+the curtain rose on the last act, it revealed this despatch-box on a
+table right opposite a French window, while at the other side of the
+room a high-backed arm-chair discreetly averted its face. Every one
+could see at a glance that the romantic Anarchist was going to sneak in
+at the window and attempt to abstract the despatch-box, while the
+heroine was to lie perdue in the high-backed chair; and when, at the
+fated moment, all this punctually occurred, one could scarcely repress
+an &quot;Ah!&quot; of sarcastic satisfaction. Similarly, in an able play named Mr.
+and Mrs. Daventry, Mr. Frank Harris had conceived a situation which
+required that the scene should be specially built for eavesdropping.<a name="FNanchor80"></a><a href="#Footnote_80"><sup>[80]</sup></a>
+As soon as the curtain rose, and revealed a screen drawn halfway down
+the stage, with a sofa ensconced behind it, we knew what to expect. Of
+course Mrs. Daventry was to lie on the sofa and overhear a duologue
+between her husband and his mistress: the only puzzle was to understand
+why the guilty pair should neglect the precaution of looking behind the
+screen. As a matter of fact, Mrs. Daventry, before she lay down,
+switched off the lights, and Daventry and Lady Langham, finding the room
+dark, assumed it to be empty. With astounding foolhardiness, considering
+that the house was full of guests, and this a much frequented public
+room, Daventry proceeded to lock the door, and continue his conversation
+with Lady Langham in the firelight. Thus, when the lady's husband came
+knocking at the door, Mrs. Daventry was able to rescue the guilty pair
+from an apparently hopeless predicament, by calmly switching on the
+lights and opening the door to Sir John Langham. The situation was
+undoubtedly a &quot;strong&quot; one; but the tendency of modern technic is to
+hold &quot;strength&quot; too dearly purchased at such reckless expense of
+preparation.</p>
+
+<p>There are, then, very clear limits to the validity of the Dumas maxim
+that &quot;The art of the theatre is the art of preparations.&quot; Certain it is
+that over-preparation is the most fatal of errors. The clumsiest thing a
+dramatist can possibly do is to lay a long and elaborate train for the
+ignition of a squib. We take pleasure in an event which has been
+&quot;prepared&quot; in the sense that we have been led to desire it, and have
+wondered how it was to be brought about. But we scoff at an occurrence
+which nothing but our knowledge of the tricks of the stage could
+possibly lead us to expect, yet which, knowing these tricks, we have
+foreseen from afar, and resented in advance.</p>
+
+
+
+<br><br><hr style="width: 35%;"><br><br>
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_XIII"></a>CHAPTER XIII</h2>
+
+<p>THE OBLIGATORY SCENE</p>
+<br>
+
+<p>I do not know whether it was Francisque Sarcey who invented the phrase
+<i>sc&egrave;ne &agrave; faire</i>; but it certainly owes its currency to that valiant
+champion of the theatrical theatre, if I may so express it. Note that in
+this term I intend no disrespect. My conception of the theatrical
+theatre may not be exactly the same as M. Sarcey's; but at all events I
+share his abhorrence of the untheatrical theatre.</p>
+
+<p>What is the <i>sc&egrave;ne &agrave; faire</i>? Sarcey has used the phrase so often, and in
+so many contexts, that it is impossible to tie him down to any strict
+definition. Instead of trying to do so, I will give a typical example of
+the way in which he usually employs the term.</p>
+
+<p>In <i>Les Fourchambault</i>, by Emile Augier, the first act introduces us to
+the household of a merchant, of Havre, who has married a wealthy, but
+extravagant woman, and has a son and daughter who are being gradually
+corrupted by their mother's worldliness. We learn that Fourchambault,
+senior, has, in his youth, betrayed a young woman who was a governess in
+his family. He wanted to marry her, but his relations maligned her
+character, and he cast her off; nor does he know what has become of her
+and her child. In the second act we pass to the house of an energetic
+and successful young shipowner named Bernard, who lives alone with his
+mother. Bernard, as we divine, is secretly devoted to a young lady named
+Marie Letellier, a guest in the Fourchambault house, to whom young
+Leopold Fourchambault is paying undesirable attentions. One day Bernard
+casually mentions to his mother that the house of Fourchambault is on
+the verge of bankruptcy; nothing less than a quarter of a million francs
+will enable it to tide over the crisis. Mme. Bernard, to her son's
+astonishment, begs him to lend the tottering firm the sum required. He
+objects that, unless the business is better managed, the loan will only
+postpone the inevitable disaster. &quot;Well, then, my son,&quot; she replied,
+&quot;you must go into partnership with M. Fourchambault.&quot; &quot;I! with that
+imbecile!&quot; he exclaims. &quot;My son,&quot; she says gravely, and emphatically,
+&quot;you must--it is your duty--I demand it of you!&quot; &quot;Ah!&quot; cries Bernard. &quot;I
+understand--he is my father!&quot;</p>
+
+<p>After ecstatically lauding this situation and the scenes which have led
+up to it, M. Sarcey continues--</p>
+
+&nbsp;&nbsp;When the curtain falls upon the words &quot;He is my father,&quot; I at once<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;see two <i>sc&egrave;nes &agrave; faire</i>, and I know that they will be <i>faites</i>: the<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;scene between the son and the father whom he is to save, the scene<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;between Bernard and his half-brother Leopold, who are in love with<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;the same woman, the one dishonourably and the other secretly and<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;nobly. What will they say to each other? I have no idea. But it is<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;precisely this <i>expectation mingled with uncertainly</i> that is one of<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;the charms of the theatre. I say to myself, &quot;Ah, they will have an<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;encounter! What will come of it?&quot; And that this is the state of mind<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;of the whole audience is proved by the fact that when the two<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;characters of the <i>sc&egrave;nes &agrave; faire</i> stand face to face, a thrill of<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;anticipation runs round the whole theatre.<br>
+
+<p>This, then, is the obligatory scene as Sarcey generally understands
+it--a scene which, for one reason or another, an audience expects and
+ardently desires. I have italicized the phrase &quot;expectation mingled with
+uncertainty&quot; because it expresses in other terms the idea which I have
+sought to convey in the formula &quot;foreshadowing without forestalling.&quot;
+But before we can judge of the merits of M. Sarcey's theory, we must
+look into it a little more closely. I shall try, then, to state it in my
+own words, in what I believe to be its most rational and
+defensible form.</p>
+
+<p>An obligatory scene is one which the audience (more or less clearly and
+consciously) foresees and desires, and the absence of which it may with
+reason resent. On a rough analysis, it will appear, I think, that there
+are five ways in which a scene may become, in this sense, obligatory:</p>
+
+<p>(1) It may be necessitated by the inherent logic of the theme.</p>
+
+<p>(2) It may be demanded by the manifest exigencies of specifically
+dramatic effect.</p>
+
+<p>(3) The author himself may have rendered it obligatory by seeming
+unmistakably to lead up to it.</p>
+
+<p>(4) It may be required in order to justify some modification of
+character or alteration of will, too important to be taken for granted.</p>
+
+<p>(5) It may be imposed by history or legend.</p>
+
+<p>These five classes of obligatory scenes may be docketed, respectively,
+as the Logical, the Dramatic, the Structural, the Psychological, and the
+Historic. M. Sarcey generally employed the term in one of the first
+three senses, without clearly distinguishing between them. It is,
+indeed, not always easy to determine whether the compulsion (assuming it
+to exist at all) lies in the very essence of the theme or situation, or
+only in the author's manipulation of it.</p>
+
+<p>Was Sarcey right in assuming such a compulsion to be a constant and
+dominant factor in the playwright's craft? I think we shall see reason
+to believe him right in holding that it frequently arises, but wrong if
+he went the length of maintaining that there can be no good play without
+a definite <i>sc&egrave;ne &agrave; faire</i>--as eighteenth-century landscape painters are
+said to have held that no one could be a master of his art till he knew
+where to place &quot;the brown tree.&quot; I remember no passage in which Sarcey
+explicitly lays down so hard and fast a rule, but several in which he
+seems to take it for granted.<a name="FNanchor81"></a><a href="#Footnote_81"><sup>[81]</sup></a></p>
+
+<p>It may be asked whether--and if so, why--the theory of the obligatory
+scene holds good for the dramatist and not for the novelist? Perhaps it
+has more application to the novel than is commonly supposed; but in so
+far as it applies peculiarly to the drama, the reason is pretty clear.
+It lies in the strict concentration imposed on the dramatist, and the
+high mental tension which is, or ought to be, characteristic of the
+theatrical audience. The leisurely and comparatively passive
+novel-reader may never miss a scene which an audience, with its
+instincts of logic and of economy keenly alert, may feel to be
+inevitable. The dramatist is bound to extract from his material the last
+particle of that particular order of effect which the stage, and the
+stage alone, can give us. If he fails to do so, we feel that there has
+been no adequate justification for setting in motion all the complex
+mechanism of the theatre. His play is like a badly-designed engine in
+which a large part of the potential energy is dissipated to no purpose.
+The novelist, with a far wider range of effects at his command, and
+employing no special mechanism to bring them home to us, is much more
+free to select and to reject. He is exempt from the law of rigid economy
+to which the dramatist must submit. Far from being bound to do things in
+the most dramatic way, he often does wisely in rejecting that course, as
+unsuited to his medium. Fundamentally, no doubt, the same principle
+applies to both arts, but with a wholly different stringency in the case
+of the drama. &quot;Advisable&quot; in the novelist's vocabulary is translated by
+&quot;imperative&quot; in the dramatist's. The one is playing a long-drawn game,
+in which the loss of a trick or two need not prove fatal; the other has
+staked his all on a single rubber.</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 25%;">
+
+<p>Obligatory scenes of the first type--those necessitated by the inherent
+logic of the theme--can naturally arise only in plays to which a
+definite theme can be assigned. If we say that woman's claim to possess
+a soul of her own, even in marriage, is the theme of <i>A Doll's House</i>,
+then evidently the last great balancing of accounts between Nora and
+Helmer is an obligatory scene. It would have been quite possible for
+Ibsen to have completed the play without any such scene: he might, for
+instance, have let Nora fulfil her intention of drowning herself; but in
+that case his play would have been merely a tragic anecdote with the
+point omitted. We should have felt vague intimations of a general idea
+hovering in the air, but it would have remained undefined and
+undeveloped. As we review, however, the series of Ibsen's plays, and
+notice how difficult it is to point to any individual scene and say,
+&quot;This was clearly the <i>sc&egrave;ne &agrave; faire</i>,&quot; we feel that, though the phrase
+may express a useful idea in a conveniently brief form, there is no
+possibility of making the presence or absence of a <i>sc&egrave;ne &agrave; faire</i> a
+general test of dramatic merit. In <i>The Wild Duck</i>, who would not say
+that, theoretically, the scene in which Gregers opens Hialmar's eyes to
+the true history of his marriage was obligatory in the highest degree?
+Yet Ibsen, as a matter of fact, does not present it to us: he sends the
+two men off for &quot;a long walk&quot; together: and who does not feel that this
+is a stroke of consummate art? In <i>Rosmersholm</i>, as we know, he has
+been accused of neglecting, not merely the scene, but the play, <i>&agrave;
+faire</i>; but who will now maintain that accusation? In <i>John Gabriel
+Borhman</i>, if we define the theme as the clash of two devouring egoisms,
+Ibsen has, in the third act, given us the obligatory scene; but he has
+done it, unfortunately, with an enfeebled hand; whereas the first and
+second acts, though largely expository, and even (in the Foldal scene)
+episodic, rank with his greatest achievements.</p>
+
+<p>For abundant examples of scenes rendered obligatory by the logic of the
+theme, we have only to turn to the works of those remorseless
+dialecticians, MM. Hervieu and Brieux. In such a play as <i>La Course du
+Flambeau</i>, there is scarcely a scene that may not be called an
+obligatory deduction from the thesis duly enunciated, with no small
+parade of erudition, in the first ten minutes of the play. It is that,
+in handing on the <i>vital lampada</i>, as Plato and &quot;le bon po&egrave;te Lucr&egrave;ce&quot;
+express it, the love of the parent for the child becomes a devouring
+mania, to which everything else is sacrificed, while the love of the
+child for the parent is a tame and essentially selfish emotion,
+absolutely powerless when it comes into competition with the passions
+which are concerned with the transmission of the vital flame. This
+theorem having been stated, what is the first obligatory scene?
+Evidently one in which a mother shall refuse a second marriage, with a
+man whom she loves, because it would injure the prospects and wound the
+feelings of her adored daughter. Then, when the adored daughter herself
+marries, the mother must make every possible sacrifice for her, and the
+daughter must accept them all with indifference, as mere matters of
+course. But what is the final, triumphant proof of the theorem? Why, of
+course, the mother must kill her mother to save the daughter's life! And
+this ultra-obligatory scene M. Hervieu duly serves up to us.
+Marie-Jeanne (the daughter) is ordered to the Engadine; Sabine (the
+mother) is warned that Madame Fontenais (the grandmother) must not go to
+that altitude on pain of death; but, by a series of violently artificial
+devices, things are so arranged that Marie-Jeanne cannot go unless
+Madame Fontenais goes too; and Sabine, rather than endanger her
+daughter's recovery, does not hesitate to let her mother set forth,
+unwittingly, to her doom. In the last scene of all, Marie-Jeanne
+light-heartedly prepares to leave her mother and go off with her husband
+to the ends of the earth; Sabine learns that the man she loved and
+rejected for Marie-Jeanne's sake is for ever lost to her; and, to
+complete the demonstration, Madame Fontenais falls dead at her feet.
+These scenes are unmistakably <i>sc&egrave;nes &agrave; faire</i>, dictated by the logic of
+the theme; but they belong to a conception of art in which the free
+rhythms of life are ruthlessly sacrificed to the needs of a
+demonstration. Obligatory scenes of this order are mere diagrams drawn
+with ruler and compass--the obligatory illustrations of an extravagantly
+over-systematic lecture.</p>
+
+<p>M. Brieux in some of his plays (not in all) is no less logic-ridden than
+M. Hervieu. Take, for instance, <i>Les Trois Filles de M. Dupont</i>: every
+character is a term in a syllogism, every scene is dictated by an
+imperious craving for symmetry. The main theorem may be stated in some
+such terms as these: &quot;The French marriage system is immoral and
+abominable; yet the married woman is, on the whole, less pitiable than
+her unmarried sisters.&quot; In order to prove this thesis in due form, we
+begin at the beginning, and show how the marriage of Antonin Mairaut and
+Julie Dupont is brought about by the dishonest cupidity of the parents
+on both sides. The Duponts flatter themselves that they have cheated the
+Mairauts, the Mairauts that they have swindled the Duponts; while
+Antonin deliberately simulates artistic tastes to deceive Julie, and
+Julie as deliberately makes a show of business capacity in order to take
+in Antonin. Every scene between father and daughter is balanced by a
+corresponding scene between mother and son. Every touch of hypocrisy on
+the one side is scrupulously set off against a trait of dishonesty on
+the other. Julie's passion for children is emphasized, Antonin's
+aversion from them is underlined. But lest he should be accused of
+seeing everything in black, M. Brieux will not make the parents
+altogether detestable. Still holding the balance true, he lets M.
+Mairaut on the one side, and Madame Dupont on the other, develop amiable
+impulses, and protest, at a given moment, against the infamies committed
+and countenanced by their respective spouses. And in the second and
+third acts, the edifice of deception symmetrically built up in the first
+act is no less symmetrically demolished. The parents expose and denounce
+each other's villainies; Julie and Antonin, in a great scene of conjugal
+recrimination, lay bare the hypocrisies of allurement that have brought
+them together. Julie then determines to escape from the loathsome
+prison-house of her marriage; and this brings us to the second part of
+the theorem. The title shows that Julie has two sisters; but hitherto
+they have remained in the background. Why do they exist at all? Why has
+Providence blessed M. Dupont with &quot;three fair daughters and no more&quot;?
+Because Providence foresaw exactly the number M. Brieux would require
+for his demonstration. Are there not three courses open to a penniless
+woman in our social system--marriage, wage-earning industry, and
+wage-earning profligacy? Well, M. Dupont must have one daughter to
+represent each of these contingencies. Julie has illustrated the
+miseries of marriage; Caroline and Ang&egrave;le shall illustrate respectively
+the still greater miseries of unmarried virtue and unmarried vice. When
+Julie declares her intention of breaking away from the house of bondage,
+her sisters rise up symmetrically, one on either hand, and implore her
+rather to bear the ills she has than to fly to others that she knows not
+of. &quot;Symmetry of symmetries, all is symmetry&quot; in the poetics of M.
+Brieux. But life does not fall into such obvious patterns. The
+obligatory scene which is imposed upon us, not by the logic of life, but
+by the logic of demonstration, is not a <i>sc&egrave;ne &agrave; faire</i>, but a <i>sc&egrave;ne
+&agrave; fuir</i>.</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Bernard Shaw, in some sense the Brieux of the English theatre, is
+not a man to be dominated by logic, or by anything else under the sun.
+He has, however, given us one or two excellent examples of the
+obligatory scene in the true and really artistic sense of the term. The
+scene of Candida's choice between Eugene and Morell crowns the edifice
+of <i>Candida</i> as nothing else could. Given the characters and their
+respective attitudes towards life, this sententious thrashing-out of the
+situation was inevitable. So, too, in <i>Mrs. Warren's Profession</i>, the
+great scene of the second act between Vivie and her mother is a superb
+example of a scene imposed by the logic of the theme. On the other hand,
+in Mr. Henry Arthur Jones's finely conceived, though unequal, play,
+<i>Michael and his Lost Angel</i>, we miss what was surely an obligatory
+scene. The play is in fact a contest between the paganism of Audrie
+Lesden and the ascetic, sacerdotal idealism of Michael Feversham. In the
+second act, paganism snatches a momentary victory; and we confidently
+expect, in the third act, a set and strenuous effort on Audrie's part to
+break down in theory the ascetic ideal which has collapsed in practice.
+It is probable enough that she might not succeed in dragging her lover
+forth from what she regards as the prison-house of a superstition; but
+the logic of the theme absolutely demands that she should make the
+attempt. Mr. Jones has preferred to go astray after some comparatively
+irrelevant and commonplace matter, and has thus left his play
+incomplete. So, too, in <i>The Triumph of the Philistines</i>, Mr. Jones
+makes the mistake of expecting us to take a tender interest in a pair of
+lovers who have had never a love-scene to set our interest agoing. They
+are introduced to each other in the first act, and we shrewdly suspect
+(for in the theatre we are all inveterate match-makers) that they are
+going to fall in love; but we have not the smallest positive evidence of
+the fact before we find, in the second act, that misunderstandings have
+arisen, and the lady declines to look at the gentleman. The actress who
+played the part at the St. James's Theatre was blamed for failing to
+enlist our sympathies in this romance; but what actress can make much of
+a love part which, up to the very last moment, is all suspicion and
+jealousy? Fancy <i>Romeo and Juliet</i> with the love-scenes omitted, &quot;by
+special request!&quot;</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 25%;">
+
+<p>In a second class, according to our analysis, we place the obligatory
+scene which is imposed by &quot;the manifest exigencies of specifically
+dramatic effect.&quot; Here it must of course be noted that the conception of
+&quot;specifically dramatic effect&quot; varies in some degree, from age to age,
+from generation to generation, and even, one may almost say, from
+theatre to theatre. Scenes of violence and slaughter were banished from
+the Greek theatre, mainly, no doubt, because rapid movement was rendered
+difficult by the hieratic trappings of the actors, and was altogether
+foreign to the spirit of tragedy; but it can scarcely be doubted that
+the tragic poets were the less inclined to rebel against this
+convention, because they extracted &quot;specifically dramatic effects&quot; of a
+very high order out of their &quot;messenger-scenes.&quot; Even in the modern
+theatre we are thrilled by the description of Hippolytus dragged at his
+own chariot wheel, or Creusa and Creon devoured by Medea's veil of
+fire.<a name="FNanchor82"></a><a href="#Footnote_82"><sup>[82]</sup></a> On the Elizabethan stage, the murder of Agamemnon would no
+doubt have been &quot;subjected to our faithful eyes&quot; like the blinding of
+Gloucester or the suffocation of Edward II; but who shall say that there
+is less &quot;specifically dramatic effect&quot; in Aeschylus's method of
+mirroring the scene in the clairvoyant ecstasy of Cassandra? I am much
+inclined to think that the dramatic effect of highly emotional narrative
+is underrated in the modern theatre.</p>
+
+<p>Again, at one class of theatre, the author of a sporting play--is bound
+to exhibit a horse-race on the stage, or he is held to have shirked his
+obligatory scene. At another class of theatre, we shall have a scene,
+perhaps, in a box in the Grand Stand, where some Lady Gay Spanker shall
+breathlessly depict, from start to finish, the race which is visible to
+her, but invisible to the audience. At a third class of the theatre, the
+&quot;specifically dramatic effect&quot; to be extracted from a horse-race is
+found in a scene in a Black-Country slum, where a group of working-men
+and women are feverishly awaiting the evening paper which shall bring
+them the result of the St. Leger, involving for some of them
+opulence--to the extent, perhaps, of a &pound;5 note--and for others ruin.<a name="FNanchor83"></a><a href="#Footnote_83"><sup>[83]</sup></a></p>
+
+<p>The difficulty of deciding that any one form of scene is predestined by
+the laws of dramatic effect is illustrated in Tolstoy's grisly drama,
+<i>The Power of Darkness</i>. The scene in which Nikita kills Akoulina's
+child was felt to be too horrible for representation; whereupon the
+author wrote an alternative scene between Mitritch and Anna, which
+passes simultaneously with the murder scene, in an adjoining room. The
+two scenes fulfil exactly the same function in the economy of the play;
+it can be acted with either of them, it might be acted with both; and it
+is impossible to say which produces the intenser or more &quot;specifically
+dramatic effect.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>The fact remains, however, that there is almost always a dramatic and
+undramatic, a more dramatic and a less dramatic, way of doing a thing;
+and an author who allows us to foresee and expect a dramatic way of
+attaining a given end, and then chooses an undramatic or less dramatic
+way, is guilty of having missed the obligatory scene. For a general
+discussion of what we mean by the terms &quot;dramatic&quot; and &quot;undramatic&quot; the
+reader may refer back to Chapter III. Here I need only give one or two
+particular illustrations.</p>
+
+<p>It will be remembered that one of the <i>sc&egrave;nes &agrave; faire</i> which M. Sarcey
+foresaw in <i>Les Fourchambault</i> was the encounter between the two
+brothers; the illegitimate Bernard and the legitimate Leopold. It would
+have been quite possible, and quite natural, to let the action of the
+play work itself out without any such encounter; or to let the encounter
+take place behind the scenes; but this would have been a patent ignoring
+of dramatic possibilities, and M. Sarcey would have had ample reason to
+pour the vials of his wrath on Augier's head. He was right, however, in
+his confidence that Augier would not fail to &quot;make&quot; the scene. And how
+did he &quot;make&quot; it? The one thing inevitable about it was that the truth
+should be revealed to Leopold; but there were a dozen different ways in
+which that might have been effected. Perhaps, in real life, Bernard
+would have said something to this effect: &quot;Young man, you are making
+questionable advances to a lady in whom I am interested. I beg that you
+will cease to persecute her; and if you ask by what right I do so, I
+reply that I am in fact your elder brother, that I have saved our father
+from ruin, that I am henceforth the predominant partner in his business,
+and that, if you do not behave yourself, I shall see that your allowance
+is withdrawn, and that you have no longer the means to lead an idle and
+dissolute life.&quot; This would have been an ungracious but not unnatural
+way of going about the business. Had Augier chosen it, we should have
+had no right to complain on the score of probability; but it would have
+been evident to the least imaginative that he had left the specifically
+dramatic opportunities of the scene entirely undeveloped. Let us now see
+what he actually did. Marie Letellier, compromised by Leopold's conduct,
+has left the Fourchambault house and taken refuge with Mme. Bernard.
+Bernard loves her devotedly, but does not dream that she can see
+anything in his uncouth personality, and imagines that she loves
+Leopold. Accordingly, he determines that Leopold shall marry her, and
+tells him so. Leopold scoffs at the idea; Bernard insists; and little by
+little the conflict rises to a tone of personal altercation. At last
+Leopold says something slighting of Mile. Letellier, and Bernard--who,
+be it noted, has begun with no intention of revealing the kinship
+between them--loses his self-control and cries, &quot;Ah, there speaks the
+blood of the man who slandered a woman in order to prevent his son from
+keeping his word to her. I recognize in you your grandfather, who was a
+miserable calumniator.&quot; &quot;Repeat that word!&quot; says Leopold. Bernard does
+so, and the other strikes him across the face with his glove. For a
+perceptible interval Bernard struggles with his rage in silence, and
+then: &quot;It is well for you,&quot; he cries, &quot;that you are my brother!&quot;</p>
+
+<p>We need not follow the scene in the sentimental turning which it then
+takes, whereby it comes about, of course, that Bernard, not Leopold,
+marries Mile. Letellier. The point is that Augier has justified Sarcey's
+confidence by making the scene thoroughly and specifically dramatic; in
+other words, by charging it with emotion, and working up the tension to
+a very high pitch. And Sarcey was no doubt right in holding that this
+was what the whole audience instinctively expected, and that they would
+have been more or less consciously disappointed had the author baulked
+their expectation.</p>
+
+<p>An instructive example of the failure to &quot;make&quot; a dramatically
+obligatory scene may be found in <i>Agatha</i> by Mrs. Humphry Ward and Mr.
+Louis Parker. Agatha is believed to be the child of Sir Richard and Lady
+Fancourt; but at a given point she learns that a gentleman whom she has
+known all her life as &quot;Cousin Ralph&quot; is in reality her father. She has a
+middle-aged suitor, Colonel Ford, whom she is very willing to marry; but
+at the end of the second act she refuses him, because she shrinks from
+the idea, on the one hand, of concealing the truth from him, on the
+other hand, of revealing her mother's trespass. This is not, in itself,
+a very strong situation, for we feel the barrier between the lovers to
+be unreal. Colonel Ford is a man of sense. The secret of Agatha's
+parentage can make no real difference to him. Nothing material--no point
+of law or of honour--depends on it. He will learn the truth, and all
+will come right between them. The only point on which our interest can
+centre is the question how he is to learn the truth; and here the
+authors go very far astray. There are two, and only two, really dramatic
+ways in which Colonel Ford can be enlightened. Lady Fancourt must
+realize that Agatha is wrecking her life to keep her mother's secret,
+and must either herself reveal it to Colonel Ford, or must encourage and
+enjoin Agatha to do so. Now, the authors choose neither of these ways:
+the secret slips out, through a chance misunderstanding in a
+conversation between Sir Richard Fancourt and the Colonel. This is a
+typical instance of an error of construction; and why?--because it
+leaves to chance what should be an act of will. Drama means a thing
+done, not merely a thing that happens; and the playwright who lets
+accident effect what might naturally and probably be a result of
+volition, or, in other words, of character, sins against the fundamental
+law of his craft. In the case before us, Lady Fancourt and Agatha--the
+two characters on whom our interest is centred--are deprived of all
+share in one of the crucial moments of the action. Whether the actual
+disclosure was made by the mother or by the daughter, there ought to
+have been a great scene between the two, in which the mother should have
+insisted that, by one or other, the truth must be told. It would have
+been a painful, a delicate, a difficult scene, but it was the obligatory
+scene of the play; and had we been allowed clearly to foresee it at the
+end of the second act, our interest would have been decisively carried
+forward. The scene, too, might have given the play a moral relevance
+which in fact it lacks. The readjustment of Agatha's scheme of things,
+so as to make room for her mother's history, might have been made
+explicit and partly intellectual, instead of implicit, inarticulate and
+wholly emotional.</p>
+
+<p>This case, then, clearly falls under our second heading. We cannot say
+that it is the logic of the theme which demands the scene, for no thesis
+or abstract idea is enunciated. Nor can we say that the course of events
+is unnatural or improbable; our complaint is that, without being at all
+less natural, they might have been highly dramatic, and that in fact
+they are not so.</p>
+
+<p>In a very different type of play, we find another example of the
+ignoring of a dramatically obligatory scene. The author of that charming
+fantasy, <i>The Passing of the Third Floor Back</i>, was long ago guilty of a
+play named <i>The Rise of Dick Halward</i>, chiefly memorable for having
+elicited from Mr. Bernard Shaw one of the most brilliant pages in
+English dramatic criticism. The hero of this play, after an adventurous
+youth in Mexico, has gone to the bar, but gets no briefs, and is
+therefore unable to marry a lady who announces that no suitor need apply
+who has less than &pound;5000 a year. One fine day Dick receives from Mexico
+the will of an old comrade, which purports to leave to him, absolutely,
+half a million dollars, gold; but the will is accompanied by a letter,
+in which the old comrade states that the property is really left to him
+only in trust for the testator's long-lost son, whom Dick is enjoined to
+search out and endow with a capital which, at 5 per cent, represents
+accurately the desiderated &pound;5000 a year. As a matter of fact (but this
+is not to our present purpose), the long-lost son is actually, at that
+moment, sharing Dick's chambers in the Temple. Dick, however, does not
+know this, and cannot resist the temptation to destroy the old miner's
+letter, and grab the property. We know, of course, that retribution is
+bound to descend upon him; but does not dramatic effect imperatively
+require that, for a brief space at any rate, he should be seen--with
+whatever qualms of conscience his nature might dictate--enjoying his
+ill-gotten wealth? Mr. Jerome, however, baulks us of this just
+expectation. In the very first scene of the second act we find that the
+game is up. The deceased miner wrote his letter to Dick seated in the
+doorway of a hut; a chance photographer took a snap-shot at him; and on
+returning to England, the chance photographer has nothing more pressing
+to do than to chance upon the one man who knows the long-lost son, and
+to show him the photograph of the dying miner, whom he at once
+recognizes. By aid of a microscope, the letter he is writing can be
+deciphered, and thus Dick's fraud is brought home to him. Now one would
+suppose that an author who had invented this monstrous and staggering
+concatenation of chances, must hope to justify it by some highly
+dramatic situation, in the obvious and commonplace sense of the word. It
+is not difficult, indeed, to foresee such a situation, in which Dick
+Halward should be confronted, as if by magic, with the very words of the
+letter he has so carefully destroyed. I am far from saying that this
+scene would, in fact, have justified its amazing antecedents; but it
+would have shown a realization on the author's part that he must at any
+rate attempt some effect proportionate to the strain he had placed upon
+our credulity. Mr. Jerome showed no such realization. He made the man
+who handed Dick the copy of the letter explain beforehand how it had
+been obtained; so that Dick, though doubtless surprised and disgusted,
+was not in the least thunderstruck, and manifested no emotion. Here,
+then, Mr. Jerome evidently missed a scene rendered obligatory by the law
+of the maximum of specifically dramatic effect.</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 25%;">
+
+<p>The third, or structural, class of obligatory scenes may be more briefly
+dealt with, seeing that we have already, in the last chapter, discussed
+the principle involved. In this class we have placed, by definition,
+scenes which the author himself has rendered obligatory by seeming
+unmistakably to lead up to them--or, in other words, scenes indicated,
+or seeming to be indicated, by deliberately-planted finger-posts. It may
+appear as though the case of Dick Halward, which we have just been
+examining, in reality came under this heading. But it cannot actually be
+said that Mr. Jerome either did, or seemed to, point by finger-posts
+towards the obligatory scene. He rather appears to have been blankly
+unconscious of its possibility.</p>
+
+<p>We have noted in the foregoing chapter the unwisdom of planting
+misleading finger-posts; here we have only to deal with the particular
+case in which they seem to point to a definite and crucial scene. An
+example given by M. Sarcey himself will, I think, make the matter
+quite clear.</p>
+
+<p>M. Jules Lemaitre's play, <i>R&eacute;volt&eacute;e</i>, tells the story of a would-be
+intellectual, ill-conditioned young woman, married to a plain and
+ungainly professor of mathematics, whom she despises. We know that she
+is in danger of yielding to the fascinations of a seductive
+man-about-town; and having shown us this danger, the author proceeds to
+emphasize the manly and sterling character of the husband. He has the
+gentleness that goes with strength; but where his affections or his
+honour is concerned, he is not a man to be trifled with. This having
+been several times impressed upon us, we naturally expect that the wife
+is to be rescued by some striking manifestation of the husband's
+masterful virility. But no such matter! Rescued she is, indeed; but it
+is by the intervention of her half-brother, who fights a duel on her
+behalf, and is brought back wounded to restore peace to the
+mathematician's household: that man of science having been quite passive
+throughout, save for some ineffectual remonstrances. It happens that in
+this case we know just where the author went astray. Helene (the wife)
+is the unacknowledged daughter of a great lady, Mme. de Voves; and the
+subject of the play, as the author first conceived it, was the relation
+between the mother, the illegitimate daughter, and the legitimate son;
+the daughter's husband taking only a subordinate place. But Lemaitre
+chose as a model for the husband a man whom he had known and admired;
+and he allowed himself to depict in vivid colours his strong and
+sympathetic character, without noticing that he was thereby upsetting
+the economy of his play, and giving his audience reason to anticipate a
+line of development quite different from that which he had in mind.
+Inadvertently, in fact, he planted, not one, but two or three,
+misleading fingerposts.</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 25%;">
+
+<p>We come now to the fourth, or psychological, class of obligatory
+scenes--those which are &quot;required in order to justify some modification
+of character or alteration of will, too important to be taken
+for granted.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>An obvious example of an obligatory scene of this class may be found in
+the third act of <i>Othello</i>. The poet is bound to show us the process by
+which Iago instils his poison into Othello's mind. He has backed
+himself, so to speak, to make this process credible to us; and, by a
+masterpiece of dexterity and daring, he wins his wager. Had he omitted
+this scene--had he shown us Othello at one moment full of serene
+confidence, and at his next appearance already convinced of Desdemona's
+guilt--he would have omitted the pivot and turning--point of the whole
+structure. It may seem fantastic to conceive that any dramatist could
+blunder so grossly; but there are not a few plays in which we observe a
+scarcely less glaring hiatus.</p>
+
+<p>A case in point may be found in Lord Tennyson's <i>Becket</i>. I am not one
+of those who hold Tennyson merely contemptible as a dramatist. I believe
+that, had he taken to playwriting nearly half-a-century earlier, and
+studied the root principles of craftsmanship, instead of blindly
+accepting the Elizabethan conventions, he might have done work as fine
+in the mass as are the best moments of <i>Queen Mary</i> and <i>Harold</i>. As a
+whole, <i>Becket</i> is one of his weakest productions; but the Prologue and
+the first act would have formed an excellent first and third act for a
+play of wholly different sequel, had he interposed, in a second act, the
+obligatory scene required to elucidate Becket's character. The historic
+and psychological problem of Thomas Becket is his startling
+transformation from an easy-going, luxurious, worldly statesman into a
+gaunt ecclesiastic, fanatically fighting for the rights of his see, of
+his order, and of Rome. In any drama which professes to deal (as this
+does) with his whole career, the intellectual interest cannot but centre
+in an analysis of the forces that brought about this seeming new-birth
+of his soul. It would have been open to the poet, no doubt, to take up
+his history at a later point, when he was already the full-fledged
+clerical and ultramontane. But this Tennyson does not do. He is at pains
+to present to us the magnificent Chancellor, the bosom friend of the
+King, and mild reprover of his vices; and then, without the smallest
+transition, hey presto! he is the intransigent priest, bitterly
+combating the Constitutions of Clarendon. It is true that in the
+Prologue the poet places one or two finger-posts--small, conventional
+foreshadowings of coming trouble. For instance, the game of chess
+between King and Chancellor ends with a victory for Becket, who says--</p>
+
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&quot;You see my bishop<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;Hath brought your king to a standstill. You are beaten.&quot;<br>
+
+<p>The symbolical game of chess is a well-worn dramatic device. Becket,
+moreover, seems to feel some vague disquietude as to what may happen if
+he accepts the archbishopric; but there is nothing to show that he is
+conscious of any bias towards the intransigent clericalism of the later
+act. The character-problem, in fact, is not only not solved, but is
+ignored. The obligatory scene is skipped over, in the interval between
+the Prologue and the first act.</p>
+
+<p>One of the finest plays of our time--Sir Arthur Pinero's <i>Iris</i>--lacks,
+in my judgment, an obligatory scene. The character of Iris is admirably
+true, so far as it goes; but it is incomplete. The author seems to have
+evaded the crucial point of his play--the scene of her installation in
+Maldonado's flat. To perfect his psychological study, he was bound to
+bridge the chasm between the Iris of the third act and the Iris of the
+fourth. He builds two ends of the bridge, in the incident of the
+cheque-book at the close of the one act, and in the state of hebetude in
+which we find her at the opening of the other; but there remains a great
+gap at which the imagination boggles. The author has tried to throw a
+retrospective footway across it in Iris's confession to Trenwith in the
+fifth act; but I do not find that it quite meets the case. It would no
+doubt have been very difficult to keep the action within reasonable
+limits had a new act taken the place of the existing fourth; but Sir
+Arthur Pinero would probably have produced a completer work of art had
+he faced this difficulty, and contrived to compress into a single last
+act something like the matter of the existing fourth and fifth. It may
+be that he deliberately preferred that Iris should give in narrative the
+history of her decline; but I do not consider this a case in support of
+that slight plea for impassioned narrative which I ventured to put forth
+a few pages back. Her confession to Trenwith would have been far more
+dramatic and moving had it been about one-fourth part as long and
+one-fourth part as articulate.</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 25%;">
+
+<p>Of the scene imposed by history or legend it is unnecessary to say very
+much. We saw in Chapter IX that the theatre is not the place for
+expounding the results of original research, which cast a new light on
+historic character. It is not the place for whitewashing Richard III, or
+representing him as a man of erect and graceful figure. It is not the
+place for proving that Guy Fawkes was an earnest Presbyterian, that Nell
+Gwynn was a lady of the strictest morals, or that George Washington was
+incapable of telling the truth. The playwright who deals with Henry VIII
+is bound to present him, in the schoolboy's phrase, as &quot;a great
+widower.&quot; William the Silent must not be a chatterbox, Torquemada a
+humanitarian, Ivan the Terrible a conscientious opponent of capital
+punishment. And legend has its fixed points no less than history. In the
+theatre, indeed, there is little distinction between them: history is
+legend, and legend history. A dramatist may, if he pleases (though it is
+a difficult task), break wholly unfamiliar ground in the past; but where
+a historic legend exists he must respect it at his peril.</p>
+
+<p>From all this it is a simple deduction that where legend (historic or
+otherwise) associates a particular character with a particular scene
+that is by any means presentable on the stage, that scene becomes
+obligatory in a drama of which he is the leading figure. The fact that
+Shakespeare could write a play about King John, and say nothing about
+Runnymede and Magna Charta, shows that that incident in constitutional
+history had not yet passed into popular legend. When Sir Herbert Tree
+revived the play, he repaired the poet's omission by means of an
+inserted tableau. Even Shakespeare had not the hardihood to let Caesar
+fall without saying, &quot;The Ides of March are come&quot; and &quot;Et tu, Brute!&quot;
+Nero is bound to fiddle while Rome burns, or the audience will know the
+reason why.<a name="FNanchor84"></a><a href="#Footnote_84"><sup>[84]</sup></a> Historic criticism will not hear of the &quot;Thou hast
+conquered, Galilean!&quot; which legend attributes to Julian the Apostate;
+yet Ibsen not only makes him say it, but may almost be said to find in
+the phrase the keynote of his world-historic drama. Tristram and Iseult
+must drink a love-philtre or they are not Tristram and Iseult. It would
+be the extreme of paradox to write a Paolo-and-Francesca play and omit
+the scene of &quot;Quel giorno pi&ugrave; non vi leggemmo avante.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>The cases are not very frequent, however, in which an individual
+incident is thus imposed by history or legend. The practical point to be
+noted is rather that, when an author introduces a strongly-marked
+historical character, he must be prepared to give him at least one good
+opportunity of acting up to the character which legend--the best of
+evidence in the theatre--assigns to him. When such a personage is
+presented to us, it ought to be at his highest potency. We do not
+want to see--</p>
+
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&quot;From Marlborough's eyes the tears of dotage flow,<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;And Swift expire, a driveller and a show.&quot;<br>
+
+<p>If you deal with Napoleon, for instance, it is perfectly clear that he
+must dominate the stage. As soon as you bring in the name, the idea, of
+Napoleon Bonaparte, men have eyes and ears for nothing else; and they
+demand to see him, in a general way, acting up to their general
+conception of him. That was what Messrs. Lloyd Osbourne and Austin
+Strong forgot in their otherwise clever play, <i>The Exile</i>. It is useless
+to prove, historically, that at a given moment he was passive, supine,
+unconscious, while people around him were eagerly plotting his escape
+and restoration. That may have been so; but it is not what an audience
+wants to see. It wants to see Napoleon Napoleonizing. For anomalies and
+uncharacteristic episodes in Napoleon's career we must go to books; the
+playhouse is not the place for them. It is true that a dramatist like
+Mr. Bernard Shaw may, at his own risk and peril, set forth to give us a
+new reading of Caesar or of Napoleon, which may or may not be
+dramatically acceptable.<a name="FNanchor85"></a><a href="#Footnote_85"><sup>[85]</sup></a> But this is not what Messrs. Osbourne and
+Strong tried to do. Their Napoleon was the Napoleon of tradition--only
+he failed to act &quot;in a concatenation according.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>There are a few figures in history--and Napoleon is one of them--which
+so thrill the imagination that their mere name can dominate the stage,
+better, perhaps, than their bodily presence. In <i>L'Aiglon</i>, by M.
+Rostand, Napoleon is in fact the hero, though he lies dead in his
+far-off island, under the Southern Cross. Another such figure is Abraham
+Lincoln. In James Herne's sadly underrated play, <i>Griffith Davenport</i>,
+we were always conscious of &quot;Mr. Lincoln&quot; in the background; and the act
+in which Governor Morton of Indiana brought the President's instructions
+to Davenport might fairly be called an obligatory scene, inasmuch as it
+gave us the requisite sense of personal nearness to the master-spirit,
+without involving any risk of belittlement through imperfections of
+representation. There is a popular melodrama, passing in Palestine under
+the Romans, throughout the course of which we constantly feel the
+influence of a strange new prophet, unseen but wonder-working, who, if I
+remember rightly, is personally presented to us only in a final tableau,
+wherein he appears riding into Jerusalem amid the hosannas of the
+multitude. The execution of <i>Ben Hur</i> is crude and commonplace, but the
+conception is by no means inartistic. Historical figures of the highest
+rank may perhaps be best adumbrated in this fashion, with or without one
+personal appearance, so brief that there shall be no danger of
+anti-climax.</p>
+
+<p>The last paragraph reminds us that the accomplished playwright shows his
+accomplishment quite as much in his recognition and avoidance of the
+<i>sc&egrave;ne &agrave; ne pas faire</i> as in his divination of the obligatory scene.
+There is always the chance that no one may miss a scene demanded by
+logic or psychology; but an audience knows too well when it has been
+bored or distressed by a superfluous, or inconsequent, or wantonly
+painful scene.</p>
+
+<p>Some twenty years ago, in criticizing a play named <i>Le Ma&icirc;tre d'Armes</i>,
+M. Sarcey took the authors gravely to task, in the name of &quot;Aristotle
+and common sense,&quot; for following the modern and reprehensible tendency
+to present &quot;slices of life&quot; rather than constructed and developed
+dramas. Especially he reproached them with deliberately omitting the
+<i>sc&egrave;ne &agrave; faire</i>. A young lady is seduced, he says, and, for the sake of
+her child, implores her betrayer to keep his promise of marriage. He
+renews the promise, without the slightest intention of fulfilling it,
+and goes on board his yacht in order to make his escape. She discovers
+his purpose and follows him on board the yacht. &quot;What is the scene,&quot;
+asks M. Sarcey--here I translate literally--&quot;which you expect, you, the
+public? It is the scene between the abandoned fair one and her seducer.
+The author may make it in a hundred ways, but make it he must!&quot; Instead
+of which, the critic proceeds, we are fobbed off with a storm-scene, a
+rescue, and other sensational incidents, and hear no word of what passes
+between the villain and his victim. Here, I think, M. Sarcey is mistaken
+in his application of his pet principle. Words cannot express our
+unconcern as to what passes between the heroine and the villain on board
+the yacht--nay, more, our gratitude for being spared that painful and
+threadbare scene of recrimination. The plot demands, observe, that the
+villain shall not relent. We know quite well that he cannot, for if he
+did the play would fall to pieces. Why, then, should we expect or demand
+a sordid squabble which can lead to nothing? We--and by &quot;we&quot; I mean the
+public which relishes such plays--cannot possibly have any keen appetite
+for copious re-hashes of such very cold mutton as the appeals of the
+penitent heroine to the recalcitrant villain. And the moral seems to be
+that in this class of play--the drama, if one may call it so, of
+foregone character--the <i>sc&egrave;ne &agrave; faire</i> is precisely the scene to
+be omitted.</p>
+
+<p>In plays of a more ambitious class, skill is often shown by the
+indication, in place of the formal presentment, even of an important
+scene which the audience may, or might, have expected to witness in
+full. We have already noted such a case in <i>The Wild Duck</i>: Ibsen knew
+that what we really required to witness was not the actual process of
+Gregers's disclosure to Hialmar, but its effects. A small, but quite
+noticeable, example of a scene thus rightly left to the imagination
+occurred in Mr. Somerset Maugham's first play, <i>A Man of Honour</i>. In the
+first act, Jack Halliwell, his wife, and his sister-in-law call upon his
+friend Basil Kent. The sister-in-law, Hilda Murray, is a rich widow; and
+she and Kent presently go out on the balcony together and are lost to
+view. Then it appears, in a scene between the Halliwells, that they
+fully believe that Kent is in love with Mrs. Murray and is now proposing
+to her. But when the two re-enter from the balcony, it is evident from
+their mien that, whatever may have passed between them, they are not
+affianced lovers; and we presently learn that though Kent is in fact
+strongly attracted to Mrs. Murray, he considers himself bound in honour
+to marry a certain Jenny Bush, a Fleet Street barmaid, with whom he has
+become entangled. Many playwrights would, so to speak, have dotted the
+i's of the situation by giving us the scene between Kent and Mrs.
+Murray; but Mr. Maugham has done exactly right in leaving us to divine
+it. We know all that, at this point, we require to know of the relation
+between them; to have told us more would have been to anticipate and
+discount the course of events.</p>
+
+<p>A more striking instance of a scene rightly placed behind the scenes
+occurs in M. de Curel's terrible drama <i>Les Fossiles</i>. I need not go
+into the singularly unpleasing details of the plot. Suffice it to say
+that a very peculiar condition of things exists in the family of the Duc
+de Chantemelle. It has been fully discussed in the second act between
+the Duke and his daughter Claire, who has been induced to accept it for
+the sake of the family name. But a person more immediately concerned is
+Robert de Chantemelle, the only son of the house--will he also accept it
+quietly? A nurse, whoù is acquainted with the black secret, misbehaves
+herself, and is to be packed off. As she is a violent woman, Robert
+insists on dismissing her himself, and leaves the room to do so. The
+rest of the family are sure that, in her rage, she will blurt out the
+whole story; and they wait, in breathless anxiety, for Robert's return.
+What follows need not be told: the point is that this scene--the scene
+of tense expectancy as to the result of a crisis which is taking place
+in another room of the same house--is really far more dramatic than the
+crisis itself would be. The audience already knows all that the angry
+virago can say to her master; and of course no discussion of the merits
+of the case is possible between these two. Therefore M. de Curel is
+conspicuously right in sparing us the scene of vulgar violence, and
+giving us the scene of far higher tension in which Robert's father, wife
+and sister expect his return, their apprehension deepening with every
+moment that he delays.</p>
+
+<p>We see, then, that there is such a thing as a false <i>sc&egrave;ne &agrave; faire</i>--a
+scene which at first sight seems obligatory, but is in fact much better
+taken for granted. It may be absolutely indispensable that it should be
+suggested to the mind of the audience, but neither indispensable nor
+advisable that it should be presented to their eyes. The judicious
+playwright will often ask himself, &quot;Is it the actual substance of this
+scene that I require, or only its repercussion?&quot;</p>
+
+
+<br><br><hr style="width: 35%;"><br><br>
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_XIV"></a>CHAPTER XIV</h2>
+
+<p>THE PERIPETY</p>
+<br>
+
+<p>In the Greek theatre, as every one knows, the <i>peripeteia</i> or reversal
+of fortune--the turning of the tables, as we might say--was a
+clearly-defined and recognized portion of the dramatic organism. It was
+often associated with the <i>anagnorisis</i> or recognition. Mr. Gilbert
+Murray has recently shown cause for believing that both these dramatic
+&quot;forms&quot; descended from the ritual in which Greek drama took its
+origin--the ritual celebrating the death and resurrection of the season
+of &quot;mellow fruitfulness.&quot; If this theory be true, the <i>peripeteia</i> was
+at first a change from sorrow to joy--joy in the rebirth of the
+beneficent powers of nature. And to this day a sudden change from gloom
+to exhilaration is a popular and effective incident--as when, at the end
+of a melodrama, the handcuffs are transferred from the wrists of the
+virtuous naval lieutenant to those of the wicked baronet, and, through
+the disclosure of a strawberry-mark on his left arm, the lieutenant is
+recognized as the long-lost heir to a dukedom and &pound;50,000 a year.</p>
+
+<p>But when, as soon happened in Greece, the forms appropriate to a
+celebration of the death and resurrection of Dionysus came to be blent
+with the tomb-ritual of a hero, the term <i>peripeteia</i> acquired a special
+association with a sudden decline from prosperity into adversity. In the
+Middle Ages, this was thought to be the very essence and meaning of
+tragedy, as we may see from Chaucer's lines:</p>
+
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&quot;Tragedie is to seyn a certeyn storie,<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;As old&euml; bok&euml;s maken us memorie,<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;Of him that stood in gret prosperitee,<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;And is y-fallen out of heigh degree<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;Into miserie, and endeth wrecchedly.&quot;<br>
+
+<p>Aristotle cites a good instance of a peripety--to Anglicize the
+word--&quot;where, in the <i>Lynceus</i>, the hero is led away to execution,
+followed by Danaus as executioner; but, as the effect of the
+antecedents, Danaus is executed and Lynceus escapes.&quot; But here, as in so
+many other contexts, we must turn for the classic example to the
+<i>Oedipus Rex</i>. Jocasta, hearing from the Corinthian stranger that
+Polybus, King of Corinth, the reputed father of Oedipus, is dead, sends
+for her husband to tell him that the oracle which doomed him to
+parricide is defeated, since Polybus has died a natural death. Oedipus
+exults in the news and triumphs over the oracles; but, as the scene
+proceeds, the further revelations made by the same stranger lead Jocasta
+to recognize in Oedipus her own child, who was exposed on Mount
+Kithairon; and, in the subsequent scene, the evidence of the old
+Shepherd brings Oedipus himself to the same crushing realization. No
+completer case of <i>anagnorisis</i> and <i>peripeteia</i> could well be
+conceived--whatever we may have to say of the means by which it is
+led up to.<a name="FNanchor86"></a><a href="#Footnote_86"><sup>[86]</sup></a></p>
+
+<p>Has the conception of the peripety, as an almost obligatory element in
+drama, any significance for the modern playwright? Obligatory, of
+course, it cannot be: it is easy to cite a hundred admirable plays in
+which it is impossible to discover anything that can reasonably be
+called a peripety. But this, I think, we may safely say: the dramatist
+is fortunate who finds in the development of his theme, without
+unnatural strain or too much preparation, opportunity for a great scene,
+highly-wrought, arresting, absorbing, wherein one or more of his
+characters shall experience a marked reversal either of inward
+soul-state or of outward fortune. The theory of the peripety, in short,
+practically resolves itself for us into the theory of the &quot;great scene,&quot;
+Plays there are, many and excellent plays, in which some one scene
+stands out from all the rest, impressing itself with peculiar vividness
+on the spectator's mind; and, nine times out of ten, this scene will be
+found to involve a peripety. It can do no harm, then, if the playwright
+should ask himself: &quot;Can I, without any undue sacrifice, so develop my
+theme as to entail upon my leading characters, naturally and probably,
+an experience of this order?&quot;</p>
+
+<p>The peripeties of real life are frequent, though they are apt to be too
+small in scale, or else too fatally conclusive, to provide material for
+drama. One of the commonest, perhaps, is that of the man who enters a
+physician's consulting-room to seek advice in some trifling ailment, and
+comes out again, half an hour later, doomed either to death or to some
+calamity worse than death. This situation has been employed, not
+ineffectively, by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, in the first act of a romantic
+drama, <i>The Fires of Fate</i>; but it is very difficult to find any
+dramatic sequel to a peripety involving mere physical disaster.<a name="FNanchor87"></a><a href="#Footnote_87"><sup>[87]</sup></a> The
+moral peripety--the sudden dissipation of some illusion, or defeat of
+some imposture, or crumbling of some castle in the air--is a no less
+characteristic incident of real life, and much more amenable to the
+playwright's uses. Certainly there are few things more impressive in
+drama than to see a man or woman--or a man and woman--come upon the
+stage, radiant, confident, assured that<br>
+<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&quot;God's in his heaven,<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;All's right with the world,&quot;<br>
+<br>
+and leave it crushed and desperate, after a gradual and yet swift
+descent into Avernus. Such a scene is of the very marrow of drama. It is
+a play within a play; a concentrated, quintessentiated crisis.</p>
+
+<p>In the third act of <i>Othello</i> we have a peripety handled with consummate
+theatrical skill. To me--I confess it with bated breath--the
+craftsmanship seems greatly superior to the psychology. Othello, when we
+look into it, succumbs with incredible facility to Iago's poisoned
+pin-pricks; but no audience dreams of looking into it; and there lies
+the proof of Shakespeare's technical mastery. In the Trial Scene in <i>The
+Merchant of Venice</i> we have another great peripety. It illustrates the
+obvious principle that, where the drama consists in a conflict between
+two persons or parties, the peripety is generally a double one--the
+sudden collapse of Shylock's case implying an equally sudden restoration
+of Antonio's fortunes. Perhaps the most striking peripety in Ibsen is
+Stockmann's fall from jubilant self-confidence to defiant impotence in
+the third act of <i>An Enemy of the People</i>. Thinking that he has the
+&quot;compact majority&quot; at his back, he assumes the Burgomaster's insignia of
+office, and lords it over his incensed brother, only to learn, by blow
+on blow of disillusionment, that &quot;the compact majority&quot; has ratted, that
+he is to be deprived of his position and income, and that the commonest
+freedom of speech is to be denied him. In <i>A Doll's House</i> there are two
+peripeties: Nora's fall from elation to despair in the first scene with
+Krogstad, and the collapse of Helmer's illusions in the last scene
+of all.</p>
+
+<p>A good instance of the &quot;great scene&quot; which involves a marked peripety
+occurs in Sardou's <i>Dora</i>, once famous in England under the title of
+<i>Diplomacy</i>. The &quot;scene of the three men&quot; shows how T&eacute;kli, a Hungarian
+exile, calls upon his old friend Andr&eacute; de Maurillac, on the day of
+Andr&eacute;'s marriage, and congratulates him on having eluded the wiles of a
+dangerous adventuress, Dora de Rio-Zar&egrave;s, by whom he had once seemed to
+be attracted. But it is precisely Dora whom Andr&eacute; has married; and,
+learning this, T&eacute;kli tries to withdraw, or minimize, his imputation. For
+a moment a duel seems imminent; but Andr&eacute;'s friend, Favrolles, adjures
+him to keep his head; and the three men proceed to thrash the matter out
+as calmly as possible, with the result that, in the course of
+half-an-hour or so, it seems to be proved beyond all doubt that the
+woman Andr&eacute; adores, and whom he has just married, is a treacherous spy,
+who sells to tyrannical foreign governments the lives of political
+exiles and the honour of the men who fall into her toils. The crushing
+suspicion is ultimately disproved, by one of the tricks in which Sardou
+delighted; but that does not here concern us. Artificial as are its
+causes and its consequences, the &quot;scene of the three men,&quot; while it
+lasts, holds us breathless and absorbed; and Andr&eacute;'s fall from the
+pinnacle of happiness to the depth of misery, is a typical peripety.</p>
+
+<p>Equally typical and infinitely more tragic is another postnuptial
+peripety--the scene of the mutual confession of Angel Clare and Tess in
+Mr. Hardy's great novel. As it stands on the printed page, this scene is
+a superb piece of drama. Its greatness has been obscured in the English
+theatre by the general unskilfulness of the dramatic version presented.
+One magnificent scene does not make a play. In America, on the other
+hand, the fine acting of Mrs. Fiske secured popularity for a version
+which was, perhaps, rather better than that which we saw in England.</p>
+
+<p>I have said that dramatic peripeties are not infrequent in real life;
+and their scene, as is natural, is often laid in the law courts. It is
+unnecessary to recall the awful &quot;reversal of fortune&quot; that overtook one
+of the most brilliant of modern dramatists. About the same period,
+another drama of the English courts ended in a startling and terrible
+peripety. A young lady was staying as a guest with a half-pay officer
+and his wife. A valuable pearl belonging to the hostess disappeared; and
+the hostess accused her guest of having stolen it. The young lady, who
+had meanwhile married, brought an action for slander against her quondam
+friend. For several days the case continued, and everything seemed to be
+going in the plaintiff's favour. Major Blank, the defendant's husband,
+was ruthlessly cross-examined by Sir Charles Russell, afterwards Lord
+Chief Justice of England, with a view to showing that he was the real
+thief. He made a very bad witness, and things looked black against him.
+The end was nearing, and every one anticipated a verdict in the
+plaintiff's favour, when there came a sudden change of scene. The stolen
+pearl had been sold to a firm of jewellers, who had recorded the numbers
+of the Bank of England notes with which they paid for it. One of these
+notes was produced in court, and lo! it was endorsed with the name of
+the plaintiff.<a name="FNanchor88"></a><a href="#Footnote_88"><sup>[88]</sup></a> In a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, the whole
+edifice of mendacity and perjury fell to pieces. The thief was arrested
+and imprisoned; but the peripety for her was less terrible than for her
+husband, who had married her in chivalrous faith in her innocence.</p>
+
+<p>Would it have been--or may it some day prove to be--possible to transfer
+this &quot;well-made&quot; drama of real life bodily to the stage? I am inclined
+to think not. It looks to me very much like one of those &quot;blind alley&quot;
+themes of which mention has been made. There is matter, indeed, for most
+painful drama in the relations of the husband and wife, both before and
+after the trial; but, from the psychological point of view, one can see
+nothing in the case but a distressing and inexplicable anomaly.<a name="FNanchor89"></a><a href="#Footnote_89"><sup>[89]</sup></a> At
+the same time, the bare fact of the sudden and tremendous peripety is
+irresistibly dramatic; and Mr. Henry Arthur Jones has admitted that it
+suggested to him the great scene of the unmasking of Felicia Hindemarsh
+in <i>Mrs. Dane's Defence.</i></p>
+
+<p>It is instructive to note the delicate adjustment which Mr. Jones found
+necessary in order to adapt the theme to dramatic uses. In the first
+place, not wishing to plunge into the depths of tragedy, he left the
+heroine unmarried, though on the point of marriage. In the second place,
+he made the blot on her past, not a theft followed by an attempt to
+shift the guilt on to other shoulders, but an error of conduct, due to
+youth and inexperience, serious in itself, but rendered disastrous by
+tragic consequences over which she, Felicia, had no control. Thus Mr.
+Jones raised a real and fairly sufficient obstacle between his lovers,
+without rendering his heroine entirely unsympathetic, or presenting her
+in the guise of a bewildering moral anomaly. Thirdly, he transferred the
+scene of the peripety from a court of justice, with its difficult
+adjuncts and tedious procedure, to the private study of a great lawyer.
+At the opening of the scene between Mrs. Dane and Sir Daniel Carteret,
+she is, no doubt, still anxious and ill-at-ease, but reasonably
+confident of having averted all danger of exposure. Sir Daniel, too
+(like Sir Charles Russell in the pearl suit), is practically convinced
+of her innocence. He merely wants to get the case absolutely clear, for
+the final confounding of her accusers. At first, all goes smoothly. Mrs.
+Dane's answers to his questions are pat and plausible. Then she makes a
+single, almost imperceptible, slip of the tongue: she says, &quot;We had
+governesses,&quot; instead of &quot;I had governesses.&quot; Sir Daniel pricks up his
+ears: &quot;We? You say you were an only child. Who's we?&quot; &quot;My cousin and I,&quot;
+she answers. Sir Daniel thinks it odd that he has not heard of this
+cousin before; but he continues his interrogatory without serious
+suspicion. Then it occurs to him to look up, in a topographical
+dictionary, the little town of Tawhampton, where Mrs. Dane spent her
+youth. He reads the bald account of it, ending thus, &quot;The living is a
+Vicarage, net yearly value &pound;376, and has been held since 1875 by&quot;--and
+he turns round upon her--&quot;by the Rev. Francis Hindemarsh! Hindemarsh?&quot;</p>
+
+&nbsp;&nbsp;Mrs. Dane: He was my uncle.<br>
+
+&nbsp;&nbsp;Sir Daniel: Your uncle?<br>
+
+&nbsp;&nbsp;Mrs. Dane: Sir Daniel, I've done wrong to hide from you that Felicia<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;Hindemarsh was my cousin.<br>
+
+&nbsp;&nbsp;Sir Daniel: Felicia Hindemarsh was your cousin!<br>
+
+&nbsp;&nbsp;Mrs. Dane: Can't you understand why I have hidden it? The whole<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;affair was so terrible.<br>
+
+<p>And so she stumbles on, from one inevitable admission to another, until
+the damning truth is clear that she herself is Felicia Hindemarsh, the
+central, though not the most guilty, figure in a horrible scandal.</p>
+
+<p>This scene is worthy of study as an excellent type of what may be called
+the judicial peripety, the crushing cross-examination, in which it is
+possible to combine the tension of the detective story with no small
+psychological subtlety. In Mr. Jones's scene, the psychology is obvious
+enough; but it is an admirable example of nice adjustment without any
+obtrusive ingenuity. The whole drama, in short, up to the last act is,
+in the exact sense of the word, a well-made play--complex yet clear,
+ingenious yet natural. In the comparative weakness of the last act we
+have a common characteristic of latter-day drama, which will have to be
+discussed in due course.</p>
+
+<p>In this case we have a peripety of external fortune. For a
+clearly-marked moral peripety we may turn to the great scene between
+Vivie and her mother in the second act of <i>Mrs. Warren's Profession.</i>
+Whatever may be thought of the matter of this scene, its movement is
+excellent. After a short, sharp opening, which reveals to Mrs. Warren
+the unfilial dispositions of her daughter, and reduces her to whimpering
+dismay, the following little passage occurs:</p>
+
+&nbsp;&nbsp;Mrs. Warren: You're very rough with me, Vivie.<br>
+
+&nbsp;&nbsp;Vivie: Nonsense. What about bed? It's past ten.<br>
+
+&nbsp;&nbsp;Mrs. Warren (passionately): What's the use of my going to bed? Do<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;you think I could sleep?<br>
+
+&nbsp;&nbsp;Vivie: Why not? I shall.<br>
+
+<p>Then the mother turns upon the daughter's stony self-righteousness, and
+pours forth her sordid history in such a way as to throw a searchlight
+on the conditions which make such histories possible; until, exhausted
+by her outburst, she says, &quot;Oh, dear! I do believe I am getting sleepy
+after all,&quot; and Vivie replies, &quot;I believe it is I who will not be able
+to sleep now.&quot; Mr. Shaw, we see, is at pains to emphasize his peripety.</p>
+
+<p>Some &quot;great scenes&quot; consist, not of one decisive turning of the tables,
+but of a whole series of minor vicissitudes of fortune. Such a scene is
+the third act of <i>The Gay Lord Quex</i>, a prolonged and thrilling duel, in
+which Sophy Fullgarney passes by degrees from impertinent exultation to
+abject surrender and then springs up again to a mood of reckless
+defiance. In the &quot;great scene&quot; of <i>The Thunderbolt</i>, on the other
+hand--the scene of Thaddeus's false confession of having destroyed his
+brother's will--though there is, in fact, a great peripety, it is not
+that which attracts and absorbs our interest. All the greedy Mortimore
+family fall from the height of jubilant confidence in their new-found
+wealth to the depth of disappointment and exasperation. But this is not
+the aspect of the scene which grips and moves us. Our attention is
+centred on Thaddeus's struggle to take his wife's misdeed upon himself;
+and his failure cannot be described as a peripety, seeing that it sinks
+him only one degree lower in the slough of despair. Like the scene in
+Mrs. Dane's Defence, this is practically a piece of judicial drama--a
+hard-fought cross-examination. But as there is no reversal of fortune
+for the character in whom we are chiefly interested, it scarcely ranks
+as a scene of peripety.<a name="FNanchor90"></a><a href="#Footnote_90"><sup>[90]</sup></a></p>
+
+<p>Before leaving this subject, we may note that a favourite effect of
+romantic drama is an upward reversal of fortune through the
+recognition--the <i>anagnorisis</i>--of some great personage in disguise.
+Victor Hugo excelled in the superb gestures appropriate to such a scene:
+witness the passage in <i>Hernani</i>, before the tomb of Charlemagne, where
+the obscure bandit claims the right to take his place at the head of the
+princes and nobles whom the newly-elected Emperor has ordered off to
+execution:</p>
+
+&nbsp;&nbsp;Hernani:<br>
+
+&nbsp;&nbsp;Dieu qui donne le sceptre et qui te le donna<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;M'a fait duc de Segorbe et duc de Cardona,<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;Marquis de Monroy, comte Albat&eacute;ra, vicomte<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;De Gor, seigneur de lieux dont j'ignore le compte.<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;Je suis Jean d'Aragon, grand ma&icirc;tre d'Avis, n&eacute;<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;Dans l'exil, fils proscrit d'un p&egrave;re assassin&eacute;<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;Par sentence du tien, roi Carlos de Castille.<br>
+
+<hr style="width: 25%;">
+
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; (<i>Aux autres conjur&eacute;s</i>)<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;Couvrons nous, grands d'Espagnol<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; (<i>Tous les Espagnols se couvrent</i>)<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; Oui, nos t&ecirc;tes, &ocirc; roi!<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;Ont le droit de tomber couvertes devant toi!<br>
+
+<p>An effective scene of this type occurs in <i>Monsieur Beaucaire</i>, where
+the supposed hairdresser is on the point of being ejected with contumely
+from the pump-room at Bath, when the French Ambassador enters, drops on
+his knee, kisses the young man's hand, and presents him to the astounded
+company as the Duc d'Orl&eacute;ans, Comte de Valois, and I know not what
+besides--a personage who immeasurably outshines the noblest of his
+insulters. Quieter, but not less telling, is the peripety in <i>The Little
+Father of the Wilderness</i>, by Messrs. Lloyd Osbourne and Austin Strong.
+The P&egrave;re Marlotte, who, by his heroism and self-devotion, has added vast
+territories to the French possessions in America, is summoned to the
+court of Louis XV, and naturally concludes that the king has heard of
+his services and wishes to reward them. He finds, on the contrary, that
+he is wanted merely to decide a foolish bet; and he is treated with the
+grossest insolence and contempt. Just as he is departing in humiliation,
+the Governor-General of Canada arrives, with a suite of officers and
+Indians. The moment they are aware of Pere Marlotte's presence, they all
+kneel to him and pay him deeper homage than they have paid to the king,
+who accepts the rebuke and joins in their demonstration.</p>
+
+<p>A famous peripety of the romantic order occurs in <i>H.M.S. Pinafore</i>,
+where, on the discovery that Captain Corcoran and Ralph Rackstraw have
+been changed at birth, Ralph instantly becomes captain of the ship,
+while the captain declines into an able-bodied seaman. This is one of
+the instances in which the idealism of art ekes out the imperfections
+of reality.</p>
+
+
+
+<br><br><hr style="width: 35%;"><br><br>
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_XV"></a>CHAPTER XV</h2>
+
+<p>PROBABILITY, CHANCE, AND COINCIDENCE</p>
+<br>
+
+<p>Aristotle indulges in an often-quoted paradox to the effect that, in
+drama, the probable impossible is to be preferred to the improbable
+possible. With all respect, this seems to be a somewhat cumbrous way of
+stating the fact that plausibility is of more importance on the stage
+than what may be called demonstrable probability. There is no time, in
+the rush of a dramatic action, for a mathematical calculation of the
+chances for and against a given event, or for experimental proof that
+such and such a thing can or cannot be done. If a thing seem plausible,
+an audience will accept it without cavil; if it, seem incredible on the
+face of it, no evidence of its credibility will be of much avail. This
+is merely a corollary from the fundamental principle that the stage is
+the realm of appearances; not of realities, where paste jewels are at
+least as effective as real ones, and a painted forest is far more sylvan
+than a few wilted and drooping saplings, insecurely planted upon
+the boards.</p>
+
+<p>That is why an improbable or otherwise inacceptable incident cannot be
+validly defended on the plea that it actually happened: that it is on
+record in history or in the newspapers. In the first place, the
+dramatist can never put it on the stage as it happened. The bare fact
+may be historical, but it is not the bare fact that matters. The
+dramatist cannot restore it to its place in that intricate plexus of
+cause and effect, which is the essence and meaning of reality. He can
+only give his interpretation of the fact; and one knows not how to
+calculate the chances that his interpretation may be a false one. But
+even if this difficulty could be overcome; if the dramatist could prove
+that he had reproduced the event with photographic and cinematographic
+accuracy, his position would not thereby be improved. He would still
+have failed in his peculiar task, which is precisely that of
+interpretation. Not truth, but verisimilitude, is his aim; for the stage
+is the realm of appearances, in which intrusive realities become unreal.
+There are, as I have said, incalculable chances to one that the
+playwright's version of a given event will not coincide with that of the
+Recording Angel: but it may be true and convincing in relation to human
+nature in general, in which case it will belong to the sphere of great
+art; or, on a lower level, it may be agreeable and entertaining without
+being conspicuously false to human nature, in which case it will do no
+harm, since it makes no pretence to historic truth. It may be objected
+that the sixteenth-century public, and even, in the next century, the
+great Duke of Marlborough, got their knowledge of English history from
+Shakespeare, and the other writers of chronicle-plays. Well, I leave it
+to historians to determine whether this very defective and, in great
+measure, false vision of the past was better or worse than none. The
+danger at any rate, if danger there was, is now past and done with. Even
+our generals no longer go to the theatre or to the First Folio for their
+history. The dramatist may, with an easy conscience, interpret historic
+fact in the light of his general insight into human nature, so long as
+he does not so falsify the recorded event that common knowledge cries
+out against him.<a name="FNanchor91"></a><a href="#Footnote_91"><sup>[91]</sup></a></p>
+
+<p>Plausibility, then, not abstract or concrete probability, and still less
+literal faithfulness to recorded fact, is what the dramatist is bound to
+aim at. To understand this as a belittling of his art is to
+misunderstand the nature of art in general. The plausibility of bad art
+is doubtless contemptible and may be harmful. But to say that good art
+must be plausible is only to say that not every sort of truth, or every
+aspect of truth, is equally suitable for artistic representation--or, in
+more general terms, that the artist, without prejudice to his allegiance
+to nature, must respect the conditions of the medium in which he works.</p>
+
+<p>Our standards of plausibility, however, are far from being invariable.
+To each separate form of art, a different standard is applicable. In
+what may roughly be called realistic art, the terms plausible and
+probable are very nearly interchangeable. Where the dramatist appeals to
+the sanction of our own experience and knowledge, he must not introduce
+matter against which our experience and knowledge cry out. A very small
+inaccuracy in a picture which is otherwise photographic will often have
+a very disturbing effect. In plays of society in particular, the
+criticism &quot;No one does such things,&quot; is held by a large class of
+playgoers to be conclusive and destructive. One has known people despise
+a play because Lady So-and-so's manner of speaking to her servants was
+not what they (the cavillers) were accustomed to. On the other hand, one
+has heard a whole production highly applauded because the buttons on a
+particular uniform were absolutely right. This merely means that when an
+effort after literal accuracy is apparent, the attention of the audience
+seizes on the most trifling details and is apt to magnify their
+importance. Niceties of language in especial are keenly, and often
+unjustly, criticized. If a particular expression does not happen to be
+current in the critic's own circle, he concludes that nobody uses it,
+and that the author is a pedant or a vulgarian. In view of this
+inevitable tendency, the prudent dramatist will try to keep out of his
+dialogue expressions that are peculiar to his own circle, and to use
+only what may be called everybody's English, or the language undoubtedly
+current throughout the whole class to which his personage belongs.</p>
+
+<p>It may be here pointed out that there are three different planes on
+which plausibility may or may not, be achieved. There is first the
+purely external plane, which concerns the producer almost as much as the
+playwright. On this plane we look for plausibility of costume, of
+manners, of dialect, of general environment. Then we have plausibility
+of what may be called uncharacteristic event--of such events as are
+independent of the will of the characters, and are not conditioned by
+their psychology. On this plane we have to deal with chance and
+accident, coincidence, and all &quot;circumstances over which we have no
+control.&quot; For instance, the playwright who makes the &quot;Marseillaise&quot;
+become popular throughout Paris within half-an-hour of its having left
+the composer's desk, is guilty of a breach of plausibility on this
+plane. So, too, if I were to make my hero enter Parliament for the first
+time, and rise in a single session to be Prime Minister of
+England--there would be no absolute impossibility in the feat, but it
+would be a rather gross improbability of the second order. On the third
+plane we come to psychological plausibility, the plausibility of events
+dependent mainly or entirely on character. For example--to cite a much
+disputed instance--is it plausible that Nora, in <i>A Doll's House</i>,
+should suddenly develop the mastery of dialectics with which she crushes
+Helmer in the final scene, and should desert her husband and children,
+slamming the door behind her?</p>
+
+<p>It need scarcely be said that plausibility on the third plane is vastly
+the most important. A very austere criticism might even call it the one
+thing worth consideration. But, as a matter of fact, when we speak of
+plausibility, it is almost always the second plane--the plane of
+uncharacteristic circumstance--that we have in mind. To plausibility of
+the third order we give a more imposing name--we call it truth. We say
+that Nora's action is true--or untrue--to nature. We speak of the truth
+with which the madness of Lear, the malignity of Iago, the race hatred
+of Shylock, is portrayed. Truth, in fact, is the term which we use in
+cases where the tests to be applied are those of introspection,
+intuition, or knowledge sub-consciously garnered from spiritual
+experience. Where the tests are external, and matters of common
+knowledge or tangible evidence, we speak of plausibility.</p>
+
+<p>It would be a mistake, however, to imagine that because plausibility of
+the third degree, or truth, is the noblest attribute &quot;I drama, it is
+therefore the one thing needful. In some forms of drama it is greatly
+impaired, or absolutely nullified, if plausibility of the second degree,
+its necessary preliminary, be not carefully secured. In the case above
+imagined, for instance, of the young politician who should become Prime
+Minister immediately on entering Parliament: it would matter nothing
+with what profundity of knowledge or subtlety of skill the character was
+drawn: we should none the less decline to believe in him. Some
+dramatists, as a matter of fact, find it much easier to attain truth of
+character than plausibility of incident. Every one who is in the habit
+of reading manuscript plays, must have come across the would-be
+playwright who has a good deal of general ability and a considerable
+power of characterization, but seems to be congenitally deficient in the
+sense of external reality, so that the one thing he (or she) can by no
+means do is to invent or conduct an action that shall be in the least
+like any sequence of events in real life. It is naturally difficult to
+give examples, for the plays composed under this curious limitation are
+apt to remain in manuscript, or to be produced for one performance, and
+forgotten. There is, however, one recent play of this order which holds
+a certain place in dramatic literature. I do not know that Mr. Granville
+Barker was well-advised in printing <i>The Marrying of Anne Leete</i> along
+with such immeasurably maturer and saner productions as <i>The Voysey
+Inheritance</i> and <i>Waste</i>; but by doing so he has served my present purpose
+in providing me with a perfect example of a play as to which we cannot
+tell whether it possesses plausibility of the third degree, so
+absolutely does it lack that plausibility of the second degree which is
+its indispensable condition precedent.</p>
+
+<p>Francisque Sarcey was fond of insisting that an audience would generally
+accept without cavil any postulates in reason which an author chose to
+impose upon it, with regard to events supposed to have occurred before
+the rise of the curtain; always provided that the consequences deduced
+from them within the limits of the play were logical, plausible, and
+entertaining. The public will swallow a camel, he would maintain, in the
+past, though they will strain at a gnat in the present. A classical
+example of this principle is (once more) the <i>Oedipus Rex</i>, in which
+several of the initial postulates are wildly improbable: for instance,
+that Oedipus should never have inquired into the circumstances of the
+death of Laius, and that, having been warned by an oracle that he was
+doomed to marry his mother, he should not have been careful, before
+marrying any woman, to ascertain that she was younger than himself.
+There is at least so much justification for Sarcey's favourite
+principle, that we are less apt to scrutinize things merely narrated to
+us than events which take place before our eyes. It is simply a special
+instance of the well-worn</p>
+
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&quot;Segnius irritant animos demissa per aurem<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;Quam quae sunt oculis subjecta fidelibus.&quot;<br>
+
+<p>But the principle is of very limited artistic validity. No one would
+nowadays think of justifying a gross improbability in the antecedents of
+a play by Ibsen or Sir Arthur Pinero, by Mr. Galsworthy or Mr. Granville
+Barker, on the plea that it occurred outside the frame of the picture.
+Such a plea might, indeed, secure a mitigation of sentence, but never a
+verdict of acquittal. Sarcey, on the other hand, brought up in the
+school of the &quot;well-made&quot; play, would rather have held it a feather in
+the playwright's cap that he should have known just where, and just how,
+he might safely outrage probability <a name="FNanchor92"></a><a href="#Footnote_92"><sup>[92]</sup></a>. The inference is that we now
+take the dramatist's art more seriously than did the generation of the
+Second Empire in France.</p>
+
+<p>This brings us, however, to an important fact, which must by no means be
+overlooked. There is a large class of plays--or rather, there are
+several classes of plays, some of them not at all to be despised--the
+charm of which resides, not in probability, but in ingenious and
+delightful improbability. I am, of course, not thinking of sheer
+fantasies, like <i>A Midsummer Night's Dream</i>, or <i>Peter Pan</i>, or <i>The
+Blue Bird</i>. They may, indeed, possess plausibility of the third order,
+but plausibility of the second order has no application to them. Its
+writs do not run on their extramundane plane. The plays which appeal to
+us in virtue of their pleasant departures from probability are romances,
+farces, a certain order of light comedies and semi-comic melodramas--in
+short, the thousand and one plays in which the author, without
+altogether despising and abjuring truth, makes it on principle
+subsidiary to delightfulness. Plays of the <i>Prisoner of Zenda</i> type
+would come under this head: so would Sir Arthur Pinero's farces, <i>The
+Magistrate</i>, <i>The Schoolmistress</i>, <i>Dandy Dick</i>; so would Mr. Carton's
+light comedies, <i>Lord and Lady Algy</i>, <i>Wheels within Wheels</i>, <i>Lady
+Huntworth's Experiment</i>; so would most of Mr. Barrie's comedies; so
+would Mr. Arnold Bennett's play, <i>The Honeymoon</i>. In a previous chapter
+I have sketched the opening act of Mr. Carton's <i>Wheels within Wheels</i>,
+which is a typical example of this style of work. Its charm lies in a
+subtle, all-pervading improbability, an infusion of fantasy so delicate
+that, while at no point can one say, &quot;This is impossible,&quot; the total
+effect is far more entertaining than that of any probable sequence of
+events in real life. The whole atmosphere of such a play should be
+impregnated with humour, without reaching that gross supersaturation
+which we find in the lower order of farce-plays of the type of
+<i>Charlie's Aunt</i> or <i>Niobe</i>.</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 25%;">
+
+<p>Plausibility of development, as distinct from plausibility of theme or
+of character, depends very largely on the judicious handling of chance,
+and the exclusion, or very sparing employment, of coincidence. This is a
+matter of importance, into which we shall find it worth while to look
+somewhat closely.</p>
+
+<p>It is not always clearly recognized that chance and coincidence are by
+no means the same thing. Coincidence is a special and complex form of
+chance, which ought by no means to be confounded with the everyday
+variety. We need not here analyse chance, or discuss the philosophic
+value of the term. It is enough that we all know what we mean by it in
+common parlance. It may be well, however, to look into the etymology of
+the two words we are considering. They both come ultimately, from the
+Latin &quot;cadere,&quot; to fall. Chance is a falling-out, like that of a die
+from the dice-box; and coincidence signifies one falling-out on the top
+of another, the concurrent happening of two or more chances which
+resemble or somehow fit into each other. If you rattle six dice in a box
+and throw them, and they turn up at haphazard--say, two aces, a deuce,
+two fours, and a six--there is nothing remarkable in this falling out.
+But if they all turn up sixes, you at once suspect that the dice are
+cogged; and if that be not so--if there be no sufficient cause behind
+the phenomenon--you say that this identical falling-out of six separate
+possibilities was a remarkable coincidence. Now, applying the
+illustration to drama, I should say that the playwright is perfectly
+justified in letting chance play its probable and even inevitable part
+in the affairs of his characters; but that, the moment we suspect him of
+cogging the dice, we feel that he is taking an unfair advantage of us,
+and our imagination either cries, &quot;I won't play!&quot; or continues the game
+under protest.</p>
+
+<p>Some critics have considered it a flaw in Shakespeare's art that the
+catastrophe of <i>Romeo and Juliet</i> should depend upon a series of
+chances, and especially on the miscarriage of the Friar's letter to
+Romeo. This is not, I think, a valid criticism. We may, if we are so
+minded, pick to pieces the course of action which brought these chances
+into play. The device of the potion--even if such a drug were known to
+the pharmacopoeia--is certainly a very clumsy method of escape from the
+position in which Juliet is placed by her father's obstinacy. But when
+once we have accepted that integral part of the legend, the intervention
+of chance in the catastrophe is entirely natural and probable. Observe
+that there is no coincidence in the matter, no interlinking or
+dovetailing of chances. The catastrophe results from the hot-headed
+impetuosity of all the characters, which so hurries events that there is
+no time for the elimination of the results of chance. Letters do
+constantly go astray, even under our highly-organized system of
+conveyance; but their delay or disappearance seldom leads to tragic
+results, because most of us have learnt to take things calmly and wait
+for the next post. Yet if we could survey the world at large, it is
+highly probable that every day or every hour we should somewhere or
+other find some Romeo on the verge of committing suicide because of a
+chance misunderstanding with regard to his Juliet; and in a certain
+percentage of cases the explanatory letter or telegram would doubtless
+arrive too late.</p>
+
+<p>We all remember how, in Mr. Hardy's <i>Tess</i>, the main trouble arises from
+the fact that the letter pushed under Angel Clare's door slips also
+under the carpet of his room, and so is never discovered. This is an
+entirely probable chance; and the sternest criticism would hardly call
+it a flaw in the structure of the fable. But take another case: Madame X
+has had a child, of whom she has lost sight for more than twenty years,
+during which she has lived abroad. She returns to France, and
+immediately on landing at Bordeaux she kills a man who accompanies her.
+The court assigns her defence to a young advocate, and this young
+advocate happens to be her son. We have here a piling of chance upon
+chance, in which the long arm of coincidence<a name="FNanchor93"></a><a href="#Footnote_93"><sup>[93]</sup></a> is very apparent. The
+coincidence would have been less startling had she returned to the place
+where she left her son and where she believed him to be. But no! she
+left him in Paris, and it is only by a series of pure chances that he
+happens to be in Bordeaux, where she happens to land, and happens to
+shoot a man. For the sake of a certain order of emotional effect, a
+certain order of audience is willing to accept this piling up of
+chances; but it relegates the play to a low and childish plane of art.
+The <i>Oedipus Rex</i>, indeed--which meets us at every turn--is founded on
+an absolutely astounding series of coincidences; but here the conception
+of fate comes in, and we vaguely figure to ourselves some malignant
+power deliberately pulling the strings which guide its puppets into such
+abhorrent tangles. On the modern view that &quot;character is destiny,&quot; the
+conception of supernatural wire-pulling is excluded. It is true that
+amazing coincidences do occur in life; but when they are invented to
+serve an artist's purposes, we feel that he is simplifying his task
+altogether beyond reason, and substituting for normal and probable
+development an irrelevant plunge into the merely marvellous.</p>
+
+<p>Of the abuse of coincidence, I have already given a specimen in speaking
+of <i>The Rise of Dick Halward</i> (Chapter XII). One or two more examples
+may not be out of place. I need not dwell on the significance of the
+fact that most of them occur in forgotten plays.</p>
+
+<p>In <i>The Man of Forty</i>, by Mr. Walter Frith, we find the following
+conjuncture of circumstances: Mr. Lewis Dunster has a long-lost wife and
+a long-lost brother. He has been for years in South Africa; they have
+meanwhile lived in London, but they do not know each other, and have
+held no communication. Lewis, returning from Africa, arrives in London.
+He does not know where to find either wife or brother, and has not the
+slightest wish to look for them; yet in the first house he goes to, the
+home of a lady whose acquaintance he chanced to make on the voyage, he
+encounters both his wife and his brother! Not quite so startling is the
+coincidence on which <i>Mrs. Willoughby's Kiss</i>, by Mr. Frank Stayton, is
+founded. An upper and lower flat in West Kensington are inhabited,
+respectively, by Mrs. Brandram and Mrs. Willoughby, whose husbands have
+both been many years absent in India. By pure chance the two husbands
+come home in the same ship; the two wives go to Plymouth to meet them,
+and by pure chance, for they are totally unacquainted with each other,
+they go to the same hotel; whence it happens that Mrs. Willoughby,
+meeting Mr. Brandram in a half-lighted room, takes him for her husband,
+flies to his arms and kisses him. More elaborate than either of these is
+the tangle of coincidences in Mr. Stuart Ogilvie's play, <i>The
+White Knight</i>--</p>
+
+<p>Giulietta, the ward of David Pennycuick, goes to study singing at Milan.
+Mr. Harry Rook, Pennycuick's most intimate friend, meets her by chance
+in Milan, and she becomes his mistress, neither having the least idea
+that the other knows Pennycuick. Then Viscount Hintlesham, like
+Pennycuick, a dupe of Rook's, meets her by chance at Monte Carlo and
+falls in love with her. He does not know that she knows Rook or
+Pennycuick, and she does not know that he knows them. Arriving in
+England, she finds in the manager, the promoter, and the chairman of the
+Electric White Lead Company her guardian, her seducer, and her lover.
+When she comes to see her guardian, the first person she meets is her
+seducer, and she learns that her lover has just left the house. Up to
+that moment, I repeat, she did not know that any one of these men knew
+any other; yet she does not even say, &quot;How small the world is!&quot;<a name="FNanchor94"></a><a href="#Footnote_94"><sup>[94]</sup></a>
+Surely some such observation was obligatory under the circumstances.</p>
+
+<p>Let us turn now to a more memorable piece of work; that interesting play
+of Sir Arthur Pinero's transition period, <i>The Profligate</i>. Here the
+great situation of the third act is brought about by a chain of
+coincidences which would be utterly unthinkable in the author's maturer
+work. Leslie Brudenell, the heroine, is the ward of Mr. Cheal, a
+solicitor. She is to be married to Dunstan Renshaw; and, as she has no
+home, the bridal party meets at Mr. Cheal's office before proceeding to
+the registrar's. No sooner have they departed than Janet Preece, who has
+been betrayed and deserted by Dunstan Renshaw (under an assumed name)
+comes to the office to state her piteous case. This is not in itself a
+pure coincidence; for Janet happened to come to London in the same train
+with Leslie Brudenell and her brother Wilfrid; and Wilfrid, seeing in
+her a damsel in distress, recommended her to lay her troubles before a
+respectable solicitor, giving her Mr. Cheal's address. So far, then, the
+coincidence is not startling. It is natural enough that Renshaw's
+mistress and his betrothed should live in the same country town; and it
+is not improbable that they should come to London by the same train, and
+that Wilfrid Brudenell should give the bewildered and weeping young
+woman a commonplace piece of advice. The concatenation of circumstances
+is remarkable rather than improbable. But when, in the next act, not a
+month later, Janet Preece, by pure chance, drops in at the Florentine
+villa where Renshaw and Leslie are spending their honeymoon, we feel
+that the long arm of coincidence is stretched to its uttermost, and that
+even the thrilling situation which follows is very dearly bought. It
+would not have been difficult to attenuate the coincidence. What has
+actually happened is this: Janet has (we know not how) become a sort of
+maid-companion to a Mrs. Stonehay, whose daughter was a school-friend of
+Leslie's; the Stonehays have come to Florence, knowing nothing of
+Leslie's presence there; and they happen to visit the villa in order to
+see a fresco which it contains. If, now, we had been told that Janet's
+engagement by the Stonehays had resulted from her visit to Mr. Cheal,
+and that the Stonehays had come to Florence knowing Leslie to be there,
+and eager to find her, several links would have been struck off the
+chain of coincidence; or, to put it more exactly, a fairly coherent
+sequence of events would have been substituted for a series of
+incoherent chances. The same result might no doubt have been achieved in
+many other and neater ways. I merely indicate, by way of illustration, a
+quite obvious method of reducing the element of coincidence in the case.</p>
+
+<p>The coincidence in <i>The Second Mrs. Tanqueray</i>, by which Ellean meets
+and falls in love with one of Paula's ex-lovers, has been very severely
+criticized. It is certainly not one of the strong points of the play;
+but, unlike the series of chances we have just been examining, it places
+no excessive strain on our credulity. Such coincidences do occur in real
+life; we have all of us seen or heard of them; the worst we can say of
+this one is that it is neither positively good nor positively bad--a
+piece of indifferent craftsmanship. On the other hand, if we turn to
+<i>Letty</i>, the chance which, in the third act, leads Letchmere's party and
+Mandeville's party to choose the same restaurant, seems to me entirely
+justified. It is not really a coincidence at all, but one of those
+everyday happenings which are not only admissible in drama, but
+positively desirable, as part of the ordinary surface-texture of life.
+Entirely to eliminate chance from our representation of life would be a
+very unreasonable austerity. Strictly speaking, indeed, it is
+impossible; for even when we have worked out an unbroken chain of
+rational and commensurate causes and effects, it remains a chance, and
+an unlikely chance, that chance should not have interfered with it.</p>
+
+<p>All the plays touched upon in the last four paragraphs are in intention
+realistic. They aim, that is to say, at a literal and sober
+representation of life. In the other class of plays, which seek their
+effect, not in plodding probability, but in delightful improbability,
+the long arm of coincidence has its legitimate functions. Yet even here
+it is not quite unfettered. One of the most agreeable coincidences in
+fiction, I take it, is the simultaneous arrival in Bagdad, from
+different quarters of the globe, of three one-eyed calenders, all blind
+of the right eye, and all, in reality, the sons of kings. But it is to
+be noted that this coincidence is not a crucial occurrence in a story,
+but only a part of the story-teller's framework or mechanism--a device
+for introducing fresh series of adventures. This illustrates the
+Sarceyan principle above referred to, which Professor Brander Matthews
+has re-stated in what seems to me an entirely acceptable form--namely,
+that improbabilities which may be admitted on the outskirts of an
+action, must be rigidly excluded when the issue is joined and we are in
+the thick of things. Coincidences, in fact, become the more improbable
+in the direct ratio of their importance. We have all, in our own
+experience, met with amazing coincidences; but how few of us have ever
+gained or lost, been made happy or unhappy, by a coincidence, as
+distinct from a chance! It is not precisely probable that three
+brothers, who have separated in early life, and have not heard of one
+another for twenty years, should find themselves seated side by side at
+an Italian <i>table-d'h&ocirc;te</i>; yet such coincidences have occurred, and are
+creditable enough so long as nothing particular comes of them. But if a
+dramatist were to make these three brothers meet in Messina on the eve
+of the earthquake, in order that they might all be killed, and thus
+enable his hero (their cousin) to succeed to a peerage and marry the
+heroine, we should say that his use of coincidence was not strictly
+artistic. A coincidence, in short, which coincides with a crisis is
+thereby raised to the <i>n</i>th power, and is wholly inacceptable in serious
+art. Mr. Bernard Shaw has based the action of <i>You Never Can Tell</i> on
+the amazing coincidence that Mrs. Clandon and her children, coming to
+England after eighteen years' absence, should by pure chance run
+straight into the arms, or rather into the teeth, of the husband and
+father whom the mother, at any rate, only wishes to avoid. This is no
+bad starting-point for an extravaganza; but even Mr. Shaw, though a
+despiser of niceties of craftsmanship, introduces no coincidences into
+serious plays such as <i>Candida</i> or <i>The Doctor's Dilemma</i>.</p>
+
+
+
+<br><br><hr style="width: 35%;"><br><br>
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_XVI"></a>CHAPTER XVI</h2>
+
+<p>LOGIC</p>
+<br>
+
+<p>The term logic is often very vaguely used in relation to drama. French
+writers especially, who regard logic as one of the peculiar faculties of
+their national genius, are apt to insist upon it in and out of season.
+But, as we have already seen, logic is a gift which may easily be
+misapplied. It too often leads such writers as M. Brieux and M. Hervieu
+to sacrifice the undulant and diverse rhythms of life to a stiff and
+symmetrical formalism. The conception of a play as the exhaustive
+demonstration of a thesis has never taken a strong hold on the
+Anglo-Saxon mind; and, though some of M. Brieux's plays are much more
+than mere dramatic arguments, we need not, in the main, envy the French
+their logician-dramatists.</p>
+
+<p>But, though the presence of logic should never be forced upon the
+spectator's attention, still less should he be disturbed and baffled by
+its conspicuous absence. If the playwright announces a theme at all: if
+he lets it be seen that some general idea underlies his work: he is
+bound to present and develop that idea in a logical fashion, not to
+shift his ground, whether inadvertently or insidiously, and not to
+wander off into irrelevant side-issues. He must face his problem
+squarely. If he sets forth to prove anything at all, he must prove that
+thing and not some totally different thing. He must beware of the
+red-herring across the trail.</p>
+
+<p>For a clear example of defective logic, I turn to a French
+play--Sardou's <i>Spiritisme</i>. Both from internal and from external
+evidence, it is certain that M. Sardou was a believer in
+spiritualism--in the existence of disembodied intelligences, and their
+power of communicating with the living. Yet he had not the courage to
+assign to them an essential part in his drama. The spirits hover round
+the outskirts of the action, but do not really or effectually intervene
+in it. The hero's <i>belief</i> in them, indeed, helps to bring about the
+conclusion; but the apparition which so potently works upon him is an
+admitted imposture, a pious fraud. Earlier in the play, two or three
+trivial and unnecessary miracles are introduced--just enough to hint at
+the author's faith without decisively affirming it. For instance:
+towards the close of Act I Madame d'Aubenas has gone off, nominally to
+take the night train for Poitiers, in reality to pay a visit to her
+lover, M. de Stoudza. When she has gone, her husband and his guests
+arrange a s&eacute;ance and evoke a spirit. No sooner have preliminaries been
+settled than the spirit spells out the word &quot;O-u-v-r-e-z.&quot; They open the
+window, and behold! the sky is red with a glare which proves to proceed
+from the burning of the train in which Madame d'Aubenas is supposed to
+have started. The incident is effective enough, and a little creepy; but
+its effect is quite incommensurate with the strain upon our powers of
+belief. The thing is supposed to be a miracle, of that there can be no
+doubt; but it has not the smallest influence on the course of the play,
+except to bring on the hurry-scurry and alarm a few minutes earlier than
+might otherwise have been the case. Now, if the spirit, instead of
+merely announcing the accident, had informed M. d'Aubenas that his wife
+was not in it--if, for example, it had rapped out &quot;Gilberte chez
+Stoudza&quot;--it would have been an honest ghost (though indiscreet), and we
+should not have felt that our credulity had been taxed to no purpose. As
+it is, the logical deduction from M. Sardou's fable is that, though
+spirit communications are genuine enough, they are never of the
+slightest use; but we can scarcely suppose that that was what he
+intended to convey.</p>
+
+<p>It may be said, and perhaps with truth, that what Sardou lacked in this
+instance was not logic, but courage: he felt that an audience would
+accept episodic miracles, but would reject supernatural interference at
+a determining crisis in the play. In that case he would have done better
+to let the theme alone: for the manifest failure of logic leaves the
+play neither good drama nor good argument. This is a totally different
+matter from Ibsen's treatment of the supernatural in such plays as <i>The
+Lady from the Sea</i>, <i>The Master Builder</i> and <i>Little Eyolf</i>. Ibsen, like
+Hawthorne, suggests without affirming the action of occult powers. He
+shows us nothing that is not capable of a perfectly natural explanation;
+but he leaves us to imagine, if we are so disposed, that there may be
+influences at work that are not yet formally recognized in physics and
+psychology. In this there is nothing illogical. The poet is merely
+appealing to a mood, familiar to all of us, in which we wonder whether
+there may not be more things in heaven and earth than are crystallized
+in our scientific formulas.</p>
+
+<p>It is a grave defect of logic to state, or hint at, a problem, and then
+illustrate it in such terms of character that it is solved in advance.
+In <i>The Liars</i>, by Mr. Henry Arthur Jones, there is an evident
+suggestion of the problem whether a man is ever justified in rescuing a
+woman, by means of the Divorce Court, from marital bondage which her
+soul abhors. The sententious Sir Christopher Deering argues the matter
+at great length: but all the time we are hungering for him to say the
+one thing demanded by the logic of the situation: to wit: &quot;Whatever the
+abstract rights and wrongs of the case, this man would be an imbecile to
+elope with this woman, who is an empty-headed, empty-hearted creature,
+incapable either of the passion or of the loathing which alone could
+lend any semblance of reason to a breach of social law.&quot; Similarly, in
+<i>The Profligate</i>, Sir Arthur Pinero no doubt intended us to reflect upon
+the question whether, in entering upon marriage, a woman has a right to
+assume in her husband the same purity of antecedent conduct which he
+demands of her. That is an arguable question, and it has been argued
+often enough; but in this play it does not really arise, for the husband
+presented to us is no ordinary loose-liver, but (it would seem--for the
+case is not clearly stated) a particularly base and heartless seducer,
+whom it is evidently a misfortune for any woman to have married. The
+authors of these two plays have committed an identical error of logic:
+namely, that of suggesting a broad issue, and then stating such a set of
+circumstances that the issue does not really arise. In other words, they
+have from the outset begged the question. The plays, it may be said,
+were both successful in their day. Yes; but had they been logical their
+day might have lasted a century. A somewhat similar defect of logic
+constitutes a fatal blemish in <i>The Ideal Husband</i>, by Oscar Wilde.
+Intentionally or otherwise, the question suggested is whether a single
+flaw of conduct (the betrayal to financiers of a state secret) ought to
+blast a political career. Here, again, is an arguable point, on the
+assumption that the statesman is penitent and determined never to repeat
+his misdeed; but when we find that this particular statesman is prepared
+to go on betraying his country indefinitely, in order to save his own
+skin, the question falls to the ground--the answer is too obvious.</p>
+
+<p>It happened some years ago that two plays satirizing &quot;yellow journalism&quot;
+were produced almost simultaneously in London--<i>The Earth</i> by Mr. James
+B. Fagan, and <i>What the Public Wants</i> by Mr. Arnold Bennett. In point of
+intellectual grasp, or power of characterization, there could be no
+comparison between the two writers; yet I hold that, from the point of
+view of dramatic composition, <i>The Earth</i> was the better play of the
+two, simply because it dealt logically with the theme announced, instead
+of wandering away into all sorts of irrelevances. Mr. Bennett, to begin
+with, could not resist making his Napoleon of the Press a native of the
+&quot;Five Towns,&quot; and exhibiting him at large in provincial middle-class
+surroundings. All this is sheer irrelevance; for the type of journalism
+in question is not characteristically an outcome of any phase of
+provincial life. Mr. Bennett may allege that Sir Charles Worgan had to
+be born somewhere, and might as well be born in Bursley as anywhere
+else. I reply that, for the purposes of the play, he need not have been
+born anywhere. His birthplace and the surroundings of his boyhood have
+nothing to do with what may be called his journalistic psychology, which
+is, or ought to be, the theme of the play. Then, again, Mr. Bennett
+shows him dabbling in theatrical management and falling in
+love--irrelevances both. As a manager, no doubt, he insists on doing
+&quot;what the public wants&quot; (it is nothing worse than a revival of <i>The
+Merchant of Venice</i>) and thus offers another illustration of the results
+of obeying that principle. But all this is beside the real issue. The
+true gravamen of the charge against a Napoleon of the Press is not that
+he gives the public what it wants, but that he can make the public want
+what <i>he</i> wants, think what <i>he</i> thinks, believe what <i>he</i> wants them to
+believe, and do what <i>he</i> wants them to do. By dint of assertion,
+innuendo, and iteration in a hundred papers, he can create an apparent
+public opinion, or public emotion, which may be directed towards the
+most dangerous ends. This point Mr. Bennett entirely missed. What he
+gave us was in reality a comedy of middle-class life with a number of
+incidental allusions to &quot;yellow&quot; journalism and kindred topics. Mr.
+Fagan, working in broader outlines, and, it must be owned, in cruder
+colours, never strayed from the logical line of development, and took us
+much nearer the heart of his subject.</p>
+
+<p>A somewhat different, and very common, fault of logic was exemplified in
+Mr. Clyde Fitch's last play, <i>The City</i>. His theme, as announced in his
+title and indicated in his exposition, was the influence of New York
+upon a family which migrates thither from a provincial town. But the
+action is not really shaped by the influence of &quot;the city.&quot; It might
+have taken practically the same course if the family had remained at
+home. The author had failed to establish a logical connection between
+his theme and the incidents supposed to illustrate it.<a name="FNanchor95"></a><a href="#Footnote_95"><sup>[95]</sup></a></p>
+
+<p>Fantastic plays, which assume an order of things more or less exempt
+from the limitations of physical reality, ought, nevertheless, to be
+logically faithful to their own assumptions. Some fantasies, indeed,
+which sinned against this principle, have had no small success. In
+<i>Pygmalion and Galatea</i>, for example, there is a conspicuous lack of
+logic. The following passage from a criticism of thirty years ago puts
+my point so clearly that I am tempted to copy it:</p>
+
+&nbsp;&nbsp;As we have no scientific record of a statue coming to life, the<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;probable moral and intellectual condition of a being so created is<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;left to the widest conjecture. The playwright may assume for it any<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;stage of development he pleases, and his audience will readily grant<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;his assumption. But if his work is to have any claim to artistic<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;value, he must not assume all sorts of different stages of<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;development at every second word his creation utters. He must not<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;make her a child in one speech, a woman of the world in the next,<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;and an idiot in the next again. Of course, it would be an extremely<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;difficult task clearly to define in all its bearings and details the<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;particular intellectual condition assumed at the outset, and then<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;gradually to indicate the natural growth of a fuller consciousness.<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;Difficult it would be, but by no means impossible; nay, it would be<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;this very problem which would tempt the true dramatist to adopt such<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;a theme. Mr. Gilbert has not essayed the task. He regulates<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;Galatea's state of consciousness by the fluctuating exigencies of<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;dialogue whose humour is levelled straight at the heads of the old<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;Haymarket pit.<br>
+
+<p>To indicate the nature of the inconsistencies which abound in every
+scene, I may say that, in the first act, Galatea does not know that she
+is a woman, but understands the word &quot;beauty,&quot; knows (though Pygmalion
+is the only living creature she has ever seen) the meaning of agreement
+and difference of taste, and is alive to the distinction between an
+original and a copy. In the second act she has got the length of knowing
+the enormity of taking life, and appreciating the fine distinction
+between taking it of one's own motive, and taking it for money. Yet the
+next moment, when Leucippe enters with a fawn he has killed, it appears
+that she does not realize the difference between man and the brute
+creation. Thus we are for ever shifting from one plane of convention to
+another. There is no fixed starting-point for our imagination, no
+logical development of a clearly-stated initial condition. The play, it
+is true, enjoyed some five-and-twenty years of life; but it certainly
+cannot claim an enduring place either in literature or on the stage. It
+is still open to the philosophic dramatist to write a logical <i>Pygmalion
+and Galatea</i>.</p>
+
+
+<br><br><hr style="width: 35%;"><br><br>
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_XVII"></a>CHAPTER XVII></h2>
+
+<p>KEEPING A SECRET</p>
+<br>
+
+<p>It has been often and authoritatively laid down that a dramatist must on
+no account keep a secret from his audience. Like most authoritative
+maxims, this one seems to require a good deal of qualification. Let us
+look into the matter a little more closely.</p>
+
+<p>So far as I can see, the strongest reason against keeping a secret is
+that, try as you may, you cannot do it. This point has already been
+discussed in Chapter IX, where we saw that from only one audience can a
+secret be really hidden, a considerable percentage of any subsequent
+audience being certain to know all about it in advance. The more
+striking and successful is the first-night effect of surprise, the more
+certainly and rapidly will the report of it circulate through all strata
+of the theatrical public. But for this fact, one could quite well
+conceive a fascinating melodrama constructed, like a detective story,
+with a view to keeping the audience in the dark as long as possible. A
+pistol shot might ring out just before the rise of the curtain: a man
+(or woman) might be discovered in an otherwise empty room, weltering in
+his (or her) gore: and the remainder of the play might consist in the
+tracking down of the murderer, who would, of course, prove to be the
+very last person to be suspected. Such a play might make a great
+first-night success; but the more the author relied upon the mystery for
+his effect, the more fatally would that effect be discounted at each
+successive repetition.</p>
+
+<p>One author of distinction, M. Hervieu, has actually made the experiment
+of presenting an enigma--he calls the play <i>L'Enigme</i>--and reserving the
+solution to the very end. We know from the outset that one of two
+sisters-in-law is unfaithful to her husband, and the question is--which?
+The whole ingenuity of the author is centred on keeping the secret, and
+the spectator who does not know it in advance is all the time in the
+attitude of a detective questing for clues. He is challenged to guess
+which of the ladies is the frail one; and he is far too intent on this
+game to think or care about the emotional process of the play. I myself
+(I remember) guessed right, mainly because the name Giselle seemed to me
+more suggestive of flightiness than the staid and sober Leonore,
+wherefore I suspected that M. Hervieu, in order to throw dust in our
+eyes, had given it to the virtuous lady. But whether we guess right or
+wrong, this clue-hunting is an intellectual sport, not an artistic
+enjoyment. If there is any aesthetic quality in the play, it can only
+come home to us when we know the secret. And the same dilemma will
+present itself to any playwright who seeks to imitate M. Hervieu.</p>
+
+<p>The actual keeping of a secret, then--the appeal to the primary
+curiosity of actual ignorance--may be ruled out as practically
+impossible, and, when possible, unworthy of serious art. But there is
+also, as we have seen, the secondary curiosity of the audience which,
+though more or less cognizant of the essential facts, instinctively
+assumes ignorance, and judges the development of a play from that point
+of view. We all realize that a dramatist has no right to trust to our
+previous knowledge, acquired from outside sources. We know that a play,
+like every other work of art, ought to be self-sufficient, and even if,
+at any given moment, we have, as a matter of fact, knowledge which
+supplements what the playwright has told us, we feel that he ought not
+to have taken for granted our possession of any such external and
+fortuitous information. To put it briefly, the dramatist must formally
+<i>assume</i> ignorance in his audience, though he must not practically <i>rely
+upon</i> it. Therefore it becomes a point of real importance to determine
+how long a secret may be kept from an audience, assumed to have no
+outside knowledge, and at what point it ought to be revealed.</p>
+
+<p>When <i>Lady Windermere's Fan</i> was first produced, no hint was given in
+the first act of the fact that Mrs. Erlynne was Lady Windermere's
+mother; so that Lord Windermere's insistence on inviting her to his
+wife's birthday reception remained wholly unexplained. But after a few
+nights the author made Lord Windermere exclaim, just as the curtain
+fell, &quot;My God! What shall I do? I dare not tell her who this woman
+really is. The shame would kill her.&quot; It was, of course, said that this
+change had been made in deference to newspaper criticism; and Oscar
+Wilde, in a characteristic letter to the <i>St. James's Gazette</i>, promptly
+repelled this calumny. At a first-night supper-party, he said--</p>
+
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&quot;All of my friends without exception were of the opinion that the<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;psychological interest of the second act would be greatly increased<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;by the disclosure of the actual relationship existing between Lady<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;Windermere and Mrs. Erlynne--an opinion, I may add, that had<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;previously been strongly held and urged by Mr. Alexander.... I<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;determined, consequently, to make a change in the precise moment of<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;revelation.&quot;<br>
+
+<p>It is impossible to say whether Wilde seriously believed that
+&quot;psychology&quot; entered into the matter at all, or whether he was laughing
+in his sleeve in putting forward this solemn plea. The truth is, I
+think, that this example cannot be cited either for or against the
+keeping of a secret, the essential fact being that the secret was such a
+bad and inacceptable one--inacceptable, I mean, as an explanation of
+Lord Windermere's conduct--that it was probably wise to make a clean
+breast of it as soon as possible, and get it over. It may be said with
+perfect confidence that it is useless to keep a secret which, when
+revealed, is certain to disappoint the audience, and to make it feel
+that it has been trifled with. That is an elementary dictate of
+prudence. But if the reason for Lord Windermere's conduct had been
+adequate, ingenious, such as to give us, when revealed, a little shock
+of pleasant surprise, the author need certainly have been in no hurry to
+disclose it. It is not improbable (though my memory is not clear on the
+point) that part of the strong interest we undoubtedly felt on the first
+night arose from the hope that Lord Windermere's seemingly unaccountable
+conduct might be satisfactorily accounted for. As this hope was futile,
+there was no reason, at subsequent performances, to keep up the pretence
+of preserving a secret which was probably known, as a matter of fact, to
+most of the audience, and which was worthless when revealed.</p>
+
+<p>In the second act of <i>The Devil's Disciple</i>, by Mr. Bernard Shaw, we
+have an instance of wholly inartistic secrecy, which would certainly be
+condemned in the work of any author who was not accepted in advance as a
+law unto himself. Richard Dudgeon has been arrested by the British
+soldiers, who mistake him for the Reverend Anthony Anderson. When
+Anderson comes home, it takes a very long time for his silly wife,
+Judith, to acquaint him with a situation that might have been explained
+in three words; and when, at last, he does understand it, he calls for a
+horse and his boots, and rushes off in mad haste, as though his one
+desire were to escape from the British and leave Dudgeon to his fate. In
+reality his purpose is to bring up a body of Continental troops to the
+rescue of Dudgeon; and this also he might (and certainly would) have
+conveyed in three words. But Mr. Shaw was so bent on letting Judith
+continue to conduct herself idiotically, that he made her sensible
+husband act no less idiotically, in order to throw dust in her eyes, and
+(incidentally) in the eyes of the audience. In the work of any other
+man, we should call this not only an injudicious, but a purposeless and
+foolish, keeping of a secret. Mr. Shaw may say that in order to develop
+the character of Judith as he had conceived it, he was forced to make
+her misunderstand her husband's motives. A development of character
+obtained by such artificial means cannot be of much worth; but even
+granting this plea, one cannot but point out that it would have been
+easy to keep Judith in the dark as to Anderson's purpose, without
+keeping the audience also in the dark, and making him behave like a
+fool. All that was required was to get Judith off the stage for a few
+moments, just before the true state of matters burst upon Anthony. It
+would then have been perfectly natural and probable that, not foreseeing
+her misunderstanding, he should hurry off without waiting to explain
+matters to her. But that he should deliberately leave her in her
+delusion, and even use phrases carefully calculated to deceive both her
+and the audience,<a name="FNanchor96"></a><a href="#Footnote_96"><sup>[96]</sup></a> would be, in a writer who professed to place reason
+above caprice, a rather gross fault of art.</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Henry Arthur Jones's light comedy, <i>Whitewashing Julia</i>, proves that
+it is possible, without incurring disaster, to keep a secret throughout
+a play, and never reveal it at all. More accurately, what Mr. Jones does
+is to pretend that there is some explanation of Mrs. Julia Wren's
+relations with the Duke of Savona, other than the simple explanation
+that she was his mistress, and to keep us waiting for this
+&quot;whitewashing&quot; disclosure, when in fact he has nothing of the sort up
+his sleeve, and the plain truth is precisely what the gossips of
+Shanctonbury surmise. Julia does not even explain or justify her conduct
+from her own point of view. She gives out that &quot;an explanation will be
+forthcoming at the right moment&quot;; but the right moment never arrives.
+All we are told is that she, Julia, considers that there was never
+anything degrading in her conduct; and this we are asked to accept as
+sufficient. It was a daring policy to dangle before our eyes an
+explanation, which always receded as we advanced towards it, and proved
+in the end to be wholly unexplanatory. The success of the play, however,
+was sufficient to show that, in light comedy, at any rate, a secret may
+with impunity be kept, even to the point of tantalization.<a name="FNanchor97"></a><a href="#Footnote_97"><sup>[97]</sup></a></p>
+
+<p>Let us now look at a couple of cases in which the keeping of a secret
+seems pretty clearly wrong, inasmuch as it diminishes tension, and
+deprives the audience of that superior knowledge in which lies the irony
+of drama. In a play named <i>Her Advocate</i>, by Mr. Walter Frith (founded
+on one of Grenville Murray's <i>French Pictures in English Chalk</i>), a K.C.
+has fallen madly in love with a woman whose defence he has undertaken.
+He believes passionately in her innocence, and, never doubting that she
+loves him in return, he is determined to secure for her a triumphant
+acquittal. Just at the crucial moment, however, he learns that she loves
+another man; and, overwhelmed by this disillusion, he has still to face
+the ordeal and plead her cause. The conjuncture would be still more
+dramatic if the revelation of this love were to put a different
+complexion on the murder, and, by introducing a new motive, shake the
+advocate's faith in his client's innocence. But that is another matter;
+the question here to be considered is whether the author did right in
+reserving the revelation to the last possible moment. In my opinion he
+would have done better to have given us an earlier inkling of the true
+state of affairs. To keep the secret, in this case, was to place the
+audience as well as the advocate on a false trail, and to deprive it of
+the sense of superiority it would have felt in seeing him marching
+confidently towards a happiness which it knew to be illusory.</p>
+
+<p>The second case is that of <i>La Douloureuse</i>, by M. Maurice Donnay.
+Through two acts out of the four an important secret is so carefully
+kept that there seems to be no obstacle between the lovers with whom
+(from the author's point of view) we are supposed to sympathize. The
+first act is devoted to an elaborate painting of a somewhat revolting
+phase of parvenu society in Paris. Towards the end of the act we learn
+that the sculptor, Philippe Lauberthie, is the lover of H&eacute;l&egrave;ne Ardan, a
+married woman; and at the very end her husband, Ardan, commits suicide.
+This act, therefore, is devoted, not, as the orthodox formula goes, to
+raising an obstacle between the lovers, but rather to destroying one. In
+the second act there still seems to be no obstacle of any sort. H&eacute;l&egrave;ne's
+year of widowhood is nearly over; she and Philippe are presently to be
+married; all is harmony, adoration, and security. In the last scene of
+the act, a cloud no bigger than a man's hand appears on the horizon. We
+find that Gotte des Trembles, H&eacute;l&egrave;ne's bosom friend, is also in love
+with Philippe, and is determined to let him know it. But Philippe
+resists her blandishments with melancholy austerity, and when the
+curtain falls on the second act, things seem to be perfectly safe and in
+order. H&eacute;l&egrave;ne a widow, and Philippe austere--what harm can Gotte
+possibly do?</p>
+
+<p>The fact is, M. Donnay is carefully keeping a secret from us. Philippe
+is not H&eacute;l&egrave;ne's first lover; her son, Georges, is not the child of her
+late husband; and Gotte, and Gotte alone, knows the truth. Had we also
+been initiated from the outset (and nothing would have been easier or
+more natural--three words exchanged between Gotte and H&eacute;l&egrave;ne would have
+done it) we should have been at no loss to foresee the impending drama,
+and the sense of irony would have tripled the interest of the
+intervening scenes. The effect of M. Donnay's third act is not a whit
+more forcible because it comes upon us unprepared. We learn at the
+beginning that Philippe's austerity has not after all been proof against
+Gotte's seductions; but it has now returned upon him embittered by
+remorse, and he treats Gotte with sternness approaching to contumely.
+She takes her revenge by revealing H&eacute;l&egrave;ne's secret; he tells H&eacute;l&egrave;ne that
+he knows it; and she, putting two and two together, divines how it has
+come to his knowledge. This long scene of mutual reproach and remorseful
+misery is, in reality, the whole drama, and might have been cited in
+Chapter XIV as a fine example of a peripety. H&eacute;l&egrave;ne enters Philippe's
+studio happy and serene, she leaves it broken-hearted; but the effect of
+the scene is not a whit greater because, in the two previous acts, we
+have been studiously deprived of the information that would have led us
+vaguely to anticipate it.</p>
+
+<p>To sum up this question of secrecy: the current maxim, &quot;Never keep a
+secret from your audience,&quot; would appear to be an over-simplification of
+a somewhat difficult question of craftsmanship. We may agree that it is
+often dangerous and sometimes manifestly foolish to keep a secret; but,
+on the other hand, there is certainly no reason why the playwright
+should blurt out all his secrets at the first possible opportunity. The
+true art lies in knowing just how long to keep silent, and just the
+right time to speak. In the first act of <i>Letty</i>, Sir Arthur Pinero
+gains a memorable effect by keeping a secret, not very long, indeed, but
+long enough and carefully enough to show that he knew very clearly what
+he was doing. We are introduced to Nevill Letchmere's bachelor
+apartments. Animated scenes occur between Letchmere and his
+brother-in-law, Letchmere and his sister, Letchmere and Letty, Marion
+and Hilda Gunning. It is evident that Letty dreams of marriage with
+Letchmere; and for aught that we see or hear, there is no just cause or
+impediment to the contrary. It is only, at the end of the very admirable
+scene between Letchmere and Mandeville that the following little
+passage occurs:</p>
+
+&nbsp;&nbsp;MANDEVILLE: ... At all events I <i>am</i> qualified to tell her I'm<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;fairly gone on her--honourably gone on her--if I choose to do it.<br>
+
+&nbsp;&nbsp;LETCHMERE: Qualified?<br>
+
+&nbsp;&nbsp;MANDEVILLE: Which is more than you are, Mr. Letchmere. I <i>am</i> a<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;single man; you ain't, bear in mind.<br>
+
+&nbsp;&nbsp;LETCHMERE: (<i>imperturbably</i>): Very true.<br>
+
+<p>This one little touch is a masterpiece of craftsmanship. It would have
+been the most natural thing in the world for either the sister or the
+brother-in-law, concerned about their own matrimonial difficulties, to
+let fall some passing allusion to Letchmere's separation from his wife;
+but the author carefully avoided this, carefully allowed us to make our
+first acquaintance with Letty in ignorance of the irony of her position,
+and then allowed the truth to slip out just in time to let us feel the
+whole force of that irony during the last scene of the act and the
+greater part of the second act. A finer instance of the delicate grading
+of tension it would be difficult to cite.</p>
+
+<p>One thing is certain; namely, that if a secret is to be kept at all, it
+must be worth the keeping; if a riddle is propounded, its answer must be
+pleasing and ingenious, or the audience will resent having been led to
+cudgel its brains for nothing. This is simply a part of the larger
+principle, before insisted on, that when a reasonable expectation is
+aroused, it can be baffled only at the author's peril. If the crux of a
+scene or of a whole play lie in the solution of some material difficulty
+or moral problem, it must on no account be solved by a mere trick or
+evasion. The dramatist is very ill-advised who sets forth with pomp and
+circumstance to perform some intellectual or technical feat, and then
+merely skirts round it or runs away from it. A fair proportion should
+always be observed between effort and effect, between promise and
+performance.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;But if the audience happens to misread the playwright's design, and
+form exaggerated and irrational expectations?&quot; That merely means that
+the playwright does not know his business, or, at any rate, does not
+know his audience. It is his business to play upon the collective mind
+of his audience as upon a keyboard--to arouse just the right order and
+measure of anticipation, and fulfil it, or outdo it, in just the right
+way at just the right time. The skill of the dramatist, as distinct from
+his genius or inspiration, lies in the correctness of his insight into
+the mind of his audience.</p>
+
+
+<br><br><hr style="width: 35%;"><br><br>
+<h2><a name="BOOK_IV"></a>BOOK IV</h2>
+<br>
+
+<p>THE END</p>
+
+
+<br><br><hr style="width: 35%;"><br><br>
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_XVIII"></a>CHAPTER XVIII</h2>
+
+<p>CLIMAX AND ANTICLIMAX</p>
+<br>
+
+<p>If it were as easy to write a good last act as a good first act, we
+should be able to reckon three masterpieces for every one that we can
+name at present. The reason why the last act should offer special
+difficulties is not far to seek. We have agreed to regard a play as
+essentially a crisis in the lives of one or more persons; and we all
+know that crises are much more apt to have a definite beginning than a
+definite end. We can almost always put our finger upon the moment--not,
+indeed, when the crisis began--but when we clearly realized its presence
+or its imminence. A chance meeting, the receipt of a letter or a
+telegram, a particular turn given to a certain conversation, even the
+mere emergence into consciousness of a previously latent feeling or
+thought, may mark quite definitely the moment of germination, so to
+speak, of a given crisis; and it is comparatively easy to dramatize such
+a moment. But how few crises come to a definite or dramatic conclusion!
+Nine times out of ten they end in some petty compromise, or do not end
+at all, but simply subside, like the waves of the sea when the storm has
+blown itself out. It is the playwright's chief difficulty to find a
+crisis with an ending which satisfies at once his artistic conscience
+and the requirements of dramatic effect.</p>
+
+<p>And the difficulty becomes greater the nearer we approach to reality. In
+the days when tragedy and comedy were cast in fixed, conventional
+moulds, the playwright's task was much simpler. It was thoroughly
+understood that a tragedy ended with one or more deaths, a comedy with
+one or more marriages; so that the question of a strong or a weak ending
+did not arise. The end might be strongly or weakly led up to, but, in
+itself, it was fore-ordained. Now that these moulds are broken, and both
+marriage and death may be said to have lost their prestige as the be-all
+and end-all of drama, the playwright's range of choice is unlimited, and
+the difficulty of choosing has become infinitely greater. Our comedies
+are much more apt to begin than to end with marriage, and death has come
+to be regarded as a rather cheap and conventional expedient for cutting
+the knots of life.</p>
+
+<p>From the fact that &quot;the difficulty becomes greater the nearer we
+approach to reality,&quot; it further follows that the higher the form of
+drama, the more probable is it that the demands of truth and the
+requirements of dramatic effect may be found to clash. In melodrama, the
+curtain falls of its own accord, so to speak, when the handcuffs are
+transferred from the hero's wrists to the villain's. In an
+adventure-play, whether farcical or romantic, when the adventure is over
+the play is done. The author's task is merely to keep the interest of
+the adventure afoot until he is ready to drop his curtain. This is a
+point of craftsmanship in which playwrights often fail; but it is a
+point of craftsmanship only. In plays of a higher order, on the other
+hand, the difficulty is often inherent in the theme, and not to be
+overcome by any feat of craftsmanship. If the dramatist were to eschew
+all crises that could not be made to resolve themselves with
+specifically dramatic crispness and decisiveness, he would very
+seriously limit the domain of his art. Many excellent themes would be
+distorted and ruined by having an emphatic ending forced upon them. It
+is surely much better that they should be brought to their natural
+unemphatic ending, than that they should be either falsified or ignored.</p>
+
+<p>I suggest, then, that the modern tendency to take lightly Aristotle's
+demand that the drama should have a &quot;beginning, a middle, <i>and an end</i>,&quot;
+arises from the nature of things, and implies, not necessarily, nor even
+probably, a decline in craftsmanship, but a new intimacy of relation to
+life, and a new sincerity of artistic conscience. I suggest that the
+&quot;weak last act,&quot; of which critics so often complain, is a natural
+development from which authors ought not, on occasion, to shrink, and of
+which critics ought, on occasion, to recognize the necessity. To elevate
+it into a system is absurd. There is certainly no more reason for
+deliberately avoiding an emphatic ending than for mechanically forcing
+one. But authors and critics alike should learn to distinguish the
+themes which do, from the themes which do not, call for a definite,
+trenchant solution, and should handle them, and judge them, in
+accordance with their inherent quality.</p>
+
+<p>Let us, however, define our terms, and be sure that we know what we are
+talking about. By an &quot;unemphatic ending&quot; I am far from meaning a
+makeshift ending, an ending carelessly and conventionally huddled up.
+Nor do I mean an indecisive ending, where the curtain falls, as the
+saying goes, on a note of interrogation. An unemphatic ending, as I
+understand it, is a deliberate anticlimax, an idyllic, or elegiac, or
+philosophic last act, following upon a penultimate act of very much
+higher tension. The disposition to condemn such an ending off-hand is
+what I am here pleading against. It is sometimes assumed that the
+playwright ought always to make his action conclude within five minutes
+of its culmination; but for such a hard-and-fast rule I can find no
+sufficient reason. The consequences of a great emotional or spiritual
+crisis cannot always be worked out, or even foreshadowed, within so
+brief a space of time. If, after such a crisis, we are unwilling to keep
+our seats for another half-hour, in order to learn &quot;what came of it
+all,&quot; the author has evidently failed to awaken in us any real interest
+in his characters.</p>
+
+<p>A good instance of the unemphatic ending is the last act of Sir Arthur
+Pinero's <i>Letty</i>. This &quot;epilogue&quot;--so the author calls it--has been
+denounced as a concession to popular sentimentality, and an unpardonable
+anticlimax. An anticlimax it is, beyond all doubt; but it does not
+follow that it is an artistic blemish. Nothing would have been easier
+than not to write it--to make the play end with Letty's awakening from
+her dream, and her flight from Letchmere's rooms. But the author has set
+forth, not merely to interest us in an adventure, but to draw a
+character; and it was essential to our full appreciation of Letty's
+character that we should know what, after all, she made of her life.
+When Iris, most hapless of women, went out into the dark, there was
+nothing more that we needed to know of her. We could guess the sequel
+only too easily. But the case of Letty was wholly different. Her exit
+was an act of will, triumphing over a form of temptation peculiarly
+alluring to her temperament. There was in her character precisely that
+grit which Iris lacked; and we wanted to know what it would do for her.
+This was not a case for an indecisive ending, a note of interrogation.
+The author felt no doubt as to Letty's destiny, and he wanted to leave
+his audience in no doubt. From Iris's fate we were only too willing to
+avert our eyes; but it would have been a sensible discomfort to us to be
+left in the dark about Letty's.</p>
+
+<p>This, then, I regard as a typical instance of justified anticlimax.
+Another is the idyllic last act of <i>The Princess and the Butterfly</i>, in
+which, moreover, despite its comparatively subdued tone, the tension is
+maintained to the end. A very different matter is the third act of <i>The
+Benefit of the Doubt</i>, already alluded to. This is a pronounced case of
+the makeshift ending, inspired (to all appearance) simply by the fact
+that the play must end somehow, and that no better idea happens to
+present itself. Admirable as are the other acts, one is almost inclined
+to agree with Dumas that an author ought not to embark upon a theme
+unless he foresees a better way out of it than this. It should be noted,
+too, that <i>The Benefit of the Doubt</i> is a three-act play, and that, in a
+play laid out on this scale, a whole act of anticlimax is necessarily
+disproportionate. It is one thing to relax the tension in the last act
+out of four or five; quite another thing in the last act out of three.
+In other words, the culminating point of a four-or five-act play may be
+placed in the penultimate act; in a three-act play, it should come, at
+earliest, in the penultimate scene.<a name="FNanchor98"></a><a href="#Footnote_98"><sup>[98]</sup></a></p>
+
+<p>In the works of Mr. Henry Arthur Jones we find several instances of the
+unemphatic last act--some clearly justified, others much less so. Among
+the former I unhesitatingly reckon the fourth act of <i>Mrs. Dane's
+Defence</i>. It would not have been difficult, but surely most inartistic,
+to huddle up the action in five minutes after Mrs. Dane's tragic
+collapse under Sir Daniel Carteret's cross-examination. She might have
+taken poison and died in picturesque contortions on the sofa; or Lionel
+might have defied all counsels of prudence and gone off with her in
+spite of her past; or she might have placed Lionel's hand in Janet's,
+saying: &quot;The game is up. Bless you, my children. I am going into the
+nearest nunnery.&quot; As a matter of fact, Mr. Jones brought his action to
+its natural close in a quiet, sufficiently adroit, last act; and I do
+not see that criticism has any just complaint to make.</p>
+
+<p>In recent French drama, <i>La Douloureuse</i>, already cited, affords an
+excellent instance of a quiet last act. After the violent and
+heartrending rupture between the lovers in the third act, we feel that,
+though this paroxysm of pain is justified by the circumstances, it will
+not last for ever, and Philippe and H&eacute;l&egrave;ne will come together again.
+This is also M. Donnay's view; and he devotes his whole last act, quite
+simply, to a duologue of reconciliation. It seems to me a fault of
+proportion, however, that he should shift his locality from Paris to the
+Riviera, and should place the brief duologue in a romantic woodland
+scene. An act of anticlimax should be treated, so to speak, as
+unpretentiously as possible. To invent an elaborate apparatus for it is
+to emphasize the anticlimax by throwing it into unnecessary relief.</p>
+
+<p>This may be a convenient place for a few words on the modern fashion of
+eschewing emphasis, not only in last acts, but at every point where the
+old French dramaturgy demanded it, and especially in act-endings.
+<i>Punch</i> has a pleasant allusion to this tendency in two suggested
+examination-papers for an &quot;Academy of Dramatists&quot;:</p>
+
+&nbsp;&nbsp;A--FOR THE CLASSICAL SIDE ONLY.<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; 1. What is a &quot;curtain&quot;; and how should it be led up to?<br>
+
+&nbsp;&nbsp;B--FOR THE MODERN SIDE ONLY.<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; 1. What is a &quot;curtain&quot;; and how can it be avoided?<br>
+
+<p>Some modern playwrights have fled in a sort of panic from the old
+&quot;picture-poster situation&quot; to the other extreme of always dropping their
+curtain when the audience least expects it. This is not a practice to be
+commended. One has often seen an audience quite unnecessarily chilled by
+a disconcerting &quot;curtain.&quot; There should be moderation even in the
+shrinking from theatricality.</p>
+
+<p>This shrinking is particularly marked, though I do not say it is carried
+too far, in the plays of Mr. Galsworthy. Even the most innocent tricks
+of emphasis are to him snares of the Evil One. He would sooner die than
+drop his curtain on a particularly effective line. It is his chief
+ambition that you should never discern any arrangement, any intention,
+in his work. As a rule, the only reason you can see for his doing thus
+or thus is his desire that you should see no reason for it. He does not
+carry this tendency, as some do, to the point of eccentricity; but he
+certainly goes as far as any one should be advised to follow. A little
+further, and you incur the danger of becoming affectedly unaffected,
+artificially inartificial.</p>
+
+<p>I am far from pleading for the conventional tableau at the end of each
+act, with all the characters petrified, as it were, in
+penny-plain-twopence-coloured attitudes. But it is certainly desirable
+that the fall of the curtain should not take an audience entirely by
+surprise, and even that the spectator should feel the moment to be
+rightly chosen, though he might be unable to give any reason for his
+feeling. Moreover--this may seem a super-subtlety, but one has seen it
+neglected with notably bad effect--a playwright should never let his
+audience expect the fall of a curtain at a given point, and then balk
+their expectancy, unless he is sure that he holds in reserve a more than
+adequate compensation. There is nothing so dangerous as to let a play,
+or an act, drag on when the audience feels in its heart that it is
+really over, and that &quot;the rest is silence&quot;--or ought to be. The end of
+Mr. Granville Barker's fine play, <i>The Voysey Inheritance</i>, was injured
+by the fact that, several minutes before the curtain actually fell, he
+had given what seemed an obvious &quot;cue for curtain.&quot; I do not say that
+what followed was superfluous; what I do say is that the author ought to
+have been careful not to let us imagine that the colloquy between Edward
+and Alice was over when in fact it had still some minutes to run. An
+even more remarkable play, <i>The Madras House</i>, was ruined, on its first
+night, by a long final anticlimax. Here, however, the fault did not lie
+in awakening a premature expectation of the close, but in the fact that
+we somehow were more interested in the other characters of the play than
+in the pair who held the stage throughout the long concluding scene.</p>
+
+<p>Once more I turn to <i>La Douloureuse</i> for an instance of an admirable
+act-ending of the quiet modern type. The third act--the terrible
+peripety in the love of Philippe and H&eacute;l&egrave;ne--has run its agonizing
+course, and worked itself out. The old dramaturgy would certainly have
+ended the scene with a bang, so to speak--a swoon or a scream, a tableau
+of desolation, or, at the very least, a piece of tearful rhetoric. M.
+Donnay does nothing of the sort. He lets his lovers unpack their hearts
+with words until they are exhausted, broken, dazed with misery, and have
+nothing more to say. Then H&eacute;l&egrave;ne asks: &quot;What o'clock is it?&quot; Philippe
+looks at his watch: &quot;Nearly seven.&quot; &quot;I must be going&quot;--and she dries her
+eyes, smoothes her hair, pulls herself together, in a word, to face the
+world again. The mechanical round of life re-asserts its hold upon them.
+&quot;Help me with my cloak,&quot; she says; and he holds her mantle for her, and
+tucks in the puffed sleeves of her blouse. Then he takes up the lamp and
+lights her out--and the curtain falls. A model &quot;curtain&quot;!</p>
+
+
+
+
+<br><br><hr style="width: 35%;"><br><br>
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_XIX"></a>CHAPTER XIX</h2>
+
+<p>CONVERSION</p>
+<br>
+
+<p>The reader may have noticed, possibly with surprise, that some of the
+stock terms of dramatic criticism occur but rarely in these pages, or
+not at all. One of them is <i>d&eacute;nouement</i>. According to orthodox theory, I
+ought to have made the <i>d&eacute;nouement</i> the subject of a whole chapter, if
+not of a whole book. Why have I not done so?</p>
+
+<p>For two reasons. The lesser, but not negligible, reason is that we
+possess no convenient English word for the unknotting or disentangling
+of a complication. D&eacute;nouement itself cannot be plausibly Anglicized, and
+no native word has as yet, by common consent, been accepted as its
+equivalent. I sometimes wish we could adopt, and print without italics,
+the excellent and expressive Greek word &quot;lusis&quot;; but I cannot, on my own
+responsibility, attempt so daring an innovation. The second and
+determining reason for not making the <i>d&eacute;nouement</i> one of the heads of
+my argument, is that, the play of intrigue being no longer the dominant
+dramatic form, the image of disentangling has lost some of its special
+fitness. It is only in a somewhat strained and conventional sense that
+the term <i>nodus</i>, or knot, can be applied to the sort of crisis with
+which the modern drama normally deals; and if we do not naturally think
+of the crisis as a knot, we naturally do not think of its close as an
+unknotting.</p>
+
+<p>Nevertheless, there are frequent cases in which the end of a play
+depends on something very like the unravelling of a tangled skein; and
+still more often, perhaps, is it brought about through the loosening of
+some knot in the mind of one or more of the characters. This was the
+characteristic end of the old comedy. The heavy father, or cantankerous
+guardian, who for four acts and a half had stood between the lovers,
+suddenly changed his mind, and all was well. Even by our ancestors this
+was reckoned a rather too simple method of disentanglement. Lisideius,
+in Dryden's dialogue,<a name="FNanchor99"></a><a href="#Footnote_99"><sup>[99]</sup></a> in enumerating the points in which the French
+drama is superior to the English notes that--</p>
+
+&nbsp;&nbsp;You never see any of their plays end with a conversion, or simple<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;change of will, which is the ordinary way which our poets use to end<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;theirs. It shew little art in the conclusion of a dramatick poem,<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;when they who have hindered the felicity during the four acts,<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;desist from it in the fifth, without some powerful cause to take<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;them off their design.<br>
+
+<p>The remark of Lisideius is suggested by a passage in Corneille, who
+instances, as an apt and artistic method of bringing about the
+conversion of a heavy father, that his daughter's lover should earn his
+gratitude by rescuing him from assassination!</p>
+
+<p>Conversions, closely examined, will be found to fall into two classes:
+changes in volition, and changes in sentiment. It was the former class
+that Dryden had in mind; and, with reference to this class, the
+principle he indicates remains a sound one. A change of resolve should
+never be due to a mere lapse of time--to the necessity for bringing the
+curtain down and letting the audience go home. It must always be
+rendered plausible by some new fact or new motive: some hitherto untried
+appeal to reason or emotion. This rule, however, is too obvious to
+require enforcement. It was not quite superfluous so long as the old
+convention of comedy endured. For a century and a half after Dryden's
+time, hard-hearted parents were apt to withdraw their opposition to
+their children's &quot;felicity&quot; for no better reason than that the fifth act
+was drawing to a close. But this formula is practically obsolete.
+Changes of will, on the modern stage, are not always adequately motived;
+but that is because of individual inexpertness, not because of any
+failure to recognize theoretically the necessity for adequate
+motivation.</p>
+
+<p>Changes of sentiment are much more important and more difficult to
+handle. A change of will can always manifest itself in action but it is
+very difficult to externalize convincingly a mere change of heart. When
+the conclusion of a play hinges (as it frequently does) on a conversion
+of this nature, it becomes a matter of the first moment that it should
+not merely be asserted, but proved. Many a promising play has gone wrong
+because of the author's neglect, or inability, to comply with this
+condition.</p>
+
+<p>It has often been observed that of all Ibsen's thoroughly mature works,
+from <i>A Doll's House</i> to <i>John Gabriel Borkman</i>, <i>The Lady from the Sea</i>
+is the loosest in texture, the least masterly in construction. The fact
+that it leaves this impression on the mind is largely due, I think, to a
+single fault. The conclusion of the play--Ellida's clinging to Wangel
+and rejection of the Stranger--depends entirely on a change in Wangel's
+mental attitude, <i>of which we have no proof whatever beyond his bare
+assertion</i>. Ellida, in her overwrought mood, is evidently inclining to
+yield to the uncanny allurement of the Stranger's claim upon her, when
+Wangel, realizing that her sanity is threatened, says:</p>
+
+&nbsp;&nbsp;WANGEL: It shall not come to that. There is no other way of<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;deliverance for you--at least I see none. And therefore--therefore<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;I--cancel our bargain on the spot. Now you can choose your own path,<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;in full--full freedom.<br>
+
+&nbsp;&nbsp;ELLIDA (<i>Gazes at him awhile, as if speechless</i>): Is this<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;true--true--what you say? Do you mean it--from your inmost heart?<br>
+
+&nbsp;&nbsp;WANGEL: Yes--from the inmost depths of my tortured heart, I mean<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;it.... Now your own true life can return to its--its right groove<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;again. For now you can choose in freedom; and on your own<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;responsibility, Ellida.<br>
+
+&nbsp;&nbsp;ELLIDA: In freedom--and on my own responsibility? Responsibility?<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;This--this transforms everything.<br>
+
+<p>--and she promptly gives the Stranger his dismissal. Now this is
+inevitably felt to be a weak conclusion, because it turns entirely on a
+condition of Wangel's mind of which he gives no positive and convincing
+evidence. Nothing material is changed by his change of heart. He could
+not in any case have restrained Ellida by force; or, if the law gave him
+the abstract right to do so, he certainly never had the slightest
+intention of exercising it. Psychologically, indeed, the incident is
+acceptable enough. The saner part of Ellida's will was always on
+Wangel's side; and a merely verbal undoing of the &quot;bargain&quot; with which
+she reproached herself might quite naturally suffice to turn the scale
+decisively in his favour. But what may suffice for Ellida is not enough
+for the audience. Too much is made to hang upon a verbally announced
+conversion. The poet ought to have invented some material--or, at the
+very least, some impressively symbolic--proof of Wangel's change of
+heart. Had he done so, <i>The Lady from the Sea</i> would assuredly have
+taken a higher rank among his works.
+
+<p>Let me further illustrate my point by comparing a very small thing with
+a very great. The late Captain Marshall wrote a &quot;farcical romance&quot; named
+<i>The Duke of Killiecrankie</i>, in which that nobleman, having been again
+and again rejected by the Lady Henrietta Addison, kidnapped the obdurate
+fair one, and imprisoned her in a crag-castle in the Highlands. Having
+kept her for a week in deferential durance, and shown her that he was
+not the inefficient nincompoop she had taken him for, he threw open the
+prison gate, and said to her: &quot;Go! I set you free!&quot; The moment she saw
+the gate unlocked, and realized that she could indeed go when and where
+she pleased, she also realized that she had not the least wish to go,
+and flung herself into her captor's arms. Here we have Ibsen's situation
+transposed into the key of fantasy, and provided with the material
+&quot;guarantee of good faith&quot; which is lacking in <i>The Lady from the Sea</i>.
+The Duke's change of mind, his will to set the Lady Henrietta free, is
+visibly demonstrated by the actual opening of the prison gate, so that
+we believe in it, and believe that she believes in it. The play was a
+trivial affair, and is deservedly forgotten; but the situation was
+effective because it obeyed the law that a change of will or of feeling,
+occurring at a crucial point in a dramatic action, must be certified by
+some external evidence, on pain of leaving the audience unimpressed.</p>
+
+<p>This is a more important matter than it may at first sight appear. How
+to bring home to the audience a decisive change of heart is one of the
+ever-recurring problems of the playwright's craft. In <i>The Lady from the
+Sea</i>, Ibsen failed to solve it: in <i>Rosmersholm</i> he solved it by heroic
+measures. The whole catastrophe is determined by Rosmer's inability to
+accept without proof Rebecca's declaration that Rosmersholm has
+&quot;ennobled&quot; her, and that she is no longer the same woman whose
+relentless egoism drove Beata into the mill-race. Rebecca herself puts
+it to him: &quot;How can you believe me on my bare word after to-day?&quot; There
+is only one proof she can give--that of &quot;going the way Beata went.&quot; She
+gives it: and Rosmer, who cannot believe her if she lives, and will not
+survive her if she dies, goes with her to her end. But the cases are not
+very frequent, fortunately, in which such drastic methods of proof are
+appropriate or possible. The dramatist must, as a rule, attain his end
+by less violent means; and often he fails to attain it at all.</p>
+
+<p>A play by Mr. Haddon Chambers, <i>The Awakening</i>, turned on a sudden
+conversion--the &quot;awakening,&quot; in fact, referred to in the title. A
+professional lady-killer, a noted Don Juan, has been idly making love to
+a country maiden, whose heart is full of innocent idealisms. She
+discovers his true character, or, at any rate, his reputation, and is
+horror-stricken, while practically at the same moment, he &quot;awakens&quot; to
+the error of his ways, and is seized with a passion for her as single
+minded and idealistic as hers for him. But how are the heroine and the
+audience to be assured of the fact? That is just the difficulty; and the
+author takes no effectual measures to overcome it. The heroine, of
+course, is ultimately convinced; but the audience remains sceptical, to
+the detriment of the desired effect. &quot;Sceptical,&quot; perhaps, is not quite
+the right word. The state of mind of a fictitious character is not a
+subject for actual belief or disbelief. We are bound to accept
+theoretically what the author tells us; but in this case he has failed
+to make us intimately feel and know that it is true.<a name="FNanchor100"></a><a href="#Footnote_100"><sup>[100]</sup></a></p>
+
+<p>In Mr. Alfred Sutro's play <i>The Builder of Bridges</i>, Dorothy Faringay,
+in her devotion to her forger brother, has conceived the rather
+disgraceful scheme of making one of his official superiors fall in love
+with her, in order to induce him to become practically an accomplice in
+her brother's crime. She succeeds beyond her hopes. Edward Thursfield
+does fall in love with her, and, at a great sacrifice, replaces the
+money the brother has stolen. But, in a very powerful peripety-scene in
+the third act, Thursfield learns that Dorothy has been deliberately
+beguiling him, while in fact she was engaged to another man. The truth
+is, however, that she has really come to love Thursfield passionately,
+and has broken her engagement with the other, for whom she never truly
+cared. So the author tells us, and so we are willing enough to
+believe--if he can devise any adequate method of making Thursfield
+believe it. Mr. Sutro's handling of the difficulty seems to me fairly,
+but not conspicuously, successful. I cite the case as a typical instance
+of the problem, apart from the merits or demerits of the solution.</p>
+
+<p>It may be said that the difficulty of bringing home to us the reality of
+a revulsion of feeling, or a radical change of mental attitude, is only
+a particular case of the playwright's general problem of convincingly
+externalizing inward conditions and processes. That is true: but the
+special importance of a conversion which unties the knot and brings the
+curtain down seemed to render it worthy of special consideration.</p>
+
+
+<br><br><hr style="width: 35%;"><br><br>
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_XX"></a>CHAPTER XX</h2>
+
+<p>BLIND-ALLEY THEMES--AND OTHERS</p>
+<br>
+
+<p>A blind-alley theme, as its name imports, is one from which there is no
+exit. It is a problem incapable of solution, or, rather, of which all
+possible solutions are equally unsatisfactory and undesirable. The
+playwright cannot too soon make sure that he has not strayed into such a
+no-thoroughfare. Whether an end be comic or tragic, romantic or ironic,
+happy or disastrous, it should satisfy something within us--our sense of
+truth, or of beauty, or of sublimity, or of justice, or of humour, or,
+at the least or lowest, our cynical sense of the baseness of human
+nature, and the vanity of human aspirations. But a play which satisfies
+neither our higher nor our lower instincts, baffles our sympathies, and
+leaves our desires at fault between equally inacceptable
+alternatives--such a play, whatever beauties of detail it may possess,
+is a weariness of the spirit, and an artistic blunder.</p>
+
+<p>There are in literature two conspicuous examples of the blind-alley
+theme--two famous plays, wherein two heroines are placed in somewhat
+similar dilemmas, which merely paralyse our sympathies and inhibit our
+moral judgment. The first of these is <i>Measure for Measure</i>. If ever
+there was an insoluble problem in casuistry, it is that which
+Shakespeare has here chosen to present to us. Isabella is forced to
+choose between what we can only describe as two detestable evils. If she
+resists Angelo, and lets her brother die, she recoils from an act of
+self-sacrifice; and, although we may coldly approve, we cannot admire or
+take pleasure in her action. If, on the other hand, she determines at
+all costs to save her brother's life, her sacrifice is a thing from
+which we want only to avert the mind: it belongs to the region of what
+Aristotle calls to <i>miaron</i>, the odious and intolerable. Shakespeare,
+indeed, confesses the problem insoluble in the fact that he leaves it
+unsolved--evading it by means of a mediaeval trick. But where, then, was
+the use of presenting it? What is the artistic profit of letting the
+imagination play around a problem which merely baffles and repels it?
+Sardou, indeed, presented the same problem, not as the theme of a whole
+play, but only of a single act; and he solved it by making Floria Tosca
+kill Scarpia. This is a solution which, at any rate, satisfies our
+craving for crude justice, and is melodramatically effective.
+Shakespeare probably ignored it, partly because it was not in his
+sources, partly because, for some obscure reason, he supposed himself to
+be writing a comedy. The result is that, though the play contains some
+wonderful poetry, and has been from time to time revived, it has never
+taken any real hold upon popular esteem.</p>
+
+<p>The second glaring instance of a blind-alley theme is that of <i>Monna
+Vanna</i>. We have all of us, I suppose, stumbled, either as actors or
+onlookers, into painful situations, which not even a miracle of tact
+could possibly save. As a rule, of course, they are comic, and the agony
+they cause may find a safety-valve in laughter. But sometimes there
+occurs some detestable incident, over which it is equally impossible to
+laugh and to weep. The wisest words, the most graceful acts, are of no
+avail. One longs only to sink into the earth, or vanish into thin air.
+Such a situation, on the largest possible scale, is that presented in
+<i>Monna Vanna</i>. It differs from that of <i>Measure for Measure</i> in the fact
+that there can be no doubt as to the moral aspect of the case. It is
+quite clear that Giovanna ought to sacrifice herself to save, not one
+puling Claudio, but a whole city full of men, women, and children. What
+she does is absolutely right; but the conjuncture is none the less a
+grotesque and detestable one, which ought to be talked about and thought
+about as little as possible. Every word that is uttered is a failure in
+tact. Guido, the husband, behaves, in the first act, with a violent
+egoism, which is certainly lacking in dignity; but will any one tell me
+what would be a dignified course for him to pursue under the
+circumstances? The sage old Marco, too--that fifteenth-century
+Renan--flounders just as painfully as the hot-headed Guido. It is the
+fatality of the case that &quot;he cannot open his mouth without putting his
+foot in it&quot;; and a theme which exposes a well-meaning old gentleman to
+this painful necessity is one by all means to be avoided. The fact that
+it is a false alarm, and that there is no rational explanation for
+Prinzivalle's wanton insult to a woman whom he reverently idolizes, in
+no way makes matters better.<a name="FNanchor101"></a><a href="#Footnote_101"><sup>[101]</sup></a> Not the least grotesque thing in the
+play is Giovanna's expectation that Guido will receive Prinzivalle with
+open arms because he has--changed his mind. We can feel neither approval
+nor disapproval, sympathy nor antipathy, in such a deplorable
+conjunction of circumstances. All we wish is that we had not been called
+upon to contemplate it.<a name="FNanchor102"></a><a href="#Footnote_102"><sup>[102]</sup></a> Maeterlinck, like Shakespeare, was simply
+dallying with the idea of a squalid heroism--so squalid, indeed, that
+neither he nor his predecessor had the courage to carry it through.</p>
+
+<p>Pray observe that the defect of these two themes is not merely that they
+are &quot;unpleasant.&quot; It is that there is no possible way out of them which
+is not worse than unpleasant: humiliating, and distressing. Let the
+playwright, then, before embarking on a theme, make sure that he has
+some sort of satisfaction to offer us at the end, if it be only the
+pessimistic pleasure of realizing some part of &quot;the bitter, old and
+wrinkled truth&quot; about life. The crimes of destiny there is some profit
+in contemplating; but its stupid vulgarities minister neither to profit
+nor delight.</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 25%;">
+
+<p>It may not be superfluous to give at this point a little list of
+subjects which, though not blind-alley themes, are equally to be
+avoided. Some of them, indeed, are the reverse of blind-alley themes,
+their drawback lying in the fact that the way out of them is too
+tediously apparent.</p>
+
+<p>At the head of this list I would place what may be called the &quot;white
+marriage&quot; theme: not because it is ineffective, but because its
+effectiveness is very cheap and has been sadly overdone. It occurs in
+two varieties: either a proud but penniless damsel is married to a
+wealthy parvenu, or a woman of culture and refinement is married to a
+&quot;rough diamond.&quot; In both cases the action consists of the transformation
+of a nominal into a real marriage; and it is almost impossible, in these
+days, to lend any novelty to the process. In the good old <i>Lady of
+Lyons</i> the theme was decked in trappings of romantic absurdity, which
+somehow harmonized with it. One could hear in it a far-off echo of
+revolutionary rodomontade. The social aspect of the matter was
+emphasized, and the satire on middle-class snobbery was cruelly
+effective. The personal aspect, on the other hand--the unfulfilment of
+the nominal marriage--was lightly and discreetly handled, according to
+early-Victorian convention. In later days--from the time of M. George
+Ohnet's <i>Ma&icirc;tre de Forges</i> onwards--this is the aspect on which
+playwrights have preferred to dwell. Usually, the theme shades off into
+the almost equally hackneyed <i>Still Waters Run Deep</i> theme; for there is
+apt to be an aristocratic lover whom the unpolished but formidable
+husband threatens to shoot or horsewhip, and thereby overcomes the last
+remnant of repugnance in the breast of his haughty spouse. In <i>The
+Ironmaster</i> the lover was called the Duc de Bligny, or, more commonly,
+the Dook de Bleeny; but he has appeared under many aliases. In the chief
+American version of the theme, Mr. Vaughn Moody's <i>Great Divide</i>, the
+lover is dispensed with altogether, being inconsistent, no doubt, with
+the austere manners of Milford Corners, Mass. In one of the recent
+French versions, on the other hand--M. Bernstein's <i>Samson</i>--the
+aristocratic lover is almost as important a character as the virile,
+masterful, plebeian husband. It appears from this survey--which might be
+largely extended--that there are several ways of handling the theme; but
+there is no way of renewing and deconventionalizing it. No doubt it has
+a long life before it on the plane of popular melodrama, but scarcely,
+one hopes, on any higher plane.</p>
+
+<p>Another theme which ought to be relegated to the theatrical lumber-room
+is that of patient, inveterate revenge. This form of vindictiveness is,
+from a dramatic point of view, an outworn passion. It is too obviously
+irrational and anti-social to pass muster in modern costume. The actual
+vendetta may possibly survive in some semi-barbarous regions, and
+Grangerfords and Shepherdsons (as in Mark Twain's immortal romance) may
+still be shooting each other at sight. But these things are relics of
+the past; they do not belong to the normal, typical life of our time. It
+is useless to say that human nature is the same in all ages. That is one
+of the facile axioms of psychological incompetence. Far be it from me to
+deny that malice, hatred, spite, and the spirit of retaliation are, and
+will be until the millennium, among the most active forces in human
+nature. But most people are coming to recognize that life is too short
+for deliberate, elaborate, cold-drawn revenge. They will hit back when
+they conveniently can; they will cherish for half a lifetime a passive,
+an obstructive, ill-will; they will even await for years an opportunity
+of &quot;getting their knife into&quot; an enemy. But they have grown chary of
+&quot;cutting off their nose to spite their face&quot;; they will very rarely
+sacrifice their own comfort in life to the mere joy of protracted,
+elaborate reprisals. Vitriol and the revolver--an outburst of rage,
+culminating in a &quot;short, sharp shock&quot;--these belong, if you will, to
+modern life. But long-drawn, unhasting, unresting machination, with no
+end in view beyond an ultimate unmasking, a turn of the tables--in a
+word, a strong situation--this, I take it, belongs to a phase of
+existence more leisurely than ours. There is no room in our crowded
+century for such large and sustained passions. One could mention
+plays--but they are happily forgotten--in which retribution was delayed
+for some thirty or forty years, during which the unconscious object of
+it enjoyed a happy and prosperous existence. These, no doubt, are
+extreme instances; but cold-storage revenge, as a whole, ought to be as
+rare on the stage as it is in real life. The serious playwright will do
+well to leave it to the melodramatists.</p>
+
+<p>A third theme to be handled with the greatest caution, if at all, is
+that of heroic self-sacrifice. Not that self-sacrifice, like revenge, is
+an outworn passion. It still rages in daily life; but no audience of
+average intelligence will to-day accept it with the uncritical
+admiration which it used to excite in the sentimental dramas of last
+century. Even then--even in 1869--Meilhac and Hal&eacute;vy, in their
+ever-memorable <i>Froufrou</i>, showed what disasters often result from it;
+but it retained its prestige with the average playwright--and with some
+who were above the average--for many a day after that. I can recall a
+play, by a living English author, in which a Colonel in the Indian Army
+pleaded guilty to a damning charge of cowardice rather than allow a lady
+whom he chivalrously adored to learn that it was her husband who was the
+real coward and traitor. He knew that the lady detested her husband; he
+knew that they had no children to suffer by the husband's disgrace; he
+knew that there was a quite probable way by which he might have cleared
+his own character without casting any imputation on the other man. But
+in a sheer frenzy of self-sacrifice he blasted his own career, and
+thereby inflicted far greater pain upon the woman he loved than if he
+had told the truth or suffered it to be told. And twenty years
+afterwards, when the villain was dead, the hero still resolutely refused
+to clear his own character, lest the villain's widow should learn the
+truth about her wholly unlamented husband. This was an extravagant and
+childish case; but the superstition of heroic self-sacrifice still
+lingers in certain quarters, and cannot be too soon eradicated. I do not
+mean, of course, that self-sacrifice is never admirable, but only that
+it can no longer be accepted as a thing inherently noble, apart from its
+circumstances and its consequences. An excellent play might be written
+with the express design of placing the ethics of self-sacrifice in their
+true light. Perhaps the upshot might be the recognition of the simple
+principle that it is immoral to make a sacrifice which the person
+supposed to benefit by it has no right to accept.</p>
+
+<p>Another motive against which it is perhaps not quite superfluous to warn
+the aspiring playwright is the &quot;voix du sang.&quot; It is only a few years
+since this miraculous voice was heard speaking loud and long in His
+Majesty's Theatre, London, and in a play by a no less modern-minded
+author than the late Clyde Fitch. It was called <i>The Last of the
+Dandies</i>,<a name="FNanchor103"></a><a href="#Footnote_103"><sup>[103]</sup></a> and its hero was Count D'Orsay. At a given moment, D'Orsay
+learned that a young man known as Lord Raoul Ardale was in reality his
+son. Instantly the man of the world, the squire of dames, went off into
+a deliquium of tender emotion. For &quot;my bo-o-oy&quot; he would do anything and
+everything. He would go down to Crockford's and win a pot of money to
+pay &quot;my boy's&quot; debts--Fortune could not but be kind to a doting parent.
+In the beautiful simplicity of his soul, he looked forward with eager
+delight to telling Raoul that the mother he adored was no better than
+she should be, and that he had no right to his name or title. Not for a
+moment did he doubt that the young man would share his transports. When
+the mother opposed his purpose of betraying her secret, he wept with
+disappointment. &quot;All day,&quot; he said, &quot;I have been saying to myself: When
+that sun sets, I shall hear him say, 'Good-night, Father!'&quot; He
+postulated in so many words the &quot;voix du sang,&quot; trusting that, even if
+the revelation were not formally made, &quot;Nature would send the boy some
+impulse&quot; of filial affection. It is hard to believe--but it is the
+fact--that, well within the present century, such ingenuous nonsense as
+this was gravely presented to the public of a leading theatre, by an
+author of keen intelligence, who, but for an unhappy accident, would now
+be at the zenith of his career. There are few more foolish conventions
+than that of the &quot;voix du sang.&quot; Perhaps, however, the rising generation
+of playwrights has more need to be warned against the opposite or
+Shawesque convention, that kinship utters itself mainly in wrangling and
+mutual dislike.</p>
+
+<p>Among inherently feeble and greatly overdone expedients may be reckoned
+the oath or promise of secrecy, exacted for no sufficient reason, and
+kept in defiance of common sense and common humanity. Lord Windermere's
+conduct in Oscar Wilde's play is a case in point, though he has not even
+an oath to excuse his insensate secretiveness. A still clearer instance
+is afforded by Clyde Fitch's play <i>The Girl with the Green Eyes</i>. In
+other respects a very able play, it is vitiated by the certainty that
+Austin ought to have, and would have, told the truth ten times over,
+rather than subject his wife's jealous disposition to the strain he
+puts upon it.</p>
+
+<p>It would not be difficult to prolong this catalogue of themes and
+motives that have come down in the world, and are no longer presentable
+in any society that pretends to intelligence. But it is needless to
+enter into further details. There is a general rule, of sovereign
+efficacy, for avoiding such anachronisms: &quot;Go to life for your themes,
+and not to the theatre.&quot; Observe that rule, and you are safe. But it is
+easier said than done.</p>
+
+
+<br><br><hr style="width: 35%;"><br><br>
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_XXI"></a>CHAPTER XXI</h2>
+
+<p>THE FULL CLOSE</p>
+<br>
+
+<p>In an earlier chapter, I have tried to show that a certain tolerance for
+anticlimax, for a fourth or fifth act of calm after the storm of the
+penultimate act, is consonant with right reason, and is a practically
+inevitable result of a really intimate relation between drama and life.
+But it would be a complete misunderstanding of my argument to suppose
+that I deny the practical, and even the artistic, superiority of those
+themes in which the tension can be maintained and heightened to the
+very end.</p>
+
+<p>The fact that tragedy has from of old been recognized as a higher form
+than comedy is partly due, no doubt, to the tragic poet's traditional
+right to round off a human destiny in death. &quot;Call no man happy till his
+life be ended,&quot; said Sophocles, quoting from an earlier sage; and it
+needed no profundity of wisdom to recognize in the &quot;happy ending&quot; of
+comedy a conventional, ephemeral thing. But when, after all the
+peripeties of life, the hero &quot;home has gone and ta'en his wages,&quot; we
+feel that, at any rate, we have looked destiny squarely in the face,
+without evasion or subterfuge. Perhaps the true justification of tragedy
+as a form of art is that, after this experience, we should feel life to
+be, not less worth living, but greater and more significant than before.</p>
+
+<p>This is no place, however, for a discussion of the aesthetic basis of
+tragedy in general.<a name="FNanchor104"></a><a href="#Footnote_104"><sup>[104]</sup></a> What is here required, from the point of view of
+craftsmanship, is not so much a glorification of the tragic ending, as a
+warning against its facile misuse. A very great play may, and often
+must, end in death; but you cannot make a play great by simply killing
+off your protagonist. Death is, after all, a very inexpensive means of
+avoiding anticlimax. Tension, as we saw, is symbolized in the sword of
+Damocles; and it can always be maintained, in a mechanical way, by
+letting your hero play about with a revolver, or placing an overdose of
+chloral well within your heroine's reach. At the time when the English
+drama was awaking from the lethargy of the 'seventies, an idea got
+abroad that a non-sanguinary ending was always and necessarily
+inartistic, and that a self-respecting playwright must at all hazards
+kill somebody before dropping his curtain. This was an extravagant
+reaction against the purely commercial principle that the public would
+not, on any terms, accept a tragic ending. As a matter of fact, the
+mortality was not very great; for managers were resolute in the old
+belief, and few dramatists had the courage or authority to stand up
+against them. But I have often heard playwrights lamenting their
+inability to massacre the luckless children of their fancy, who, nine
+times out of ten, had done nothing to incur such a doom. The real
+trouble was that death seemed to be the only method of avoiding
+anticlimax.</p>
+
+<p>It is a very sound rule that, before you determine to write a tragedy,
+you should make sure that you have a really tragic theme: that you can
+place your hero at such odds with life that reconciliation, or mere
+endurance, would be morally base or psychologically improbable.
+Moreover, you must strike deep into character before you are justified
+in passing capital sentence on your personages. Death is a
+disproportionate close for a commonplace and superficially-studied life.
+It is true that quite commonplace people do die; indeed, they
+preponderate in the bills of mortality; but death on the stage confers a
+sort of distinction which ought not to be accorded without due and
+sufficient cause. To one god in particular we may apply the Horatian
+maxim, &quot;Nec deus intersit, nisi dignus vindice nodus.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>In German aesthetic theory, the conception <i>tragische Schuld</i>--&quot;tragic
+guilt&quot;--plays a large part. It descends, no doubt, from the Aristotelian
+maxim that a tragic hero must neither be too good nor too bad; but it
+also belongs to a moralizing conception, which tacitly or explicitly
+assumes that the dramatist's aim ought to be &quot;to justify the ways of God
+to man.&quot; In these days we look at drama more objectively, and do not
+insist on deciding in what degree a man has deserved death, if only we
+feel that he has necessarily or probably incurred it. But in order that
+we may be satisfied of this, we must know him intimately and feel with
+him intensely. We must, in other words, believe that he dies because he
+cannot live, and not merely to suit the playwright's convenience and
+help him to an effective &quot;curtain.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>As we review the series of Ibsen's modern plays, we cannot but feel
+that, though he did not shrink from death, he never employed it, except
+perhaps in his last melancholy effort, as a mere way of escape from a
+difficulty. In five out of his thirteen modern plays, no one dies at
+all.<a name="FNanchor105"></a><a href="#Footnote_105"><sup>[105]</sup></a> One might even say six: for Oswald, in <i>Ghosts</i>, may live for
+years; but I hold it as only fair to count the death of his mind as more
+than equivalent to bodily death. Solness, on the plane of literal fact,
+dies by an accident; on the plane of symbolic interpretation, he dies of
+the over-great demands which Hilda makes upon his &quot;sickly conscience.&quot;
+Little Eyolf's death can also be regarded from a symbolic point of view;
+but there is no substantial reason to think of it otherwise than as an
+accident. John Gabriel Borkman dies of heart seizure, resulting from
+sudden exposure to extreme cold. In the case of Solness and Borkman,
+death is a quite natural and probable result of the antecedent
+conditions; and in the case of Eyolf, it is not a way out of the action,
+but rather the way into it. There remain the three cases of suicide:
+Rebecca and Rosmer, Hedda Gabler, and Hedvig. I have already, in Chapter
+XIX, shown how the death of Rebecca was the inevitable outcome of the
+situation--the one conclusive proof of her &quot;ennoblement&quot;--and how it was
+almost equally inevitable that Rosmer should accompany her to her end.
+Hedda Gabler was constitutionally fated to suicide: a woman of low
+vitality, overmastering egoism, and acute supersensitiveness, placed in
+a predicament which left her nothing to expect from life but tedium and
+humiliation. The one case left--that of Hedvig--is the only one in which
+Ibsen can possibly be accused of wanton bloodshed. Bj&ouml;rnson, in a very
+moving passage in his novel, <i>The Paths of God</i>, did actually, though
+indirectly, make that accusation. Certainly, there is no more
+heartrending incident in fiction; and certainly it is a thing that only
+consummate genius can justify. Ibsen happened to possess that genius,
+and I am not far from agreeing with those who hold <i>The Wild Duck</i> to be
+his greatest work. But for playwrights who are tempted to seek for
+effects of pathos by similar means, one may without hesitation lay down
+this maxim: Be sure you are an Ibsen before you kill your Hedvig.</p>
+
+<p>This analysis of Ibsen's practice points to the fact--for such I believe
+it to be--that what the modern playwright has chiefly to guard against
+is the temptation to overdo suicide as a means of cutting the dramatic
+knot. In France and Germany there is another temptation, that of the
+duel;<a name="FNanchor106"></a><a href="#Footnote_106"><sup>[106]</sup></a> but in Anglo-Saxon countries it scarcely presents itself.
+Death, other than self-inflicted, is much less tempting, and less apt to
+be resorted to in and out of season. The heroine, whether virtuous or
+erring, who dies of consumption, has gone greatly out of vogue. A broken
+heart is no longer held to be necessarily fatal. The veriest tyro
+realizes that death by crude accident is inadmissible as a determining
+factor in serious drama; and murder is practically (though not
+absolutely) relegated to the melodramatic domain. The one urgent
+question, then, is that of the artistic use and abuse of suicide.</p>
+
+<p>The principle is pretty plain, I think, that it ought to be the
+artist's, as it is the man's, last resort. We know that, in most
+civilized countries, suicide is greatly on the increase. It cannot be
+called an infrequent incident in daily life. It is certain, too, that
+the motives impelling to it are apt to be of a dramatic nature, and
+therefore suited to the playwright's purposes. But it is, on the other
+hand, such a crude and unreasoning means of exit from the tangle of
+existence that a playwright of delicate instincts will certainly employ
+it only under the strongest compulsion from his artistic conscience.</p>
+
+<p>Sir Arthur Pinero has three suicides on his record, though one of them
+was, so to speak, nipped in the bud. In <i>The Profligate</i>, as presented
+on the stage, Dunstan Renshaw changed his mind before draining the fatal
+goblet; and in this case the stage version was surely the right one. The
+suicide, to which the author still clings in the printed text,
+practically dates the play as belonging to the above-mentioned period of
+rebellion against the conventional &quot;happy ending,&quot; when the ambitious
+British dramatist felt that honour required him to kill his man on the
+smallest provocation.<a name="FNanchor107"></a><a href="#Footnote_107"><sup>[107]</sup></a> Nearly a quarter of a century has passed since
+then, and the disproportion between such a play and such a catastrophe
+is now apparent to everyone. It is not that we judge Renshaw's
+delinquencies to be over-punished by death--that is not the question.
+The fact is simply that the characters are not large enough, true
+enough, living enough--that the play does not probe deep enough into
+human experience--to make the august intervention of death seem other
+than an incongruity. The suicide of Paula Tanqueray, though it, too, has
+been much criticized, is a very different matter. Inevitable it cannot
+be called: if the play had been written within the past ten years, Sir
+Arthur would very likely have contrived to do without it. But it is, in
+itself, probable enough: both the good and the bad in Paula's character
+might easily make her feel that only the dregs of life remained to her,
+and they not worth drinking. The worst one can say of it is that it sins
+against the canon of practical convenience which enjoins on the prudent
+dramatist strict economy in suicide. The third case, Zoe Blundell's leap
+to nothingness, in that harsh and ruthless masterpiece, <i>Mid-Channel</i>,
+is as inevitable as anything can well be in human destiny. Zoe has made
+a miserable and hopeless muddle of her life. In spite of her goodness of
+heart, she has no interests and no ideals, apart from the personal
+satisfactions which have now been poisoned at their source. She has
+intervened disastrously in the destinies of others. She is ill; her
+nerves are all on edge; and she is, as it were, driven into a corner,
+from which there is but one easy and rapid exit. Here is a case, if ever
+there was one, where the end is imposed upon the artist by the whole
+drift of his action. It may be said that chance plays a large part in
+the concatenation of events--that, for instance, if Leonard Ferris had
+not happened to live at the top of a very high building, Zoe would not
+have encountered the sudden temptation to which she yields. But this, as
+I have tried to show above, is a baseless complaint. Chance is a
+constant factor in life, now aiding, now thwarting, the will. To
+eliminate it altogether would be to produce a most unlifelike world. It
+is only when the playwright so manipulates and reduplicates chance as to
+make it seem no longer chance, but purposeful arrangement, that we have
+the right to protest.</p>
+
+<p>Another instance of indisputably justified suicide may be found in Mr.
+Galsworthy's <i>Justice</i>. The whole theme of the play is nothing but the
+hounding to his end of a luckless youth, who has got on the wrong side
+of the law, and finds all the forces of society leagued against him. In
+Mr. Granville Barker's <i>Waste</i>, the artistic justification for Trebell's
+self-effacement is less clear and compulsive. It is true that the play
+was suggested by the actual suicide, not of a politician, but of a
+soldier, who found his career ruined by some pitiful scandal. But the
+author has made no attempt to reproduce the actual circumstances of that
+case; and even if he had reproduced the external circumstances, the
+psychological conditions would clearly have eluded him. Thus the appeal
+to fact is, as it always must be, barred. In two cases, indeed, much
+more closely analogous to Trebell's than that which actually suggested
+it--two famous cases in which a scandal cut short a brilliant political
+career--suicide played no part in the catastrophe. These real-life
+instances are, I repeat, irrelevant. The only question is whether Mr.
+Barker has made us feel that a man of Trebell's character would
+certainly not survive the paralysing of his energies; and that question
+every spectator must answer for himself. I am far from answering it in
+the negative. I merely suggest that the playwright may one day come
+across a theme for which there is no conceivable ending but suicide, and
+may wish that he had let Trebell live, lest people should come to regard
+him as a spendthrift of self-slaughter.</p>
+
+<p>The suicide which brings to a close Mr. Clyde Fitch's very able play,
+<i>The Climbers</i>, stands on a somewhat different level. Here it is not the
+protagonist who makes away with himself, nor is his destiny the main
+theme of the play. Mr. Fitch has painted a broad social picture, in
+which, if there is any concentration of interest, it is upon Blanche and
+Warden. Sterling's suicide, then, though it does in fact cut the chief
+knot of the play, is to be regarded rather as a characteristic and
+probable incident of a certain phase of life, than as the culmination of
+a spiritual tragedy. It has not the artistic significance, either good
+or bad, that it would have if the character and destiny of Sterling were
+our main concernment.</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 25%;">
+
+<p>The happy playwright, one may say, is he whose theme does not force upon
+him either a sanguinary or a tame last act, but enables him, without
+troubling the coroner, to sustain and increase the tension up to the
+very close. Such themes are not too common, but they do occur. Dumas
+found one in <i>Denise</i>, and another in <i>Francillon</i>, where the famous &quot;Il
+en a menti!&quot; comes within two minutes of the fall of the curtain. In
+<i>Heimat</i> (Magda) and in <i>Johannisfeuer</i>, Sudermann keeps the tension at
+its height up to the fall of the curtain. Sir Arthur Pinero's <i>Iris</i> is
+a case in point; so are Mr. Shaw's <i>Candida</i> and <i>The Devil's Disciple</i>;
+so is Mr. Galsworthy's <i>Strife</i>. Other instances will no doubt occur to
+the reader; yet he will probably be surprised to find that it is not
+very easy to recall them.</p>
+
+<p>For this is not, in fact, the typical modern formula. In plays which do
+not end in death, it will generally be found that the culminating scene
+occurs in the penultimate act, and that, if anticlimax is avoided, it is
+not by the maintenance of an unbroken tension, by its skilful renewal
+and reinforcement in the last act. This is a resource which the
+playwright will do well to bear in mind. Where he cannot place his
+&quot;great scene&quot; in his last act, he should always consider whether it be
+not possible to hold some development in reserve whereby the tension may
+be screwed up again--if unexpectedly, so much the better. Some of the
+most successful plays within my recollection have been those in which
+the last act came upon us as a pleasant surprise. An anticlimax had
+seemed inevitable; and behold! the author had found a way out of it.</p>
+
+<p><i>An Enemy of the People</i> may perhaps be placed in this class, though, as
+before remarked, the last act is almost an independent comedy. Had the
+play ended with the fourth act, no one would have felt that anything was
+lacking; so that in his fifth act, Ibsen was not so much grappling with
+an urgent technical problem, as amusing himself by wringing the last
+drop of humour out of the given situation. A more strictly apposite
+example may be found in Sir Arthur Pinero's play, <i>His House in Order</i>.
+Here the action undoubtedly culminates in the great scene between Nina
+and Hilary Jesson in the third act; yet we await with eager anticipation
+the discomfiture of the Ridgeley family; and when we realize that it is
+to be brought about by the disclosure to Filmer of Annabel's secret, the
+manifest rightness of the proceeding gives us a little shock of
+pleasure. Mr. Somerset Maugham, again, in the last act of <i>Grace</i>,
+employs an ingenious device to keep the tension at a high pitch. The
+matter of the act consists mainly of a debate as to whether Grace Insole
+ought, or ought not, to make a certain painful avowal to her husband. As
+the negative opinion was to carry the day, Mr. Maugham saw that there
+was grave danger that the final scene might appear an almost ludicrous
+anticlimax. To obviate this, he made Grace, at the beginning of the act,
+write a letter of confession, and address it to Claude; so that all
+through the discussion we had at the back of our mind the question &quot;Will
+the letter reach his hands? Will the sword of Damocles fall?&quot; This may
+seem like a leaf from the book of Sardou; but in reality it was a
+perfectly natural and justified expedient. It kept the tension alive
+throughout a scene of ethical discussion, interesting in itself, but
+pretty clearly destined to lead up to the undramatic alternative--a
+policy of silence and inaction. Mr. Clyde Fitch, in the last act of <i>The
+Truth</i>, made an elaborate and daring endeavour to relieve the
+mawkishness of the clearly-foreseen reconciliation between Warder and
+Becky. He let Becky fall in with her father's mad idea of working upon
+Warder's compassion by pretending that she had tried to kill herself.
+Only at the last moment did she abandon the sordid comedy, and so prove
+herself (as we are asked to suppose) cured for ever of the habit of
+fibbing. Mr. Fitch here showed good technical insight marred by
+over-hasty execution. That Becky should be tempted to employ her old
+methods, and should overcome the temptation, was entirely right; but the
+actual deception attempted was so crude and hopeless that there was no
+plausibility in her consenting to it, and no merit in her desisting
+from it.</p>
+
+<p>In light comedy and farce it is even more desirable than in serious
+drama to avoid a tame and perfunctory last act. Very often a seemingly
+trivial invention will work wonders in keeping the interest afoot. In
+Mr. Anstey's delightful farce, <i>The Brass Bottle</i>, one looked forward
+rather dolefully to a flat conclusion; but by the simple device of
+letting the Jinny omit to include Pringle in his &quot;act of oblivion,&quot; the
+author is enabled to make his last scene quite as amusing as any of its
+predecessors. Mr. Arnold Bennett, in <i>The Honeymoon</i>, had the audacity
+to play a deliberate trick on the audience, in order to evade an
+anticlimax. Seeing that his third act could not at best be very good, he
+purposely put the audience on a false scent, made it expect an
+absolutely commonplace ending (the marriage of Flora to Charles Haslam),
+and then substituted one which, if not very brilliant, was at least
+ingenious and unforeseen. Thus, by defeating the expectation of a
+superlatively bad act, he made a positively insignificant act seem
+comparatively good. Such feats of craftsmanship are entertaining, but
+too dangerous to be commended for imitation.</p>
+
+<p>In some modern plays a full close is achieved by the simple expedient of
+altogether omitting the last act, or last scene, and leaving the end of
+the play to the imagination. This method is boldly and (I understand)
+successfully employed by Mr. Edward Sheldon in his powerful play, <i>The
+Nigger</i>. Philip Morrow, the popular Governor of one of the Southern
+States, has learnt that his grandmother was a quadroon, and that
+consequently he has in him a much-attenuated strain of African blood. In
+the Southern States, attenuation matters nothing: if the remotest
+filament of a man's ancestry runs back to Africa, he is &quot;a nigger all
+right.&quot; Philip has just suppressed a race-riot in the city, and, from
+the balcony of the State Capitol, is to address the troops who have
+aided him, and the assembled multitude. Having resolutely parted from
+the woman he adores, but can no longer marry, he steps out upon the
+balcony to announce that he is a negro, that he resigns the
+Governorship, and that henceforth he casts in his lot with his black
+brethren. The stage-direction runs thus--</p>
+
+&nbsp;&nbsp;The afternoon sun strikes his figure. At his appearance a shout goes<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;up--long, steady, enthusiastic cheering; and, after a moment, the<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;big regimental band begins playing, very slowly, &quot;My Country, 'tis<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;of Thee.&quot; ... All the people in the room are smiling and applauding<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;enthusiastically; and--as Phil in vain raises his hand for silence,<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;and the band crashes through the National Anthem, and the roar of<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;voices still rises from below--<br>
+
+&nbsp;&nbsp;THE CURTAIN FALLS.<br>
+
+<p>One does not know whether to praise Mr. Sheldon for having adroitly
+avoided an anticlimax, or to reproach him with having unblushingly
+shirked a difficulty. To my sense, the play has somewhat the air of a
+hexameter line with the spondee cut off.<a name="FNanchor108"></a><a href="#Footnote_108"><sup>[108]</sup></a> One <i>does</i> want to see the
+peripety through. But if the audience is content to imagine the sequel,
+Mr. Sheldon's craftsmanship is justified, and there is no more to be
+said. M. Brieux experienced some difficulty in bringing his early play,
+<i>Blanchette</i>, to a satisfactory close. The third act which he originally
+wrote was found unendurably cynical; a more agreeable third act was
+condemned as an anticlimax; and for some time the play was presented
+with no third act at all. It did not end, but simply left off. No doubt
+it is better that a play should stop in the middle than that it should
+drag on tediously and ineffectually. But it would be foolish to make a
+system o&pound; such an expedient. It is, after all, an evasion, not a
+solution, of the artist's problem.</p>
+
+<p>An incident which occurred during the rehearsals for the first
+production of <i>A Doll's House</i>, at the Novelty Theatre, London,
+illustrates the difference between the old, and what was then the new,
+fashion of ending a play. The business manager of the company, a man of
+ripe theatrical experience, happened to be present one day when Miss
+Achurch and Mr. Waring were rehearsing the last great scene between Nora
+and Helmar. At the end of it, he came up to me, in a state of high
+excitement. &quot;This is a fine play!&quot; he said. &quot;This is sure to be a big
+thing!&quot; I was greatly pleased. &quot;If this scene, of all others,&quot; I
+thought, &quot;carries a man like Mr. Smith off his feet, it cannot fail to
+hold the British public.&quot; But I was somewhat dashed when, a day or two
+later, Mr. Smith came up to me again, in much less buoyant spirits. &quot;I
+made a mistake about that scene,&quot; he said. &quot;They tell me it's the end of
+the <i>last</i> act--I thought it was the end of the <i>first</i>!&quot;</p>
+
+
+<br><br><hr style="width: 35%;"><br><br>
+<h2><a name="BOOK_V"></a>BOOK V</h2>
+
+<p>EPILOGUE</p>
+
+
+<br><br><hr style="width: 35%;"><br><br>
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_XXII"></a>CHAPTER XXII</h2>
+
+<p>CHARACTER AND PSYCHOLOGY</p>
+<br>
+
+<p>For the invention and ordering of incident it is possible, if not to lay
+down rules, at any rate to make plausible recommendations; but the power
+to observe, to penetrate, and to reproduce character can neither be
+acquired nor regulated by theoretical recommendations. Indirectly, of
+course, all the technical discussions of the previous chapters tend, or
+ought to tend, towards the effective presentment of character; for
+construction, in drama of any intellectual quality, has no other end.
+But specific directions for character-drawing would be like rules for
+becoming six feet high. Either you have it in you, or you have it not.</p>
+
+<p>Under the heading of character, however, two points arise which may be
+worth a brief discussion: first, ought we always to aim at development
+in character? second, what do we, or ought we to, mean by &quot;psychology&quot;?</p>
+
+<p>It is a frequent critical complaint that in such-and-such a character
+there is &quot;no development&quot;: that it remains the same throughout a play;
+or (so the reproach is sometimes worded) that it is not a character but
+an invariable attitude. A little examination will show us, I think,
+that, though the critic may in these cases be pointing to a real fault,
+he does not express himself quite accurately.</p>
+
+<p>What is character? For the practical purposes of the dramatist, it may
+be defined as a complex of intellectual, emotional, and nervous habits.
+Some of these habits are innate and temperamental--habits formed, no
+doubt, by far-off ancestors.<a name="FNanchor109"></a><a href="#Footnote_109"><sup>[109]</sup></a> But this distinction does not here
+concern us. Temperamental bias is a habit, like another, only somewhat
+older, and, therefore, harder to deflect or eradicate. What do we imply,
+then, when we complain that, in a given character, no development has
+taken place? We imply that he ought, within the limits of the play, to
+have altered the mental habits underlying his speech and actions. But is
+this a reasonable demand? Is it consistent with the usual and desirable
+time-limits of drama? In the long process of a novel, there may be time
+for the gradual alteration of habits: in the drama, which normally
+consists of a single crisis, any real change of character would have to
+be of a catastrophic nature, in which experience does not encourage us
+to put much faith. It was, indeed--as Dryden pointed out in a passage
+quoted above<a name="FNanchor110"></a><a href="#Footnote_110"><sup>[110]</sup></a>--one of the foibles of our easy-going ancestors to treat
+character as practically reversible when the time approached for ringing
+down the curtain. The same convention survives to this day in certain
+forms of drama. Even Ibsen, in his earlier work, had not shaken it off;
+witness the sudden ennoblement of Bernick in <i>Pillars of Society</i>. But
+it can scarcely be that sort of &quot;development&quot; which the critics consider
+indispensable. What is it, then, that they have in mind?</p>
+
+<p>By &quot;development&quot; of character, I think they mean, not change, but rather
+unveiling, disclosure. They hold, not unreasonably, that a dramatic
+crisis ought to disclose latent qualities in the persons chiefly
+concerned in it, and involve, not, indeed, a change, but, as it were, an
+exhaustive manifestation of character. The interest of the highest order
+of drama should consist in the reaction of character to a series of
+crucial experiences. We should, at the end of a play, know more of the
+protagonist's character than he himself, or his most intimate friend,
+could know at the beginning; for the action should have been such as to
+put it to some novel and searching test. The word &quot;development&quot; might be
+very aptly used in the photographic sense. A drama ought to bring out
+character as the photographer's chemicals &quot;bring out&quot; the forms latent
+in the negative. But this is quite a different thing from development in
+the sense of growth or radical change. In all modern drama, there is
+perhaps no character who &quot;develops,&quot; in the ordinary sense of the word,
+so startlingly as Ibsen's Nora; and we cannot but feel that the poet has
+compressed into a week an evolution which, in fact, would have demanded
+many months.</p>
+
+<p>The complaint that a character preserves the same attitude throughout
+means (if it be justified) that it is not a human being at all, but a
+mere embodiment of two or three characteristics which are fully
+displayed within the first ten minutes, and then keep on repeating
+themselves, like a recurrent decimal. Strong theatrical effects can be
+produced by this method, which is that of the comedy of types, or of
+&quot;humors.&quot; But it is now generally, and rightly, held that a character
+should be primarily an individual, and only incidentally (if at all)
+capable of classification under this type or that. It is a little
+surprising to find Sarcey, so recently as 1889, laying it down that &quot;a
+character is a master faculty or passion, which absorbs all the rest....
+To study and paint a character is, therefore, by placing a man in a
+certain number of situations, to show how this principal motive force in
+his nature annihilates or directs all those which, if he had been
+another man, would probably have come into action.&quot; This dogma of the
+&quot;ruling passion&quot; belongs rather to the eighteenth century than to the
+close of the nineteenth.</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 25%;">
+
+<p>We come now to the second of the questions above propounded, which I
+will state more definitely in this form: Is &quot;psychology&quot; simply a more
+pedantic term for &quot;character-drawing&quot;? Or can we establish a distinction
+between the two ideas? I do not think that, as a matter of fact, any
+difference is generally and clearly recognized; but I suggest that it is
+possible to draw a distinction which might, if accepted, prove
+serviceable both to critics and to playwrights.</p>
+
+<p>Let me illustrate my meaning by an example. In <i>Bella Donna</i>, by Messrs.
+Robert Hichens and James B. Fagan, we have a murder-story of a not
+uncommon or improbable type. A woman of very shady reputation marries an
+amiable idealist who is infatuated with her. She naturally finds his
+idealism incomprehensible and his amiability tedious. His position as
+heir-presumptive to a peerage is shattered by the birth of an
+heir-apparent. She becomes passionately enamoured of an Egyptian
+millionaire; and she sets to work to poison her husband with
+sugar-of-lead, provided by her oriental lover. How her criminal purpose
+is thwarted by a wise Jewish physician is nothing to the present
+purpose. In intent she is a murderess, no less than Lucrezia Borgia or
+the Marquise de Brinvilliers. And the authors have drawn her character
+cleverly enough. They have shown her in the first act as a
+shallow-souled materialist, and in the later acts as a vain, irritable,
+sensual, unscrupulous creature. But have they given us any insight into
+her psychology? No, that is just what they have not done. They have
+assigned to her certain characteristics without which cruel and
+cold-blooded murder would be inconceivable; but they have afforded us no
+insight into the moral conditions and, mental processes which make it,
+not only conceivable, but almost an everyday occurrence. For the average
+human mind, I suppose, the psychology of crime, and especially of
+fiendish, hypocritical murder-by-inches, has an undeniable fascination.
+To most of us it seems an abhorrent miracle; and it would interest us
+greatly to have it brought more or less within the range of our
+comprehension, and co-ordinated with other mental phenomena which we can
+and do understand. But of such illumination we find nothing in <i>Bella
+Donna</i>. It leaves the working of a poisoner's mind as dark to us as
+ever. So far as that goes, we might just as well have read the report of
+a murder-trial, wherein the facts are stated with, perhaps, some
+superficial speculation as to motive, but no attempt is made to
+penetrate to underlying soul-states. Yet this is surely the highest
+privilege of art--to take us behind and beneath those surfaces of things
+which are apparent to the detective and the reporter, the juryman and
+the judge.</p>
+
+<p>Have we not here, then, the distinction between character-drawing and
+psychology? Character-drawing is the presentment of human nature in its
+commonly-recognized, understood, and accepted aspects; psychology is, as
+it were, the exploration of character, the bringing of hitherto
+unsurveyed tracts within the circle of our knowledge and comprehension.
+In other words, character-drawing is synthetic, psychology analytic.
+This does not mean that the one is necessarily inferior to the other.
+Some of the greatest masterpieces of creative art have been achieved by
+the synthesis of known elements. Falstaff, for example--there is no more
+brilliant or more living character in all fiction; yet it is impossible
+to say that Shakespeare has here taken us into previously unplumbed
+depths of human nature, as he has in Hamlet, or in Lear. No doubt it is
+often very hard to decide whether a given personage is a mere projection
+of the known or a divination of the unknown. What are we to say, for
+example, of Cleopatra, or of Shylock, or of Macbeth? Richard II, on the
+other hand, is as clearly a piece of psychology as the Nurse in <i>Romeo
+and Juliet</i> is a piece of character-drawing. The comedy of types
+necessarily tends to keep within the limits of the known, and
+Moli&egrave;re--in spite of Alceste and Don Juan--is characteristically a
+character-drawer, as Racine is characteristically a psychologist. Ibsen
+is a psychologist or he is nothing. Earl Skule and Bishop Nicholas,
+Hedda Gabler and John Gabriel Borkman are daring explorations of
+hitherto uncharted regions of the human soul. But Ibsen, too, was a
+character-drawer when it suited him. One is tempted to say that there is
+no psychology in Brand--he is a mere incarnation of intransigent
+idealism--while Peer Gynt is as brilliant a psychological inspiration as
+Don Quixote. Dr. Stockmann is a vigorously-projected character, Hialmar
+Ekdal a piece of searching psychology. Finally, my point could scarcely
+be better illustrated than by a comparison--cruel but
+instructive--between Rebecca in <i>Rosmersholm</i> and the heroine in <i>Bella
+Donna</i>. Each is, in effect, a murderess, though it was a moral, not a
+mineral, poison that Rebecca employed. But while we know nothing
+whatever of Mrs. Armine's mental processes, Rebecca's temptations,
+struggles, sophistries, hesitations, resolves, and revulsions of feeling
+are all laid bare to us, so that we feel her to be no monster, but a
+living woman, comprehensible to our intelligence, and, however
+blameworthy, not wholly beyond the range of our sympathies. There are
+few greater achievements of psychology.</p>
+
+<p>Among the playwrights of to-day, I should call Mr. Granville Barker
+above all things a psychologist. It is his instinct to venture into
+untrodden fields of character, or, at any rate, to probe deeply into
+phenomena which others have noted but superficially, if at all. Hence
+the occasional obscurity of his dialogue. Mr. Shaw is not, primarily,
+either a character-drawer or a psychologist, but a dealer in personified
+ideas. His leading figures are, as a rule, either his mouthpieces or his
+butts. When he gives us a piece of real character-drawing, it is
+generally in some subordinate personage. Mr. Galsworthy, I should say,
+shows himself a psychologist in <i>Strife</i>, a character-drawer in <i>The
+Silver Box</i> and <i>Justice</i>. Sir Arthur Pinero, a character-drawer of
+great versatility, becomes a psychologist in some of his studies of
+feminine types--in Iris, in Letty, in the luckless heroine of
+<i>Mid-Channel</i>. Mr. Clyde Fitch had, at least, laudable ambitions in the
+direction of psychology. Becky in <i>The Truth</i>, and Jinny in <i>The Girl
+with the Green Eyes</i>, in so far as they are successfully drawn, really
+do mean a certain advance on our knowledge of feminine human nature.
+Unfortunately, owing to the author's over-facile and over-hasty method
+of work, they are now and then a little out of drawing. The most
+striking piece of psychology known to me in American drama is the Faith
+Healer in William Vaughn Moody's drama of that name. If the last act of
+<i>The Faith Healer</i> were as good as the rest of it, one might safely call
+it the finest play ever written, at any rate in the English language,
+beyond the Atlantic. The psychologists of the modern French stage, I
+take it, are M. de Curel and M. de Porto-Riche. MM. Brieux and Hervieu
+are, like Mr. Shaw, too much concerned with ideas to probe very deep
+into character. In Germany, Hauptmann, and, so far as I understand him,
+Wedekind, are psychologists, Sudermann, a vigorous character-drawer.</p>
+
+<p>It is pretty clear that, if this distinction were accepted, it would be
+of use to the critic, inasmuch as we should have two terms for two
+ideas, instead of one popular term with a rather pedantic synonym. But
+what would be its practical use to the artist, the craftsman? Simply
+this, that if the word &quot;psychology&quot; took on for him a clear and definite
+meaning, it might stimulate at once his imagination and his ambition.
+Messrs. Hichens and Fagan, for example, might have asked themselves--or
+each other--&quot;Are we getting beneath the surface of this woman's nature?
+Are we plucking the heart out of her mystery? Cannot we make the
+specific processes of a murderess's mind clearer to ourselves and to our
+audiences?&quot; Whether they would have been capable of rising to the
+opportunity, I cannot tell; but in the case of other authors one not
+infrequently feels: &quot;This man could have taken us deeper into this
+problem if he had only thought of it.&quot; I do not for a moment mean that
+every serious dramatist should always be aiming at psychological
+exploration. The character-drawer's appeal to common knowledge and
+instant recognition is often all that is required, or that would be in
+place. But there are also occasions not a few when the dramatist shows
+himself unequal to his opportunities if he does not at least attempt to
+bring hitherto unrecorded or unscrutinized phases of character within
+the scope of our understanding and our sympathies.</p>
+
+
+
+
+<br><br><hr style="width: 35%;"><br><br>
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_XXIII"></a>CHAPTER XXIII</h2>
+
+<p>DIALOGUE AND DETAILS</p>
+<br>
+
+<p>The extraordinary progress made by the drama of the English language
+during the past quarter of a century is in nothing more apparent than in
+the average quality of modern dialogue. Tolerably well-written dialogue
+is nowadays the rule rather than the exception. Thirty years ago, the
+idea that it was possible to combine naturalness with vivacity and
+vigour had scarcely dawned upon the playwright's mind. He passed and
+repassed from stilted pathos to strained and verbal wit (often mere
+punning); and when a reformer like T.W. Robertson tried to come a little
+nearer to the truth of life, he was apt to fall into babyish simplicity
+or flat commonness.</p>
+
+<p>Criticism has not given sufficient weight to the fact that English
+dramatic writing laboured for centuries--and still labours to some
+degree--under a historic misfortune. It has never wholly recovered from
+the euphuism--to use the word in its widest sense--of the late sixteenth
+century. The influence of John Lyly and his tribe is still traceable,
+despite a hundred metamorphoses, in some of the plays of to-day and in
+many of the plays of yesterday. From the very beginnings of English
+comedy, it was accepted as almost self-evident that &quot;wit&quot;--a factitious,
+supererogatory sparkle--was indispensable to all dialogue of a
+non-tragic order. Language was a newly discovered and irresistibly
+fascinating playground for the fancy. Conversation must be thick-strewn
+with verbal quibbles, similes, figures, and flourishes of every
+description, else it was unworthy to be spoken on the stage. We all know
+how freely Shakespeare yielded to this convention, and so helped to
+establish it. Sometimes, not always, his genius enabled him to render it
+delightful; but in most of the Elizabethans--though it be heresy to say
+so--it is an extremely tedious mannerism. After the Restoration, when
+modern light talk came into being in the coffee-houses, the fashion of
+the day, no doubt, favoured a straining after wit; so that the
+playwrights were in some measure following nature--that very small
+corner of nature which they called &quot;the town&quot;--in accepting and making a
+law of the Elizabethan convention. The leading characters of Restoration
+comedy, from Etherege to Vanbrugh, are consciously and almost
+professionally wits. Simile and repartee are as indispensable a part of
+a gentleman's social outfit as his wig or his rapier. In Congreve the
+word &quot;wit&quot; is almost as common as the thing. When Farquhar made some
+movement towards a return to nature, he was rewarded with Pope's line,
+which clings like a burr to his memory--</p>
+
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&quot;What pert, low dialogue has Farquhar writ.&quot;<br>
+
+<p>If eighteenth-century comedy, as a whole, is not brilliantly written, it
+is for lack of talent in the playwrights, not for lack of desire or
+intention. Goldsmith, like Farquhar and Steele, vaguely realized the
+superiority of humour to wit; but he died too early to exercise much
+influence on his successors. In Sheridan the convention of wit
+reasserted itself triumphantly, and the scene in which Lady Teazle, Mrs.
+Candour, and the rest of the scandalous college sit in a semicircle and
+cap malicious similes, came to be regarded as an unapproachable model of
+comedy dialogue. The convention maintained itself firmly down to the
+days of <i>Money</i> and <i>London Assurance</i>, the dullness of the intervening
+period being due, not to any change of theory, but to sheer impotence of
+practice. T.W. Robertson, as above mentioned, attempted a return to
+nature, with occasional and very partial success; but wit, with a dash
+of fanciful sentiment, reasserted itself in James Albery; while in H.J.
+Byron it degenerated into mere punning and verbal horse-play. I should
+not be surprised if the historian of the future were to find in the
+plays of Mr. Henry Arthur Jones the first marked symptoms of a
+reaction--of a tendency to reject extrinsic and fanciful ornament in
+dialogue, and to rely for its effect upon its vivid appropriateness to
+character and situation. In the early plays of Sir Arthur Pinero there
+is a great deal of extrinsic ornament; especially of that
+metaphor-hunting which was one of the characteristic forms of euphuism.
+Take this, for example, from <i>The Profligate</i>. Dunstan Renshaw has
+expressed to Hugh Murray the opinion that &quot;marriages of contentment are
+the reward of husbands who have taken the precaution to sow their wild
+oats rather thickly&quot;; whereupon the Scotch solicitor replies--</p>
+
+&nbsp;&nbsp;HUGH MURRAY: Contentment! Renshaw, do you imagine that there is no<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;autumn in the life of a profligate? Do you think there is no moment<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;when the accursed crop begins to rear its millions of heads above<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;ground; when the rich man would give his wealth to be able to tread<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;them back into the earth which rejects the foul load? To-day you<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;have robbed some honest man of a sweet companion!<br>
+
+&nbsp;&nbsp;DUNSTAN RENSHAW: Look here, Mr. Murray--!<br>
+
+&nbsp;&nbsp;HUGH MURRAY: To-morrow, next week, next month, you may be happy--but<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;what of the time when those wild oats thrust their ears through the<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;very seams of the floor trodden by the wife whose respect you will<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;have learned to covet! You may drag her into the crowded<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;streets--there is the same vile growth springing up from the chinks<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;of the pavement! In your house or in the open, the scent of the<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;mildewed grain always in your nostrils, and in your ears no music<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;but the wind's rustle amongst the fat sheaves! And, worst of all,<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;your wife's heart a granary bursting with the load of shame your<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;profligacy has stored there! I warn you--Mr. Lawrence Kenward!<br>
+
+<p>If we compare this passage with any page taken at random from
+<i>Mid-Channel</i>, we might think that a century of evolution lay between
+them, instead of barely twenty years.</p>
+
+<p>The convention of wit-at-any-price is, indeed, moribund; but it is
+perhaps not quite superfluous, even now, to emphasize the difference
+between what the French call the &quot;mot d'auteur&quot; and the &quot;mot de
+situation.&quot; The terms practically explain themselves; but a third class
+ought to be added--the &quot;mot de caract&egrave;re.&quot; The &quot;mot d'auteur&quot; is the
+distinguishing mark of the Congreve-Sheridan convention. It survives in
+full vigour--or, shall one say, it sings its swan-song?--in the works of
+Oscar Wilde. For instance, the scene of the five men in the third act of
+<i>Lady Windermere's Fan</i> is a veritable running-fire of epigrams wholly
+unconnected with the situation, and very slightly related, if at all, to
+the characters of the speakers. The mark of the &quot;mot d'auteur&quot; is that
+it can with perfect ease be detached from its context. I could fill this
+page with sayings from the scene in question, all perfectly
+comprehensible without any account of the situation. Among them would be
+one of those; profound sayings which Wilde now and then threw off in his
+lightest moods, like opals among soap-bubbles. &quot;In the world,&quot; says
+Dumby, &quot;there are two tragedies. One is not getting what one wants, and
+the other is getting it.&quot; This may rank with Lord Illingworth's speech
+in <i>A Woman of No Importance</i>: &quot;All thought is immoral. Its very essence
+is destruction. If you think of anything you kill it. Nothing survives
+being thought of.&quot; When we hear such sayings as these--or the immortal
+&quot;Vulgarity is the behaviour of other people&quot;--we do not enquire too
+curiously into their appropriateness to character or situation; but none
+the less do they belong to an antiquated conception of drama.</p>
+
+<p>It is useless to begin to give specimens of the &quot;mot de caract&egrave;re&quot; and
+&quot;mot de situation.&quot; All really dramatic dialogue falls under one head or
+the other. One could easily pick out a few brilliantly effective
+examples of each class: but as their characteristic is to fade when
+uprooted from the soil in which they grow, they would take up space to
+very little purpose.</p>
+
+<p>But there is another historic influence, besides that of euphuism, which
+has been hurtful, though in a minor degree, to the development of a
+sound style in dialogue. Some of the later Elizabethans, and notably
+Webster and Ford, cultivated a fashion of abrupt utterance, whereby an
+immensity of spiritual significance--generally tragic--was supposed to
+be concentrated into a few brief words. The classic example is
+Ferdinand's &quot;Cover her face. Mine eyes dazzle. She died young,&quot; in <i>The
+Duchess of Malfy</i>. Charles Lamb celebrated the virtues of this pregnant,
+staccato style with somewhat immoderate admiration, and thus helped to
+set a fashion of spasmodic pithiness in dialogue, which too often
+resulted in dense obscurity. Not many plays composed under this
+influence have reached the stage; not one has held it. But we find in
+some recent writing a qualified recrudescence of the spasmodic manner,
+with a touch of euphuism thrown in. This is mainly due, I think, to the
+influence of George Meredith, who accepted the convention of wit as the
+informing spirit of comedy dialogue, and whose abnormally rapid faculty
+of association led him to delight in a sort of intellectual shorthand
+which the normal mind finds very difficult to decipher. Meredith was a
+man of brilliant genius, which lent a fascination to his very
+mannerisms; but when these mannerisms are transferred by lesser men to a
+medium much less suited to them--that of the stage--the result is apt to
+be disastrous. I need not go into particulars; for no play of which the
+dialogue places a constant strain on the intellectual muscles of the
+audience ever has held, or ever will hold, a place in living dramatic
+literature. I will merely note the curious fact that English--my own
+language--is the only language out of the three or four known to me in
+which I have ever come across an entirely incomprehensible play. I could
+name English plays, both pre-Meredithian and post-Meredithian, which
+might almost as well be written in Chinese for all that I can make
+of them.</p>
+
+<p>Obscurity and precocity are generally symptoms of an exaggerated dread
+of the commonplace. The writer of dramatic prose has, indeed, a very
+difficult task if he is to achieve style without deserting nature.
+Perhaps it would be more accurate to say that the difficulty lies in
+getting criticism to give him credit for the possession of style,
+without incurring the reproach of mannerism. How is one to give
+concentration and distinction to ordinary talk, while making it still
+seem ordinary? Either the distinction will strike the critics, and they
+will call it pompous and unreal, or the ordinariness will come home to
+them, and they will deny the distinction. This is the dramatist's
+constant dilemma. One can only comfort him with the assurance that if he
+has given his dialogue the necessary concentration, and has yet kept it
+plausibly near to the language of life, he has achieved style, and may
+snap his fingers at the critics. Style, in prose drama, is the sifting
+of common speech.</p>
+
+<p>It is true, however, that, with equal concentration and equal
+naturalness, one man may give his work a beauty of cadence and phrasing
+which another man may entirely miss. Two recent writers of English
+dramatic prose have stood out from their fellows in respect of the sheer
+beauty of their style--I need scarcely name Oscar Wilde and J.M. Synge.
+But Wilde's dialogue can by no means be called free from mannerism,<a name="FNanchor111"></a><a href="#Footnote_111"><sup>[111]</sup></a>
+while Synge wrote in a language which had a music of its own, even
+before his genius took hold of it.</p>
+
+<p>It does not seem very profitable to try to concentrate into a definition
+the distinctive qualities of dramatic dialogue. The late Mrs. Craigie
+(&quot;John Oliver Hobbes&quot;) attempted to do so in the preface to a charming
+play, <i>The Ambassador</i>; and the result at any rate the sequel--was that
+her next play, <i>The Wisdom of the Wise</i>, was singularly self-conscious
+and artificial. She found in &quot;emotion&quot; the test of dramatic quality in
+any given utterance. &quot;Stage dialogue,&quot; she says, &quot;may or may not have
+many qualities, but it must be emotional.&quot; Here we have a statement
+which is true in a vague and general sense, untrue in the definite and
+particular sense in which alone it could afford any practical guidance.
+&quot;My lord, the carriage waits,&quot; may be, in its right place, a highly
+dramatic speech, even though it be uttered with no emotion, and arouse
+no emotion in the person addressed. What Mrs. Craigie meant, I take it,
+was that, to be really dramatic, every speech must have some bearing,
+direct or indirect, prospective, present, or retrospective, upon
+individual human destinies. The dull play, the dull scene, the dull
+speech, is that in which we do not perceive this connection; but when
+once we are interested in the individuals concerned, we are so quick to
+perceive the connection, even though it be exceedingly distant and
+indirect, that the dramatist who should always hold the fear of Mrs.
+Craigie's aphorism consciously before his eyes would unnecessarily
+fetter and restrict himself. Even the driest scientific proposition may,
+under special circumstances, become electrical with drama. The statement
+that the earth moves round the sun does not, in itself, stir our pulses;
+yet what playwright has ever invented a more dramatic utterance than
+that which some one invented for Galileo: &quot;E pur si muove!&quot;? In all
+this, to be sure, I am illustrating, not confuting, Mrs. Craigie's
+maxim. I have no wish to confute it, for, in the largest interpretation,
+it is true; but I suggest that it is true only when attenuated almost
+beyond recognition, and quite beyond the point at which it can be of any
+practical help to the practical dramatist. He must rely on his instinct,
+not numb and bewilder it by constantly subjecting it to the dictates of
+hard-and-fast aesthetic theory.</p>
+
+<p>We shall scarcely come much nearer to helpful truth than the point we
+have already reached, in the principle that all dialogue, except the
+merely mechanical parts--the connective tissue of the play--should
+consist either of &quot;mots de caract&egrave;re&quot; or of &quot;mots de situation.&quot; But if
+we go to French critics for this principle, do not let us go to French
+dramatists for models of practice. It is part of the abiding insularity
+of our criticism that the same writers who cannot forgive an English
+dramatist what they conceive to be a stilted turn of phrase, will pass
+without remark, if not with positive admiration, the outrageously
+rhetorical style which is still prevalent in French drama. Here, for
+instance, is a quite typical passage from <i>Le Duel</i>, by M. Henri
+Lavedan, an author of no small repute; and it would be easy to find even
+more magniloquent tirades in the works of almost any of his
+contemporaries. I translate from the concluding scene between the Abb&eacute;
+and the Duchess:</p>
+
+&nbsp;&nbsp;THE ABB&Eacute;: &quot;In our strange life, there are sometimes unexpected and<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;decisive moments, sovereign, though we know not why. We feel it,<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;that is all!--fulgurant moments, which throw, as it were, a flash of<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;lightning upon our destinies, like those meteors which shine forth<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;from time to time in the heavens, and of which none can say what<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;their purple signifies, whether it be a cataclysm or an apotheosis.<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;Well, it appears to me that we, you and I, are now face to face with<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;one of these moments!&quot;<br>
+
+&nbsp;&nbsp;THE DUCHESS: &quot;So I, too, believe.&quot;<br>
+
+&nbsp;&nbsp;THE ABB&Eacute;: &quot;We must take care, then, that it be an apotheosis. That<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;is why I want--Mon Dieu, madame! how shall I say it to you? Where<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;shall I go to find the chosen words, the words of pure gold, of<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;diamonds, the immaculate words that are worthy of us? All that you<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;are, all that you are worth, I know, and I alone know. You have<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;opened, that I might read it, the book of hours that is your mind. I<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;am in no wise disquieted about you or your future; yet, that I may<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;be fully reassured before we part, I wish, I wish you to tell me, to<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;declare to me, that you are at this very moment in absolute repose,<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;calm as a lake.&quot;<br>
+
+<p>And so Monsieur l'Abb&eacute; goes on for another page. If it be said that this
+ornate eloquence is merely professional, I reply that his brother, the
+atheist doctor, and the Duchess herself, are quite as copious in their
+rhetoric, and scarcely less ornate.</p>
+
+<p>It is a mistake to suppose that &quot;literary merit&quot; can be imparted to
+drama by such flagrant departures from nature; though some critics have
+not yet outgrown that superstition. Let the playwright take to heart an
+anecdote told by Professor Matthews in his <i>Inquiries and Opinions</i>--an
+anecdote of a New England farmer, who, being asked who was the architect
+of his house, replied: &quot;Oh, I built that house myself; but there's a man
+coming down from Boston next week to put on the architecture.&quot; Better no
+style at all than style thus plastered on.</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 25%;">
+
+<p>What is to be said of the possibilities of blank verse as a dramatic
+medium? This is a thorny question, to be handled with caution. One can
+say with perfect assurance, however, that its possibilities are
+problematical, its difficulties and dangers certain.</p>
+
+<p>To discuss the question whether drama in verse is in its very nature
+nobler than drama in prose would lead us away from craftsmanship into
+the realm of pure aesthetics. For my own part, I doubt it. I suspect
+that the drama, like all literature, took its rise in verse, for the
+simple reason that verse is easier to make--and to memorize--than prose.
+Primitive peoples felt with Goethe--though not quite in the same
+sense--that &quot;art is art because it is not nature.&quot; Not merely for
+emotional, but for all sorts of literary, expression, they demanded a
+medium clearly marked off from the speech of everyday life. The drama
+&quot;lisped in numbers, for the numbers came.&quot; Even of so modern a writer
+(comparatively) as Shakespeare, it would scarcely be true to say that he
+&quot;chose&quot; verse as his medium, in the same sense in which Ibsen chose
+prose. He accepted it just as he accepted the other traditions and
+methods of the theatre of his time. In familiar passages he broke away
+from it; but on the whole it provided (among other advantages) a
+convenient and even necessary means of differentiation between the mimic
+personage and the audience, from whom he was not marked off by the
+proscenium arch and the artificial lights which make a world apart of
+the modern stage.</p>
+
+<p>And Shakespeare so glorified this metrical medium as to give it an
+overwhelming prestige. It was extremely easy to write blank verse after
+a fashion; and playwrights who found it flow almost spontaneously from
+their pens were only too ready to overlook the world-wide difference
+between their verse and that of the really great Elizabethans. Just
+after the Restoration, there was an attempt to introduce the rhymed
+couplet as the medium for heroic plays; but that, on the other hand, was
+too difficult to establish itself in general use. Tragedy soon fell back
+upon the fatally facile unrhymed iambic, and a reign of stilted, stodgy
+mediocrity set in. There is nothing drearier in literature than the
+century-and-a-half of English tragedy, from Otway to Sheridan Knowles.
+One is lost in wonder at the genius of the actors who could infuse life
+and passion into those masterpieces of turgid conventionality. The
+worship of the minor Elizabethans, which began with Lamb and culminated
+in Swinburne, brought into fashion (as we have seen) a spasmodic rather
+than a smoothly rhetorical way of writing, but did not really put new
+life into the outworn form. It may almost be called an appalling fact
+that for at least two centuries--from 1700 to 1900--not a single
+blank-verse play was produced which lives, or deserves to live,<a name="FNanchor112"></a><a href="#Footnote_112"><sup>[112]</sup></a> on
+the stage of to-day.</p>
+
+<p>I have thus glanced at the history of the blank-verse play because I
+believe that it can never revive until we clearly realize and admit that
+it is, and has been for a century, thoroughly dead, while, for a century
+before that again, it was only galvanized into a semblance of life by a
+great school of rhetorical acting. The playwright who sets forth with
+the idea that, in writing a poetical drama, he is going to continue the
+great Elizabethan tradition, is starting on a wild-goose chase. The
+great Elizabethan tradition is an incubus to be exorcised. It was
+because Mr. Stephen Phillips was not Elizabethanizing, but clothing a
+vital and personal conception of drama in verse of very appealing
+lyrical quality, that some of us thought we saw in <i>Paolo and Francesca</i>
+the dawn of a new art. Apparently it was a false dawn; but I still
+believe that our orientation was right when we looked for the daybreak
+in the lyric quarter of the heavens. The very summits of Shakespeare's
+achievement are his glorious lyrical passages. Think of the exquisite
+elegiacs of Macbeth! Think of the immortal death-song of Cleopatra! If
+verse has any function on the stage, it is that of imparting lyric
+beauty to passionate speech. For the mere rhetorical &quot;elevation&quot; of
+blank verse we have no use whatever. It consists in saying simple things
+with verbose pomposity. But should there arise a man who combines
+highly-developed dramatic faculty with great lyric genius, it is quite
+possible that he may give us the new poetic drama for which our
+idealists are sighing. He will choose his themes, I take it, from
+legend, or from the domain of pure fantasy--themes which can be steeped
+from first to last in an atmosphere of poetry, as <i>Tristan und Isolde</i>
+is steeped in an atmosphere of music. Of historic themes, I would
+counsel this hypothetical genius to beware. If there are any which can
+fittingly be steeped in a lyric atmosphere, they are to be sought on the
+outskirts of history, or in the debatable land between history and
+legend. The formula of Schiller can no more be revived than the formula
+of Chapman or of Rowe. That a new historic drama awaits us in the
+future, I have little doubt; but it will be written in prose. The idea
+that the poetry of drama is to be sought specifically in verse has long
+ago been exploded by Ibsen and Maeterlinck and D'Annunzio and Synge. But
+there are, no doubt, themes which peculiarly lend themselves to
+lyrico-dramatic treatment, and we shall all welcome the poet who
+discovers and develops them.</p>
+
+<p>One warning let me add, in no uncertain voice. If you choose to write a
+blank-verse play, write it in blank verse, and not in some nondescript
+rhythm which is one long series of jolts and pitfalls to the sensitive
+ear. Many playwrights have thought by this means to escape from the
+monotony of blank verse; not one (that I ever heard of) has achieved
+even temporary success. If you cannot save your blank verse from
+monotony without breaking it on the wheel, that merely means that you
+cannot write blank verse, and had better let it alone. Again, in spite
+of Elizabethan precedent, there is nothing more irritating on the modern
+stage than a play which keeps on changing from verse to prose and back
+again. It gives the verse-passages an air of pompous self-consciousness.
+We seem to hear the author saying, as he shifts his gear, &quot;Look you now!
+I am going to be eloquent and impressive!&quot; The most destructive fault a
+dramatist can commit, in my judgment, is to pass, in the same work of
+art, from one plane of convention to another.<a name="FNanchor113"></a><a href="#Footnote_113"><sup>[113]</sup></a></p>
+
+<hr style="width: 25%;">
+
+<p>We must now consider for a moment the question--if question it can be
+called--of the soliloquy and the aside. The example of Ibsen has gone
+far towards expelling these slovenlinesses from the work of all
+self-respecting playwrights. But theorists spring up every now and then
+to defend them. &quot;The stage is the realm of convention,&quot; they argue. &quot;If
+you accept a room with its fourth wall removed, which nothing short of
+an earthquake could render possible in real life, why should you jib at
+the idea--in which, after all, there is nothing absolutely
+impossible--that a man should utter aloud the thoughts that are passing
+through his mind?&quot;</p>
+
+<p>It is all a question, once more, of planes of convention. No doubt there
+is an irreducible minimum of convention in all drama; but how strange is
+the logic which leaps from that postulate to the assertion that, if we
+admit a minimum, we cannot, or ought not to, exclude a maximum! There
+are plays which do not, and there are plays which do, set forth to give
+as nearly as possible an exact reproduction of the visual and auditory
+realities of life. In the Elizabethan theatre, with its platform stage
+under the open sky, any pictorial exactness of reproduction was clearly
+impossible. Its fundamental conditions necessitated very nearly<a name="FNanchor114"></a><a href="#Footnote_114"><sup>[114]</sup></a> a
+maximum of convention; therefore such conventions as blank verse and the
+soliloquy were simply of a piece with all the rest. In the theatre of
+the eighteenth century and early nineteenth, the proscenium arch--the
+frame of the picture--made pictorial realism theoretically possible. But
+no one recognized the possibility; and indeed, on a candle-lit stage, it
+would have been extremely difficult. As a matter of fact, the
+Elizabethan platform survived in the shape of a long &quot;apron,&quot; projecting
+in front of the proscenium, on which the most important parts of the
+action took place. The characters, that is to say, were constantly
+stepping out of the frame of the picture; and while this visual
+convention maintained itself, there was nothing inconsistent or jarring
+in the auditory convention of the soliloquy. Only in the last quarter of
+the nineteenth century did new methods of lighting, combined with new
+literary and artistic influences, complete the evolutionary process, and
+lead to the withdrawal of the whole stage--the whole dramatic
+domain--within the frame of the picture. It was thus possible to reduce
+visual convention to a minimum so trifling that in a well-set &quot;interior&quot;
+it needs a distinct effort of attention to be conscious of it at all. In
+fact, if we come to think of it, the removal of the fourth wall is
+scarcely to be classed as a convention; for in real life, as we do not
+happen to have eyes in the back of our heads, we are never visually
+conscious of all four walls of a room at once. If, then, in a room that
+is absolutely real, we see a man who (in all other respects) strives to
+be equally real, suddenly begin to expound himself aloud, in good, set
+terms, his own emotions, motives, or purposes, we instantly plump down
+from one plane of convention to another, and receive a disagreeable jar
+to our sense of reality. Up to that moment, all the efforts of author,
+producer, and actor have centred in begetting in us a particular order
+of illusion; and lo! the effort is suddenly abandoned, and the illusion
+shattered by a crying unreality. In modern serious drama, therefore, the
+soliloquy can only be regarded as a disturbing anachronism.<a name="FNanchor115"></a><a href="#Footnote_115"><sup>[115]</sup></a></p>
+
+<p>The physical conditions which tended to banish it from the stage were
+reinforced by the growing perception of its artistic slovenliness. It
+was found that the most delicate analyses could be achieved without its
+aid; and it became a point of honour with the self-respecting artist to
+accept a condition which rendered his material somewhat harder of
+manipulation, indeed, but all the more tempting to wrestle with and
+overcome. A drama with soliloquies and asides is like a picture with
+inscribed labels issuing from the mouths of the figures. In that way,
+any bungler can reveal what is passing in the minds of his personages.
+But the glorious problem of the modern playwright is to make his
+characters reveal the inmost workings of their souls without saying or
+doing anything that they would not say or do in the real world.<a name="FNanchor116"></a><a href="#Footnote_116"><sup>[116]</sup></a></p>
+
+<p>There are degrees, however, even in the makeshift and the slovenly; and
+not all lapses into anachronism are equally to be condemned. One thing
+is so patent as to call for no demonstration: to wit, that the aside is
+ten times worse than the soliloquy. It is always possible that a man
+might speak his thought, but it is glaringly impossible that he should
+speak it so as to be heard by the audience and not heard by others on
+the stage. In French light comedy and farce of the mid-nineteenth
+century, the aside is abused beyond even the license of fantasy. A man
+will speak an aside of several lines over the shoulder of another person
+whom he is embracing. Not infrequently in a conversation between two
+characters, each will comment aside on every utterance of the other,
+before replying to it. The convenience of this method of proceeding is
+manifest. It is as though the author stood by and delivered a running
+commentary on the secret motives and designs of his characters. But it
+is such a crying confession of unreality that, on the English-speaking
+stage, at any rate, it would scarcely be tolerated to-day, even in
+farce. In serious modern drama the aside is now practically unknown. It
+is so obsolete, indeed, that actors are puzzled how to handle it, and
+audiences what to make of it. In an ambitious play produced at a leading
+London theatre about ten years ago, a lady, on leaving the stage,
+announced, in an aside, her intention of drowning herself, and several
+critics, the next day, not understanding that she was speaking aside,
+severely blamed the gentleman who was on the stage with her for not
+frustrating her intention. About the same time, there occurred one of
+the most glaring instances within my recollection of inept
+conventionalism. The hero of the play was Eugene Aram. Alone in his room
+at dead of night, Aram heard Houseman breaking open the outside shutters
+of the window. Designing to entrap the robber, what did he do? He went
+up to the window and drew back the curtains, with a noise loud enough to
+be heard in the next parish. It was inaudible, however, to Houseman on
+the other side of the shutters. He proceeded with his work, opened the
+window, and slipped in, Aram hiding in the shadow. Then, while Houseman
+peered about him with his lantern, not six feet from Aram, and actually
+between him and the audience, Aram indulged in a long and loud monologue
+as to whether he should shoot Houseman or not, ending with a prayer to
+heaven to save him from more blood-guiltiness! Such are the childish
+excesses to which a playwright will presently descend when once he
+begins to dally with facile convention.</p>
+
+<p>An aside is intolerable because it is <i>not</i> heard by the other person on
+the stage: it outrages physical possibility. An overheard soliloquy, on
+the other hand, is intolerable because it <i>is</i> heard. It keeps within
+the bounds of physical possibility, but it stultifies the only logical
+excuse for the soliloquy, namely, that it is an externalization of
+thought which would in reality remain unuttered. This point is so clear
+that I need not insist upon it.</p>
+
+<p>Are there, in modern drama, any admissible soliloquies? A few brief
+ejaculations of joy, or despair, are, of course, natural enough, and no
+one will cavil at them. The approach of mental disease is often marked
+by a tendency to unrestrained loquacity, which goes on even while the
+sufferer is alone; and this distressing symptom may, on rare occasions,
+be put to artistic use. Short of actual derangement, however, there are
+certain states of nervous surexcitation which cause even healthy people
+to talk to themselves; and if an author has the skill to make us realize
+that his character is passing through such a crisis, he may risk a
+soliloquy, not only without reproach, but with conspicuous psychological
+justification. In the third act of Clyde Fitch's play, <i>The Girl with
+the Green Eyes</i>, there is a daring attempt at such a soliloquy, where
+Jinny says: &quot;Good Heavens! why am I maudling on like this to myself out
+loud? It's really nothing--Jack will explain once more that he can't
+explain&quot;--and so on. Whether the attempt justified itself or not would
+depend largely on the acting. In any case, it is clear that the author,
+though as a rule somewhat lax in his craftsmanship, was here aiming at
+psychological truth.</p>
+
+<p>A word must be said as to a special case of the soliloquy--the letter
+which a person speaks aloud as he writes it, or reads over to himself
+aloud. This is a convention to be employed as sparingly as possible; but
+it is not exactly on a level with the ordinary soliloquy. A letter has
+an actual objective existence. The words are formulated in the
+character's mind and are supposed to be externalized, even though the
+actor may not really write them on the paper. Thus the letter has, so to
+speak, the same right to come to the knowledge of the audience as any
+other utterance. It is, in fact, part of the dialogue of the play, only
+that it happens to be inaudible. A soliloquy, on the other hand, has no
+real existence. It is a purely artificial unravelling of motive or
+emotion, which, nine times out of ten, would not become articulate at
+all, even in the speaker's brain or heart. Thus it is by many degrees a
+greater infraction of the surface texture of life than the spoken
+letter, which we may call inadvisable rather than inadmissible.</p>
+
+<p>Some theorists carry their solicitude for surface reality to such an
+extreme as to object to any communication between two characters which
+is not audible to every one on the stage. This is a very idle pedantry.
+The difference between a conversation in undertones and a soliloquy or
+aside is abundantly plain: the one occurs every hour of the day, the
+other never occurs at all. When two people, or a group, are talking
+among themselves, unheard by the others on the stage, it requires a
+special effort to remember that, as a matter of fact, the others
+probably do hear them. Even if the scene be unskilfully arranged, it is
+not the audibility of one group, but the inaudibility of the others,
+that is apt to strike us as unreal.</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 25%;">
+
+<p>This is not the only form of technical pedantry that one occasionally
+encounters. Some years ago, a little band of playwrights and would-be
+playwrights, in fanatical reaction against the Sardou technique, tried
+to lay down a rule that no room on the stage must ever have more than
+one door, and that no letter must ever enter into the mechanism of a
+play. I do not know which contention was the more ridiculous.</p>
+
+<p>Nothing is commoner in modern house-planning than rooms which have at
+least two doors and a French window. We constantly see rooms or halls
+which, if transported to the stage, would provide three or four
+entrances and exits; and this is even more true of the &quot;central heated&quot;
+houses of America than of English houses. The technical purists used
+especially to despise the French window--a harmless, agreeable and very
+common device. Why the playwright should make &quot;one room one door&quot; an
+inexorable canon of art is more than human reason can divine. There are
+cases, no doubt, in which probability demands that the dramatist should
+be content with one practicable opening to his scene, and should plan
+his entrances and exits accordingly. This is no such great feat as might
+be imagined. Indeed a playwright will sometimes deliberately place a
+particular act in a room with one door, because it happens to facilitate
+the movement he desires. It is absurd to lay down any rule in the
+matter, other than that the scene should provide a probable locality for
+whatever action is to take place in it. I am the last to defend the old
+French farce with its ten or a dozen doors through which the characters
+kept scuttling in and out like rabbits in a warren. But the fact that we
+are tired of conventional laxity is no good reason for rushing to the
+other extreme of conventional and hampering austerity.</p>
+
+<p>Similarly, because the forged will and the lost &quot;marriage lines&quot; have
+been rightly relegated to melodrama, is there any reason why we should
+banish from the stage every form of written document? Mr. Bernard Shaw,
+in an article celebrating the advent of the new technique, once wrote,
+&quot;Nowadays an actor cannot open a letter or toss off somebody else's
+glass of poison without having to face a brutal outburst of jeering.&quot;
+What an extravagance to bracket as equally exploded absurdities the
+opening of a letter and the tossing off of the wrong glass of poison!
+Letters--more's the pity--play a gigantic part in the economy of modern
+life. The General Post Office is a vast mechanism for the distribution
+of tragedy, comedy, melodrama, and farce throughout the country and
+throughout the world. To whose door has not Destiny come in the disguise
+of a postman, and slipped its decree, with a double rat-tat, into the
+letter-box? Whose heart has not sickened as he heard the postman's
+footstep pass his door without pausing? Whose hand has not trembled as
+he opened a letter? Whose face has not blanched as he took in its
+import, almost without reading the words? Why, I would fain know, should
+our stage-picture of life be falsified by the banishment of the postman?
+Even the revelation brought about by the discovery of a forgotten letter
+or bundle of letters is not an infrequent incident of daily life. Why
+should it be tabu on the stage? Because the French dramatist, forty
+years ago, would sometimes construct a Chinese-puzzle play around some
+stolen letter or hidden document, are we to suffer no &quot;scrap of paper&quot;
+to play any part whatever in English drama? Even the Hebrew sense of
+justice would recoil from such a conclusion. It would be a case of &quot;The
+fathers have eaten sour grapes, and other people's children must pay the
+penalty.&quot; Against such whimsies of reactionary purism, the playwright's
+sole and sufficient safeguard is a moderate exercise of common sense.</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 25%;">
+
+<p><a name="Footnote_1"></a><a href="#FNanchor1">[1]</a><blockquote> It is against &quot;technic&quot; in this sense of the term that the
+hero of Mr. Howells's admirable novel, <i>The Story of a Play</i>, protests
+in vigorous and memorable terms. &quot;They talk,&quot; says Maxwell, &quot;about a
+knowledge of the stage as if it were a difficult science, instead of a
+very simple piece of mechanism whose limitations and possibilities
+anyone may see at a glance. All that their knowledge of it comes to is
+claptrap, pure and simple.... They think that their exits and entrances
+are great matters and that they must come on with such a speech, and go
+off with another; but it is not of the least importance how they come or
+go, if they have something interesting to say or do.&quot; Maxwell, it must
+be remembered, is speaking of technic as expounded by the star actor,
+who is shilly-shallying--as star actors will--over the production of his
+play. He would not, in his calmer moments, deny that it is of little use
+to have something interesting to say, unless you know how to say it
+interestingly. Such a denial would simply be the negation of the very
+idea of art.</blockquote>
+
+<p><a name="Footnote_2"></a><a href="#FNanchor2">[2]</a><blockquote> A dramatist of my acquaintance adds this footnote: &quot;But, by
+the Lord! They have to give advice. I believe I write more plays of
+other people's than I do of my own.&quot;</blockquote>
+
+<p><a name="Footnote_3"></a><a href="#FNanchor3">[3]</a><blockquote> It may be hoped, too, that even the accomplished dramatist
+may take some interest in considering the reasons for things which he
+does, or does not do, by instinct.</blockquote>
+
+<p><a name="Footnote_4"></a><a href="#FNanchor4">[4]</a><blockquote> This is not a phrase of contempt. The would-be intelligent
+playgoer is vastly to be preferred to the playgoer who makes a boast of
+his unintelligence.</blockquote>
+
+<p><a name="Footnote_5"></a><a href="#FNanchor5">[5]</a><blockquote> In all the arts, however, the very idea of craftsmanship
+implies some sort of external percipient, or, in other words, some sort
+of an audience. In point of sheer self-expression, a child's scrabblings
+with a box of crayons may deserve to rank with the most masterly canvas
+of Velasquez or Vermeer. The real difference between the dramatist and
+other artists, is that they can be <i>their own audience</i>, in a sense in
+which he cannot.</blockquote>
+
+<p><a name="Footnote_6"></a><a href="#FNanchor6">[6]</a><blockquote> Let me guard against the possibility that this might be
+interpreted as a sneer at <i>The Dynasts</i>--a great work by a great poet.</blockquote>
+
+<p><a name="Footnote_7"></a><a href="#FNanchor7">[7]</a><blockquote> For instance, <i>Il ne faut jurer de rien. Il faut qu'une
+porte soit ouverte où ferm&eacute;e. Un bienfait n'est jamais perdu.</i> There is
+also a large class of pieces of which the title, though not itself a
+proverb, makes direct allusion to some fable or proverbial saying: for
+example, <i>Les Brebis de Panurge, La Chasse aux Corbeaux, La Cigale chez
+les Fourmis</i>.</blockquote>
+
+<p><a name="Footnote_8"></a><a href="#FNanchor8">[8]</a><blockquote> I learn, on the best authority, that I am wrong, in point
+of fact, as to the origin of <i>Strife</i>. The play arose in Mr.
+Galsworthy's mind from his actually having seen in conflict the two men
+who were the prototypes of Anthony and Roberts, and thus noted the waste
+and inefficacy arising from the clash of strong characters unaccompanied
+by balance. It was accident that led him to place the two men in an
+environment of capital and labour. In reality, both of them were, if not
+capitalists, at any rate on the side of capital. This interesting
+correction of fact does not invalidate the theory above stated.</blockquote>
+
+<p><a name="Footnote_9"></a><a href="#FNanchor9">[9]</a><blockquote> Mr. Henry Arthur Jones writes to me: &quot;Sometimes I start
+with a scene only, sometimes with a complete idea. Sometimes a play
+splits into two plays, sometimes two or three ideas combine into a
+concrete whole. Always the final play is altered out of all knowledge
+from its first idea.&quot; An interesting account of the way in which two
+very different plays by M. de Curel: <i>L'Envers d'une Sainte</i> and
+<i>L'Invit&eacute;e</i>,--grew out of one and the same initial idea, may be found in
+<i>L'Ann&eacute;e Psychologique</i>, 1894, p. 121.</blockquote>
+
+<p><a name="Footnote_10"></a><a href="#FNanchor10">[10]</a><blockquote> In my discussion of this point, I have rather simplified
+Aristotle's position. He appears to make action the essential element in
+tragedy and not merely the necessary vehicle of character. &quot;In a play,&quot;
+he says, &quot;they do not act in order to portray the characters, they
+include the characters for the sake of the action. So that it is the
+action in it, <i>i.e.</i> its Fable or Plot, that is the end and purpose of
+the tragedy, and the end is everywhere the chief thing. Besides this, a
+tragedy is impossible without action, but there may be one without
+character.&quot; (Bywater's Translation.) The last sentence is, in my view,
+the gist of the matter; the preceding sentences greatly overstate the
+case. There was a lively controversy on the subject in the <i>Times</i>
+Literary Supplement in May, 1902. It arose from a review of Mr.
+Phillips's <i>Paolo and Francesco</i>, and Mr. Andrew Lang, Mr. Churton
+Collins, and Mr. A.B. Walkley took part in it.</blockquote>
+
+<p><a name="Footnote_11"></a><a href="#FNanchor11">[11]</a><blockquote> &quot;Are the first beginnings of imaginative conception
+directed by the will? Are they, indeed, conscious at all? Do they not
+rather emerge unbidden from the vague limbo of sub-consciousness?&quot; A.B.
+Walkley, <i>Drama and Life</i>, p. 85.</blockquote>
+
+<p><a name="Footnote_12"></a><a href="#FNanchor12">[12]</a><blockquote> Sardou kept a file of about fifty <i>dossiers</i>, each bearing
+the name of an unwritten play, and containing notes and sketches for it.
+Dumas, on the other hand, always finished one play before he began to
+think of another. See <i>L'Ann&eacute;e Psychologique</i>, 1894, pp. 67, 76.</blockquote>
+
+<p><a name="Footnote_13"></a><a href="#FNanchor13">[13]</a><blockquote> &quot;My experience is,&quot; a dramatist writes to me, &quot;that you
+never deliberately choose a theme. You lie awake, or you go walking, and
+suddenly there flashes into your mind a contrast, a piece of spiritual
+irony, an old incident carrying some general significance. Round this
+your mind broods, and there is the germ of your play.&quot; Again be writes:
+&quot;It is not advisable for a playwright to start out at all unless he has
+so felt or seen something, that he feels, as it matures in his mind,
+that he must express it, and in dramatic form.&quot;</blockquote>
+
+<p><a name="Footnote_14"></a><a href="#FNanchor14">[14]</a><blockquote> <i>Etudes Critiques</i>, vol. vii, pp. 153 and 207.</blockquote>
+
+<p><a name="Footnote_15"></a><a href="#FNanchor15">[15]</a><blockquote> In the most aggravated cases, the misunderstanding is
+maintained by a persevering use of pronouns in place of proper names:
+&quot;he&quot; and &quot;she&quot; being taken by the hearer to mean A. and B., when the
+speaker is in fact referring to X. and Y. This ancient trick becomes the
+more irritating the longer the <i>quiproquo</i> is dragged out.</blockquote>
+
+<p><a name="Footnote_16"></a><a href="#FNanchor16">[16]</a><blockquote> The Lowland Scottish villager. It is noteworthy that Mr.
+J.M. Barrie, who himself belongs to this race, has an almost unique gift
+of extracting dramatic effect out of taciturnity, and even out
+of silence.</blockquote>
+
+<p><a name="Footnote_17"></a><a href="#FNanchor17">[17]</a><blockquote> There is a somewhat similar incident in Clyde Fitch's play,
+<i>The Moth and the Flame</i>.</blockquote>
+
+<p><a name="Footnote_18"></a><a href="#FNanchor18">[18]</a><blockquote> <i>Les Corbeaux</i>, by Henri Becque, might perhaps be classed
+as a bankruptcy play, though the point of it is that the Vigneron family
+is not really bankrupt at all, but is unblushingly fleeced by the
+partner and the lawyer of the deceased Vigneron, who play into each
+other's hands.</blockquote>
+
+<p><a name="Footnote_19"></a><a href="#FNanchor19">[19]</a><blockquote> &quot;Dramatic&quot; has recently become one of the most overworked
+words in the vocabulary of journalism. It constantly appears, not only
+in the text of the picturesque reporter, but in head-lines and on
+bulletin-boards. When, on July 20, 1911, Mr. Asquith wrote to Mr.
+Balfour to inform him that the King had guaranteed the creation of
+peers, should it prove necessary for the passing of the Parliament Bill,
+one paper published the news under this headline: &quot;DRAMATIC ANNOUNCEMENT
+BY THE PRIME MINISTER,&quot; and the parliamentary correspondent of another
+paper wrote: &quot;With dramatic suddenness and swiftness, the Prime Minister
+hurled his thunderbolt at the wavering Tory party yesterday.&quot; As a
+matter of fact, the letter was probably not &quot;hurled&quot; more suddenly or
+swiftly than the most ordinary invitation to dinner: nor can its
+contents have been particularly surprising to any one. It was probably
+the conclusiveness, the finality, of the announcement that struck these
+writers as &quot;dramatic.&quot; The letter put an end to all dubiety with a
+&quot;short, sharp shock.&quot; It was, in fact, crisp. As a rule, however,
+&quot;dramatic&quot; is employed by the modern journalist simply as a rather
+pretentious synonym for the still more hackneyed &quot;startling.&quot;</blockquote>
+
+<p><a name="Footnote_20"></a><a href="#FNanchor20">[20]</a><blockquote> As a specimen, and a successful specimen, of this new
+technic, I may cite Miss Elizabeth Baker's very interesting play,
+<i>Chains</i>. There is absolutely no &quot;story&quot; in it, no complication of
+incidents, not even any emotional tension worth speaking of. Another
+recent play of something the same type, <i>The Way the Money Goes</i>, by
+Lady Bell, was quite thrilling by comparison. There we saw a workman's
+wife bowed down by a terrible secret which threatened to wreck her whole
+life--the secret that she had actually run into debt to the amount of
+&pound;30. Her situation was dramatic in the ordinary sense of the word, very
+much as Nora's situation is dramatic when she knows that Krogstad's
+letter is in Helmer's hands. But in <i>Chains</i> there is not even this
+simple form of excitement and suspense. A city clerk, oppressed by the
+deadly monotony and narrowness of his life, thinks of going to
+Australia--and doesn't go: that is the sum and substance of the action.
+Also, by way of underplot, a shopgirl, oppressed by the deadly monotony
+and narrowness of her life, thinks of escaping from it by marrying a
+middle-aged widower--and doesn't do it. If any one had told the late
+Francisque Sarcey, or the late Clement Scott, that a play could be made
+out of this slender material, which should hold an audience absorbed
+through four acts, and stir them to real enthusiasm, these eminent
+critics would have thought him a madman. Yet Miss Baker has achieved
+this feat, by the simple process of supplementing competent observation
+with a fair share of dramatic instinct.</blockquote>
+
+<p><a name="Footnote_21"></a><a href="#FNanchor21">[21]</a><blockquote> If the essence of drama is crisis, it follows that nothing
+can be more dramatic than a momentous choice which may make or mar both
+the character and the fortune of the chooser and of others. There is an
+element of choice in all action which is, or seems to be, the product of
+free will; but there is a peculiar crispness of effect when two
+alternatives are clearly formulated, and the choice is made after a
+mental struggle, accentuated, perhaps, by impassioned advocacy of the
+conflicting interests. Such scenes are <i>Coriolanus</i>, v. 3, the scene
+between Ellida, Wangel, and the Stranger in the last act of <i>The Lady
+from the Sea</i>, and the concluding scene of <i>Candida</i>.</blockquote>
+
+<p><a name="Footnote_22"></a><a href="#FNanchor22">[22]</a><blockquote> Sardou wrote careful and detailed scenarios, Dumas <i>fils</i>
+held it a waste of time to do so. Pailleron wrote &quot;enormous&quot; scenarios,
+Meilhac very brief ones, or none at all. Mr. Galsworthy, rather to my
+surprise, disdains, and even condemns, the scenario, holding that a
+theme becomes lifeless when you put down its skeleton on paper. Sir
+Arthur Pinero says: &quot;Before beginning to write a play, I always make
+sure, by means of a definite scheme, that there is <i>a</i> way of doing it;
+but whether I ultimately follow that way is a totally different matter.&quot;
+Mr. Alfred Sutro practically confesses to a scenario. He says: &quot;Before I
+start writing the dialogue of a play, I make sure that I shall have an
+absolutely free hand over the entrances and exits: in other words, that
+there is ample and legitimate reason for each character appearing in any
+particular scene, and ample motive for his leaving it.&quot; Mr. Granville
+Barker does not put on paper a detailed scenario. He says: &quot;I plan the
+general scheme, and particularly the balance of the play, in my head;
+but this, of course, does not depend entirely on entrances and exits.&quot;
+Mr. Henry Arthur Jones says: &quot;I know the leading scenes, and the general
+course of action in each act, before I write a line. When I have got the
+whole story clear, and divided into acts, I very carefully construct the
+first act, as a series of scenes between such and such of the
+characters. When the first act is written I carefully construct the
+second act in the same way--and so on. I sometimes draw up twenty
+scenarios for an act before I can get it to go straight.&quot;</blockquote>
+
+<p><a name="Footnote_23"></a><a href="#FNanchor23">[23]</a><blockquote> A friend of the late Clyde Fitch writes to me: &quot;Fitch was
+often astonished at the way in which his characters developed. He tried
+to make them do certain things: they did others.&quot;</blockquote>
+
+<p><a name="Footnote_24"></a><a href="#FNanchor24">[24]</a><blockquote> This account of the matter seems to find support in a
+statement, by M. Fran&ccedil;ois de Curel, an accomplished psychologist, to the
+effect that during the first few days of work at a play he is &quot;clearly
+conscious of creating,&quot; but that gradually he gets &quot;into the skin&quot; of
+his characters, and appears to work by instinct. No doubt some artists
+are actually subject to a sort of hallucination, during which they seem
+rather to record than to invent the doings of their characters. But this
+somewhat morbid condition should scarcely be cultivated by the
+dramatist, whose intelligence should always keep a light rein on his
+more instinctive mental processes. See <i>L'Ann&eacute;e Psychologique</i>, 1894.
+p. 120.</blockquote>
+
+<p><a name="Footnote_25"></a><a href="#FNanchor25">[25]</a><blockquote> Sir Arthur Pinero says: &quot;The beginning of a play to me is a
+little world of people. I live with them, get familiar with them, and
+<i>they</i> tell me the story.&quot; This may sound not unlike the remark of the
+novelist above quoted; but the intention was quite different. Sir Arthur
+simply meant that the story came to him as the characters took on life
+in his imagination. Mr. H.A. Jones writes: &quot;When you have a character or
+several characters you haven't a play. You may keep these in your mind
+and nurse them till they combine in a piece of action; but you haven't
+got your play till you have theme, characters, and action all fused. The
+process with me is as purely automatic and spontaneous as dreaming; in
+fact it is really dreaming while you are awake.&quot;</blockquote>
+
+<p><a name="Footnote_26"></a><a href="#FNanchor26">[26]</a><blockquote> &quot;Here,&quot; says a well-known playwright, &quot;is a common
+experience. You are struck by an idea with which you fall in love. 'Ha!'
+you say. 'What a superb scene where the man shall find the missing will
+under the sofa! If that doesn't make them sit up, what will?' You begin
+the play. The first act goes all right, and the second act goes all
+right. You come to the third act, and somehow it won't go at all. You
+battle with it for weeks in vain; and then it suddenly occurs to you,
+'Why, I see what's wrong! It's that confounded scene where the man finds
+the will under the sofa! Out it must come!' You cut it out, and at once
+all goes smooth again. But you have thrown overboard the great effect
+that first tempted you.&quot;</blockquote>
+
+<p><a name="Footnote_27"></a><a href="#FNanchor27">[27]</a><blockquote> The manuscripts of Dumas <i>fils</i> are said to contain, as a
+rule, about four times as much matter as the printed play! (Parigot:
+<i>G&eacute;nie et M&eacute;tier</i>, p. 243). This probably means, however, that he
+preserved tentative and ultimately rejected scenes, which most
+playwrights destroy as they go along.</blockquote>
+
+<p><a name="Footnote_28"></a><a href="#FNanchor28">[28]</a><blockquote> Lowell points out that this assertion of Heminge and
+Condell merely shows them to have been unfamiliar with the simple
+phenomenon known as a fair copy.</blockquote>
+
+<p><a name="Footnote_29"></a><a href="#FNanchor29">[29]</a><blockquote> Since writing this I have learnt that my conjecture is
+correct, at any rate as regards some of M. Hervieu's plays.</blockquote>
+
+<p><a name="Footnote_30"></a><a href="#FNanchor30">[30]</a><blockquote> See Chapters XIII and XVI.</blockquote>
+
+<p><a name="Footnote_31"></a><a href="#FNanchor31">[31]</a><blockquote> This view is expressed with great emphasis by Dumas <i>fils</i>
+in the preface to <i>La Princesse Georges</i>. &quot;You should not begin your
+work,&quot; he says, &quot;until you have your concluding scene, movement and
+speech clear in your mind. How can you tell what road you ought to take
+until you know where you are going?&quot; It is perhaps a more apparent than
+real contradiction of this rule that, until <i>Iris</i> was three parts
+finished, Sir Arthur Pinero intended the play to end with the throttling
+of Iris by Maldonado. The actual end is tantamount to a murder, though
+Iris is not actually killed.</blockquote>
+
+<p><a name="Footnote_32"></a><a href="#FNanchor32">[32]</a><blockquote> See Chapter XVIII.</blockquote>
+
+<p><a name="Footnote_33"></a><a href="#FNanchor33">[33]</a><blockquote> See Chapter XX.</blockquote>
+
+<p><a name="Footnote_34"></a><a href="#FNanchor34">[34]</a><blockquote> Most of the dramatists whom I have consulted are opposed
+to the principle of &quot;roughing out&quot; the big scenes first, and then
+imbedding them, as it were, in their context. Sir Arthur Pinero goes the
+length of saying: &quot;I can never go on to page 2 until I am sure that page
+1 is as right as I can make it. Indeed, when an act is finished, I send
+it at once to the printers, confident that I shall not have to go back
+upon it.&quot; Mr. Alfred Sutro says: &quot;I write a play straight ahead from
+beginning to end, taking practically as long over the first act as over
+the last three.&quot; And Mr. Granville Barker: &quot;I always write the beginning
+of a play first and the end last: but as to writing 'straight ahead'--it
+sounds like what one may be able to do in Heaven.&quot; But almost all
+dramatists, I take it, jot down brief passages of dialogue which they
+may or may not eventually work into the texture of their play.</blockquote>
+
+<p><a name="Footnote_35"></a><a href="#FNanchor35">[35]</a><blockquote> One is not surprised to learn that Sardou &quot;did his
+stage-management as he went along,&quot; and always knew exactly the position
+of his characters from moment to moment.</blockquote>
+
+<p><a name="Footnote_36"></a><a href="#FNanchor36">[36]</a><blockquote> And aurally, it may be added. Sarcey comments on the
+impossibility of a scene in Zola's <i>Pot Bouille</i> in which the so-called
+&quot;lovers,&quot; Octave Mouret and Blanche, throw open the window of the garret
+in which they are quarrelling, and hear the servants in the courtyard
+outside discussing their intrigue. In order that the comments of the
+servants might reach the ears of the audience, they had to be shouted in
+a way (says M. Sarcey) that was fatal to the desired illusion.</blockquote>
+
+<p><a name="Footnote_37"></a><a href="#FNanchor37">[37]</a><blockquote> Partially, too, they were under the influence of antiquity;
+but the ancients were very discreet in their use of significant names.
+Only in satyr-plays, in the comic epics, and for a few extravagant
+characters in comedy (such as the boastful soldier) were grotesque
+appellations employed. For the rest, the Greek habit of nomenclature
+made it possible to use significant names which were at the same time
+probable enough in daily life. For example, a slave might be called
+Onesimus, &quot;useful,&quot; or a soldier Polemon, to imply his warlike function;
+but both names would be familiar to the audience in actual use.</blockquote>
+
+<p><a name="Footnote_38"></a><a href="#FNanchor38">[38]</a><blockquote> Writing of <i>Le Supplice d'une Femme</i>, Alexandre Dumas
+<i>fils</i> said: &quot;This situation I declare to be one of the most dramatic
+and interesting in all drama. But a situation is not an idea. An idea,
+has a beginning, a middle and an end: an exposition, a development, a
+conclusion. Any one can relate a dramatic situation: the art lies in
+preparing it, getting it accepted, rendering it possible, especially in
+untying the knot.&quot;</blockquote>
+
+<p><a name="Footnote_39"></a><a href="#FNanchor39">[39]</a><blockquote> This is what we regard as peculiarly the method of Ibsen.
+There is, however, this essential difference, that, instead of narrating
+his preliminaries in cold blood, Ibsen, in his best work, <i>dramatizes</i>
+the narration.</blockquote>
+
+<p><a name="Footnote_40"></a><a href="#FNanchor40">[40]</a><blockquote> See Chapter XII.</blockquote>
+
+<p><a name="Footnote_41"></a><a href="#FNanchor41">[41]</a><blockquote> This must not be taken to imply that, in a good
+stage-version of the play, Fortinbras should be altogether omitted. Mr.
+Forbes Robertson, in his Lyceum revival of 1897, found several
+advantages in his retention. Among the rest, it permitted the retention
+of one of Hamlet's most characteristic soliloquies.</blockquote>
+
+<p><a name="Footnote_42"></a><a href="#FNanchor42">[42]</a><blockquote> I omit all speculation as to the form which the story
+assumed in the <i>Ur-Hamlet</i>. We have no evidence on the point; and, as
+the poet was no doubt free to remodel the material as he thought fit,
+even in following his original he was making a deliberate
+artistic choice.</blockquote>
+
+<p><a name="Footnote_43"></a><a href="#FNanchor43">[43]</a><blockquote> Shakespeare committed it in <i>Romeo and Juliet</i>, where he
+made Friar Laurence, in the concluding scene, retell the whole story of
+the tragedy. Even in so early a play, such a manifest redundancy seems
+unaccountable. A narrative of things already seen may, of course, be a
+trait of character in the person delivering it; but, in that case, it
+will generally be mendacious (for instance, Falstaff and the men in
+buckram). Or it may be introduced for the sake of its effect upon the
+characters to whom the narration is addressed. But in these cases its
+purpose is no longer to convey information to the audience--it belongs,
+not to the &quot;intelligence department,&quot; but to the department of
+analysis.</blockquote>
+
+<p><a name="Footnote_44"></a><a href="#FNanchor44">[44]</a><blockquote> I say &quot;variety&quot; rather than complexity because I take it
+that the emotions of all concerned are here too intense to be very
+complex. The effect of the scene would appear to lie in the rapidly
+increasing intensity of comparatively simple emotions in Hamlet, in the
+King, in the Queen, and in the amazed and bewildered courtiers.</blockquote>
+
+<p><a name="Footnote_45"></a><a href="#FNanchor45">[45]</a><blockquote> This excludes <i>Love's Comedy, Brand, Peer Gynt</i>, and
+<i>Emperor and Galilean</i>.</blockquote>
+
+<p><a name="Footnote_46"></a><a href="#FNanchor46">[46]</a><blockquote> See, for example, <i>King Henry VIII</i>, Act IV, and the
+opening scene of Tennyson's <i>Queen Mary</i>.</blockquote>
+
+<p><a name="Footnote_47"></a><a href="#FNanchor47">[47]</a><blockquote> This rule of economy does not necessarily exclude a group
+of characters performing something like the function of the antique
+Chorus; that is to say, commenting upon the action from a more or less
+disinterested point of view. The function of <i>Kaffee-Klatsch</i> in
+<i>Pillars of Society</i> is not at all that of the Chorus, but rather that
+of the Euripidean Prologue, somewhat thinly disguised.</blockquote>
+
+<p><a name="Footnote_48"></a><a href="#FNanchor48">[48]</a><blockquote> It is perhaps worth nothing that Gabriele d'Annunzio in
+<i>La Gioconda</i>, reverts to, and outdoes, the French classic convention,
+by giving us three actors and four confidants. The play consists of a
+crisis in three lives, passively, though sympathetically, contemplated
+by what is in effect a Chorus of two men and two women. It would be
+interesting to inquire why, in this particular play, such an abuse of
+the confidant seems quite admissible, if not conspicuously right.</blockquote>
+
+<p><a name="Footnote_49"></a><a href="#FNanchor49">[49]</a><blockquote> Dryden, in his <i>Essay of Dramatic Poesy</i>, represents this
+method as being characteristic of Greek tragedy as a whole. The tragic
+poet, he says, &quot;set the audience, as it were, at the post where the race
+is to be concluded; and, saving them the tedious expectation of seeing
+the poet set out and ride the beginning of the course, they suffer you
+not to behold him, till he is in sight of the goal and just upon you.&quot;
+Dryden seems to think that the method was forced upon them by &quot;the rule
+of time.&quot;</blockquote>
+
+<p><a name="Footnote_50"></a><a href="#FNanchor50">[50]</a><blockquote> It is a rash enterprise to reconstruct Ibsen, but one
+cannot help wondering how he would have planned <i>A Doll's House</i> had he
+written it in the 'eighties instead of the 'seventies. One can imagine a
+long opening scene between Helmer and Nora in which a great deal of the
+necessary information might have been conveyed; while it would have
+heightened by contrast the effect of the great final duologue as we now
+possess it. Such information as could not possibly have been conveyed in
+dialogue with Helmer might, one would think, have been left for Nora's
+first scene with Krogstad, the effect of which it would have enhanced.
+Perhaps Mrs. Linden might with advantage have been retained, though not
+in her present character of confidant, in order to show Nora in relation
+to another woman.</blockquote>
+
+<p><a name="Footnote_51"></a><a href="#FNanchor51">[51]</a><blockquote> See Chapter XXIII.</blockquote>
+
+<p><a name="Footnote_52"></a><a href="#FNanchor52">[52]</a><blockquote> Henri Becque's two best-known plays aptly exemplify the two
+types of opening. In <i>Les Corbeaux</i> we have almost an entire act of calm
+domesticity in which the only hint of coming trouble is an allusion to
+Vigneron's attacks of vertigo. In <i>La Parisienne</i> Clotilde and Lafont
+are in the thick of a vehement quarrel over a letter. It proceeds for
+ten minutes or so, at the end of which Clotilde says, &quot;Prenez garde,
+voil&agrave; mon mari!&quot;--and we find that the two are not husband and wife, but
+wife and lover.</blockquote>
+
+<p><a name="Footnote_53"></a><a href="#FNanchor53">[53]</a><blockquote> Mrs. Craigie (&quot;John Oliver Hobbes&quot;) opened her very
+successful play, <i>The Ambassador</i>, with a scene between Juliet
+Desborough and her sister Alice, a nun, who apparently left her convent
+specially to hear her sister's confession, and then returned to it for
+ever. This was certainly not an economical form of exposition, but it
+was not unsuited to the type of play.</blockquote>
+
+<p><a name="Footnote_54"></a><a href="#FNanchor54">[54]</a><blockquote> In that charming comedy, <i>Rosemary</i>, by Messrs. Parker and
+Carson, there is a gap of fifty years between the last act and its
+predecessor; but the so-called last act is only an &quot;epi-monologue.&quot;</blockquote>
+
+<p><a name="Footnote_55"></a><a href="#FNanchor55">[55]</a><blockquote> Or at most two closely connected characters: for instance,
+a husband and wife.</blockquote>
+
+<p><a name="Footnote_56"></a><a href="#FNanchor56">[56]</a><blockquote> There are several cases in Greek drama in which a hero
+leaves the stage to fight a battle and returns victorious in a few
+minutes. See, for example, the <i>Supplices</i> of Euripides.</blockquote>
+
+<p><a name="Footnote_57"></a><a href="#FNanchor57">[57]</a><blockquote> So far was Shakespeare from ignoring the act-division that
+it is a question whether his art did not sometimes suffer from the
+supposed necessity of letting a fourth act intervene between the
+culmination in the third act and the catastrophe in the fifth.</blockquote>
+
+<p><a name="Footnote_58"></a><a href="#FNanchor58">[58]</a><blockquote> I think it may be said that the majority of modern serious
+plays are in four acts. It is a favourite number with Sir Arthur Pinero,
+Mr. Henry Arthur Jones, Mr. Clyde Fitch, and Mr. Alfred Sutro.</blockquote>
+
+<p><a name="Footnote_59"></a><a href="#FNanchor59">[59]</a><blockquote> This must not be taken to mean that in no case is a change
+of scene within the act advisable. The point to be considered is whether
+the author does or does not want to give the audience time for
+reflection--time to return to the real world--between two episodes. If
+it is of great importance that they should not do so, then a rapid
+change of scene may be the less of two evils. In this case the lights
+should be kept lowered in order to show that no interact is intended;
+but the fashion of changing the scene on a pitch-dark stage, without
+dropping the curtain, is much to be deprecated. If the revolving stage
+should ever become a common institution in English-speaking countries,
+dramatists would doubtless be more tempted than they are at present to
+change their scenes within the act; but I doubt whether the tendency
+would be wholly advantageous. No absolute rule, however, can be laid
+down, and it may well be maintained that a true dramatic artist could
+only profit by the greater flexibility of his medium.</blockquote>
+
+<p><a name="Footnote_60"></a><a href="#FNanchor60">[60]</a><blockquote> He was, in the first draft; and Lona Hessel was only a
+distant relative of Bernick's.</blockquote>
+
+<p><a name="Footnote_61"></a><a href="#FNanchor61">[61]</a><blockquote> The Greeks, who knew most things, knew the value of
+manageable dimensions and simple structure in a work of art, and had a
+word to express that combination of qualities--the word <i>eusynopton</i>.</blockquote>
+
+<p><a name="Footnote_62"></a><a href="#FNanchor62">[62]</a><blockquote> The view that the dramatist has only to think of pleasing
+himself is elsewhere dealt with.</blockquote>
+
+<p><a name="Footnote_63"></a><a href="#FNanchor63">[63]</a><blockquote> Two dramatists who have read these pages in proof, exclaim
+at this passage. The one says, &quot;No, no!&quot; the other asks, &quot;Why?&quot; I can
+only reiterate that, where there exists a strong and generally accepted
+tradition, the dramatist not only runs counter to it at his peril, but
+goes outside the true domain of his art in so doing. New truth, in
+history, must be established either by new documents, or by a careful
+and detailed re-interpretation of old documents; but the stage is not
+the place either for the production of documents or for historical
+exegesis. It is needless to say that where the popular mind is unbiased,
+the dramatist's hands are free. For instance, I presume that one might,
+in England, take any view one pleased of the character of Mary. Queen of
+Scots; but a highly unfavourable view would scarcely be accepted by
+Scottish audiences. Similarly, it would be both dangerous and
+unprofitable to present on the English stage any very damaging &quot;scandal
+about Queen Elizabeth.&quot; Historical criticism, I understand, does not
+accept the view that Robespierre was mainly responsible for the Reign of
+Terror, and that his death betokened a general revolt against his
+sanguinary tyranny; but it would be very hard for any dramatist to
+secure general acceptance for a more accurate reading of his character
+and function. Some further remarks on this subject will be found in
+Chapter XIII.</blockquote>
+
+<p><a name="Footnote_64"></a><a href="#FNanchor64">[64]</a><blockquote> A malicious anecdote to a similar effect was current in the
+early days of Sir Henry Irving's career. It was said that at Bristol one
+night, when Mr. Irving, as Hamlet, &quot;took his call&quot; after the first act,
+a man turned to his neighbour in the pit and said, &quot;Can you tell me,
+sir, does that young man appear much in this play?&quot; His neighbour
+informed him that Hamlet was rather largely concerned in the action,
+whereupon the inquirer remarked, &quot;Oh! Then I'm off!&quot;</blockquote>
+
+<p><a name="Footnote_65"></a><a href="#FNanchor65">[65]</a><blockquote> If it be well done, it may remain highly effective in spite
+of being discounted by previous knowledge. For instance, the clock-trick
+in <i>Raffles</i> was none the less amusing because every one was on the
+look-out for it.</blockquote>
+
+<p><a name="Footnote_66"></a><a href="#FNanchor66">[66]</a><blockquote> The question whether it is ever politic for a playwright to
+keep a secret from his audience is discussed elsewhere. What I have here
+in mind is not an ordinary secret, but a more or less tricky effect of
+surprise.</blockquote>
+
+<p><a name="Footnote_67"></a><a href="#FNanchor67">[67]</a><blockquote> The pleasure received from exceptionally good acting is, of
+course, a different matter. I assume that the acting is merely competent
+enough to pass muster without irritating us, and so distracting our
+attention.</blockquote>
+
+<p><a name="Footnote_68"></a><a href="#FNanchor68">[68]</a><blockquote> I myself expressed it in slightly different terms nearly
+ten years ago. &quot;Curiosity,&quot; I said, &quot;is the accidental relish of a
+single night; whereas the essential and abiding pleasure of the theatre
+lies in foreknowledge. In relation to the characters in the drama, the
+audience are as gods looking before and after. Sitting in the theatre,
+we taste, for a moment, the glory of omniscience. With vision unsealed,
+we watch the gropings of purblind mortals after happiness, and smile at
+their stumblings, their blunders, their futile quests, their misplaced
+exultations, their groundless panics. To keep a secret from us is to
+reduce us to their level, and deprive us of our clairvoyant aloofness.
+There may be a pleasure in that too; we may join with zest in the game
+of blind-man's-buff; but the theatre is in its essence a place where we
+are privileged to take off the bandage we wear in daily life, and to
+contemplate, with laughter or with tears, the blindfold gambols of our
+neighbours.&quot;</blockquote>
+
+<p><a name="Footnote_69"></a><a href="#FNanchor69">[69]</a><blockquote> Here an acute critic writes: &quot;On the whole I agree; but I
+do think there is dramatic interest to be had out of curiosity, through
+the identification, so to speak, of the audience with the discovering
+persons on the stage. It is an interest of sympathy, not to be despised,
+rather than an interest of actual curiosity.&quot;</blockquote>
+
+<p><a name="Footnote_70"></a><a href="#FNanchor70">[70]</a><blockquote> That great story-teller, Alexandra Dumas <i>pere,</i> those a
+straightforward way of carrying forward the interest at the end of the
+first act of <i>Henri III et sa Cour.</i> The Due de Guise, insulted by
+Saint-M&eacute;grin, beckons to his henchman and says, as the curtain falls,
+<i>&quot;Qu'on me cherche les m&egrave;mes hommes qui ont assassin&eacute; Dugast!&quot;</i></blockquote>
+
+<p><a name="Footnote_71"></a><a href="#FNanchor71">[71]</a><blockquote> There are limits to the validity of this rule, as applied
+to minor incidents. For example, it may sometimes be a point of art to
+lead the audience to expect the appearance of one person, when in fact
+another is about to enter. But it is exceedingly dangerous to baffle the
+carefully fostered anticipation of an important scene. See Chapters
+XVII and XXI.</blockquote>
+
+<p><a name="Footnote_72"></a><a href="#FNanchor72">[72]</a><blockquote> This method of heightening the tension would have been
+somewhat analogous to that employed by Oscar Wilde in Lady Windermere's
+instructions to her butler, cited on p. 115.</blockquote>
+
+<p><a name="Footnote_73"></a><a href="#FNanchor73">[73]</a><blockquote> Dryden (<i>Of Dramatic Poesy</i>, p. 56, ed. Arnold, 1903) says:
+&quot;Our plays, besides the main design, have underplots or by-concernments,
+of less considerable persons and intrigues, which are carried on with
+the motion of the main plot; as they say the orb of the fixed stars, and
+those of the planets, though they have motions of their own, are whirled
+about by the motion of the <i>primum mobile</i>, in which they are
+contained.&quot; This is an admirable description of the ideal underplot, as
+conceived by our forefathers; but we find that two lines of tension jar
+with and weaken each other.</blockquote>
+
+<p><a name="Footnote_74"></a><a href="#FNanchor74">[74]</a><blockquote> <i>Of Dramatic Poesy,</i> ed. Arnold, 1903, p. 60.</blockquote>
+
+<p><a name="Footnote_75"></a><a href="#FNanchor75">[75]</a><blockquote> <i>The World</i>, December 20, 1899.</blockquote>
+
+<p><a name="Footnote_76"></a><a href="#FNanchor76">[76]</a><blockquote> At the end of the first act of <i>Lady Inger of Ostraat</i>,
+Ibsen evidently intends to produce a startling effect through the sudden
+appearance of Olaf Skaktavl in Lady Inger's hall. But as he has totally
+omitted to tell us who the strange man is, the incident has no meaning
+for us. In 1855 Ibsen had all his technical lessons yet to learn.</blockquote>
+
+<p><a name="Footnote_77"></a><a href="#FNanchor77">[77]</a><blockquote> The fact that Mr. Phillips should have deemed such a
+foreshadowing necessary shows how instinctively a dramatist feels that
+the logic of his art requires him to assume that his audience is
+ignorant of his fable. In reality, very few members of the first-night
+audience, or of any other, can have depended on old Angela's
+vaticination for the requisite foresight of events. But this does not
+prove Angela to be artistically superfluous.</blockquote>
+
+<p><a name="Footnote_78"></a><a href="#FNanchor78">[78]</a><blockquote> See pp. 118, 240.</blockquote>
+
+<p><a name="Footnote_79"></a><a href="#FNanchor79">[79]</a><blockquote> There is no special harm in this: the question of exits and
+entrances and their mechanism is discussed in Chapter XXIII.</blockquote>
+
+<p><a name="Footnote_80"></a><a href="#FNanchor80">[80]</a><blockquote> This might be said of the scene of the second act of <i>The
+Benefit of the Doubt</i>; but here the actual stage-topography is natural
+enough. The author, however, is rather over-anxious to emphasize the
+acoustic relations of the two rooms.</blockquote>
+
+<p><a name="Footnote_81"></a><a href="#FNanchor81">[81]</a><blockquote> For example, in his criticism of Becque's <i>La Parisienne
+(Quarante Ans de Th&eacute;&acirc;tre</i>, VI, p. 364), he tells how, at the end o&pound; the
+second act, one of his neighbours said to him, &quot;Eh! bien, vous voil&agrave;
+bien attrap&eacute;! O est la <i>sc&egrave;ne &agrave; faire</i>?&quot; &quot;I freely admit,&quot; he
+continues, &quot;that there is no <i>sc&egrave;ne &agrave; faire</i>; if there had been no third
+act I should not have been greatly astonished. When you make it your
+business to recite on the stage articles from the <i>Vie Parisienne</i>, it
+makes no difference whether you stop at the end of the second article or
+at the end of the third.&quot; This clearly implies that a play in which
+there is no <i>sc&egrave;ne &agrave; faire</i> is nothing but a series of newspaper
+sketches. Becque, one fancies, might have replied that the scene between
+Clotilde and Monsieur Simpson at the beginning of Act III was precisely
+the <i>sc&egrave;ne &agrave; faire</i> demanded by the logic of his cynicism.</blockquote>
+
+<p><a name="Footnote_82"></a><a href="#FNanchor82">[82]</a><blockquote> I need scarcely direct the reader's attention to Mr.
+Gilbert Murray's noble renderings of these speeches.</blockquote>
+
+<p><a name="Footnote_83"></a><a href="#FNanchor83">[83]</a><blockquote> Such a scene occurs in that very able play, <i>The Way the
+Money Goes</i>, by Lady Bell.</blockquote>
+
+<p><a name="Footnote_84"></a><a href="#FNanchor84">[84]</a><blockquote> In Mr. Stephen Phillips's play he does not actually play on
+the lyre, but he improvises and recites an ode to the conflagration.</blockquote>
+
+<p><a name="Footnote_85"></a><a href="#FNanchor85">[85]</a><blockquote> And, after all, Mr. Shaw does not run counter to the
+legend. He exhibits Caesar and Napoleon &quot;in their well-known attitudes&quot;:
+only, by an odd metempsychosis, the soul of Mr. Shaw has somehow entered
+into them.</blockquote>
+
+<p><a name="Footnote_86"></a><a href="#FNanchor86">[86]</a><blockquote> That great spiritual drama known as the Book of Job opens,
+after the Prologue in Heaven, with one of the most startling of
+peripeties.</blockquote>
+
+<p><a name="Footnote_87"></a><a href="#FNanchor87">[87]</a><blockquote> The first act of Mr. Gilbert Murray's <i>Carlyon Sahib</i>
+contains an incident of this nature; but it can scarcely be called a
+peripety, since the victim remains unconscious of his doom.</blockquote>
+
+<p><a name="Footnote_88"></a><a href="#FNanchor88">[88]</a><blockquote> For the benefit of American readers, it may be well to
+state that the person who changes a Bank of England note is often asked
+to write his or her name on the back of it. It must have been in a
+moment of sheer aberration that the lady in question wrote her
+own name.</blockquote>
+
+<p><a name="Footnote_89"></a><a href="#FNanchor89">[89]</a><blockquote> M. Bernstein, dishing up a similar theme with a piquant
+sauce of sensuality, made but a vulgar and trivial piece of work of it.</blockquote>
+
+<p><a name="Footnote_90"></a><a href="#FNanchor90">[90]</a><blockquote> One of the most striking peripeties in recent English drama
+occurs in the third act of The Builder of Bridges, by Mr. Alfred Sutro.</blockquote>
+
+<p><a name="Footnote_91"></a><a href="#FNanchor91">[91]</a><blockquote> The malignant caricature of Cromwell in W.G. Wills'
+<i>Charles</i> I did not, indeed, prevent the acceptance of the play by the
+mid-Victorian public; but it will certainly shorten the life of the one
+play which might have secured for its author a lasting place in dramatic
+literature. It is unimaginable that future generations should accept a
+representation of Cromwell as
+<br><br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&quot;A mouthing patriot, with an itching palm,<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;In one hand menace, in the other greed.&quot;</blockquote>
+
+<p><a name="Footnote_92"></a><a href="#FNanchor92">[92]</a><blockquote> It is only fair to say that Sarcey drew a distinction
+between antecedent <i>events</i> and what he calls &quot;postulates of character.&quot;
+He did not maintain that an audience ought to accept a psychological
+impossibility, merely because it was placed outside the frame of the
+picture. See <i>Quarante Ans de Th&eacute;&acirc;tre</i>, vii, p. 395.</blockquote>
+
+<p><a name="Footnote_93"></a><a href="#FNanchor93">[93]</a><blockquote> This phrase, which occurs in Mr. Haddon Chambers's romantic
+melodrama, <i>Captain Swift</i>, was greeted with a burst of laughter by the
+first-night audience; but little did we then think that Mr. Chambers was
+enriching the English language. It is not, on examination, a
+particularly luminous phrase: &quot;the three or four arms of coincidence&quot;
+would really be more to the point. But it is not always the most
+accurate expression that is fittest to survive.</blockquote>
+
+<p><a name="Footnote_94"></a><a href="#FNanchor94">[94]</a><blockquote> The abuse of coincidence is a legacy to modern drama from
+the Latin comedy, which, again, was founded on the Greek New Comedy. It
+is worth noting that in the days of Menander the world really was much
+smaller than it is to-day, when &quot;thalassic&quot; has grown into &quot;oceanic&quot;
+civilization. Travellers in those days followed a few main routes; half
+a dozen great seaports were rendezvous for all the world; the
+slave-trade was active, and kidnappings and abductions with the
+corresponding meetings and recognitions were no doubt frequent. Thus
+such a plot as that of the <i>Menaechmi</i> was by no means the sheer
+impossibility which Shakespeare made it by attaching indistinguishable
+Dromios to his indistinguishable Antipholuses. To reduplicate a
+coincidence is in fact to multiply it by a figure far beyond my
+mathematics. It may be noted, too, that the practice of exposing
+children, on which the <i>Oedipus</i>, and many plays of Menander, are
+founded, was common in historic Greece, and that the hapless children
+were generally provided with identification-tokens <i>gnorismata</i>.</blockquote>
+
+<p><a name="Footnote_95"></a><a href="#FNanchor95">[95]</a><blockquote> I am here writing from memory, having been unable to obtain
+a copy of <i>The City</i>; but my memory is pretty clear.</blockquote>
+
+<p><a name="Footnote_96"></a><a href="#FNanchor96">[96]</a><blockquote> For instance: &quot;If you can get a word with him by pretending
+that you are his wife, tell him to hold his tongue until morning; <i>that
+will give me all the start I need</i>.&quot;</blockquote>
+
+<p><a name="Footnote_97"></a><a href="#FNanchor97">[97]</a><blockquote> In <i>The Idyll</i>, by Herr Egge, of which some account is
+given in Chapter X, the author certainly does right in not allowing the
+audience for a moment to share the hero's doubts as to the heroine's
+past. It would have been very easy for him to have kept the secret; but
+he takes the earliest opportunity of assuring us that her relations with
+Ringve were quite innocent.</blockquote>
+
+<p><a name="Footnote_98"></a><a href="#FNanchor98">[98]</a><blockquote> The fact that a great poet can ignore such precepts with
+impunity is proved by the exquisite anticlimax of the third act of
+D'Annunzio's <i>La Gioconda</i>.</blockquote>
+
+<p><a name="Footnote_99"></a><a href="#FNanchor99">[99]</a><blockquote> <i>Of Dramatic Poesy</i>, ed. Arnold, 1903, p. 51.</blockquote>
+
+<p><a name="Footnote_100"></a><a href="#FNanchor100">[100]</a><blockquote> In Mr. Somerset Maugham's <i>Grace</i> the heroine undergoes a
+somewhat analogous change of heart, coming to love the husband whom she
+has previously despised. But we have no difficulty in accepting her
+conversion, partly because its reasons are clear and fairly adequate,
+partly because there is no question of convincing the husband, who has
+never realized her previous contempt for him.</blockquote>
+
+<p><a name="Footnote_101"></a><a href="#FNanchor101">[101]</a><blockquote> I have good reason for believing that, in M. Maeterlinck's
+original scheme, Prinzivalle imposed no such humiliating condition.
+Giovanna went of her own motive to appeal to his clemency; and her
+success was so complete that her husband, on her return, could not
+believe that it had been won by avowable means. This is a really fine
+conception--what a pity that the poet departed from it!</blockquote>
+
+<p><a name="Footnote_102"></a><a href="#FNanchor102">[102]</a><blockquote> Much has been made of the Censor's refusal to license
+<i>Monna Vanna</i>; but I think there is more to be said for his action in
+this than in many other cases. In those countries where the play has
+succeeded, I cannot but suspect that the appeal it made was not wholly
+to the higher instincts of the public.</blockquote>
+
+<p><a name="Footnote_103"></a><a href="#FNanchor103">[103]</a><blockquote> I am not sure what was the precise relationship of this
+play to the same author's <i>Beau Brummel</i>. D'Orsay's death scene was
+certainly a repetition of Brummel's.</blockquote>
+
+<p><a name="Footnote_104"></a><a href="#FNanchor104">[104]</a><blockquote> The reader who wishes to pursue the theme may do so to
+excellent advantage in Professor Bradley's <i>Shakespearean Tragedy</i>.</blockquote>
+
+<p><a name="Footnote_105"></a><a href="#FNanchor105">[105]</a><blockquote> It is true that in <i>A Doll's House</i>, Dr. Rank announces his
+approaching demise: but he does not actually die, nor is his fate an
+essential part of the action of the play.</blockquote>
+
+<p><a name="Footnote_106"></a><a href="#FNanchor106">[106]</a><blockquote> The duel, even in countries whose customs permit of it, is
+essentially an inartistic end; for it leaves the catastrophe to be
+decided either by Chance or Providence--two equally inadmissible
+arbiters in modern drama. Alexandre Dumas <i>fils</i>, in his preface to
+<i>H&eacute;lo&iuml;se Paranquet</i>, condemns the duel as a dramatic expedient. &quot;Not to
+mention,&quot; he says, &quot;the fact that it has been much over-done, we are
+bound to recognize that Providence, in a fit of absence of mind,
+sometimes suffers the rascal to kill the honest man. Let me recommend my
+young colleagues,&quot; he proceeds, &quot;never to end a piece which pretends to
+reproduce a phase of real life, by an intervention of chance.&quot; The
+recommendation came rather oddly from the dramatist who, in
+<i>L'Etrang&egrave;re</i>, had disposed of his &quot;vibrion,&quot; the Duc de Septmonts, by
+making Clarkson kill him in a duel. Perhaps he did not reckon
+<i>L'Etrang&egrave;re</i> as pretending to reproduce a phase of real life. A duel
+is, of course, perfectly admissible in a French or German play, simply
+as part of a picture of manners. Its stupid inconclusiveness may be the
+very point to be illustrated. It is only when represented as a moral
+arbitrament that it becomes an anachronism.</blockquote>
+
+<p><a name="Footnote_107"></a><a href="#FNanchor107">[107]</a><blockquote> I am glad to see, from Mr. Malcolm Salaman's introduction
+to the printed play, that, even in those days of our hot youth, my own
+aesthetic principles were less truculent.</blockquote>
+
+<p><a name="Footnote_108"></a><a href="#FNanchor108">[108]</a><blockquote> This image is sometimes suggested by an act-ending which
+leaves a marked situation obviously unresolved. The curtain should never
+be dropped at such a point as to leave the characters in a physical or
+mental attitude which cannot last for more than a moment, and must
+certainly be followed, then and there, by important developments. In
+other words, a situation ought not to be cut short at the very height of
+its tension, but only when it has reached a point of--at any rate
+momentary--relaxation.</blockquote>
+
+<p><a name="Footnote_109"></a><a href="#FNanchor109">[109]</a><blockquote> If this runs counter to the latest biological orthodoxy, I
+am sorry. Habits are at any rate transmissible by imitation, if not
+otherwise.</blockquote>
+
+<p><a name="Footnote_110"></a><a href="#FNanchor110">[110]</a><blockquote> Chapter XIX.</blockquote>
+
+<p><a name="Footnote_111"></a><a href="#FNanchor111">[111]</a><blockquote> So, too, with the style of Congreve. It is much, and
+justly, admired; but who does not feel more than a touch of mannerism in
+such a passage as this?--
+<br><br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;MILLAMANT: &quot;... Let us never visit together, nor go to a play<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;together; but let us be very strange and well-bred: let us be as<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;strange as if we had been married a great while; and as well-bred as<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;if we were not married at all.&quot;<br>
+<br><br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;MIRABELL: &quot;Have you any more conditions to offer? Hitherto your<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;demands are pretty reasonable.&quot;<br>
+<br><br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;MILLAMANT: &quot;Trifles!--as liberty to pay and receive visits to and<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;from whom I please; to write and receive letters, without<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;interrogatories or wry faces on your part; to wear what I please;<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;and choose conversation with regard only to my own taste; to have no<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;obligation upon me to converse with wits that I don't like because<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;they are your acquaintances; or to be intimate with fools because<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;they may be your relatives.... These articles subscribed, if I<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;continue to endure you a little longer, I may by degrees dwindle<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;into a wife.&quot;<br>
+<br><br>
+This is very pretty prose, granted; but it is the prose of literature,
+not of life.</blockquote>
+
+<p><a name="Footnote_112"></a><a href="#FNanchor112">[112]</a><blockquote> From the fact that I do not make an exception in favour of
+<i>The Blot in the Scutcheon</i> or <i>Stratford</i>, I must leave the reader to
+draw what inference he pleases. On the other hand, I believe that a
+reconstruction of Tennyson's <i>Queen Mary</i>, with a few connecting links
+written in, might take a permanent place in the theatre.</blockquote>
+
+<p><a name="Footnote_113"></a><a href="#FNanchor113">[113]</a><blockquote> Mr. Israel Zangwill, in his symbolic play, <i>The War-God</i>,
+has put blank verse to what I believe to be a new use, with noteworthy
+success. He writes in very strict measure, but without the least
+inversion or inflation, without a touch of Elizabethan, or
+conventionally poetic, diction. He is thus enabled to use the most
+modern expressions, and even slang, without incongruity; while at the
+same time he can give rhetorical movement to the speeches of his
+symbolic personages, and, in passages of argument, can achieve that
+clash of measured phrase against measured phrase which the Greeks called
+&quot;stichomythy,&quot; and which the French dramatist sometimes produces in
+rapid rapier play with the Alexandrine. Mr. Zangwill's practice is in
+absolute contradiction of the principle above suggested that blank
+verse, to be justified in drama, ought to be lyrical. His verse is a
+product of pure intellect and wit, without a single lyric accent. It is
+measured prose; if it ever tries to be more, it fails. I think, then,
+that he has shown a new use for blank verse, in rhetorico-symbolic
+drama. But it is no small literary feat to handle the measure as
+he does.</blockquote>
+
+<p><a name="Footnote_114"></a><a href="#FNanchor114">[114]</a><blockquote> Not quite. The drama of some Oriental peoples recognizes
+conventions which the Elizabethans did not admit.</blockquote>
+
+<p><a name="Footnote_115"></a><a href="#FNanchor115">[115]</a><blockquote> A conversation on the telephone often provides a convenient
+and up-to-date substitute for a soliloquy; but that is an expedient
+which ought not to be abused.</blockquote>
+
+<p><a name="Footnote_116"></a><a href="#FNanchor116">[116]</a><blockquote> The soliloquy is often not only slovenly, but a gratuitous
+and unnecessary slovenliness. In <i>Les Corbeaux</i>, by Henry Becque,
+produced in 1889, there occur two soliloquies--one by Teissier (Act ii,
+Scene 3), the other by Madame de Saint-Genis (Act in, Scene 10)--either
+or both of which could be omitted without leaving any sensible gap. The
+latter is wholly superfluous, the former conveys some information which
+might have been taken for granted, and could, in any case, have been
+conveyed without difficulty in some other way. Yet Becque was, in his
+day, regarded as a quite advanced technician.</blockquote>
+
+
+
+
+
+<br><br><hr style="width: 35%;"><br><br>
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+<pre>
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Play-Making, by William Archer
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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of Play-Making, by William Archer
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: Play-Making
+       A Manual of Craftsmanship
+
+Author: William Archer
+
+Release Date: January 29, 2004 [EBook #10865]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK PLAY-MAKING ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Riikka Talonpoika, Ginny Brewer and PG Distributed
+Proofreaders
+
+
+
+
+
+PLAY-MAKING
+
+_A Manual of Craftsmanship_
+
+by William Archer
+
+
+1912
+
+
+
+
+PREFATORY NOTE
+
+This book is, to all intents and purposes, entirely new. No considerable
+portion of it has already appeared, although here and there short
+passages and phrases from articles of bygone years are embedded
+--indistinguishably, I hope--in the text. I have tried, wherever
+it was possible, to select my examples from published plays, which the
+student may read for himself, and so check my observations. One reason,
+among others, which led me to go to Shakespeare and Ibsen for so many of
+my illustrations, was that they are the most generally accessible of
+playwrights.
+
+If the reader should feel that I have been over lavish in the use of
+footnotes, I have two excuses to allege. The first is that more than
+half of the following chapters were written on shipboard and in places
+where I had scarcely any books to refer to; so that a great deal had to
+be left to subsequent enquiry and revision. The second is that several
+of my friends, dramatists and others, have been kind enough to read my
+manuscript, and to suggest valuable afterthoughts.
+
+LONDON
+
+_January_, 1912
+
+
+To
+
+Brander Matthews
+
+Guide Philosopher and Friend
+
+
+
+CONTENTS
+
+  BOOK I
+
+  PROLOGUE
+
+  _CHAPTER I_ INTRODUCTORY
+  _CHAPTER II_ THE CHOICE OF A THEME
+  _CHAPTER III_ DRAMATIC AND UNDRAMATIC
+  _CHAPTER IV_ THE ROUTINE OF COMPOSITION
+  _CHAPTER V_ DRAMATIS PERSONAE
+
+
+  BOOK II
+
+  THE BEGINNING
+
+  _CHAPTER VI_ THE POINT OF ATTACK: SHAKESPEARE AND IBSEN
+  _CHAPTER VII_ EXPOSITION: ITS END AND ITS MEANS
+  _CHAPTER VIII_ THE FIRST ACT
+  _CHAPTER IX_ "CURIOSITY" AND "INTEREST"
+  _CHAPTER X_ FORESHADOWING, NOT FORESTALLING
+
+
+  BOOK III
+
+  THE MIDDLE
+
+  _CHAPTER XI_ TENSION AND ITS SUSPENSION
+  _CHAPTER XII_ PREPARATION: THE FINGER-POST
+  _CHAPTER XIII_ THE OBLIGATORY SCENE
+  _CHAPTER XIV_ THE PERIPETY
+  _CHAPTER XV_ PROBABILITY, CHANCE AND COINCIDENCE
+  _CHAPTER XVI_ LOGIC
+  _CHAPTER XVII_ KEEPING A SECRET
+
+
+  BOOK IV
+
+  THE END
+
+  _CHAPTER XVIII_ CLIMAX AND ANTICLIMAX
+  _CHAPTER XIX_ CONVERSION
+  _CHAPTER XX_ BLIND-ALLEY THEMES--AND OTHERS
+  _CHAPTER XXI_ THE FULL CLOSE
+
+
+  BOOK V
+
+  EPILOGUE
+
+  _CHAPTER XXII_ CHARACTER AND PSYCHOLOGY
+  _CHAPTER XXIII_ DIALOGUE AND DETAILS
+
+
+
+
+_BOOK I_
+
+PROLOGUE
+
+
+
+_CHAPTER I_
+
+INTRODUCTORY
+
+
+There are no rules for writing a play. It is easy, indeed, to lay down
+negative recommendations--to instruct the beginner how _not_ to do it.
+But most of these "don'ts" are rather obvious; and those which are not
+obvious are apt to be questionable. It is certain, for instance, that if
+you want your play to be acted, anywhere else than in China, you must
+not plan it in sixteen acts of an hour apiece; but where is the tyro who
+needs a text-book to tell him that? On the other hand, most theorists of
+to-day would make it an axiom that you must not let your characters
+narrate their circumstances, or expound their motives, in speeches
+addressed, either directly to the audience, or ostensibly to their
+solitary selves. But when we remember that, of all dramatic openings,
+there is none finer than that which shows Richard Plantagenet limping
+down the empty stage to say--
+
+  "Now is the winter of our discontent
+  Made glorious summer by this sun of York;
+  And all the clouds that lour'd upon our house
+  In the deep bosom of the ocean buried"--
+
+we feel that the axiom requires large qualifications. There are no
+absolute rules, in fact, except such as are dictated by the plainest
+common sense. Aristotle himself did not so much dogmatize as analyse,
+classify, and generalize from, the practices of the Attic dramatists. He
+said, "you had better" rather than "you must." It was Horace, in an age
+of deep dramatic decadence, who re-stated the pseudo-Aristotelian
+formulas of the Alexandrians as though they were unassailable dogmas
+of art.
+
+How comes it, then, that there is a constant demand for text-books of
+the art and craft of drama? How comes it that so many people--and I
+among the number--who could not write a play to save their lives, are
+eager to tell others how to do so? And, stranger still, how comes it
+that so many people are willing to sit at the feet of these instructors?
+It is not so with the novel. Popular as is that form of literature,
+guides to novel-writing, if they exist at all, are comparatively rare.
+Why are people possessed with the idea that the art of dramatic fiction
+differs from that of narrative fiction, in that it can and must
+be taught?
+
+The reason is clear, and is so far valid as to excuse, if not to
+justify, such works as the present. The novel, as soon as it is legibly
+written, exists, for what it is worth. The page of black and white is
+the sole intermediary between the creative and the perceptive brain.
+Even the act of printing merely widens the possible appeal: it does not
+alter its nature. But the drama, before it can make its proper appeal at
+all, must be run through a highly complex piece of mechanism--the
+theatre--the precise conditions of which are, to most beginners, a
+fascinating mystery. While they feel a strong inward conviction of their
+ability to master it, they are possessed with an idea, often exaggerated
+and superstitious, of its technical complexities. Having, as a rule,
+little or no opportunity of closely examining or experimenting with it,
+they are eager to "read it up," as they might any other machine. That is
+the case of the average aspirant, who has neither the instinct of the
+theatre fully developed in his blood, nor such a congenital lack of that
+instinct as to be wholly inapprehensive of any technical difficulties or
+problems. The intelligent novice, standing between these extremes,
+tends, as a rule, to overrate the efficacy of theoretical instruction,
+and to expect of analytic criticism more than it has to give.
+
+There is thus a fine opening for pedantry on the one side, and quackery
+on the other, to rush in. The pedant, in this context, is he who
+constructs a set of rules from metaphysical or psychological first
+principles, and professes to bring down a dramatic decalogue from the
+Sinai of some lecture-room in the University of Weissnichtwo. The quack,
+on the other hand, is he who generalizes from the worst practices of the
+most vulgar theatrical journeymen, and has no higher ambition than to
+interpret the oracles of the box-office. If he succeeded in so doing,
+his function would not be wholly despicable; but as he is generally
+devoid of insight, and as, moreover, the oracles of the box-office vary
+from season to season, if not from month to month, his lucubrations are
+about as valuable as those of Zadkiel or Old Moore.[1]
+
+What, then, is the excuse for such a discussion as is here attempted?
+Having admitted that there are no rules for dramatic composition, and
+that the quest of such rules is apt to result either in pedantry or
+quackery, why should I myself set forth upon so fruitless and foolhardy
+an enterprise? It is precisely because I am alive to its dangers that I
+have some hope of avoiding them. Rules there are none; but it does not
+follow that some of the thousands who are fascinated by the art of the
+playwright may not profit by having their attention called, in a plain
+and practical way, to some of its problems and possibilities. I have
+myself felt the need of some such handbook, when would-be dramatists
+have come to me for advice and guidance. It is easy to name excellent
+treatises on the drama; but the aim of such books is to guide the
+judgment of the critic rather than the creative impulse of the
+playwright. There are also valuable collections of dramatic criticisms;
+but any practical hints that they may contain are scattered and
+unsystematic. On the other hand, the advice one is apt to give to
+beginners--"Go to the theatre; study its conditions and mechanism for
+yourself"--is, in fact, of very doubtful value. It might, in many cases,
+be wiser to warn the aspirant to keep himself unspotted from the
+playhouse. To send him there is to imperil, on the one hand, his
+originality of vision, on the other, his individuality of method. He may
+fall under the influence of some great master, and see life only through
+his eyes; or he may become so habituated to the current tricks of the
+theatrical trade as to lose all sense of their conventionality and
+falsity, and find himself, in the end, better fitted to write what I
+have called a quack handbook than a living play. It would be ridiculous,
+of course, to urge an aspirant positively to avoid the theatre; but the
+common advice to steep himself in it is beset with dangers.
+
+It may be asked why, if I have any guidance and help to give, I do not
+take it myself, and write plays instead of instructing others in the
+art. This is a variant of an ancient and fallacious jibe against
+criticism in general. It is quite true that almost all critics who are
+worth their salt are "stickit" artists. Assuredly, if I had the power, I
+should write plays instead of writing about them; but one may have a
+great love for an art, and some insight into its principles and methods,
+without the innate faculty required for actual production. On the other
+hand, there is nothing to show that, if I were a creative artist, I
+should be a good mentor for beginners. An accomplished painter may be
+the best teacher of painters; but an accomplished dramatist is scarcely
+the best guide for dramatists. He cannot analyse his own practice, and
+discriminate between that in it which is of universal validity, and that
+which may be good for him, but would be bad for any one else. If he
+happened to be a great man, he would inevitably, even if unconsciously,
+seek to impose upon his disciples his individual attitude towards life;
+if he were a lesser man, he would teach them only his tricks. But
+dramatists do not, as a matter of fact, take pupils or write
+handbooks.[2] When they expound their principles of art, it is generally
+in answer to, or in anticipation of, criticism--with a view, in short,
+not to helping others, but to defending themselves. If beginners, then,
+are to find any systematic guidance, they must turn to the critics, not
+to the dramatists; and no person of common sense holds it a reproach to
+a critic to tell him that he is a "stickit" playwright.
+
+If questions are worth discussing at all, they are worth discussing
+gravely. When, in the following pages, I am found treating with all
+solemnity matters of apparently trivial detail, I beg the reader to
+believe that very possibly I do not in my heart overrate their
+importance. One thing is certain, and must be emphasized from the
+outset: namely, that if any part of the dramatist's art can be taught,
+it is only a comparatively mechanical and formal part--the art of
+structure. One may learn how to tell a story in good dramatic form: how
+to develop and marshal it in such a way as best to seize and retain the
+interest of a theatrical audience. But no teaching or study can enable a
+man to choose or invent a good story, and much less to do that which
+alone lends dignity to dramatic story-telling--to observe and portray
+human character. This is the aim and end of all serious drama; and it
+will be apt to appear as though, in the following pages, this aim and
+end were ignored. In reality it is not so. If I hold comparatively
+mechanical questions of pure craftsmanship to be worth discussing, it is
+because I believe that only by aid of competent craftsmanship can the
+greatest genius enable his creations to live and breathe upon the stage.
+The profoundest insight into human nature and destiny cannot find valid
+expression through the medium of the theatre without some understanding
+of the peculiar art of dramatic construction. Some people are born with
+such an instinct for this art, that a very little practice renders them
+masters of it. Some people are born with a hollow in their cranium where
+the bump of drama ought to be. But between these extremes, as I said
+before, there are many people with moderately developed and cultivable
+faculty; and it is these who, I trust, may find some profit in the
+following discussions.[3] Let them not forget, however, that the topics
+treated of are merely the indispensable rudiments of the art, and are
+not for a moment to be mistaken for its ultimate and incommunicable
+secrets. Beethoven could not have composed the Ninth Symphony without a
+mastery of harmony and counterpoint; but there are thousands of masters
+of harmony and counterpoint who could not compose the Ninth Symphony.
+
+The art of theatrical story-telling is necessarily relative to the
+audience to whom the story is to be told. One must assume an audience of
+a certain status and characteristics before one can rationally discuss
+the best methods of appealing to its intelligence and its sympathies.
+The audience I have throughout assumed is drawn from what may be called
+the ordinary educated public of London and New York. It is not an ideal
+or a specially selected audience; but it is somewhat above the average
+of the theatre-going public, that average being sadly pulled down by the
+myriad frequenters of musical farce and absolutely worthless melodrama.
+It is such an audience as assembles every night at, say, the half-dozen
+best theatres of each city. A peculiarly intellectual audience it
+certainly is not. I gladly admit that theatrical art owes much, in both
+countries, to voluntary organizations of intelligent or would-be
+intelligent[4] playgoers, who have combined to provide themselves with
+forms of drama which specially interest them, and do not attract the
+great public. But I am entirely convinced that the drama renounces its
+chief privilege and glory when it waives its claim to be a popular art,
+and is content to address itself to coteries, however "high-browed."
+Shakespeare did not write for a coterie: yet he produced some works of
+considerable subtlety and profundity. Moliere was popular with the
+ordinary parterre of his day: yet his plays have endured for over two
+centuries, and the end of their vitality does not seem to be in sight.
+Ibsen did not write for a coterie, though special and regrettable
+circumstances have made him, in England, something of a coterie-poet. In
+Scandinavia, in Germany, even in America, he casts his spell over great
+audiences, if not through long runs (which are a vice of the merely
+commercial theatre), at any rate through frequently-repeated
+representations. So far as I know, history records no instance of a
+playwright failing to gain the ear of his contemporaries, and then being
+recognized and appreciated by posterity. Alfred de Musset might,
+perhaps, be cited as a case in point; but he did not write with a view
+to the stage, and made no bid for contemporary popularity. As soon as it
+occurred to people to produce his plays, they were found to be
+delightful. Let no playwright, then, make it his boast that he cannot
+disburden his soul within the three hours' limit, and cannot produce
+plays intelligible or endurable to any audience but a band of adepts. A
+popular audience, however, does not necessarily mean the mere riff-raff
+of the theatrical public. There is a large class of playgoers, both in
+England and America, which is capable of appreciating work of a high
+intellectual order, if only it does not ignore the fundamental
+conditions of theatrical presentation. It is an audience of this class
+that I have in mind throughout the following pages; and I believe that a
+playwright who despises such an audience will do so to the detriment,
+not only of his popularity and profits, but of the artistic quality
+of his work.
+
+Some people may exclaim: "Why should the dramatist concern himself about
+his audience? That may be all very well for the mere journeymen of the
+theatre, the hacks who write to an actor-manager's order--not for the
+true artist! He has a soul above all such petty considerations. Art, to
+him, is simply self-expression. He writes to please himself, and has no
+thought of currying favour with an audience, whether intellectual or
+idiotic." To this I reply simply that to an artist of this way of
+thinking I have nothing to say. He has a perfect right to express
+himself in a whole literature of so-called plays, which may possibly be
+studied, and even acted, by societies organized to that laudable end.
+But the dramatist who declares his end to be mere self-expression
+stultifies himself in that very phrase. The painter may paint, the
+sculptor model, the lyric poet sing, simply to please himself,[5] but
+the drama has no meaning except in relation to an audience. It is a
+portrayal of life by means of a mechanism so devised as to bring it home
+to a considerable number of people assembled in a given place. "The
+public," it has been well said, "constitutes the theatre." The moment a
+playwright confines his work within the two or three hours' limit
+prescribed by Western custom for a theatrical performance, he is
+currying favour with an audience. That limit is imposed simply by the
+physical endurance and power of sustained attention that can be demanded
+of Western human beings assembled in a theatre. Doubtless an author
+could express himself more fully and more subtly if he ignored these
+limitations; the moment he submits to them, he renounces the pretence
+that mere self-expression is his aim. I know that there are
+haughty-souls who make no such submission, and express themselves in
+dramas which, so far as their proportions are concerned, might as well
+be epic poems or historical romances.[6] To them, I repeat, I have
+nothing to say. The one and only subject of the following discussions is
+the best method of fitting a dramatic theme for representation before an
+audience assembled in a theatre. But this, be it noted, does not
+necessarily mean "writing down" to the audience in question. It is by
+obeying, not by ignoring, the fundamental conditions of his craft that
+the dramatist may hope to lead his audience upward to the highest
+intellectual level which he himself can attain.
+
+These pages, in short, are addressed to students of play-writing who
+sincerely desire to do sound, artistic work under the conditions and
+limitations of the actual, living playhouse. This does not mean, of
+course, that they ought always to be studying "what the public wants."
+The dramatist should give the public what he himself wants--but in such
+form as to make it comprehensible and interesting in a theatre.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+[Footnote 1: It is against "technic" in this sense of the term that the
+hero of Mr. Howells's admirable novel, _The Story of a Play_, protests
+in vigorous and memorable terms. "They talk," says Maxwell, "about a
+knowledge of the stage as if it were a difficult science, instead of a
+very simple piece of mechanism whose limitations and possibilities
+anyone may see at a glance. All that their knowledge of it comes to is
+claptrap, pure and simple.... They think that their exits and entrances
+are great matters and that they must come on with such a speech, and go
+off with another; but it is not of the least importance how they come or
+go, if they have something interesting to say or do." Maxwell, it must
+be remembered, is speaking of technic as expounded by the star actor,
+who is shilly-shallying--as star actors will--over the production of his
+play. He would not, in his calmer moments, deny that it is of little use
+to have something interesting to say, unless you know how to say it
+interestingly. Such a denial would simply be the negation of the very
+idea of art.]
+
+[Footnote 2: A dramatist of my acquaintance adds this footnote: "But, by
+the Lord! They have to give advice. I believe I write more plays of
+other people's than I do of my own."]
+
+[Footnote 3: It may be hoped, too, that even the accomplished dramatist
+may take some interest in considering the reasons for things which he
+does, or does not do, by instinct.]
+
+[Footnote 4: This is not a phrase of contempt. The would-be intelligent
+playgoer is vastly to be preferred to the playgoer who makes a boast of
+his unintelligence.]
+
+[Footnote 5: In all the arts, however, the very idea of craftsmanship
+implies some sort of external percipient, or, in other words, some sort
+of an audience. In point of sheer self-expression, a child's scrabblings
+with a box of crayons may deserve to rank with the most masterly canvas
+of Velasquez or Vermeer. The real difference between the dramatist and
+other artists, is that they can be _their own audience_, in a sense in
+which he cannot.]
+
+[Footnote 6: Let me guard against the possibility that this might be
+interpreted as a sneer at _The Dynasts_--a great work by a great poet.]
+
+
+
+
+_CHAPTER II_
+
+THE CHOICE OF A THEME
+
+
+The first step towards writing a play is manifestly to choose a theme.
+
+Even this simple statement, however, requires careful examination before
+we can grasp its full import. What, in the first place, do we mean by a
+"theme"? And, secondly, in what sense can we, or ought we to,
+"choose" one?
+
+"Theme" may mean either of two things: either the subject of a play, or
+its story. The former is, perhaps, its proper or more convenient sense.
+The theme of _Romeo and Juliet_ is youthful love crossed by ancestral
+hate; the theme of _Othello_ is jealousy; the theme of _Le Tartufe_ is
+hypocrisy; the theme of _Caste_ is fond hearts and coronets; the theme
+of _Getting Married_ is getting married; the theme of _Maternite_ is
+maternity. To every play it is possible, at a pinch, to assign a theme;
+but in many plays it is evident that no theme expressible in abstract
+terms was present to the author's mind. Nor are these always plays of a
+low class. It is only by a somewhat artificial process of abstraction
+that we can formulate a theme for _As You Like It_, for _The Way of the
+World_, or for _Hedda Gabler_.
+
+The question now arises: ought a theme, in its abstract form, to be the
+first germ of a play? Ought the dramatist to say, "Go to, I will write a
+play on temperance, or on woman's suffrage, or on capital and labour,"
+and then cast about for a story to illustrate his theme? This is a
+possible, but not a promising, method of procedure. A story made to the
+order of a moral concept is always apt to advertise its origin, to the
+detriment of its illusive quality. If a play is to be a moral apologue
+at all, it is well to say so frankly--probably in the title--and aim,
+not at verisimilitude, but at neatness and appositeness in the working
+out of the fable. The French _proverbe_ proceeds on this principle, and
+is often very witty and charming.[1] A good example in English is _A
+Pair of Spectacles_, by Mr. Sydney Grundy, founded on a play by Labiche.
+In this bright little comedy every incident and situation bears upon the
+general theme, and pleases us, not by its probability, but by its
+ingenious appropriateness. The dramatic fable, in fact, holds very much
+the same rank in drama as the narrative fable holds in literature at
+large. We take pleasure in them on condition that they be witty, and
+that they do not pretend to be what they are not.
+
+A play manifestly suggested by a theme of temporary interest will often
+have a great but no less temporary success. For instance, though there
+was a good deal of clever character-drawing in _An Englishman's Home_,
+by Major du Maurier, the theme was so evidently the source and
+inspiration of the play that it will scarcely bear revival. In America,
+where the theme was of no interest, the play failed.
+
+It is possible, no doubt, to name excellent plays in which the theme, in
+all probability, preceded both the story and the characters in the
+author's mind. Such plays are most of M. Brieux's; such plays are Mr.
+Galsworthy's _Strife_ and _Justice_. The French plays, in my judgment,
+suffer artistically from the obtrusive predominance of the theme--that
+is to say, the abstract element--over the human and concrete factors in
+the composition. Mr. Galsworthy's more delicate and unemphatic art
+eludes this danger, at any rate in _Strife_. We do not remember until
+all is over that his characters represent classes, and his action is,
+one might almost say, a sociological symbol. If, then, the theme does,
+as a matter of fact, come first in the author's conception, he will do
+well either to make it patently and confessedly dominant, as in the
+_proverbe_, or to take care that, as in _Strife_, it be not suffered to
+make its domination felt, except as an afterthought.[2] No outside force
+should appear to control the free rhythm of the action.
+
+The theme may sometimes be, not an idea, an abstraction or a principle,
+but rather an environment, a social phenomenon of one sort or another.
+The author's primary object in such a case is, not to portray any
+individual character or tell any definite story, but to transfer to the
+stage an animated picture of some broad aspect or phase of life, without
+concentrating the interest on any one figure or group. There are
+theorists who would, by definition, exclude from the domain of drama any
+such cinematograph-play, as they would probably call it; but we shall
+see cause, as we go on, to distrust definitions, especially when they
+seek to clothe themselves with the authority of laws. Tableau-plays of
+the type here in question may even claim classical precedent. What else
+is Ben Jonson's _Bartholomew Fair_? What else is Schiller's
+_Wallensteins Lager_? Amongst more recent plays, Hauptmann's _Die Weber_
+and Gorky's _Nachtasyl_ are perhaps the best examples of the type. The
+drawback of such themes is, not that they do not conform to this or that
+canon of art, but that it needs an exceptional amount of knowledge and
+dramaturgic skill to handle them successfully. It is far easier to tell
+a story on the stage than to paint a picture, and few playwrights can
+resist the temptation to foist a story upon their picture, thus marring
+it by an inharmonious intrusion of melodrama or farce. This has often
+been done upon deliberate theory, in the belief that no play can exist,
+or can attract playgoers, without a definite and more or less exciting
+plot. Thus the late James A. Herne inserted into a charming idyllic
+picture of rural life, entitled _Shore Acres_, a melodramatic scene in a
+lighthouse, which was hopelessly out of key with the rest of the play.
+The dramatist who knows any particular phase of life so thoroughly as to
+be able to transfer its characteristic incidents to the stage, may be
+advised to defy both critical and managerial prejudice, and give his
+tableau-play just so much of story as may naturally and inevitably fall
+within its limits.
+
+One of the most admirable and enthralling scenes I ever saw on any stage
+was that of the Trafalgar Square suffrage meeting in Miss Elizabeth
+Robins's _Votes for Women_. Throughout a whole act it held us
+spellbound, while the story of the play stood still, and we forgot its
+existence. It was only within a few minutes of the end, when the story
+was dragged in neck and crop, that the reality of the thing vanished,
+and the interest with it.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+If an abstract theme be not an advisable starting-point, what is? A
+character? A situation? Or a story? On this point it would be absurd to
+lay down any rule; the more so as, in many cases, a playwright is quite
+unable to say in what form the germ of a play first floated into his
+mind. The suggestion may come from a newspaper paragraph, from an
+incident seen in the street, from an emotional adventure or a comic
+misadventure, from a chance word dropped by an acquaintance, or from
+some flotsam or jetsam of phrase or fable that has drifted from the
+other end of history. Often, too, the original germ, whatever it may be,
+is transformed beyond recognition before a play is done.[3] In the mind
+of the playwright figs grow from thistles, and a silk purse--perhaps a
+Fortunatus' purse--may often be made from a sow's ear. The whole
+delicate texture of Ibsen's _Doll's House_ was woven from a commonplace
+story of a woman who forged a cheque in order to redecorate her
+drawing-room. Stevenson's romance of _Prince Otto_ (to take an example
+from fiction) grew out of a tragedy on the subject of Semiramis!
+
+One thing, however, we may say with tolerable confidence: whatever may
+be the germ of a play--whether it be an anecdote, a situation, or what
+not--the play will be of small account as a work of art unless
+character, at a very early point, enters into and conditions its
+development. The story which is independent of character--which can be
+carried through by a given number of ready-made puppets--is essentially
+a trivial thing. Unless, at an early stage of the organizing process,
+character begins to take the upper hand--unless the playwright finds
+himself thinking, "Oh, yes, George is just the man to do this," or,
+"That is quite foreign to Jane's temperament"--he may be pretty sure
+that it is a piece of mechanism he is putting together, not a drama with
+flesh and blood in it. The difference between a live play and a dead one
+is that in the former the characters control the plot, while in the
+latter the plot controls the characters. Which is not to say, of course,
+that there may not be clever and entertaining plays which are "dead" in
+this sense, and dull and unattractive plays which are "live."
+
+A great deal of ink has been wasted in controversy over a remark of
+Aristotle's that the action or _muthos_, not the character or _ethos_,
+is the essential element in drama. The statement is absolutely true and
+wholly unimportant. A play can exist without anything that can be called
+character, but not without some sort of action. This is implied in the
+very word "drama," which means a doing, not a mere saying or existing.
+It would be possible, no doubt, to place Don Quixote, or Falstaff, or
+Peer Gynt, on the stage, and let him develop his character in mere
+conversation, or even monologue, without ever moving from his chair. But
+it is a truism that deeds, not words, are the demonstration and test of
+character; wherefore, from time immemorial, it has been the recognized
+business of the theatre to exhibit character in action. Historically,
+too, we find that drama has everywhere originated in the portrayal of an
+action--some exploit or some calamity in the career of some demigod or
+hero. Thus story or plot is by definition, tradition, and practical
+reason, the fundamental element in drama; but does it therefore follow
+that it is the noblest element, or that by which its value should be
+measured? Assuredly not. The skeleton is, in a sense, the fundamental
+element in the human organism. It can exist, and, with a little
+assistance, retain its form, when stripped of muscle and blood and
+nerve; whereas a boneless man would be an amorphous heap, more helpless
+than a jelly-fish. But do we therefore account the skeleton man's
+noblest part? Scarcely. It is by his blood and nerve that he lives, not
+by his bones; and it is because his bones are, comparatively speaking,
+dead matter that they continue to exist when the flesh has fallen away
+from them. It is, therefore, if not a misreading of Aristotle,[4] at any
+rate a perversion of reason, to maintain that the drama lives by action,
+rather than by character. Action ought to exist for the sake of
+character: when the relation is reversed, the play may be an ingenious
+toy, but scarcely a vital work of art.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+It is time now to consider just what we mean when we say that the first
+step towards play-writing is the "choice" of a theme.
+
+In many cases, no doubt, it is the plain and literal fact that the
+impulse to write some play--any play--exists, so to speak, in the
+abstract, unassociated with any particular subject, and that the
+would-be playwright proceeds, as he thinks, to set his imagination to
+work, and invent a story. But this frame of mind is to be regarded with
+suspicion. Few plays of much value, one may guess, have resulted from
+such an abstract impulse. Invention, in these cases, is apt to be
+nothing but recollection in disguise, the shaking of a kaleidoscope
+formed of fragmentary reminiscences. I remember once, in some momentary
+access of ambition, trying to invent a play. I occupied several hours of
+a long country walk in, as I believed, creating out of nothing at all a
+dramatic story. When at last I had modelled it into some sort of
+coherency, I stepped back from it in my mind, as it were, and
+contemplated it as a whole. No sooner had I done so than it began to
+seem vaguely familiar. "Where have I seen this story before?" I asked
+myself; and it was only after cudgelling my brains for several minutes
+that I found I had re-invented Ibsen's _Hedda Gabler_. Thus, when we
+think we are choosing a plot out of the void, we are very apt to be, in
+fact, ransacking the store-house of memory. The plot which chooses us
+is much more to be depended upon--the idea which comes when we least
+expect it, perhaps from the most unlikely quarter, clamours at the gates
+of birth, and will not let us rest till it be clothed in dramatic flesh
+and blood.[5] It may very well happen, of course, that it has to
+wait--that it has to be pigeon-holed for a time, until its due turn
+comes.[6] Occasionally, perhaps, it may slip out of its pigeon-hole for
+an airing, only to be put back again in a slightly more developed form.
+Then at last its convenient season will arrive, and the play will be
+worked out, written, and launched into the struggle for life. In the
+sense of selecting from among a number of embryonic themes stored in his
+mind, the playwright has often to make a deliberate choice; but when,
+moved by a purely abstract impulse, he goes out of set purpose to look
+for a theme, it may be doubted whether he is likely to return with any
+very valuable treasure-trove.[7]
+
+The same principle holds good in the case of the ready-made poetic or
+historical themes, which are--rightly or wrongly--considered suitable
+for treatment in blank verse. Whether, and how far, the blank verse
+drama can nowadays be regarded as a vital and viable form is a question
+to be considered later. In the meantime it is sufficient to say that
+whatever principles of conception and construction apply to the modern
+prose drama, apply with equal cogency to the poetic drama. The
+verse-poet may perhaps take one or two licenses denied to the
+prose-poet. For instance, we may find reason to think the soliloquy more
+excusable in verse than in prose. But fundamentally, the two forms are
+ruled by the same set of conditions, which the verse-poet, no less than
+the prose-poet, can ignore only at his peril. Unless, indeed, he
+renounces from the outset all thought of the stage and chooses to
+produce that cumbrous nondescript, a "closet drama." Of such we do not
+speak, but glance and pass on. What laws, indeed, can apply to a form
+which has no proper element, but, like the amphibious animal described
+by the sailor, "cannot live on land and dies in the water"?
+
+To return to our immediate topic, the poet who essays dramatic
+composition on mere abstract impulse, because other poets have done so,
+or because he is told that it pays, is only too likely to produce
+willy-nilly a "closet drama." Let him beware of saying to himself, "I
+will gird up my loins and write a play. Shall it be a Phaedra, or a
+Semiramis, or a Sappho, or a Cleopatra? A Julian, or an Attila, or a
+Savanarola, or a Cromwell?" A drama conceived in this reach-me-down
+fashion will scarcely have the breath of life in it. If, on the other
+hand, in the course of his legendary, romantic, or historical reading,
+some character should take hold upon his imagination and demand to be
+interpreted, or some episode should, as it were, startle him by putting
+on vivid dramatic form before his mind's eye, then let him by all means
+yield to the inspiration, and try to mould the theme into a drama. The
+real labour of creation will still lie before him; but he may face it
+with the hope of producing a live play, not a long-drawn rhetorical
+anachronism, whether of the rotund or of the spasmodic type.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+[Footnote 1: For instance, _Il ne faut jurer de rien. Il faut qu'une
+porte soit ouverte ou fermee. Un bienfait n'est jamais perdu._ There is
+also a large class of pieces of which the title, though not itself a
+proverb, makes direct allusion to some fable or proverbial saying: for
+example, _Les Brebis de Panurge, La Chasse aux Corbeaux, La Cigale chez
+les Fourmis_.]
+
+[Footnote 2: I learn, on the best authority, that I am wrong, in point
+of fact, as to the origin of _Strife_. The play arose in Mr.
+Galsworthy's mind from his actually having seen in conflict the two men
+who were the prototypes of Anthony and Roberts, and thus noted the waste
+and inefficacy arising from the clash of strong characters unaccompanied
+by balance. It was accident that led him to place the two men in an
+environment of capital and labour. In reality, both of them were, if not
+capitalists, at any rate on the side of capital. This interesting
+correction of fact does not invalidate the theory above stated.]
+
+[Footnote 3: Mr. Henry Arthur Jones writes to me: "Sometimes I start
+with a scene only, sometimes with a complete idea. Sometimes a play
+splits into two plays, sometimes two or three ideas combine into a
+concrete whole. Always the final play is altered out of all knowledge
+from its first idea." An interesting account of the way in which two
+very different plays by M. de Curel: _L'Envers d'une Sainte_ and
+_L'Invitee_,--grew out of one and the same initial idea, may be found in
+_L'Annee Psychologique_, 1894, p. 121.]
+
+[Footnote 4: In my discussion of this point, I have rather simplified
+Aristotle's position. He appears to make action the essential element in
+tragedy and not merely the necessary vehicle of character. "In a play,"
+he says, "they do not act in order to portray the characters, they
+include the characters for the sake of the action. So that it is the
+action in it, _i.e._ its Fable or Plot, that is the end and purpose of
+the tragedy, and the end is everywhere the chief thing. Besides this, a
+tragedy is impossible without action, but there may be one without
+character." (Bywater's Translation.) The last sentence is, in my view,
+the gist of the matter; the preceding sentences greatly overstate the
+case. There was a lively controversy on the subject in the _Times_
+Literary Supplement in May, 1902. It arose from a review of Mr.
+Phillips's _Paolo and Francesco_, and Mr. Andrew Lang, Mr. Churton
+Collins, and Mr. A.B. Walkley took part in it.]
+
+[Footnote 5: "Are the first beginnings of imaginative conception
+directed by the will? Are they, indeed, conscious at all? Do they not
+rather emerge unbidden from the vague limbo of sub-consciousness?" A.B.
+Walkley, _Drama and Life_, p. 85.]
+
+[Footnote 6: Sardou kept a file of about fifty _dossiers_, each bearing
+the name of an unwritten play, and containing notes and sketches for it.
+Dumas, on the other hand, always finished one play before he began to
+think of another. See _L'Annee Psychologique_, 1894, pp. 67, 76.]
+
+[Footnote 7: "My experience is," a dramatist writes to me, "that you
+never deliberately choose a theme. You lie awake, or you go walking, and
+suddenly there flashes into your mind a contrast, a piece of spiritual
+irony, an old incident carrying some general significance. Round this
+your mind broods, and there is the germ of your play." Again be writes:
+"It is not advisable for a playwright to start out at all unless he has
+so felt or seen something, that he feels, as it matures in his mind,
+that he must express it, and in dramatic form."]
+
+
+
+
+_CHAPTER III_
+
+DRAMATIC AND UNDRAMATIC
+
+
+It may be well, at this point, to consider for a little what we mean
+when we use the term "dramatic." We shall probably not arrive at any
+definition which can be applied as an infallible touchstone to
+distinguish the dramatic from the undramatic. Perhaps, indeed, the
+upshot may rather be to place the student on his guard against troubling
+too much about the formal definitions of critical theorists.
+
+The orthodox opinion of the present time is that which is generally
+associated with the name of the late Ferdinand Brunetiere. "The theatre
+in general," said that critic, "is nothing but the place for the
+development of the human will, attacking the obstacles opposed to it by
+destiny, fortune, or circumstances." And again: "Drama is a
+representation of the will of man in conflict with the mysterious powers
+or natural forces which limit and belittle us; it is one of us thrown
+living upon the stage, there to struggle against fatality, against
+social law, against one of his fellow-mortals, against himself, if need
+be, against the ambitions, the interests, the prejudices, the folly, the
+malevolence of those who surround him."[1]
+
+The difficulty about this definition is that, while it describes the
+matter of a good many dramas, it does not lay down any true
+differentia--any characteristic common to all drama, and possessed by no
+other form of fiction. Many of the greatest plays in the world can with
+difficulty be brought under the formula, while the majority of romances
+and other stories come under it with ease. Where, for instance, is the
+struggle in the _Agamemnon_? There is no more struggle between
+Clytemnestra and Agamemnon than there is between the spider and the fly
+who walks into his net. There is not even a struggle in Clytemnestra's
+mind. Agamemnon's doom is sealed from the outset, and she merely carries
+out a pre-arranged plot. There is contest indeed in the succeeding plays
+of the trilogy; but it will scarcely be argued that the _Agamemnon_,
+taken alone, is not a great drama. Even the _Oedipus_ of Sophocles,
+though it may at first sight seem a typical instance of a struggle
+against Destiny, does not really come under the definition. Oedipus, in
+fact, does not struggle at all. His struggles, in so far as that word
+can be applied to his misguided efforts to escape from the toils of
+fate, are all things of the past; in the actual course of the tragedy he
+simply writhes under one revelation after another of bygone error and
+unwitting crime. It would be a mere play upon words to recognize as a
+dramatic "struggle" the writhing of a worm on a hook. And does not this
+description apply very closely to the part played by another great
+protagonist--Othello to wit? There is no struggle, no conflict, between
+him and Iago. It is Iago alone who exerts any will; neither Othello nor
+Desdemona makes the smallest fight. From the moment when Iago sets his
+machination to work, they are like people sliding down an ice-slope to
+an inevitable abyss. Where is the conflict in _As You Like It_? No one,
+surely, will pretend that any part of the interest or charm of the play
+arises from the struggle between the banished Duke and the Usurper, or
+between Orlando and Oliver. There is not even the conflict, if so it can
+be called, which nominally brings so many hundreds of plays under the
+Brunetiere canon--the conflict between an eager lover and a more or less
+reluctant maid. Or take, again, Ibsen's _Ghosts_--in what valid sense
+can it be said that that tragedy shows us will struggling against
+obstacles? Oswald, doubtless, wishes to live, and his mother desires
+that he should live; but this mere will for life cannot be the
+differentia that makes of _Ghosts_ a drama. If the reluctant descent of
+the "downward path to death" constituted drama, then Tolstoy's _Death of
+Ivan Ilytch_ would be one of the greatest dramas ever written--which it
+certainly is not. Yet again, if we want to see will struggling against
+obstacles, the classic to turn to is not _Hamlet_, not _Lear_, but
+_Robinson Crusoe_; yet no one, except a pantomime librettist, ever saw a
+drama in Defoe's narrative. In a Platonic dialogue, in _Paradise Lost_,
+in _John Gilpin_, there is a struggle of will against obstacles; there
+is none in _Hannele_, which, nevertheless, is a deeply-moving drama.
+Such a struggle is characteristic of all great fiction, from _Clarissa
+Harlowe_ to _The House with the Green Shutters_; whereas in many plays
+the struggle, if there be any at all, is the merest matter of form (for
+instance, a quite conventional love-story), while the real interest
+resides in something quite different.
+
+The plain truth seems to be that conflict is _one_ of the most dramatic
+elements in life, and that many dramas--perhaps most--do, as a matter
+of fact, turn upon strife of one sort or another. But it is clearly an
+error to make conflict indispensable to drama, and especially to
+insist--as do some of Brunetiere's followers--that the conflict must be
+between will and will. A stand-up fight between will and will--such a
+fight as occurs in, say, the _Hippolytus_ of Euripides, or Racine's
+_Andromaque_, or Moliere's _Tartufe_, or Ibsen's _Pretenders_, or
+Dumas's _Francillon_, or Sudermann's _Heimat_, or Sir Arthur Pinero's
+_Gay Lord Quex_, or Mr. Shaw's _Candida_, or Mr. Galsworthy's
+_Strife_--such a stand-up fight, I say, is no doubt one of the intensest
+forms of drama. But it is comparatively rare at any rate as the formula
+of a whole play. In individual scenes a conflict of will is frequent
+enough; but it is, after all, only one among a multitude of equally
+telling forms of drama. No one can say that the Balcony Scene in _Romeo
+and Juliet_ is undramatic, or the "Galeoto fu il libro" scene in Mr.
+Stephen Phillips's _Paolo and Francesca_; yet the point of these scenes
+is not a clash, but an ecstatic concordance, of wills. Is the
+death-scene of Cleopatra undramatic? Or the Banquet scene in _Macbeth_?
+Or the pastoral act in _The Winter's Tale_? Yet in none of these is
+there any conflict of wills. In the whole range of drama there is
+scarcely a passage which one would call more specifically dramatic than
+the Screen Scene in _The School for Scandal_; yet it would be the
+veriest quibbling to argue that any appreciable part of its effect
+arises from the clash of will against will. This whole comedy, indeed,
+suffices to show the emptiness of the theory. With a little strain it is
+possible to bring it within the letter of the formula; but who can
+pretend that any considerable part of the attraction or interest of the
+play is due to that possibility?
+
+The champions of the theory, moreover, place it on a metaphysical basis,
+finding in the will the essence of human personality, and therefore of
+the art which shows human personality raised to its highest power. It
+seems unnecessary, however, to apply to Schopenhauer for an explanation
+of whatever validity the theory may possess. For a sufficient account of
+the matter, we need go no further than the simple psychological
+observation that human nature loves a fight, whether it be with clubs or
+with swords, with tongues or with brains. One of the earliest forms of
+mediaeval drama was the "estrif" or "flyting"--the scolding-match
+between husband and wife, or between two rustic gossips. This motive is
+glorified in the quarrel between Brutus and Cassius, degraded in the
+patter of two "knockabout comedians." Certainly there is nothing more
+telling in drama than a piece of "cut-and-thrust" dialogue after the
+fashion of the ancient "stichomythia." When a whole theme involving
+conflict, or even a single scene of the nature described as a
+"passage-at-arms," comes naturally in the playwright's way, by all means
+let him seize the opportunity. But do not let him reject a theme or
+scene as undramatic merely because it has no room for a clash of
+warring wills.
+
+There is a variant of the "conflict" theory which underlines the word
+"obstacles" in the above-quoted dictum of Brunetiere, and lays down the
+rule: "No obstacle, no drama." Though far from being universally valid,
+this form of the theory has a certain practical usefulness, and may well
+be borne in mind. Many a play would have remained unwritten if the
+author had asked himself, "Is there a sufficient obstacle between my two
+lovers?" or, in more general terms, "between my characters and the
+realization of their will?" There is nothing more futile than a play in
+which we feel that there is no real obstacle to the inevitable happy
+ending, and that the curtain might just as well fall in the middle of
+the first act as at the end of the third. Comedies abound (though they
+reach the stage only by accident) in which the obstacle between Corydon
+and Phyllis, between Lord Edwin and Lady Angelina, is not even a defect
+or peculiarity of character, but simply some trumpery
+misunderstanding[2] which can be kept afoot only so long as every one
+concerned holds his or her common sense in studious abeyance. "Pyramus
+and Thisbe without the wall" may be taken as the formula for the whole
+type of play. But even in plays of a much higher type, the author might
+often ask himself with advantage whether he could not strengthen his
+obstacle, and so accentuate the struggle which forms the matter of his
+play. Though conflict may not be essential to drama, yet, when you set
+forth to portray a struggle, you may as well make it as real and intense
+as possible.
+
+It seems to me that in the late William Vaughn Moody's drama, _The Great
+Divide_, the body of the play, after the stirring first act, is weakened
+by our sense that the happy ending is only being postponed by a violent
+effort. We have been assured from the very first--even before Ruth
+Jordan has set eyes on Stephen Ghent--that just such a rough diamond is
+the ideal of her dreams. It is true that, after their marriage, the
+rough diamond seriously misconducts himself towards her; and we have
+then to consider the rather unattractive question whether a single act
+of brutality on the part of a drunken husband ought to be held so
+unpardonable as to break up a union which otherwise promises to be quite
+satisfactory. But the author has taken such pains to emphasize the fact
+that these two people are really made for each other, that the answer to
+the question is not for a moment in doubt, and we become rather
+impatient of the obstinate sulkiness of Ruth's attitude. If there had
+been a real disharmony of character to be overcome, instead of, or in
+addition to, the sordid misadventure which is in fact the sole barrier
+between them, the play would certainly have been stronger, and perhaps
+more permanently popular.
+
+In a play by Mr. James Bernard Fagan, _The Prayer of the Sword_, we have
+a much clearer example of an inadequate obstacle. A youth named Andrea
+has been brought up in a monastery, and destined for the priesthood; but
+his tastes and aptitudes are all for a military career. He is, however,
+on the verge of taking his priestly vows, when accident calls him forth
+into the world, and he has the good fortune to quell a threatened
+revolution in a romantic Duchy, ruled over by a duchess of surpassing
+loveliness. With her he naturally falls in love; and the tragedy lies,
+or ought to lie, in the conflict between this earthly passion and his
+heavenly calling and election. But the author has taken pains to make
+the obstacle between Andrea and Ilaria absolutely unreal. The fact that
+Andrea has as yet taken no irrevocable vow is not the essence of the
+matter. Vow or no vow, there would have been a tragic conflict if Andrea
+had felt absolutely certain of his calling to the priesthood, and had
+defied Heaven, and imperilled his immortal soul, because of his
+overwhelming passion. That would have been a tragic situation; but the
+author had carefully avoided it. From the very first--before Andrea had
+ever seen Ilaria--it had been impressed upon us that he had no priestly
+vocation. There was no struggle in his soul between passion and duty;
+there was no struggle at all in his soul. His struggles are all with
+external forces and influences; wherefore the play, which a real
+obstacle might have converted into a tragedy, remained a sentimental
+romance--and is forgotten.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+What, then, is the essence of drama, if conflict be not it? What is the
+common quality of themes, scenes, and incidents, which we recognize as
+specifically dramatic? Perhaps we shall scarcely come nearer to a
+helpful definition than if we say that the essence of drama is _crisis_.
+A play is a more or less rapidly-developing crisis in destiny or
+circumstance, and a dramatic scene is a crisis within a crisis, clearly
+furthering the ultimate event. The drama may be called the art of
+crises, as fiction is the art of gradual developments. It is the
+slowness of its processes which differentiates the typical novel from
+the typical play. If the novelist does not take advantage of the
+facilities offered by his form for portraying gradual change, whether in
+the way of growth or of decay, he renounces his own birthright, in order
+to trespass on the domain of the dramatist. Most great novels embrace
+considerable segments of many lives; whereas the drama gives us only the
+culminating points--or shall we say the intersecting culminations?--two
+or three destinies. Some novelists have excelled precisely in the art
+with which they have made the gradations of change in character or
+circumstance so delicate as to be imperceptible from page to page, and
+measurable, as in real life, only when we look back over a considerable
+period. The dramatist, on the other hand, deals in rapid and startling
+changes, the "peripeties," as the Greeks called them, which may be the
+outcome of long, slow processes, but which actually occur in very brief
+spaces of time. Nor is this a merely mechanical consequence of the
+narrow limits of stage presentation. The crisis is as real, though not
+as inevitable, a part of human experience as the gradual development.
+Even if the material conditions of the theatre permitted the
+presentation of a whole _Middlemarch_ or _Anna Karenine_--as the
+conditions of the Chinese theatre actually do--some dramatists, we
+cannot doubt, would voluntarily renounce that license of prolixity, in
+order to cultivate an art of concentration and crisis. The Greek drama
+"subjected to the faithful eyes," as Horace phrases it, the culminating
+points of the Greek epic; the modern drama places under the lens of
+theatrical presentment the culminating points of modern experience.
+
+But, manifestly, it is not every crisis that is dramatic. A serious
+illness, a law-suit, a bankruptcy, even an ordinary prosaic marriage,
+may be a crisis in a man's life, without being necessarily, or even
+probably, material for drama. How, then, do we distinguish a dramatic
+from a non-dramatic crisis? Generally, I think, by the fact that it
+develops, or can be made naturally to develop, through a series of minor
+crises, involving more or less emotional excitement, and, if possible,
+the vivid manifestation of character. Take, for instance, the case of a
+bankruptcy. Most people, probably, who figure in the _Gazette_ do not go
+through any one, or two, or three critical moments of special tension,
+special humiliation, special agony. They gradually drift to leeward in
+their affairs, undergoing a series of small discouragements, small
+vicissitudes of hope and fear, small unpleasantnesses, which they take
+lightly or hardly according to their temperament, or the momentary state
+of their liver. In this average process of financial decline, there may
+be--there has been--matter for many excellent novels, but scarcely for a
+drama. That admirable chapter in _Little Dorrit,_ wherein Dickens
+describes the gradual degradation of the Father of the Marshalsea, shows
+how a master of fiction deals with such a subject; but it would be quite
+impossible to transfer this chapter to the stage. So, too, with the
+bankruptcy of Colonel Newcome--certain emotional crises arising from it
+have, indeed, been placed on the stage, but only after all Thackeray's
+knowledge of the world and fine gradations of art had been eliminated.
+Mr. Hardy's _Mayor of Casterbridge_ has, I think, been dramatized, but
+not, I think, with success. A somewhat similar story of financial ruin,
+the grimly powerful _House with the Green Shutters_, has not even
+tempted the dramatiser. There are, in this novel, indeed, many
+potentially dramatic crises; the trouble is that they are too numerous
+and individually too small to be suitable for theatrical presentment.
+Moreover, they are crises affecting a taciturn and inarticulate race,[3]
+a fact which places further difficulties in the way of the playwright.
+In all these cases, in short, the bankruptcy portrayed is a matter of
+slow development, with no great outstanding moments, and is consequently
+suited for treatment in fiction rather than in drama.
+
+But bankruptcy sometimes occurs in the form of one or more sudden, sharp
+crises, and has, therefore, been utilized again and again as a dramatic
+motive. In a hundred domestic dramas or melodramas, we have seen the
+head of a happy household open a newspaper or a telegram announcing the
+failure of some enterprise in which all his fortune is embarked. So
+obviously dramatic is this incident that it has become sadly hackneyed.
+Again, we have bankruptcy following upon a course of gambling, generally
+in stocks. Here there is evident opportunity, which has been frequently
+utilized, for a series of crises of somewhat violent and commonplace
+emotion. In American drama especially, the duels of Wall Street, the
+combats of bull and bear, form a very popular theme, which clearly falls
+under the Brunetiere formula. Few American dramatists can resist the
+temptation of showing some masterful financier feverishly watching the
+"ticker" which proclaims him a millionaire or a beggar. The "ticker" had
+not been invented in the days when Ibsen wrote _The League of Youth_,
+otherwise he would doubtless have made use of it in the fourth act of
+that play. The most popular of all Bjoernson's plays is specifically
+entitled _A Bankruptcy_. Here the poet has had the art to select a
+typical phase of business life, which naturally presents itself in the
+form of an ascending curve, so to speak, of emotional crises. We see the
+energetic, active business man, with a number of irons in the fire,
+aware in his heart that he is insolvent, but not absolutely clear as to
+his position, and hoping against hope to retrieve it. We see him give a
+great dinner-party, in order to throw dust in the eyes of the world, and
+to secure the support of a financial magnate, who is the guest of
+honour. The financial magnate is inclined to "bite," and goes off,
+leaving the merchant under the impression that he is saved. This is an
+interesting and natural, but scarcely a thrilling, crisis. It does not,
+therefore, discount the supreme crisis of the play, in which a cold,
+clear-headed business man, who has been deputed by the banks to look
+into the merchant's affairs, proves to him, point by point, that it
+would be dishonest of him to flounder any longer in the swamp of
+insolvency, into which he can only sink deeper and drag more people down
+with him. Then the bankrupt produces a pistol and threatens murder and
+suicide if the arbiter of his fate will not consent to give him one more
+chance; but his frenzy breaks innocuous against the other's calm,
+relentless reason. Here we have, I repeat, a typically dramatic theme: a
+great crisis, bringing out vivid manifestations of character, not only
+in the bankrupt himself, but in those around him, and naturally
+unfolding itself through a series of those lesser crises, which we call
+interesting and moving scenes. The play is scarcely a great one, partly
+because its ending is perfunctory, partly because Bjoernson, poet though
+he was, had not Ibsen's art of "throwing in a little poetry" into his
+modern dramas. I have summarized it up to its culminating point, because
+it happened to illustrate the difference between a bankruptcy, dramatic
+in its nature and treatment, and those undramatic bankruptcies to which
+reference has been made. In _La Douloureuse_, by Maurice Donnay,
+bankruptcy is incidentally employed to bring about a crisis of a
+different order. A ball is proceeding at the house of a Parisian
+financier, when the whisper spreads that the host is ruined, and has
+committed suicide in a room above; whereupon the guests, after a moment
+of flustered consternation, go on supping and dancing![4] We are not at
+all deeply interested in the host or his fortunes. The author's purpose
+is to illustrate, rather crudely, the heartlessness of plutocratic
+Bohemia; and by means of the bankruptcy and suicide he brings about what
+may be called a crisis of collective character.[5]
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+As regards individual incidents, it may be said in general that the
+dramatic way of treating them is the crisp and staccato, as opposed to
+the smooth or legato, method. It may be thought a point of inferiority
+in dramatic art that it should deal so largely in shocks to the nerves,
+and should appeal by preference, wherever it is reasonably possible, to
+the cheap emotions of curiosity and surprise. But this is a criticism,
+not of dramatic art, but of human nature. We may wish that mankind took
+more pleasure in pure apprehension than in emotion; but so long as the
+fact is otherwise, that way of handling an incident by which the
+greatest variety of poignancy of emotion can be extracted from it will
+remain the specifically dramatic way.
+
+We shall have to consider later the relation between what may be called
+primary and secondary suspense or surprise--that is to say between
+suspense or surprise actually experienced by the spectator to whom the
+drama is new, and suspense or surprise experienced only sympathetically,
+on behalf of the characters, by a spectator who knows perfectly what is
+to follow. The two forms of emotion are so far similar that we need not
+distinguish between them in considering the general content of the term
+"dramatic." It is plain that the latter or secondary form of emotion
+must be by far the commoner, and the one to which the dramatist of any
+ambition must make his main appeal; for the longer his play endures, the
+larger will be the proportion of any given audience which knows it
+beforehand, in outline, if not in detail.
+
+As a typical example of a dramatic way of handling an incident, so as to
+make a supreme effect of what might else have been an anti-climax, one
+may cite the death of Othello. Shakespeare was faced by no easy problem.
+Desdemona was dead, Emilia dead, Iago wounded and doomed to the torture;
+how was Othello to die without merely satiating the audience with a glut
+of blood? How was his death to be made, not a foregone conclusion, a
+mere conventional suicide, but the culminating moment of the tragedy? In
+no single detail, perhaps, did Shakespeare ever show his dramatic genius
+more unmistakably than in his solution of this problem. We all remember
+how, as he is being led away, Othello stays his captors with a gesture,
+and thus addresses them:
+
+  "Soft you; a word or two, before you go.
+  I have done the state some service, and they know 't;
+  No more of that. I pray you, in your letters,
+  When you shall these unlucky deeds relate,
+  Speak of me as I am; nothing extenuate,
+  Nor set down aught in malice, then must you speak
+  Of one that loved not wisely but too well;
+  Of one not easily jealous, but, being wrought,
+  Perplex'd in the extreme; of one whose hand,
+  Like the base Indian, threw a pearl away
+  Richer than all his tribe; of one whose subdued eyes,
+  Albeit unused to the melting mood,
+  Drop tears as fast as the Arabian trees
+  Their medicinal gum. Set you down this;
+  And say besides, that in Aleppo once,
+  Where a malignant and a turban'd Turk
+  Beat a Venetian and traduced the state,
+  I took by the throat the circumcised dog,
+  And smote him--thus!"
+
+What is the essence of Shakespeare's achievement in this marvellous
+passage? What is it that he has done? He has thrown his audience, just
+as Othello has thrown his captors, off their guard, and substituted a
+sudden shock of surprise for a tedious fulfilment of expectation. In
+other words, he has handled the incident crisply instead of flaccidly,
+and so given it what we may call the specific accent of drama.
+
+Another consummate example of the dramatic handling of detail may be
+found in the first act of Ibsen's _Little Eyolf_. The lame boy, Eyolf,
+has followed the Rat-wife down to the wharf, has fallen into the water,
+and been drowned. This is the bare fact: how is it to be conveyed to the
+child's parents and to the audience?
+
+A Greek dramatist would probably have had recourse to a long and
+elaborately worked-up "messenger-speech," a pathetic recitation. That
+was the method best suited to the conditions, and to what may be called
+the prevailing tempo, of the Greek theatre. I am far from saying that it
+was a bad method: no method is bad which holds and moves an audience.
+But in this case it would have had the disadvantage of concentrating
+attention on the narrator instead of on the child's parents, on the mere
+event instead of on the emotions it engendered. In the modern theatre,
+with greater facilities for reproducing the actual movement of life, the
+dramatist naturally aims at conveying to the audience the growing
+anxiety, the suspense and the final horror, of the father and mother.
+The most commonplace playwright would have seen this opportunity and
+tried to make the most of it. Every one can think of a dozen commonplace
+ways in which the scene could be arranged and written; and some of them
+might be quite effective. The great invention by which Ibsen snatches
+the scene out of the domain of the commonplace, and raises it to the
+height of dramatic poetry, consists in leaving it doubtful to the father
+and mother what is the meaning of the excitement on the beach and the
+confused cries which reach their ears, until one cry comes home to them
+with terrible distinctness, "The crutch is floating!" It would be hard
+to name any single phrase in literature in which more dramatic effect is
+concentrated than in these four words--they are only two words in the
+original. However dissimilar in its nature and circumstances, this
+incident is comparable with the death of Othello, inasmuch as in each
+case the poet, by a supreme felicity of invention, has succeeded in
+doing a given thing in absolutely the most dramatic method conceivable.
+Here we recognize in a consummate degree what has been called the
+"fingering of the dramatist"; and I know not how better to express the
+common quality of the two incidents than in saying that each is touched
+with extraordinary crispness, so as to give to what in both cases has
+for some time been expected and foreseen a sudden thrill of novelty and
+unexpectedness. That is how to do a thing dramatically.[6]
+
+And now, after all this discussion of the "dramatic" in theme and
+incident, it remains to be said that the tendency of recent theory, and
+of some recent practice, has been to widen the meaning of the word,
+until it bursts the bonds of all definition. Plays have been written,
+and have found some acceptance, in which the endeavour of the dramatist
+has been to depict life, not in moments of crisis, but in its most level
+and humdrum phases, and to avoid any crispness of touch in the
+presentation of individual incidents. "Dramatic," in the eyes of writers
+of this school, has become a term of reproach, synonymous with
+"theatrical." They take their cue from Maeterlinck's famous essay on
+"The Tragic in Daily Life," in which he lays it down that: "An old man,
+seated in his armchair, waiting patiently, with his lamp beside
+him--submitting with bent head to the presence of his soul and his
+destiny--motionless as he is, does yet live in reality a deeper, more
+human, and more universal life than the lover who strangles his
+mistress, the captain who conquers in battle, or the husband who
+'avenges his honour.'" They do not observe that Maeterlinck, in his own
+practice, constantly deals with crises, and often with violent and
+startling ones.
+
+At the same time, I am far from suggesting that the reaction against the
+traditional "dramatic" is a wholly mistaken movement. It is a valuable
+corrective of conventional theatricalism; and it has, at some points,
+positively enlarged the domain of dramatic art. Any movement is good
+which helps to free art from the tyranny of a code of rules and
+definitions. The only really valid definition of the dramatic is: Any
+representation of imaginary personages which is capable of interesting
+an average audience assembled in a theatre. We must say "representation
+of imaginary personages" in order to exclude a lecture or a prize-fight;
+and we must say "an average audience" (or something to that effect) in
+order to exclude a dialogue of Plato or of Landor, the recitation of
+which might interest a specially selected public. Any further attempt to
+limit the content of the term "dramatic" is simply the expression of an
+opinion that such-and-such forms of representation will not be found to
+interest an audience; and this opinion may always be rebutted by
+experiment. In all that I have said, then, as to the dramatic and the
+non-dramatic, I must be taken as meaning: "Such-and-such forms and
+methods have been found to please, and will probably please again. They
+are, so to speak, safer and easier than other forms and methods. But it
+is the part of original genius to override the dictates of experience,
+and nothing in these pages is designed to discourage original genius
+from making the attempt." We have already seen, indeed, that in a
+certain type of play--the broad picture of a social phenomenon or
+environment--it is preferable that no attempt should be made to depict a
+marked crisis. There should be just enough story to afford a plausible
+excuse for raising and for lowering the curtain.[7]
+
+Let us not, however, seem to grant too much to the innovators and the
+quietists. To say that a drama should be, or tends to be, the
+presentation of a crisis in the life of certain characters, is by no
+means to insist on a mere arbitrary convention. It is to make at once an
+induction from the overwhelming majority of existing dramas, and a
+deduction from the nature and inherent conditions of theatrical
+presentation. The fact that theatrical conditions often encourage a
+violent exaggeration of the characteristically dramatic elements in life
+does not make these elements any the less real or any the less
+characteristically dramatic. It is true that crispness of handling may
+easily degenerate into the pursuit of mere picture-poster situation; but
+that is no reason why the artist should not seek to achieve crispness
+within the bounds prescribed by nature and common sense. There is a
+drama--I have myself seen it--in which the heroine, fleeing from the
+villain, is stopped by a yawning chasm. The pursuer is at her heels, and
+it seems as though she has no resource but to hurl herself into the
+abyss. But she is accompanied by three Indian servants, who happen, by
+the mercy of Providence, to be accomplished acrobats. The second climbs
+on the shoulders of the first, the third on the shoulders of the second;
+and then the whole trio falls forward across the chasm, the top one
+grasping some bush or creeper on the other side; so that a living bridge
+is formed, on which the heroine (herself, it would seem, something of an
+acrobat) can cross the dizzy gulf and bid defiance to the baffled
+villain. This is clearly a dramatic crisis within our definition; but,
+no less clearly, it is not a piece of rational or commendable drama. To
+say that such-and-such a factor is necessary, or highly desirable, in a
+dramatic scene, is by no means to imply that every scene which contains
+this factor is good drama. Let us take the case of another heroine--Nina
+in Sir Arthur Pinero's _His House in Order_. The second wife of Filmer
+Jesson, she is continually being offered up as a sacrifice on the altar
+dedicated to the memory of his adored first wife. Not only her husband,
+but the relatives of the sainted Annabel, make her life a burden to her.
+Then it comes to her knowledge--she obtains absolute proof--that
+Annabel was anything but the saint she was believed to be. By a single
+word she can overturn the altar of her martyrdom, and shatter the
+dearest illusion of her persecutors. Shall she speak that word, or shall
+she not? Here is a crisis which comes within our definition just as
+clearly as the other;[8] only it happens to be entirely natural and
+probable, and eminently illustrative of character. Ought we, then, to
+despise it because of the element it has in common with the
+picture-poster situation of preposterous melodrama? Surely not. Let
+those who have the art--the extremely delicate and difficult art--of
+making drama without the characteristically dramatic ingredients, do so
+by all means; but let them not seek to lay an embargo on the judicious
+use of these ingredients as they present themselves in life.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+[Footnote 1: _Etudes Critiques_, vol. vii, pp. 153 and 207.]
+
+[Footnote 2: In the most aggravated cases, the misunderstanding is
+maintained by a persevering use of pronouns in place of proper names:
+"he" and "she" being taken by the hearer to mean A. and B., when the
+speaker is in fact referring to X. and Y. This ancient trick becomes the
+more irritating the longer the _quiproquo_ is dragged out.]
+
+[Footnote 3: The Lowland Scottish villager. It is noteworthy that Mr.
+J.M. Barrie, who himself belongs to this race, has an almost unique gift
+of extracting dramatic effect out of taciturnity, and even out
+of silence.]
+
+[Footnote 4: There is a somewhat similar incident in Clyde Fitch's play,
+_The Moth and the Flame_.]
+
+[Footnote 5: _Les Corbeaux_, by Henri Becque, might perhaps be classed
+as a bankruptcy play, though the point of it is that the Vigneron family
+is not really bankrupt at all, but is unblushingly fleeced by the
+partner and the lawyer of the deceased Vigneron, who play into each
+other's hands.]
+
+[Footnote 6: "Dramatic" has recently become one of the most overworked
+words in the vocabulary of journalism. It constantly appears, not only
+in the text of the picturesque reporter, but in head-lines and on
+bulletin-boards. When, on July 20, 1911, Mr. Asquith wrote to Mr.
+Balfour to inform him that the King had guaranteed the creation of
+peers, should it prove necessary for the passing of the Parliament Bill,
+one paper published the news under this head-line: "DRAMATIC ANNOUNCEMENT
+BY THE PRIME MINISTER," and the parliamentary correspondent of another
+paper wrote: "With dramatic suddenness and swiftness, the Prime Minister
+hurled his thunderbolt at the wavering Tory party yesterday." As a
+matter of fact, the letter was probably not "hurled" more suddenly or
+swiftly than the most ordinary invitation to dinner: nor can its
+contents have been particularly surprising to any one. It was probably
+the conclusiveness, the finality, of the announcement that struck these
+writers as "dramatic." The letter put an end to all dubiety with a
+"short, sharp shock." It was, in fact, crisp. As a rule, however,
+"dramatic" is employed by the modern journalist simply as a rather
+pretentious synonym for the still more hackneyed "startling."]
+
+[Footnote 7: As a specimen, and a successful specimen, of this new
+technic, I may cite Miss Elizabeth Baker's very interesting play,
+_Chains_. There is absolutely no "story" in it, no complication of
+incidents, not even any emotional tension worth speaking of. Another
+recent play of something the same type, _The Way the Money Goes_, by
+Lady Bell, was quite thrilling by comparison. There we saw a workman's
+wife bowed down by a terrible secret which threatened to wreck her whole
+life--the secret that she had actually run into debt to the amount of
+L30. Her situation was dramatic in the ordinary sense of the word, very
+much as Nora's situation is dramatic when she knows that Krogstad's
+letter is in Helmer's hands. But in _Chains_ there is not even this
+simple form of excitement and suspense. A city clerk, oppressed by the
+deadly monotony and narrowness of his life, thinks of going to
+Australia--and doesn't go: that is the sum and substance of the action.
+Also, by way of underplot, a shopgirl, oppressed by the deadly monotony
+and narrowness of her life, thinks of escaping from it by marrying a
+middle-aged widower--and doesn't do it. If any one had told the late
+Francisque Sarcey, or the late Clement Scott, that a play could be made
+out of this slender material, which should hold an audience absorbed
+through four acts, and stir them to real enthusiasm, these eminent
+critics would have thought him a madman. Yet Miss Baker has achieved
+this feat, by the simple process of supplementing competent observation
+with a fair share of dramatic instinct.]
+
+[Footnote 8: If the essence of drama is crisis, it follows that nothing
+can be more dramatic than a momentous choice which may make or mar both
+the character and the fortune of the chooser and of others. There is an
+element of choice in all action which is, or seems to be, the product of
+free will; but there is a peculiar crispness of effect when two
+alternatives are clearly formulated, and the choice is made after a
+mental struggle, accentuated, perhaps, by impassioned advocacy of the
+conflicting interests. Such scenes are _Coriolanus_, v. 3, the scene
+between Ellida, Wangel, and the Stranger in the last act of _The Lady
+from the Sea_, and the concluding scene of _Candida_.]
+
+
+
+
+_CHAPTER IV_
+
+THE ROUTINE OF COMPOSITION
+
+
+As no two people, probably, ever did, or ever will, pursue the same
+routine in play-making, it is manifestly impossible to lay down any
+general rules on the subject. There are one or two considerations,
+however, which it may not be wholly superfluous to suggest to beginners.
+
+An invaluable insight into the methods of a master is provided by the
+scenarios and drafts of plays published in Henrik Ibsen's _Efterladte
+Skrifter_. The most important of these "fore-works," as he used to call
+them, have now been translated under the title of _From Ibsen's
+Workshop_ (Scribner), and may be studied with the greatest profit. Not
+that the student should mechanically imitate even Ibsen's routine of
+composition, which, indeed, varied considerably from play to play. The
+great lesson to be learnt from Ibsen's practice is that the play should
+be kept fluid or plastic as long as possible, and not suffered to become
+immutably fixed, either in the author's mind or on paper, before it has
+had time to grow and ripen. Many, if not most, of Ibsen's greatest
+individual inspirations came to him as afterthoughts, after the play had
+reached a point of development at which many authors would have held the
+process of gestation ended, and the work of art ripe for birth. Among
+these inspired afterthoughts may be reckoned Nora's great line,
+"Millions of women have done that"--the most crushing repartee in
+literature--Hedvig's threatened blindness, with all that ensues from it,
+and Little Eyolf's crutch, used to such purpose as we have already seen.
+
+This is not to say that the drawing-up of a tentative scenario ought not
+to be one of the playwright's first proceedings. Indeed, if he is able
+to dispense with a scenario on paper, it can only be because his mind is
+so clear, and so retentive of its own ideas, as to enable him to carry
+in his head, always ready for reference, a more or less detailed scheme.
+Go-as-you-please composition may be possible for the novelist, perhaps
+even for the writer of a one-act play, a mere piece of dialogue; but in
+a dramatic structure of any considerable extent, proportion, balance,
+and the interconnection of parts are so essential that a scenario is
+almost as indispensable to a dramatist as a set of plans to an
+architect. There is one dramatist of note whom one suspects of sometimes
+working without any definite scenario, and inventing as he goes along.
+That dramatist, I need scarcely say, is Mr. Bernard Shaw. I have no
+absolute knowledge of his method; but if he schemed out any scenario for
+_Getting Married_ or _Misalliance_, he has sedulously concealed the
+fact--to the detriment of the plays.[1]
+
+The scenario or skeleton is so manifestly the natural ground-work of a
+dramatic performance that the playwrights of the Italian _commedia dell'
+arte_ wrote nothing more than a scheme of scenes, and left the actors to
+do the rest. The same practice prevailed in early Elizabethan days, as
+one or two MS. "Plats," designed to be hung up in the wings, are extant
+to testify. The transition from extempore acting regulated by a scenario
+to the formal learning of parts falls within the historical period of
+the German stage. It seems probable that the romantic playwrights of the
+sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, both in England and in Spain, may
+have adopted a method not unlike that of the drama of improvisation,
+that is to say, they may have drawn out a scheme of entrances and exits,
+and then let their characters discourse (on paper) as their fancy
+prompted. So, at least, the copious fluency of their dialogue seems to
+suggest. But the typical modern play is a much more close-knit organism,
+in which every word has to be weighed far more carefully than it was by
+playwrights who stood near to the days of improvisation, and could
+indulge in "the large utterance of the early gods." Consequently it
+would seem that, until a play has been thought out very clearly and in
+great detail, any scheme of entrances and exits ought to be merely
+provisional and subject to indefinite modification. A modern play is not
+a framework of story loosely draped in a more or less gorgeous robe of
+language. There is, or ought to be, a close interdependence between
+action, character and dialogue, which forbids a playwright to tie his
+hands very far in advance.
+
+As a rule, then, it would seem to be an unfavourable sign when a drama
+presents itself at an early stage with a fixed and unalterable outline.
+The result may be a powerful, logical, well-knit piece of work; but the
+breath of life will scarcely be in it. Room should be left as long as
+possible for unexpected developments of character. If your characters
+are innocent of unexpected developments, the less characters they.[2]
+Not that I, personally, have any faith in those writers of fiction, be
+they playwrights or novelists, who contend that they do not speak
+through the mouths of their personages, but rather let their personages
+speak through them. "I do not invent or create" I have heard an eminent
+novelist say: "I simply record; my characters speak and act, and I write
+down their sayings and doings." This author may be a fine psychologist
+for purposes of fiction, but I question his insight into his own mental
+processes. The apparent spontaneity of a character's proceedings is a
+pure illusion. It means no more than that the imagination, once set in
+motion along a given line, moves along that line with an ease and
+freedom which seems to its possessor preternatural and almost
+uncanny.[3]
+
+Most authors, however, who have any real gift for character-creation
+probably fall more or less under this illusion, though they are sane
+enough and modest enough to realize that an illusion it is.[4] A
+character will every now and then seem to take the bit between his teeth
+and say and do things for which his creator feels himself hardly
+responsible. The playwright's scheme should not, then, until the latest
+possible moment, become so hard and fast as to allow his characters no
+elbow room for such manifestations of spontaneity. And this is only one
+of several forms of afterthought which may arise as the play develops.
+The playwright may all of a sudden see that a certain character is
+superfluous, or that a new character is needed, or that a new
+relationship between two characters would simplify matters, or that a
+scene that he has placed in the first act ought to be in the second, or
+that he can dispense with it altogether, or that it reveals too much to
+the audience and must be wholly recast.[5]
+
+These are only a few of the re-adjustments which have constantly to be
+made if a play is shaping itself by a process of vital growth; and that
+is why the playwright may be advised to keep his material fluid as long
+as he can. Ibsen had written large portions of the play now known to us
+as _Rosmersholm_ before he decided that Rebecca should not be married to
+Rosmer. He also, at a comparatively late stage, did away with two
+daughters whom he had at first given to Rosmer, and decided to make her
+childlessness the main cause of Beata's tragedy.
+
+Perhaps I insist too strongly on the advisability of treating a dramatic
+theme as clay to be modelled and remodelled, rather than as wood or
+marble to be carved unalterably and once for all. If so, it is because
+of a personal reminiscence. In my early youth, I had, like everybody
+else, ambitions in the direction of play-writing; and it was my
+inability to keep a theme plastic that convinced me of my lack of
+talent. It pleased me greatly to draw out a detailed scenario, working
+up duly to a situation at the end of each act; and, once made, that
+scenario was like a cast-iron mould into which the dialogue had simply
+to be poured. The result was that the play had all the merits of a
+logical, well-ordered essay. My situations worked out like the Q.E.D.'s
+of Euclid. My characters obstinately refused to come to life, or to take
+the bit between their teeth. They were simply cog-wheels in a
+pre-arranged mechanism. In one respect, my two or three plays were
+models--in respect of brevity and conciseness. I was never troubled by
+the necessity of cutting down--so cruel a necessity to many
+playwrights.[6] My difficulty was rather to find enough for my
+characters to say--for they never wanted to say anything that was not
+strictly germane to the plot. It was this that made me despair of
+play-writing, and realize that my mission was to teach other people how
+to write plays. And, similarly, the aspirant who finds that his people
+never want to say more than he can allow them to say--that they never
+rush headlong into blind alleys, or do things that upset the balance of
+the play and have to be resolutely undone--that aspirant will do well
+not to be over-confident of his dramatic calling and election. There may
+be authors who can write vital plays, as Shakespeare is said (on rather
+poor evidence)[7] to have done, without blotting a line; but I believe
+them to be rare. In our day, the great playwright is more likely to be
+he who does not shrink, on occasion, from blotting an act or two.
+
+There is a modern French dramatist who writes, with success, such plays
+as I might have written had I combined a strong philosophical faculty
+with great rhetorical force and fluency. The dramas of M. Paul Hervieu
+have all the neatness and cogency of a geometrical demonstration. One
+imagines that, for M. Hervieu, the act of composition means merely the
+careful filling in of a scenario as neat and complete as a schedule.[8]
+But for that very reason, despite their undoubted intellectual power, M.
+Hervieu's dramas command our respect rather than our enthusiasm. The
+dramatist should aim at _being_ logical without _seeming_ so.[9]
+
+It is sometimes said that a playwright ought to construct his play
+backwards, and even to write his last act first.[10] This doctrine
+belongs to the period of the well-made play, when climax was regarded as
+the one thing needful in dramatic art, and anticlimax as the
+unforgivable sin. Nowadays, we do not insist that every play should end
+with a tableau, or with an emphatic _mot de la fin_. We are more willing
+to accept a quiet, even an indecisive, ending.[11] Nevertheless it is
+and must ever be true that, at a very early period in the scheming of
+his play, the playwright ought to assure himself that his theme is
+capable of a satisfactory ending. Of course this phrase does not imply a
+"happy ending," but one which satisfies the author as being artistic,
+effective, inevitable (in the case of a serious play), or, in one word,
+"right." An obviously makeshift ending can never be desirable, either
+from the ideal or from the practical point of view. Many excellent plays
+have been wrecked on this rock. The very frequent complaint that "the
+last act is weak" is not always or necessarily a just reproach; but it
+is so when the author has clearly been at a loss for an ending, and has
+simply huddled his play up in a conventional and perfunctory fashion. It
+may even be said that some apparently promising themes are deceptive in
+their promise, since they are inherently incapable of a satisfactory
+ending. The playwright should by all means make sure that he has not run
+up against one of these blind-alley themes.[12] He should, at an early
+point, see clearly the end for which he is making, and be sure that it
+is an end which he actively desires, not merely one which satisfies
+convention, or which "will have to do."
+
+Some dramatists, when a play is provisionally mapped out, do not attempt
+to begin at the beginning and write it as a coherent whole, but make a
+dash first at the more salient and critical scenes, or those which
+specially attract their imagination. On such a point every author must
+obviously be a law unto himself. From the theoretical point of view, one
+can only approve the practice, since it certainly makes for plasticity.
+It is evident that a detached scene, written while those that lead up to
+it are as yet but vaguely conceived, must be subject to indefinite
+modification.[13] In several of Ibsen's very roughest drafts, we find
+short passages of dialogue sketched out even before the names have been
+assigned to the characters, showing that some of his earliest ideas came
+to him, as it were, ready dramatized. One would be tempted to hope much
+of an author who habitually and unaffectedly thus "lisped in dialogue
+for the dialogue came."
+
+Ought the playwright, at an early stage in the process of each act, to
+have the details of its scene clearly before him? Ought he to draw out a
+scene-plot, and know, from moment to moment, just where each character
+is, whether He is standing on the hearthrug and She sitting on the
+settee, or _vice versa_? There is no doubt that furniture, properties,
+accidents of environment, play a much larger part in modern drama than
+they did on the Elizabethan, the eighteenth century, or even the
+early-Victorian stage. Some of us, who are not yet centenarians, can
+remember to have seen rooms on the stage with no furniture at all except
+two or three chairs "painted on the flat." Under such conditions, it was
+clearly useless for the playwright to trouble his head about furniture,
+and even "positions" might well be left for arrangement at rehearsal.
+This carelessness of the environment, however, is no longer possible.
+Whether we like it or no (and some theorists do not like it at all),
+scenery has ceased to be a merely suggestive background against which
+the figures stand out in high relief. The stage now aims at presenting a
+complete picture, with the figures, not "a little out of the picture,"
+but completely in it. This being so, the playwright must evidently, at
+some point in the working out of his theme, visualize the stage-picture
+in considerable detail; and we find that almost all modern dramatists
+do, as a matter of fact, pay great attention to what may be called the
+topography of their scenes, and the shifting "positions" of their
+characters. The question is: at what stage of the process of composition
+ought this visualization to occur? Here, again, it would be absurd to
+lay down a general rule; but I am inclined to think, both theoretically
+and from what can be gathered of the practice of the best dramatists,
+that it is wisest to reserve it for a comparatively late stage. A
+playwright of my acquaintance, and a very remarkable playwright too,
+used to scribble the first drafts of his play in little notebooks, which
+he produced from his pocket whenever he had a moment to spare--often on
+the top of an omnibus. Only when the first draft was complete did he
+proceed to set the scenes, as it were, and map out the stage-management.
+On the other hand, one has heard of playwrights whose first step in
+setting to work upon a particular act was to construct a complete model
+of the scene, and people it with manikins to represent the characters.
+As a general practice, this is scarcely to be commended. It is wiser,
+one fancies, to have the matter of the scene pretty fully roughed-out
+before details of furniture, properties, and position are arranged.[14]
+It may happen, indeed, that some natural phenomenon, some property or
+piece of furniture, is the very pivot of the scene; in which case it
+must, of course, be posited from the first. From the very moment of his
+conceiving the fourth act of _Le Tartufe_, Moliere must have had clearly
+in view the table under which Orgon hides; and Sheridan cannot have got
+very far with the Screen Scene before he had mentally placed the screen.
+But even where a great deal turns on some individual object, the
+detailed arrangements of the scene may in most cases be taken for
+granted until a late stage in its working out.
+
+One proviso, however, must be made; where any important effect depends
+upon a given object, or a particular arrangement of the scene, the
+playwright cannot too soon assure himself that the object comes well
+within the physical possibilities of the stage, and that the arrangement
+is optically[15] possible and effective. Few things, indeed, are quite
+impossible to the modern stage; but there are many that had much better
+not be attempted. It need scarcely be added that the more serious a play
+is, or aspires to be, the more carefully should the author avoid any
+such effects as call for the active collaboration of the
+stage-carpenter, machinist, or electrician. Even when a mechanical
+effect can be produced to perfection, the very fact that the audience
+cannot but admire the ingenuity displayed, and wonder "how it is done,"
+implies a failure of that single-minded attention to the essence of the
+matter in hand which the dramatist would strive to beget and maintain. A
+small but instructive example of a difficult effect, such as the prudent
+playwright will do well to avoid, occurs in the third act of Ibsen's
+_Little Eyolf_. During the greater part of the act, the flag in
+Allmers's garden is hoisted to half-mast in token of mourning; until at
+the end, when he and Rita attain a serener frame of mind, he runs it up
+to the truck. Now, from the poetic and symbolic point of view, this flag
+is all that can be desired; but from the practical point of view it
+presents grave difficulties. Nothing is so pitifully ineffective as a
+flag in a dead calm, drooping nervelessly against the mast; and though,
+no doubt, by an ingenious arrangement of electric fans, it might be
+possible to make this flag flutter in the breeze, the very fact of its
+doing so would tend to set the audience wondering by what mechanism the
+effect was produced, instead of attending to the soul-struggles of Rita
+and Allmers. It would be absurd to blame Ibsen for overriding theatrical
+prudence in such a case; I merely point out to beginners that it is
+wise, before relying on an effect of this order, to make sure that it
+is, not only possible, but convenient from the practical point of view.
+In one or two other cases Ibsen strained the resources of the stage. The
+illumination in the last act of _Pillars of Society_ cannot be carried
+out as he describes it; or rather, if it were carried out on some
+exceptionally large and well-equipped stage, the feat of the mechanician
+would eclipse the invention of the poet. On the other hand, the abode of
+the Wild Duck in the play of that name is a conception entirely
+consonant with the optics of the theatre; for no detail at all need be,
+or ought to be, visible, and a vague effect of light is all that is
+required. Only in his last melancholy effort did Ibsen, in a play
+designed for representation, demand scenic effects entirely beyond the
+resources of any theatre not specially fitted for spectacular drama, and
+possible, even in such a theatre, only in some ridiculously
+makeshift form.
+
+There are two points of routine on which I am compelled to speak in no
+uncertain voice--two practices which I hold to be almost equally
+condemnable. In the first place, no playwright who understands the
+evolution of the modern theatre can nowadays use in his stage-directions
+the abhorrent jargon of the early nineteenth century. When one comes
+across a manuscript bespattered with such cabalistic signs as "R.2.E.,"
+"R.C.," "L.C.," "L.U.E.," and so forth, one sees at a glance that the
+writer has neither studied dramatic literature nor thought out for
+himself the conditions of the modern theatre, but has found his dramatic
+education between the buff covers of _French's Acting Edition_. Some
+beginners imagine that a plentiful use of such abbreviations will be
+taken as a proof of their familiarity with the stage; whereas, in fact,
+it only shows their unfamiliarity with theatrical history. They might as
+well set forth to describe a modern battleship in the nautical
+terminology of Captain Marryat. "Right First Entrance," "Left Upper
+Entrance," and so forth, are terms belonging to the period when there
+were no "box" rooms or "set" exteriors on the stage, when the sides of
+each scene were composed of "wings" shoved on in grooves, and entrances
+could be made between each pair of wings. Thus, "R. 1 E." meant the
+entrance between the proscenium and the first "wing" on the right, "R. 2
+E." meant the entrance between the first pair of "wings," and so forth.
+"L.U.E." meant the entrance at the left between the last "wing" and the
+back cloth. Now grooves and "wings" have disappeared from the stage. The
+"box" room is entered, like any room in real life, by doors or French
+windows; and the only rational course is to state the position of your
+doors in your opening stage-direction, and thereafter to say in plain
+language by which door an entrance or an exit is to be made. In exterior
+scenes where, for example, trees or clumps of shrubbery answer in a
+measure to the old "wings," the old terminology may not be quite
+meaningless; but it is far better eschewed. It is a good general rule to
+avoid, so far as possible, expressions which show that the author has a
+stage scene, and not an episode of real life, before his eyes. Men of
+the theatre are the last to be impressed by theatrical jargon; and when
+the play comes to be printed, the general reader is merely bewildered
+and annoyed by technicalities, which tend, moreover, to disturb
+his illusion.
+
+A still more emphatic warning must be given against another and more
+recent abuse in the matter of stage-directions. The "L.U.E.'s," indeed,
+are bound very soon to die a natural death. The people who require to be
+warned against them are, as a rule, scarcely worth warning. But it is
+precisely the cleverest people (to use clever in a somewhat narrow
+sense) who are apt to be led astray by Mr. Bernard Shaw's practice of
+expanding his stage-directions into essays, disquisitions, monologues,
+pamphlets. This is a practice which goes far to justify the belief of
+some foreign critics that the English, or, since Mr. Shaw is in
+question, let us say the inhabitants of the British Islands, are
+congenitally incapable of producing a work of pure art. Our
+novelists--Fielding, Thackeray, George Eliot--have been sufficiently,
+though perhaps not unjustly, called over the coals for their habit of
+coming in front of their canvas, and either gossiping with the reader or
+preaching at him. But, if it be a sound maxim that the novelist should
+not obtrude his personality on his reader, how much more is this true of
+the dramatist! When the dramatist steps to the footlights and begins to
+lecture, all illusion is gone. It may be said that, as a matter of fact,
+this does not occur: that on the stage we hear no more of the
+disquisitions of Mr. Shaw and his imitators than we do of the curt, and
+often non-existent, stage-directions of Shakespeare and his
+contemporaries. To this the reply is twofold. First, the very fact that
+these disquisitions are written proves that the play is designed to be
+printed and read, and that we are, therefore, justified in applying to
+it the standard of what may be called literary illusion. Second, when a
+playwright gets into the habit of talking around his characters, he
+inevitably, even if unconsciously, slackens his endeavour to make them
+express themselves as completely as may be in their own proper medium of
+dramatic action and dialogue. You cannot with impunity mix up two
+distinct forms of art--the drama and the sociological essay or lecture.
+To Mr. Shaw, of course, much may, and must, be forgiven. His
+stage-directions are so brilliant that some one, some day, will
+assuredly have them spoken by a lecturer in the orchestra while the
+action stands still on the stage. Thus, he will have begotten a bastard,
+but highly entertaining, form of art. My protest has no practical
+application to him, for he is a standing exception to all rules. It is
+to the younger generation that I appeal not to be misled by his
+seductive example. They have little chance of rivalling him as
+sociological essayists; but if they treat their art seriously, and as a
+pure art, they may easily surpass him as dramatists. By adopting his
+practice they will tend to produce, not fine works of art, but inferior
+sociological documents. They will impair their originality and spoil
+their plays in order to do comparatively badly what Mr. Shaw has done
+incomparably well.
+
+The common-sense rule as to stage directions is absolutely plain; be
+they short, or be they long, they ought always to be _impersonal_. The
+playwright who cracks jokes in his stage-directions, or indulges in
+graces of style, is intruding himself between the spectator and the work
+of art, to the inevitable detriment of the illusion. In preparing a play
+for the press, the author should make his stage-directions as brief as
+is consistent with clearness. Few readers will burden their memory with
+long and detailed descriptions. When a new character of importance
+appears, a short description of his or her personal appearance and dress
+may be helpful to the reader; but even this should be kept impersonal.
+Moreover, as a play has always to be read before it can be rehearsed or
+acted, it is no bad plan to make the stage-directions, from the first,
+such as tend to bring the play home clearly to the reader's mental
+vision. And here I may mention a principle, based on more than mere
+convenience, which some playwrights observe with excellent results. Not
+merely in writing stage-directions, but in visualizing a scene, the idea
+of the stage should, as far as possible, be banished from the author's
+mind. He should see and describe the room, the garden, the sea-shore, or
+whatever the place of his action may be, not as a stage-scene, but as a
+room, garden, or sea-shore in the real world. The cultivation of this
+habit ought to be, and I believe is in some cases, a safeguard against
+theatricality.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+[Footnote 1: Sardou wrote careful and detailed scenarios, Dumas _fils_
+held it a waste of time to do so. Pailleron wrote "enormous" scenarios,
+Meilhac very brief ones, or none at all. Mr. Galsworthy, rather to my
+surprise, disdains, and even condemns, the scenario, holding that a
+theme becomes lifeless when you put down its skeleton on paper. Sir
+Arthur Pinero says: "Before beginning to write a play, I always make
+sure, by means of a definite scheme, that there is _a_ way of doing it;
+but whether I ultimately follow that way is a totally different matter."
+Mr. Alfred Sutro practically confesses to a scenario. He says: "Before I
+start writing the dialogue of a play, I make sure that I shall have an
+absolutely free hand over the entrances and exits: in other words, that
+there is ample and legitimate reason for each character appearing in any
+particular scene, and ample motive for his leaving it." Mr. Granville
+Barker does not put on paper a detailed scenario. He says: "I plan the
+general scheme, and particularly the balance of the play, in my head;
+but this, of course, does not depend entirely on entrances and exits."
+Mr. Henry Arthur Jones says: "I know the leading scenes, and the general
+course of action in each act, before I write a line. When I have got the
+whole story clear, and divided into acts, I very carefully construct the
+first act, as a series of scenes between such and such of the
+characters. When the first act is written I carefully construct the
+second act in the same way--and so on. I sometimes draw up twenty
+scenarios for an act before I can get it to go straight."]
+
+[Footnote 2: A friend of the late Clyde Fitch writes to me: "Fitch was
+often astonished at the way in which his characters developed. He tried
+to make them do certain things: they did others."]
+
+[Footnote 3: This account of the matter seems to find support in a
+statement, by M. Francois de Curel, an accomplished psychologist, to the
+effect that during the first few days of work at a play he is "clearly
+conscious of creating," but that gradually he gets "into the skin" of
+his characters, and appears to work by instinct. No doubt some artists
+are actually subject to a sort of hallucination, during which they seem
+rather to record than to invent the doings of their characters. But this
+somewhat morbid condition should scarcely be cultivated by the
+dramatist, whose intelligence should always keep a light rein on his
+more instinctive mental processes. See _L'Annee Psychologique_, 1894.
+p. 120.]
+
+[Footnote 4: Sir Arthur Pinero says: "The beginning of a play to me is a
+little world of people. I live with them, get familiar with them, and
+_they_ tell me the story." This may sound not unlike the remark of the
+novelist above quoted; but the intention was quite different. Sir Arthur
+simply meant that the story came to him as the characters took on life
+in his imagination. Mr. H.A. Jones writes: "When you have a character or
+several characters you haven't a play. You may keep these in your mind
+and nurse them till they combine in a piece of action; but you haven't
+got your play till you have theme, characters, and action all fused. The
+process with me is as purely automatic and spontaneous as dreaming; in
+fact it is really dreaming while you are awake."]
+
+[Footnote 5: "Here," says a well-known playwright, "is a common
+experience. You are struck by an idea with which you fall in love. 'Ha!'
+you say. 'What a superb scene where the man shall find the missing will
+under the sofa! If that doesn't make them sit up, what will?' You begin
+the play. The first act goes all right, and the second act goes all
+right. You come to the third act, and somehow it won't go at all. You
+battle with it for weeks in vain; and then it suddenly occurs to you,
+'Why, I see what's wrong! It's that confounded scene where the man finds
+the will under the sofa! Out it must come!' You cut it out, and at once
+all goes smooth again. But you have thrown overboard the great effect
+that first tempted you."]
+
+[Footnote 6: The manuscripts of Dumas _fils_ are said to contain, as a
+rule, about four times as much matter as the printed play! (Parigot:
+_Genie et Metier_, p. 243). This probably means, however, that he
+preserved tentative and ultimately rejected scenes, which most
+playwrights destroy as they go along.]
+
+[Footnote 7: Lowell points out that this assertion of Heminge and
+Condell merely shows them to have been unfamiliar with the simple
+phenomenon known as a fair copy.]
+
+[Footnote 8: Since writing this I have learnt that my conjecture is
+correct, at any rate as regards some of M. Hervieu's plays.]
+
+[Footnote 9: See Chapters XIII and XVI.]
+
+[Footnote 10: This view is expressed with great emphasis by Dumas _fils_
+in the preface to _La Princesse Georges_. "You should not begin your
+work," he says, "until you have your concluding scene, movement and
+speech clear in your mind. How can you tell what road you ought to take
+until you know where you are going?" It is perhaps a more apparent than
+real contradiction of this rule that, until _Iris_ was three parts
+finished, Sir Arthur Pinero intended the play to end with the throttling
+of Iris by Maldonado. The actual end is tantamount to a murder, though
+Iris is not actually killed.]
+
+[Footnote 11: See Chapter XVIII.]
+
+[Footnote 12: See Chapter XX.]
+
+[Footnote 13: Most of the dramatists whom I have consulted are opposed
+to the principle of "roughing out" the big scenes first, and then
+imbedding them, as it were, in their context. Sir Arthur Pinero goes the
+length of saying: "I can never go on to page 2 until I am sure that page
+1 is as right as I can make it. Indeed, when an act is finished, I send
+it at once to the printers, confident that I shall not have to go back
+upon it." Mr. Alfred Sutro says: "I write a play straight ahead from
+beginning to end, taking practically as long over the first act as over
+the last three." And Mr. Granville Barker: "I always write the beginning
+of a play first and the end last: but as to writing 'straight ahead'--it
+sounds like what one may be able to do in Heaven." But almost all
+dramatists, I take it, jot down brief passages of dialogue which they
+may or may not eventually work into the texture of their play.]
+
+[Footnote 14: One is not surprised to learn that Sardou "did his
+stage-management as he went along," and always knew exactly the position
+of his characters from moment to moment.]
+
+[Footnote 15: And aurally, it may be added. Sarcey comments on the
+impossibility of a scene in Zola's _Pot Bouille_ in which the so-called
+"lovers," Octave Mouret and Blanche, throw open the window of the garret
+in which they are quarrelling, and hear the servants in the courtyard
+outside discussing their intrigue. In order that the comments of the
+servants might reach the ears of the audience, they had to be shouted in
+a way (says M. Sarcey) that was fatal to the desired illusion.]
+
+
+
+
+_CHAPTER V_
+
+DRAMATIS PERSONAE
+
+
+The theme being chosen, the next step will probably be to determine what
+characters shall be employed in developing it. Most playwrights, I take
+it, draw up a provisional Dramatis Personae before beginning the serious
+work of construction. Ibsen seems always to have done so; but, in some
+of his plays, the list of persons was at first considerably larger than
+it ultimately became. The frugal poet sometimes saved up the characters
+rejected from one play, and used them in another. Thus Boletta and Hilda
+Wangel were originally intended to have been the daughters of Rosmer and
+Beata; and the delightful Foldal of _John Gabriel Borkman_ was a
+character left over from _The Lady from the Sea_.
+
+The playwright cannot proceed far in planning out his work without
+determining, roughly at any rate, what auxiliary characters he means to
+employ. There are in every play essential characters, without whom the
+theme is unthinkable, and auxiliary characters, not indispensable to the
+theme, but simply convenient for filling in the canvas and carrying on
+the action. It is not always possible to decide whether a character is
+essential or auxiliary--it depends upon how we define the theme. In
+_Hamlet_, for example, Hamlet, Claudius, and Gertrude are manifestly
+essential: for the theme is the hesitancy of a young man of a certain
+temperament in taking vengeance upon the seducer of his mother and
+murderer of his father. But is Ophelia essential, or merely auxiliary?
+Essential, if we consider Hamlet's pessimistic feeling as to woman and
+the "breeding of sinners" a necessary part of his character; auxiliary,
+if we take the view that without this feeling he would still have been
+Hamlet, and the action, to all intents and purposes, the same. The
+remaining characters, on the other hand, are clearly auxiliary. This is
+true even of the Ghost: for Hamlet might have learnt of his father's
+murder in fifty other ways.
+
+Polonius, Laertes, Horatio, and the rest might all have been utterly
+different, or might never have existed at all, and yet the essence of
+the play might have remained intact.
+
+It would be perfectly possible to write a _Hamlet_ after the manner of
+Racine, in which there should be only six personages instead of
+Shakespeare's six-and-twenty: and in this estimate I assume Ophelia to
+be an essential character. The dramatis personae would be: Hamlet, his
+confidant; Ophelia, her confidant; and the King and Queen, who would
+serve as confidants to each other. Indeed, an economy of one person
+might be affected by making the Queen (as she naturally might) play the
+part of confidant to Ophelia.
+
+Shakespeare, to be sure, did not deliberately choose between his own
+method and that of Racine. Classic concentration was wholly unsuited to
+the physical conditions of the Elizabethan stage, on which external
+movement and bustle were imperatively demanded. But the modern
+playwright has a wide latitude of choice in this purely technical
+matter. He may work out his plot with the smallest possible number of
+characters, or he may introduce a crowd of auxiliary personages. The
+good craftsman will be guided by the nature of his theme. In a broad
+social study or a picturesque romance, you may have as many auxiliary
+figures as you please. In a subtle comedy, or a psychological tragedy,
+the essential characters should have the stage as much as possible to
+themselves. In Becque's _La Parisienne_ there are only four characters
+and a servant; in Rostand's _Cyrano de Bergerac_ there are fifty-four
+personages named in the playbill, to say nothing of supernumeraries. In
+_Peer Gynt_, a satiric phantasmagory, Ibsen introduces some fifty
+individual characters, with numberless supernumeraries; in _An Enemy of
+the People_, a social comedy, he has eleven characters and a crowd; for
+_Ghosts_ and _Rosmersholm_, psychological tragedies, six persons apiece
+are sufficient.
+
+It can scarcely be necessary, at this time of day, to say much on the
+subject of nomenclature. One does occasionally, in manuscripts of a
+quite hopeless type, find the millionaire's daughter figuring as "Miss
+Aurea Golden," and her poor but sprightly cousin as "Miss Lalage Gay";
+but the veriest tyro realizes, as a rule, that this sort of punning
+characterization went out with the eighteenth century, or survived into
+the nineteenth century only as a flagrant anachronism, like
+knee-breeches and hair-powder.
+
+A curious essay might be written on the reasons why such names as Sir
+John Brute, Sir Tunbelly Clumsy, Sir Peter Teazle, Sir Anthony Absolute,
+Sir Lucius O'Trigger, Lord Foppington, Lord Rake, Colonel Bully,
+Lovewell, Heartfree, Gripe, Shark and the rest were regarded as a matter
+of course in "the comedy of manners," but have become offensive to-day,
+except in deliberate imitations of the eighteenth-century style. The
+explanation does not lie merely in the contrast between "conventional"
+comedy and "realistic" drama. Our forefathers (whatever Lamb may say)
+did not consciously place their comedy in a realm of convention, but
+generally considered themselves, and sometimes were, realists. The
+fashion of label-names, if we may call them so, came down from the
+Elizabethans, who, again, borrowed it from the Mediaeval Moralities.[1]
+Shakespeare himself gave us Master Slender and Justice Shallow; but it
+was in the Jonsonian comedy of types that the practice of advertising a
+"humour" or "passion" in a name (English or Italian) established itself
+most firmly. Hence such strange appellatives as Sir Epicure Mammon, Sir
+Amorous La Foole, Morose, Wellbred, Downright, Fastidius Brisk, Volpone,
+Corbaccio, Sordido, and Fallace. After the Restoration, Jonson, Beaumont
+and Fletcher, and Massinger were, for a time, more popular than
+Shakespeare; so that the label-names seemed to have the sanction of the
+giants that were before the Flood. Even when comedy began to deal with
+individuals rather than mere incarnations of a single "humour," the
+practice of giving them obvious pseudonyms held its ground. Probably it
+was reinforced by the analogous practice which obtained in journalism,
+in which real persons were constantly alluded to (and libelled) under
+fictitious designations, more or less transparent to the initiated. Thus
+a label-name did not carry with it a sense of unreality, but rather,
+perhaps, a vague suggestion of covert reference to a real person. I must
+not here attempt to trace the stages by which the fashion went out. It
+could doubtless be shown that the process of change ran parallel to the
+shrinkage of the "apron" and the transformation of the platform-stage
+into the picture-stage. That transformation was completed about the
+middle of the nineteenth century; and it was about that time that
+label-names made their latest appearances in works of any artistic
+pretension--witness the Lady Gay Spanker of _London Assurance_, and the
+Captain Dudley (or "Deadly") Smooth of _Money_. Faint traces of the
+practice survive in T.W. Robertson, as in his master, Thackeray. But it
+was in his earliest play of any note that he called a journalist Stylus.
+In his later comedies the names are admirably chosen: they are
+characteristic without eccentricity or punning. One feels that Eccles in
+_Caste_ could not possibly have borne any other name. How much less
+living would he be had he been called Mr. Soaker or Mr. Tosspot!
+
+Characteristic without eccentricity--that is what a name ought to be. As
+the characteristic quality depends upon a hundred indefinable,
+subconscious associations, it is clearly impossible to suggest any
+principle of choice. The only general rule that can be laid down is that
+the key of the nomenclature, so to speak, may rightly vary with the key
+of the play--that farcical names are, within limits, admissible in
+farce, eccentric names in eccentric comedy, while soberly appropriate
+names are alone in place in serious plays. Some dramatists are
+habitually happy in their nomenclature, others much less so. Ibsen would
+often change a name three or four times in the course of writing a play,
+until at last he arrived at one which seemed absolutely to fit the
+character; but the appropriateness of his names is naturally lost upon
+foreign audiences.
+
+One word may perhaps be said on the recent fashion--not to say fad--of
+suppressing in the printed play the traditional list of "Dramatis
+Personae." Bjoernson, in some of his later plays, was, so far as I am
+aware, the first of the moderns to adopt this plan. I do not know
+whether his example has influenced certain English playwrights, or
+whether they arrived independently at the same austere principle, by
+sheer force of individual genius. The matter is a trifling one--so
+trifling that the departure from established practice has something of
+the air of a pedantry. It is not, on the whole, to be approved. It adds
+perceptibly to the difficulty which some readers experience in picking
+up the threads of a play; and it deprives other readers of a real and
+appreciable pleasure of anticipation. There is a peculiar and not
+irrational charm in looking down a list of quite unknown names, and
+thinking: "In the course of three hours, I shall know these people: I
+shall have read their hearts: I shall have lived with them through a
+great crisis in their lives: some of them may be my friends for ever."
+It is one of the glories and privileges of the dramatist's calling that
+he can arouse in us this eager and poignant expectation; and I cannot
+commend his wisdom in deliberately taking the edge off it, and making us
+feel as though we were not sitting down to a play, but to a sort of
+conversational novel. A list of characters, it is true, may also affect
+one with acute anticipations of boredom; but I have never yet found a
+play less tedious by reason of the suppression of the "Dramatis
+Personae."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+[Footnote 1: Partially, too, they were under the influence of antiquity;
+but the ancients were very discreet in their use of significant names.
+Only in satyr-plays, in the comic epics, and for a few extravagant
+characters in comedy (such as the boastful soldier) were grotesque
+appellations employed. For the rest, the Greek habit of nomenclature
+made it possible to use significant names which were at the same time
+probable enough in daily life. For example, a slave might be called
+Onesimus, "useful," or a soldier Polemon, to imply his warlike function;
+but both names would be familiar to the audience in actual use.]
+
+
+
+
+_BOOK II_
+
+THE BEGINNING
+
+
+
+
+_CHAPTER VI_
+
+THE POINT OF ATTACK: SHAKESPEARE AND IBSEN
+
+
+Though, as we have already noted, the writing of plays does not always
+follow the chronological sequence of events, in discussing the process
+of their evolution we are bound to assume that the playwright begins at
+the beginning, and proceeds in orderly fashion, by way of the middle, to
+the end. It was one of Aristotle's requirements that a play should have
+a beginning, middle and end; and though it may seem that it scarcely
+needed an Aristotle to lay down so self-evident a proposition, the fact
+is that playwrights are more than sufficiently apt to ignore or despise
+the rule.[1] Especially is there a tendency to rebel against the
+requirement that a play should have an end. We have seen a good many
+plays of late which do not end, but simply leave off: at their head we
+might perhaps place Ibsen's _Ghosts_. But let us not anticipate. For the
+moment, what we have to inquire is where, and how, a play ought
+to begin.
+
+In life there are no such things as beginnings. Even a man's birth is a
+quite arbitrary point at which to launch his biography; for the
+determining factors in his career are to be found in persons, events,
+and conditions that existed before he was ever thought of. For the
+biographer, however, and for the novelist as a writer of fictitious
+biography, birth forms a good conventional starting-point. He can give a
+chapter or so to "Ancestry," and then relate the adventures of his hero
+from the cradle onwards. But the dramatist, as we have seen, deals, not
+with protracted sequences of events, but with short, sharp crises. The
+question for him, therefore, is: at what moment of the crisis, or of its
+antecedents, he had better ring up his curtain? At this point he is like
+the photographer studying his "finder" in order to determine how much of
+a given prospect he can "get in."
+
+The answer to the question depends on many things, but chiefly on the
+nature of the crisis and the nature of the impression which the
+playwright desires to make upon his audience. If his play be a comedy,
+and if his object be gently and quietly to interest and entertain, the
+chances are that he begins by showing us his personages in their normal
+state, concisely indicates their characters, circumstances and
+relations, and then lets the crisis develop from the outset before our
+eyes. If, on the other hand, his play be of a more stirring description,
+and he wants to seize the spectator's attention firmly from the start,
+he will probably go straight at his crisis, plunging, perhaps, into the
+very middle of it, even at the cost of having afterwards to go back in
+order to put the audience in possession of the antecedent circumstances.
+In a third type of play, common of late years, and especially affected
+by Ibsen, the curtain rises on a surface aspect of profound peace, which
+is presently found to be but a thin crust over an absolutely volcanic
+condition of affairs, the origin of which has to be traced backwards, it
+may be for many years.
+
+Let us glance at a few of Shakespeare's openings, and consider at what
+points he attacks his various themes. Of his comedies, all except one
+begin with a simple conversation, showing a state of affairs from which
+the crisis develops with more or less rapidity, but in which it is as
+yet imperceptibly latent. In no case does he plunge into the middle of
+his subject, leaving its antecedents to be stated in what is technically
+called an "exposition." Neither in tragedy nor in comedy, indeed, was
+this Shakespeare's method. In his historical plays he relied to some
+extent on his hearers' knowledge of history, whether gathered from books
+or from previous plays of the historical series; and where such
+knowledge was not to be looked for, he would expound the situation in
+good set terms, like those of a Euripidean Prologue. But the
+chronicle-play is a species apart, and practically an extinct species:
+we need not pause to study its methods. In his fictitious plays, with
+two notable exceptions, it was Shakespeare's constant practice to bring
+the whole action within the frame of the picture, opening at such a
+point that no retrospect should be necessary, beyond what could be
+conveyed in a few casual words. The exceptions are _The Tempest_ and
+_Hamlet_, to which we shall return in due course.
+
+How does _The Merchant of Venice_ open? With a long conversation
+exhibiting the character of Antonio, the friendship between him and
+Bassanio, the latter's financial straits, and his purpose of wooing
+Portia. The second scene displays the character of Portia, and informs
+us of her father's device with regard to her marriage; but this
+information is conveyed in three or four lines. Not till the third scene
+do we see or hear of Shylock, and not until very near the end of the act
+is there any foreshadowing of what is to be the main crisis of the play.
+Not a single antecedent event has to be narrated to us; for the mere
+fact that Antonio has been uncivil to Shylock, and shown disapproval of
+his business methods, can scarcely be regarded as a preliminary outside
+the frame of the picture.
+
+In _As You Like It_ there are no preliminaries to be stated beyond the
+facts that Orlando is at enmity with his elder brother, and that Duke
+Frederick has usurped the coronet and dukedom of Rosalind's father.
+These facts being made apparent without any sort of formal exposition,
+the crisis of the play rapidly announces itself in the wrestling-match
+and its sequels. In _Much Ado About Nothing_ there is even less of
+antecedent circumstance to be imparted. We learn in the first scene,
+indeed, that Beatrice and Benedick have already met and crossed swords;
+but this is not in the least essential to the action; the play might
+have been to all intents and purposes the same had they never heard of
+each other until after the rise of the curtain. In _Twelfth Night_ there
+is a semblance of a retrospective exposition in the scene between Viola
+and the Captain; but it is of the simplest nature, and conveys no
+information beyond what, at a later period, would have been imparted on
+the playbill, thus--
+
+  "Orsino, Duke of Illyria, in love with Olivia.
+  Olivia, an heiress, in mourning for her brother,"
+
+and so forth. In _The Taming of the Shrew_ there are no antecedents
+whatever to be stated. It is true that Lucentio, in the opening speech,
+is good enough to inform Tranio who he is and what he is doing
+there--facts with which Tranio is already perfectly acquainted. But this
+was merely a conventional opening, excused by the fashion of the time;
+it was in no sense a necessary exposition. For the rest, the crisis of
+the play--the battle between Katherine and Petruchio--begins, develops,
+and ends before our very eyes. In _The Winter's Tale_, a brief
+conversation between Camillo and Archidamus informs us that the King of
+Bohemia is paying a visit to the King of Sicilia; and that is absolutely
+all we need to know. It was not even necessary that it should be
+conveyed to us in this way. The situation would be entirely
+comprehensible if the scene between Camillo and Archidamus were omitted.
+
+It is needless to go through the whole list of comedies. The broad fact
+is that in all the plays commonly so described, excepting only _The
+Tempest_, the whole action comes within the frame of the picture. In
+_The Tempest_ the poet employs a form of opening which otherwise he
+reserves for tragedies. The first scene is simply an animated tableau,
+calculated to arrest the spectator's attention, without conveying to him
+any knowledge either of situation or character. Such gleams of character
+as do, in fact, appear in the dialogue, are scarcely perceived in the
+hurly-burly of the storm. Then, in the calm which ensues, Prospero
+expounds to Miranda in great detail the antecedents of the crisis now
+developing. It might almost seem, indeed, that the poet, in this, his
+poetic last-will-and-testament, intended to warn his successors against
+the dangers of a long narrative exposition; for Prospero's story sends
+Miranda to sleep. Be this as it may, we have here a case in which
+Shakespeare deliberately adopted the plan of placing on the stage, not
+the whole crisis, but only its culmination, leaving its earlier stages
+to be conveyed in narrative.[2] It would have been very easy for him to
+have begun at the beginning and shown us in action the events narrated
+by Prospero. This course would have involved no greater leap, either in
+time or space, than he had perpetrated in the almost contemporary
+_Winter's Tale_; and it cannot be said that there would have been any
+difficulty in compressing into three acts, or even two, the essentials
+of the action of the play as we know it. His reasons for departing from
+his usual practice were probably connected with the particular occasion
+for which the play was written. He wanted to produce a masque rather
+than a drama. We must not, therefore, attach too much significance to
+the fact that in almost the only play in which Shakespeare seems to have
+built entirely out of his own head, with no previous play or novel to
+influence him, he adopted the plan of going straight to the catastrophe,
+in which he had been anticipated by Sophocles (_Oedipus Rex_), and was
+to be followed by Ibsen (_Ghosts_, _Rosmersholm_, etc.).
+
+Coming now to the five great tragedies, we find that in four of them
+Shakespeare began, as in _The Tempest_, with a picturesque and stirring
+episode calculated to arrest the spectator's attention and awaken his
+interest, while conveying to him little or no information. The opening
+scene of _Romeo and Juliet_ is simply a brawl, bringing home to us
+vividly the family feud which is the root of the tragedy, but informing
+us of nothing beyond the fact that such a feud exists. This is, indeed,
+absolutely all that we require to know. There is not a single
+preliminary circumstance, outside the limits of the play, that has to be
+explained to us. The whole tragedy germinates and culminates within what
+the prologue calls "the two hours' traffick of the stage." The opening
+colloquy of the Witches in _Macbeth_, strikes the eerie keynote, but
+does nothing more. Then, in the second scene, we learn that there has
+been a great battle and that a nobleman named Macbeth has won a victory
+which covers him with laurels. This can in no sense be called an
+exposition. It is the account of a single event, not of a sequence; and
+that event is contemporary, not antecedent. In the third scene, the
+meeting of Macbeth and Banquo with the Witches, we have what may be
+called an exposition reversed; not a narrative of the past, but a
+foreshadowing of the future. Here we touch on one of the subtlest of the
+playwright's problems--the art of arousing anticipation in just the
+right measure. But that is not the matter at present in hand.[3]
+
+In the opening scene of _Othello_ it is true that some talk passes
+between Iago and Roderigo before they raise the alarm and awaken
+Brabantio; but it is carefully non-expository talk; it expounds nothing
+but Iago's character. Far from being a real exception to the rule that
+Shakespeare liked to open his tragedies with a very crisply dramatic
+episode, _Othello_ may rather be called its most conspicuous example.
+The rousing of Brabantio is immediately followed by the encounter
+between his men and Othello's, which so finely brings out the lofty
+character of the Moor; and only in the third scene, that of the Doge's
+Council, do we pass from shouts and swords to quiet discussion and, in a
+sense, exposition. Othello's great speech, while a vital portion of the
+drama, is in so far an exposition that it refers to events which do not
+come absolutely within the frame of the picture. But they are very
+recent, very simple, events. If Othello's speech were omitted, or cut
+down to half a dozen lines, we should know much less of his character
+and Desdemona's, but the mere action of the play would remain perfectly
+comprehensible.
+
+_King Lear_ necessarily opens with a great act of state, the partition
+of the kingdom. A few words between Kent and Gloucester show us what is
+afoot, and then, at one plunge, we are in the thick of the drama. There
+was no opportunity here for one of those picturesque tableaux, exciting
+rather than informative, which initiate the other tragedies. It would
+have had to be artificially dragged in; and it was the less necessary,
+as the partition scene took on, in a very few lines, just that
+arresting, stimulating quality which the poet seems to have desired in
+the opening of a play of this class.
+
+Finally, when we turn to _Hamlet_, we find a consummate example of the
+crisply-touched opening tableau, making a nervous rather than an
+intellectual appeal, informing us of nothing, but exciting a vivid,
+though quite vague, anticipation. The silent transit of the Ghost,
+desiring to speak, yet tongue-tied, is certainly one of Shakespeare's
+unrivalled masterpieces of dramatic craftsmanship. One could pretty
+safely wager that if the _Ur-Hamlet_, on which Shakespeare worked, were
+to come to light to-morrow, this particular trait would not be found in
+it. But, oddly enough, into the middle of this admirable opening
+tableau, Shakespeare inserts a formal exposition, introduced in the most
+conventional way. Marcellus, for some unexplained reason, is ignorant of
+what is evidently common knowledge as to the affairs of the realm, and
+asks to be informed; whereupon Horatio, in a speech of some twenty-five
+lines, sets forth the past relations between Norway and Denmark, and
+prepares us for the appearance of Fortinbras in the fourth act. In
+modern stage versions all this falls away, and nobody who has not
+studied the printed text is conscious of its absence. The commentators,
+indeed, have proved that Fortinbras is an immensely valuable element in
+the moral scheme of the play; but from the point of view of pure drama,
+there is not the slightest necessity for this Norwegian-Danish
+embroilment or its consequences.[4] The real exposition--for _Hamlet_
+differs from the other tragedies in requiring an exposition--comes in
+the great speech of the Ghost in Scene V. The contrast between this
+speech and Horatio's lecture in the first scene, exemplifies the
+difference between a dramatized and an undramatized exposition. The
+crisis, as we now learn, began months or years before the rise of the
+curtain. It began when Claudius inveigled the affections of Gertrude;
+and it would have been possible for the poet to have started from this
+point, and shown us in action all that he in fact conveys to us by way
+of narration. His reason for choosing the latter course is abundantly
+obvious.[5] Hamlet the Younger was to be the protagonist: the interest
+of the play was to centre in his mental processes. To have awakened our
+interest in Hamlet the Elder would, therefore, have been a superfluity
+and an irrelevance. Moreover (to say nothing of the fact that the Ghost
+was doubtless a popular figure in the old play, and demanded by the
+public) it was highly desirable that Hamlet's knowledge of the usurper's
+crime should come to him from a supernatural witness, who could not be
+cross-questioned or called upon to give material proof. This was the
+readiest as well as the most picturesque method of begetting in him that
+condition of doubt, real or affected, which was necessary to account for
+his behaviour. But to have shown us in action the matter of the Ghost's
+revelation would have been hopelessly to ruin its effect. A repetition
+in narrative of matters already seen in action is the grossest of
+technical blunders.[6] Hamlet senior, in other words, being
+indispensable in the spirit, was superfluous in the flesh. But there was
+another and equally cogent reason for beginning the play after the
+commission of the initial crime or crimes. To have done otherwise would
+have been to discount, not only the Ghost, but the play-scene. By a
+piece of consummate ingenuity, which may, of course, have been conceived
+by the earlier playwright, the initial incidents of the story are in
+fact presented to us, in the guise of a play within the play, and as a
+means to the achievement of one of the greatest dramatic effects in all
+literature. The moment the idea of the play-scene presented itself to
+the author's mind, it became absolutely unthinkable that he should, to
+put it vulgarly, "queer the pitch" for the Players by showing us the
+real facts of which their performance was to be the counterfeit
+presentment. The dramatic effect of the incidents was incalculably
+heightened when they were presented, as in a looking-glass, before the
+guilty pair, with the eye of the avenger boring into their souls. And
+have we not here, perhaps, a clue to one of the most frequent and
+essential meanings of the word "dramatic"? May we not say that the
+dramatic quality of an incident is proportionate to the variety[7] and
+intensity of the emotions involved in it?
+
+All this may appear too obvious to be worth setting forth at such
+length. Very likely it never occurred to Shakespeare that it was
+possible to open the play at an earlier point; so that he can hardly be
+said to have exercised a deliberate choice in the matter. Nevertheless,
+the very obviousness of the considerations involved makes this a good
+example of the importance of discovering just the right point at which
+to raise the curtain. In the case of _The Tempest_, Shakespeare plunged
+into the middle of the crisis because his object was to produce a
+philosophico-dramatic entertainment rather than a play in the strict
+sense of the word. He wanted room for the enchantments of Ariel, the
+brutishnesses of Caliban, the humours of Stephano and Trinculo--all
+elements extrinsic to the actual story. But in _Hamlet_ he adopted a
+similar course for purely dramatic reasons--in order to concentrate his
+effects and present the dramatic elements of his theme at their
+highest potency.
+
+In sum, then, it was Shakespeare's usual practice, histories apart, to
+bring the whole action of his plays within the frame of the picture,
+leaving little or nothing to narrative exposition. The two notable
+exceptions to this rule are those we have just examined--_Hamlet_ and
+_The Tempest_. Furthermore, he usually opened his comedies with quiet
+conversational passages, presenting the antecedents of the crisis with
+great deliberation. In his tragedies, on the other hand, he was apt to
+lead off with a crisp, somewhat startling passage of more or less
+vehement action, appealing rather to the nerves than to the
+intelligence--such a passage as Gustav Freytag, in his _Technik des
+Dramas_, happily entitles an _einleitende Akkord_, an introductory
+chord. It may be added that this rule holds good both for _Coriolanus_
+and for _Julius Caesar_, in which the keynote is briskly struck in
+highly animated scenes of commotion among the Roman populace.
+
+Let us now look at the practice of Ibsen, which offers a sharp contrast
+to that of Shakespeare. To put it briefly, the plays in which Ibsen gets
+his whole action within the frame of the picture are as exceptional as
+those in which Shakespeare does not do so.
+
+Ibsen's practice in this matter has been compared with that of the Greek
+dramatists, who also were apt to attack their crisis in the middle, or
+even towards the end, rather than at the beginning. It must not be
+forgotten, however, that there is one great difference between his
+position and theirs. They could almost always rely upon a general
+knowledge, on the part of the audience, of the theme with which they
+were dealing. The purpose even of the Euripidean prologue is not so much
+to state unknown facts, as to recall facts vaguely remembered, to state
+the particular version of a legend which the poet proposes to adopt, and
+to define the point in the development of the legend at which he is
+about to set his figures in motion. Ibsen, on the other hand, drew upon
+no storehouse of tradition. He had to convey to his audience everything
+that he wanted them to know; and this was often a long and complex
+series of facts.
+
+The earliest play in which Ibsen can be said to show maturity of
+craftsmanship is _The Vikings at Helgeland_. It is curious to note that
+both in _The Vikings_ and in _The Pretenders_, two plays which are in
+some measure comparable with Shakespearean tragedies, he opens with a
+firmly-touched _einleitende Akkord_. In _The Vikings_, Ornulf and his
+sons encounter and fight with Sigurd and his men, very much after the
+fashion of the Montagues and Capulets in _Romeo and Juliet_. In _The
+Pretenders_ the rival factions of Haakon and Skule stand outside the
+cathedral of Bergen, intently awaiting the result of the ordeal which is
+proceeding within; and though they do not there and then come to blows,
+the air is electrical with their conflicting ambitions and passions. His
+modern plays, on the other hand, Ibsen opens quietly enough, though
+usually with some more or less arresting little incident, calculated to
+arouse immediate curiosity. One may cite as characteristic examples the
+hurried colloquy between Engstrand and Regina in _Ghosts_; Rebecca and
+Madam Helseth in _Rosmersholm_, watching to see whether Rosmer will
+cross the mill-race; and in _The Master Builder_, old Brovik's querulous
+outburst, immediately followed by the entrance of Solness and his
+mysterious behaviour towards Kaia. The opening of _Hedda Gabler_, with
+its long conversation between Miss Tesman and the servant Bertha, comes
+as near as Ibsen ever did to the conventional exposition of the French
+stage, conducted by a footman and a parlour-maid engaged in dusting the
+furniture. On the other hand, there never was a more masterly opening,
+in its sheer simplicity, than Nora's entrance in _A Doll's House_, and
+the little silent scene that precedes the appearance of Helmer.
+
+Regarding _The Vikings_ as Ibsen's first mature production, and
+surveying the whole series of his subsequent works in which he had stage
+presentation directly in view,[8] we find that in only two out of the
+fifteen plays does the whole action come within the frame of the
+picture. These two are _The League of Youth_ and _An Enemy of the
+People_. In neither of these have any antecedents to be stated; neither
+turns upon any disclosure of bygone events or emotions. We are, indeed,
+afforded brief glimpses into the past both of Stensgaard and of
+Stockmann; but the glimpses are incidental and inessential. It is
+certainly no mere coincidence that if one were asked to pick out the
+pieces of thinnest texture in all Ibsen's mature work, one would
+certainly select these two plays. Far be it from me to disparage _An
+Enemy of the People_; as a work of art it is incomparably greater than
+such a piece as _Pillars of Society_; but it is not so richly woven,
+not, as it were, so deep in pile. Written in half the time Ibsen usually
+devoted to a play, it is an outburst of humorous indignation, a _jeu
+d'esprit_, one might almost say, though the _jeu_ of a giant _esprit_.
+
+Observing the effect of comparative tenuity in these two plays, we
+cannot but surmise that the secret of the depth and richness of texture
+so characteristic of Ibsen's work, lay in his art of closely
+interweaving a drama of the present with a drama of the past. _An Enemy
+of the People_ is a straightforward, spirited melody; _The Wild Duck_
+and _Rosmersholm_ are subtly and intricately harmonized.
+
+Going a little more into detail, we find in Ibsen's work an
+extraordinary progress in the art of so unfolding the drama of the past
+as to make the gradual revelation no mere preface or prologue to the
+drama of the present, but an integral part of its action. It is true
+that in _The Vikings_ he already showed himself a master in this art.
+The great revelation--the disclosure of the fact that Sigurd, not
+Gunnar, did the deed of prowess which Hioerdis demanded of the man who
+should be her mate--this crucial revelation is brought about in a scene
+of the utmost dramatic intensity. The whole drama of the past,
+indeed--both its facts and its emotions--may be said to be dragged to
+light in the very stress and pressure of the drama of the present. Not a
+single detail of it is narrated in cold blood, as, for example, Prospero
+relates to Miranda the story of their marooning, or Horatio expounds the
+Norwegian-Danish political situation. I am not holding up _The Vikings_
+as a great masterpiece; it has many weaknesses both of substance and of
+method; but in this particular art of indistinguishably blending the
+drama of the present with the drama of the past, it is already
+consummate. _The Pretenders_ scarcely comes into the comparison. It is
+Ibsen's one chronicle-play; and, like Shakespeare, he did not shrink
+from employing a good deal of narrative, though his narratives, it must
+be said, are always introduced under such circumstances as to make them
+a vital part of the drama. It is when we come to the modern plays that
+we find the poet falling back upon conventional and somewhat clumsy
+methods of exposition, which he only by degrees, though by rapid
+degrees, unlearns.
+
+_The League of Youth_, as we have seen, requires no exposition. All we
+have to learn is the existing relations of the characters, which appear
+quite naturally as the action proceeds. But let us look at _Pillars of
+Society_. Here we have to be placed in possession of a whole antecedent
+drama: the intrigue of Karsten Bernick with Dina Dorf's mother, the
+threatened scandal, Johan Toennesen's vicarious acceptance of Bernick's
+responsibility, the subsidiary scandal of Lona Hessel's outburst on
+learning of Bernick's engagement to her half-sister, the report of an
+embezzlement committed by Johan before his departure for America. All
+this has to be conveyed to us in retrospect; or, rather, in the first
+place, we have to be informed of the false version of these incidents
+which is current in the little town, and on which Bernick's moral and
+commercial prestige is built up. What device, then, does Ibsen adopt to
+this end? He introduces a "sewing-bee" of tattling women, one of whom
+happens to be a stranger to the town, and unfamiliar with its gossip.
+Into her willing ear the others pour the popular version of the Bernick
+story; and, this impartment effected, the group of gossips disappears,
+to be heard of no more. These ladies perform the function, in fact, of
+the First, Second, and Third Gentlemen, so common in Elizabethan and
+pseudo-Elizabethan plays.[9] They are not quite so artless in their
+conventionality, for they bring with them the social atmosphere of the
+tattling little town, which is an essential factor in the drama.
+Moreover, their exposition is not a simple narrative of facts. It is to
+some extent subtilized by the circumstance that the facts are not facts,
+and that the gist of the drama is to lie in the gradual triumph of the
+truth over this tissue of falsehoods. Still, explain it as we may, the
+fact remains that in no later play does Ibsen initiate us into the
+preliminaries of his action by so hackneyed and unwieldy a device. It is
+no conventional canon, but a maxim of mere common sense, that the
+dramatist should be chary of introducing characters who have no personal
+share in the drama, and are mere mouthpieces for the conveyance of
+information. Nowhere else does Ibsen so flagrantly disregard so obvious
+a principle of dramatic economy.[10]
+
+When we turn to his next play, _A Doll's House_, we find that he has
+already made a great step in advance. He has progressed from the First,
+Second, and Third Gentlemen of the Elizabethans to the confidant[11] of
+the French classic drama. He even attempts, not very successfully, to
+disguise the confidant by giving her a personal interest, an effective
+share, in the drama. Nothing can really dissemble the fact that the long
+scene between Nora and Mrs. Linden, which occupies almost one-third of
+the first act, is simply a formal exposition, outside the action of the
+play. Just as it was providential that one of the house-wives of the
+sewing-bee in _Pillars of Society_ should have been a stranger to the
+town, so it was the luckiest of chances (for the dramatist's
+convenience) that an old school-friend should have dropped in from the
+clouds precisely half-an-hour before the entrance of Krogstad brings to
+a sudden head the great crisis of Nora's life. This happy conjuncture of
+events is manifestly artificial: a trick of the dramatist's trade: a
+point at which his art does not conceal his art. Mrs. Linden does not,
+like the dames of the sewing-bee, fade out of the saga; she even,
+through her influence on Krogstad, plays a determining part in the
+development of the action. But to all intents and purposes she remains a
+mere confidant, a pretext for Nora's review of the history of her
+married life. There are two other specimens of the genus confidant in
+Ibsen's later plays. Arnholm, in _The Lady from the Sea_, is little
+more; Dr. Herdal, in _The Master Builder_, is that and nothing else. It
+may be alleged in his defence that the family physician is the
+professional confidant of real life.
+
+In _Ghosts_, Ibsen makes a sudden leap to the extreme of his
+retrospective method. I am not one of those who consider this play
+Ibsen's masterpiece: I do not even place it, technically, in the first
+rank among his works. And why? Because there is here no reasonable
+equilibrium between the drama of the past and the drama of the present.
+The drama of the past is almost everything, the drama of the present
+next to nothing. As soon as we have probed to the depths the Alving
+marriage and its consequences, the play is over, and there is nothing
+left but for Regina to set off in pursuit of the joy of life, and for
+Oswald to collapse into imbecility. It is scarcely an exaggeration to
+call the play all exposition and no drama. Here for the first time,
+however, Ibsen perfected his peculiar gift of imparting tense dramatic
+interest to the unveiling of the past. While in one sense the play is
+all exposition, in another sense it may quite as truly be said to
+contain no exposition; for it contains no narrative delivered in cold
+blood, in mere calm retrospection, as a necessary preliminary to the
+drama which is in the meantime waiting at the door. In other words, the
+exposition is all drama, it _is_ the drama. The persons who are tearing
+the veils from the past, and for whom the veils are being torn, are
+intensely concerned in the process, which actually constitutes the
+dramatic crisis. The discovery of this method, or its rediscovery in
+modern drama,[12] was Ibsen's great technical achievement. In his best
+work, the progress of the unveiling occasions a marked development, or
+series of changes, in the actual and present relations of the
+characters. The drama of the past and the drama of the present proceed,
+so to speak, in interlacing rhythms, or, as I said before, in a rich,
+complex harmony. In _Ghosts_ this harmony is not so rich as in some
+later plays, because the drama of the present is disproportionately
+meagre. None the less, or all the more, is it a conspicuous example of
+Ibsen's method of raising his curtain, not at the beginning of the
+crisis, but rather at the beginning of the catastrophe.
+
+In _An Enemy of the People_, as already stated, he momentarily deserted
+that method, and gave us an action which begins, develops, and ends
+entirely within the frame of the picture. But in the two following
+plays, _The Wild Duck_ and _Rosmersholm_, he touched the highest point
+of technical mastery in his interweaving of the past with the present. I
+shall not attempt any analysis of the fabric of these plays. The process
+would be long, tedious, and unhelpful; for no one could hope to employ a
+method of such complexity without something of Ibsen's genius; and
+genius will evolve its methods for itself. Let me only ask the reader to
+compare the scene between old Werle and Gregers in the first act of _The
+Wild Duck_ with the scene between Nora and Mrs. Linden in the first act
+of _A Doll's House_, and mark the technical advance. Both scenes are, in
+a sense, scenes of exposition. Both are mainly designed to place us in
+possession of a sequence of bygone facts. But while the _Doll's House_
+scene is a piece of quiet gossip, brought about (as we have noted) by
+rather artificial means, and with no dramatic tension in it, the _Wild
+Duck_ scene is a piece of tense, one might almost say fierce, drama,
+fulfilling the Brunetiere definition in that it shows us two characters,
+a father and son, at open war with each other. The one scene is outside
+the real action, the other is an integral part of it. The one belongs to
+Ibsen's tentative period, the other ushers in, one might almost say, his
+period of consummate mastery.[13]
+
+_Rosmersholm_ is so obviously nothing but the catastrophe of an
+antecedent drama that an attempt has actually been made to rectify
+Ibsen's supposed mistake, and to write the tragedy of the deceased
+Beata. It was made by an unskilful hand; but even a skilful hand would
+scarcely have done more than prove how rightly Ibsen judged that the
+recoil of Rebecca's crime upon herself and Rosmer would prove more
+interesting, and in a very real sense more dramatic, than the somewhat
+vulgar process of the crime itself. The play is not so profound in its
+humanity as _The Wild Duck_, but it is Ibsen's masterpiece in the art of
+withdrawing veil after veil. From the technical point of view, it will
+repay the closest study.
+
+We need not look closely at the remaining plays. _Hedda Gabler_ is
+perhaps that in which a sound proportion between the past and the
+present is most successfully preserved. The interest of the present
+action is throughout very vivid; but it is all rooted in facts and
+relations of the past, which are elicited under circumstances of high
+dramatic tension. Here again it is instructive to compare the scene
+between Hedda and Thea, in the first act, with the scene between Nora
+and Mrs. Linden. Both are scenes of exposition: and each is, in its way,
+character-revealing; but the earlier scene is a passage of quite
+unemotional narrative; the later is a passage of palpitating drama. In
+the plays subsequent to _Hedda Gabler_, it cannot be denied that the
+past took the upper hand of the present to a degree which could only be
+justified by the genius of an Ibsen. Three-fourths of the action of _The
+Master Builder_, _Little Eyolf_, _John Gabriel Borkman_, and _When We
+Dead Awaken_, consists of what may be called a passionate analysis of
+the past. Ibsen had the art of making such an analysis absorbingly
+interesting; but it is not a formula to be commended for the practical
+purposes of the everyday stage.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+[Footnote 1: Writing of _Le Supplice d'une Femme_, Alexandre Dumas
+_fils_ said: "This situation I declare to be one of the most dramatic
+and interesting in all drama. But a situation is not an idea. An idea,
+has a beginning, a middle and an end: an exposition, a development, a
+conclusion. Any one can relate a dramatic situation: the art lies in
+preparing it, getting it accepted, rendering it possible, especially in
+untying the knot."]
+
+[Footnote 2: This is what we regard as peculiarly the method of Ibsen.
+There is, however, this essential difference, that, instead of narrating
+his preliminaries in cold blood, Ibsen, in his best work, _dramatizes_
+the narration.]
+
+[Footnote 3: See Chapter XII.]
+
+[Footnote 4: This must not be taken to imply that, in a good
+stage-version of the play, Fortinbras should be altogether omitted. Mr.
+Forbes Robertson, in his Lyceum revival of 1897, found several
+advantages in his retention. Among the rest, it permitted the retention
+of one of Hamlet's most characteristic soliloquies.]
+
+[Footnote 5: I omit all speculation as to the form which the story
+assumed in the _Ur-Hamlet_. We have no evidence on the point; and, as
+the poet was no doubt free to remodel the material as he thought fit,
+even in following his original he was making a deliberate
+artistic choice.]
+
+[Footnote 6: Shakespeare committed it in _Romeo and Juliet_, where he
+made Friar Laurence, in the concluding scene, retell the whole story of
+the tragedy. Even in so early a play, such a manifest redundancy seems
+unaccountable. A narrative of things already seen may, of course, be a
+trait of character in the person delivering it; but, in that case, it
+will generally be mendacious (for instance, Falstaff and the men in
+buckram). Or it may be introduced for the sake of its effect upon the
+characters to whom the narration is addressed. But in these cases its
+purpose is no longer to convey information to the audience--it belongs,
+not to the "intelligence department," but to the department of
+analysis.]
+
+[Footnote 7: I say "variety" rather than complexity because I take it
+that the emotions of all concerned are here too intense to be very
+complex. The effect of the scene would appear to lie in the rapidly
+increasing intensity of comparatively simple emotions in Hamlet, in the
+King, in the Queen, and in the amazed and bewildered courtiers.]
+
+[Footnote 8: This excludes _Love's Comedy, Brand, Peer Gynt_, and
+_Emperor and Galilean_.]
+
+[Footnote 9: See, for example, _King Henry VIII_, Act IV, and the
+opening scene of Tennyson's _Queen Mary_.]
+
+[Footnote 10: This rule of economy does not necessarily exclude a group
+of characters performing something like the function of the antique
+Chorus; that is to say, commenting upon the action from a more or less
+disinterested point of view. The function of _Kaffee-Klatsch_ in
+_Pillars of Society_ is not at all that of the Chorus, but rather that
+of the Euripidean Prologue, somewhat thinly disguised.]
+
+[Footnote 11: It is perhaps worth nothing that Gabriele d'Annunzio in
+_La Gioconda_, reverts to, and outdoes, the French classic convention,
+by giving us three actors and four confidants. The play consists of a
+crisis in three lives, passively, though sympathetically, contemplated
+by what is in effect a Chorus of two men and two women. It would be
+interesting to inquire why, in this particular play, such an abuse of
+the confidant seems quite admissible, if not conspicuously right.]
+
+[Footnote 12: Dryden, in his _Essay of Dramatic Poesy_, represents this
+method as being characteristic of Greek tragedy as a whole. The tragic
+poet, he says, "set the audience, as it were, at the post where the race
+is to be concluded; and, saving them the tedious expectation of seeing
+the poet set out and ride the beginning of the course, they suffer you
+not to behold him, till he is in sight of the goal and just upon you."
+Dryden seems to think that the method was forced upon them by "the rule
+of time."]
+
+[Footnote 13: It is a rash enterprise to reconstruct Ibsen, but one
+cannot help wondering how he would have planned _A Doll's House_ had he
+written it in the 'eighties instead of the 'seventies. One can imagine a
+long opening scene between Helmer and Nora in which a great deal of the
+necessary information might have been conveyed; while it would have
+heightened by contrast the effect of the great final duologue as we now
+possess it. Such information as could not possibly have been conveyed in
+dialogue with Helmer might, one would think, have been left for Nora's
+first scene with Krogstad, the effect of which it would have enhanced.
+Perhaps Mrs. Linden might with advantage have been retained, though not
+in her present character of confidant, in order to show Nora in relation
+to another woman.]
+
+
+
+
+_CHAPTER VII_
+
+EXPOSITION: ITS END AND ITS MEANS
+
+
+We have passed in rapid survey the practices of Shakespeare and Ibsen in
+respect of their point and method of attack upon their themes. What
+practical lessons can we now deduce from this examination?
+
+One thing is clear: namely, that there is no inherent superiority in one
+method over another. There are masterpieces in which the whole crisis
+falls within the frame of the picture, and masterpieces in which the
+greater part of the crisis has to be conveyed to us in retrospect, only
+the catastrophe being transacted before our eyes. Genius can manifest
+itself equally in either form.
+
+But each form has its peculiar advantages. You cannot, in a
+retrospective play like _Rosmersholm_, attain anything like the
+magnificent onward rush of Othello, which moves--
+
+               "Like to the Pontick sea
+  Whose icy current and compulsive course
+  Ne'er feels retiring ebb, but keeps due on
+  To the Propontick and the Hellespont."
+
+The movement of _Rosmersholm_ is rather like that of a winding river,
+which flows with a full and steady current, but seems sometimes to be
+almost retracing its course. If, then, you aim at rapidity of movement,
+you will choose a theme which leaves little or nothing to retrospect;
+and conversely, if you have a theme the whole of which falls easily and
+conveniently within the frame of the picture, you will probably take
+advantage of the fact to give your play animated and rapid movement.
+
+There is an undeniable attraction in a play which constitutes, so to
+speak, one brisk and continuous adventure, begun, developed, and ended
+before our eyes. For light comedy in particular is this a desirable
+form, and for romantic plays in which no very searching character-study
+is attempted. _The Taming of the Shrew_ no doubt passed for a light
+comedy in Shakespeare's day, though we describe it by a briefer name.
+Its rapid, bustling action is possible because we are always ready to
+take the character of a shrew for granted. It would have been a very
+different play had the poet required to account for Katharine's
+peculiarities of temper by a retrospective study of her heredity and
+upbringing. Many eighteenth-century comedies are single-adventure plays,
+or dual-adventure plays, in the sense that the main action sometimes
+stands aside to let an underplot take the stage. Both _She Stoops to
+Conquer_ and _The Rivals_ are good examples of the rapid working-out of
+an intrigue, engendered, developed, and resolved all within the frame of
+the picture. Single-adventure plays of a more modern type are the elder
+Dumas's _Mademoiselle de Belle-Isle_, the younger Dumas's _Francillon_,
+Sardou's _Divorcons_, Sir Arthur Pinero's _Gay Lord Quex_, Mr. Shaw's
+_Devil's Disciple_, Oscar Wilde's _Importance of Being Earnest_, Mr.
+Galsworthy's _Silver Box_. Widely as these plays differ in type and
+tone, they are alike in this, that they do not attempt to present very
+complex character-studies, or to probe the deeps of human experience.
+The last play cited, _The Silver Box_, may perhaps be thought an
+exception to this rule; but, though the experience of the hapless
+charwoman is pitiful enough, hers is a simple soul, so inured to
+suffering that a little more or less is no such great matter. The play
+is an admirable genre-picture rather than a searching tragedy.
+
+The point to be observed is that, under modern conditions, it is
+difficult to produce a play of very complex psychological, moral, or
+emotional substance, in which the whole crisis comes within the frame of
+the picture. The method of attacking the crisis in the middle or towards
+the end is really a device for relaxing, in some measure, the narrow
+bounds of theatrical representation, and enabling the playwright to deal
+with a larger segment of human experience. It may be asked why modern
+conditions should in this respect differ from Elizabethan conditions,
+and why, if Shakespeare could produce such profound and complex
+tragedies as _Othello_ and _King Lear_ without a word of exposition or
+retrospect, the modern dramatist should not go and do likewise? The
+answer to this question is not simply that the modern dramatist is
+seldom a Shakespeare. That is true, but we must look deeper than that.
+There are, in fact, several points to be taken into consideration. For
+one thing--this is a minor point--Shakespeare had really far more
+elbow-room than the playwright of to-day. _Othello_ and _King Lear_, to
+say nothing of _Hamlet_, are exceedingly long plays. Something like a
+third of them is omitted in modern representation; and when we speak of
+their richness and complexity of characterization, we do not think
+simply of the plays as we see them compressed into acting limits, but of
+the plays as we know them in the study. It is possible, no doubt, for
+modern playwrights to let themselves go in the matter of length, and
+then print their plays with brackets or other marks to show the
+"passages omitted in representation." This is, however, essentially an
+inartistic practice, and one cannot regret that it has gone out of
+fashion. Another point to be considered is this: are Othello and Lear
+really very complex character-studies? They are extremely vivid: they
+are projected with enormous energy, in actions whose violence affords
+scope for the most vehement self-expression; but are they not, in
+reality, colossally simple rather than complex? It is true that in Lear
+the phenomena of insanity are reproduced with astonishing minuteness and
+truth; but this does not imply any elaborate analysis or demand any
+great space. Hamlet is complex; and were I "talking for victory," I
+should point out that _Hamlet_ is, of all the tragedies, precisely the
+one which does not come within the frame of the picture. But the true
+secret of the matter does not lie here: it lies in the fact that Hamlet
+unpacks his heart to us in a series of soliloquies--a device employed
+scarcely at all in the portrayal of Othello and Lear, and denied to the
+modern dramatist.[1] Yet again, the social position and environment of
+the great Shakespearean characters is taken for granted. No time is
+spent in "placing" them in a given stratum of society, or in
+establishing their heredity, traditions, education, and so forth. And,
+finally, the very copiousness of expression permitted by the rhetorical
+Elizabethan form came to Shakespeare's aid. The modern dramatist is
+hampered by all sorts of reticences. He has often to work rather in
+indirect suggestion than in direct expression. He has, in short, to
+submit to a hundred hampering conditions from which Shakespeare was
+exempt; wherefore, even if he had Shakespeare's genius, he would find it
+difficult to produce a very profound effect in a crisis worked out from
+first to last before the eyes of the audience.
+
+Nevertheless, as before stated, such a crisis has a charm of its own.
+There is a peculiar interest in watching the rise and development out of
+nothing, as it were, of a dramatic complication. For this class of play
+(despite the Shakespearean precedents) a quiet opening is often
+advisable, rather than a strong _einleitende Akkord_. "From calm,
+through storm, to calm," is its characteristic formula; whether the
+concluding calm be one of life and serenity or of despair and death. To
+my personal taste, one of the keenest forms of theatrical enjoyment is
+that of seeing the curtain go up on a picture of perfect tranquillity,
+wondering from what quarter the drama is going to arise, and then
+watching it gather on the horizon like a cloud no bigger than a man's
+hand. Of this type of opening, _An Enemy of the People_ provides us with
+a classic example; and among English plays we may cite Mr. Shaw's
+_Candida_, Mr. Barker's _Waste_, and Mr. Besier's _Don_, in which so
+sudden and unlooked-for a cyclone swoops down upon the calm of an
+English vicarage. An admirable instance of a fantastic type may be found
+in _Prunella_, by Messrs. Barker and Housman.[2]
+
+There is much to be said, however, in favour of the opening which does
+not present an aspect of delusive calm, but shows the atmosphere already
+charged with electricity. Compare, for instance, the opening of _The
+Case of Rebellious Susan_, by Mr. Henry Arthur Jones, with that of a
+French play of very similar theme--Dumas's _Francillon_. In the latter,
+we see the storm-cloud slowly gathering up on the horizon; in the
+former, it is already on the point of breaking, right overhead. Mr.
+Jones places us at the beginning, where Dumas leaves us at the end, of
+his first act. It is true that at the end of Mr. Jones's act he has not
+advanced any further than Dumas. The French author shows his heroine
+gradually working up to a nervous crisis, the English author introduces
+his heroine already at the height of her paroxysm, and the act consists
+of the unavailing efforts of her friends to smooth her down. The upshot
+is the same; but in Mr. Jones's act we are, as the French say, "in full
+drama" all the time, while in Dumas's we await the coming of the drama,
+and only by exerting all his wit, not to say over-exerting it, does he
+prevent our feeling impatient. I am not claiming superiority for either
+method; I merely point to a good example of two different ways of
+attacking the same problem.
+
+In _The Benefit of the Doubt_, by Sir Arthur Pinero, we have a crisply
+dramatic opening of the very best type. A few words from a contemporary
+criticism may serve to indicate the effect it produced on a first-night
+audience--
+
+  We are in the thick of the action at once, or at least in the thick
+  of the interest, so that the exposition, instead of being, so to
+  speak, a mere platform from which the train is presently to start,
+  becomes an inseparable part of the movement. The sense of dramatic
+  irony is strongly and yet delicately suggested. We foresee a
+  "peripety," apparent prosperity suddenly crumbling into disaster,
+  within the act itself; and, when it comes, it awakens our sympathy
+  and redoubles our interest.
+
+Almost the same words might be applied to the opening of _The Climbers_,
+by the late Clyde Fitch, one of the many individual scenes which make
+one deeply regret that Mr. Fitch did not live to do full justice to his
+remarkable talent.
+
+One of the ablest of recent openings is that of Mr. Galsworthy's _Silver
+Box_. The curtain rises upon a solid, dull, upper-middle-class
+dining-room, empty and silent, the electric lights burning, the tray
+with whiskey, siphon and cigarette-box marking the midnight hour. Then
+we have the stumbling, fumbling entrance of Jack Barthwick, beatifically
+drunk, his maudlin babble, and his ill-omened hospitality to the haggard
+loafer who follows at his heels. Another example of a high-pitched
+opening scene may be found in Mr. Perceval Landon's _The House
+Opposite_. Here we have a midnight parting between a married woman and
+her lover, in the middle of which the man, glancing at the lighted
+window of the house opposite, sees a figure moving in such a way as to
+suggest that a crime is being perpetrated. As a matter of fact, an old
+man is murdered, and his housekeeper is accused of the crime. The hero,
+if so he can be called, knows that it was a man, not a woman, who was in
+the victim's room that night; and the problem is: how can he give his
+evidence without betraying a woman's secret by admitting his presence in
+her house at midnight? I neither praise nor blame this class of story; I
+merely cite the play as one in which we plunge straight into the crisis,
+without any introductory period of tranquillity.
+
+The interest of Mr. Landon's play lay almost wholly in the story. There
+was just enough character in it to keep the story going, so to speak.
+The author might, on the other hand, have concentrated our attention on
+character, and made his play a soul-tragedy; but in that case it would
+doubtless have been necessary to take us some way backward in the
+heroine's antecedents and the history of her marriage. In other words,
+if the play had gone deeper into human nature, the preliminaries of the
+crisis would have had to be traced in some detail, possibly in a first
+act, introductory to the actual opening, but more probably, and better,
+in an exposition following the crisply touched _einleitende Akkord_.
+This brings us to the question how an exposition may best be managed.
+
+It may not unreasonably be contended, I think, that, when an exposition
+cannot be thoroughly dramatized--that is, wrung out, in the stress of
+the action, from the characters primarily concerned--it may best be
+dismissed, rapidly and even conventionally, by any not too improbable
+device. That is the principle on which Sir Arthur Pinero has always
+proceeded, and for which he has been unduly censured, by critics who
+make no allowances for the narrow limits imposed by custom and the
+constitution of the modern audience upon the playwrights of to-day. In
+_His House in Order_ (one of his greatest plays) Sir Arthur effects part
+of his exposition by the simple device of making Hilary Jesson a
+candidate for Parliament, and bringing on a reporter to interview his
+private secretary. The incident is perfectly natural and probable; all
+one can say of it is that it is perhaps an over-simplification of the
+dramatist's task.[3] _The Second Mrs. Tanqueray_ requires an unusual
+amount of preliminary retrospect. We have to learn the history of Aubrey
+Tanqueray's first marriage, with the mother of Ellean, as well as the
+history of Paula Ray's past life. The mechanism employed to this end has
+been much criticized, but seems to me admirable. Aubrey gives a farewell
+dinner-party to his intimate friends, Misquith and Jayne. Cayley
+Drummle, too, is expected, but has not arrived when the play opens.
+Without naming the lady, Aubrey announces to his guests his approaching
+marriage. He proposes to go out with them, and has one or two notes to
+write before doing so. Moreover, he is not sorry to give them an
+opportunity to talk over the announcement he has made; so he retires to
+a side-table in the same room, to do his writing. Misquith and Jayne
+exchange a few speeches in an undertone, and then Cayley Drummle comes
+in, bringing the story of George Orreyd's marriage to the unmentionable
+Miss Hervey. This story is so unpleasant to Tanqueray that, to get out
+of the conversation, he returns to his writing; but still he cannot help
+listening to Cayley's comments on George Orreyd's "disappearance"; and
+at last the situation becomes so intolerable to him that he purposely
+leaves the room, bidding the other two "Tell Cayley the news." The
+technical manipulation of all this seems to me above reproach
+--dramatically effective and yet life-like in every detail. If
+one were bound to raise an objection, it would be to the coincidence
+which brings to Cayley's knowledge, on one and the same evening, two
+such exactly similar misalliances in his own circle of acquaintance. But
+these are just the coincidences that do constantly happen. Every one
+knows that life is full of them.
+
+The exposition might, no doubt, have been more economically effected.
+Cayley Drummle might have figured as sole confidant and chorus; or even
+he might have been dispensed with, and all that was necessary might have
+appeared in colloquies between Aubrey and Paula on the one hand, Aubrey
+and Ellean on the other. But Cayley as sole confidant--the "Charles, his
+friend," of eighteenth-century comedy--would have been more plainly
+conventional than Cayley as one of a trio of Aubrey's old cronies,
+representing the society he is sacrificing in entering upon this
+experimental marriage; and to have conveyed the necessary information
+without any confidant or chorus at all would (one fancies) have strained
+probability, or, still worse, impaired consistency of character. Aubrey
+could not naturally discuss his late wife either with her successor or
+with her daughter; while, as for Paula's past, all he wanted was to
+avert his eyes from it. I do not say that these difficulties might not
+have been overcome; for, in the vocabulary of the truly ingenious
+dramatist there is no such word as impossible. But I do suggest that the
+result would scarcely have been worth the trouble, and that it is
+hyper-criticism which objects to an exposition so natural and probable
+as that of _The Second Mrs. Tanqueray_, simply on the ground that
+certain characters are introduced for the purpose of conveying certain
+information. It would be foolish to expect of every work of art an
+absolutely austere economy of means.
+
+Sometimes, however, Sir Arthur Pinero injudiciously emphasizes the
+artifices employed to bring about an exposition. In _The Thunderbolt_,
+for instance, in order that the Mortimores' family solicitor may without
+reproach ask for information on matters with which a family solicitor
+ought to be fully conversant, it has to be explained that the senior
+partner of the firm, who had the Mortimore business specially in hand,
+has been called away to London, and that a junior partner has taken his
+place. Such a rubbing-in, as it were, of an obvious device ought at all
+hazards to be avoided. If the information cannot be otherwise imparted
+(as in this case it surely could), the solicitor had better be allowed
+to ask one or two improbable questions--it is the lesser evil of
+the two.
+
+When the whole of a given subject cannot be got within the limits of
+presentation, is there any means of determining how much should be left
+for retrospect, and at what point the curtain ought to be raised? The
+principle would seem to be that slow and gradual processes, and
+especially separate lines of causation, should be left outside the frame
+of the picture, and that the curtain should be raised at the point where
+separate lines have converged, and where the crisis begins to move
+towards its solution with more or less rapidity and continuity. The
+ideas of rapidity and continuity may be conveniently summed up in the
+hackneyed and often misapplied term, unity of action. Though the unities
+of time and place are long ago exploded as binding principles--indeed,
+they never had any authority in English drama--yet it is true that a
+broken-backed action, whether in time or space, ought, so far as
+possible, to be avoided. An action with a gap of twenty years in it may
+be all very well in melodrama or romance, but scarcely in higher and
+more serious types of drama.[4] Especially is it to be desired that
+interest should be concentrated on one set of characters, and should not
+be frittered away on subsidiary or preliminary personages. Take, for
+instance, the case of _The Second Mrs. Tanqueray_. It would have been
+theoretically possible for Sir Arthur Pinero to have given us either (or
+both) of two preliminary scenes: he might have shown us the first Mrs.
+Tanqueray at home, and at the same time have introduced us more at large
+to the characters of Aubrey and Ellean; or he might have depicted for us
+one of the previous associations of Paula Ray--might perhaps have let us
+see her "keeping house" with Hugh Ardale. But either of these openings
+would have been disproportionate and superfluous. It would have excited,
+or tried to excite, our interest in something that was not the real
+theme of the play, and in characters which were to drop out before the
+real theme--the Aubrey-Paula marriage--was reached. Therefore the
+author, in all probability, never thought of beginning at either of
+these points. He passed instinctively to the point at which the two
+lines of causation converged, and from which the action could be carried
+continuously forward by one set of characters. He knew that we could
+learn in retrospect all that it was necessary for us to know of the
+first Mrs. Tanqueray, and that to introduce her in the flesh would be
+merely to lead the interest of the audience into a blind alley, and to
+break the back of his action. Again, in _His House in Order_ it may seem
+that the intrigue between Maurewarde and the immaculate Annabel, with
+its tragic conclusion, would have made a stirring introductory act. But
+to have presented such an act would have been to destroy the unity of
+the play, which centres in the character of Nina. Annabel is "another
+story"; and to have told, or rather shown us, more of it than was
+absolutely necessary, would have been to distract our attention from the
+real theme of the play, while at the same time fatally curtailing the
+all-too-brief time available for the working-out of that theme. There
+are cases, no doubt, when verbal exposition may advantageously be
+avoided by means of a dramatized "Prologue"--a single act, constituting
+a little drama in itself, and generally separated by a considerable
+space of time from the action proper. But this method is scarcely to be
+commended, except, as aforesaid, for purposes of melodrama and romance.
+A "Prologue" is for such plays as _The Prisoner of Zenda_ and _The Only
+Way_, not for such plays as _His House in Order_.
+
+The question whether a legato or a staccato opening be the more
+desirable must be decided in accordance with the nature and
+opportunities of each theme. The only rule that can be stated is that,
+when the attention of the audience is required for an exposition of any
+length, some attempt ought to be made to awaken in advance their general
+interest in the theme and characters. It is dangerous to plunge straight
+into narrative, or unemotional discussion, without having first made the
+audience actively desire the information to be conveyed to them.
+Especially is it essential that the audience should know clearly who are
+the subjects of the discussion or narrative--that they should not be
+mere names to them. It is a grave flaw in the construction of Mr.
+Granville Barker's otherwise admirable play _Waste_, that it should open
+with a long discussion, by people whom we scarcely know, of other people
+whom we do not know at all, whose names we may or may not have noted on
+the playbill.
+
+Trebell, Lord Charles Cantelupe, and Blackborough ought certainly to
+have been presented to us in the flesh, however briefly and summarily,
+before we were asked to interest ourselves in their characters and the
+political situation arising from them.
+
+There is, however, one limitation to this principle. A great effect is
+sometimes attained by retarding the entrance of a single leading figure
+for a whole act, or even two, while he is so constantly talked about as
+to beget in the audience a vivid desire to make his personal
+acquaintance. Thus Moliere's Tartufe does not come on the stage until
+the third act of the comedy which bears his name. Ibsen's John Gabriel
+Borkman is unseen until the second act, though (through his wife's ears)
+we have already heard him pacing up and down his room like a wolf in his
+cage. Dubedat, in _The Doctor's Dilemma_, is not revealed to us in the
+flesh until the second act. But for this device to be successful, it is
+essential that only one leading character[5] should remain unseen, on
+whom the attention of the audience may, by that very fact, be riveted.
+In _Waste_, for instance, all would have been well had it suited Mr.
+Barker's purpose to leave Trebell invisible till the second act, while
+all the characters in the first act, clearly presented to us, canvassed
+him from their various points of view. Keen expectancy, in short, is the
+most desirable frame of mind in which an audience can be placed, so long
+as the expectancy be not ultimately disappointed. But there is no less
+desirable mental attitude than that of straining after gleams of
+guidance in an expository twilight.
+
+The advantage of a staccato opening--or, to vary the metaphor, a brisk,
+highly aerated introductory passage--is clearly exemplified in _A Doll's
+House_. It would have been quite possible for Ibsen to have sent up his
+curtain upon Nora and Mrs. Linden seated comfortably before the stove,
+and exchanging confidences as to their respective careers. Nothing
+indispensable would have been omitted; but how languid would have been
+the interest of the audience! As it is, a brief, bright scene has
+already introduced us, not only to Nora, but to Helmer, and aroused an
+eager desire for further insight into the affairs of this--to all
+appearance--radiantly happy household. Therefore, we settle down without
+impatience to listen to the fireside gossip of the two old
+school-fellows.
+
+The problem of how to open a play is complicated in the English theatre
+by considerations wholly foreign to art. Until quite recently, it used
+to be held impossible for a playwright to raise his curtain upon his
+leading character or characters, because the actor-manager would thus be
+baulked of his carefully arranged "entrance" and "reception," and,
+furthermore, because twenty-five per cent of the audience would probably
+arrive about a quarter of an hour late, and would thus miss the opening
+scene or scenes. It used at one time to be the fashion to add to the
+advertisement of a play an entreaty that the audience should be
+punctually in their seats, "as the interest began with the rise of the
+curtain." One has seen this assertion made with regard to plays in
+which, as a matter of fact, the interest had not begun at the fall of
+the curtain. Nowadays, managers, and even leading ladies, are a good
+deal less insistent on their "reception" than they used to be. They
+realize that it may be a distinct advantage to hold the stage from the
+very outset. There are few more effective openings than that of _The
+Second Mrs. Tanqueray_, where we find Aubrey Tanqueray seated squarely
+at his bachelor dinner-table with Misquith on his right and Jayne on his
+left. It may even be taken as a principle that, where it is desired to
+give to one character a special prominence and predominance, it ought,
+if possible, to be the first figure on which the eye of the audience
+falls. In a Sherlock Holmes play, for example, the curtain ought
+assuredly to rise on the great Sherlock enthroned in Baker Street, with
+Dr. Watson sitting at his feet. The solitary entrance of Richard III
+throws his figure into a relief which could by no other means have been
+attained. So, too, it would have been a mistake on Sophocles' part to
+let any one but the protagonist open the _Oedipus Rex_.
+
+So long as the fashion of late dinners continues, however, it must
+remain a measure of prudence to let nothing absolutely essential to the
+comprehension of a play be said or done during the first ten minutes
+after the rise of the curtain. Here, again, _A Doll's House_ may be
+cited as a model, though Ibsen, certainly, had no thought of the British
+dinner-hour in planning the play. The opening scene is just what the
+ideal opening scene ought to be--invaluable, yet not indispensable. The
+late-comer who misses it deprives himself of a preliminary glimpse into
+the characters of Nora and Helmer and the relation between them; but he
+misses nothing that is absolutely essential to his comprehension of the
+play as a whole. This, then, would appear to be a sound maxim both of
+art and prudence: let your first ten minutes by all means be crisp,
+arresting, stimulating, but do not let them embody any absolutely vital
+matter, ignorance of which would leave the spectator in the dark as to
+the general design and purport of the play.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+[Footnote 1: See Chapter XXIII.]
+
+[Footnote 2: Henri Becque's two best-known plays aptly exemplify the two
+types of opening. In _Les Corbeaux_ we have almost an entire act of calm
+domesticity in which the only hint of coming trouble is an allusion to
+Vigneron's attacks of vertigo. In _La Parisienne_ Clotilde and Lafont
+are in the thick of a vehement quarrel over a letter. It proceeds for
+ten minutes or so, at the end of which Clotilde says, "Prenez garde,
+voila mon mari!"--and we find that the two are not husband and wife, but
+wife and lover.]
+
+[Footnote 3: Mrs. Craigie ("John Oliver Hobbes") opened her very
+successful play, _The Ambassador_, with a scene between Juliet
+Desborough and her sister Alice, a nun, who apparently left her convent
+specially to hear her sister's confession, and then returned to it for
+ever. This was certainly not an economical form of exposition, but it
+was not unsuited to the type of play.]
+
+[Footnote 4: In that charming comedy, _Rosemary_, by Messrs. Parker and
+Carson, there is a gap of fifty years between the last act and its
+predecessor; but the so-called last act is only an "epi-monologue."]
+
+[Footnote 5: Or at most two closely connected characters: for instance,
+a husband and wife.]
+
+
+
+
+_CHAPTER VIII_
+
+THE FIRST ACT
+
+
+Both in the theory and in practice, of late years, war has been declared
+in certain quarters against the division of a play into acts. Students
+of the Elizabethan stage have persuaded themselves, by what I believe to
+be a complete misreading of the evidence, that Shakespeare did not, as
+it were, "think in acts," but conceived his plays as continuous series
+of events, without any pause or intermission in their flow. It can, I
+think, be proved beyond any shadow of doubt that they are wrong in this;
+that the act division was perfectly familiar to Shakespeare, and was
+used by him to give to the action of his plays a rhythm which ought not,
+in representation, to be obscured or falsified. It is true that in the
+Elizabethan theatre there was no need of long interacts for the change
+of scenes, and that such interacts are an abuse that calls for remedy.
+But we have abundant evidence that the act division was sometimes marked
+on the Elizabethan stage, and have no reason to doubt that it was always
+more or less recognized, and was present to Shakespeare's mind no less
+than to Ibsen's or Pinero's.
+
+Influenced in part, perhaps, by the Elizabethan theorists, but mainly by
+the freakishness of his own genius, Mr. Bernard Shaw has taken to
+writing plays in one continuous gush of dialogue, and has put forward,
+more or less seriously, the claim that he is thereby reviving the
+practice of the Greeks. In a prefatory note to _Getting Married_,
+he says--
+
+  "There is a point of some technical interest to be noted in this
+  play. The customary division into acts and scenes has been disused,
+  and a return made to unity of time and place, as observed in the
+  ancient Greek drama. In the foregoing tragedy, _The Doctor's
+  Dilemma_, there are five acts; the place is altered five times; and
+  the time is spread over an undetermined period of more than a year.
+  No doubt the strain on the attention of the audience and on the
+  ingenuity of the playwright is much less; but I find in practice
+  that the Greek form is inevitable when the drama reaches a certain
+  point in poetic and intellectual evolution. Its adoption was not, on
+  my part, a deliberate display of virtuosity in form, but simply the
+  spontaneous falling of a play of ideas into the form most suitable
+  to it, which turned out to be the classical form."
+
+It is hard to say whether Mr. Shaw is here writing seriously or in a
+mood of solemn facetiousness. Perhaps he himself is not quite clear on
+the point. There can be no harm, at any rate, in assuming that he
+genuinely believes the unity of _Getting Married_ to be "a return to the
+unity observed in," say, the _Oedipus Rex_, and examining a little into
+so pleasant an illusion.
+
+It is, if I may so phrase it, a double-barrelled illusion. _Getting
+Married_ has not the unity of the Greek drama, and the Greek drama has
+not the unity of _Getting Married_. Whatever "unity" is predicable of
+either form of art is a wholly different thing from whatever "unity" is
+predicable of the other. Mr. Shaw, in fact, is, consciously or
+unconsciously, playing with words, very much as Lamb did when he said to
+the sportsman, "Is that your own hare or a wig?" There are, roughly
+speaking, three sorts of unity: the unity of a plum-pudding, the unity
+of a string or chain, and, the unity of the Parthenon. Let us call them,
+respectively, unity of concoction, unity of concatenation, and
+structural or organic unity. The second form of unity is that of most
+novels and some plays. They present a series of events, more or less
+closely intertwined or interlinked with one another, but not built up
+into any symmetrical interdependence. This unity of longitudinal
+extension does not here concern us, for it is not that of either Shaw or
+Sophocles. Plum-pudding unity, on the other hand--the unity of a number
+of ingredients stirred up together, put in a cloth, boiled to a certain
+consistency, and then served up in a blue flame of lambent humour--that
+is precisely the unity of _Getting Married_. A jumble of ideas,
+prejudices, points of view, and whimsicalities on the subject of
+marriage is tied up in a cloth and boiled into a sort of glutinous
+fusion or confusion, so that when the cloth is taken off they do not at
+once lose the coherent rotundity conferred upon them by pressure from
+without. In a quite real sense, the comparison does more than justice to
+the technical qualities of the play; for in a good plum-pudding the due
+proportions of the ingredients are carefully studied, whereas Mr. Shaw
+flings in recklessly whatever comes into his head. At the same time it
+is undeniably true that he shows us a number of people in one room,
+talking continuously and without a single pause, on different aspects of
+a given theme. If this be unity, then he has achieved it. In the
+theatre, as a matter of fact, the plum-pudding was served up in three
+chunks instead of one; but this was a mere concession to human weakness.
+The play had all the globular unity of a pill, though it happened to be
+too big a pill to be swallowed at one gulp.
+
+Turning now to the _Oedipus_--I choose that play as a typical example of
+Greek tragedy--what sort of unity do we find? It is the unity, not of a
+continuous mass or mash, but of carefully calculated proportion, order,
+interrelation of parts--the unity of a fine piece of architecture, or
+even of a living organism. The inorganic continuity of _Getting Married_
+it does not possess. If that be what we understand by unity, then Shaw
+has it and Sophocles has not. The _Oedipus_ is as clearly divided into
+acts as is _Hamlet_ or _Hedda Gabler_. In modern parlance, we should
+probably call it a play in five acts and an epilogue. It so happened
+that the Greek theatre did not possess a curtain, and did possess a
+Chorus; consequently, the Greek dramatist employed the Chorus, as we
+employ the curtain, to emphasize the successive stages of his action, to
+mark the rhythm of its progress, and, incidentally, to provide
+resting-places for the mind of the audience--intervals during which the
+strain upon their attention was relaxed, or at any rate varied. It is
+not even true that the Greeks habitually aimed at such continuity of
+time as we find in _Getting Married_. They treated time ideally, the
+imaginary duration of the story being, as a rule, widely different from
+the actual time of representation. In this respect the _Oedipus_ is
+something of an exception, since the events might, at a pinch, be
+conceived as passing within the "two hours' traffick of the stage"; but
+in many cases a whole day, or even more, must be understood to be
+compressed within these two hours. It is true that the continuous
+presence of the Chorus made it impossible for the Greeks to overleap
+months and years, as we do on the modern stage; but they did not aim at
+that strict coincidence of imaginary with actual time which Mr. Shaw
+believes himself to have achieved.[1] Even he, however, subjects the
+events which take place behind the scenes to a good deal of "ideal"
+compression.
+
+Of course, when Mr. Shaw protests that, in _Getting Married_, he did not
+indulge in a "deliberate display of virtuosity of form," that is only
+his fun. You cannot well have virtuosity of form where there is no form.
+What he did was to rely upon his virtuosity of dialogue to enable him to
+dispense with form. Whether he succeeded or not is a matter of opinion
+which does not at present concern us. The point to be noted is the
+essential difference between the formless continuity of _Getting
+Married_, and the sedulous ordering and balancing of clearly
+differentiated parts, which went to the structure of a Greek tragedy. A
+dramatist who can so develop his story as to bring it within the
+quasi-Aristotelean "unities" performs a curious but not particularly
+difficult or valuable feat; but this does not, or ought not to, imply
+the abandonment of the act-division, which is no mere convention, but a
+valuable means of marking the rhythm of the story. When, on the other
+hand, you have no story to tell, the act-division is manifestly
+superfluous; but it needs no "virtuosity" to dispense with it.
+
+It is a grave error, then, to suppose that the act is a mere division of
+convenience, imposed by the limited power of attention of the human
+mind, or by the need of the human body for occasional refreshment. A
+play with a well-marked, well-balanced act-structure is a higher
+artistic organism than a play with no act-structure, just as a
+vertebrate animal is higher than a mollusc. In every crisis of real life
+(unless it be so short as to be a mere incident) there is a rhythm of
+rise, progress, culmination and solution. We are not always, perhaps not
+often, conscious of these stages; but that is only because we do not
+reflect upon our experiences while they are passing, or map them out in
+memory when they are past. We do, however, constantly apply to real-life
+crises expressions borrowed more or less directly from the terminology
+of the drama. We say, somewhat incorrectly, "Things have come to a
+climax," meaning thereby a culmination; or we say, "The catastrophe is
+at hand," or, again, "What a fortunate _denouement_!" Be this as it may,
+it is the business of the dramatist to analyse the crises with which he
+deals, and to present them to us in their rhythm of growth, culmination,
+solution. To this end the act-division is--not, perhaps, essential,
+since the rhythm may be marked even in a one-act play--but certainly of
+enormous and invaluable convenience. "Si l'acte n'existait pas, il
+faudrait l'inventer"; but as a matter of fact it has existed wherever,
+in the Western world, the drama has developed beyond its rudest
+beginnings.
+
+It was doubtless the necessity for marking this rhythm that Aristotle
+had in mind when he said that a dramatic action must have a beginning, a
+middle and an end. Taken in its simplicity, this principle would
+indicate the three-act division as the ideal scheme for a play. As a
+matter of fact, many of the best modern plays in all languages fall into
+three acts; one has only to note _Monsieur Alphonse, Francillon, La
+Parisienne, Amoureuse, A Doll's House, Ghosts, The Master Builder,
+Little Eyolf, Johannisfeuer, Caste, Candida, The Benefit of the Doubt,
+The Importance of Being Earnest, The Silver Box_; and, furthermore, many
+old plays which are nominally in five acts really fall into a triple
+rhythm, and might better have been divided into three. Alexandrian
+precept, handed on by Horace, gave to the five act division a purely
+arbitrary sanction, which induced playwrights to mask the natural rhythm
+of their themes beneath this artificial one.[2] But in truth the
+three-act division ought no more to be elevated into an absolute rule
+than the five-act division. We have seen that a play consists, or ought
+to consist, of a great crisis, worked out through a series of minor
+crises. An act, then, ought to consist either of a minor crisis, carried
+to its temporary solution, or of a well-marked group of such crises; and
+there can be no rule as to the number of such crises which ought to
+present themselves in the development of a given theme. On the modern
+stage, five acts may be regarded as the maximum, simply by reason of the
+time-limit imposed by social custom on a performance. But one frequently
+sees a melodrama divided into "five acts and eight tableaux," or even
+more; which practically means that the play is in eight, or nine, or ten
+acts, but that there will be only the four conventional interacts in the
+course of the evening. The playwright should not let himself be
+constrained by custom to force his theme into the arbitrary mould of a
+stated number of acts. Three acts is a good number, four acts is a good
+number,[3] there is no positive objection to five acts. Should he find
+himself hankering after more acts, he will do well to consider whether
+he be not, at one point or another, failing in the art of condensation
+and trespassing on the domain of the novelist.
+
+There is undoubted convenience in the rule of the modern stage: "One
+act, one scene." A change of scene in the middle of an act is not only
+materially difficult, but tends to impair the particular order of
+illusion at which the modern drama aims.[4] Roughly, indeed, an act may
+be defined as any part of a given crisis which works itself out at one
+time and in one place; but more fundamentally it is a segment of the
+action during which the author desires to hold the attention of his
+audience unbroken and unrelaxed. It is no mere convention, however,
+which decrees that the flight of time is best indicated by an interact.
+When the curtain is down, the action on the stage remains, as it were,
+in suspense. The audience lets its attention revert to the affairs of
+real life; and it is quite willing, when the mimic world is once more
+revealed, to suppose that any reasonable space of time has elapsed while
+its thoughts were occupied with other matters. It is much more difficult
+for it to accept a wholly imaginary lapse of time while its attention is
+centred on the mimic world. Some playwrights have of late years adopted
+the device of dropping their curtain once, or even twice, in the middle
+of an act, to indicate an interval of a few minutes, or even of an
+hour--for instance, of the time between "going in to dinner" and the
+return of the ladies to the drawing-room. Sir Arthur Pinero employs this
+device with good effect in _Iris_; so does Mr. Granville Barker in
+_Waste_, and Mr. Galsworthy in _The Silver Box_. It is certainly far
+preferable to that "ideal" treatment of time which was common in the
+French drama of the nineteenth century, and survives to this day in
+plays adapted or imitated from the French.
+
+I remember seeing in London, not very long ago, a one-act play on the
+subject of Rouget de l'Isle. In the space of about half-an-hour, he
+handed the manuscript of the "Marseillaise" to an opera-singer whom he
+adored, she took it away and sang it at the Opera, it caught the popular
+ear from that one performance, and the dying Rouget heard it sung by the
+passing multitude in the streets within about fifteen minutes of the
+moment when it first left his hands. (The whole piece, I repeat,
+occupied about half-an-hour; but as a good deal of that time was devoted
+to preliminaries, not more than fifteen minutes can have elapsed between
+the time when the cantatrice left Rouget's garret and the time when all
+Paris was singing the "Marseillaise.") This is perhaps an extreme
+instance of the ideal treatment of time; but one could find numberless
+cases in the works of Scribe, Labiche, and others, in which the
+transactions of many hours are represented as occurring within the
+limits of a single act. Our modern practice eschews such licenses. It
+will often compress into an act of half-an-hour more events than would
+probably happen in real life in a similar space of time, but not such a
+train of occurrences as to transcend the limits of possibility. It must
+be remembered, however, that the standard of verisimilitude naturally
+and properly varies with the seriousness of the theme under treatment.
+Improbabilities are admissible in light comedy, and still more in farce,
+which would wreck the fortunes of a drama purporting to present a sober
+and faithful picture of real life.
+
+Acts, then, mark the time-stages in the development of a given crisis;
+and each act ought to embody a minor crisis of its own, with a
+culmination and a temporary solution. It would be no gain, but a loss,
+if a whole two hours' or three hours' action could be carried through in
+one continuous movement, with no relaxation of the strain upon the
+attention of the audience, and without a single point at which the
+spectator might review what was past and anticipate what was to come.
+The act-division positively enhances the amount of pleasurable emotion
+through which the audience passes. Each act ought to stimulate and
+temporarily satisfy an interest of its own, while definitely advancing
+the main action. The psychological principle is evident enough; namely,
+that there is more sensation to be got out of three or four
+comparatively brief experiences, suited to our powers of perception,
+than out of one protracted experience, forced on us without relief,
+without contrast, in such a way as to fatigue and deaden our faculties.
+Who would not rather drink three, four, or five glasses of wine than put
+the bottle to his lips and let its contents pour down his throat in one
+long draught? Who would not rather see a stained-glass window broken
+into three, four, or five cunningly-proportioned "lights," than a great
+flat sheet of coloured glass, be its design never so effective?
+
+It used to be the fashion in mid Victorian melodramas to give each act a
+more or less alluring title of its own. I am far from recommending the
+revival of this practice; but it might be no bad plan for a beginner, in
+sketching out a play, to have in his mind, or in his private notes, a
+descriptive head-line for each act, thereby assuring himself that each
+had a character of its own, and at the same time contributed its due
+share to the advancement of the whole design. Let us apply this
+principle to a Shakespearean play--for example, to _Macbeth_. The act
+headings might run somewhat as follows--
+
+  ACT I.--TEMPTATION.
+
+  ACT II.--MURDER AND USURPATION.
+
+  ACT III.--THE FRENZY OF CRIME AND THE HAUNTING OF REMORSE.
+
+  ACT IV.--GATHERING RETRIBUTION.
+
+  ACT V.--RETRIBUTION CONSUMMATED.
+
+Can it be doubted that Shakespeare had in his mind the rhythm marked by
+this act-division? I do not mean, of course, that these phrases, or
+anything like them, were present to his consciousness, but merely that
+he "thought in acts," and mentally assigned to each act its definite
+share in the development of the crisis.
+
+Turning now to Ibsen, let us draw up an act-scheme for the simplest and
+most straightforward of his plays, _An Enemy of the People_. It might
+run as follows:
+
+  ACT I.--THE INCURABLE OPTIMIST.--Dr. Stockmann announces his
+  discovery of the insanitary condition of the Baths.
+
+  ACT II.--THE COMPACT MAJORITY.--Dr. Stockmann finds that he will
+  have to fight vested interests before the evils he has discovered
+  can be remedied, but is assured that the Compact Majority is at
+  his back.
+
+  ACT III.--THE TURN OF FORTUNE.--The Doctor falls from the pinnacle
+  of his optimistic confidence, and learns that he will have the
+  Compact Majority, not _at_, but _on_ his back.
+
+  ACT IV.--THE COMPACT MAJORITY ON THE WARPATH.--The crowd, finding
+  that its immediate interests are identical with those of the
+  privileged few, joins with the bureaucracy in shouting down the
+  truth, and organizing a conspiracy of silence.
+
+  ACT V.--OPTIMISM DISILLUSIONED BUT INDOMITABLE.--Dr. Stockmann,
+  gagged and thrown back into poverty, is tempted to take flight, but
+  determines to remain in his native place and fight for its moral, if
+  not for its physical, sanitation.
+
+Each of these acts is a little drama in itself, while each leads forward
+to the next, and marks a distinct phase in the development of
+the crisis.
+
+When the younger Dumas asked his father, that master of dramatic
+movement, to initiate him into the secret of dramatic craftsmanship, the
+great Alexandre replied in this concise formula: "Let your first act be
+clear, your last act brief, and the whole interesting." Of the wisdom of
+the first clause there can be no manner of doubt. Whether incidentally
+or by way of formal exposition, the first act ought to show us clearly
+who the characters are, what are their relations and relationships, and
+what is the nature of the gathering crisis. It is very important that
+the attention of the audience should not be overstrained in following
+out needlessly complex genealogies and kinships. How often, at the end
+of a first act, does one turn to one's neighbour and say, "Are Edith and
+Adela sisters or only half-sisters?" or, "Did you gather what was the
+villain's claim to the title?" If a story cannot be made clear without
+an elaborate study of one or more family trees, beware of it. In all
+probability, it is of very little use for dramatic purposes. But before
+giving it up, see whether the relationships, and other relations, cannot
+be simplified. Complexities which at first seemed indispensable will
+often prove to be mere useless encumbrances.
+
+In _Pillars of Society_ Ibsen goes as far as any playwright ought to go
+in postulating fine degrees of kinship--and perhaps a little further.
+Karsten Bernick has married into a family whose gradations put something
+of a strain on the apprehension and memory of an audience. We have to
+bear in mind that Mrs. Bernick has (_a_) a half-sister, Lona Hessel;
+(_b_) a full brother, Johan Toennesen; (_c_) a cousin, Hilmar Toennesen.
+Then Bernick has an unmarried sister, Martha; another relationship,
+however simple, to be borne in mind. And, finally, when we see Dina Dorf
+living in Bernick's house, and know that Bernick has had an intrigue
+with her mother, we are apt to fall into the error of supposing her to
+be Bernick's daughter. There is only one line which proves that this is
+not so--a remark to the effect that, when Madam Dorf came to the town.
+Dina was already old enough to run about and play angels in the theatre.
+Any one who does not happen to hear or notice this remark, is almost
+certain to misapprehend Dina's parentage. Taking one thing with another,
+then, the Bernick family group is rather more complex than is strictly
+desirable. Ibsen's reasons for making Lona Hessel a half-sister instead
+of a full sister of Mrs. Bernick are evident enough. He wanted her to be
+a considerably older woman, of a very different type of character; and
+it was necessary, in order to explain Karsten's desertion of Lona for
+Betty, that the latter should be an heiress, while the former was
+penniless. These reasons are clear and apparently adequate; yet it may
+be doubted whether the dramatist did not lose more than he gained by
+introducing even this small degree of complexity. It was certainly not
+necessary to explain the difference of age and character between Lona
+and Betty; while as for the money, there would have been nothing
+improbable in supposing that a wealthy uncle had marked his disapproval
+of Lona's strong-mindedness by bequeathing all his property to her
+younger sister. Again, there is no reason why Hilmar should not have
+been a brother of Johan and Betty;[5] in which case we should have had
+the simple family group of two brothers and two sisters, instead of the
+comparatively complex relationship of a brother and sister, a
+half-sister and a cousin.
+
+These may seem very trivial considerations: but nothing is really
+trivial when it comes to be placed under the powerful lens of theatrical
+presentation. Any given audience has only a certain measure of attention
+at command, and to claim attention for inessentials is to diminish the
+stock available for essentials. In only one other play does Ibsen
+introduce any complexity of relationship, and in that case it does not
+appear in the exposition, but is revealed at a critical moment towards
+the close. In _Little Eyolf_, Asta and Allmers are introduced to us at
+first as half-sister and half-brother; and only at the end of the second
+act does it appear that Asta's mother (Allmers' stepmother) was
+unfaithful to her husband, and that, Asta being the fruit of this
+infidelity, there is no blood kinship between her and Allmers. The
+danger of relying upon such complexities is shown by the fact that so
+acute a critic as M. Jules Lemaitre, in writing of _Little Eyolf_,
+mistook the situation, and thought that Asta fled from Allmers because
+he was her brother, whereas in fact she fled because he was not. I had
+the honour of calling M. Lemaitre's attention to this error, which he
+handsomely acknowledged.
+
+Complexities of kinship are, of course, not the only complexities which
+should, so far as possible, be avoided. Every complexity of relation or
+of antecedent circumstance is in itself a weakness, which, if it cannot
+be eliminated, must, so to speak, be lived down. No dramatic critic, I
+think, can have failed to notice that the good plays are those of which
+the story can be clearly indicated in ten lines; while it very often
+takes a column to give even a confused idea of the plot of a bad play.
+Here, then, is a preliminary test which may be commended to the would-be
+playwright, in order to ascertain whether the subject he is
+contemplating is or is not a good one: can he state the gist of it in a
+hundred words or so, like the "argument" of a Boccaccian novella? The
+test, of course, is far from being infallible; for a theme may err on
+the side of over-simplicity or emptiness, no less than on the side of
+over-complexity. But it is, at any rate, negatively useful: if the
+playwright finds that he cannot make his story comprehensible without a
+long explanation of an intricate network of facts, he may be pretty sure
+that he has got hold of a bad theme, or of one that stands sorely in
+need of simplification.[6]
+
+It is not sufficient, however, that a first act should fulfil Dumas's
+requirement by placing the situation clearly before us: it ought also to
+carry us some way towards the heart of the drama, or, at the very least,
+to point distinctly towards that quarter of the horizon where the clouds
+are gathering up. In a three-act play this is evidently demanded by the
+most elementary principles of proportion. It would be absurd to make
+one-third of the play merely introductory, and to compress the whole
+action into the remaining two-thirds. But even in a four- or five-act
+play, the interest of the audience ought to be strongly enlisted, and
+its anticipation headed in a definite direction, before the curtain
+falls for the first time. When we find a dramatist of repute neglecting
+this principle, we may suspect some reason with which art has no
+concern. Several of Sardou's social dramas begin with two acts of more
+or less smart and entertaining satire or caricature, and only at the end
+of the second or beginning of the third act (out of five) does the drama
+proper set in. What was the reason of this? Simply that under the system
+of royalties prevalent in France, it was greatly to the author's
+interest that his play should fill the whole evening. Sardou needed no
+more than three acts for the development of his drama; to have spread it
+out thinner would have been to weaken and injure it; wherefore he
+preferred to occupy an hour or so with clever dramatic journalism,
+rather than share the evening, and the fees, with another dramatist. So,
+at least, I have heard his practice explained; perhaps his own account
+of the matter may have been that he wanted to paint a broad social
+picture to serve as a background for his action.
+
+The question how far an audience ought to be carried towards the heart
+of a dramatic action in the course of the first act is always and
+inevitably one of proportion. It is clear that too much ought not to be
+told, so as to leave the remaining acts meagre and spun-out; nor should
+any one scene be so intense in its interest as to outshine all
+subsequent scenes, and give to the rest of the play an effect of
+anti-climax. If the strange and fascinating creations of Ibsen's last
+years were to be judged by ordinary dramaturgic canons, we should have
+to admit that in _Little Eyolf_ he was guilty of the latter fault, since
+in point of sheer "strength," in the common acceptation of the word, the
+situation at the end of the first act could scarcely be outdone, in that
+play or any other. The beginner, however, is far more likely to put too
+little than too much into his first act: he is more likely to leave our
+interest insufficiently stimulated than to carry us too far in the
+development of his theme. My own feeling is that, as a general rule,
+what Freytag calls the _erregende Moment_ ought by all means to fall
+within the first act. What is the _erregende Moment_? One is inclined to
+render it "the firing of the fuse." In legal parlance, it might be
+interpreted as the joining of issue. It means the point at which the
+drama, hitherto latent, plainly declares itself. It means the
+germination of the crisis, the appearance on the horizon of the cloud no
+bigger than a man's hand. I suggest, then, that this _erregende Moment_
+ought always to come within the first act--if it is to come at all There
+are plays, as we have seen, which depict life on so even a plane that it
+is impossible to say at any given point, "Here the drama sets in," or
+"The interest is heightened there."
+
+_Pillars of Society_ is, in a sense, Ibsen's prentice-work in the form
+of drama which he afterwards perfected; wherefore it affords us numerous
+illustrations of the problems we have to consider. Does he, or does he
+not, give us in the first act sufficient insight into his story? I am
+inclined to answer the question in the negative. The first act puts us
+in possession of the current version of the Bernick-Toennesen family
+history, but it gives us no clear indication that this version is an
+elaborate tissue of falsehoods. It is true that Bernick's evident
+uneasiness and embarrassment at the mere idea of the reappearance of
+Lona and Johan may lead us to suspect that all is not as it seems; but
+simple annoyance at the inopportune arrival of the black sheep of the
+family might be sufficient to account for this. To all intents and
+purposes, we are completely in the dark as to the course the drama is
+about to take; and when, at the end of the first act, Lona Hessel
+marches in and flutters the social dovecote, we do not know in what
+light to regard her, or why we are supposed to sympathize with her. The
+fact that she is eccentric, and that she talks of "letting in fresh
+air," combines with our previous knowledge of the author's idiosyncrasy
+to assure us that she is his heroine; but so far as the evidence
+actually before us goes, we have no means of forming even the vaguest
+provisional judgment as to her true character. This is almost certainly
+a mistake in art. It is useless to urge that sympathy and antipathy are
+primitive emotions, and that we ought to be able to regard a character
+objectively, rating it as true or false, not as attractive or repellent.
+The answer to this is twofold. Firstly, the theatre has never been, and
+never will be, a moral dissecting room, nor has the theatrical audience
+anything in common with a class of students dispassionately following a
+professor's demonstration of cold scientific facts. Secondly, in the
+particular case in point, the dramatist makes a manifest appeal to our
+sympathies. There can be no doubt that we are intended to take Lona's
+part, as against the representatives of propriety and convention
+assembled at the sewing-bee; but we have been vouchsafed no rational
+reason for so doing. In other words, the author has not taken us far
+enough into his action to enable us to grasp the true import and
+significance of the situation. He relies for his effect either on the
+general principle that an eccentric character must be sympathetic, or on
+the knowledge possessed by those who have already seen or read the rest
+of the play. Either form of reliance is clearly inartistic. The former
+appeals to irrational prejudice; the latter ignores what we shall
+presently find to be a fundamental principle of the playwright's
+art--namely, that, with certain doubtful exceptions in the case of
+historical themes, he must never assume previous knowledge either of
+plot or character on the part of his public, but must always have in his
+mind's eye a first-night audience, which knows nothing but what he
+chooses to tell it.
+
+My criticism of the first act of _Pillars of Society_ may be summed up
+in saying that the author has omitted to place in it the _erregende
+Moment_. The issue is not joined, the true substance of the drama is not
+clear to us, until, in the second act, Bernick makes sure there are no
+listeners, and then holds out both hands to Johan, saying: "Johan, now
+we are alone; now you must give me leave to thank you," and so forth.
+Why should not this scene have occurred in the first act? Materially,
+there is no reason whatever. It would need only the change of a few
+words to lift the scene bodily out of the second act and transfer it to
+the first. Why did Ibsen not do so? His reason is not hard to divine; he
+wished to concentrate into two great scenes, with scarcely a moment's
+interval between them, the revelation of Bernick's treachery, first to
+Johan, second to Lona. He gained his point: the sledge-hammer effect of
+these two scenes is undeniable. But it remains a question whether he did
+not make a disproportionate sacrifice; whether he did not empty his
+first act in order to overfill his second. I do not say he did: I merely
+propound the question for the student's consideration. One thing we must
+recognize in dramatic art as in all other human affairs; namely, that
+perfection, if not unattainable, is extremely rare. We have often to
+make a deliberate sacrifice at one point in order to gain some greater
+advantage at another; to incur imperfection here that we may achieve
+perfection there. It is no disparagement to the great masters to admit
+that they frequently show us rather what to avoid than what to do.
+Negative instruction, indeed, is in its essence more desirable than
+positive. The latter tends to make us mere imitators, whereas the
+former, in saving us from dangers, leaves our originality unimpaired.
+
+It is curious to note that, in another play, Ibsen did actually transfer
+the _erregende Moment_, the joining of issue, from the second act to the
+first. In his early draft of _Rosmersholm_, the great scene in which
+Rosmer confesses to Kroll his change of views did not occur until the
+second act. There can be no doubt that the balance and proportion of the
+play gained enormously by the transference.
+
+After all, however, the essential question is not how much or how little
+is conveyed to us in the first act, but whether our interest is
+thoroughly aroused, and, what is of equal importance, skilfully carried
+forward. Before going more at large into this very important detail of
+the playwright's craft, it may be well to say something of the nature of
+dramatic interest in general.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+[Footnote 1: There are several cases in Greek drama in which a hero
+leaves the stage to fight a battle and returns victorious in a few
+minutes. See, for example, the _Supplices_ of Euripides.]
+
+[Footnote 2: So far was Shakespeare from ignoring the act-division that
+it is a question whether his art did not sometimes suffer from the
+supposed necessity of letting a fourth act intervene between the
+culmination in the third act and the catastrophe in the fifth.]
+
+[Footnote 3: I think it may be said that the majority of modern serious
+plays are in four acts. It is a favourite number with Sir Arthur Pinero,
+Mr. Henry Arthur Jones, Mr. Clyde Fitch, and Mr. Alfred Sutro.]
+
+[Footnote 4: This must not be taken to mean that in no case is a change
+of scene within the act advisable. The point to be considered is whether
+the author does or does not want to give the audience time for
+reflection--time to return to the real world--between two episodes. If
+it is of great importance that they should not do so, then a rapid
+change of scene may be the less of two evils. In this case the lights
+should be kept lowered in order to show that no interact is intended;
+but the fashion of changing the scene on a pitch-dark stage, without
+dropping the curtain, is much to be deprecated. If the revolving stage
+should ever become a common institution in English-speaking countries,
+dramatists would doubtless be more tempted than they are at present to
+change their scenes within the act; but I doubt whether the tendency
+would be wholly advantageous. No absolute rule, however, can be laid
+down, and it may well be maintained that a true dramatic artist could
+only profit by the greater flexibility of his medium.]
+
+[Footnote 5: He was, in the first draft; and Lona Hessel was only a
+distant relative of Bernick's.]
+
+[Footnote 6: The Greeks, who knew most things, knew the value of
+manageable dimensions and simple structure in a work of art, and had a
+word to express that combination of qualities--the word _eusynopton_.]
+
+
+
+
+_CHAPTER IX_
+
+"CURIOSITY" AND "INTEREST"
+
+
+The paradox of dramatic theory is this: while our aim is, of course, to
+write plays which shall achieve immortality, or shall at any rate become
+highly popular, and consequently familiar in advance to a considerable
+proportion of any given audience, we are all the time studying how to
+awaken and to sustain that interest, or, more precisely, that curiosity,
+which can be felt only by those who see the play for the first time,
+without any previous knowledge of its action. Under modern conditions
+especially, the spectators who come to the theatre with their minds an
+absolute blank as to what is awaiting them, are comparatively few; for
+newspaper criticism and society gossip very soon bruit abroad a general
+idea of the plot of any play which attains a reasonable measure of
+success. Why, then, should we assume, in the ideal spectator to whom we
+address ourselves, a state of mind which, we hope and trust, will not be
+the state of mind of the majority of actual spectators?
+
+To this question there are several answers. The first and most obvious
+is that to one audience, at any rate, every play must be absolutely new,
+and that it is this first-night audience which in great measure
+determines its success or failure. Many plays have survived a
+first-night failure, and still more have gone off in a rapid decline
+after a first-night success. But these caprices of fortune are not to be
+counted on. The only prudent course is for the dramatist to direct all
+his thought and care towards conciliating or dominating an audience to
+which his theme is entirely unknown,[1] and so coming triumphant through
+his first-night ordeal. This principle is subject to a certain
+qualification in the case of historic and legendary themes. In treating
+such subjects, the dramatist is not relieved of the necessity of
+developing his story clearly and interestingly, but has, on the
+contrary, an additional charge imposed upon him--that of not flagrantly
+defying or disappointing popular knowledge or prejudice. Charles I must
+not die in a green old age, Oliver Cromwell must not display the manners
+and graces of Sir Charles Grandison, Charles II must not be represented
+as a model of domestic virtue. Historians may indict a hero or whitewash
+a villain at their leisure; but to the dramatist a hero must be (more or
+less) a hero, a villain (more or less) a villain, if accepted tradition
+so decrees it.[2] Thus popular knowledge can scarcely be said to lighten
+a dramatist's task, but rather to impose a new limitation upon him. In
+some cases, however, he can rely on a general knowledge of the historic
+background of a given period, which may save him some exposition. An
+English audience, for instance, does not require to be told what was the
+difference between Cavaliers and Roundheads; nor does any audience, I
+imagine, look for a historical disquisition on the Reign of Terror. The
+dramatist has only to bring on some ruffianly characters in Phrygian
+caps, who address each other as "Citizen" and "Citizeness," and at once
+the imagination of the audience will supply the roll of the tumbrels and
+the silhouette of the guillotine in the background.
+
+To return to the general question: not only must the dramatist reckon
+with one all-important audience which is totally ignorant of the story
+he has to tell; he must also bear in mind that it is very easy to
+exaggerate the proportion of any given audience which will know his plot
+in advance, even when his play has been performed a thousand times.
+There are inexhaustible possibilities of ignorance in the theatrical
+public. A story is told, on pretty good authority, of a late eminent
+statesman who visited the Lyceum one night when Sir Henry Irving was
+appearing as Hamlet. After the third act he went to the actor's
+dressing-room, expressed great regret that duty called him back to
+Westminster, and begged Sir Henry to tell him how the play ended, as it
+had interested him greatly.[3] One of our most eminent novelists has
+assured me that he never saw or read _Macbeth_ until he was present at
+(I think) Mr. Forbes Robertson's revival of the play, he being then
+nearer fifty than forty. These, no doubt, are "freak" instances; but in
+any given audience, even at the most hackneyed classical plays, there
+will be a certain percentage of children (who contribute as much as
+their elders to the general temper of an audience), and also a
+percentage of adult ignoramuses. And if this be so in the case of plays
+which have held the stage for generations, are studied in schools, and
+are every day cited as matters of common knowledge, how much more
+certain may we be that even the most popular modern play will have to
+appeal night after night to a considerable number of people who have no
+previous acquaintance with either its story or its characters! The
+playwright may absolutely count on having to make such an appeal; but he
+must remember at the same time that he can by no means count on keeping
+any individual effect, more especially any notable trick or device, a
+secret from the generality of his audience. Mr. J.M. Barrie (to take a
+recent instance) sedulously concealed, throughout the greater part of
+_Little Mary_, what was meant by that ever-recurring expression, and
+probably relied to some extent on an effect of amused surprise when the
+disclosure was made. On the first night, the effect came off happily
+enough; but on subsequent nights, there would rarely be a score of
+people in the house who did not know the secret. The great majority
+might know nothing else about the play, but that they knew. Similarly,
+in the case of any mechanical _truc_, as the French call it, or feat of
+theatrical sleight-of-hand, it is futile to trust to its taking unawares
+any audience after the first. Nine-tenths of all subsequent audiences
+are sure to be on the look-out for it, and to know, or think they know,
+"how it's done."[4] These are the things which theatrical gossip,
+printed and oral, most industriously disseminates. The fine details of a
+plot are much less easily conveyed and less likely to be remembered.
+
+To sum up this branch of the argument: however oft-repeated and
+much-discussed a play may be, the playwright must assume that in every
+audience there will be an appreciable number of persons who know
+practically nothing about it, and whose enjoyment will depend, like that
+of the first-night audience, on the skill with which he develops his
+story. On the other hand, he can never rely on taking an audience by
+surprise at any particular point. The class of effect which depends on
+surprise is precisely the class of effect which is certain to be
+discounted.[5]
+
+We come now to a third reason why a playwright is bound to assume that
+the audience to which he addresses himself has no previous knowledge of
+his fable. It is simply that no other assumption has, or can have, any
+logical basis. If the audience is not to be conceived as ignorant, how
+much is it to be assumed to know? There is clearly no possible answer to
+this question, except a purely arbitrary one, having no relation to the
+facts. In any audience after the first, there will doubtless be a
+hundred degrees of knowledge and of ignorance. Many people will know
+nothing at all about the play; some people will have seen or read it
+yesterday, and will thus know all there is to know; while between these
+extremes there will be every variety of clearness or vagueness of
+knowledge. Some people will have read and remembered a detailed
+newspaper notice; others will have read the same notice and forgotten
+almost all of it. Some will have heard a correct and vivid account of
+the play, others a vague and misleading summary. It would be absolutely
+impossible to enumerate all the degrees of previous knowledge which are
+pretty certain to be represented in an average audience; and to which
+degree of knowledge is the playwright to address himself? If he is to
+have any firm ground under his feet, he must clearly adopt the only
+logical course, and address himself to a spectator assumed to have no
+previous knowledge whatever. To proceed on any other assumption would
+not only be to ignore the all-powerful first-night audience, but to
+plunge into a veritable morass of inconsistencies, dubieties and
+slovenlinesses.
+
+These considerations, however, have not yet taken us to the heart of the
+matter. We have seen that the dramatist has no rational course open to
+him but to assume complete ignorance in his audience; but we have also
+seen that, as a matter of fact, only one audience will be entirely in
+this condition, and that, the more successful the play is, the more
+widely will subsequent audiences tend to depart from it. Does it not
+follow that interest of plot, interest of curiosity as to coming events,
+is at best an evanescent factor in a play's attractiveness--of a certain
+importance, no doubt, on the first night, but less and less efficient
+the longer the play holds the stage?
+
+In a sense, this is undoubtedly true. We see every day that a mere
+story-play--a play which appeals to us solely by reason of the adroit
+stimulation and satisfaction of curiosity--very rapidly exhausts its
+success. No one cares to see it a second time; and spectators who happen
+to have read the plot in advance, find its attraction discounted even on
+a first hearing. But if we jump to the conclusion that the skilful
+marshalling and development of the story is an unimportant detail, which
+matters little when once the first-night ordeal is past, we shall go
+very far astray. Experience shows us that dramatic _interest_ is
+entirely distinct from mere _curiosity_, and survives when curiosity is
+dead. Though a skilfully-told story is not of itself enough to secure
+long life for a play, it materially and permanently enhances the
+attractions of a play which has other and higher claims to longevity.
+Character, poetry, philosophy, atmosphere, are all very good in their
+way; but they all show to greater advantage by aid of a well-ordered
+fable. In a picture, I take it, drawing is not everything; but drawing
+will always count for much.
+
+This separation of interest from curiosity is partly explicable by one
+very simple reflection. However well we may know a play beforehand, we
+seldom know it by heart or nearly by heart; so that, though we may
+anticipate a development in general outline, we do not clearly foresee
+the ordering of its details, which, therefore, may give us almost the
+same sort of pleasure that it gave us when the story was new to us. Most
+playgoers will, I think, bear me out in saying that we constantly find a
+great scene or act to be in reality richer in invention and more
+ingenious in arrangement than we remembered it to be.
+
+We come, now, to another point that must not be overlooked. It needs no
+subtle introspection to assure us that we, the audience, do our own
+little bit of acting, and instinctively place ourselves at the point of
+view of a spectator before whose eyes the drama is unrolling itself for
+the first time. If the play has any richness of texture, we have many
+sensations that he cannot have. We are conscious of ironies and
+subtleties which necessarily escape him, or which he can but dimly
+divine. But in regard to the actual development of the story, we imagine
+ourselves back into his condition of ignorance, with this difference,
+that we can more fully appreciate the dramatist's skill, and more
+clearly resent his clumsiness or slovenliness. Our sensations, in short,
+are not simply conditioned by our knowledge or ignorance of what is to
+come. The mood of dramatic receptivity is a complex one. We
+instinctively and without any effort remember that the dramatist is
+bound by the rules of the game, or, in other words, by the inherent
+conditions of his craft, to unfold his tale before an audience to which
+it is unknown; and it is with implicit reference to these conditions
+that we enjoy and appreciate his skill. Even the most unsophisticated
+audience realizes in some measure that the playwright is an artist
+presenting a picture of life under such-and-such assumptions and
+limitations, and appraises his skill by its own vague and instinctive
+standards. As our culture increases, we more and more consistently adopt
+this attitude, and take pleasure in a playwright's marshalling of
+material in proportion to its absolute skill, even if that skill no
+longer produces its direct and pristine effect upon us. In many cases,
+indeed, our pleasure consists of a delicate blending of surprise with
+realized anticipation. We foresaw, and are pleased to recognize, the art
+of the whole achievement, while details which had grown dim to us give
+us each its little thrill of fresh admiration. Regarded in this aspect,
+a great play is like a great piece of music: we can hear it again and
+again with ever-new realization of its subtle beauties, its complex
+harmonies, and with unfailing interest in the merits and demerits of
+each particular rendering.
+
+But we must look deeper than this if we would fully understand the true
+nature of dramatic interest. The last paragraph has brought us to the
+verge of the inmost secret, but we have yet to take the final step. We
+have yet to realize that, in truly great drama, the foreknowledge
+possessed by the audience is not a disadvantage with certain incidental
+mitigations and compensations, but is the source of the highest pleasure
+which the theatre is capable of affording us. In order to illustrate my
+meaning, I propose to analyse a particular scene, not, certainly, among
+the loftiest in dramatic literature, but particularly suited to my
+purpose, inasmuch as it is familiar to every one, and at the same time
+full of the essential qualities of drama. I mean the Screen Scene in
+_The School for Scandal_.
+
+In her "English Men of Letters" volume on Sheridan, Mrs. Oliphant
+discusses this scene. Speaking in particular of the moment at which the
+screen is overturned, revealing Lady Teazle behind it, she says--
+
+  "It would no doubt have been higher art could the dramatist have
+  deceived his audience as well as the personages of the play, and
+  made us also parties in the surprise of the discovery."
+
+There could scarcely be a completer reversal of the truth than this
+"hopeless comment," as Professor Brander Matthews has justly called it.
+The whole effect of the long and highly-elaborated scene depends upon
+our knowledge that Lady Teazle is behind the screen. Had the audience
+either not known that there was anybody there, or supposed it to be the
+"little French milliner," where would have been the breathless interest
+which has held us through a whole series of preceding scenes? When Sir
+Peter reveals to Joseph his generous intentions towards his wife, the
+point lies in the fact that Lady Teazle overhears; and this is doubly
+the case when he alludes to Joseph as a suitor for the hand of Maria.
+So, too, with the following scene between Joseph and Charles; in itself
+it would be flat enough; the fact that Sir Peter is listening lends it a
+certain piquancy; but this is ten times multiplied by the fact that Lady
+Teazle, too, hears all that passes. When Joseph is called from the room
+by the arrival of the pretended Old Stanley, there would be no interest
+in his embarrassment if we believed the person behind the screen to be
+the French milliner. And when Sir Peter yields to the temptation to let
+Charles into the secret of his brother's frailty, and we feel every
+moment more certain that the screen will be overthrown, where would be
+the excitement, the tension, if we did not know who was behind it? The
+real drama, in fact, passes behind the screen. It lies in the terror,
+humiliation, and disillusionment which we know to be coursing each other
+through Lady Teazle's soul. And all this Mrs. Oliphant would have
+sacrificed for a single moment of crude surprise!
+
+Now let us hear Professor Matthews's analysis of the effect of the
+scene. He says:
+
+"The playgoer's interest is really not so much as to what is to happen
+as the way in which this event is going to affect the characters
+involved. He thinks it likely enough that Sir Peter will discover that
+Lady Teazle is paying a visit to Joseph Surface; but what he is really
+anxious to learn is the way the husband will take it. What will Lady
+Teazle have to say when she is discovered where she has no business to
+be? How will Sir Peter receive her excuses? What will the effect be on
+the future conduct of both husband and wife? These are the questions
+which the spectators are eager to have answered."
+
+This is an admirable exposition of the frame of mind of the Drury Lane
+audience of May 8, 1777. who first saw the screen overturned. But in the
+thousands of audiences who have since witnessed the play, how many
+individuals, on an average, had any doubt as to what Lady Teazle would
+have to say, and how Sir Peter would receive her excuses? It would
+probably be safe to guess that, for a century past, two-thirds of every
+audience have clearly foreknown the outcome of the situation. Professor
+Matthews himself has edited Sheridan's plays, and probably knows _The
+School for Scandal_ almost by heart; yet we may be pretty sure that any
+reasonably good performance of the Screen Scene will to-day give him
+pleasure not so very much inferior to that which he felt the first time
+he saw it. In this pleasure, it is manifest that mere curiosity as to
+the immediate and subsequent conduct of Sir Peter and Lady Teazle can
+have no part. There is absolutely no question which Professor Matthews,
+or any playgoer who shares his point of view, is "eager to have
+answered."
+
+Assuming, then, that we are all familiar with the Screen Scene, and
+assuming that we, nevertheless, take pleasure in seeing it reasonably
+well acted,[6] let us try to discover of what elements that pleasure is
+composed. It is, no doubt, somewhat complex. For one thing, we have
+pleasure in meeting old friends. Sir Peter, Lady Teazle, Charles, even
+Joseph, are agreeable creatures who have all sorts of pleasant
+associations for us. Again, we love to encounter not only familiar
+characters but familiar jokes. Like Goldsmith's Diggory, we can never
+help laughing at the story of "ould Grouse in the gunroom." The best
+order of dramatic wit does not become stale, but rather grows upon us.
+We relish it at least as much at the tenth repetition as at the first.
+But while these considerations may partly account for the pleasure we
+take in seeing the play as a whole, they do not explain why the Screen
+Scene in particular should interest and excite us. Another source of
+pleasure, as before indicated, may be renewed recognition of the
+ingenuity with which the scene is pieced together. However familiar we
+may be with it, short of actually knowing it by heart, we do not recall
+the details of its dovetailing, and it is a delight to realize afresh
+the neatness of the manipulation by which the tension is heightened from
+speech to speech and from incident to incident. If it be objected that
+this is a pleasure which the critic alone is capable of experiencing, I
+venture to disagree. The most unsophisticated playgoer feels the effect
+of neat workmanship, though he may not be able to put his satisfaction
+into words. It is evident, however, that the mere intellectual
+recognition of fine workmanship is not sufficient to account for the
+emotions with which we witness the Screen Scene. A similar, though, of
+course, not quite identical, effect is produced by scenes of the utmost
+simplicity, in which there is no room for delicacy of dovetailing or
+neatness of manipulation.
+
+Where, then, are we to seek for the fundamental constituent in dramatic
+interest, as distinct from mere curiosity? Perhaps Mrs. Oliphant's
+glaring error may put us on the track of the truth. Mrs. Oliphant
+thought that Sheridan would have shown higher art had he kept the
+audience, as well as Sir Peter and Charles, ignorant of Lady Teazle's
+presence behind the screen. But this, as we saw, is precisely the
+reverse of the truth: the whole interest of the scene arises from our
+knowledge of Lady Teazle's presence. Had Sheridan fallen into Mrs.
+Oliphant's mistake, the little shock of surprise which the first-night
+audience would have felt when the screen was thrown down would have been
+no compensation at all for the comparative tameness and pointlessness of
+the preceding passages. Thus we see that the greater part of our
+pleasure arises precisely from the fact that we know what Sir Peter and
+Charles do not know, or, in other words, that we have a clear vision of
+all the circumstances, relations, and implications of a certain
+conjuncture of affairs, in which two, at least, of the persons concerned
+are ignorantly and blindly moving towards issues of which they do not
+dream. We are, in fact, in the position of superior intelligences
+contemplating, with miraculous clairvoyance, the stumblings and
+tumblings of poor blind mortals straying through the labyrinth of life.
+Our seat in the theatre is like a throne on the Epicurean Olympus,
+whence we can view with perfect intelligence, but without participation
+or responsibility, the intricate reactions of human destiny. And this
+sense of superiority does not pall upon us. When Othello comes on the
+scene, radiant and confident in Desdemona's love, our knowledge of the
+fate awaiting him makes him a hundred times more interesting than could
+any mere curiosity as to what was about to happen. It is our prevision
+of Nora's exit at the end of the last act that lends its dramatic
+poignancy to her entrance at the beginning of the first.
+
+There is nothing absolutely new in this theory.[7] "The irony of fate"
+has long been recognized as one of the main elements of dramatic effect.
+It has been especially dwelt upon in relation to Greek tragedy, of which
+the themes were all known in advance even to "first-day" audiences. We
+should take but little interest in seeing the purple carpet spread for
+Agamemnon's triumphal entry into his ancestral halls, if it were not for
+our foreknowledge of the net and the axe prepared for him. But, familiar
+as is this principle, I am not aware that it has hitherto been extended,
+as I suggest that it should be, to cover the whole field of dramatic
+interest. I suggest that the theorists have hitherto dwelt far too much
+on curiosity[8]--which may be defined as the interest of ignorance--and
+far too little on the feeling of superiority, of clairvoyance, with
+which we contemplate a foreknown action, whether of a comic or of a
+tragic cast. Of course the action must be, essentially if not in every
+detail, true to nature. We can derive no sense of superiority from our
+foreknowledge of an arbitrary or preposterous action; and that, I take
+it, is the reason why a good many plays have an initial success of
+curiosity, but cease to attract when their plot becomes familiar. Again,
+we take no pleasure in foreknowing the fate of wholly uninteresting
+people; which is as much as to say that character is indispensable to
+enduring interest in drama. With these provisos, I suggest a
+reconstruction of our theories of dramatic interest, in which mere
+first-night curiosity shall be relegated to the subordinate place which
+by right belongs to it.
+
+Nevertheless, we must come back to the point that there is always the
+ordeal of the first night to be faced, and that the plays are
+comparatively few which have lived-down a bad first-night. It is true
+that specifically first-night merit is a trivial matter compared with
+what may be called thousandth-performance merit; but it is equally true
+that there is no inconsistency between the two orders of merit, and that
+a play will never be less esteemed on its thousandth performance for
+having achieved a conspicuous first-night success. The practical lesson
+which seems to emerge from these considerations is that a wise
+theatrical policy would seek to diminish the all-importance of the
+first-night, and to give a play a greater chance of recovery than it has
+under present conditions, from the depressing effect of an inauspicious
+production. This is the more desirable as its initial misadventure may
+very likely be due to external and fortuitous circumstances, wholly
+unconnected with its inherent qualities.
+
+At the same time, we are bound to recognize that, from the very nature
+of the case, our present inquiry must be far more concerned with
+first-night than with thousandth-performance merit. Craftsmanship can,
+within limits, be acquired, genius cannot; and it is craftsmanship that
+pilots us through the perils of the first performance, genius that
+carries us on to the apotheosis of the thousandth. Therefore, our
+primary concern must be with the arousing and sustaining of curiosity,
+though we should never forget that it is only a means to the ultimate
+enlistment of the higher and more abiding forms of interest.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+[Footnote 1: The view that the dramatist has only to think of pleasing
+himself is elsewhere dealt with.]
+
+[Footnote 2: Two dramatists who have read these pages in proof, exclaim
+at this passage. The one says, "No, no!" the other asks, "Why?" I can
+only reiterate that, where there exists a strong and generally accepted
+tradition, the dramatist not only runs counter to it at his peril, but
+goes outside the true domain of his art in so doing. New truth, in
+history, must be established either by new documents, or by a careful
+and detailed re-interpretation of old documents; but the stage is not
+the place either for the production of documents or for historical
+exegesis. It is needless to say that where the popular mind is unbiased,
+the dramatist's hands are free. For instance, I presume that one might,
+in England, take any view one pleased of the character of Mary. Queen of
+Scots; but a highly unfavourable view would scarcely be accepted by
+Scottish audiences. Similarly, it would be both dangerous and
+unprofitable to present on the English stage any very damaging "scandal
+about Queen Elizabeth." Historical criticism, I understand, does not
+accept the view that Robespierre was mainly responsible for the Reign of
+Terror, and that his death betokened a general revolt against his
+sanguinary tyranny; but it would be very hard for any dramatist to
+secure general acceptance for a more accurate reading of his character
+and function. Some further remarks on this subject will be found in
+Chapter XIII.]
+
+[Footnote 3: A malicious anecdote to a similar effect was current in the
+early days of Sir Henry Irving's career. It was said that at Bristol one
+night, when Mr. Irving, as Hamlet, "took his call" after the first act,
+a man turned to his neighbour in the pit and said, "Can you tell me,
+sir, does that young man appear much in this play?" His neighbour
+informed him that Hamlet was rather largely concerned in the action,
+whereupon the inquirer remarked, "Oh! Then I'm off!"]
+
+[Footnote 4: If it be well done, it may remain highly effective in spite
+of being discounted by previous knowledge. For instance, the clock-trick
+in _Raffles_ was none the less amusing because every one was on the
+look-out for it.]
+
+[Footnote 5: The question whether it is ever politic for a playwright to
+keep a secret from his audience is discussed elsewhere. What I have here
+in mind is not an ordinary secret, but a more or less tricky effect of
+surprise.]
+
+[Footnote 6: The pleasure received from exceptionally good acting is, of
+course, a different matter. I assume that the acting is merely competent
+enough to pass muster without irritating us, and so distracting our
+attention.]
+
+[Footnote 7: I myself expressed it in slightly different terms nearly
+ten years ago. "Curiosity," I said, "is the accidental relish of a
+single night; whereas the essential and abiding pleasure of the theatre
+lies in foreknowledge. In relation to the characters in the drama, the
+audience are as gods looking before and after. Sitting in the theatre,
+we taste, for a moment, the glory of omniscience. With vision unsealed,
+we watch the gropings of purblind mortals after happiness, and smile at
+their stumblings, their blunders, their futile quests, their misplaced
+exultations, their groundless panics. To keep a secret from us is to
+reduce us to their level, and deprive us of our clairvoyant aloofness.
+There may be a pleasure in that too; we may join with zest in the game
+of blind-man's-buff; but the theatre is in its essence a place where we
+are privileged to take off the bandage we wear in daily life, and to
+contemplate, with laughter or with tears, the blindfold gambols of our
+neighbours."]
+
+[Footnote 8: Here an acute critic writes: "On the whole I agree; but I
+do think there is dramatic interest to be had out of curiosity, through
+the identification, so to speak, of the audience with the discovering
+persons on the stage. It is an interest of sympathy, not to be despised,
+rather than an interest of actual curiosity."]
+
+
+
+
+_CHAPTER X_
+
+FORESHADOWING, NOT FORESTALLING
+
+
+We return now to the point at which the foregoing disquisition--it is
+not a digression--became necessary. We had arrived at the general
+principle that the playwright's chief aim in his first act ought to be
+to arouse and carry forward the interest of the audience. This may seem
+a tolerably obvious statement; but it is worth while to examine a little
+more closely into its implications.
+
+As to arousing the interest of the audience, it is clear that very
+little specific advice can be given. One can only say, "Find an
+interesting theme, state its preliminaries clearly and crisply, and let
+issue be joined without too much delay." There can be no rules for
+finding an interesting theme, any more than for catching the Blue Bird.
+At a later stage we may perhaps attempt a summary enumeration of themes
+which are not interesting, which have exhausted any interest they ever
+possessed, and "repay careful avoidance." But such an enumeration would
+be out of place here, where we are studying principles of form apart
+from details of matter.
+
+The arousing of interest, however, is one thing, the carrying-forward of
+interest is another; and on the latter point there are one or two things
+that may profitably be said. Each act, as we have seen, should consist
+of, or at all events contain, a subordinate crisis, contributory to the
+main crisis of the play: and the art of act-construction lies in giving
+to each act an individuality and interest of its own, without so
+rounding it off as to obscure even for a moment its subsidiary, and, in
+the case of the first act, its introductory, relation to the whole. This
+is a point which many dramatists ignore or undervalue. Very often, when
+the curtain falls on a first or a second act, one says, "This is a
+fairly good act in itself; but whither does it lead? what is to come of
+it all?" It awakens no definite anticipation, and for two pins one would
+take up one's hat and go home. The author has neglected the art of
+carrying-forward the interest.
+
+It is curious to note that in the most unsophisticated forms of
+melodrama this art is deliberately ignored. In plays of the type of _The
+Worst Woman in London_, it appears to be an absolute canon of art that
+every act must have a "happy ending"--that the curtain must always fall
+on the hero, or, preferably, the comic man, in an attitude of triumph,
+while the villain and villainess cower before him in baffled impotence.
+We have perfect faith, of course, that the villain will come up smiling
+in the next act, and proceed with his nefarious practices; but, for the
+moment, virtue has it all its own way. This, however, is a very artless
+formula which has somehow developed of recent years; and it is doubtful
+whether even the audiences to which these plays appeal would not in
+reality prefer something a little less inept in the matter of
+construction. As soon as we get above this level, at all events, the
+fostering of anticipation becomes a matter of the first importance. The
+problem is, not to cut short the spectator's interest, or to leave it
+fluttering at a loose end, but to provide it either with a
+clearly-foreseen point in the next act towards which it can reach
+onwards, or with a definite enigma, the solution of which is impatiently
+awaited. In general terms, a bridge should be provided between one act
+and another, along which the spectator's mind cannot but travel with
+eager anticipation. And this is particularly important, or particularly
+apt to be neglected, at the end of the first act. At a later point, if
+the interest does not naturally and inevitably carry itself forward, the
+case is hopeless indeed.
+
+To illustrate what is meant by the carrying-forward of interest, let me
+cite one or two instances in which it is achieved with conspicuous
+success.
+
+In Oscar Wilde's first modern comedy, _Lady Windermere's Fan_, the
+heroine, Lady Windermere, has learnt that her husband has of late been
+seen to call very frequently at the house of a certain Mrs. Erlynne,
+whom nobody knows. Her suspicions thus aroused, she searches her
+husband's desk, discovers a private and locked bank-book, cuts it open,
+and finds that one large cheque after another has been drawn in favour
+of the lady in question. At this inopportune moment, Lord Windermere
+appears with a request that Mrs. Erlynne shall be invited to their
+reception that evening. Lady Windermere indignantly refuses, her husband
+insists, and, finally, with his own hand, fills in an invitation-card
+and sends it by messenger to Mrs. Erlynne. Here some playwrights might
+have been content to finish the act. It is sufficiently evident that
+Lady Windermere will not submit to the apparent insult, and that
+something exciting may be looked for at the reception in the following
+act. But Oscar Wilde was not content with this vague expectancy. He
+first defined it, and then he underlined the definition, in a perfectly
+natural and yet ingenious and skilful way. The day happens to be Lady
+Windermere's birthday, and at the beginning of the act her husband has
+given her a beautiful ostrich-feather fan. When he sends off the
+invitation, she turns upon him and says, "If that woman crosses my
+threshold, I shall strike her across the face with this fan." Here,
+again, many a dramatist might be content to bring down his curtain. The
+announcement of Lady Windermere's resolve carries forward the interest
+quite clearly enough for all practical purposes. But even this did not
+satisfy Wilde. He imagined a refinement, simple, probable, and yet
+immensely effective, which put an extraordinarily keen edge upon the
+expectancy of the audience. He made Lady Windermere ring for her butler,
+and say: "Parker, be sure you pronounce the names of the guests very
+distinctly to-night. Sometimes you speak so fast that I miss them. I am
+particularly anxious to hear the names quite clearly, so as to make no
+mistake." I well remember the effect which this little touch produced on
+the first night. The situation was, in itself, open to grave objections.
+There is no plausible excuse for Lord Windermere's obstinacy in forcing
+Mrs. Erlynne upon his wife, and risking a violent scandal in order to
+postpone an explanation which he must know to be ultimately inevitable.
+Though one had not as yet learnt the precise facts of the case, one felt
+pretty confident that his lordship's conduct would scarcely justify
+itself. But interest is largely independent of critical judgment, and,
+for my own part, I can aver that, when the curtain fell on the first
+act, a five-pound note would not have bribed me to leave the theatre
+without assisting at Lady Windermere's reception in the second act. That
+is the frame of mind which the author should try to beget in his
+audience; and Oscar Wilde, then almost a novice, had, in this one little
+passage between Lady Windermere and the butler, shown himself a master
+of the art of dramatic story-telling. The dramatist has higher functions
+than mere story-telling; but this is fundamental, and the true artist is
+the last to despise it.[1]
+
+For another example of a first act brought to what one may call a
+judiciously tantalizing conclusion, I turn to Mr. R.C. Carton's comedy
+_Wheels within Wheels._ Lord Eric Chantrell has just returned from
+abroad after many years' absence. He drives straight to the bachelor
+flat of his old chum, Egerton Vartrey. At the flat he finds only his
+friend's valet, Vartrey himself has been summoned to Scotland that very
+evening, and the valet is on the point of following him. He knows,
+however, that his master would wish his old friend to make himself at
+home in the flat; so he presently goes off, leaving the newcomer
+installed for the night. Lord Eric goes to the bedroom to change his
+clothes; and, the stage being thus left vacant, we hear a latch-key
+turning in the outer door. A lady in evening dress enters, goes up to
+the bureau at the back of the stage, and calmly proceeds to break it
+open and ransack it. While she is thus burglariously employed, Lord Eric
+enters, and cannot refrain from a slight expression of surprise. The
+lady takes the situation with humorous calmness, they fall into
+conversation, and it is manifest that at every word Lord Eric is more
+and more fascinated by the fair house-breaker. She learns who he is, and
+evidently knows all about him; but she is careful to give him no inkling
+of her own identity. At last she takes her leave, and he expresses such
+an eager hope of being allowed to renew their acquaintance, that it
+amounts to a declaration of a peculiar interest in her. Thereupon she
+addresses him to this effect: "Has it occurred to you to wonder how I
+got into your friend's rooms? I will show you how"--and, producing a
+latch-key, she holds it up, with all its questionable implications,
+before his eyes. Then she lays it on the table, says: "I leave you to
+draw your own conclusions" and departs. A better opening for a light
+social comedy could scarcely be devised. We have no difficulty in
+guessing that the lady, who is not quite young, and has clearly a strong
+sense of humour, is freakishly turning appearances against herself, by
+way of throwing a dash of cold water on Lord Eric's sudden flame of
+devotion. But we long for a clear explanation of the whole quaint little
+episode; and here, again, no reasonable offer would tempt us to leave
+the theatre before our curiosity is satisfied. The remainder of the
+play, though amusing, is unfortunately not up to the level of the first
+act; else _Wheels within Wheels_ would be a little classic of
+light comedy.
+
+For a third example of interest carefully carried forward, I turn to a
+recent Norwegian play, _The Idyll_, by Peter Egge. At the very rise of
+the curtain, we find Inga Gar, wife of an author and journalist, Dr.
+Gar, reading, with evident tokens of annoyance and distaste, a new book
+of poems by one Rolfe Ringve. Before her marriage, Inga was an actress
+of no great talent; Ringve made himself conspicuous by praising her far
+beyond her merits; and when, at last, an engagement between them was
+announced, people shrugged their shoulders and said: "They are going to
+regularize the situation." As a matter of fact (of this we have early
+assurance), though Ringve has been her ardent lover, Inga has neither
+loved him nor been his mistress. Ringve being called abroad, she has,
+during his absence, broken off her engagement to him, and has then,
+about a year before the play opens, married Dr. Gar, to whom she is
+devoted. While Gar is away on a short lecture tour, Ringve has published
+the book of love-poems which we find her reading. They are very
+remarkable poems; they have already made a great stir in the literary
+world; and interest is all the keener for the fact that they are
+evidently inspired by his passion for Inga, and are couched in such a
+tone of intimacy as to create a highly injurious impression of the
+relations between them. Gar, having just come home, has no suspicion of
+the nature of the book; and when an editor, who cherishes a grudge
+against him, conceives the malicious idea of asking him to review
+Ringve's masterpiece, he consents with alacrity. One or two small
+incidents have in the meantime shown us that there is a little rift in
+the idyllic happiness of Inga and Gar, arising from her inveterate habit
+of telling trifling fibs to avoid facing the petty annoyances of life.
+For instance, when Gar asks her casually whether she has read Ringve's
+poems, a foolish denial slips out, though she knows that the cut pages
+of the book will give her the lie. These incidents point to a state of
+unstable equilibrium in the relations between husband and wife;
+wherefore, when we see Gar, at the end of the act, preparing to read
+Ringve's poems, our curiosity is very keen as to how he will take them.
+We feel the next hour to be big with fate for these two people; and we
+long for the curtain to rise again upon the threatened household. The
+fuse has been fired; we are all agog for the explosion.
+
+In Herr Egge's place, I should have been inclined to have dropped my
+curtain upon Gar, with the light of the reading-lamp full upon him, in
+the act of opening the book, and then to have shown him, at the
+beginning of the second act, in exactly the same position. With more
+delicate art, perhaps, the author interposes a little domestic incident
+at the end of the first act, while leaving it clearly impressed on our
+minds that the reading of the poems is only postponed by a few minutes.
+That is the essential point: the actual moment upon which the curtain
+falls is of minor importance. What is of vast importance, on the other
+hand, is that the expectation of the audience should not be baffled, and
+that the curtain should rise upon the immediate sequel to the reading of
+the poems. This is, in the exact sense of the words, _a scene a
+faire_--an obligatory scene. The author has aroused in us a reasonable
+expectation of it, and should he choose to balk us--to raise his
+curtain, say, a week, or a month, later--we should feel that we had been
+trifled with. The general theory of the _scene a faire_ will presently
+come up for discussion. In the meantime, I merely make the obvious
+remark that it is worse than useless to awaken a definite expectation in
+the breast of the audience, and then to disappoint it.[2]
+
+The works of Sir Arthur Pinero afford many examples of interest very
+skilfully carried forward. In his farces--let no one despise the
+technical lessons to be learnt from a good farce--there is always an
+_adventure_ afoot, whose development we eagerly anticipate. When the
+curtain falls on the first act of _The Magistrate_, we foresee the
+meeting of all the characters at the Hotel des Princes, and are
+impatient to assist at it. In _The Schoolmistress_, we would not for
+worlds miss Peggy Hesseltine's party, which we know awaits us in Act II.
+An excellent example, of a more serious order, is to be found in _The
+Benefit of the Doubt_. When poor Theo, rebuffed by her husband's chilly
+scepticism, goes off on some manifestly harebrained errand, we divine,
+as do her relatives, that she is about to commit social suicide by
+seeking out John Allingham; and we feel more than curiosity as to the
+event--we feel active concern, almost anxiety, as though our own
+personal interests were involved. Our anticipation is heightened, too,
+when we see Sir Fletcher Portwood and Mrs. Cloys set off upon her track.
+This gives us a definite point to which to look forward, while leaving
+the actual course of events entirely undefined. It fulfils one of the
+great ends of craftsmanship, in foreshadowing without forestalling an
+intensely interesting conjuncture of affairs.
+
+I have laid stress on the importance of carrying forward the interest of
+the audience because it is a detail that is often overlooked. There is,
+as a rule, no difficulty in the matter, always assuming that the theme
+be not inherently devoid of interest. One could mention many plays in
+which the author has, from sheer inadvertence, failed to carry forward
+the interest of the first act, though a very little readjustment, or a
+trifling exercise of invention, would have enabled him to do so.
+_Pillars of Society_, indeed, may be taken as an instance, though not a
+very flagrant one. Such interest as we feel at the end of the first act
+is vague and unfocused. We are sure that something is to come of the
+return of Lona and Johan, but we have no inkling as to what that
+something may be. If we guess that the so-called black sheep of the
+family will prove to be the white sheep, it is only because we know that
+it is Ibsen's habit to attack respectability and criticize accepted
+moral values--it is not because of anything that he has told us, or
+hinted to us, in the play itself. In no other case does he leave our
+interest at such a loose end as in this, his prentice-work in modern
+drama. In _The League of Youth_, an earlier play, but of an altogether
+lighter type, the interest is much more definitely carried forward at
+the end of the first act. Stensgaard has attacked Chamberlain Bratsberg
+in a rousing speech, and the Chamberlain has been induced to believe
+that the attack was directed not against himself, but against his enemy
+Monsen. Consequently he invites Stensgaard to his great dinner-party,
+and this invitation Stensgaard regards as a cowardly attempt at
+conciliation. We clearly see a crisis looming ahead, when this
+misunderstanding shall be cleared up; and we consequently look forward
+with lively interest to the dinner-party of the second act--which ends,
+as a matter of fact, in a brilliant scene of comedy.
+
+The principle, to recapitulate, is simply this: a good first act should
+never end in a blank wall. There should always be a window in it, with
+at least a glimpse of something attractive beyond. In _Pillars of
+Society_ there is a window, indeed; but it is of ground glass.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+[Footnote 1: That great story-teller, Alexandra Dumas _pere,_ those a
+straightforward way of carrying forward the interest at the end of the
+first act of _Henri III et sa Cour._ The Due de Guise, insulted by
+Saint-Megrin, beckons to his henchman and says, as the curtain falls,
+_"Qu'on me cherche les memes hommes qui ont assassine Dugast!"_]
+
+[Footnote 2: There are limits to the validity of this rule, as applied
+to minor incidents. For example, it may sometimes be a point of art to
+lead the audience to expect the appearance of one person, when in fact
+another is about to enter. But it is exceedingly dangerous to baffle the
+carefully fostered anticipation of an important scene. See Chapters
+XVII and XXI.]
+
+
+
+
+_BOOK III_
+
+THE MIDDLE
+
+
+
+
+_CHAPTER XI_
+
+TENSION AND ITS SUSPENSION
+
+
+In the days of the five-act dogma, each act was supposed to have its
+special and pre-ordained function. Freytag assigns to the second act, as
+a rule, the _Steigerung_ or heightening--the working-up, one might call
+it--of the interest. But the second act, in modern plays, has often to
+do all the work of the three middle acts under the older dispensation;
+wherefore the theory of their special functions has more of a historical
+than of a practical interest. For our present purposes, we may treat the
+interior section of a play as a unit, whether it consist of one, two, or
+three acts.
+
+The first act may be regarded as the porch or vestibule through which we
+pass into the main fabric--solemn or joyous, fantastic or austere--of
+the actual drama. Sometimes, indeed, the vestibule is reduced to a mere
+threshold which can be crossed in two strides; but normally the first
+act, or at any rate the greater part of it, is of an introductory
+character. Let us conceive, then, that we have passed the vestibule, and
+are now to study the principles on which the body of the structure
+is reared.
+
+In the first place, is the architectural metaphor a just one? Is there,
+or ought there to be, any analogy between a drama and a
+finely-proportioned building? The question has already been touched on
+in the opening paragraphs of Chapter VIII; but we may now look into it a
+little more closely.
+
+What is the characteristic of a fine piece of architecture? Manifestly
+an organic relation, a carefully-planned interdependence, between all
+its parts. A great building is a complete and rounded whole, just like a
+living organism. It is informed by an inner law of harmony and
+proportion, and cannot be run up at haphazard, with no definite and
+pre-determined design. Can we say the same of a great play?
+
+I think we can. Even in those plays which present a picture rather than
+an action, we ought to recognize a principle of selection, proportion,
+composition, which, if not absolutely organic, is at any rate the
+reverse of haphazard. We may not always be able to define the principle,
+to put it clearly in words; but if we feel that the author has been
+guided by no principle, that he has proceeded on mere hand-to-mouth
+caprice, that there is no "inner law of harmony and proportion" in his
+work, then we instinctively relegate it to a low place in our esteem.
+Hauptmann's _Weavers_ certainly cannot be called a piece of dramatic
+architecture, like _Rosmersholm_ or _Iris_; but that does not mean that
+it is a mere rambling series of tableaux. It is not easy to define the
+principle of unity in that brilliant comedy _The Madras House_; but we
+nevertheless feel that a principle of unity exists; or, if we do not, so
+much the worse for the play and its author.
+
+There is, indeed, a large class of plays, often popular, and sometimes
+meritorious, in relation to which the architectural metaphor entirely
+breaks down. They are what may be called "running fire" plays. We have
+all seen children setting a number of wooden blocks on end, at equal
+intervals, and then tilting over the first so that it falls against the
+second, which in turn falls against the third, and so on, till the whole
+row, with a rapid clack-clack-clack, lies flat upon the table. This is
+called a "running fire"; and this is the structural principle of a good
+many plays. We feel that the playwright is, so to speak, inventing as he
+goes along--that the action, like the child's fantastic serpentine of
+blocks, might at any moment take a turn in any possible direction
+without falsifying its antecedents or our expectations. No part of it is
+necessarily involved in any other part. If the play were found too long
+or too short, an act might be cut out or written in without
+necessitating any considerable readjustments in the other acts. The play
+is really a series of episodes,
+
+  "Which might, odd bobs, sir! in judicious hands,
+  Extend from here to Mesopotamy."
+
+The episodes may grow out of each other plausibly enough, but by no
+pre-ordained necessity, and with no far-reaching interdependence. We
+live, in such plays, from moment to moment, foreseeing nothing, desiring
+nothing; and though this frame of mind may be mildly agreeable, it
+involves none of that complexity of sensation with which we contemplate
+a great piece of architecture, or follow the development of a
+finely-constructed drama. To this order belong many cape-and-sword plays
+and detective dramas--plays like _The Adventure of Lady Ursula_, _The
+Red Robe_, the Musketeer romances that were at one time so popular, and
+most plays of the _Sherlock Holmes_ and _Raffles_ type. But pieces of a
+more ambitious order have been known to follow the same formula--some of
+the works, for instance, of Mr. Charles McEvoy, to say nothing of Mr.
+Bernard Shaw.
+
+We may take it, I think, that the architectural analogy holds good of
+every play which can properly be said to be "constructed." Construction
+means dramatic architecture, or in other words, a careful
+pre-arrangement of proportions and interdependencies. But to carry
+beyond this point the analogy between the two arts would be fantastic
+and unhelpful. The one exists in space, the other in time. The one seeks
+to beget in the spectator a state of placid, though it may be of
+aspiring, contemplation; the other, a state of more or less acute
+tension. The resemblances between music and architecture are, as is well
+known, much more extensive and illuminating. It might not be wholly
+fanciful to call music a sort of middle term between the two other arts.
+
+A great part of the secret of dramatic architecture lies in the one word
+"tension." To engender, maintain, suspend, heighten and resolve a state
+of tension--that is the main object of the dramatist's craft.
+
+What do we mean by tension? Clearly a stretching out, a stretching
+forward, of the mind. That is the characteristic mental attitude of the
+theatrical audience. If the mind is not stretching forward, the body
+will soon weary of its immobility and constraint. Attention may be
+called the momentary correlative of tension. When we are intent on what
+is to come, we are attentive to what is there and then happening. The
+term tension is sometimes applied, not to the mental state of the
+audience, but to the relation of the characters on the stage. "A scene
+of high tension" is primarily one in which the actors undergo a great
+emotional strain. But this is, after all, only a means towards
+heightening of the mental tension of the audience. In such a scene the
+mind stretches forward, no longer to something vague and distant, but to
+something instant and imminent.
+
+In discussing what Freytag calls the _erregende Moment,_ we might have
+defined it as the starting-point of the tension. A reasonable audience
+will, if necessary, endure a certain amount of exposition, a certain
+positing of character and circumstance, before the tension sets in; but
+when it once has set in, the playwright must on no account suffer it to
+relax until he deliberately resolves it just before the fall of the
+curtain. There are, of course, minor rhythms of tension and resolution,
+like the harmonic vibrations of a violin-string. That is implied when we
+say that a play consists of a great crisis worked out through a series
+of minor crises. But the main tension, once initiated, must never be
+relaxed. If it is, the play is over, though the author may have omitted
+to note the fact. Not infrequently, he begins a new play under the
+impression that he is finishing the old one. That is what Shakespeare
+did in _The Merchant of Venice._ The fifth act is an independent
+afterpiece, though its independence is slightly disguised by the fact
+that the _erregende Moment_ of the new play follows close upon the end
+of the old one, with no interact between. A very exacting technical
+criticism might accuse Ibsen of verging towards the same fault in _An
+Enemy of the People._ There the tension is practically resolved with Dr.
+Stockmann's ostracism at the end of the fourth act. At that point, if it
+did not know that there was another act to come, an audience might go
+home in perfect content. The fifth act is a sort of epilogue or sequel,
+built out of the materials of the preceding drama, but not forming an
+integral part of it. With a brief exposition to set forth the antecedent
+circumstances, it would be quite possible to present the fifth act as an
+independent comedietta.
+
+But here a point of great importance calls for our notice. Though the
+tension, once started, must never be relaxed: though it ought, on the
+contrary, to be heightened or tightened (as you choose to put it) from
+act to act; yet there are times when it may without disadvantage, or
+even with marked advantage, be temporarily suspended. In other words,
+the stretching-forward, without in any way slackening, may fall into the
+background of our consciousness, while other matters, the relevance of
+which may not be instantly apparent, are suffered to occupy the
+foreground. We know all too well, in everyday experience, that tension
+is not really relaxed by a temporary distraction. The dread of a coming
+ordeal in the witness-box or on the operating-table may be forcibly
+crushed down like a child's jack-in-the-box; but we are always conscious
+of the effort to compress it, and we know that it will spring up again
+the moment that effort ceases. Sir Arthur Pinero's play, _The
+Profligate,_ was written at a time when it was the fashion to give each
+act a sub-title; and one of its acts is headed "The Sword of Damocles."
+That is, indeed, the inevitable symbol of dramatic tension: we see a
+sword of Damocles (even though it be only a farcical blade of painted
+lathe) impending over someone's head: and when once we are confident
+that it will fall at the fated moment, we do not mind having our
+attention momentarily diverted to other matters. A rather flagrant
+example of suspended attention is afforded by Hamlet's advice to the
+Players. We know that Hamlet has hung a sword of Damocles over the
+King's head in the shape of the mimic murder-scene; and, while it is
+preparing, we are quite willing to have our attention switched off to
+certain abstract questions of dramatic criticism. The scene might have
+been employed to heighten the tension. Instead of giving the Players (in
+true princely fashion) a lesson in the general principles of their art,
+Hamlet might have specially "coached" them in the "business" of the
+scene to be enacted, and thus doubly impressed on the audience his
+resolve to "tent" the King "to the quick." I am far from suggesting that
+this would have been desirable; but it would obviously have been
+possible.[1] Shakespeare, as the experience of three centuries has
+shown, did right in judging that the audience was already sufficiently
+intent on the coming ordeal, and would welcome an interlude of
+aesthetic theory.
+
+There are times, moreover, when it is not only permissible to suspend
+the tension, but when, by so doing, a great artist can produce a
+peculiar and admirable effect. A sudden interruption, on the very brink
+of a crisis, may, as it were, whet the appetite of the audience for what
+is to come. We see in the Porter scene in Macbeth a suspension of this
+nature; but Shakespeare used it sparingly, unless, indeed, we are to
+consider as a deliberate point of art the retardation of movement
+commonly observable in the fourth acts of his tragedies. Ibsen, on the
+other hand, deliberately employed this device on three conspicuous
+occasions. The entrance of Dr. Rank in the last act of _A Doll's House_
+is a wholly unnecessary interruption to the development of the crisis
+between Nora and Helmer. The scene might be entirely omitted without
+leaving a perceptible hiatus in the action; yet who does not feel that
+this brief respite lends gathered impetus to the main action when it is
+resumed? The other instances are offered by the two apparitions of Ulric
+Brendel in _Rosmersholm._ The first occurs when Rosmer is on the very
+verge of his momentous confession to Kroll, the second when Rosmer and
+Rebecca are on the very verge of their last great resolve; and in each
+case we feel a distinct value (apart from the inherent quality of the
+Brendel scenes) in the very fact that the tension has been momentarily
+suspended. Such a _rallentando_ effect is like the apparent pause in the
+rush of a river before it thunders over a precipice.
+
+The possibility of suspending tension is of wider import than may at
+first sight appear. But for it, our dramas would have to be all bone and
+muscle, like the figures in an anatomical textbook. As it is, we are
+able, without relaxing tension, to shift it to various planes of
+consciousness, and thus find leisure to reproduce the surface aspects of
+life, with some of its accidents and irrelevances. For example, when the
+playwright has, at the end of his first act, succeeded in carrying
+onward the spectator's interest, and giving him something definite to
+look forward to, it does not at all follow that the expected scene,
+situation, revelation, or what not, should come at the beginning of the
+second act. In some cases it must do so; when, as in _The Idyll_ above
+cited, the spectator has been carefully induced to expect some imminent
+conjuncture which cannot be postponed. But this can scarcely be called a
+typical case. More commonly, when an author has enlisted the curiosity
+of his audience of some definite point, he will be in no great hurry to
+satisfy and dissipate it. He may devote the early part of the second act
+to working-up the same line of interest to a higher pitch; or he may
+hold it in suspense while he prepares some further development of the
+action. The closeness with which a line of interest, once started, ought
+to be followed up, must depend in some measure on the nature and tone of
+the play. If it be a serious play, in which character and action are
+very closely intertwined, any pause or break in the conjoint development
+is to be avoided. If, on the other hand, it is a play of light and
+graceful dialogue, in which the action is a pretext for setting the
+characters in motion rather than the chief means towards their
+manifestation, then the playwright can afford to relax the rate of his
+progress, and even to wander a little from the straight line of advance.
+In such a play, even the old institution of the "underplot" is not
+inadmissible; though the underplot ought scarcely to be a "plot," but
+only some very slight thread of interest, involving no strain on the
+attention.[2] It may almost be called an established practice, on the
+English stage, to let the dalliance of a pair of boy-and-girl lovers
+relieve the main interest of a more or less serious comedy; and there is
+no particular harm in such a convention, if it be not out of keeping
+with the general character of the play. In some plays the substance--the
+character-action, if one may so call it--is the main, and indeed the
+only, thing. In others the substance, though never unimportant, is in
+some degree subordinate to the embroideries; and it is for the
+playwright to judge how far this subordination may safely be carried.
+
+One principle, however, may be emphasized as almost universally valid,
+and that is that the end of an act should never leave the action just
+where it stood at the beginning. An audience has an instinctive sense
+of, and desire for, progress. It does not like to realize that things
+have been merely marking time. Even if it has been thoroughly
+entertained, from moment to moment, during the progress of an act, it
+does not like to feel at the end that nothing has really happened. The
+fall of the curtain gives time for reflection, and for the ordering of
+impressions which, while the action was afoot, were more or less vague
+and confused. It is therefore of great importance that each act should,
+to put it briefly, bear looking back upon--that it should appear to
+stand in due proportion to the general design of the play, and should
+not be felt to have been empty, or irrelevant, or disappointing. This
+is, indeed, a plain corollary from the principle of tension. Suspended
+it may be, sometimes with positive advantage; but it must not be
+suspended too long; and suspension for a whole act is equivalent to
+relaxation.
+
+To sum up: when once a play has begun to move, its movement ought to
+proceed continuously, and with gathering momentum; or, if it stands
+still for a space, the stoppage ought to be deliberate and purposeful.
+It is fatal when the author thinks it is moving, while in fact it is
+only revolving on its own axis.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+[Footnote 1: This method of heightening the tension would have been
+somewhat analogous to that employed by Oscar Wilde in Lady Windermere's
+instructions to her butler, cited on p. 115.]
+
+[Footnote 2: Dryden (_Of Dramatic Poesy_, p. 56, ed. Arnold, 1903) says:
+"Our plays, besides the main design, have underplots or by-concernments,
+of less considerable persons and intrigues, which are carried on with
+the motion of the main plot; as they say the orb of the fixed stars, and
+those of the planets, though they have motions of their own, are whirled
+about by the motion of the _primum mobile_, in which they are
+contained." This is an admirable description of the ideal underplot, as
+conceived by our forefathers; but we find that two lines of tension jar
+with and weaken each other.]
+
+
+
+
+_CHAPTER XII_
+
+PREPARATION: THE FINGER-POST
+
+
+We shall find, on looking into it, that most of the technical maxims
+that have any validity may be traced back, directly or indirectly, to
+the great principle of tension. The art of construction is summed up,
+first, in giving the mind of an audience something to which to stretch
+forward, and, secondly, in not letting it feel that it has stretched
+forward in vain. "You will find it infinitely pleasing," says Dryden,[1]
+"to be led in a labyrinth of design, where you see some of your way
+before you, yet discern not the end till you arrive at it." Or, he might
+have added, "if you foresee the end, but not the means by which it is to
+be reached." In drama, as in all art, the "how" is often more important
+than the "what."
+
+No technical maxim is more frequently cited than the remark of the
+younger Dumas: "The art of the theatre is the art of preparations." This
+is true in a larger sense than he intended; but at the same time there
+are limits to its truth, which we must not fail to observe.
+
+Dumas, as we know, was an inveterate preacher, using the stage as a
+pulpit for the promulgation of moral and social ideas which were, in
+their day, considered very advanced and daring. The primary meaning of
+his maxim, then, was that a startling idea, or a scene wherein such an
+idea was implied, ought not to be sprung upon an audience wholly
+unprepared to accept it. For instance, in _Monsieur Alphonse,_ a
+husband, on discovering that his wife has had an intrigue before their
+marriage, and that a little girl whom she wishes to adopt is really her
+daughter, instantly raises her from the ground where she lies grovelling
+at his feet, and says: "Creature de Dieu, toi qui as failli et te
+repens, releve toi, je te pardonne." This evangelical attitude on the
+part of Admiral de Montaiglin was in itself very surprising, and perhaps
+not wholly admirable, to the Parisian public of 1873; but Dumas had so
+"prepared" the _coup de theatre_ that it passed with very slight
+difficulty on the first night, and with none at all at subsequent
+performances and revivals. How had he "prepared" it? Why, by playing, in
+a score of subtle ways, upon the sympathies and antipathies of the
+audience. For instance, as Sarcey points out, he had made M. de
+Montaiglin a sailor, "accustomed, during his distant voyages, to long
+reveries in view of the boundless ocean, whence he had acquired a
+mystical habit of mind.... Dumas certainly would never have placed this
+pardon in the mouth of a stockbroker." So far so good; but
+"preparation," in the sense of the word, is a device of rhetoric or of
+propaganda rather than of dramatic craftsmanship. It is a method of
+astutely undermining or outflanking prejudice. Desiring to enforce a
+general principle, you invent a case which is specially favourable to
+your argument, and insinuate it into the acceptance of the audience by
+every possible subtlety of adjustment. You trust, it would seem, that
+people who have applauded an act of pardon in an extreme case will be so
+much the readier to exercise that high prerogative in the less carefully
+"prepared" cases which present themselves in real life. This may or may
+not be a sound principle of persuasion; as we are not here considering
+the drama as an art of persuasion, we have not to decide between this
+and the opposite, or Shawesque, principle of shocking and startling an
+audience by the utmost violence of paradox. There is something to be
+said for both methods--for conversion by pill-and-jelly and for
+conversion by nitroglycerine.
+
+Reverting, now, to the domain of pure craftsmanship, can it be said that
+"the art of the theatre is the art of preparation"? Yes, it is very
+largely the art of delicate and unobtrusive preparation, of helping an
+audience to divine whither it is going, while leaving it to wonder how
+it is to get there. On the other hand, it is also the art of avoiding
+laborious, artificial and obvious preparations which lead to little or
+nothing. A due proportion must always be observed between the
+preparation and the result.
+
+To illustrate the meaning of preparation, as the word is here employed,
+I may perhaps be allowed to reprint a passage from a review of Mr.
+Israel Zangwill's play _Children of the Ghetto_.[2]
+
+  "... To those who have not read the novel, it must seem as though
+  the mere illustrations of Jewish life entirely overlaid and
+  overwhelmed the action. It is not so in reality. One who knows the
+  story beforehand can often see that it is progressing even in scenes
+  which seem purely episodic and unconnected either with each other or
+  with the general scheme. But Mr. Zangwill has omitted to provide
+  finger-posts, if I may so express it, to show those who do not know
+  the story beforehand whither he is leading them. He has neglected
+  the great art of forecasting, of keeping anticipation on the alert,
+  which is half the secret of dramatic construction. To forecast,
+  without discounting, your effects--that is all the Law and the
+  Prophets. In the first act of _Children of the Ghetto_, for
+  instance, we see the marriage in jest of Hannah to Sam Levine,
+  followed by the instant divorce with all its curious ceremonies.
+  This is amusing so far as it goes; but when the divorce is
+  completed, the whole thing seems to be over and done with. We have
+  seen some people, in whom as yet we take no particular interest,
+  enmeshed in a difficulty arising from a strange and primitive
+  formalism in the interpretation of law; and we have seen the meshes
+  cut to the satisfaction of all parties, and the incident to all
+  appearance closed. There is no finger-post to direct our
+  anticipation on the way it should go; and those who have not read
+  the book cannot possibly guess that this mock marriage, instantly
+  and ceremoniously dissolved, can have any ulterior effect upon the
+  fortunes of any one concerned. Thus, the whole scene, however
+  curious in itself, seems motiveless and resultless. How the
+  requisite finger-post was to be provided I cannot tell. That is not
+  my business; but a skilful dramatist would have made it his. Then,
+  in the second act, amid illustrations of social life in the Ghetto,
+  we have the meeting of Hannah with David Brandon, a prettily-written
+  scene of love-at-first-sight. But, so far as any one can see, there
+  is every prospect that the course of true love will run absolutely
+  smooth. Again we lack a finger-post to direct our interest forward;
+  nor do we see anything that seems to bring this act into vital
+  relation with its predecessor. Those who have read the book know
+  that David Brandon is a 'Cohen,' a priest, a descendant of Aaron,
+  and that a priest may not marry a divorced woman. Knowing this, we
+  have a sense of irony, of impending disaster, which renders the
+  love-scene of the second act dramatic. But to those, and they must
+  always be a majority in any given audience, who do not know this,
+  the scene has no more dramatic quality than lies in its actual
+  substance, which, although pretty enough, is entirely commonplace.
+  Not till the middle of the third act (out of four) is the obstacle
+  revealed, and we see that the mighty maze was not without a plan.
+  Here, then, the drama begins, after two acts and a half of
+  preparation, during which we were vouchsafed no inkling of what was
+  preparing. It is capital drama when we come to it, really human,
+  really tragic. The arbitrary prohibitions of the Mosaic law have no
+  religious or moral force either for David or for Hannah. They feel
+  it to be their right, almost their duty, to cast off their shackles.
+  In any community, save that of strict Judaism, they are perfectly
+  free to marry. But in thus flouting the letter of the law, Hannah
+  well knows that she will break her father's heart. Even as she
+  struggles to shake them off, the traditions of her race take firmer
+  hold on her; and in the highly dramatic last act (a not unskilful
+  adaptation to the stage of the crucial scene of the book) she bows
+  her neck beneath the yoke, and renounces love that the Law may be
+  fulfilled."
+
+To state the matter in other terms, we are conscious of no tension in
+the earlier acts of this play, because we have not been permitted to see
+the sword of Damocles hanging over the heads of Hannah and David
+Brandon. For lack of preparation, of pointing-forward, we feel none of
+that god-like superiority to the people of the mimic world which we have
+recognized as the characteristic privilege of the spectator. We know no
+more than they do of the implications of their acts, and the network of
+embarrassments in which they are involving themselves. Indeed, we know
+less than they do: for Hannah, as a well brought-up Jewess, is no doubt
+vaguely aware of the disabilities attaching to a divorced woman. A
+gentile audience, on the other hand, cannot possibly foresee how--
+
+  "Some consequence yet hanging in the stars
+  Shall bitterly begin his fearful date
+  With this night's revels."
+
+and, lacking that foreknowledge, it misses the specifically dramatic
+effect of the scenes. The author invites it to play at blind-man's-buff
+with the characters, instead of unsealing its eyes and enabling it to
+watch the game from its Olympian coign of vantage.
+
+Let the dramatist, then, never neglect to place the requisite
+finger-posts on the road he would have us follow. It is not, of course,
+necessary that we should be conscious of all the implications of any
+given scene or incident, but we must know enough of them not only to
+create the requisite tension, but to direct it towards the right quarter
+of the compass. Retrospective elucidations are valueless and sometimes
+irritating. It is in nowise to the author's interest that we should say,
+"Ah, if we had only known this, or foreseen that, in time, the effect of
+such-and-such a scene would have been entirely different!" We have no
+use for finger-posts that point backwards.[3]
+
+In the works of Sir Arthur Pinero I recall two cases in which the lack
+of a finger-post impairs the desired effect: slightly, in the one
+instance, in the other, very considerably. The third act of that
+delightful comedy _The Princess and the Butterfly_ contains no
+sufficient indication of Fay Zuliani's jealousy of the friendship
+between Sir George Lamorant and the Princess Pannonia. We are rather at
+a loss to account for the coldness of her attitude to the Princess, and
+her perverse naughtiness in going off to the Opera Ball. This renders
+the end of the act practically ineffective. We so little foresee what is
+to come of Fay's midnight escapade, that we take no particular interest
+in it, and are rather disconcerted by the care with which it is led up
+to, and the prominence assigned to it. This, however, is a trifling
+fault. Far different is the case in the last act of _The Benefit of the
+Doubt_, which goes near to ruining what is otherwise a very fine play.
+The defect, indeed, is not purely technical: on looking into it we find
+that the author is not in fact working towards an ending which can be
+called either inevitable or conspicuously desirable. His failure to
+point forward is no doubt partly due to his having nothing very
+satisfactory to point forward to. But it is only in retrospect that this
+becomes apparent. What we feel while the act is in progress is simply
+the lack of any finger-post to afford us an inkling of the end towards
+which we are proceeding. Through scene after scene we appear to be
+making no progress, but going round and round in a depressing circle.
+The tension, in a word, is fatally relaxed. It may perhaps be suggested
+as a maxim that when an author finds a difficulty in placing the
+requisite finger-posts, as he nears the end of his play, he will do well
+to suspect that the end he has in view is defective, and to try if he
+cannot amend it.
+
+In the ancient, and in the modern romantic, drama, oracles, portents,
+prophecies, horoscopes and such-like intromissions of the supernatural
+afforded a very convenient aid to the placing of the requisite
+finger-posts--"foreshadowing without forestalling." It has often been
+said that _Macbeth_ approaches the nearest of all Shakespeare's
+tragedies to the antique model: and in nothing is the resemblance
+clearer than in the employment of the Witches to point their skinny
+fingers into the fated future. In _Romeo and Juliet_, inward foreboding
+takes the place of outward prophecy. I have quoted above Romeo's
+prevision of "Some consequence yet hanging in the stars"; and beside it
+may be placed Juliet's--
+
+  "I have no joy of this contract to-night;
+  It is too rash, too unadvised, too sudden,
+  Too like the lightning which doth cease to be
+  Ere one can say it lightens."
+
+In _Othello,_ on the other hand, the most modern of all his plays,
+Shakespeare had recourse neither to outward boding, nor to inward
+foreboding, but planted a plain finger-post in the soil of human nature,
+when he made Brabantio say--
+
+  "Look to her, Moor, if thou hast eyes to see:
+  She has deceived her father, and may thee."
+
+Mr. Stephen Phillips, in the first act of _Paolo and Francesca,_ outdoes
+all his predecessors, ancient or modern, in his daring use of sibylline
+prophecy. He makes Giovanni's blind foster-mother, Angela, foretell the
+tragedy in almost every detail, save that, in her vision, she cannot see
+the face of Francesca's lover. Mr. Phillips, I take it, is here
+reinforcing ancient tradition by a reference to modern "psychical
+research." He trusts to our conceiving such clairvoyance to be not
+wholly impossible, and giving it what may be called provisional
+credence. Whether the device be artistic or not we need not here
+consider. I merely point to it as a conspicuous example of the use of
+the finger-post.[4]
+
+It need scarcely be said that a misleading finger-post is carefully to
+be avoided, except in the rare cases where it may be advisable to beget
+a momentary misapprehension on the part of the audience, which shall be
+almost instantly corrected in some pleasant or otherwise effective
+fashion.[5] It is naturally difficult to think of striking instances of
+the misleading finger-posts; for plays which contain such a blunder are
+not apt to survive, even in the memory. A small example occurs in a
+clever play named _A Modern Aspasia_ by Mr. Hamilton Fyfe. Edward
+Meredith has two households: a London house over which his lawful wife,
+Muriel, presides; and a country cottage where dwells his mistress,
+Margaret, with her two children. One day Muriel's automobile breaks down
+near Margaret's cottage, and, while the tyre is being repaired, Margaret
+gives her visitor tea, neither of them knowing the other. Throughout the
+scene we are naturally wondering whether a revelation is to occur; and
+when, towards the close, Muriel goes to Margaret's room, "to put her hat
+straight," we have no longer any doubt on the subject. It is practically
+inevitable that she should find in the room her husband's photograph, or
+some object which she should instantly recognize as his, and should
+return to the stage in full possession of the secret. This is so
+probable that nothing but a miracle can prevent it: we mentally give the
+author credit for bringing about his revelation in a very simple and
+natural way; and we are proportionately disappointed when we find that
+the miracle has occurred, and that Muriel returns to the sitting-room no
+wiser than she left it. Very possibly the general economy of the play
+demanded that the revelation should not take place at this juncture.
+That question does not here concern us. The point is that, having
+determined to reserve the revelation for his next act, the author ought
+not, by sending Muriel into Margaret's bedroom, to have awakened in us a
+confident anticipation of its occurring there and then. A romantic play
+by Mr. J. B. Fagan, entitled _Under Which King?_ offers another small
+instance of the same nature. The date is 1746; certain despatches of
+vast importance have to be carried by a Hanoverian officer from Moidart
+to Fort William. The Jacobites arrange to drug the officer; and, to make
+assurance doubly sure, in case the drug should fail to act, they post a
+Highland marksman in a narrow glen to pick him off as he passes. The
+drug does act; but his lady-love, to save his military honour, assumes
+male attire and rides off with the despatches. We hear her horse's hoofs
+go clattering down the road; and then, as the curtain falls, we hear a
+shot ring out into the night. This shot is a misleading finger-post.
+Nothing comes of it: we find in the next act that the marksman has
+missed! But marksmen, under such circumstances, have no business to
+miss. It is a breach of the dramatic proprieties. We feel that the
+author has been trifling with us in inflicting on us this purely
+mechanical and momentary "scare." The case would be different if the
+young lady knew that the marksman was lying in ambush, and determined to
+run the gantlet. In that case the incident would be a trait of
+character; but, unless my memory deceives me, that is not the case. On
+the stage, every bullet should have its billet--not necessarily in the
+person aimed at, but in the emotions or anticipations of the audience.
+This bullet may, indeed, give us a momentary thrill of alarm; but it is
+dearly bought at the expense of subsequent disillusionment.
+
+We have now to consider the subject of over-preparation, too obtrusive
+preparation, mountainous preparation leading only to a mouse-like
+effect. This is the characteristic error of the so-called "well-made
+play," the play of elaborate and ingenious intrigue. The trouble with
+the well-made play is that it is almost always, and of necessity,
+ill-made. Very rarely does the playwright succeed in weaving a web which
+is at once intricate, consistent, and clear. In nineteen cases out of
+twenty there are glaring flaws that have to be overlooked; or else the
+pattern is so involved that the mind's eye cannot follow it, and becomes
+bewildered and fatigued. A classical example of both faults may be found
+in Congreve's so-called comedy _The Double-Dealer_. This is, in fact, a
+powerful drama, somewhat in the Sardou manner; but Congreve had none of
+Sardou's deftness in manipulating an intrigue. Maskwell is not only a
+double-dealer, but a triple--or quadruple-dealer; so that the brain soon
+grows dizzy in the vortex of his villainies. The play, it may be noted,
+was a failure.
+
+There is a quite legitimate pleasure to be found, no doubt, in a complex
+intrigue which is also perspicuous. Plays such as Alexandre Dumas's
+_Mademoiselle de Belle-Isle_, or the pseudo-historical dramas of
+Scribe-_Adrienne Lecouvreur, Bertrand et Raton, Un Verre d'Eau, Les
+Trois Maupin,_ etc.--are amusing toys, like those social or military
+tableaux, the figures of which you can set in motion by dropping a penny
+in the slot. But the trick of this sort of "preparation" has long been
+found out, and even unsophisticated audiences are scarcely to be
+thrilled by it. We may accept it as a sound principle, based on common
+sense and justified by experience, that an audience should never be
+tempted to exclaim, "What a marvellously clever fellow is this
+playwright! How infinitely cleverer than the dramatist who constructs
+the tragi-comedy of life."
+
+This is what we inevitably exclaim as we watch Victorien Sardou, in whom
+French ingenuity culminated and caricatured itself, laying the
+foundations of one of his labyrinthine intrigues. The absurdities of
+"preparation" in this sense could scarcely be better satirized than in
+the following page from Francisque Sarcey's criticism of _Nos Intimes_
+(known in English as _Peril_)--a page which is intended, not as satire,
+but as eulogy--
+
+  At the sixth performance, I met, during the first interact, a man of
+  infinite taste who ... complained of the lengthiness of this first
+  act: "What a lot of details," he said, "which serve no purpose, and
+  had better have been omitted! What is the use of that long story
+  about the cactus with a flower that is unique in all the world? Why
+  trouble us with that dahlia-root, which M. Caussade's neighbour has
+  thrown over the garden wall? Was it necessary to inflict on us all
+  that talk about the fox that plays havoc in the garden? What have we
+  to do with that mischievous beast? And that Tolozan, with his
+  endless digressions! What do we care about his ideas on love, on
+  metempsychosis, on friendship, etc.? All this stuff only retards
+  the action."
+
+  "On the contrary," I replied, "all this is just what is going to
+  interest you. You are impatient of these details, because you are
+  looking out for the scenes of passion which have been promised you.
+  But reflect that, without these preparations, the scenes of passion
+  would not touch you. That cactus-flower will play its part, you may
+  be sure; that dahlia-root is not there for nothing; that fox to
+  which you object, and of which you will hear more talk during two
+  more acts, will bring about the solution of one of the most
+  entertaining situations in all drama."
+
+M. Sarcey does not tell us what his interlocutor replied; but he might
+have said, like the hero of _Le Reveillon_: "Are you sure there is no
+mistake? Are you defending Sardou, or attacking him?"
+
+For another example of ultra-complex preparation let me turn to a play
+by Mr. Sydney Grundy, entitled _The Degenerates_. Mr. Grundy, though an
+adept of the Scribe school, has done so much strong and original work
+that I apologize for exhuming a play in which he almost burlesqued his
+own method; but for that very reason it is difficult to find a more
+convincing or more deterrent example of misdirected ingenuity. The
+details of the plot need not be recited. It is sufficient to say that
+the curtain has not been raised ten minutes before our attention has
+been drawn to the fact that a certain Lady Saumarez has her monogram on
+everything she wears, even to her gloves: whence we at once foresee that
+she is destined to get into a compromising situation, to escape from it,
+but to leave a glove behind her. In due time the compromising situation
+arrives, and we find that it not only requires a room with three
+doors,[6] but that a locksmith has to be specially called in to provide
+two of these doors with peculiar locks, so that, when once shut, they
+cannot be opened from inside except with a key! What interest can we
+take in a situation turning on such contrivances? Sane technic laughs at
+locksmiths. And after all this preparation, the situation proves to be a
+familiar trick of theatrical thimble-rigging: you lift the thimble, and
+instead of Pea A, behold Pea B!--instead of Lady Saumarez it is Mrs.
+Trevelyan who is concealed in Isidore de Lorano's bedroom. Sir William
+Saumarez must be an exceedingly simple-minded person to accept the
+substitution, and exceedingly unfamiliar with the French drama of the
+'seventies and 'eighties. If he had his wits about him he would say: "I
+know this dodge: it comes from Sardou. Lady Saumarez has just slipped
+out by that door, up R., and if I look about I shall certainly find her
+fan, or her glove, or her handkerchief somewhere on the premises." The
+author may object that such criticism would end in paralysing the
+playwright, and that, if men always profited by the lessons of the
+stage, the world would long ago have become so wise that there would be
+no more room in it for drama, which lives on human folly. "You will tell
+me next," he may say, "that I must not make groundless jealousy the
+theme of a play, because every one who has seen Othello would at once
+detect the machinations of an Iago!" The retort is logically specious,
+but it mistakes the point. It would certainly be rash to put any limit
+to human gullibility, or to deny that Sir William Saumarez, in the given
+situation, might conceivably be hoodwinked. The question is not one of
+psychology but of theatrical expediency: and the point is that when a
+situation is at once highly improbable in real life and exceedingly
+familiar on the stage, we cannot help mentally caricaturing it as it
+proceeds, and are thus prevented from lending it the provisional
+credence on which interest and emotion depend.
+
+An instructive contrast to _The Degenerates_ may be found in a nearly
+contemporary play, _Mrs. Dane's Defence_, by Mr. Henry Arthur Jones. The
+first three acts of this play may be cited as an excellent example of
+dexterous preparation and development. Our interest in the sequence of
+events is aroused, sustained, and worked up to a high tension with
+consummate skill. There is no feverish overcrowding of incident, as is
+so often the case in the great French story-plays--_Adrienne
+Lecouvreur_, for example, or _Fedora_. The action moves onwards,
+unhasting, unresting, and the finger-posts are placed just where they
+are wanted.
+
+The observance of a due proportion between preparation and result is a
+matter of great moment. Even when the result achieved is in itself very
+remarkable, it may be dearly purchased by a too long and too elaborate
+process of preparation. A famous play which is justly chargeable with
+this fault is _The Gay Lord Quex_. The third act is certainly one of the
+most breathlessly absorbing scenes in modern drama; but by what long,
+and serpentine, and gritty paths do we not approach it! The elaborate
+series of trifling incidents by means of which Sophy Fullgarney is first
+brought from New Bond Street to Fauncey Court, and then substituted for
+the Duchess's maid, is at no point actually improbable; and yet we feel
+that a vast effort has been made to attain an end which, owing to the
+very length of the sequence of chances, at last assumes an air of
+improbability. There is little doubt that the substructure of the great
+scene might have been very much simpler. I imagine that Sir Arthur
+Pinero was betrayed into complexity and over-elaboration by his desire
+to use, as a background for his action, a study of that "curious phase
+of modern life," the manicurist's parlour. To those who find this study
+interesting, the disproportion between preliminaries and result may be
+less apparent. It certainly did not interfere with the success of the
+play in its novelty; but it may very probably curtail its lease of life.
+What should we know of _The School for Scandal_ to-day, if it consisted
+of nothing but the Screen Scene and two laborious acts of preparation?
+
+A too obvious preparation is very apt to defeat its end by begetting a
+perversely quizzical frame of mind in the audience. The desired effect
+is discounted, like a conjuring trick in which the mechanism is too
+transparent. Let me recall a trivial but instructive instance of this
+error. The occasion was the first performance of _Pillars of Society_ at
+the Gaiety Theatre, London--the first Ibsen performance ever given in
+England. At the end of the third act, Krap, Consul Bernick's clerk,
+knocks at the door of his master's office and says, "It is blowing up to
+a stiff gale. Is the _Indian Girl_ to sail in spite of it?" Whereupon
+Bernick, though he knows that the _Indian Girl_ is hopelessly
+unseaworthy, replies, "The _Indian Girl_ is to sail in spite of it." It
+had occurred to someone that the effect of this incident would be
+heightened if Krap, before knocking at the Consul's door, were to
+consult the barometer, and show by his demeanour that it was falling
+rapidly. A barometer had accordingly been hung, up stage, near the
+veranda entrance; and, as the scenic apparatus of a Gaiety matinee was
+in those days always of the scantiest, it was practically the one
+decoration of a room otherwise bare almost to indecency. It had stared
+the audience full in the face through three long acts; and when, at the
+end of the third, Krap went up to it and tapped it, a sigh of relief ran
+through the house, as much as to say, "At last! so _that_ was what it
+was for!"--to the no small detriment of the situation. Here the fault
+lay in the obtrusiveness of the preparation. Had the barometer passed
+practically unnoticed among the other details of a well-furnished hall,
+it would at any rate have been innocent, and perhaps helpful. As it was,
+it seemed to challenge the curiosity of the audience, saying, "I am
+evidently here with some intention; guess, now, what the intention can
+be!" The producer had failed in the art which conceals art.
+
+Another little trait from a play of those far-past days illustrates the
+same point. It was a drawing-room drama of the Scribe school. Near the
+beginning of an act, some one spilt a bottle of red ink, and mopped it
+up with his (or her) handkerchief, leaving the handkerchief on the
+escritoire. The act proceeded from scene to scene, and the handkerchief
+remained unnoticed; but every one in the audience who knew the rules of
+the game, kept his eye on the escritoire, and was certain that that ink
+had not been spilt for nothing. In due course a situation of great
+intensity was reached, wherein the villain produced a pistol and fired
+at the heroine, who fainted. As a matter of fact he had missed her; but
+her quick-witted friend seized the gory handkerchief, and, waving it in
+the air, persuaded the villain that the shot had taken deadly effect,
+and that he must flee for his life. Even in those days, such an
+unblushing piece of trickery was found more comic than impressive. It
+was a case of preparation "giving itself away."
+
+A somewhat later play, _The Mummy and the Humming Bird_, by Mr. Isaac
+Henderson, contains a good example of over-elaborate preparation. The
+Earl of Lumley, lost in his chemical studies with a more than Newtonian
+absorption, suffers his young wife to form a sentimental friendship with
+a scoundrel of an Italian novelist, Signor D'Orelli. Remaining at home
+one evening, when Lady Lumley and a party of friends, including
+D'Orelli, have gone off to dine at a restaurant, the Earl chances to
+look out of the window, and observes an organ-grinder making doleful
+music in the snow. His heart is touched, and he invites the music-monger
+to join him in his study and share his informal dinner. The conversation
+between them is carried on by means of signs, for the organ-grinder
+knows no English, and the Earl is painfully and improbably ignorant of
+Italian. He does not even know that Roma means Rome, and Londra, London.
+This ignorance, however, is part of the author's ingenuity. It leads to
+the establishment of a sort of object-speech, by aid of which the Earl
+learns that his guest has come to England to prosecute a vendetta
+against the man who ruined his happy Sicilian home. I need scarcely say
+that this villain is none other than D'Orelli; and when at last he and
+the Countess elope to Paris, the object-speech enables Giuseppe to
+convey to the Earl, by aid of a brandy-bottle, a siphon, a broken plate,
+and half-a-crown, not only the place of their destination, but the very
+hotel to which they are going. This is a fair example of that ingenuity
+for ingenuity's sake which was once thought the very essence of the
+playwright's craft, but has long ago lost all attraction for intelligent
+audiences.
+
+We may take it as a rule that any scene which requires an obviously
+purposeful scenic arrangement is thereby discounted. It may be strong
+enough to live down the disadvantage; but a disadvantage it is none the
+less. In a play of Mr. Carton's, _The Home Secretary_, a paper of great
+importance was known to be contained in an official despatch-box. When
+the curtain rose on the last act, it revealed this despatch-box on a
+table right opposite a French window, while at the other side of the
+room a high-backed arm-chair discreetly averted its face. Every one
+could see at a glance that the romantic Anarchist was going to sneak in
+at the window and attempt to abstract the despatch-box, while the
+heroine was to lie perdue in the high-backed chair; and when, at the
+fated moment, all this punctually occurred, one could scarcely repress
+an "Ah!" of sarcastic satisfaction. Similarly, in an able play named Mr.
+and Mrs. Daventry, Mr. Frank Harris had conceived a situation which
+required that the scene should be specially built for eavesdropping.[7]
+As soon as the curtain rose, and revealed a screen drawn halfway down
+the stage, with a sofa ensconced behind it, we knew what to expect. Of
+course Mrs. Daventry was to lie on the sofa and overhear a duologue
+between her husband and his mistress: the only puzzle was to understand
+why the guilty pair should neglect the precaution of looking behind the
+screen. As a matter of fact, Mrs. Daventry, before she lay down,
+switched off the lights, and Daventry and Lady Langham, finding the room
+dark, assumed it to be empty. With astounding foolhardiness, considering
+that the house was full of guests, and this a much frequented public
+room, Daventry proceeded to lock the door, and continue his conversation
+with Lady Langham in the firelight. Thus, when the lady's husband came
+knocking at the door, Mrs. Daventry was able to rescue the guilty pair
+from an apparently hopeless predicament, by calmly switching on the
+lights and opening the door to Sir John Langham. The situation was
+undoubtedly a "strong" one; but the tendency of modern technic is to
+hold "strength" too dearly purchased at such reckless expense of
+preparation.
+
+There are, then, very clear limits to the validity of the Dumas maxim
+that "The art of the theatre is the art of preparations." Certain it is
+that over-preparation is the most fatal of errors. The clumsiest thing a
+dramatist can possibly do is to lay a long and elaborate train for the
+ignition of a squib. We take pleasure in an event which has been
+"prepared" in the sense that we have been led to desire it, and have
+wondered how it was to be brought about. But we scoff at an occurrence
+which nothing but our knowledge of the tricks of the stage could
+possibly lead us to expect, yet which, knowing these tricks, we have
+foreseen from afar, and resented in advance.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+[Footnote 1: _Of Dramatic Poesy,_ ed. Arnold, 1903, p. 60.]
+
+[Footnote 2: _The World_, December 20, 1899.]
+
+[Footnote 3: At the end of the first act of _Lady Inger of Ostraat_,
+Ibsen evidently intends to produce a startling effect through the sudden
+appearance of Olaf Skaktavl in Lady Inger's hall. But as he has totally
+omitted to tell us who the strange man is, the incident has no meaning
+for us. In 1855 Ibsen had all his technical lessons yet to learn.]
+
+[Footnote 4: The fact that Mr. Phillips should have deemed such a
+foreshadowing necessary shows how instinctively a dramatist feels that
+the logic of his art requires him to assume that his audience is
+ignorant of his fable. In reality, very few members of the first-night
+audience, or of any other, can have depended on old Angela's
+vaticination for the requisite foresight of events. But this does not
+prove Angela to be artistically superfluous.]
+
+[Footnote 5: See pp. 118, 240.]
+
+[Footnote 6: There is no special harm in this: the question of exits and
+entrances and their mechanism is discussed in Chapter XXIII.]
+
+[Footnote 7: This might be said of the scene of the second act of _The
+Benefit of the Doubt_; but here the actual stage-topography is natural
+enough. The author, however, is rather over-anxious to emphasize the
+acoustic relations of the two rooms.]
+
+
+
+
+_CHAPTER XIII_
+
+THE OBLIGATORY SCENE
+
+
+I do not know whether it was Francisque Sarcey who invented the phrase
+_scene a faire_; but it certainly owes its currency to that valiant
+champion of the theatrical theatre, if I may so express it. Note that in
+this term I intend no disrespect. My conception of the theatrical
+theatre may not be exactly the same as M. Sarcey's; but at all events I
+share his abhorrence of the untheatrical theatre.
+
+What is the _scene a faire_? Sarcey has used the phrase so often, and in
+so many contexts, that it is impossible to tie him down to any strict
+definition. Instead of trying to do so, I will give a typical example of
+the way in which he usually employs the term.
+
+In _Les Fourchambault_, by Emile Augier, the first act introduces us to
+the household of a merchant, of Havre, who has married a wealthy, but
+extravagant woman, and has a son and daughter who are being gradually
+corrupted by their mother's worldliness. We learn that Fourchambault,
+senior, has, in his youth, betrayed a young woman who was a governess in
+his family. He wanted to marry her, but his relations maligned her
+character, and he cast her off; nor does he know what has become of her
+and her child. In the second act we pass to the house of an energetic
+and successful young shipowner named Bernard, who lives alone with his
+mother. Bernard, as we divine, is secretly devoted to a young lady named
+Marie Letellier, a guest in the Fourchambault house, to whom young
+Leopold Fourchambault is paying undesirable attentions. One day Bernard
+casually mentions to his mother that the house of Fourchambault is on
+the verge of bankruptcy; nothing less than a quarter of a million francs
+will enable it to tide over the crisis. Mme. Bernard, to her son's
+astonishment, begs him to lend the tottering firm the sum required. He
+objects that, unless the business is better managed, the loan will only
+postpone the inevitable disaster. "Well, then, my son," she replied,
+"you must go into partnership with M. Fourchambault." "I! with that
+imbecile!" he exclaims. "My son," she says gravely, and emphatically,
+"you must--it is your duty--I demand it of you!" "Ah!" cries Bernard. "I
+understand--he is my father!"
+
+After ecstatically lauding this situation and the scenes which have led
+up to it, M. Sarcey continues--
+
+  When the curtain falls upon the words "He is my father," I at once
+  see two _scenes a faire_, and I know that they will be _faites_: the
+  scene between the son and the father whom he is to save, the scene
+  between Bernard and his half-brother Leopold, who are in love with
+  the same woman, the one dishonourably and the other secretly and
+  nobly. What will they say to each other? I have no idea. But it is
+  precisely this _expectation mingled with uncertainly_ that is one of
+  the charms of the theatre. I say to myself, "Ah, they will have an
+  encounter! What will come of it?" And that this is the state of mind
+  of the whole audience is proved by the fact that when the two
+  characters of the _scenes a faire_ stand face to face, a thrill of
+  anticipation runs round the whole theatre.
+
+This, then, is the obligatory scene as Sarcey generally understands
+it--a scene which, for one reason or another, an audience expects and
+ardently desires. I have italicized the phrase "expectation mingled with
+uncertainty" because it expresses in other terms the idea which I have
+sought to convey in the formula "foreshadowing without forestalling."
+But before we can judge of the merits of M. Sarcey's theory, we must
+look into it a little more closely. I shall try, then, to state it in my
+own words, in what I believe to be its most rational and
+defensible form.
+
+An obligatory scene is one which the audience (more or less clearly and
+consciously) foresees and desires, and the absence of which it may with
+reason resent. On a rough analysis, it will appear, I think, that there
+are five ways in which a scene may become, in this sense, obligatory:
+
+(1) It may be necessitated by the inherent logic of the theme.
+
+(2) It may be demanded by the manifest exigencies of specifically
+dramatic effect.
+
+(3) The author himself may have rendered it obligatory by seeming
+unmistakably to lead up to it.
+
+(4) It may be required in order to justify some modification of
+character or alteration of will, too important to be taken for granted.
+
+(5) It may be imposed by history or legend.
+
+These five classes of obligatory scenes may be docketed, respectively,
+as the Logical, the Dramatic, the Structural, the Psychological, and the
+Historic. M. Sarcey generally employed the term in one of the first
+three senses, without clearly distinguishing between them. It is,
+indeed, not always easy to determine whether the compulsion (assuming it
+to exist at all) lies in the very essence of the theme or situation, or
+only in the author's manipulation of it.
+
+Was Sarcey right in assuming such a compulsion to be a constant and
+dominant factor in the playwright's craft? I think we shall see reason
+to believe him right in holding that it frequently arises, but wrong if
+he went the length of maintaining that there can be no good play without
+a definite _scene a faire_--as eighteenth-century landscape painters are
+said to have held that no one could be a master of his art till he knew
+where to place "the brown tree." I remember no passage in which Sarcey
+explicitly lays down so hard and fast a rule, but several in which he
+seems to take it for granted.[1]
+
+It may be asked whether--and if so, why--the theory of the obligatory
+scene holds good for the dramatist and not for the novelist? Perhaps it
+has more application to the novel than is commonly supposed; but in so
+far as it applies peculiarly to the drama, the reason is pretty clear.
+It lies in the strict concentration imposed on the dramatist, and the
+high mental tension which is, or ought to be, characteristic of the
+theatrical audience. The leisurely and comparatively passive
+novel-reader may never miss a scene which an audience, with its
+instincts of logic and of economy keenly alert, may feel to be
+inevitable. The dramatist is bound to extract from his material the last
+particle of that particular order of effect which the stage, and the
+stage alone, can give us. If he fails to do so, we feel that there has
+been no adequate justification for setting in motion all the complex
+mechanism of the theatre. His play is like a badly-designed engine in
+which a large part of the potential energy is dissipated to no purpose.
+The novelist, with a far wider range of effects at his command, and
+employing no special mechanism to bring them home to us, is much more
+free to select and to reject. He is exempt from the law of rigid economy
+to which the dramatist must submit. Far from being bound to do things in
+the most dramatic way, he often does wisely in rejecting that course, as
+unsuited to his medium. Fundamentally, no doubt, the same principle
+applies to both arts, but with a wholly different stringency in the case
+of the drama. "Advisable" in the novelist's vocabulary is translated by
+"imperative" in the dramatist's. The one is playing a long-drawn game,
+in which the loss of a trick or two need not prove fatal; the other has
+staked his all on a single rubber.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Obligatory scenes of the first type--those necessitated by the inherent
+logic of the theme--can naturally arise only in plays to which a
+definite theme can be assigned. If we say that woman's claim to possess
+a soul of her own, even in marriage, is the theme of _A Doll's House_,
+then evidently the last great balancing of accounts between Nora and
+Helmer is an obligatory scene. It would have been quite possible for
+Ibsen to have completed the play without any such scene: he might, for
+instance, have let Nora fulfil her intention of drowning herself; but in
+that case his play would have been merely a tragic anecdote with the
+point omitted. We should have felt vague intimations of a general idea
+hovering in the air, but it would have remained undefined and
+undeveloped. As we review, however, the series of Ibsen's plays, and
+notice how difficult it is to point to any individual scene and say,
+"This was clearly the _scene a faire_," we feel that, though the phrase
+may express a useful idea in a conveniently brief form, there is no
+possibility of making the presence or absence of a _scene a faire_ a
+general test of dramatic merit. In _The Wild Duck_, who would not say
+that, theoretically, the scene in which Gregers opens Hialmar's eyes to
+the true history of his marriage was obligatory in the highest degree?
+Yet Ibsen, as a matter of fact, does not present it to us: he sends the
+two men off for "a long walk" together: and who does not feel that this
+is a stroke of consummate art? In _Rosmersholm_, as we know, he has
+been accused of neglecting, not merely the scene, but the play, _a
+faire_; but who will now maintain that accusation? In _John Gabriel
+Borhman_, if we define the theme as the clash of two devouring egoisms,
+Ibsen has, in the third act, given us the obligatory scene; but he has
+done it, unfortunately, with an enfeebled hand; whereas the first and
+second acts, though largely expository, and even (in the Foldal scene)
+episodic, rank with his greatest achievements.
+
+For abundant examples of scenes rendered obligatory by the logic of the
+theme, we have only to turn to the works of those remorseless
+dialecticians, MM. Hervieu and Brieux. In such a play as _La Course du
+Flambeau_, there is scarcely a scene that may not be called an
+obligatory deduction from the thesis duly enunciated, with no small
+parade of erudition, in the first ten minutes of the play. It is that,
+in handing on the _vital lampada_, as Plato and "le bon poete Lucrece"
+express it, the love of the parent for the child becomes a devouring
+mania, to which everything else is sacrificed, while the love of the
+child for the parent is a tame and essentially selfish emotion,
+absolutely powerless when it comes into competition with the passions
+which are concerned with the transmission of the vital flame. This
+theorem having been stated, what is the first obligatory scene?
+Evidently one in which a mother shall refuse a second marriage, with a
+man whom she loves, because it would injure the prospects and wound the
+feelings of her adored daughter. Then, when the adored daughter herself
+marries, the mother must make every possible sacrifice for her, and the
+daughter must accept them all with indifference, as mere matters of
+course. But what is the final, triumphant proof of the theorem? Why, of
+course, the mother must kill her mother to save the daughter's life! And
+this ultra-obligatory scene M. Hervieu duly serves up to us.
+Marie-Jeanne (the daughter) is ordered to the Engadine; Sabine (the
+mother) is warned that Madame Fontenais (the grandmother) must not go to
+that altitude on pain of death; but, by a series of violently artificial
+devices, things are so arranged that Marie-Jeanne cannot go unless
+Madame Fontenais goes too; and Sabine, rather than endanger her
+daughter's recovery, does not hesitate to let her mother set forth,
+unwittingly, to her doom. In the last scene of all, Marie-Jeanne
+light-heartedly prepares to leave her mother and go off with her husband
+to the ends of the earth; Sabine learns that the man she loved and
+rejected for Marie-Jeanne's sake is for ever lost to her; and, to
+complete the demonstration, Madame Fontenais falls dead at her feet.
+These scenes are unmistakably _scenes a faire_, dictated by the logic of
+the theme; but they belong to a conception of art in which the free
+rhythms of life are ruthlessly sacrificed to the needs of a
+demonstration. Obligatory scenes of this order are mere diagrams drawn
+with ruler and compass--the obligatory illustrations of an extravagantly
+over-systematic lecture.
+
+M. Brieux in some of his plays (not in all) is no less logic-ridden than
+M. Hervieu. Take, for instance, _Les Trois Filles de M. Dupont_: every
+character is a term in a syllogism, every scene is dictated by an
+imperious craving for symmetry. The main theorem may be stated in some
+such terms as these: "The French marriage system is immoral and
+abominable; yet the married woman is, on the whole, less pitiable than
+her unmarried sisters." In order to prove this thesis in due form, we
+begin at the beginning, and show how the marriage of Antonin Mairaut and
+Julie Dupont is brought about by the dishonest cupidity of the parents
+on both sides. The Duponts flatter themselves that they have cheated the
+Mairauts, the Mairauts that they have swindled the Duponts; while
+Antonin deliberately simulates artistic tastes to deceive Julie, and
+Julie as deliberately makes a show of business capacity in order to take
+in Antonin. Every scene between father and daughter is balanced by a
+corresponding scene between mother and son. Every touch of hypocrisy on
+the one side is scrupulously set off against a trait of dishonesty on
+the other. Julie's passion for children is emphasized, Antonin's
+aversion from them is underlined. But lest he should be accused of
+seeing everything in black, M. Brieux will not make the parents
+altogether detestable. Still holding the balance true, he lets M.
+Mairaut on the one side, and Madame Dupont on the other, develop amiable
+impulses, and protest, at a given moment, against the infamies committed
+and countenanced by their respective spouses. And in the second and
+third acts, the edifice of deception symmetrically built up in the first
+act is no less symmetrically demolished. The parents expose and denounce
+each other's villainies; Julie and Antonin, in a great scene of conjugal
+recrimination, lay bare the hypocrisies of allurement that have brought
+them together. Julie then determines to escape from the loathsome
+prison-house of her marriage; and this brings us to the second part of
+the theorem. The title shows that Julie has two sisters; but hitherto
+they have remained in the background. Why do they exist at all? Why has
+Providence blessed M. Dupont with "three fair daughters and no more"?
+Because Providence foresaw exactly the number M. Brieux would require
+for his demonstration. Are there not three courses open to a penniless
+woman in our social system--marriage, wage-earning industry, and
+wage-earning profligacy? Well, M. Dupont must have one daughter to
+represent each of these contingencies. Julie has illustrated the
+miseries of marriage; Caroline and Angele shall illustrate respectively
+the still greater miseries of unmarried virtue and unmarried vice. When
+Julie declares her intention of breaking away from the house of bondage,
+her sisters rise up symmetrically, one on either hand, and implore her
+rather to bear the ills she has than to fly to others that she knows not
+of. "Symmetry of symmetries, all is symmetry" in the poetics of M.
+Brieux. But life does not fall into such obvious patterns. The
+obligatory scene which is imposed upon us, not by the logic of life, but
+by the logic of demonstration, is not a _scene a faire_, but a _scene
+a fuir_.
+
+Mr. Bernard Shaw, in some sense the Brieux of the English theatre, is
+not a man to be dominated by logic, or by anything else under the sun.
+He has, however, given us one or two excellent examples of the
+obligatory scene in the true and really artistic sense of the term. The
+scene of Candida's choice between Eugene and Morell crowns the edifice
+of _Candida_ as nothing else could. Given the characters and their
+respective attitudes towards life, this sententious thrashing-out of the
+situation was inevitable. So, too, in _Mrs. Warren's Profession_, the
+great scene of the second act between Vivie and her mother is a superb
+example of a scene imposed by the logic of the theme. On the other hand,
+in Mr. Henry Arthur Jones's finely conceived, though unequal, play,
+_Michael and his Lost Angel_, we miss what was surely an obligatory
+scene. The play is in fact a contest between the paganism of Audrie
+Lesden and the ascetic, sacerdotal idealism of Michael Feversham. In the
+second act, paganism snatches a momentary victory; and we confidently
+expect, in the third act, a set and strenuous effort on Audrie's part to
+break down in theory the ascetic ideal which has collapsed in practice.
+It is probable enough that she might not succeed in dragging her lover
+forth from what she regards as the prison-house of a superstition; but
+the logic of the theme absolutely demands that she should make the
+attempt. Mr. Jones has preferred to go astray after some comparatively
+irrelevant and commonplace matter, and has thus left his play
+incomplete. So, too, in _The Triumph of the Philistines_, Mr. Jones
+makes the mistake of expecting us to take a tender interest in a pair of
+lovers who have had never a love-scene to set our interest agoing. They
+are introduced to each other in the first act, and we shrewdly suspect
+(for in the theatre we are all inveterate match-makers) that they are
+going to fall in love; but we have not the smallest positive evidence of
+the fact before we find, in the second act, that misunderstandings have
+arisen, and the lady declines to look at the gentleman. The actress who
+played the part at the St. James's Theatre was blamed for failing to
+enlist our sympathies in this romance; but what actress can make much of
+a love part which, up to the very last moment, is all suspicion and
+jealousy? Fancy _Romeo and Juliet_ with the love-scenes omitted, "by
+special request!"
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+In a second class, according to our analysis, we place the obligatory
+scene which is imposed by "the manifest exigencies of specifically
+dramatic effect." Here it must of course be noted that the conception of
+"specifically dramatic effect" varies in some degree, from age to age,
+from generation to generation, and even, one may almost say, from
+theatre to theatre. Scenes of violence and slaughter were banished from
+the Greek theatre, mainly, no doubt, because rapid movement was rendered
+difficult by the hieratic trappings of the actors, and was altogether
+foreign to the spirit of tragedy; but it can scarcely be doubted that
+the tragic poets were the less inclined to rebel against this
+convention, because they extracted "specifically dramatic effects" of a
+very high order out of their "messenger-scenes." Even in the modern
+theatre we are thrilled by the description of Hippolytus dragged at his
+own chariot wheel, or Creusa and Creon devoured by Medea's veil of
+fire.[2] On the Elizabethan stage, the murder of Agamemnon would no
+doubt have been "subjected to our faithful eyes" like the blinding of
+Gloucester or the suffocation of Edward II; but who shall say that there
+is less "specifically dramatic effect" in Aeschylus's method of
+mirroring the scene in the clairvoyant ecstasy of Cassandra? I am much
+inclined to think that the dramatic effect of highly emotional narrative
+is underrated in the modern theatre.
+
+Again, at one class of theatre, the author of a sporting play--is bound
+to exhibit a horse-race on the stage, or he is held to have shirked his
+obligatory scene. At another class of theatre, we shall have a scene,
+perhaps, in a box in the Grand Stand, where some Lady Gay Spanker shall
+breathlessly depict, from start to finish, the race which is visible to
+her, but invisible to the audience. At a third class of the theatre, the
+"specifically dramatic effect" to be extracted from a horse-race is
+found in a scene in a Black-Country slum, where a group of working-men
+and women are feverishly awaiting the evening paper which shall bring
+them the result of the St. Leger, involving for some of them
+opulence--to the extent, perhaps, of a L5 note--and for others ruin.[3]
+
+The difficulty of deciding that any one form of scene is predestined by
+the laws of dramatic effect is illustrated in Tolstoy's grisly drama,
+_The Power of Darkness_. The scene in which Nikita kills Akoulina's
+child was felt to be too horrible for representation; whereupon the
+author wrote an alternative scene between Mitritch and Anna, which
+passes simultaneously with the murder scene, in an adjoining room. The
+two scenes fulfil exactly the same function in the economy of the play;
+it can be acted with either of them, it might be acted with both; and it
+is impossible to say which produces the intenser or more "specifically
+dramatic effect."
+
+The fact remains, however, that there is almost always a dramatic and
+undramatic, a more dramatic and a less dramatic, way of doing a thing;
+and an author who allows us to foresee and expect a dramatic way of
+attaining a given end, and then chooses an undramatic or less dramatic
+way, is guilty of having missed the obligatory scene. For a general
+discussion of what we mean by the terms "dramatic" and "undramatic" the
+reader may refer back to Chapter III. Here I need only give one or two
+particular illustrations.
+
+It will be remembered that one of the _scenes a faire_ which M. Sarcey
+foresaw in _Les Fourchambault_ was the encounter between the two
+brothers; the illegitimate Bernard and the legitimate Leopold. It would
+have been quite possible, and quite natural, to let the action of the
+play work itself out without any such encounter; or to let the encounter
+take place behind the scenes; but this would have been a patent ignoring
+of dramatic possibilities, and M. Sarcey would have had ample reason to
+pour the vials of his wrath on Augier's head. He was right, however, in
+his confidence that Augier would not fail to "make" the scene. And how
+did he "make" it? The one thing inevitable about it was that the truth
+should be revealed to Leopold; but there were a dozen different ways in
+which that might have been effected. Perhaps, in real life, Bernard
+would have said something to this effect: "Young man, you are making
+questionable advances to a lady in whom I am interested. I beg that you
+will cease to persecute her; and if you ask by what right I do so, I
+reply that I am in fact your elder brother, that I have saved our father
+from ruin, that I am henceforth the predominant partner in his business,
+and that, if you do not behave yourself, I shall see that your allowance
+is withdrawn, and that you have no longer the means to lead an idle and
+dissolute life." This would have been an ungracious but not unnatural
+way of going about the business. Had Augier chosen it, we should have
+had no right to complain on the score of probability; but it would have
+been evident to the least imaginative that he had left the specifically
+dramatic opportunities of the scene entirely undeveloped. Let us now see
+what he actually did. Marie Letellier, compromised by Leopold's conduct,
+has left the Fourchambault house and taken refuge with Mme. Bernard.
+Bernard loves her devotedly, but does not dream that she can see
+anything in his uncouth personality, and imagines that she loves
+Leopold. Accordingly, he determines that Leopold shall marry her, and
+tells him so. Leopold scoffs at the idea; Bernard insists; and little by
+little the conflict rises to a tone of personal altercation. At last
+Leopold says something slighting of Mile. Letellier, and Bernard--who,
+be it noted, has begun with no intention of revealing the kinship
+between them--loses his self-control and cries, "Ah, there speaks the
+blood of the man who slandered a woman in order to prevent his son from
+keeping his word to her. I recognize in you your grandfather, who was a
+miserable calumniator." "Repeat that word!" says Leopold. Bernard does
+so, and the other strikes him across the face with his glove. For a
+perceptible interval Bernard struggles with his rage in silence, and
+then: "It is well for you," he cries, "that you are my brother!"
+
+We need not follow the scene in the sentimental turning which it then
+takes, whereby it comes about, of course, that Bernard, not Leopold,
+marries Mile. Letellier. The point is that Augier has justified Sarcey's
+confidence by making the scene thoroughly and specifically dramatic; in
+other words, by charging it with emotion, and working up the tension to
+a very high pitch. And Sarcey was no doubt right in holding that this
+was what the whole audience instinctively expected, and that they would
+have been more or less consciously disappointed had the author baulked
+their expectation.
+
+An instructive example of the failure to "make" a dramatically
+obligatory scene may be found in _Agatha_ by Mrs. Humphry Ward and Mr.
+Louis Parker. Agatha is believed to be the child of Sir Richard and Lady
+Fancourt; but at a given point she learns that a gentleman whom she has
+known all her life as "Cousin Ralph" is in reality her father. She has a
+middle-aged suitor, Colonel Ford, whom she is very willing to marry; but
+at the end of the second act she refuses him, because she shrinks from
+the idea, on the one hand, of concealing the truth from him, on the
+other hand, of revealing her mother's trespass. This is not, in itself,
+a very strong situation, for we feel the barrier between the lovers to
+be unreal. Colonel Ford is a man of sense. The secret of Agatha's
+parentage can make no real difference to him. Nothing material--no point
+of law or of honour--depends on it. He will learn the truth, and all
+will come right between them. The only point on which our interest can
+centre is the question how he is to learn the truth; and here the
+authors go very far astray. There are two, and only two, really dramatic
+ways in which Colonel Ford can be enlightened. Lady Fancourt must
+realize that Agatha is wrecking her life to keep her mother's secret,
+and must either herself reveal it to Colonel Ford, or must encourage and
+enjoin Agatha to do so. Now, the authors choose neither of these ways:
+the secret slips out, through a chance misunderstanding in a
+conversation between Sir Richard Fancourt and the Colonel. This is a
+typical instance of an error of construction; and why?--because it
+leaves to chance what should be an act of will. Drama means a thing
+done, not merely a thing that happens; and the playwright who lets
+accident effect what might naturally and probably be a result of
+volition, or, in other words, of character, sins against the fundamental
+law of his craft. In the case before us, Lady Fancourt and Agatha--the
+two characters on whom our interest is centred--are deprived of all
+share in one of the crucial moments of the action. Whether the actual
+disclosure was made by the mother or by the daughter, there ought to
+have been a great scene between the two, in which the mother should have
+insisted that, by one or other, the truth must be told. It would have
+been a painful, a delicate, a difficult scene, but it was the obligatory
+scene of the play; and had we been allowed clearly to foresee it at the
+end of the second act, our interest would have been decisively carried
+forward. The scene, too, might have given the play a moral relevance
+which in fact it lacks. The readjustment of Agatha's scheme of things,
+so as to make room for her mother's history, might have been made
+explicit and partly intellectual, instead of implicit, inarticulate and
+wholly emotional.
+
+This case, then, clearly falls under our second heading. We cannot say
+that it is the logic of the theme which demands the scene, for no thesis
+or abstract idea is enunciated. Nor can we say that the course of events
+is unnatural or improbable; our complaint is that, without being at all
+less natural, they might have been highly dramatic, and that in fact
+they are not so.
+
+In a very different type of play, we find another example of the
+ignoring of a dramatically obligatory scene. The author of that charming
+fantasy, _The Passing of the Third Floor Back_, was long ago guilty of a
+play named _The Rise of Dick Halward_, chiefly memorable for having
+elicited from Mr. Bernard Shaw one of the most brilliant pages in
+English dramatic criticism. The hero of this play, after an adventurous
+youth in Mexico, has gone to the bar, but gets no briefs, and is
+therefore unable to marry a lady who announces that no suitor need apply
+who has less than L5000 a year. One fine day Dick receives from Mexico
+the will of an old comrade, which purports to leave to him, absolutely,
+half a million dollars, gold; but the will is accompanied by a letter,
+in which the old comrade states that the property is really left to him
+only in trust for the testator's long-lost son, whom Dick is enjoined to
+search out and endow with a capital which, at 5 per cent, represents
+accurately the desiderated L5000 a year. As a matter of fact (but this
+is not to our present purpose), the long-lost son is actually, at that
+moment, sharing Dick's chambers in the Temple. Dick, however, does not
+know this, and cannot resist the temptation to destroy the old miner's
+letter, and grab the property. We know, of course, that retribution is
+bound to descend upon him; but does not dramatic effect imperatively
+require that, for a brief space at any rate, he should be seen--with
+whatever qualms of conscience his nature might dictate--enjoying his
+ill-gotten wealth? Mr. Jerome, however, baulks us of this just
+expectation. In the very first scene of the second act we find that the
+game is up. The deceased miner wrote his letter to Dick seated in the
+doorway of a hut; a chance photographer took a snap-shot at him; and on
+returning to England, the chance photographer has nothing more pressing
+to do than to chance upon the one man who knows the long-lost son, and
+to show him the photograph of the dying miner, whom he at once
+recognizes. By aid of a microscope, the letter he is writing can be
+deciphered, and thus Dick's fraud is brought home to him. Now one would
+suppose that an author who had invented this monstrous and staggering
+concatenation of chances, must hope to justify it by some highly
+dramatic situation, in the obvious and commonplace sense of the word. It
+is not difficult, indeed, to foresee such a situation, in which Dick
+Halward should be confronted, as if by magic, with the very words of the
+letter he has so carefully destroyed. I am far from saying that this
+scene would, in fact, have justified its amazing antecedents; but it
+would have shown a realization on the author's part that he must at any
+rate attempt some effect proportionate to the strain he had placed upon
+our credulity. Mr. Jerome showed no such realization. He made the man
+who handed Dick the copy of the letter explain beforehand how it had
+been obtained; so that Dick, though doubtless surprised and disgusted,
+was not in the least thunderstruck, and manifested no emotion. Here,
+then, Mr. Jerome evidently missed a scene rendered obligatory by the law
+of the maximum of specifically dramatic effect.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The third, or structural, class of obligatory scenes may be more briefly
+dealt with, seeing that we have already, in the last chapter, discussed
+the principle involved. In this class we have placed, by definition,
+scenes which the author himself has rendered obligatory by seeming
+unmistakably to lead up to them--or, in other words, scenes indicated,
+or seeming to be indicated, by deliberately-planted finger-posts. It may
+appear as though the case of Dick Halward, which we have just been
+examining, in reality came under this heading. But it cannot actually be
+said that Mr. Jerome either did, or seemed to, point by finger-posts
+towards the obligatory scene. He rather appears to have been blankly
+unconscious of its possibility.
+
+We have noted in the foregoing chapter the unwisdom of planting
+misleading finger-posts; here we have only to deal with the particular
+case in which they seem to point to a definite and crucial scene. An
+example given by M. Sarcey himself will, I think, make the matter
+quite clear.
+
+M. Jules Lemaitre's play, _Revoltee_, tells the story of a would-be
+intellectual, ill-conditioned young woman, married to a plain and
+ungainly professor of mathematics, whom she despises. We know that she
+is in danger of yielding to the fascinations of a seductive
+man-about-town; and having shown us this danger, the author proceeds to
+emphasize the manly and sterling character of the husband. He has the
+gentleness that goes with strength; but where his affections or his
+honour is concerned, he is not a man to be trifled with. This having
+been several times impressed upon us, we naturally expect that the wife
+is to be rescued by some striking manifestation of the husband's
+masterful virility. But no such matter! Rescued she is, indeed; but it
+is by the intervention of her half-brother, who fights a duel on her
+behalf, and is brought back wounded to restore peace to the
+mathematician's household: that man of science having been quite passive
+throughout, save for some ineffectual remonstrances. It happens that in
+this case we know just where the author went astray. Helene (the wife)
+is the unacknowledged daughter of a great lady, Mme. de Voves; and the
+subject of the play, as the author first conceived it, was the relation
+between the mother, the illegitimate daughter, and the legitimate son;
+the daughter's husband taking only a subordinate place. But Lemaitre
+chose as a model for the husband a man whom he had known and admired;
+and he allowed himself to depict in vivid colours his strong and
+sympathetic character, without noticing that he was thereby upsetting
+the economy of his play, and giving his audience reason to anticipate a
+line of development quite different from that which he had in mind.
+Inadvertently, in fact, he planted, not one, but two or three,
+misleading finger-posts.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+We come now to the fourth, or psychological, class of obligatory
+scenes--those which are "required in order to justify some modification
+of character or alteration of will, too important to be taken
+for granted."
+
+An obvious example of an obligatory scene of this class may be found in
+the third act of _Othello_. The poet is bound to show us the process by
+which Iago instils his poison into Othello's mind. He has backed
+himself, so to speak, to make this process credible to us; and, by a
+masterpiece of dexterity and daring, he wins his wager. Had he omitted
+this scene--had he shown us Othello at one moment full of serene
+confidence, and at his next appearance already convinced of Desdemona's
+guilt--he would have omitted the pivot and turning--point of the whole
+structure. It may seem fantastic to conceive that any dramatist could
+blunder so grossly; but there are not a few plays in which we observe a
+scarcely less glaring hiatus.
+
+A case in point may be found in Lord Tennyson's _Becket_. I am not one
+of those who hold Tennyson merely contemptible as a dramatist. I believe
+that, had he taken to playwriting nearly half-a-century earlier, and
+studied the root principles of craftsmanship, instead of blindly
+accepting the Elizabethan conventions, he might have done work as fine
+in the mass as are the best moments of _Queen Mary_ and _Harold_. As a
+whole, _Becket_ is one of his weakest productions; but the Prologue and
+the first act would have formed an excellent first and third act for a
+play of wholly different sequel, had he interposed, in a second act, the
+obligatory scene required to elucidate Becket's character. The historic
+and psychological problem of Thomas Becket is his startling
+transformation from an easy-going, luxurious, worldly statesman into a
+gaunt ecclesiastic, fanatically fighting for the rights of his see, of
+his order, and of Rome. In any drama which professes to deal (as this
+does) with his whole career, the intellectual interest cannot but centre
+in an analysis of the forces that brought about this seeming new-birth
+of his soul. It would have been open to the poet, no doubt, to take up
+his history at a later point, when he was already the full-fledged
+clerical and ultramontane. But this Tennyson does not do. He is at pains
+to present to us the magnificent Chancellor, the bosom friend of the
+King, and mild reprover of his vices; and then, without the smallest
+transition, hey presto! he is the intransigent priest, bitterly
+combating the Constitutions of Clarendon. It is true that in the
+Prologue the poet places one or two finger-posts--small, conventional
+foreshadowings of coming trouble. For instance, the game of chess
+between King and Chancellor ends with a victory for Becket, who says--
+
+  "You see my bishop
+  Hath brought your king to a standstill. You are beaten."
+
+The symbolical game of chess is a well-worn dramatic device. Becket,
+moreover, seems to feel some vague disquietude as to what may happen if
+he accepts the archbishopric; but there is nothing to show that he is
+conscious of any bias towards the intransigent clericalism of the later
+act. The character-problem, in fact, is not only not solved, but is
+ignored. The obligatory scene is skipped over, in the interval between
+the Prologue and the first act.
+
+One of the finest plays of our time--Sir Arthur Pinero's _Iris_--lacks,
+in my judgment, an obligatory scene. The character of Iris is admirably
+true, so far as it goes; but it is incomplete. The author seems to have
+evaded the crucial point of his play--the scene of her installation in
+Maldonado's flat. To perfect his psychological study, he was bound to
+bridge the chasm between the Iris of the third act and the Iris of the
+fourth. He builds two ends of the bridge, in the incident of the
+cheque-book at the close of the one act, and in the state of hebetude in
+which we find her at the opening of the other; but there remains a great
+gap at which the imagination boggles. The author has tried to throw a
+retrospective footway across it in Iris's confession to Trenwith in the
+fifth act; but I do not find that it quite meets the case. It would no
+doubt have been very difficult to keep the action within reasonable
+limits had a new act taken the place of the existing fourth; but Sir
+Arthur Pinero would probably have produced a completer work of art had
+he faced this difficulty, and contrived to compress into a single last
+act something like the matter of the existing fourth and fifth. It may
+be that he deliberately preferred that Iris should give in narrative the
+history of her decline; but I do not consider this a case in support of
+that slight plea for impassioned narrative which I ventured to put forth
+a few pages back. Her confession to Trenwith would have been far more
+dramatic and moving had it been about one-fourth part as long and
+one-fourth part as articulate.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Of the scene imposed by history or legend it is unnecessary to say very
+much. We saw in Chapter IX that the theatre is not the place for
+expounding the results of original research, which cast a new light on
+historic character. It is not the place for whitewashing Richard III, or
+representing him as a man of erect and graceful figure. It is not the
+place for proving that Guy Fawkes was an earnest Presbyterian, that Nell
+Gwynn was a lady of the strictest morals, or that George Washington was
+incapable of telling the truth. The playwright who deals with Henry VIII
+is bound to present him, in the schoolboy's phrase, as "a great
+widower." William the Silent must not be a chatterbox, Torquemada a
+humanitarian, Ivan the Terrible a conscientious opponent of capital
+punishment. And legend has its fixed points no less than history. In the
+theatre, indeed, there is little distinction between them: history is
+legend, and legend history. A dramatist may, if he pleases (though it is
+a difficult task), break wholly unfamiliar ground in the past; but where
+a historic legend exists he must respect it at his peril.
+
+From all this it is a simple deduction that where legend (historic or
+otherwise) associates a particular character with a particular scene
+that is by any means presentable on the stage, that scene becomes
+obligatory in a drama of which he is the leading figure. The fact that
+Shakespeare could write a play about King John, and say nothing about
+Runnymede and Magna Charta, shows that that incident in constitutional
+history had not yet passed into popular legend. When Sir Herbert Tree
+revived the play, he repaired the poet's omission by means of an
+inserted tableau. Even Shakespeare had not the hardihood to let Caesar
+fall without saying, "The Ides of March are come" and "Et tu, Brute!"
+Nero is bound to fiddle while Rome burns, or the audience will know the
+reason why.[4] Historic criticism will not hear of the "Thou hast
+conquered, Galilean!" which legend attributes to Julian the Apostate;
+yet Ibsen not only makes him say it, but may almost be said to find in
+the phrase the keynote of his world-historic drama. Tristram and Iseult
+must drink a love-philtre or they are not Tristram and Iseult. It would
+be the extreme of paradox to write a Paolo-and-Francesca play and omit
+the scene of "Quel giorno piu non vi leggemmo avante."
+
+The cases are not very frequent, however, in which an individual
+incident is thus imposed by history or legend. The practical point to be
+noted is rather that, when an author introduces a strongly-marked
+historical character, he must be prepared to give him at least one good
+opportunity of acting up to the character which legend--the best of
+evidence in the theatre--assigns to him. When such a personage is
+presented to us, it ought to be at his highest potency. We do not
+want to see--
+
+  "From Marlborough's eyes the tears of dotage flow,
+  And Swift expire, a driveller and a show."
+
+If you deal with Napoleon, for instance, it is perfectly clear that he
+must dominate the stage. As soon as you bring in the name, the idea, of
+Napoleon Bonaparte, men have eyes and ears for nothing else; and they
+demand to see him, in a general way, acting up to their general
+conception of him. That was what Messrs. Lloyd Osbourne and Austin
+Strong forgot in their otherwise clever play, _The Exile_. It is useless
+to prove, historically, that at a given moment he was passive, supine,
+unconscious, while people around him were eagerly plotting his escape
+and restoration. That may have been so; but it is not what an audience
+wants to see. It wants to see Napoleon Napoleonizing. For anomalies and
+uncharacteristic episodes in Napoleon's career we must go to books; the
+playhouse is not the place for them. It is true that a dramatist like
+Mr. Bernard Shaw may, at his own risk and peril, set forth to give us a
+new reading of Caesar or of Napoleon, which may or may not be
+dramatically acceptable.[5] But this is not what Messrs. Osbourne and
+Strong tried to do. Their Napoleon was the Napoleon of tradition--only
+he failed to act "in a concatenation according."
+
+There are a few figures in history--and Napoleon is one of them--which
+so thrill the imagination that their mere name can dominate the stage,
+better, perhaps, than their bodily presence. In _L'Aiglon_, by M.
+Rostand, Napoleon is in fact the hero, though he lies dead in his
+far-off island, under the Southern Cross. Another such figure is Abraham
+Lincoln. In James Herne's sadly underrated play, _Griffith Davenport_,
+we were always conscious of "Mr. Lincoln" in the background; and the act
+in which Governor Morton of Indiana brought the President's instructions
+to Davenport might fairly be called an obligatory scene, inasmuch as it
+gave us the requisite sense of personal nearness to the master-spirit,
+without involving any risk of belittlement through imperfections of
+representation. There is a popular melodrama, passing in Palestine under
+the Romans, throughout the course of which we constantly feel the
+influence of a strange new prophet, unseen but wonder-working, who, if I
+remember rightly, is personally presented to us only in a final tableau,
+wherein he appears riding into Jerusalem amid the hosannas of the
+multitude. The execution of _Ben Hur_ is crude and commonplace, but the
+conception is by no means inartistic. Historical figures of the highest
+rank may perhaps be best adumbrated in this fashion, with or without one
+personal appearance, so brief that there shall be no danger of
+anti-climax.
+
+The last paragraph reminds us that the accomplished playwright shows his
+accomplishment quite as much in his recognition and avoidance of the
+_scene a ne pas faire_ as in his divination of the obligatory scene.
+There is always the chance that no one may miss a scene demanded by
+logic or psychology; but an audience knows too well when it has been
+bored or distressed by a superfluous, or inconsequent, or wantonly
+painful scene.
+
+Some twenty years ago, in criticizing a play named _Le Maitre d'Armes_,
+M. Sarcey took the authors gravely to task, in the name of "Aristotle
+and common sense," for following the modern and reprehensible tendency
+to present "slices of life" rather than constructed and developed
+dramas. Especially he reproached them with deliberately omitting the
+_scene a faire_. A young lady is seduced, he says, and, for the sake of
+her child, implores her betrayer to keep his promise of marriage. He
+renews the promise, without the slightest intention of fulfilling it,
+and goes on board his yacht in order to make his escape. She discovers
+his purpose and follows him on board the yacht. "What is the scene,"
+asks M. Sarcey--here I translate literally--"which you expect, you, the
+public? It is the scene between the abandoned fair one and her seducer.
+The author may make it in a hundred ways, but make it he must!" Instead
+of which, the critic proceeds, we are fobbed off with a storm-scene, a
+rescue, and other sensational incidents, and hear no word of what passes
+between the villain and his victim. Here, I think, M. Sarcey is mistaken
+in his application of his pet principle. Words cannot express our
+unconcern as to what passes between the heroine and the villain on board
+the yacht--nay, more, our gratitude for being spared that painful and
+threadbare scene of recrimination. The plot demands, observe, that the
+villain shall not relent. We know quite well that he cannot, for if he
+did the play would fall to pieces. Why, then, should we expect or demand
+a sordid squabble which can lead to nothing? We--and by "we" I mean the
+public which relishes such plays--cannot possibly have any keen appetite
+for copious re-hashes of such very cold mutton as the appeals of the
+penitent heroine to the recalcitrant villain. And the moral seems to be
+that in this class of play--the drama, if one may call it so, of
+foregone character--the _scene a faire_ is precisely the scene to
+be omitted.
+
+In plays of a more ambitious class, skill is often shown by the
+indication, in place of the formal presentment, even of an important
+scene which the audience may, or might, have expected to witness in
+full. We have already noted such a case in _The Wild Duck_: Ibsen knew
+that what we really required to witness was not the actual process of
+Gregers's disclosure to Hialmar, but its effects. A small, but quite
+noticeable, example of a scene thus rightly left to the imagination
+occurred in Mr. Somerset Maugham's first play, _A Man of Honour_. In the
+first act, Jack Halliwell, his wife, and his sister-in-law call upon his
+friend Basil Kent. The sister-in-law, Hilda Murray, is a rich widow; and
+she and Kent presently go out on the balcony together and are lost to
+view. Then it appears, in a scene between the Halliwells, that they
+fully believe that Kent is in love with Mrs. Murray and is now proposing
+to her. But when the two re-enter from the balcony, it is evident from
+their mien that, whatever may have passed between them, they are not
+affianced lovers; and we presently learn that though Kent is in fact
+strongly attracted to Mrs. Murray, he considers himself bound in honour
+to marry a certain Jenny Bush, a Fleet Street barmaid, with whom he has
+become entangled. Many playwrights would, so to speak, have dotted the
+i's of the situation by giving us the scene between Kent and Mrs.
+Murray; but Mr. Maugham has done exactly right in leaving us to divine
+it. We know all that, at this point, we require to know of the relation
+between them; to have told us more would have been to anticipate and
+discount the course of events.
+
+A more striking instance of a scene rightly placed behind the scenes
+occurs in M. de Curel's terrible drama _Les Fossiles_. I need not go
+into the singularly unpleasing details of the plot. Suffice it to say
+that a very peculiar condition of things exists in the family of the Duc
+de Chantemelle. It has been fully discussed in the second act between
+the Duke and his daughter Claire, who has been induced to accept it for
+the sake of the family name. But a person more immediately concerned is
+Robert de Chantemelle, the only son of the house--will he also accept it
+quietly? A nurse, who is acquainted with the black secret, misbehaves
+herself, and is to be packed off. As she is a violent woman, Robert
+insists on dismissing her himself, and leaves the room to do so. The
+rest of the family are sure that, in her rage, she will blurt out the
+whole story; and they wait, in breathless anxiety, for Robert's return.
+What follows need not be told: the point is that this scene--the scene
+of tense expectancy as to the result of a crisis which is taking place
+in another room of the same house--is really far more dramatic than the
+crisis itself would be. The audience already knows all that the angry
+virago can say to her master; and of course no discussion of the merits
+of the case is possible between these two. Therefore M. de Curel is
+conspicuously right in sparing us the scene of vulgar violence, and
+giving us the scene of far higher tension in which Robert's father, wife
+and sister expect his return, their apprehension deepening with every
+moment that he delays.
+
+We see, then, that there is such a thing as a false _scene a faire_--a
+scene which at first sight seems obligatory, but is in fact much better
+taken for granted. It may be absolutely indispensable that it should be
+suggested to the mind of the audience, but neither indispensable nor
+advisable that it should be presented to their eyes. The judicious
+playwright will often ask himself, "Is it the actual substance of this
+scene that I require, or only its repercussion?"
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+[Footnote 1: For example, in his criticism of Becque's _La Parisienne
+(Quarante Ans de Theatre_, VI, p. 364), he tells how, at the end of the
+second act, one of his neighbours said to him, "Eh! bien, vous voila
+bien attrape! Ou est la _scene a faire_?" "I freely admit," he
+continues, "that there is no _scene a faire_; if there had been no third
+act I should not have been greatly astonished. When you make it your
+business to recite on the stage articles from the _Vie Parisienne_, it
+makes no difference whether you stop at the end of the second article or
+at the end of the third." This clearly implies that a play in which
+there is no _scene a faire_ is nothing but a series of newspaper
+sketches. Becque, one fancies, might have replied that the scene between
+Clotilde and Monsieur Simpson at the beginning of Act III was precisely
+the _scene a faire_ demanded by the logic of his cynicism.]
+
+[Footnote 2: I need scarcely direct the reader's attention to Mr.
+Gilbert Murray's noble renderings of these speeches.]
+
+[Footnote 3: Such a scene occurs in that very able play, _The Way the
+Money Goes_, by Lady Bell.]
+
+[Footnote 4: In Mr. Stephen Phillips's play he does not actually play on
+the lyre, but he improvises and recites an ode to the conflagration.]
+
+[Footnote 5: And, after all, Mr. Shaw does not run counter to the
+legend. He exhibits Caesar and Napoleon "in their well-known attitudes":
+only, by an odd metempsychosis, the soul of Mr. Shaw has somehow entered
+into them.]
+
+
+
+
+_CHAPTER XIV_
+
+THE PERIPETY
+
+
+In the Greek theatre, as every one knows, the _peripeteia_ or reversal
+of fortune--the turning of the tables, as we might say--was a
+clearly-defined and recognized portion of the dramatic organism. It was
+often associated with the _anagnorisis_ or recognition. Mr. Gilbert
+Murray has recently shown cause for believing that both these dramatic
+"forms" descended from the ritual in which Greek drama took its
+origin--the ritual celebrating the death and resurrection of the season
+of "mellow fruitfulness." If this theory be true, the _peripeteia_ was
+at first a change from sorrow to joy--joy in the rebirth of the
+beneficent powers of nature. And to this day a sudden change from gloom
+to exhilaration is a popular and effective incident--as when, at the end
+of a melodrama, the handcuffs are transferred from the wrists of the
+virtuous naval lieutenant to those of the wicked baronet, and, through
+the disclosure of a strawberry-mark on his left arm, the lieutenant is
+recognized as the long-lost heir to a dukedom and L50,000 a year.
+
+But when, as soon happened in Greece, the forms appropriate to a
+celebration of the death and resurrection of Dionysus came to be blent
+with the tomb-ritual of a hero, the term _peripeteia_ acquired a special
+association with a sudden decline from prosperity into adversity. In the
+Middle Ages, this was thought to be the very essence and meaning of
+tragedy, as we may see from Chaucer's lines:
+
+  "Tragedie is to seyn a certeyn storie,
+  As olde bokes maken us memorie,
+  Of him that stood in gret prosperitee,
+  And is y-fallen out of heigh degree
+  Into miserie, and endeth wrecchedly."
+
+Aristotle cites a good instance of a peripety--to Anglicize the
+word--"where, in the _Lynceus_, the hero is led away to execution,
+followed by Danaus as executioner; but, as the effect of the
+antecedents, Danaus is executed and Lynceus escapes." But here, as in so
+many other contexts, we must turn for the classic example to the
+_Oedipus Rex_. Jocasta, hearing from the Corinthian stranger that
+Polybus, King of Corinth, the reputed father of Oedipus, is dead, sends
+for her husband to tell him that the oracle which doomed him to
+parricide is defeated, since Polybus has died a natural death. Oedipus
+exults in the news and triumphs over the oracles; but, as the scene
+proceeds, the further revelations made by the same stranger lead Jocasta
+to recognize in Oedipus her own child, who was exposed on Mount
+Kithairon; and, in the subsequent scene, the evidence of the old
+Shepherd brings Oedipus himself to the same crushing realization. No
+completer case of _anagnorisis_ and _peripeteia_ could well be
+conceived--whatever we may have to say of the means by which it is
+led up to.[1]
+
+Has the conception of the peripety, as an almost obligatory element in
+drama, any significance for the modern playwright? Obligatory, of
+course, it cannot be: it is easy to cite a hundred admirable plays in
+which it is impossible to discover anything that can reasonably be
+called a peripety. But this, I think, we may safely say: the dramatist
+is fortunate who finds in the development of his theme, without
+unnatural strain or too much preparation, opportunity for a great scene,
+highly-wrought, arresting, absorbing, wherein one or more of his
+characters shall experience a marked reversal either of inward
+soul-state or of outward fortune. The theory of the peripety, in short,
+practically resolves itself for us into the theory of the "great scene,"
+Plays there are, many and excellent plays, in which some one scene
+stands out from all the rest, impressing itself with peculiar vividness
+on the spectator's mind; and, nine times out of ten, this scene will be
+found to involve a peripety. It can do no harm, then, if the playwright
+should ask himself: "Can I, without any undue sacrifice, so develop my
+theme as to entail upon my leading characters, naturally and probably,
+an experience of this order?"
+
+The peripeties of real life are frequent, though they are apt to be too
+small in scale, or else too fatally conclusive, to provide material for
+drama. One of the commonest, perhaps, is that of the man who enters a
+physician's consulting-room to seek advice in some trifling ailment, and
+comes out again, half an hour later, doomed either to death or to some
+calamity worse than death. This situation has been employed, not
+ineffectively, by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, in the first act of a romantic
+drama, _The Fires of Fate_; but it is very difficult to find any
+dramatic sequel to a peripety involving mere physical disaster.[2] The
+moral peripety--the sudden dissipation of some illusion, or defeat of
+some imposture, or crumbling of some castle in the air--is a no less
+characteristic incident of real life, and much more amenable to the
+playwright's uses. Certainly there are few things more impressive in
+drama than to see a man or woman--or a man and woman--come upon the
+stage, radiant, confident, assured that
+
+  "God's in his heaven,
+   All's right with the world,"
+
+and leave it crushed and desperate, after a gradual and yet swift
+descent into Avernus. Such a scene is of the very marrow of drama. It is
+a play within a play; a concentrated, quintessentiated crisis.
+
+In the third act of _Othello_ we have a peripety handled with consummate
+theatrical skill. To me--I confess it with bated breath--the
+craftsmanship seems greatly superior to the psychology. Othello, when we
+look into it, succumbs with incredible facility to Iago's poisoned
+pin-pricks; but no audience dreams of looking into it; and there lies
+the proof of Shakespeare's technical mastery. In the Trial Scene in _The
+Merchant of Venice_ we have another great peripety. It illustrates the
+obvious principle that, where the drama consists in a conflict between
+two persons or parties, the peripety is generally a double one--the
+sudden collapse of Shylock's case implying an equally sudden restoration
+of Antonio's fortunes. Perhaps the most striking peripety in Ibsen is
+Stockmann's fall from jubilant self-confidence to defiant impotence in
+the third act of _An Enemy of the People_. Thinking that he has the
+"compact majority" at his back, he assumes the Burgomaster's insignia of
+office, and lords it over his incensed brother, only to learn, by blow
+on blow of disillusionment, that "the compact majority" has ratted, that
+he is to be deprived of his position and income, and that the commonest
+freedom of speech is to be denied him. In _A Doll's House_ there are two
+peripeties: Nora's fall from elation to despair in the first scene with
+Krogstad, and the collapse of Helmer's illusions in the last scene
+of all.
+
+A good instance of the "great scene" which involves a marked peripety
+occurs in Sardou's _Dora_, once famous in England under the title of
+_Diplomacy_. The "scene of the three men" shows how Tekli, a Hungarian
+exile, calls upon his old friend Andre de Maurillac, on the day of
+Andre's marriage, and congratulates him on having eluded the wiles of a
+dangerous adventuress, Dora de Rio-Zares, by whom he had once seemed to
+be attracted. But it is precisely Dora whom Andre has married; and,
+learning this, Tekli tries to withdraw, or minimize, his imputation. For
+a moment a duel seems imminent; but Andre's friend, Favrolles, adjures
+him to keep his head; and the three men proceed to thrash the matter out
+as calmly as possible, with the result that, in the course of
+half-an-hour or so, it seems to be proved beyond all doubt that the
+woman Andre adores, and whom he has just married, is a treacherous spy,
+who sells to tyrannical foreign governments the lives of political
+exiles and the honour of the men who fall into her toils. The crushing
+suspicion is ultimately disproved, by one of the tricks in which Sardou
+delighted; but that does not here concern us. Artificial as are its
+causes and its consequences, the "scene of the three men," while it
+lasts, holds us breathless and absorbed; and Andre's fall from the
+pinnacle of happiness to the depth of misery, is a typical peripety.
+
+Equally typical and infinitely more tragic is another postnuptial
+peripety--the scene of the mutual confession of Angel Clare and Tess in
+Mr. Hardy's great novel. As it stands on the printed page, this scene is
+a superb piece of drama. Its greatness has been obscured in the English
+theatre by the general unskilfulness of the dramatic version presented.
+One magnificent scene does not make a play. In America, on the other
+hand, the fine acting of Mrs. Fiske secured popularity for a version
+which was, perhaps, rather better than that which we saw in England.
+
+I have said that dramatic peripeties are not infrequent in real life;
+and their scene, as is natural, is often laid in the law courts. It is
+unnecessary to recall the awful "reversal of fortune" that overtook one
+of the most brilliant of modern dramatists. About the same period,
+another drama of the English courts ended in a startling and terrible
+peripety. A young lady was staying as a guest with a half-pay officer
+and his wife. A valuable pearl belonging to the hostess disappeared; and
+the hostess accused her guest of having stolen it. The young lady, who
+had meanwhile married, brought an action for slander against her quondam
+friend. For several days the case continued, and everything seemed to be
+going in the plaintiff's favour. Major Blank, the defendant's husband,
+was ruthlessly cross-examined by Sir Charles Russell, afterwards Lord
+Chief Justice of England, with a view to showing that he was the real
+thief. He made a very bad witness, and things looked black against him.
+The end was nearing, and every one anticipated a verdict in the
+plaintiff's favour, when there came a sudden change of scene. The stolen
+pearl had been sold to a firm of jewellers, who had recorded the numbers
+of the Bank of England notes with which they paid for it. One of these
+notes was produced in court, and lo! it was endorsed with the name of
+the plaintiff.[3] In a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, the whole
+edifice of mendacity and perjury fell to pieces. The thief was arrested
+and imprisoned; but the peripety for her was less terrible than for her
+husband, who had married her in chivalrous faith in her innocence.
+
+Would it have been--or may it some day prove to be--possible to transfer
+this "well-made" drama of real life bodily to the stage? I am inclined
+to think not. It looks to me very much like one of those "blind alley"
+themes of which mention has been made. There is matter, indeed, for most
+painful drama in the relations of the husband and wife, both before and
+after the trial; but, from the psychological point of view, one can see
+nothing in the case but a distressing and inexplicable anomaly.[4] At
+the same time, the bare fact of the sudden and tremendous peripety is
+irresistibly dramatic; and Mr. Henry Arthur Jones has admitted that it
+suggested to him the great scene of the unmasking of Felicia Hindemarsh
+in _Mrs. Dane's Defence._
+
+It is instructive to note the delicate adjustment which Mr. Jones found
+necessary in order to adapt the theme to dramatic uses. In the first
+place, not wishing to plunge into the depths of tragedy, he left the
+heroine unmarried, though on the point of marriage. In the second place,
+he made the blot on her past, not a theft followed by an attempt to
+shift the guilt on to other shoulders, but an error of conduct, due to
+youth and inexperience, serious in itself, but rendered disastrous by
+tragic consequences over which she, Felicia, had no control. Thus Mr.
+Jones raised a real and fairly sufficient obstacle between his lovers,
+without rendering his heroine entirely unsympathetic, or presenting her
+in the guise of a bewildering moral anomaly. Thirdly, he transferred the
+scene of the peripety from a court of justice, with its difficult
+adjuncts and tedious procedure, to the private study of a great lawyer.
+At the opening of the scene between Mrs. Dane and Sir Daniel Carteret,
+she is, no doubt, still anxious and ill-at-ease, but reasonably
+confident of having averted all danger of exposure. Sir Daniel, too
+(like Sir Charles Russell in the pearl suit), is practically convinced
+of her innocence. He merely wants to get the case absolutely clear, for
+the final confounding of her accusers. At first, all goes smoothly. Mrs.
+Dane's answers to his questions are pat and plausible. Then she makes a
+single, almost imperceptible, slip of the tongue: she says, "We had
+governesses," instead of "I had governesses." Sir Daniel pricks up his
+ears: "We? You say you were an only child. Who's we?" "My cousin and I,"
+she answers. Sir Daniel thinks it odd that he has not heard of this
+cousin before; but he continues his interrogatory without serious
+suspicion. Then it occurs to him to look up, in a topographical
+dictionary, the little town of Tawhampton, where Mrs. Dane spent her
+youth. He reads the bald account of it, ending thus, "The living is a
+Vicarage, net yearly value L376, and has been held since 1875 by"--and
+he turns round upon her--"by the Rev. Francis Hindemarsh! Hindemarsh?"
+
+  Mrs. Dane: He was my uncle.
+
+  Sir Daniel: Your uncle?
+
+  Mrs. Dane: Sir Daniel, I've done wrong to hide from you that Felicia
+  Hindemarsh was my cousin.
+
+  Sir Daniel: Felicia Hindemarsh was your cousin!
+
+  Mrs. Dane: Can't you understand why I have hidden it? The whole
+  affair was so terrible.
+
+And so she stumbles on, from one inevitable admission to another, until
+the damning truth is clear that she herself is Felicia Hindemarsh, the
+central, though not the most guilty, figure in a horrible scandal.
+
+This scene is worthy of study as an excellent type of what may be called
+the judicial peripety, the crushing cross-examination, in which it is
+possible to combine the tension of the detective story with no small
+psychological subtlety. In Mr. Jones's scene, the psychology is obvious
+enough; but it is an admirable example of nice adjustment without any
+obtrusive ingenuity. The whole drama, in short, up to the last act is,
+in the exact sense of the word, a well-made play--complex yet clear,
+ingenious yet natural. In the comparative weakness of the last act we
+have a common characteristic of latter-day drama, which will have to be
+discussed in due course.
+
+In this case we have a peripety of external fortune. For a
+clearly-marked moral peripety we may turn to the great scene between
+Vivie and her mother in the second act of _Mrs. Warren's Profession._
+Whatever may be thought of the matter of this scene, its movement is
+excellent. After a short, sharp opening, which reveals to Mrs. Warren
+the unfilial dispositions of her daughter, and reduces her to whimpering
+dismay, the following little passage occurs:
+
+  Mrs. Warren: You're very rough with me, Vivie.
+
+  Vivie: Nonsense. What about bed? It's past ten.
+
+  Mrs. Warren (passionately): What's the use of my going to bed? Do
+  you think I could sleep?
+
+  Vivie: Why not? I shall.
+
+Then the mother turns upon the daughter's stony self-righteousness, and
+pours forth her sordid history in such a way as to throw a searchlight
+on the conditions which make such histories possible; until, exhausted
+by her outburst, she says, "Oh, dear! I do believe I am getting sleepy
+after all," and Vivie replies, "I believe it is I who will not be able
+to sleep now." Mr. Shaw, we see, is at pains to emphasize his peripety.
+
+Some "great scenes" consist, not of one decisive turning of the tables,
+but of a whole series of minor vicissitudes of fortune. Such a scene is
+the third act of _The Gay Lord Quex_, a prolonged and thrilling duel, in
+which Sophy Fullgarney passes by degrees from impertinent exultation to
+abject surrender and then springs up again to a mood of reckless
+defiance. In the "great scene" of _The Thunderbolt_, on the other
+hand--the scene of Thaddeus's false confession of having destroyed his
+brother's will--though there is, in fact, a great peripety, it is not
+that which attracts and absorbs our interest. All the greedy Mortimore
+family fall from the height of jubilant confidence in their new-found
+wealth to the depth of disappointment and exasperation. But this is not
+the aspect of the scene which grips and moves us. Our attention is
+centred on Thaddeus's struggle to take his wife's misdeed upon himself;
+and his failure cannot be described as a peripety, seeing that it sinks
+him only one degree lower in the slough of despair. Like the scene in
+Mrs. Dane's Defence, this is practically a piece of judicial drama--a
+hard-fought cross-examination. But as there is no reversal of fortune
+for the character in whom we are chiefly interested, it scarcely ranks
+as a scene of peripety.[5]
+
+Before leaving this subject, we may note that a favourite effect of
+romantic drama is an upward reversal of fortune through the
+recognition--the _anagnorisis_--of some great personage in disguise.
+Victor Hugo excelled in the superb gestures appropriate to such a scene:
+witness the passage in _Hernani_, before the tomb of Charlemagne, where
+the obscure bandit claims the right to take his place at the head of the
+princes and nobles whom the newly-elected Emperor has ordered off to
+execution:
+
+  Hernani:
+
+  Dieu qui donne le sceptre et qui te le donna
+  M'a fait duc de Segorbe et duc de Cardona,
+  Marquis de Monroy, comte Albatera, vicomte
+  De Gor, seigneur de lieux dont j'ignore le compte.
+  Je suis Jean d'Aragon, grand maitre d'Avis, ne
+  Dans l'exil, fils proscrit d'un pere assassine
+  Par sentence du tien, roi Carlos de Castille.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+    (_Aux autres conjures_)
+  Couvrons nous, grands d'Espagnol
+    (_Tous les Espagnols se couvrent_)
+      Oui, nos tetes, o roi!
+  Ont le droit de tomber couvertes devant toi!
+
+An effective scene of this type occurs in _Monsieur Beaucaire_, where
+the supposed hairdresser is on the point of being ejected with contumely
+from the pump-room at Bath, when the French Ambassador enters, drops on
+his knee, kisses the young man's hand, and presents him to the astounded
+company as the Duc d'Orleans, Comte de Valois, and I know not what
+besides--a personage who immeasurably outshines the noblest of his
+insulters. Quieter, but not less telling, is the peripety in _The Little
+Father of the Wilderness_, by Messrs. Lloyd Osbourne and Austin Strong.
+The Pere Marlotte, who, by his heroism and self-devotion, has added vast
+territories to the French possessions in America, is summoned to the
+court of Louis XV, and naturally concludes that the king has heard of
+his services and wishes to reward them. He finds, on the contrary, that
+he is wanted merely to decide a foolish bet; and he is treated with the
+grossest insolence and contempt. Just as he is departing in humiliation,
+the Governor-General of Canada arrives, with a suite of officers and
+Indians. The moment they are aware of Pere Marlotte's presence, they all
+kneel to him and pay him deeper homage than they have paid to the king,
+who accepts the rebuke and joins in their demonstration.
+
+A famous peripety of the romantic order occurs in _H.M.S. Pinafore_,
+where, on the discovery that Captain Corcoran and Ralph Rackstraw have
+been changed at birth, Ralph instantly becomes captain of the ship,
+while the captain declines into an able-bodied seaman. This is one of
+the instances in which the idealism of art ekes out the imperfections
+of reality.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+[Footnote 1: That great spiritual drama known as the Book of Job opens,
+after the Prologue in Heaven, with one of the most startling of
+peripeties.]
+
+[Footnote 2: The first act of Mr. Gilbert Murray's _Carlyon Sahib_
+contains an incident of this nature; but it can scarcely be called a
+peripety, since the victim remains unconscious of his doom.]
+
+[Footnote 3: For the benefit of American readers, it may be well to
+state that the person who changes a Bank of England note is often asked
+to write his or her name on the back of it. It must have been in a
+moment of sheer aberration that the lady in question wrote her
+own name.]
+
+[Footnote 4: M. Bernstein, dishing up a similar theme with a piquant
+sauce of sensuality, made but a vulgar and trivial piece of work of it.]
+
+[Footnote 5: One of the most striking peripeties in recent English drama
+occurs in the third act of The Builder of Bridges, by Mr. Alfred Sutro.]
+
+
+
+
+_CHAPTER XV_
+
+PROBABILITY, CHANCE, AND COINCIDENCE
+
+
+Aristotle indulges in an often-quoted paradox to the effect that, in
+drama, the probable impossible is to be preferred to the improbable
+possible. With all respect, this seems to be a somewhat cumbrous way of
+stating the fact that plausibility is of more importance on the stage
+than what may be called demonstrable probability. There is no time, in
+the rush of a dramatic action, for a mathematical calculation of the
+chances for and against a given event, or for experimental proof that
+such and such a thing can or cannot be done. If a thing seem plausible,
+an audience will accept it without cavil; if it, seem incredible on the
+face of it, no evidence of its credibility will be of much avail. This
+is merely a corollary from the fundamental principle that the stage is
+the realm of appearances; not of realities, where paste jewels are at
+least as effective as real ones, and a painted forest is far more sylvan
+than a few wilted and drooping saplings, insecurely planted upon
+the boards.
+
+That is why an improbable or otherwise inacceptable incident cannot be
+validly defended on the plea that it actually happened: that it is on
+record in history or in the newspapers. In the first place, the
+dramatist can never put it on the stage as it happened. The bare fact
+may be historical, but it is not the bare fact that matters. The
+dramatist cannot restore it to its place in that intricate plexus of
+cause and effect, which is the essence and meaning of reality. He can
+only give his interpretation of the fact; and one knows not how to
+calculate the chances that his interpretation may be a false one. But
+even if this difficulty could be overcome; if the dramatist could prove
+that he had reproduced the event with photographic and cinematographic
+accuracy, his position would not thereby be improved. He would still
+have failed in his peculiar task, which is precisely that of
+interpretation. Not truth, but verisimilitude, is his aim; for the stage
+is the realm of appearances, in which intrusive realities become unreal.
+There are, as I have said, incalculable chances to one that the
+playwright's version of a given event will not coincide with that of the
+Recording Angel: but it may be true and convincing in relation to human
+nature in general, in which case it will belong to the sphere of great
+art; or, on a lower level, it may be agreeable and entertaining without
+being conspicuously false to human nature, in which case it will do no
+harm, since it makes no pretence to historic truth. It may be objected
+that the sixteenth-century public, and even, in the next century, the
+great Duke of Marlborough, got their knowledge of English history from
+Shakespeare, and the other writers of chronicle-plays. Well, I leave it
+to historians to determine whether this very defective and, in great
+measure, false vision of the past was better or worse than none. The
+danger at any rate, if danger there was, is now past and done with. Even
+our generals no longer go to the theatre or to the First Folio for their
+history. The dramatist may, with an easy conscience, interpret historic
+fact in the light of his general insight into human nature, so long as
+he does not so falsify the recorded event that common knowledge cries
+out against him.[1]
+
+Plausibility, then, not abstract or concrete probability, and still less
+literal faithfulness to recorded fact, is what the dramatist is bound to
+aim at. To understand this as a belittling of his art is to
+misunderstand the nature of art in general. The plausibility of bad art
+is doubtless contemptible and may be harmful. But to say that good art
+must be plausible is only to say that not every sort of truth, or every
+aspect of truth, is equally suitable for artistic representation--or, in
+more general terms, that the artist, without prejudice to his allegiance
+to nature, must respect the conditions of the medium in which he works.
+
+Our standards of plausibility, however, are far from being invariable.
+To each separate form of art, a different standard is applicable. In
+what may roughly be called realistic art, the terms plausible and
+probable are very nearly interchangeable. Where the dramatist appeals to
+the sanction of our own experience and knowledge, he must not introduce
+matter against which our experience and knowledge cry out. A very small
+inaccuracy in a picture which is otherwise photographic will often have
+a very disturbing effect. In plays of society in particular, the
+criticism "No one does such things," is held by a large class of
+playgoers to be conclusive and destructive. One has known people despise
+a play because Lady So-and-so's manner of speaking to her servants was
+not what they (the cavillers) were accustomed to. On the other hand, one
+has heard a whole production highly applauded because the buttons on a
+particular uniform were absolutely right. This merely means that when an
+effort after literal accuracy is apparent, the attention of the audience
+seizes on the most trifling details and is apt to magnify their
+importance. Niceties of language in especial are keenly, and often
+unjustly, criticized. If a particular expression does not happen to be
+current in the critic's own circle, he concludes that nobody uses it,
+and that the author is a pedant or a vulgarian. In view of this
+inevitable tendency, the prudent dramatist will try to keep out of his
+dialogue expressions that are peculiar to his own circle, and to use
+only what may be called everybody's English, or the language undoubtedly
+current throughout the whole class to which his personage belongs.
+
+It may be here pointed out that there are three different planes on
+which plausibility may or may not, be achieved. There is first the
+purely external plane, which concerns the producer almost as much as the
+playwright. On this plane we look for plausibility of costume, of
+manners, of dialect, of general environment. Then we have plausibility
+of what may be called uncharacteristic event--of such events as are
+independent of the will of the characters, and are not conditioned by
+their psychology. On this plane we have to deal with chance and
+accident, coincidence, and all "circumstances over which we have no
+control." For instance, the playwright who makes the "Marseillaise"
+become popular throughout Paris within half-an-hour of its having left
+the composer's desk, is guilty of a breach of plausibility on this
+plane. So, too, if I were to make my hero enter Parliament for the first
+time, and rise in a single session to be Prime Minister of
+England--there would be no absolute impossibility in the feat, but it
+would be a rather gross improbability of the second order. On the third
+plane we come to psychological plausibility, the plausibility of events
+dependent mainly or entirely on character. For example--to cite a much
+disputed instance--is it plausible that Nora, in _A Doll's House_,
+should suddenly develop the mastery of dialectics with which she crushes
+Helmer in the final scene, and should desert her husband and children,
+slamming the door behind her?
+
+It need scarcely be said that plausibility on the third plane is vastly
+the most important. A very austere criticism might even call it the one
+thing worth consideration. But, as a matter of fact, when we speak of
+plausibility, it is almost always the second plane--the plane of
+uncharacteristic circumstance--that we have in mind. To plausibility of
+the third order we give a more imposing name--we call it truth. We say
+that Nora's action is true--or untrue--to nature. We speak of the truth
+with which the madness of Lear, the malignity of Iago, the race hatred
+of Shylock, is portrayed. Truth, in fact, is the term which we use in
+cases where the tests to be applied are those of introspection,
+intuition, or knowledge sub-consciously garnered from spiritual
+experience. Where the tests are external, and matters of common
+knowledge or tangible evidence, we speak of plausibility.
+
+It would be a mistake, however, to imagine that because plausibility of
+the third degree, or truth, is the noblest attribute of drama, it is
+therefore the one thing needful. In some forms of drama it is greatly
+impaired, or absolutely nullified, if plausibility of the second degree,
+its necessary preliminary, be not carefully secured. In the case above
+imagined, for instance, of the young politician who should become Prime
+Minister immediately on entering Parliament: it would matter nothing
+with what profundity of knowledge or subtlety of skill the character was
+drawn: we should none the less decline to believe in him. Some
+dramatists, as a matter of fact, find it much easier to attain truth of
+character than plausibility of incident. Every one who is in the habit
+of reading manuscript plays, must have come across the would-be
+playwright who has a good deal of general ability and a considerable
+power of characterization, but seems to be congenitally deficient in the
+sense of external reality, so that the one thing he (or she) can by no
+means do is to invent or conduct an action that shall be in the least
+like any sequence of events in real life. It is naturally difficult to
+give examples, for the plays composed under this curious limitation are
+apt to remain in manuscript, or to be produced for one performance, and
+forgotten. There is, however, one recent play of this order which holds
+a certain place in dramatic literature. I do not know that Mr. Granville
+Barker was well-advised in printing _The Marrying of Anne Leete_ along
+with such immeasurably maturer and saner productions as _The Voysey
+Inheritance_ and _Waste_; but by doing so he has served my present purpose
+in providing me with a perfect example of a play as to which we cannot
+tell whether it possesses plausibility of the third degree, so
+absolutely does it lack that plausibility of the second degree which is
+its indispensable condition precedent.
+
+Francisque Sarcey was fond of insisting that an audience would generally
+accept without cavil any postulates in reason which an author chose to
+impose upon it, with regard to events supposed to have occurred before
+the rise of the curtain; always provided that the consequences deduced
+from them within the limits of the play were logical, plausible, and
+entertaining. The public will swallow a camel, he would maintain, in the
+past, though they will strain at a gnat in the present. A classical
+example of this principle is (once more) the _Oedipus Rex_, in which
+several of the initial postulates are wildly improbable: for instance,
+that Oedipus should never have inquired into the circumstances of the
+death of Laius, and that, having been warned by an oracle that he was
+doomed to marry his mother, he should not have been careful, before
+marrying any woman, to ascertain that she was younger than himself.
+There is at least so much justification for Sarcey's favourite
+principle, that we are less apt to scrutinize things merely narrated to
+us than events which take place before our eyes. It is simply a special
+instance of the well-worn
+
+  "Segnius irritant animos demissa per aurem
+  Quam quae sunt oculis subjecta fidelibus."
+
+But the principle is of very limited artistic validity. No one would
+nowadays think of justifying a gross improbability in the antecedents of
+a play by Ibsen or Sir Arthur Pinero, by Mr. Galsworthy or Mr. Granville
+Barker, on the plea that it occurred outside the frame of the picture.
+Such a plea might, indeed, secure a mitigation of sentence, but never a
+verdict of acquittal. Sarcey, on the other hand, brought up in the
+school of the "well-made" play, would rather have held it a feather in
+the playwright's cap that he should have known just where, and just how,
+he might safely outrage probability [2]. The inference is that we now
+take the dramatist's art more seriously than did the generation of the
+Second Empire in France.
+
+This brings us, however, to an important fact, which must by no means be
+overlooked. There is a large class of plays--or rather, there are
+several classes of plays, some of them not at all to be despised--the
+charm of which resides, not in probability, but in ingenious and
+delightful improbability. I am, of course, not thinking of sheer
+fantasies, like _A Midsummer Night's Dream_, or _Peter Pan_, or _The
+Blue Bird_. They may, indeed, possess plausibility of the third order,
+but plausibility of the second order has no application to them. Its
+writs do not run on their extramundane plane. The plays which appeal to
+us in virtue of their pleasant departures from probability are romances,
+farces, a certain order of light comedies and semi-comic melodramas--in
+short, the thousand and one plays in which the author, without
+altogether despising and abjuring truth, makes it on principle
+subsidiary to delightfulness. Plays of the _Prisoner of Zenda_ type
+would come under this head: so would Sir Arthur Pinero's farces, _The
+Magistrate_, _The Schoolmistress_, _Dandy Dick_; so would Mr. Carton's
+light comedies, _Lord and Lady Algy_, _Wheels within Wheels_, _Lady
+Huntworth's Experiment_; so would most of Mr. Barrie's comedies; so
+would Mr. Arnold Bennett's play, _The Honeymoon_. In a previous chapter
+I have sketched the opening act of Mr. Carton's _Wheels within Wheels_,
+which is a typical example of this style of work. Its charm lies in a
+subtle, all-pervading improbability, an infusion of fantasy so delicate
+that, while at no point can one say, "This is impossible," the total
+effect is far more entertaining than that of any probable sequence of
+events in real life. The whole atmosphere of such a play should be
+impregnated with humour, without reaching that gross supersaturation
+which we find in the lower order of farce-plays of the type of
+_Charlie's Aunt_ or _Niobe_.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Plausibility of development, as distinct from plausibility of theme or
+of character, depends very largely on the judicious handling of chance,
+and the exclusion, or very sparing employment, of coincidence. This is a
+matter of importance, into which we shall find it worth while to look
+somewhat closely.
+
+It is not always clearly recognized that chance and coincidence are by
+no means the same thing. Coincidence is a special and complex form of
+chance, which ought by no means to be confounded with the everyday
+variety. We need not here analyse chance, or discuss the philosophic
+value of the term. It is enough that we all know what we mean by it in
+common parlance. It may be well, however, to look into the etymology of
+the two words we are considering. They both come ultimately, from the
+Latin "cadere," to fall. Chance is a falling-out, like that of a die
+from the dice-box; and coincidence signifies one falling-out on the top
+of another, the concurrent happening of two or more chances which
+resemble or somehow fit into each other. If you rattle six dice in a box
+and throw them, and they turn up at haphazard--say, two aces, a deuce,
+two fours, and a six--there is nothing remarkable in this falling out.
+But if they all turn up sixes, you at once suspect that the dice are
+cogged; and if that be not so--if there be no sufficient cause behind
+the phenomenon--you say that this identical falling-out of six separate
+possibilities was a remarkable coincidence. Now, applying the
+illustration to drama, I should say that the playwright is perfectly
+justified in letting chance play its probable and even inevitable part
+in the affairs of his characters; but that, the moment we suspect him of
+cogging the dice, we feel that he is taking an unfair advantage of us,
+and our imagination either cries, "I won't play!" or continues the game
+under protest.
+
+Some critics have considered it a flaw in Shakespeare's art that the
+catastrophe of _Romeo and Juliet_ should depend upon a series of
+chances, and especially on the miscarriage of the Friar's letter to
+Romeo. This is not, I think, a valid criticism. We may, if we are so
+minded, pick to pieces the course of action which brought these chances
+into play. The device of the potion--even if such a drug were known to
+the pharmacopoeia--is certainly a very clumsy method of escape from the
+position in which Juliet is placed by her father's obstinacy. But when
+once we have accepted that integral part of the legend, the intervention
+of chance in the catastrophe is entirely natural and probable. Observe
+that there is no coincidence in the matter, no interlinking or
+dovetailing of chances. The catastrophe results from the hot-headed
+impetuosity of all the characters, which so hurries events that there is
+no time for the elimination of the results of chance. Letters do
+constantly go astray, even under our highly-organized system of
+conveyance; but their delay or disappearance seldom leads to tragic
+results, because most of us have learnt to take things calmly and wait
+for the next post. Yet if we could survey the world at large, it is
+highly probable that every day or every hour we should somewhere or
+other find some Romeo on the verge of committing suicide because of a
+chance misunderstanding with regard to his Juliet; and in a certain
+percentage of cases the explanatory letter or telegram would doubtless
+arrive too late.
+
+We all remember how, in Mr. Hardy's _Tess_, the main trouble arises from
+the fact that the letter pushed under Angel Clare's door slips also
+under the carpet of his room, and so is never discovered. This is an
+entirely probable chance; and the sternest criticism would hardly call
+it a flaw in the structure of the fable. But take another case: Madame X
+has had a child, of whom she has lost sight for more than twenty years,
+during which she has lived abroad. She returns to France, and
+immediately on landing at Bordeaux she kills a man who accompanies her.
+The court assigns her defence to a young advocate, and this young
+advocate happens to be her son. We have here a piling of chance upon
+chance, in which the long arm of coincidence[3] is very apparent. The
+coincidence would have been less startling had she returned to the place
+where she left her son and where she believed him to be. But no! she
+left him in Paris, and it is only by a series of pure chances that he
+happens to be in Bordeaux, where she happens to land, and happens to
+shoot a man. For the sake of a certain order of emotional effect, a
+certain order of audience is willing to accept this piling up of
+chances; but it relegates the play to a low and childish plane of art.
+The _Oedipus Rex_, indeed--which meets us at every turn--is founded on
+an absolutely astounding series of coincidences; but here the conception
+of fate comes in, and we vaguely figure to ourselves some malignant
+power deliberately pulling the strings which guide its puppets into such
+abhorrent tangles. On the modern view that "character is destiny," the
+conception of supernatural wire-pulling is excluded. It is true that
+amazing coincidences do occur in life; but when they are invented to
+serve an artist's purposes, we feel that he is simplifying his task
+altogether beyond reason, and substituting for normal and probable
+development an irrelevant plunge into the merely marvellous.
+
+Of the abuse of coincidence, I have already given a specimen in speaking
+of _The Rise of Dick Halward_ (Chapter XII). One or two more examples
+may not be out of place. I need not dwell on the significance of the
+fact that most of them occur in forgotten plays.
+
+In _The Man of Forty_, by Mr. Walter Frith, we find the following
+conjuncture of circumstances: Mr. Lewis Dunster has a long-lost wife and
+a long-lost brother. He has been for years in South Africa; they have
+meanwhile lived in London, but they do not know each other, and have
+held no communication. Lewis, returning from Africa, arrives in London.
+He does not know where to find either wife or brother, and has not the
+slightest wish to look for them; yet in the first house he goes to, the
+home of a lady whose acquaintance he chanced to make on the voyage, he
+encounters both his wife and his brother! Not quite so startling is the
+coincidence on which _Mrs. Willoughby's Kiss_, by Mr. Frank Stayton, is
+founded. An upper and lower flat in West Kensington are inhabited,
+respectively, by Mrs. Brandram and Mrs. Willoughby, whose husbands have
+both been many years absent in India. By pure chance the two husbands
+come home in the same ship; the two wives go to Plymouth to meet them,
+and by pure chance, for they are totally unacquainted with each other,
+they go to the same hotel; whence it happens that Mrs. Willoughby,
+meeting Mr. Brandram in a half-lighted room, takes him for her husband,
+flies to his arms and kisses him. More elaborate than either of these is
+the tangle of coincidences in Mr. Stuart Ogilvie's play, _The
+White Knight_--
+
+Giulietta, the ward of David Pennycuick, goes to study singing at Milan.
+Mr. Harry Rook, Pennycuick's most intimate friend, meets her by chance
+in Milan, and she becomes his mistress, neither having the least idea
+that the other knows Pennycuick. Then Viscount Hintlesham, like
+Pennycuick, a dupe of Rook's, meets her by chance at Monte Carlo and
+falls in love with her. He does not know that she knows Rook or
+Pennycuick, and she does not know that he knows them. Arriving in
+England, she finds in the manager, the promoter, and the chairman of the
+Electric White Lead Company her guardian, her seducer, and her lover.
+When she comes to see her guardian, the first person she meets is her
+seducer, and she learns that her lover has just left the house. Up to
+that moment, I repeat, she did not know that any one of these men knew
+any other; yet she does not even say, "How small the world is!"[4]
+Surely some such observation was obligatory under the circumstances.
+
+Let us turn now to a more memorable piece of work; that interesting play
+of Sir Arthur Pinero's transition period, _The Profligate_. Here the
+great situation of the third act is brought about by a chain of
+coincidences which would be utterly unthinkable in the author's maturer
+work. Leslie Brudenell, the heroine, is the ward of Mr. Cheal, a
+solicitor. She is to be married to Dunstan Renshaw; and, as she has no
+home, the bridal party meets at Mr. Cheal's office before proceeding to
+the registrar's. No sooner have they departed than Janet Preece, who has
+been betrayed and deserted by Dunstan Renshaw (under an assumed name)
+comes to the office to state her piteous case. This is not in itself a
+pure coincidence; for Janet happened to come to London in the same train
+with Leslie Brudenell and her brother Wilfrid; and Wilfrid, seeing in
+her a damsel in distress, recommended her to lay her troubles before a
+respectable solicitor, giving her Mr. Cheal's address. So far, then, the
+coincidence is not startling. It is natural enough that Renshaw's
+mistress and his betrothed should live in the same country town; and it
+is not improbable that they should come to London by the same train, and
+that Wilfrid Brudenell should give the bewildered and weeping young
+woman a commonplace piece of advice. The concatenation of circumstances
+is remarkable rather than improbable. But when, in the next act, not a
+month later, Janet Preece, by pure chance, drops in at the Florentine
+villa where Renshaw and Leslie are spending their honeymoon, we feel
+that the long arm of coincidence is stretched to its uttermost, and that
+even the thrilling situation which follows is very dearly bought. It
+would not have been difficult to attenuate the coincidence. What has
+actually happened is this: Janet has (we know not how) become a sort of
+maid-companion to a Mrs. Stonehay, whose daughter was a school-friend of
+Leslie's; the Stonehays have come to Florence, knowing nothing of
+Leslie's presence there; and they happen to visit the villa in order to
+see a fresco which it contains. If, now, we had been told that Janet's
+engagement by the Stonehays had resulted from her visit to Mr. Cheal,
+and that the Stonehays had come to Florence knowing Leslie to be there,
+and eager to find her, several links would have been struck off the
+chain of coincidence; or, to put it more exactly, a fairly coherent
+sequence of events would have been substituted for a series of
+incoherent chances. The same result might no doubt have been achieved in
+many other and neater ways. I merely indicate, by way of illustration, a
+quite obvious method of reducing the element of coincidence in the case.
+
+The coincidence in _The Second Mrs. Tanqueray_, by which Ellean meets
+and falls in love with one of Paula's ex-lovers, has been very severely
+criticized. It is certainly not one of the strong points of the play;
+but, unlike the series of chances we have just been examining, it places
+no excessive strain on our credulity. Such coincidences do occur in real
+life; we have all of us seen or heard of them; the worst we can say of
+this one is that it is neither positively good nor positively bad--a
+piece of indifferent craftsmanship. On the other hand, if we turn to
+_Letty_, the chance which, in the third act, leads Letchmere's party and
+Mandeville's party to choose the same restaurant, seems to me entirely
+justified. It is not really a coincidence at all, but one of those
+everyday happenings which are not only admissible in drama, but
+positively desirable, as part of the ordinary surface-texture of life.
+Entirely to eliminate chance from our representation of life would be a
+very unreasonable austerity. Strictly speaking, indeed, it is
+impossible; for even when we have worked out an unbroken chain of
+rational and commensurate causes and effects, it remains a chance, and
+an unlikely chance, that chance should not have interfered with it.
+
+All the plays touched upon in the last four paragraphs are in intention
+realistic. They aim, that is to say, at a literal and sober
+representation of life. In the other class of plays, which seek their
+effect, not in plodding probability, but in delightful improbability,
+the long arm of coincidence has its legitimate functions. Yet even here
+it is not quite unfettered. One of the most agreeable coincidences in
+fiction, I take it, is the simultaneous arrival in Bagdad, from
+different quarters of the globe, of three one-eyed calenders, all blind
+of the right eye, and all, in reality, the sons of kings. But it is to
+be noted that this coincidence is not a crucial occurrence in a story,
+but only a part of the story-teller's framework or mechanism--a device
+for introducing fresh series of adventures. This illustrates the
+Sarceyan principle above referred to, which Professor Brander Matthews
+has re-stated in what seems to me an entirely acceptable form--namely,
+that improbabilities which may be admitted on the outskirts of an
+action, must be rigidly excluded when the issue is joined and we are in
+the thick of things. Coincidences, in fact, become the more improbable
+in the direct ratio of their importance. We have all, in our own
+experience, met with amazing coincidences; but how few of us have ever
+gained or lost, been made happy or unhappy, by a coincidence, as
+distinct from a chance! It is not precisely probable that three
+brothers, who have separated in early life, and have not heard of one
+another for twenty years, should find themselves seated side by side at
+an Italian _table-d'hote_; yet such coincidences have occurred, and are
+creditable enough so long as nothing particular comes of them. But if a
+dramatist were to make these three brothers meet in Messina on the eve
+of the earthquake, in order that they might all be killed, and thus
+enable his hero (their cousin) to succeed to a peerage and marry the
+heroine, we should say that his use of coincidence was not strictly
+artistic. A coincidence, in short, which coincides with a crisis is
+thereby raised to the _n_th power, and is wholly inacceptable in serious
+art. Mr. Bernard Shaw has based the action of _You Never Can Tell_ on
+the amazing coincidence that Mrs. Clandon and her children, coming to
+England after eighteen years' absence, should by pure chance run
+straight into the arms, or rather into the teeth, of the husband and
+father whom the mother, at any rate, only wishes to avoid. This is no
+bad starting-point for an extravaganza; but even Mr. Shaw, though a
+despiser of niceties of craftsmanship, introduces no coincidences into
+serious plays such as _Candida_ or _The Doctor's Dilemma_.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+[Footnote 1: The malignant caricature of Cromwell in W.G. Wills'
+_Charles_ I did not, indeed, prevent the acceptance of the play by the
+mid-Victorian public; but it will certainly shorten the life of the one
+play which might have secured for its author a lasting place in dramatic
+literature. It is unimaginable that future generations should accept a
+representation of Cromwell as
+
+  "A mouthing patriot, with an itching palm,
+  In one hand menace, in the other greed."]
+
+[Footnote 2: It is only fair to say that Sarcey drew a distinction
+between antecedent _events_ and what he calls "postulates of character."
+He did not maintain that an audience ought to accept a psychological
+impossibility, merely because it was placed outside the frame of the
+picture. See _Quarante Ans de Theatre_, vii, p. 395.]
+
+[Footnote 3: This phrase, which occurs in Mr. Haddon Chambers's romantic
+melodrama, _Captain Swift_, was greeted with a burst of laughter by the
+first-night audience; but little did we then think that Mr. Chambers was
+enriching the English language. It is not, on examination, a
+particularly luminous phrase: "the three or four arms of coincidence"
+would really be more to the point. But it is not always the most
+accurate expression that is fittest to survive.]
+
+[Footnote 4: The abuse of coincidence is a legacy to modern drama from
+the Latin comedy, which, again, was founded on the Greek New Comedy. It
+is worth noting that in the days of Menander the world really was much
+smaller than it is to-day, when "thalassic" has grown into "oceanic"
+civilization. Travellers in those days followed a few main routes; half
+a dozen great seaports were rendezvous for all the world; the
+slave-trade was active, and kidnappings and abductions with the
+corresponding meetings and recognitions were no doubt frequent. Thus
+such a plot as that of the _Menaechmi_ was by no means the sheer
+impossibility which Shakespeare made it by attaching indistinguishable
+Dromios to his indistinguishable Antipholuses. To reduplicate a
+coincidence is in fact to multiply it by a figure far beyond my
+mathematics. It may be noted, too, that the practice of exposing
+children, on which the _Oedipus_, and many plays of Menander, are
+founded, was common in historic Greece, and that the hapless children
+were generally provided with identification-tokens _gnorismata_.]
+
+
+
+
+_CHAPTER XVI_
+
+LOGIC
+
+
+The term logic is often very vaguely used in relation to drama. French
+writers especially, who regard logic as one of the peculiar faculties of
+their national genius, are apt to insist upon it in and out of season.
+But, as we have already seen, logic is a gift which may easily be
+misapplied. It too often leads such writers as M. Brieux and M. Hervieu
+to sacrifice the undulant and diverse rhythms of life to a stiff and
+symmetrical formalism. The conception of a play as the exhaustive
+demonstration of a thesis has never taken a strong hold on the
+Anglo-Saxon mind; and, though some of M. Brieux's plays are much more
+than mere dramatic arguments, we need not, in the main, envy the French
+their logician-dramatists.
+
+But, though the presence of logic should never be forced upon the
+spectator's attention, still less should he be disturbed and baffled by
+its conspicuous absence. If the playwright announces a theme at all: if
+he lets it be seen that some general idea underlies his work: he is
+bound to present and develop that idea in a logical fashion, not to
+shift his ground, whether inadvertently or insidiously, and not to
+wander off into irrelevant side-issues. He must face his problem
+squarely. If he sets forth to prove anything at all, he must prove that
+thing and not some totally different thing. He must beware of the
+red-herring across the trail.
+
+For a clear example of defective logic, I turn to a French
+play--Sardou's _Spiritisme_. Both from internal and from external
+evidence, it is certain that M. Sardou was a believer in
+spiritualism--in the existence of disembodied intelligences, and their
+power of communicating with the living. Yet he had not the courage to
+assign to them an essential part in his drama. The spirits hover round
+the outskirts of the action, but do not really or effectually intervene
+in it. The hero's _belief_ in them, indeed, helps to bring about the
+conclusion; but the apparition which so potently works upon him is an
+admitted imposture, a pious fraud. Earlier in the play, two or three
+trivial and unnecessary miracles are introduced--just enough to hint at
+the author's faith without decisively affirming it. For instance:
+towards the close of Act I Madame d'Aubenas has gone off, nominally to
+take the night train for Poitiers, in reality to pay a visit to her
+lover, M. de Stoudza. When she has gone, her husband and his guests
+arrange a seance and evoke a spirit. No sooner have preliminaries been
+settled than the spirit spells out the word "O-u-v-r-e-z." They open the
+window, and behold! the sky is red with a glare which proves to proceed
+from the burning of the train in which Madame d'Aubenas is supposed to
+have started. The incident is effective enough, and a little creepy; but
+its effect is quite incommensurate with the strain upon our powers of
+belief. The thing is supposed to be a miracle, of that there can be no
+doubt; but it has not the smallest influence on the course of the play,
+except to bring on the hurry-scurry and alarm a few minutes earlier than
+might otherwise have been the case. Now, if the spirit, instead of
+merely announcing the accident, had informed M. d'Aubenas that his wife
+was not in it--if, for example, it had rapped out "Gilberte chez
+Stoudza"--it would have been an honest ghost (though indiscreet), and we
+should not have felt that our credulity had been taxed to no purpose. As
+it is, the logical deduction from M. Sardou's fable is that, though
+spirit communications are genuine enough, they are never of the
+slightest use; but we can scarcely suppose that that was what he
+intended to convey.
+
+It may be said, and perhaps with truth, that what Sardou lacked in this
+instance was not logic, but courage: he felt that an audience would
+accept episodic miracles, but would reject supernatural interference at
+a determining crisis in the play. In that case he would have done better
+to let the theme alone: for the manifest failure of logic leaves the
+play neither good drama nor good argument. This is a totally different
+matter from Ibsen's treatment of the supernatural in such plays as _The
+Lady from the Sea_, _The Master Builder_ and _Little Eyolf_. Ibsen, like
+Hawthorne, suggests without affirming the action of occult powers. He
+shows us nothing that is not capable of a perfectly natural explanation;
+but he leaves us to imagine, if we are so disposed, that there may be
+influences at work that are not yet formally recognized in physics and
+psychology. In this there is nothing illogical. The poet is merely
+appealing to a mood, familiar to all of us, in which we wonder whether
+there may not be more things in heaven and earth than are crystallized
+in our scientific formulas.
+
+It is a grave defect of logic to state, or hint at, a problem, and then
+illustrate it in such terms of character that it is solved in advance.
+In _The Liars_, by Mr. Henry Arthur Jones, there is an evident
+suggestion of the problem whether a man is ever justified in rescuing a
+woman, by means of the Divorce Court, from marital bondage which her
+soul abhors. The sententious Sir Christopher Deering argues the matter
+at great length: but all the time we are hungering for him to say the
+one thing demanded by the logic of the situation: to wit: "Whatever the
+abstract rights and wrongs of the case, this man would be an imbecile to
+elope with this woman, who is an empty-headed, empty-hearted creature,
+incapable either of the passion or of the loathing which alone could
+lend any semblance of reason to a breach of social law." Similarly, in
+_The Profligate_, Sir Arthur Pinero no doubt intended us to reflect upon
+the question whether, in entering upon marriage, a woman has a right to
+assume in her husband the same purity of antecedent conduct which he
+demands of her. That is an arguable question, and it has been argued
+often enough; but in this play it does not really arise, for the husband
+presented to us is no ordinary loose-liver, but (it would seem--for the
+case is not clearly stated) a particularly base and heartless seducer,
+whom it is evidently a misfortune for any woman to have married. The
+authors of these two plays have committed an identical error of logic:
+namely, that of suggesting a broad issue, and then stating such a set of
+circumstances that the issue does not really arise. In other words, they
+have from the outset begged the question. The plays, it may be said,
+were both successful in their day. Yes; but had they been logical their
+day might have lasted a century. A somewhat similar defect of logic
+constitutes a fatal blemish in _The Ideal Husband_, by Oscar Wilde.
+Intentionally or otherwise, the question suggested is whether a single
+flaw of conduct (the betrayal to financiers of a state secret) ought to
+blast a political career. Here, again, is an arguable point, on the
+assumption that the statesman is penitent and determined never to repeat
+his misdeed; but when we find that this particular statesman is prepared
+to go on betraying his country indefinitely, in order to save his own
+skin, the question falls to the ground--the answer is too obvious.
+
+It happened some years ago that two plays satirizing "yellow journalism"
+were produced almost simultaneously in London--_The Earth_ by Mr. James
+B. Fagan, and _What the Public Wants_ by Mr. Arnold Bennett. In point of
+intellectual grasp, or power of characterization, there could be no
+comparison between the two writers; yet I hold that, from the point of
+view of dramatic composition, _The Earth_ was the better play of the
+two, simply because it dealt logically with the theme announced, instead
+of wandering away into all sorts of irrelevances. Mr. Bennett, to begin
+with, could not resist making his Napoleon of the Press a native of the
+"Five Towns," and exhibiting him at large in provincial middle-class
+surroundings. All this is sheer irrelevance; for the type of journalism
+in question is not characteristically an outcome of any phase of
+provincial life. Mr. Bennett may allege that Sir Charles Worgan had to
+be born somewhere, and might as well be born in Bursley as anywhere
+else. I reply that, for the purposes of the play, he need not have been
+born anywhere. His birthplace and the surroundings of his boyhood have
+nothing to do with what may be called his journalistic psychology, which
+is, or ought to be, the theme of the play. Then, again, Mr. Bennett
+shows him dabbling in theatrical management and falling in
+love--irrelevances both. As a manager, no doubt, he insists on doing
+"what the public wants" (it is nothing worse than a revival of _The
+Merchant of Venice_) and thus offers another illustration of the results
+of obeying that principle. But all this is beside the real issue. The
+true gravamen of the charge against a Napoleon of the Press is not that
+he gives the public what it wants, but that he can make the public want
+what _he_ wants, think what _he_ thinks, believe what _he_ wants them to
+believe, and do what _he_ wants them to do. By dint of assertion,
+innuendo, and iteration in a hundred papers, he can create an apparent
+public opinion, or public emotion, which may be directed towards the
+most dangerous ends. This point Mr. Bennett entirely missed. What he
+gave us was in reality a comedy of middle-class life with a number of
+incidental allusions to "yellow" journalism and kindred topics. Mr.
+Fagan, working in broader outlines, and, it must be owned, in cruder
+colours, never strayed from the logical line of development, and took us
+much nearer the heart of his subject.
+
+A somewhat different, and very common, fault of logic was exemplified in
+Mr. Clyde Fitch's last play, _The City_. His theme, as announced in his
+title and indicated in his exposition, was the influence of New York
+upon a family which migrates thither from a provincial town. But the
+action is not really shaped by the influence of "the city." It might
+have taken practically the same course if the family had remained at
+home. The author had failed to establish a logical connection between
+his theme and the incidents supposed to illustrate it.[1]
+
+Fantastic plays, which assume an order of things more or less exempt
+from the limitations of physical reality, ought, nevertheless, to be
+logically faithful to their own assumptions. Some fantasies, indeed,
+which sinned against this principle, have had no small success. In
+_Pygmalion and Galatea_, for example, there is a conspicuous lack of
+logic. The following passage from a criticism of thirty years ago puts
+my point so clearly that I am tempted to copy it:
+
+  As we have no scientific record of a statue coming to life, the
+  probable moral and intellectual condition of a being so created is
+  left to the widest conjecture. The playwright may assume for it any
+  stage of development he pleases, and his audience will readily grant
+  his assumption. But if his work is to have any claim to artistic
+  value, he must not assume all sorts of different stages of
+  development at every second word his creation utters. He must not
+  make her a child in one speech, a woman of the world in the next,
+  and an idiot in the next again. Of course, it would be an extremely
+  difficult task clearly to define in all its bearings and details the
+  particular intellectual condition assumed at the outset, and then
+  gradually to indicate the natural growth of a fuller consciousness.
+  Difficult it would be, but by no means impossible; nay, it would be
+  this very problem which would tempt the true dramatist to adopt such
+  a theme. Mr. Gilbert has not essayed the task. He regulates
+  Galatea's state of consciousness by the fluctuating exigencies of
+  dialogue whose humour is levelled straight at the heads of the old
+  Haymarket pit.
+
+To indicate the nature of the inconsistencies which abound in every
+scene, I may say that, in the first act, Galatea does not know that she
+is a woman, but understands the word "beauty," knows (though Pygmalion
+is the only living creature she has ever seen) the meaning of agreement
+and difference of taste, and is alive to the distinction between an
+original and a copy. In the second act she has got the length of knowing
+the enormity of taking life, and appreciating the fine distinction
+between taking it of one's own motive, and taking it for money. Yet the
+next moment, when Leucippe enters with a fawn he has killed, it appears
+that she does not realize the difference between man and the brute
+creation. Thus we are for ever shifting from one plane of convention to
+another. There is no fixed starting-point for our imagination, no
+logical development of a clearly-stated initial condition. The play, it
+is true, enjoyed some five-and-twenty years of life; but it certainly
+cannot claim an enduring place either in literature or on the stage. It
+is still open to the philosophic dramatist to write a logical _Pygmalion
+and Galatea_.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+[Footnote 1: I am here writing from memory, having been unable to obtain
+a copy of _The City_; but my memory is pretty clear.]
+
+
+
+
+_CHAPTER XVII_
+
+KEEPING A SECRET
+
+
+It has been often and authoritatively laid down that a dramatist must on
+no account keep a secret from his audience. Like most authoritative
+maxims, this one seems to require a good deal of qualification. Let us
+look into the matter a little more closely.
+
+So far as I can see, the strongest reason against keeping a secret is
+that, try as you may, you cannot do it. This point has already been
+discussed in Chapter IX, where we saw that from only one audience can a
+secret be really hidden, a considerable percentage of any subsequent
+audience being certain to know all about it in advance. The more
+striking and successful is the first-night effect of surprise, the more
+certainly and rapidly will the report of it circulate through all strata
+of the theatrical public. But for this fact, one could quite well
+conceive a fascinating melodrama constructed, like a detective story,
+with a view to keeping the audience in the dark as long as possible. A
+pistol shot might ring out just before the rise of the curtain: a man
+(or woman) might be discovered in an otherwise empty room, weltering in
+his (or her) gore: and the remainder of the play might consist in the
+tracking down of the murderer, who would, of course, prove to be the
+very last person to be suspected. Such a play might make a great
+first-night success; but the more the author relied upon the mystery for
+his effect, the more fatally would that effect be discounted at each
+successive repetition.
+
+One author of distinction, M. Hervieu, has actually made the experiment
+of presenting an enigma--he calls the play _L'Enigme_--and reserving the
+solution to the very end. We know from the outset that one of two
+sisters-in-law is unfaithful to her husband, and the question is--which?
+The whole ingenuity of the author is centred on keeping the secret, and
+the spectator who does not know it in advance is all the time in the
+attitude of a detective questing for clues. He is challenged to guess
+which of the ladies is the frail one; and he is far too intent on this
+game to think or care about the emotional process of the play. I myself
+(I remember) guessed right, mainly because the name Giselle seemed to me
+more suggestive of flightiness than the staid and sober Leonore,
+wherefore I suspected that M. Hervieu, in order to throw dust in our
+eyes, had given it to the virtuous lady. But whether we guess right or
+wrong, this clue-hunting is an intellectual sport, not an artistic
+enjoyment. If there is any aesthetic quality in the play, it can only
+come home to us when we know the secret. And the same dilemma will
+present itself to any playwright who seeks to imitate M. Hervieu.
+
+The actual keeping of a secret, then--the appeal to the primary
+curiosity of actual ignorance--may be ruled out as practically
+impossible, and, when possible, unworthy of serious art. But there is
+also, as we have seen, the secondary curiosity of the audience which,
+though more or less cognizant of the essential facts, instinctively
+assumes ignorance, and judges the development of a play from that point
+of view. We all realize that a dramatist has no right to trust to our
+previous knowledge, acquired from outside sources. We know that a play,
+like every other work of art, ought to be self-sufficient, and even if,
+at any given moment, we have, as a matter of fact, knowledge which
+supplements what the playwright has told us, we feel that he ought not
+to have taken for granted our possession of any such external and
+fortuitous information. To put it briefly, the dramatist must formally
+_assume_ ignorance in his audience, though he must not practically _rely
+upon_ it. Therefore it becomes a point of real importance to determine
+how long a secret may be kept from an audience, assumed to have no
+outside knowledge, and at what point it ought to be revealed.
+
+When _Lady Windermere's Fan_ was first produced, no hint was given in
+the first act of the fact that Mrs. Erlynne was Lady Windermere's
+mother; so that Lord Windermere's insistence on inviting her to his
+wife's birthday reception remained wholly unexplained. But after a few
+nights the author made Lord Windermere exclaim, just as the curtain
+fell, "My God! What shall I do? I dare not tell her who this woman
+really is. The shame would kill her." It was, of course, said that this
+change had been made in deference to newspaper criticism; and Oscar
+Wilde, in a characteristic letter to the _St. James's Gazette_, promptly
+repelled this calumny. At a first-night supper-party, he said--
+
+  "All of my friends without exception were of the opinion that the
+  psychological interest of the second act would be greatly increased
+  by the disclosure of the actual relationship existing between Lady
+  Windermere and Mrs. Erlynne--an opinion, I may add, that had
+  previously been strongly held and urged by Mr. Alexander.... I
+  determined, consequently, to make a change in the precise moment of
+  revelation."
+
+It is impossible to say whether Wilde seriously believed that
+"psychology" entered into the matter at all, or whether he was laughing
+in his sleeve in putting forward this solemn plea. The truth is, I
+think, that this example cannot be cited either for or against the
+keeping of a secret, the essential fact being that the secret was such a
+bad and inacceptable one--inacceptable, I mean, as an explanation of
+Lord Windermere's conduct--that it was probably wise to make a clean
+breast of it as soon as possible, and get it over. It may be said with
+perfect confidence that it is useless to keep a secret which, when
+revealed, is certain to disappoint the audience, and to make it feel
+that it has been trifled with. That is an elementary dictate of
+prudence. But if the reason for Lord Windermere's conduct had been
+adequate, ingenious, such as to give us, when revealed, a little shock
+of pleasant surprise, the author need certainly have been in no hurry to
+disclose it. It is not improbable (though my memory is not clear on the
+point) that part of the strong interest we undoubtedly felt on the first
+night arose from the hope that Lord Windermere's seemingly unaccountable
+conduct might be satisfactorily accounted for. As this hope was futile,
+there was no reason, at subsequent performances, to keep up the pretence
+of preserving a secret which was probably known, as a matter of fact, to
+most of the audience, and which was worthless when revealed.
+
+In the second act of _The Devil's Disciple_, by Mr. Bernard Shaw, we
+have an instance of wholly inartistic secrecy, which would certainly be
+condemned in the work of any author who was not accepted in advance as a
+law unto himself. Richard Dudgeon has been arrested by the British
+soldiers, who mistake him for the Reverend Anthony Anderson. When
+Anderson comes home, it takes a very long time for his silly wife,
+Judith, to acquaint him with a situation that might have been explained
+in three words; and when, at last, he does understand it, he calls for a
+horse and his boots, and rushes off in mad haste, as though his one
+desire were to escape from the British and leave Dudgeon to his fate. In
+reality his purpose is to bring up a body of Continental troops to the
+rescue of Dudgeon; and this also he might (and certainly would) have
+conveyed in three words. But Mr. Shaw was so bent on letting Judith
+continue to conduct herself idiotically, that he made her sensible
+husband act no less idiotically, in order to throw dust in her eyes, and
+(incidentally) in the eyes of the audience. In the work of any other
+man, we should call this not only an injudicious, but a purposeless and
+foolish, keeping of a secret. Mr. Shaw may say that in order to develop
+the character of Judith as he had conceived it, he was forced to make
+her misunderstand her husband's motives. A development of character
+obtained by such artificial means cannot be of much worth; but even
+granting this plea, one cannot but point out that it would have been
+easy to keep Judith in the dark as to Anderson's purpose, without
+keeping the audience also in the dark, and making him behave like a
+fool. All that was required was to get Judith off the stage for a few
+moments, just before the true state of matters burst upon Anthony. It
+would then have been perfectly natural and probable that, not foreseeing
+her misunderstanding, he should hurry off without waiting to explain
+matters to her. But that he should deliberately leave her in her
+delusion, and even use phrases carefully calculated to deceive both her
+and the audience,[1] would be, in a writer who professed to place reason
+above caprice, a rather gross fault of art.
+
+Mr. Henry Arthur Jones's light comedy, _Whitewashing Julia_, proves that
+it is possible, without incurring disaster, to keep a secret throughout
+a play, and never reveal it at all. More accurately, what Mr. Jones does
+is to pretend that there is some explanation of Mrs. Julia Wren's
+relations with the Duke of Savona, other than the simple explanation
+that she was his mistress, and to keep us waiting for this
+"whitewashing" disclosure, when in fact he has nothing of the sort up
+his sleeve, and the plain truth is precisely what the gossips of
+Shanctonbury surmise. Julia does not even explain or justify her conduct
+from her own point of view. She gives out that "an explanation will be
+forthcoming at the right moment"; but the right moment never arrives.
+All we are told is that she, Julia, considers that there was never
+anything degrading in her conduct; and this we are asked to accept as
+sufficient. It was a daring policy to dangle before our eyes an
+explanation, which always receded as we advanced towards it, and proved
+in the end to be wholly unexplanatory. The success of the play, however,
+was sufficient to show that, in light comedy, at any rate, a secret may
+with impunity be kept, even to the point of tantalization.[2]
+
+Let us now look at a couple of cases in which the keeping of a secret
+seems pretty clearly wrong, inasmuch as it diminishes tension, and
+deprives the audience of that superior knowledge in which lies the irony
+of drama. In a play named _Her Advocate_, by Mr. Walter Frith (founded
+on one of Grenville Murray's _French Pictures in English Chalk_), a K.C.
+has fallen madly in love with a woman whose defence he has undertaken.
+He believes passionately in her innocence, and, never doubting that she
+loves him in return, he is determined to secure for her a triumphant
+acquittal. Just at the crucial moment, however, he learns that she loves
+another man; and, overwhelmed by this disillusion, he has still to face
+the ordeal and plead her cause. The conjuncture would be still more
+dramatic if the revelation of this love were to put a different
+complexion on the murder, and, by introducing a new motive, shake the
+advocate's faith in his client's innocence. But that is another matter;
+the question here to be considered is whether the author did right in
+reserving the revelation to the last possible moment. In my opinion he
+would have done better to have given us an earlier inkling of the true
+state of affairs. To keep the secret, in this case, was to place the
+audience as well as the advocate on a false trail, and to deprive it of
+the sense of superiority it would have felt in seeing him marching
+confidently towards a happiness which it knew to be illusory.
+
+The second case is that of _La Douloureuse_, by M. Maurice Donnay.
+Through two acts out of the four an important secret is so carefully
+kept that there seems to be no obstacle between the lovers with whom
+(from the author's point of view) we are supposed to sympathize. The
+first act is devoted to an elaborate painting of a somewhat revolting
+phase of parvenu society in Paris. Towards the end of the act we learn
+that the sculptor, Philippe Lauberthie, is the lover of Helene Ardan, a
+married woman; and at the very end her husband, Ardan, commits suicide.
+This act, therefore, is devoted, not, as the orthodox formula goes, to
+raising an obstacle between the lovers, but rather to destroying one. In
+the second act there still seems to be no obstacle of any sort. Helene's
+year of widowhood is nearly over; she and Philippe are presently to be
+married; all is harmony, adoration, and security. In the last scene of
+the act, a cloud no bigger than a man's hand appears on the horizon. We
+find that Gotte des Trembles, Helene's bosom friend, is also in love
+with Philippe, and is determined to let him know it. But Philippe
+resists her blandishments with melancholy austerity, and when the
+curtain falls on the second act, things seem to be perfectly safe and in
+order. Helene a widow, and Philippe austere--what harm can Gotte
+possibly do?
+
+The fact is, M. Donnay is carefully keeping a secret from us. Philippe
+is not Helene's first lover; her son, Georges, is not the child of her
+late husband; and Gotte, and Gotte alone, knows the truth. Had we also
+been initiated from the outset (and nothing would have been easier or
+more natural--three words exchanged between Gotte and Helene would have
+done it) we should have been at no loss to foresee the impending drama,
+and the sense of irony would have tripled the interest of the
+intervening scenes. The effect of M. Donnay's third act is not a whit
+more forcible because it comes upon us unprepared. We learn at the
+beginning that Philippe's austerity has not after all been proof against
+Gotte's seductions; but it has now returned upon him embittered by
+remorse, and he treats Gotte with sternness approaching to contumely.
+She takes her revenge by revealing Helene's secret; he tells Helene that
+he knows it; and she, putting two and two together, divines how it has
+come to his knowledge. This long scene of mutual reproach and remorseful
+misery is, in reality, the whole drama, and might have been cited in
+Chapter XIV as a fine example of a peripety. Helene enters Philippe's
+studio happy and serene, she leaves it broken-hearted; but the effect of
+the scene is not a whit greater because, in the two previous acts, we
+have been studiously deprived of the information that would have led us
+vaguely to anticipate it.
+
+To sum up this question of secrecy: the current maxim, "Never keep a
+secret from your audience," would appear to be an over-simplification of
+a somewhat difficult question of craftsmanship. We may agree that it is
+often dangerous and sometimes manifestly foolish to keep a secret; but,
+on the other hand, there is certainly no reason why the playwright
+should blurt out all his secrets at the first possible opportunity. The
+true art lies in knowing just how long to keep silent, and just the
+right time to speak. In the first act of _Letty_, Sir Arthur Pinero
+gains a memorable effect by keeping a secret, not very long, indeed, but
+long enough and carefully enough to show that he knew very clearly what
+he was doing. We are introduced to Nevill Letchmere's bachelor
+apartments. Animated scenes occur between Letchmere and his
+brother-in-law, Letchmere and his sister, Letchmere and Letty, Marion
+and Hilda Gunning. It is evident that Letty dreams of marriage with
+Letchmere; and for aught that we see or hear, there is no just cause or
+impediment to the contrary. It is only, at the end of the very admirable
+scene between Letchmere and Mandeville that the following little
+passage occurs:
+
+  MANDEVILLE: ... At all events I _am_ qualified to tell her I'm
+  fairly gone on her--honourably gone on her--if I choose to do it.
+
+  LETCHMERE: Qualified?
+
+  MANDEVILLE: Which is more than you are, Mr. Letchmere. I _am_ a
+  single man; you ain't, bear in mind.
+
+  LETCHMERE: (_imperturbably_): Very true.
+
+This one little touch is a masterpiece of craftsmanship. It would have
+been the most natural thing in the world for either the sister or the
+brother-in-law, concerned about their own matrimonial difficulties, to
+let fall some passing allusion to Letchmere's separation from his wife;
+but the author carefully avoided this, carefully allowed us to make our
+first acquaintance with Letty in ignorance of the irony of her position,
+and then allowed the truth to slip out just in time to let us feel the
+whole force of that irony during the last scene of the act and the
+greater part of the second act. A finer instance of the delicate grading
+of tension it would be difficult to cite.
+
+One thing is certain; namely, that if a secret is to be kept at all, it
+must be worth the keeping; if a riddle is propounded, its answer must be
+pleasing and ingenious, or the audience will resent having been led to
+cudgel its brains for nothing. This is simply a part of the larger
+principle, before insisted on, that when a reasonable expectation is
+aroused, it can be baffled only at the author's peril. If the crux of a
+scene or of a whole play lie in the solution of some material difficulty
+or moral problem, it must on no account be solved by a mere trick or
+evasion. The dramatist is very ill-advised who sets forth with pomp and
+circumstance to perform some intellectual or technical feat, and then
+merely skirts round it or runs away from it. A fair proportion should
+always be observed between effort and effect, between promise and
+performance.
+
+"But if the audience happens to misread the playwright's design, and
+form exaggerated and irrational expectations?" That merely means that
+the playwright does not know his business, or, at any rate, does not
+know his audience. It is his business to play upon the collective mind
+of his audience as upon a keyboard--to arouse just the right order and
+measure of anticipation, and fulfil it, or outdo it, in just the right
+way at just the right time. The skill of the dramatist, as distinct from
+his genius or inspiration, lies in the correctness of his insight into
+the mind of his audience.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+[Footnote 1: For instance: "If you can get a word with him by pretending
+that you are his wife, tell him to hold his tongue until morning; _that
+will give me all the start I need_."]
+
+[Footnote 2: In _The Idyll_, by Herr Egge, of which some account is
+given in Chapter X, the author certainly does right in not allowing the
+audience for a moment to share the hero's doubts as to the heroine's
+past. It would have been very easy for him to have kept the secret; but
+he takes the earliest opportunity of assuring us that her relations with
+Ringve were quite innocent.]
+
+
+
+
+_BOOK IV_
+
+
+THE END
+
+
+
+
+_CHAPTER XVIII_
+
+CLIMAX AND ANTICLIMAX
+
+
+If it were as easy to write a good last act as a good first act, we
+should be able to reckon three masterpieces for every one that we can
+name at present. The reason why the last act should offer special
+difficulties is not far to seek. We have agreed to regard a play as
+essentially a crisis in the lives of one or more persons; and we all
+know that crises are much more apt to have a definite beginning than a
+definite end. We can almost always put our finger upon the moment--not,
+indeed, when the crisis began--but when we clearly realized its presence
+or its imminence. A chance meeting, the receipt of a letter or a
+telegram, a particular turn given to a certain conversation, even the
+mere emergence into consciousness of a previously latent feeling or
+thought, may mark quite definitely the moment of germination, so to
+speak, of a given crisis; and it is comparatively easy to dramatize such
+a moment. But how few crises come to a definite or dramatic conclusion!
+Nine times out of ten they end in some petty compromise, or do not end
+at all, but simply subside, like the waves of the sea when the storm has
+blown itself out. It is the playwright's chief difficulty to find a
+crisis with an ending which satisfies at once his artistic conscience
+and the requirements of dramatic effect.
+
+And the difficulty becomes greater the nearer we approach to reality. In
+the days when tragedy and comedy were cast in fixed, conventional
+moulds, the playwright's task was much simpler. It was thoroughly
+understood that a tragedy ended with one or more deaths, a comedy with
+one or more marriages; so that the question of a strong or a weak ending
+did not arise. The end might be strongly or weakly led up to, but, in
+itself, it was fore-ordained. Now that these moulds are broken, and both
+marriage and death may be said to have lost their prestige as the be-all
+and end-all of drama, the playwright's range of choice is unlimited, and
+the difficulty of choosing has become infinitely greater. Our comedies
+are much more apt to begin than to end with marriage, and death has come
+to be regarded as a rather cheap and conventional expedient for cutting
+the knots of life.
+
+From the fact that "the difficulty becomes greater the nearer we
+approach to reality," it further follows that the higher the form of
+drama, the more probable is it that the demands of truth and the
+requirements of dramatic effect may be found to clash. In melodrama, the
+curtain falls of its own accord, so to speak, when the handcuffs are
+transferred from the hero's wrists to the villain's. In an
+adventure-play, whether farcical or romantic, when the adventure is over
+the play is done. The author's task is merely to keep the interest of
+the adventure afoot until he is ready to drop his curtain. This is a
+point of craftsmanship in which playwrights often fail; but it is a
+point of craftsmanship only. In plays of a higher order, on the other
+hand, the difficulty is often inherent in the theme, and not to be
+overcome by any feat of craftsmanship. If the dramatist were to eschew
+all crises that could not be made to resolve themselves with
+specifically dramatic crispness and decisiveness, he would very
+seriously limit the domain of his art. Many excellent themes would be
+distorted and ruined by having an emphatic ending forced upon them. It
+is surely much better that they should be brought to their natural
+unemphatic ending, than that they should be either falsified or ignored.
+
+I suggest, then, that the modern tendency to take lightly Aristotle's
+demand that the drama should have a "beginning, a middle, _and an end_,"
+arises from the nature of things, and implies, not necessarily, nor even
+probably, a decline in craftsmanship, but a new intimacy of relation to
+life, and a new sincerity of artistic conscience. I suggest that the
+"weak last act," of which critics so often complain, is a natural
+development from which authors ought not, on occasion, to shrink, and of
+which critics ought, on occasion, to recognize the necessity. To elevate
+it into a system is absurd. There is certainly no more reason for
+deliberately avoiding an emphatic ending than for mechanically forcing
+one. But authors and critics alike should learn to distinguish the
+themes which do, from the themes which do not, call for a definite,
+trenchant solution, and should handle them, and judge them, in
+accordance with their inherent quality.
+
+Let us, however, define our terms, and be sure that we know what we are
+talking about. By an "unemphatic ending" I am far from meaning a
+makeshift ending, an ending carelessly and conventionally huddled up.
+Nor do I mean an indecisive ending, where the curtain falls, as the
+saying goes, on a note of interrogation. An unemphatic ending, as I
+understand it, is a deliberate anticlimax, an idyllic, or elegiac, or
+philosophic last act, following upon a penultimate act of very much
+higher tension. The disposition to condemn such an ending off-hand is
+what I am here pleading against. It is sometimes assumed that the
+playwright ought always to make his action conclude within five minutes
+of its culmination; but for such a hard-and-fast rule I can find no
+sufficient reason. The consequences of a great emotional or spiritual
+crisis cannot always be worked out, or even foreshadowed, within so
+brief a space of time. If, after such a crisis, we are unwilling to keep
+our seats for another half-hour, in order to learn "what came of it
+all," the author has evidently failed to awaken in us any real interest
+in his characters.
+
+A good instance of the unemphatic ending is the last act of Sir Arthur
+Pinero's _Letty_. This "epilogue"--so the author calls it--has been
+denounced as a concession to popular sentimentality, and an unpardonable
+anticlimax. An anticlimax it is, beyond all doubt; but it does not
+follow that it is an artistic blemish. Nothing would have been easier
+than not to write it--to make the play end with Letty's awakening from
+her dream, and her flight from Letchmere's rooms. But the author has set
+forth, not merely to interest us in an adventure, but to draw a
+character; and it was essential to our full appreciation of Letty's
+character that we should know what, after all, she made of her life.
+When Iris, most hapless of women, went out into the dark, there was
+nothing more that we needed to know of her. We could guess the sequel
+only too easily. But the case of Letty was wholly different. Her exit
+was an act of will, triumphing over a form of temptation peculiarly
+alluring to her temperament. There was in her character precisely that
+grit which Iris lacked; and we wanted to know what it would do for her.
+This was not a case for an indecisive ending, a note of interrogation.
+The author felt no doubt as to Letty's destiny, and he wanted to leave
+his audience in no doubt. From Iris's fate we were only too willing to
+avert our eyes; but it would have been a sensible discomfort to us to be
+left in the dark about Letty's.
+
+This, then, I regard as a typical instance of justified anticlimax.
+Another is the idyllic last act of _The Princess and the Butterfly_, in
+which, moreover, despite its comparatively subdued tone, the tension is
+maintained to the end. A very different matter is the third act of _The
+Benefit of the Doubt_, already alluded to. This is a pronounced case of
+the makeshift ending, inspired (to all appearance) simply by the fact
+that the play must end somehow, and that no better idea happens to
+present itself. Admirable as are the other acts, one is almost inclined
+to agree with Dumas that an author ought not to embark upon a theme
+unless he foresees a better way out of it than this. It should be noted,
+too, that _The Benefit of the Doubt_ is a three-act play, and that, in a
+play laid out on this scale, a whole act of anticlimax is necessarily
+disproportionate. It is one thing to relax the tension in the last act
+out of four or five; quite another thing in the last act out of three.
+In other words, the culminating point of a four-or five-act play may be
+placed in the penultimate act; in a three-act play, it should come, at
+earliest, in the penultimate scene.[1]
+
+In the works of Mr. Henry Arthur Jones we find several instances of the
+unemphatic last act--some clearly justified, others much less so. Among
+the former I unhesitatingly reckon the fourth act of _Mrs. Dane's
+Defence_. It would not have been difficult, but surely most inartistic,
+to huddle up the action in five minutes after Mrs. Dane's tragic
+collapse under Sir Daniel Carteret's cross-examination. She might have
+taken poison and died in picturesque contortions on the sofa; or Lionel
+might have defied all counsels of prudence and gone off with her in
+spite of her past; or she might have placed Lionel's hand in Janet's,
+saying: "The game is up. Bless you, my children. I am going into the
+nearest nunnery." As a matter of fact, Mr. Jones brought his action to
+its natural close in a quiet, sufficiently adroit, last act; and I do
+not see that criticism has any just complaint to make.
+
+In recent French drama, _La Douloureuse_, already cited, affords an
+excellent instance of a quiet last act. After the violent and
+heartrending rupture between the lovers in the third act, we feel that,
+though this paroxysm of pain is justified by the circumstances, it will
+not last for ever, and Philippe and Helene will come together again.
+This is also M. Donnay's view; and he devotes his whole last act, quite
+simply, to a duologue of reconciliation. It seems to me a fault of
+proportion, however, that he should shift his locality from Paris to the
+Riviera, and should place the brief duologue in a romantic woodland
+scene. An act of anticlimax should be treated, so to speak, as
+unpretentiously as possible. To invent an elaborate apparatus for it is
+to emphasize the anticlimax by throwing it into unnecessary relief.
+
+This may be a convenient place for a few words on the modern fashion of
+eschewing emphasis, not only in last acts, but at every point where the
+old French dramaturgy demanded it, and especially in act-endings.
+_Punch_ has a pleasant allusion to this tendency in two suggested
+examination-papers for an "Academy of Dramatists":
+
+  A--FOR THE CLASSICAL SIDE ONLY.
+    1. What is a "curtain"; and how should it be led up to?
+
+  B--FOR THE MODERN SIDE ONLY.
+    1. What is a "curtain"; and how can it be avoided?
+
+Some modern playwrights have fled in a sort of panic from the old
+"picture-poster situation" to the other extreme of always dropping their
+curtain when the audience least expects it. This is not a practice to be
+commended. One has often seen an audience quite unnecessarily chilled by
+a disconcerting "curtain." There should be moderation even in the
+shrinking from theatricality.
+
+This shrinking is particularly marked, though I do not say it is carried
+too far, in the plays of Mr. Galsworthy. Even the most innocent tricks
+of emphasis are to him snares of the Evil One. He would sooner die than
+drop his curtain on a particularly effective line. It is his chief
+ambition that you should never discern any arrangement, any intention,
+in his work. As a rule, the only reason you can see for his doing thus
+or thus is his desire that you should see no reason for it. He does not
+carry this tendency, as some do, to the point of eccentricity; but he
+certainly goes as far as any one should be advised to follow. A little
+further, and you incur the danger of becoming affectedly unaffected,
+artificially inartificial.
+
+I am far from pleading for the conventional tableau at the end of each
+act, with all the characters petrified, as it were, in
+penny-plain-twopence-coloured attitudes. But it is certainly desirable
+that the fall of the curtain should not take an audience entirely by
+surprise, and even that the spectator should feel the moment to be
+rightly chosen, though he might be unable to give any reason for his
+feeling. Moreover--this may seem a super-subtlety, but one has seen it
+neglected with notably bad effect--a playwright should never let his
+audience expect the fall of a curtain at a given point, and then balk
+their expectancy, unless he is sure that he holds in reserve a more than
+adequate compensation. There is nothing so dangerous as to let a play,
+or an act, drag on when the audience feels in its heart that it is
+really over, and that "the rest is silence"--or ought to be. The end of
+Mr. Granville Barker's fine play, _The Voysey Inheritance_, was injured
+by the fact that, several minutes before the curtain actually fell, he
+had given what seemed an obvious "cue for curtain." I do not say that
+what followed was superfluous; what I do say is that the author ought to
+have been careful not to let us imagine that the colloquy between Edward
+and Alice was over when in fact it had still some minutes to run. An
+even more remarkable play, _The Madras House_, was ruined, on its first
+night, by a long final anticlimax. Here, however, the fault did not lie
+in awakening a premature expectation of the close, but in the fact that
+we somehow were more interested in the other characters of the play than
+in the pair who held the stage throughout the long concluding scene.
+
+Once more I turn to _La Douloureuse_ for an instance of an admirable
+act-ending of the quiet modern type. The third act--the terrible
+peripety in the love of Philippe and Helene--has run its agonizing
+course, and worked itself out. The old dramaturgy would certainly have
+ended the scene with a bang, so to speak--a swoon or a scream, a tableau
+of desolation, or, at the very least, a piece of tearful rhetoric. M.
+Donnay does nothing of the sort. He lets his lovers unpack their hearts
+with words until they are exhausted, broken, dazed with misery, and have
+nothing more to say. Then Helene asks: "What o'clock is it?" Philippe
+looks at his watch: "Nearly seven." "I must be going"--and she dries her
+eyes, smoothes her hair, pulls herself together, in a word, to face the
+world again. The mechanical round of life re-asserts its hold upon them.
+"Help me with my cloak," she says; and he holds her mantle for her, and
+tucks in the puffed sleeves of her blouse. Then he takes up the lamp and
+lights her out--and the curtain falls. A model "curtain"!
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+[Footnote 1: The fact that a great poet can ignore such precepts with
+impunity is proved by the exquisite anticlimax of the third act of
+D'Annunzio's _La Gioconda_.]
+
+
+
+
+_CHAPTER XIX_
+
+CONVERSION
+
+
+The reader may have noticed, possibly with surprise, that some of the
+stock terms of dramatic criticism occur but rarely in these pages, or
+not at all. One of them is _denouement_. According to orthodox theory, I
+ought to have made the _denouement_ the subject of a whole chapter, if
+not of a whole book. Why have I not done so?
+
+For two reasons. The lesser, but not negligible, reason is that we
+possess no convenient English word for the unknotting or disentangling
+of a complication. Denouement itself cannot be plausibly Anglicized, and
+no native word has as yet, by common consent, been accepted as its
+equivalent. I sometimes wish we could adopt, and print without italics,
+the excellent and expressive Greek word "lusis"; but I cannot, on my own
+responsibility, attempt so daring an innovation. The second and
+determining reason for not making the _denouement_ one of the heads of
+my argument, is that, the play of intrigue being no longer the dominant
+dramatic form, the image of disentangling has lost some of its special
+fitness. It is only in a somewhat strained and conventional sense that
+the term _nodus_, or knot, can be applied to the sort of crisis with
+which the modern drama normally deals; and if we do not naturally think
+of the crisis as a knot, we naturally do not think of its close as an
+unknotting.
+
+Nevertheless, there are frequent cases in which the end of a play
+depends on something very like the unravelling of a tangled skein; and
+still more often, perhaps, is it brought about through the loosening of
+some knot in the mind of one or more of the characters. This was the
+characteristic end of the old comedy. The heavy father, or cantankerous
+guardian, who for four acts and a half had stood between the lovers,
+suddenly changed his mind, and all was well. Even by our ancestors this
+was reckoned a rather too simple method of disentanglement. Lisideius,
+in Dryden's dialogue,[1] in enumerating the points in which the French
+drama is superior to the English notes that--
+
+  You never see any of their plays end with a conversion, or simple
+  change of will, which is the ordinary way which our poets use to end
+  theirs. It shew little art in the conclusion of a dramatick poem,
+  when they who have hindered the felicity during the four acts,
+  desist from it in the fifth, without some powerful cause to take
+  them off their design.
+
+The remark of Lisideius is suggested by a passage in Corneille, who
+instances, as an apt and artistic method of bringing about the
+conversion of a heavy father, that his daughter's lover should earn his
+gratitude by rescuing him from assassination!
+
+Conversions, closely examined, will be found to fall into two classes:
+changes in volition, and changes in sentiment. It was the former class
+that Dryden had in mind; and, with reference to this class, the
+principle he indicates remains a sound one. A change of resolve should
+never be due to a mere lapse of time--to the necessity for bringing the
+curtain down and letting the audience go home. It must always be
+rendered plausible by some new fact or new motive: some hitherto untried
+appeal to reason or emotion. This rule, however, is too obvious to
+require enforcement. It was not quite superfluous so long as the old
+convention of comedy endured. For a century and a half after Dryden's
+time, hard-hearted parents were apt to withdraw their opposition to
+their children's "felicity" for no better reason than that the fifth act
+was drawing to a close. But this formula is practically obsolete.
+Changes of will, on the modern stage, are not always adequately motived;
+but that is because of individual inexpertness, not because of any
+failure to recognize theoretically the necessity for adequate
+motivation.
+
+Changes of sentiment are much more important and more difficult to
+handle. A change of will can always manifest itself in action but it is
+very difficult to externalize convincingly a mere change of heart. When
+the conclusion of a play hinges (as it frequently does) on a conversion
+of this nature, it becomes a matter of the first moment that it should
+not merely be asserted, but proved. Many a promising play has gone wrong
+because of the author's neglect, or inability, to comply with this
+condition.
+
+It has often been observed that of all Ibsen's thoroughly mature works,
+from _A Doll's House_ to _John Gabriel Borkman_, _The Lady from the Sea_
+is the loosest in texture, the least masterly in construction. The fact
+that it leaves this impression on the mind is largely due, I think, to a
+single fault. The conclusion of the play--Ellida's clinging to Wangel
+and rejection of the Stranger--depends entirely on a change in Wangel's
+mental attitude, _of which we have no proof whatever beyond his bare
+assertion_. Ellida, in her overwrought mood, is evidently inclining to
+yield to the uncanny allurement of the Stranger's claim upon her, when
+Wangel, realizing that her sanity is threatened, says:
+
+  WANGEL: It shall not come to that. There is no other way of
+  deliverance for you--at least I see none. And therefore--therefore
+  I--cancel our bargain on the spot. Now you can choose your own path,
+  in full--full freedom.
+
+  ELLIDA (_Gazes at him awhile, as if speechless_): Is this
+  true--true--what you say? Do you mean it--from your inmost heart?
+
+  WANGEL: Yes--from the inmost depths of my tortured heart, I mean
+  it.... Now your own true life can return to its--its right groove
+  again. For now you can choose in freedom; and on your own
+  responsibility, Ellida.
+
+  ELLIDA: In freedom--and on my own responsibility? Responsibility?
+  This--this transforms everything.
+
+--and she promptly gives the Stranger his dismissal. Now this is
+inevitably felt to be a weak conclusion, because it turns entirely on a
+condition of Wangel's mind of which he gives no positive and convincing
+evidence. Nothing material is changed by his change of heart. He could
+not in any case have restrained Ellida by force; or, if the law gave him
+the abstract right to do so, he certainly never had the slightest
+intention of exercising it. Psychologically, indeed, the incident is
+acceptable enough. The saner part of Ellida's will was always on
+Wangel's side; and a merely verbal undoing of the "bargain" with which
+she reproached herself might quite naturally suffice to turn the scale
+decisively in his favour. But what may suffice for Ellida is not enough
+for the audience. Too much is made to hang upon a verbally announced
+conversion. The poet ought to have invented some material--or, at the
+very least, some impressively symbolic--proof of Wangel's change of
+heart. Had he done so, _The Lady from the Sea_ would assuredly have
+taken a higher rank among his works.
+
+Let me further illustrate my point by comparing a very small thing with
+a very great. The late Captain Marshall wrote a "farcical romance" named
+_The Duke of Killiecrankie_, in which that nobleman, having been again
+and again rejected by the Lady Henrietta Addison, kidnapped the obdurate
+fair one, and imprisoned her in a crag-castle in the Highlands. Having
+kept her for a week in deferential durance, and shown her that he was
+not the inefficient nincompoop she had taken him for, he threw open the
+prison gate, and said to her: "Go! I set you free!" The moment she saw
+the gate unlocked, and realized that she could indeed go when and where
+she pleased, she also realized that she had not the least wish to go,
+and flung herself into her captor's arms. Here we have Ibsen's situation
+transposed into the key of fantasy, and provided with the material
+"guarantee of good faith" which is lacking in _The Lady from the Sea_.
+The Duke's change of mind, his will to set the Lady Henrietta free, is
+visibly demonstrated by the actual opening of the prison gate, so that
+we believe in it, and believe that she believes in it. The play was a
+trivial affair, and is deservedly forgotten; but the situation was
+effective because it obeyed the law that a change of will or of feeling,
+occurring at a crucial point in a dramatic action, must be certified by
+some external evidence, on pain of leaving the audience unimpressed.
+
+This is a more important matter than it may at first sight appear. How
+to bring home to the audience a decisive change of heart is one of the
+ever-recurring problems of the playwright's craft. In _The Lady from the
+Sea_, Ibsen failed to solve it: in _Rosmersholm_ he solved it by heroic
+measures. The whole catastrophe is determined by Rosmer's inability to
+accept without proof Rebecca's declaration that Rosmersholm has
+"ennobled" her, and that she is no longer the same woman whose
+relentless egoism drove Beata into the mill-race. Rebecca herself puts
+it to him: "How can you believe me on my bare word after to-day?" There
+is only one proof she can give--that of "going the way Beata went." She
+gives it: and Rosmer, who cannot believe her if she lives, and will not
+survive her if she dies, goes with her to her end. But the cases are not
+very frequent, fortunately, in which such drastic methods of proof are
+appropriate or possible. The dramatist must, as a rule, attain his end
+by less violent means; and often he fails to attain it at all.
+
+A play by Mr. Haddon Chambers, _The Awakening_, turned on a sudden
+conversion--the "awakening," in fact, referred to in the title. A
+professional lady-killer, a noted Don Juan, has been idly making love to
+a country maiden, whose heart is full of innocent idealisms. She
+discovers his true character, or, at any rate, his reputation, and is
+horror-stricken, while practically at the same moment, he "awakens" to
+the error of his ways, and is seized with a passion for her as single
+minded and idealistic as hers for him. But how are the heroine and the
+audience to be assured of the fact? That is just the difficulty; and the
+author takes no effectual measures to overcome it. The heroine, of
+course, is ultimately convinced; but the audience remains sceptical, to
+the detriment of the desired effect. "Sceptical," perhaps, is not quite
+the right word. The state of mind of a fictitious character is not a
+subject for actual belief or disbelief. We are bound to accept
+theoretically what the author tells us; but in this case he has failed
+to make us intimately feel and know that it is true.[2]
+
+In Mr. Alfred Sutro's play _The Builder of Bridges_, Dorothy Faringay,
+in her devotion to her forger brother, has conceived the rather
+disgraceful scheme of making one of his official superiors fall in love
+with her, in order to induce him to become practically an accomplice in
+her brother's crime. She succeeds beyond her hopes. Edward Thursfield
+does fall in love with her, and, at a great sacrifice, replaces the
+money the brother has stolen. But, in a very powerful peripety-scene in
+the third act, Thursfield learns that Dorothy has been deliberately
+beguiling him, while in fact she was engaged to another man. The truth
+is, however, that she has really come to love Thursfield passionately,
+and has broken her engagement with the other, for whom she never truly
+cared. So the author tells us, and so we are willing enough to
+believe--if he can devise any adequate method of making Thursfield
+believe it. Mr. Sutro's handling of the difficulty seems to me fairly,
+but not conspicuously, successful. I cite the case as a typical instance
+of the problem, apart from the merits or demerits of the solution.
+
+It may be said that the difficulty of bringing home to us the reality of
+a revulsion of feeling, or a radical change of mental attitude, is only
+a particular case of the playwright's general problem of convincingly
+externalizing inward conditions and processes. That is true: but the
+special importance of a conversion which unties the knot and brings the
+curtain down seemed to render it worthy of special consideration.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+[Footnote 1: _Of Dramatic Poesy_, ed. Arnold, 1903, p. 51.]
+
+[Footnote 2: In Mr. Somerset Maugham's _Grace_ the heroine undergoes a
+somewhat analogous change of heart, coming to love the husband whom she
+has previously despised. But we have no difficulty in accepting her
+conversion, partly because its reasons are clear and fairly adequate,
+partly because there is no question of convincing the husband, who has
+never realized her previous contempt for him.]
+
+
+
+
+_CHAPTER XX_
+
+BLIND-ALLEY THEMES--AND OTHERS
+
+
+A blind-alley theme, as its name imports, is one from which there is no
+exit. It is a problem incapable of solution, or, rather, of which all
+possible solutions are equally unsatisfactory and undesirable. The
+playwright cannot too soon make sure that he has not strayed into such a
+no-thoroughfare. Whether an end be comic or tragic, romantic or ironic,
+happy or disastrous, it should satisfy something within us--our sense of
+truth, or of beauty, or of sublimity, or of justice, or of humour, or,
+at the least or lowest, our cynical sense of the baseness of human
+nature, and the vanity of human aspirations. But a play which satisfies
+neither our higher nor our lower instincts, baffles our sympathies, and
+leaves our desires at fault between equally inacceptable
+alternatives--such a play, whatever beauties of detail it may possess,
+is a weariness of the spirit, and an artistic blunder.
+
+There are in literature two conspicuous examples of the blind-alley
+theme--two famous plays, wherein two heroines are placed in somewhat
+similar dilemmas, which merely paralyse our sympathies and inhibit our
+moral judgment. The first of these is _Measure for Measure_. If ever
+there was an insoluble problem in casuistry, it is that which
+Shakespeare has here chosen to present to us. Isabella is forced to
+choose between what we can only describe as two detestable evils. If she
+resists Angelo, and lets her brother die, she recoils from an act of
+self-sacrifice; and, although we may coldly approve, we cannot admire or
+take pleasure in her action. If, on the other hand, she determines at
+all costs to save her brother's life, her sacrifice is a thing from
+which we want only to avert the mind: it belongs to the region of what
+Aristotle calls to _miaron_, the odious and intolerable. Shakespeare,
+indeed, confesses the problem insoluble in the fact that he leaves it
+unsolved--evading it by means of a mediaeval trick. But where, then, was
+the use of presenting it? What is the artistic profit of letting the
+imagination play around a problem which merely baffles and repels it?
+Sardou, indeed, presented the same problem, not as the theme of a whole
+play, but only of a single act; and he solved it by making Floria Tosca
+kill Scarpia. This is a solution which, at any rate, satisfies our
+craving for crude justice, and is melodramatically effective.
+Shakespeare probably ignored it, partly because it was not in his
+sources, partly because, for some obscure reason, he supposed himself to
+be writing a comedy. The result is that, though the play contains some
+wonderful poetry, and has been from time to time revived, it has never
+taken any real hold upon popular esteem.
+
+The second glaring instance of a blind-alley theme is that of _Monna
+Vanna_. We have all of us, I suppose, stumbled, either as actors or
+onlookers, into painful situations, which not even a miracle of tact
+could possibly save. As a rule, of course, they are comic, and the agony
+they cause may find a safety-valve in laughter. But sometimes there
+occurs some detestable incident, over which it is equally impossible to
+laugh and to weep. The wisest words, the most graceful acts, are of no
+avail. One longs only to sink into the earth, or vanish into thin air.
+Such a situation, on the largest possible scale, is that presented in
+_Monna Vanna_. It differs from that of _Measure for Measure_ in the fact
+that there can be no doubt as to the moral aspect of the case. It is
+quite clear that Giovanna ought to sacrifice herself to save, not one
+puling Claudio, but a whole city full of men, women, and children. What
+she does is absolutely right; but the conjuncture is none the less a
+grotesque and detestable one, which ought to be talked about and thought
+about as little as possible. Every word that is uttered is a failure in
+tact. Guido, the husband, behaves, in the first act, with a violent
+egoism, which is certainly lacking in dignity; but will any one tell me
+what would be a dignified course for him to pursue under the
+circumstances? The sage old Marco, too--that fifteenth-century
+Renan--flounders just as painfully as the hot-headed Guido. It is the
+fatality of the case that "he cannot open his mouth without putting his
+foot in it"; and a theme which exposes a well-meaning old gentleman to
+this painful necessity is one by all means to be avoided. The fact that
+it is a false alarm, and that there is no rational explanation for
+Prinzivalle's wanton insult to a woman whom he reverently idolizes, in
+no way makes matters better.[1] Not the least grotesque thing in the
+play is Giovanna's expectation that Guido will receive Prinzivalle with
+open arms because he has--changed his mind. We can feel neither approval
+nor disapproval, sympathy nor antipathy, in such a deplorable
+conjunction of circumstances. All we wish is that we had not been called
+upon to contemplate it.[2] Maeterlinck, like Shakespeare, was simply
+dallying with the idea of a squalid heroism--so squalid, indeed, that
+neither he nor his predecessor had the courage to carry it through.
+
+Pray observe that the defect of these two themes is not merely that they
+are "unpleasant." It is that there is no possible way out of them which
+is not worse than unpleasant: humiliating, and distressing. Let the
+playwright, then, before embarking on a theme, make sure that he has
+some sort of satisfaction to offer us at the end, if it be only the
+pessimistic pleasure of realizing some part of "the bitter, old and
+wrinkled truth" about life. The crimes of destiny there is some profit
+in contemplating; but its stupid vulgarities minister neither to profit
+nor delight.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+It may not be superfluous to give at this point a little list of
+subjects which, though not blind-alley themes, are equally to be
+avoided. Some of them, indeed, are the reverse of blind-alley themes,
+their drawback lying in the fact that the way out of them is too
+tediously apparent.
+
+At the head of this list I would place what may be called the "white
+marriage" theme: not because it is ineffective, but because its
+effectiveness is very cheap and has been sadly overdone. It occurs in
+two varieties: either a proud but penniless damsel is married to a
+wealthy parvenu, or a woman of culture and refinement is married to a
+"rough diamond." In both cases the action consists of the transformation
+of a nominal into a real marriage; and it is almost impossible, in these
+days, to lend any novelty to the process. In the good old _Lady of
+Lyons_ the theme was decked in trappings of romantic absurdity, which
+somehow harmonized with it. One could hear in it a far-off echo of
+revolutionary rodomontade. The social aspect of the matter was
+emphasized, and the satire on middle-class snobbery was cruelly
+effective. The personal aspect, on the other hand--the unfulfilment of
+the nominal marriage--was lightly and discreetly handled, according to
+early-Victorian convention. In later days--from the time of M. George
+Ohnet's _Maitre de Forges_ onwards--this is the aspect on which
+playwrights have preferred to dwell. Usually, the theme shades off into
+the almost equally hackneyed _Still Waters Run Deep_ theme; for there is
+apt to be an aristocratic lover whom the unpolished but formidable
+husband threatens to shoot or horsewhip, and thereby overcomes the last
+remnant of repugnance in the breast of his haughty spouse. In _The
+Ironmaster_ the lover was called the Duc de Bligny, or, more commonly,
+the Dook de Bleeny; but he has appeared under many aliases. In the chief
+American version of the theme, Mr. Vaughn Moody's _Great Divide_, the
+lover is dispensed with altogether, being inconsistent, no doubt, with
+the austere manners of Milford Corners, Mass. In one of the recent
+French versions, on the other hand--M. Bernstein's _Samson_--the
+aristocratic lover is almost as important a character as the virile,
+masterful, plebeian husband. It appears from this survey--which might be
+largely extended--that there are several ways of handling the theme; but
+there is no way of renewing and deconventionalizing it. No doubt it has
+a long life before it on the plane of popular melodrama, but scarcely,
+one hopes, on any higher plane.
+
+Another theme which ought to be relegated to the theatrical lumber-room
+is that of patient, inveterate revenge. This form of vindictiveness is,
+from a dramatic point of view, an outworn passion. It is too obviously
+irrational and anti-social to pass muster in modern costume. The actual
+vendetta may possibly survive in some semi-barbarous regions, and
+Grangerfords and Shepherdsons (as in Mark Twain's immortal romance) may
+still be shooting each other at sight. But these things are relics of
+the past; they do not belong to the normal, typical life of our time. It
+is useless to say that human nature is the same in all ages. That is one
+of the facile axioms of psychological incompetence. Far be it from me to
+deny that malice, hatred, spite, and the spirit of retaliation are, and
+will be until the millennium, among the most active forces in human
+nature. But most people are coming to recognize that life is too short
+for deliberate, elaborate, cold-drawn revenge. They will hit back when
+they conveniently can; they will cherish for half a lifetime a passive,
+an obstructive, ill-will; they will even await for years an opportunity
+of "getting their knife into" an enemy. But they have grown chary of
+"cutting off their nose to spite their face"; they will very rarely
+sacrifice their own comfort in life to the mere joy of protracted,
+elaborate reprisals. Vitriol and the revolver--an outburst of rage,
+culminating in a "short, sharp shock"--these belong, if you will, to
+modern life. But long-drawn, unhasting, unresting machination, with no
+end in view beyond an ultimate unmasking, a turn of the tables--in a
+word, a strong situation--this, I take it, belongs to a phase of
+existence more leisurely than ours. There is no room in our crowded
+century for such large and sustained passions. One could mention
+plays--but they are happily forgotten--in which retribution was delayed
+for some thirty or forty years, during which the unconscious object of
+it enjoyed a happy and prosperous existence. These, no doubt, are
+extreme instances; but cold-storage revenge, as a whole, ought to be as
+rare on the stage as it is in real life. The serious playwright will do
+well to leave it to the melodramatists.
+
+A third theme to be handled with the greatest caution, if at all, is
+that of heroic self-sacrifice. Not that self-sacrifice, like revenge, is
+an outworn passion. It still rages in daily life; but no audience of
+average intelligence will to-day accept it with the uncritical
+admiration which it used to excite in the sentimental dramas of last
+century. Even then--even in 1869--Meilhac and Halevy, in their
+ever-memorable _Froufrou_, showed what disasters often result from it;
+but it retained its prestige with the average playwright--and with some
+who were above the average--for many a day after that. I can recall a
+play, by a living English author, in which a Colonel in the Indian Army
+pleaded guilty to a damning charge of cowardice rather than allow a lady
+whom he chivalrously adored to learn that it was her husband who was the
+real coward and traitor. He knew that the lady detested her husband; he
+knew that they had no children to suffer by the husband's disgrace; he
+knew that there was a quite probable way by which he might have cleared
+his own character without casting any imputation on the other man. But
+in a sheer frenzy of self-sacrifice he blasted his own career, and
+thereby inflicted far greater pain upon the woman he loved than if he
+had told the truth or suffered it to be told. And twenty years
+afterwards, when the villain was dead, the hero still resolutely refused
+to clear his own character, lest the villain's widow should learn the
+truth about her wholly unlamented husband. This was an extravagant and
+childish case; but the superstition of heroic self-sacrifice still
+lingers in certain quarters, and cannot be too soon eradicated. I do not
+mean, of course, that self-sacrifice is never admirable, but only that
+it can no longer be accepted as a thing inherently noble, apart from its
+circumstances and its consequences. An excellent play might be written
+with the express design of placing the ethics of self-sacrifice in their
+true light. Perhaps the upshot might be the recognition of the simple
+principle that it is immoral to make a sacrifice which the person
+supposed to benefit by it has no right to accept.
+
+Another motive against which it is perhaps not quite superfluous to warn
+the aspiring playwright is the "voix du sang." It is only a few years
+since this miraculous voice was heard speaking loud and long in His
+Majesty's Theatre, London, and in a play by a no less modern-minded
+author than the late Clyde Fitch. It was called _The Last of the
+Dandies_,[3] and its hero was Count D'Orsay. At a given moment, D'Orsay
+learned that a young man known as Lord Raoul Ardale was in reality his
+son. Instantly the man of the world, the squire of dames, went off into
+a deliquium of tender emotion. For "my bo-o-oy" he would do anything and
+everything. He would go down to Crockford's and win a pot of money to
+pay "my boy's" debts--Fortune could not but be kind to a doting parent.
+In the beautiful simplicity of his soul, he looked forward with eager
+delight to telling Raoul that the mother he adored was no better than
+she should be, and that he had no right to his name or title. Not for a
+moment did he doubt that the young man would share his transports. When
+the mother opposed his purpose of betraying her secret, he wept with
+disappointment. "All day," he said, "I have been saying to myself: When
+that sun sets, I shall hear him say, 'Good-night, Father!'" He
+postulated in so many words the "voix du sang," trusting that, even if
+the revelation were not formally made, "Nature would send the boy some
+impulse" of filial affection. It is hard to believe--but it is the
+fact--that, well within the present century, such ingenuous nonsense as
+this was gravely presented to the public of a leading theatre, by an
+author of keen intelligence, who, but for an unhappy accident, would now
+be at the zenith of his career. There are few more foolish conventions
+than that of the "voix du sang." Perhaps, however, the rising generation
+of playwrights has more need to be warned against the opposite or
+Shawesque convention, that kinship utters itself mainly in wrangling and
+mutual dislike.
+
+Among inherently feeble and greatly overdone expedients may be reckoned
+the oath or promise of secrecy, exacted for no sufficient reason, and
+kept in defiance of common sense and common humanity. Lord Windermere's
+conduct in Oscar Wilde's play is a case in point, though he has not even
+an oath to excuse his insensate secretiveness. A still clearer instance
+is afforded by Clyde Fitch's play _The Girl with the Green Eyes_. In
+other respects a very able play, it is vitiated by the certainty that
+Austin ought to have, and would have, told the truth ten times over,
+rather than subject his wife's jealous disposition to the strain he
+puts upon it.
+
+It would not be difficult to prolong this catalogue of themes and
+motives that have come down in the world, and are no longer presentable
+in any society that pretends to intelligence. But it is needless to
+enter into further details. There is a general rule, of sovereign
+efficacy, for avoiding such anachronisms: "Go to life for your themes,
+and not to the theatre." Observe that rule, and you are safe. But it is
+easier said than done.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+[Footnote 1: I have good reason for believing that, in M. Maeterlinck's
+original scheme, Prinzivalle imposed no such humiliating condition.
+Giovanna went of her own motive to appeal to his clemency; and her
+success was so complete that her husband, on her return, could not
+believe that it had been won by avowable means. This is a really fine
+conception--what a pity that the poet departed from it!]
+
+[Footnote 2: Much has been made of the Censor's refusal to license
+_Monna Vanna_; but I think there is more to be said for his action in
+this than in many other cases. In those countries where the play has
+succeeded, I cannot but suspect that the appeal it made was not wholly
+to the higher instincts of the public.]
+
+[Footnote 3: I am not sure what was the precise relationship of this
+play to the same author's _Beau Brummel_. D'Orsay's death scene was
+certainly a repetition of Brummel's.]
+
+
+
+
+_CHAPTER XXI_
+
+THE FULL CLOSE
+
+
+In an earlier chapter, I have tried to show that a certain tolerance for
+anticlimax, for a fourth or fifth act of calm after the storm of the
+penultimate act, is consonant with right reason, and is a practically
+inevitable result of a really intimate relation between drama and life.
+But it would be a complete misunderstanding of my argument to suppose
+that I deny the practical, and even the artistic, superiority of those
+themes in which the tension can be maintained and heightened to the
+very end.
+
+The fact that tragedy has from of old been recognized as a higher form
+than comedy is partly due, no doubt, to the tragic poet's traditional
+right to round off a human destiny in death. "Call no man happy till his
+life be ended," said Sophocles, quoting from an earlier sage; and it
+needed no profundity of wisdom to recognize in the "happy ending" of
+comedy a conventional, ephemeral thing. But when, after all the
+peripeties of life, the hero "home has gone and ta'en his wages," we
+feel that, at any rate, we have looked destiny squarely in the face,
+without evasion or subterfuge. Perhaps the true justification of tragedy
+as a form of art is that, after this experience, we should feel life to
+be, not less worth living, but greater and more significant than before.
+
+This is no place, however, for a discussion of the aesthetic basis of
+tragedy in general.[1] What is here required, from the point of view of
+craftsmanship, is not so much a glorification of the tragic ending, as a
+warning against its facile misuse. A very great play may, and often
+must, end in death; but you cannot make a play great by simply killing
+off your protagonist. Death is, after all, a very inexpensive means of
+avoiding anticlimax. Tension, as we saw, is symbolized in the sword of
+Damocles; and it can always be maintained, in a mechanical way, by
+letting your hero play about with a revolver, or placing an overdose of
+chloral well within your heroine's reach. At the time when the English
+drama was awaking from the lethargy of the 'seventies, an idea got
+abroad that a non-sanguinary ending was always and necessarily
+inartistic, and that a self-respecting playwright must at all hazards
+kill somebody before dropping his curtain. This was an extravagant
+reaction against the purely commercial principle that the public would
+not, on any terms, accept a tragic ending. As a matter of fact, the
+mortality was not very great; for managers were resolute in the old
+belief, and few dramatists had the courage or authority to stand up
+against them. But I have often heard playwrights lamenting their
+inability to massacre the luckless children of their fancy, who, nine
+times out of ten, had done nothing to incur such a doom. The real
+trouble was that death seemed to be the only method of avoiding
+anticlimax.
+
+It is a very sound rule that, before you determine to write a tragedy,
+you should make sure that you have a really tragic theme: that you can
+place your hero at such odds with life that reconciliation, or mere
+endurance, would be morally base or psychologically improbable.
+Moreover, you must strike deep into character before you are justified
+in passing capital sentence on your personages. Death is a
+disproportionate close for a commonplace and superficially-studied life.
+It is true that quite commonplace people do die; indeed, they
+preponderate in the bills of mortality; but death on the stage confers a
+sort of distinction which ought not to be accorded without due and
+sufficient cause. To one god in particular we may apply the Horatian
+maxim, "Nec deus intersit, nisi dignus vindice nodus."
+
+In German aesthetic theory, the conception _tragische Schuld_--"tragic
+guilt"--plays a large part. It descends, no doubt, from the Aristotelian
+maxim that a tragic hero must neither be too good nor too bad; but it
+also belongs to a moralizing conception, which tacitly or explicitly
+assumes that the dramatist's aim ought to be "to justify the ways of God
+to man." In these days we look at drama more objectively, and do not
+insist on deciding in what degree a man has deserved death, if only we
+feel that he has necessarily or probably incurred it. But in order that
+we may be satisfied of this, we must know him intimately and feel with
+him intensely. We must, in other words, believe that he dies because he
+cannot live, and not merely to suit the playwright's convenience and
+help him to an effective "curtain."
+
+As we review the series of Ibsen's modern plays, we cannot but feel
+that, though he did not shrink from death, he never employed it, except
+perhaps in his last melancholy effort, as a mere way of escape from a
+difficulty. In five out of his thirteen modern plays, no one dies at
+all.[2] One might even say six: for Oswald, in _Ghosts_, may live for
+years; but I hold it as only fair to count the death of his mind as more
+than equivalent to bodily death. Solness, on the plane of literal fact,
+dies by an accident; on the plane of symbolic interpretation, he dies of
+the over-great demands which Hilda makes upon his "sickly conscience."
+Little Eyolf's death can also be regarded from a symbolic point of view;
+but there is no substantial reason to think of it otherwise than as an
+accident. John Gabriel Borkman dies of heart seizure, resulting from
+sudden exposure to extreme cold. In the case of Solness and Borkman,
+death is a quite natural and probable result of the antecedent
+conditions; and in the case of Eyolf, it is not a way out of the action,
+but rather the way into it. There remain the three cases of suicide:
+Rebecca and Rosmer, Hedda Gabler, and Hedvig. I have already, in Chapter
+XIX, shown how the death of Rebecca was the inevitable outcome of the
+situation--the one conclusive proof of her "ennoblement"--and how it was
+almost equally inevitable that Rosmer should accompany her to her end.
+Hedda Gabler was constitutionally fated to suicide: a woman of low
+vitality, overmastering egoism, and acute supersensitiveness, placed in
+a predicament which left her nothing to expect from life but tedium and
+humiliation. The one case left--that of Hedvig--is the only one in which
+Ibsen can possibly be accused of wanton bloodshed. Bjoernson, in a very
+moving passage in his novel, _The Paths of God_, did actually, though
+indirectly, make that accusation. Certainly, there is no more
+heartrending incident in fiction; and certainly it is a thing that only
+consummate genius can justify. Ibsen happened to possess that genius,
+and I am not far from agreeing with those who hold _The Wild Duck_ to be
+his greatest work. But for playwrights who are tempted to seek for
+effects of pathos by similar means, one may without hesitation lay down
+this maxim: Be sure you are an Ibsen before you kill your Hedvig.
+
+This analysis of Ibsen's practice points to the fact--for such I believe
+it to be--that what the modern playwright has chiefly to guard against
+is the temptation to overdo suicide as a means of cutting the dramatic
+knot. In France and Germany there is another temptation, that of the
+duel;[3] but in Anglo-Saxon countries it scarcely presents itself.
+Death, other than self-inflicted, is much less tempting, and less apt to
+be resorted to in and out of season. The heroine, whether virtuous or
+erring, who dies of consumption, has gone greatly out of vogue. A broken
+heart is no longer held to be necessarily fatal. The veriest tyro
+realizes that death by crude accident is inadmissible as a determining
+factor in serious drama; and murder is practically (though not
+absolutely) relegated to the melodramatic domain. The one urgent
+question, then, is that of the artistic use and abuse of suicide.
+
+The principle is pretty plain, I think, that it ought to be the
+artist's, as it is the man's, last resort. We know that, in most
+civilized countries, suicide is greatly on the increase. It cannot be
+called an infrequent incident in daily life. It is certain, too, that
+the motives impelling to it are apt to be of a dramatic nature, and
+therefore suited to the playwright's purposes. But it is, on the other
+hand, such a crude and unreasoning means of exit from the tangle of
+existence that a playwright of delicate instincts will certainly employ
+it only under the strongest compulsion from his artistic conscience.
+
+Sir Arthur Pinero has three suicides on his record, though one of them
+was, so to speak, nipped in the bud. In _The Profligate_, as presented
+on the stage, Dunstan Renshaw changed his mind before draining the fatal
+goblet; and in this case the stage version was surely the right one. The
+suicide, to which the author still clings in the printed text,
+practically dates the play as belonging to the above-mentioned period of
+rebellion against the conventional "happy ending," when the ambitious
+British dramatist felt that honour required him to kill his man on the
+smallest provocation.[4] Nearly a quarter of a century has passed since
+then, and the disproportion between such a play and such a catastrophe
+is now apparent to everyone. It is not that we judge Renshaw's
+delinquencies to be over-punished by death--that is not the question.
+The fact is simply that the characters are not large enough, true
+enough, living enough--that the play does not probe deep enough into
+human experience--to make the august intervention of death seem other
+than an incongruity. The suicide of Paula Tanqueray, though it, too, has
+been much criticized, is a very different matter. Inevitable it cannot
+be called: if the play had been written within the past ten years, Sir
+Arthur would very likely have contrived to do without it. But it is, in
+itself, probable enough: both the good and the bad in Paula's character
+might easily make her feel that only the dregs of life remained to her,
+and they not worth drinking. The worst one can say of it is that it sins
+against the canon of practical convenience which enjoins on the prudent
+dramatist strict economy in suicide. The third case, Zoe Blundell's leap
+to nothingness, in that harsh and ruthless masterpiece, _Mid-Channel_,
+is as inevitable as anything can well be in human destiny. Zoe has made
+a miserable and hopeless muddle of her life. In spite of her goodness of
+heart, she has no interests and no ideals, apart from the personal
+satisfactions which have now been poisoned at their source. She has
+intervened disastrously in the destinies of others. She is ill; her
+nerves are all on edge; and she is, as it were, driven into a corner,
+from which there is but one easy and rapid exit. Here is a case, if ever
+there was one, where the end is imposed upon the artist by the whole
+drift of his action. It may be said that chance plays a large part in
+the concatenation of events--that, for instance, if Leonard Ferris had
+not happened to live at the top of a very high building, Zoe would not
+have encountered the sudden temptation to which she yields. But this, as
+I have tried to show above, is a baseless complaint. Chance is a
+constant factor in life, now aiding, now thwarting, the will. To
+eliminate it altogether would be to produce a most unlifelike world. It
+is only when the playwright so manipulates and reduplicates chance as to
+make it seem no longer chance, but purposeful arrangement, that we have
+the right to protest.
+
+Another instance of indisputably justified suicide may be found in Mr.
+Galsworthy's _Justice_. The whole theme of the play is nothing but the
+hounding to his end of a luckless youth, who has got on the wrong side
+of the law, and finds all the forces of society leagued against him. In
+Mr. Granville Barker's _Waste_, the artistic justification for Trebell's
+self-effacement is less clear and compulsive. It is true that the play
+was suggested by the actual suicide, not of a politician, but of a
+soldier, who found his career ruined by some pitiful scandal. But the
+author has made no attempt to reproduce the actual circumstances of that
+case; and even if he had reproduced the external circumstances, the
+psychological conditions would clearly have eluded him. Thus the appeal
+to fact is, as it always must be, barred. In two cases, indeed, much
+more closely analogous to Trebell's than that which actually suggested
+it--two famous cases in which a scandal cut short a brilliant political
+career--suicide played no part in the catastrophe. These real-life
+instances are, I repeat, irrelevant. The only question is whether Mr.
+Barker has made us feel that a man of Trebell's character would
+certainly not survive the paralysing of his energies; and that question
+every spectator must answer for himself. I am far from answering it in
+the negative. I merely suggest that the playwright may one day come
+across a theme for which there is no conceivable ending but suicide, and
+may wish that he had let Trebell live, lest people should come to regard
+him as a spendthrift of self-slaughter.
+
+The suicide which brings to a close Mr. Clyde Fitch's very able play,
+_The Climbers_, stands on a somewhat different level. Here it is not the
+protagonist who makes away with himself, nor is his destiny the main
+theme of the play. Mr. Fitch has painted a broad social picture, in
+which, if there is any concentration of interest, it is upon Blanche and
+Warden. Sterling's suicide, then, though it does in fact cut the chief
+knot of the play, is to be regarded rather as a characteristic and
+probable incident of a certain phase of life, than as the culmination of
+a spiritual tragedy. It has not the artistic significance, either good
+or bad, that it would have if the character and destiny of Sterling were
+our main concernment.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The happy playwright, one may say, is he whose theme does not force upon
+him either a sanguinary or a tame last act, but enables him, without
+troubling the coroner, to sustain and increase the tension up to the
+very close. Such themes are not too common, but they do occur. Dumas
+found one in _Denise_, and another in _Francillon_, where the famous "Il
+en a menti!" comes within two minutes of the fall of the curtain. In
+_Heimat_ (Magda) and in _Johannisfeuer_, Sudermann keeps the tension at
+its height up to the fall of the curtain. Sir Arthur Pinero's _Iris_ is
+a case in point; so are Mr. Shaw's _Candida_ and _The Devil's Disciple_;
+so is Mr. Galsworthy's _Strife_. Other instances will no doubt occur to
+the reader; yet he will probably be surprised to find that it is not
+very easy to recall them.
+
+For this is not, in fact, the typical modern formula. In plays which do
+not end in death, it will generally be found that the culminating scene
+occurs in the penultimate act, and that, if anticlimax is avoided, it is
+not by the maintenance of an unbroken tension, by its skilful renewal
+and reinforcement in the last act. This is a resource which the
+playwright will do well to bear in mind. Where he cannot place his
+"great scene" in his last act, he should always consider whether it be
+not possible to hold some development in reserve whereby the tension may
+be screwed up again--if unexpectedly, so much the better. Some of the
+most successful plays within my recollection have been those in which
+the last act came upon us as a pleasant surprise. An anticlimax had
+seemed inevitable; and behold! the author had found a way out of it.
+
+_An Enemy of the People_ may perhaps be placed in this class, though, as
+before remarked, the last act is almost an independent comedy. Had the
+play ended with the fourth act, no one would have felt that anything was
+lacking; so that in his fifth act, Ibsen was not so much grappling with
+an urgent technical problem, as amusing himself by wringing the last
+drop of humour out of the given situation. A more strictly apposite
+example may be found in Sir Arthur Pinero's play, _His House in Order_.
+Here the action undoubtedly culminates in the great scene between Nina
+and Hilary Jesson in the third act; yet we await with eager anticipation
+the discomfiture of the Ridgeley family; and when we realize that it is
+to be brought about by the disclosure to Filmer of Annabel's secret, the
+manifest rightness of the proceeding gives us a little shock of
+pleasure. Mr. Somerset Maugham, again, in the last act of _Grace_,
+employs an ingenious device to keep the tension at a high pitch. The
+matter of the act consists mainly of a debate as to whether Grace Insole
+ought, or ought not, to make a certain painful avowal to her husband. As
+the negative opinion was to carry the day, Mr. Maugham saw that there
+was grave danger that the final scene might appear an almost ludicrous
+anticlimax. To obviate this, he made Grace, at the beginning of the act,
+write a letter of confession, and address it to Claude; so that all
+through the discussion we had at the back of our mind the question "Will
+the letter reach his hands? Will the sword of Damocles fall?" This may
+seem like a leaf from the book of Sardou; but in reality it was a
+perfectly natural and justified expedient. It kept the tension alive
+throughout a scene of ethical discussion, interesting in itself, but
+pretty clearly destined to lead up to the undramatic alternative--a
+policy of silence and inaction. Mr. Clyde Fitch, in the last act of _The
+Truth_, made an elaborate and daring endeavour to relieve the
+mawkishness of the clearly-foreseen reconciliation between Warder and
+Becky. He let Becky fall in with her father's mad idea of working upon
+Warder's compassion by pretending that she had tried to kill herself.
+Only at the last moment did she abandon the sordid comedy, and so prove
+herself (as we are asked to suppose) cured for ever of the habit of
+fibbing. Mr. Fitch here showed good technical insight marred by
+over-hasty execution. That Becky should be tempted to employ her old
+methods, and should overcome the temptation, was entirely right; but the
+actual deception attempted was so crude and hopeless that there was no
+plausibility in her consenting to it, and no merit in her desisting
+from it.
+
+In light comedy and farce it is even more desirable than in serious
+drama to avoid a tame and perfunctory last act. Very often a seemingly
+trivial invention will work wonders in keeping the interest afoot. In
+Mr. Anstey's delightful farce, _The Brass Bottle_, one looked forward
+rather dolefully to a flat conclusion; but by the simple device of
+letting the Jinny omit to include Pringle in his "act of oblivion," the
+author is enabled to make his last scene quite as amusing as any of its
+predecessors. Mr. Arnold Bennett, in _The Honeymoon_, had the audacity
+to play a deliberate trick on the audience, in order to evade an
+anticlimax. Seeing that his third act could not at best be very good, he
+purposely put the audience on a false scent, made it expect an
+absolutely commonplace ending (the marriage of Flora to Charles Haslam),
+and then substituted one which, if not very brilliant, was at least
+ingenious and unforeseen. Thus, by defeating the expectation of a
+superlatively bad act, he made a positively insignificant act seem
+comparatively good. Such feats of craftsmanship are entertaining, but
+too dangerous to be commended for imitation.
+
+In some modern plays a full close is achieved by the simple expedient of
+altogether omitting the last act, or last scene, and leaving the end of
+the play to the imagination. This method is boldly and (I understand)
+successfully employed by Mr. Edward Sheldon in his powerful play, _The
+Nigger_. Philip Morrow, the popular Governor of one of the Southern
+States, has learnt that his grandmother was a quadroon, and that
+consequently he has in him a much-attenuated strain of African blood. In
+the Southern States, attenuation matters nothing: if the remotest
+filament of a man's ancestry runs back to Africa, he is "a nigger all
+right." Philip has just suppressed a race-riot in the city, and, from
+the balcony of the State Capitol, is to address the troops who have
+aided him, and the assembled multitude. Having resolutely parted from
+the woman he adores, but can no longer marry, he steps out upon the
+balcony to announce that he is a negro, that he resigns the
+Governorship, and that henceforth he casts in his lot with his black
+brethren. The stage-direction runs thus--
+
+  The afternoon sun strikes his figure. At his appearance a shout goes
+  up--long, steady, enthusiastic cheering; and, after a moment, the
+  big regimental band begins playing, very slowly, "My Country, 'tis
+  of Thee." ... All the people in the room are smiling and applauding
+  enthusiastically; and--as Phil in vain raises his hand for silence,
+  and the band crashes through the National Anthem, and the roar of
+  voices still rises from below--
+
+  THE CURTAIN FALLS.
+
+One does not know whether to praise Mr. Sheldon for having adroitly
+avoided an anticlimax, or to reproach him with having unblushingly
+shirked a difficulty. To my sense, the play has somewhat the air of a
+hexameter line with the spondee cut off.[5] One _does_ want to see the
+peripety through. But if the audience is content to imagine the sequel,
+Mr. Sheldon's craftsmanship is justified, and there is no more to be
+said. M. Brieux experienced some difficulty in bringing his early play,
+_Blanchette_, to a satisfactory close. The third act which he originally
+wrote was found unendurably cynical; a more agreeable third act was
+condemned as an anticlimax; and for some time the play was presented
+with no third act at all. It did not end, but simply left off. No doubt
+it is better that a play should stop in the middle than that it should
+drag on tediously and ineffectually. But it would be foolish to make a
+system of such an expedient. It is, after all, an evasion, not a
+solution, of the artist's problem.
+
+An incident which occurred during the rehearsals for the first
+production of _A Doll's House_, at the Novelty Theatre, London,
+illustrates the difference between the old, and what was then the new,
+fashion of ending a play. The business manager of the company, a man of
+ripe theatrical experience, happened to be present one day when Miss
+Achurch and Mr. Waring were rehearsing the last great scene between Nora
+and Helmar. At the end of it, he came up to me, in a state of high
+excitement. "This is a fine play!" he said. "This is sure to be a big
+thing!" I was greatly pleased. "If this scene, of all others," I
+thought, "carries a man like Mr. Smith off his feet, it cannot fail to
+hold the British public." But I was somewhat dashed when, a day or two
+later, Mr. Smith came up to me again, in much less buoyant spirits. "I
+made a mistake about that scene," he said. "They tell me it's the end of
+the _last_ act--I thought it was the end of the _first_!"
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+[Footnote 1: The reader who wishes to pursue the theme may do so to
+excellent advantage in Professor Bradley's _Shakespearean Tragedy_.]
+
+[Footnote 2: It is true that in _A Doll's House_, Dr. Rank announces his
+approaching demise: but he does not actually die, nor is his fate an
+essential part of the action of the play.]
+
+[Footnote 3: The duel, even in countries whose customs permit of it, is
+essentially an inartistic end; for it leaves the catastrophe to be
+decided either by Chance or Providence--two equally inadmissible
+arbiters in modern drama. Alexandre Dumas _fils_, in his preface to
+_Heloise Paranquet_, condemns the duel as a dramatic expedient. "Not to
+mention," he says, "the fact that it has been much over-done, we are
+bound to recognize that Providence, in a fit of absence of mind,
+sometimes suffers the rascal to kill the honest man. Let me recommend my
+young colleagues," he proceeds, "never to end a piece which pretends to
+reproduce a phase of real life, by an intervention of chance." The
+recommendation came rather oddly from the dramatist who, in
+_L'Etrangere_, had disposed of his "vibrion," the Duc de Septmonts, by
+making Clarkson kill him in a duel. Perhaps he did not reckon
+_L'Etrangere_ as pretending to reproduce a phase of real life. A duel
+is, of course, perfectly admissible in a French or German play, simply
+as part of a picture of manners. Its stupid inconclusiveness may be the
+very point to be illustrated. It is only when represented as a moral
+arbitrament that it becomes an anachronism.]
+
+[Footnote 4: I am glad to see, from Mr. Malcolm Salaman's introduction
+to the printed play, that, even in those days of our hot youth, my own
+aesthetic principles were less truculent.]
+
+[Footnote 5: This image is sometimes suggested by an act-ending which
+leaves a marked situation obviously unresolved. The curtain should never
+be dropped at such a point as to leave the characters in a physical or
+mental attitude which cannot last for more than a moment, and must
+certainly be followed, then and there, by important developments. In
+other words, a situation ought not to be cut short at the very height of
+its tension, but only when it has reached a point of--at any rate
+momentary--relaxation.]
+
+
+
+
+_BOOK V_
+
+EPILOGUE
+
+
+
+
+_CHAPTER XXII_
+
+CHARACTER AND PSYCHOLOGY
+
+
+For the invention and ordering of incident it is possible, if not to lay
+down rules, at any rate to make plausible recommendations; but the power
+to observe, to penetrate, and to reproduce character can neither be
+acquired nor regulated by theoretical recommendations. Indirectly, of
+course, all the technical discussions of the previous chapters tend, or
+ought to tend, towards the effective presentment of character; for
+construction, in drama of any intellectual quality, has no other end.
+But specific directions for character-drawing would be like rules for
+becoming six feet high. Either you have it in you, or you have it not.
+
+Under the heading of character, however, two points arise which may be
+worth a brief discussion: first, ought we always to aim at development
+in character? second, what do we, or ought we to, mean by "psychology"?
+
+It is a frequent critical complaint that in such-and-such a character
+there is "no development": that it remains the same throughout a play;
+or (so the reproach is sometimes worded) that it is not a character but
+an invariable attitude. A little examination will show us, I think,
+that, though the critic may in these cases be pointing to a real fault,
+he does not express himself quite accurately.
+
+What is character? For the practical purposes of the dramatist, it may
+be defined as a complex of intellectual, emotional, and nervous habits.
+Some of these habits are innate and temperamental--habits formed, no
+doubt, by far-off ancestors.[1] But this distinction does not here
+concern us. Temperamental bias is a habit, like another, only somewhat
+older, and, therefore, harder to deflect or eradicate. What do we imply,
+then, when we complain that, in a given character, no development has
+taken place? We imply that he ought, within the limits of the play, to
+have altered the mental habits underlying his speech and actions. But is
+this a reasonable demand? Is it consistent with the usual and desirable
+time-limits of drama? In the long process of a novel, there may be time
+for the gradual alteration of habits: in the drama, which normally
+consists of a single crisis, any real change of character would have to
+be of a catastrophic nature, in which experience does not encourage us
+to put much faith. It was, indeed--as Dryden pointed out in a passage
+quoted above[2]--one of the foibles of our easy-going ancestors to treat
+character as practically reversible when the time approached for ringing
+down the curtain. The same convention survives to this day in certain
+forms of drama. Even Ibsen, in his earlier work, had not shaken it off;
+witness the sudden ennoblement of Bernick in _Pillars of Society_. But
+it can scarcely be that sort of "development" which the critics consider
+indispensable. What is it, then, that they have in mind?
+
+By "development" of character, I think they mean, not change, but rather
+unveiling, disclosure. They hold, not unreasonably, that a dramatic
+crisis ought to disclose latent qualities in the persons chiefly
+concerned in it, and involve, not, indeed, a change, but, as it were, an
+exhaustive manifestation of character. The interest of the highest order
+of drama should consist in the reaction of character to a series of
+crucial experiences. We should, at the end of a play, know more of the
+protagonist's character than he himself, or his most intimate friend,
+could know at the beginning; for the action should have been such as to
+put it to some novel and searching test. The word "development" might be
+very aptly used in the photographic sense. A drama ought to bring out
+character as the photographer's chemicals "bring out" the forms latent
+in the negative. But this is quite a different thing from development in
+the sense of growth or radical change. In all modern drama, there is
+perhaps no character who "develops," in the ordinary sense of the word,
+so startlingly as Ibsen's Nora; and we cannot but feel that the poet has
+compressed into a week an evolution which, in fact, would have demanded
+many months.
+
+The complaint that a character preserves the same attitude throughout
+means (if it be justified) that it is not a human being at all, but a
+mere embodiment of two or three characteristics which are fully
+displayed within the first ten minutes, and then keep on repeating
+themselves, like a recurrent decimal. Strong theatrical effects can be
+produced by this method, which is that of the comedy of types, or of
+"humors." But it is now generally, and rightly, held that a character
+should be primarily an individual, and only incidentally (if at all)
+capable of classification under this type or that. It is a little
+surprising to find Sarcey, so recently as 1889, laying it down that "a
+character is a master faculty or passion, which absorbs all the rest....
+To study and paint a character is, therefore, by placing a man in a
+certain number of situations, to show how this principal motive force in
+his nature annihilates or directs all those which, if he had been
+another man, would probably have come into action." This dogma of the
+"ruling passion" belongs rather to the eighteenth century than to the
+close of the nineteenth.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+We come now to the second of the questions above propounded, which I
+will state more definitely in this form: Is "psychology" simply a more
+pedantic term for "character-drawing"? Or can we establish a distinction
+between the two ideas? I do not think that, as a matter of fact, any
+difference is generally and clearly recognized; but I suggest that it is
+possible to draw a distinction which might, if accepted, prove
+serviceable both to critics and to playwrights.
+
+Let me illustrate my meaning by an example. In _Bella Donna_, by Messrs.
+Robert Hichens and James B. Fagan, we have a murder-story of a not
+uncommon or improbable type. A woman of very shady reputation marries an
+amiable idealist who is infatuated with her. She naturally finds his
+idealism incomprehensible and his amiability tedious. His position as
+heir-presumptive to a peerage is shattered by the birth of an
+heir-apparent. She becomes passionately enamoured of an Egyptian
+millionaire; and she sets to work to poison her husband with
+sugar-of-lead, provided by her oriental lover. How her criminal purpose
+is thwarted by a wise Jewish physician is nothing to the present
+purpose. In intent she is a murderess, no less than Lucrezia Borgia or
+the Marquise de Brinvilliers. And the authors have drawn her character
+cleverly enough. They have shown her in the first act as a
+shallow-souled materialist, and in the later acts as a vain, irritable,
+sensual, unscrupulous creature. But have they given us any insight into
+her psychology? No, that is just what they have not done. They have
+assigned to her certain characteristics without which cruel and
+cold-blooded murder would be inconceivable; but they have afforded us no
+insight into the moral conditions and, mental processes which make it,
+not only conceivable, but almost an everyday occurrence. For the average
+human mind, I suppose, the psychology of crime, and especially of
+fiendish, hypocritical murder-by-inches, has an undeniable fascination.
+To most of us it seems an abhorrent miracle; and it would interest us
+greatly to have it brought more or less within the range of our
+comprehension, and co-ordinated with other mental phenomena which we can
+and do understand. But of such illumination we find nothing in _Bella
+Donna_. It leaves the working of a poisoner's mind as dark to us as
+ever. So far as that goes, we might just as well have read the report of
+a murder-trial, wherein the facts are stated with, perhaps, some
+superficial speculation as to motive, but no attempt is made to
+penetrate to underlying soul-states. Yet this is surely the highest
+privilege of art--to take us behind and beneath those surfaces of things
+which are apparent to the detective and the reporter, the juryman and
+the judge.
+
+Have we not here, then, the distinction between character-drawing and
+psychology? Character-drawing is the presentment of human nature in its
+commonly-recognized, understood, and accepted aspects; psychology is, as
+it were, the exploration of character, the bringing of hitherto
+unsurveyed tracts within the circle of our knowledge and comprehension.
+In other words, character-drawing is synthetic, psychology analytic.
+This does not mean that the one is necessarily inferior to the other.
+Some of the greatest masterpieces of creative art have been achieved by
+the synthesis of known elements. Falstaff, for example--there is no more
+brilliant or more living character in all fiction; yet it is impossible
+to say that Shakespeare has here taken us into previously unplumbed
+depths of human nature, as he has in Hamlet, or in Lear. No doubt it is
+often very hard to decide whether a given personage is a mere projection
+of the known or a divination of the unknown. What are we to say, for
+example, of Cleopatra, or of Shylock, or of Macbeth? Richard II, on the
+other hand, is as clearly a piece of psychology as the Nurse in _Romeo
+and Juliet_ is a piece of character-drawing. The comedy of types
+necessarily tends to keep within the limits of the known, and
+Moliere--in spite of Alceste and Don Juan--is characteristically a
+character-drawer, as Racine is characteristically a psychologist. Ibsen
+is a psychologist or he is nothing. Earl Skule and Bishop Nicholas,
+Hedda Gabler and John Gabriel Borkman are daring explorations of
+hitherto uncharted regions of the human soul. But Ibsen, too, was a
+character-drawer when it suited him. One is tempted to say that there is
+no psychology in Brand--he is a mere incarnation of intransigent
+idealism--while Peer Gynt is as brilliant a psychological inspiration as
+Don Quixote. Dr. Stockmann is a vigorously-projected character, Hialmar
+Ekdal a piece of searching psychology. Finally, my point could scarcely
+be better illustrated than by a comparison--cruel but instructive
+--between Rebecca in _Rosmersholm_ and the heroine in _Bella
+Donna_. Each is, in effect, a murderess, though it was a moral, not a
+mineral, poison that Rebecca employed. But while we know nothing
+whatever of Mrs. Armine's mental processes, Rebecca's temptations,
+struggles, sophistries, hesitations, resolves, and revulsions of feeling
+are all laid bare to us, so that we feel her to be no monster, but a
+living woman, comprehensible to our intelligence, and, however
+blameworthy, not wholly beyond the range of our sympathies. There are
+few greater achievements of psychology.
+
+Among the playwrights of to-day, I should call Mr. Granville Barker
+above all things a psychologist. It is his instinct to venture into
+untrodden fields of character, or, at any rate, to probe deeply into
+phenomena which others have noted but superficially, if at all. Hence
+the occasional obscurity of his dialogue. Mr. Shaw is not, primarily,
+either a character-drawer or a psychologist, but a dealer in personified
+ideas. His leading figures are, as a rule, either his mouthpieces or his
+butts. When he gives us a piece of real character-drawing, it is
+generally in some subordinate personage. Mr. Galsworthy, I should say,
+shows himself a psychologist in _Strife_, a character-drawer in _The
+Silver Box_ and _Justice_. Sir Arthur Pinero, a character-drawer of
+great versatility, becomes a psychologist in some of his studies of
+feminine types--in Iris, in Letty, in the luckless heroine of
+_Mid-Channel_. Mr. Clyde Fitch had, at least, laudable ambitions in the
+direction of psychology. Becky in _The Truth_, and Jinny in _The Girl
+with the Green Eyes_, in so far as they are successfully drawn, really
+do mean a certain advance on our knowledge of feminine human nature.
+Unfortunately, owing to the author's over-facile and over-hasty method
+of work, they are now and then a little out of drawing. The most
+striking piece of psychology known to me in American drama is the Faith
+Healer in William Vaughn Moody's drama of that name. If the last act of
+_The Faith Healer_ were as good as the rest of it, one might safely call
+it the finest play ever written, at any rate in the English language,
+beyond the Atlantic. The psychologists of the modern French stage, I
+take it, are M. de Curel and M. de Porto-Riche. MM. Brieux and Hervieu
+are, like Mr. Shaw, too much concerned with ideas to probe very deep
+into character. In Germany, Hauptmann, and, so far as I understand him,
+Wedekind, are psychologists, Sudermann, a vigorous character-drawer.
+
+It is pretty clear that, if this distinction were accepted, it would be
+of use to the critic, inasmuch as we should have two terms for two
+ideas, instead of one popular term with a rather pedantic synonym. But
+what would be its practical use to the artist, the craftsman? Simply
+this, that if the word "psychology" took on for him a clear and definite
+meaning, it might stimulate at once his imagination and his ambition.
+Messrs. Hichens and Fagan, for example, might have asked themselves--or
+each other--"Are we getting beneath the surface of this woman's nature?
+Are we plucking the heart out of her mystery? Cannot we make the
+specific processes of a murderess's mind clearer to ourselves and to our
+audiences?" Whether they would have been capable of rising to the
+opportunity, I cannot tell; but in the case of other authors one not
+infrequently feels: "This man could have taken us deeper into this
+problem if he had only thought of it." I do not for a moment mean that
+every serious dramatist should always be aiming at psychological
+exploration. The character-drawer's appeal to common knowledge and
+instant recognition is often all that is required, or that would be in
+place. But there are also occasions not a few when the dramatist shows
+himself unequal to his opportunities if he does not at least attempt to
+bring hitherto unrecorded or unscrutinized phases of character within
+the scope of our understanding and our sympathies.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+[Footnote 1: If this runs counter to the latest biological orthodoxy, I
+am sorry. Habits are at any rate transmissible by imitation, if not
+otherwise.]
+
+[Footnote 2: Chapter XIX.]
+
+
+
+
+_CHAPTER XXIII_
+
+DIALOGUE AND DETAILS
+
+
+The extraordinary progress made by the drama of the English language
+during the past quarter of a century is in nothing more apparent than in
+the average quality of modern dialogue. Tolerably well-written dialogue
+is nowadays the rule rather than the exception. Thirty years ago, the
+idea that it was possible to combine naturalness with vivacity and
+vigour had scarcely dawned upon the playwright's mind. He passed and
+repassed from stilted pathos to strained and verbal wit (often mere
+punning); and when a reformer like T.W. Robertson tried to come a little
+nearer to the truth of life, he was apt to fall into babyish simplicity
+or flat commonness.
+
+Criticism has not given sufficient weight to the fact that English
+dramatic writing laboured for centuries--and still labours to some
+degree--under a historic misfortune. It has never wholly recovered from
+the euphuism--to use the word in its widest sense--of the late sixteenth
+century. The influence of John Lyly and his tribe is still traceable,
+despite a hundred metamorphoses, in some of the plays of to-day and in
+many of the plays of yesterday. From the very beginnings of English
+comedy, it was accepted as almost self-evident that "wit"--a factitious,
+supererogatory sparkle--was indispensable to all dialogue of a
+non-tragic order. Language was a newly discovered and irresistibly
+fascinating playground for the fancy. Conversation must be thick-strewn
+with verbal quibbles, similes, figures, and flourishes of every
+description, else it was unworthy to be spoken on the stage. We all know
+how freely Shakespeare yielded to this convention, and so helped to
+establish it. Sometimes, not always, his genius enabled him to render it
+delightful; but in most of the Elizabethans--though it be heresy to say
+so--it is an extremely tedious mannerism. After the Restoration, when
+modern light talk came into being in the coffee-houses, the fashion of
+the day, no doubt, favoured a straining after wit; so that the
+playwrights were in some measure following nature--that very small
+corner of nature which they called "the town"--in accepting and making a
+law of the Elizabethan convention. The leading characters of Restoration
+comedy, from Etherege to Vanbrugh, are consciously and almost
+professionally wits. Simile and repartee are as indispensable a part of
+a gentleman's social outfit as his wig or his rapier. In Congreve the
+word "wit" is almost as common as the thing. When Farquhar made some
+movement towards a return to nature, he was rewarded with Pope's line,
+which clings like a burr to his memory--
+
+  "What pert, low dialogue has Farquhar writ."
+
+If eighteenth-century comedy, as a whole, is not brilliantly written, it
+is for lack of talent in the playwrights, not for lack of desire or
+intention. Goldsmith, like Farquhar and Steele, vaguely realized the
+superiority of humour to wit; but he died too early to exercise much
+influence on his successors. In Sheridan the convention of wit
+reasserted itself triumphantly, and the scene in which Lady Teazle, Mrs.
+Candour, and the rest of the scandalous college sit in a semicircle and
+cap malicious similes, came to be regarded as an unapproachable model of
+comedy dialogue. The convention maintained itself firmly down to the
+days of _Money_ and _London Assurance_, the dullness of the intervening
+period being due, not to any change of theory, but to sheer impotence of
+practice. T.W. Robertson, as above mentioned, attempted a return to
+nature, with occasional and very partial success; but wit, with a dash
+of fanciful sentiment, reasserted itself in James Albery; while in H.J.
+Byron it degenerated into mere punning and verbal horse-play. I should
+not be surprised if the historian of the future were to find in the
+plays of Mr. Henry Arthur Jones the first marked symptoms of a
+reaction--of a tendency to reject extrinsic and fanciful ornament in
+dialogue, and to rely for its effect upon its vivid appropriateness to
+character and situation. In the early plays of Sir Arthur Pinero there
+is a great deal of extrinsic ornament; especially of that
+metaphor-hunting which was one of the characteristic forms of euphuism.
+Take this, for example, from _The Profligate_. Dunstan Renshaw has
+expressed to Hugh Murray the opinion that "marriages of contentment are
+the reward of husbands who have taken the precaution to sow their wild
+oats rather thickly"; whereupon the Scotch solicitor replies--
+
+  HUGH MURRAY: Contentment! Renshaw, do you imagine that there is no
+  autumn in the life of a profligate? Do you think there is no moment
+  when the accursed crop begins to rear its millions of heads above
+  ground; when the rich man would give his wealth to be able to tread
+  them back into the earth which rejects the foul load? To-day you
+  have robbed some honest man of a sweet companion!
+
+  DUNSTAN RENSHAW: Look here, Mr. Murray--!
+
+  HUGH MURRAY: To-morrow, next week, next month, you may be happy--but
+  what of the time when those wild oats thrust their ears through the
+  very seams of the floor trodden by the wife whose respect you will
+  have learned to covet! You may drag her into the crowded
+  streets--there is the same vile growth springing up from the chinks
+  of the pavement! In your house or in the open, the scent of the
+  mildewed grain always in your nostrils, and in your ears no music
+  but the wind's rustle amongst the fat sheaves! And, worst of all,
+  your wife's heart a granary bursting with the load of shame your
+  profligacy has stored there! I warn you--Mr. Lawrence Kenward!
+
+If we compare this passage with any page taken at random from
+_Mid-Channel_, we might think that a century of evolution lay between
+them, instead of barely twenty years.
+
+The convention of wit-at-any-price is, indeed, moribund; but it is
+perhaps not quite superfluous, even now, to emphasize the difference
+between what the French call the "mot d'auteur" and the "mot de
+situation." The terms practically explain themselves; but a third class
+ought to be added--the "mot de caractere." The "mot d'auteur" is the
+distinguishing mark of the Congreve-Sheridan convention. It survives in
+full vigour--or, shall one say, it sings its swan-song?--in the works of
+Oscar Wilde. For instance, the scene of the five men in the third act of
+_Lady Windermere's Fan_ is a veritable running-fire of epigrams wholly
+unconnected with the situation, and very slightly related, if at all, to
+the characters of the speakers. The mark of the "mot d'auteur" is that
+it can with perfect ease be detached from its context. I could fill this
+page with sayings from the scene in question, all perfectly
+comprehensible without any account of the situation. Among them would be
+one of those; profound sayings which Wilde now and then threw off in his
+lightest moods, like opals among soap-bubbles. "In the world," says
+Dumby, "there are two tragedies. One is not getting what one wants, and
+the other is getting it." This may rank with Lord Illingworth's speech
+in _A Woman of No Importance_: "All thought is immoral. Its very essence
+is destruction. If you think of anything you kill it. Nothing survives
+being thought of." When we hear such sayings as these--or the immortal
+"Vulgarity is the behaviour of other people"--we do not enquire too
+curiously into their appropriateness to character or situation; but none
+the less do they belong to an antiquated conception of drama.
+
+It is useless to begin to give specimens of the "mot de caractere" and
+"mot de situation." All really dramatic dialogue falls under one head or
+the other. One could easily pick out a few brilliantly effective
+examples of each class: but as their characteristic is to fade when
+uprooted from the soil in which they grow, they would take up space to
+very little purpose.
+
+But there is another historic influence, besides that of euphuism, which
+has been hurtful, though in a minor degree, to the development of a
+sound style in dialogue. Some of the later Elizabethans, and notably
+Webster and Ford, cultivated a fashion of abrupt utterance, whereby an
+immensity of spiritual significance--generally tragic--was supposed to
+be concentrated into a few brief words. The classic example is
+Ferdinand's "Cover her face. Mine eyes dazzle. She died young," in _The
+Duchess of Malfy_. Charles Lamb celebrated the virtues of this pregnant,
+staccato style with somewhat immoderate admiration, and thus helped to
+set a fashion of spasmodic pithiness in dialogue, which too often
+resulted in dense obscurity. Not many plays composed under this
+influence have reached the stage; not one has held it. But we find in
+some recent writing a qualified recrudescence of the spasmodic manner,
+with a touch of euphuism thrown in. This is mainly due, I think, to the
+influence of George Meredith, who accepted the convention of wit as the
+informing spirit of comedy dialogue, and whose abnormally rapid faculty
+of association led him to delight in a sort of intellectual shorthand
+which the normal mind finds very difficult to decipher. Meredith was a
+man of brilliant genius, which lent a fascination to his very
+mannerisms; but when these mannerisms are transferred by lesser men to a
+medium much less suited to them--that of the stage--the result is apt to
+be disastrous. I need not go into particulars; for no play of which the
+dialogue places a constant strain on the intellectual muscles of the
+audience ever has held, or ever will hold, a place in living dramatic
+literature. I will merely note the curious fact that English--my own
+language--is the only language out of the three or four known to me in
+which I have ever come across an entirely incomprehensible play. I could
+name English plays, both pre-Meredithian and post-Meredithian, which
+might almost as well be written in Chinese for all that I can make
+of them.
+
+Obscurity and precocity are generally symptoms of an exaggerated dread
+of the commonplace. The writer of dramatic prose has, indeed, a very
+difficult task if he is to achieve style without deserting nature.
+Perhaps it would be more accurate to say that the difficulty lies in
+getting criticism to give him credit for the possession of style,
+without incurring the reproach of mannerism. How is one to give
+concentration and distinction to ordinary talk, while making it still
+seem ordinary? Either the distinction will strike the critics, and they
+will call it pompous and unreal, or the ordinariness will come home to
+them, and they will deny the distinction. This is the dramatist's
+constant dilemma. One can only comfort him with the assurance that if he
+has given his dialogue the necessary concentration, and has yet kept it
+plausibly near to the language of life, he has achieved style, and may
+snap his fingers at the critics. Style, in prose drama, is the sifting
+of common speech.
+
+It is true, however, that, with equal concentration and equal
+naturalness, one man may give his work a beauty of cadence and phrasing
+which another man may entirely miss. Two recent writers of English
+dramatic prose have stood out from their fellows in respect of the sheer
+beauty of their style--I need scarcely name Oscar Wilde and J.M. Synge.
+But Wilde's dialogue can by no means be called free from mannerism,[1]
+while Synge wrote in a language which had a music of its own, even
+before his genius took hold of it.
+
+It does not seem very profitable to try to concentrate into a definition
+the distinctive qualities of dramatic dialogue. The late Mrs. Craigie
+("John Oliver Hobbes") attempted to do so in the preface to a charming
+play, _The Ambassador_; and the result at any rate the sequel--was that
+her next play, _The Wisdom of the Wise_, was singularly self-conscious
+and artificial. She found in "emotion" the test of dramatic quality in
+any given utterance. "Stage dialogue," she says, "may or may not have
+many qualities, but it must be emotional." Here we have a statement
+which is true in a vague and general sense, untrue in the definite and
+particular sense in which alone it could afford any practical guidance.
+"My lord, the carriage waits," may be, in its right place, a highly
+dramatic speech, even though it be uttered with no emotion, and arouse
+no emotion in the person addressed. What Mrs. Craigie meant, I take it,
+was that, to be really dramatic, every speech must have some bearing,
+direct or indirect, prospective, present, or retrospective, upon
+individual human destinies. The dull play, the dull scene, the dull
+speech, is that in which we do not perceive this connection; but when
+once we are interested in the individuals concerned, we are so quick to
+perceive the connection, even though it be exceedingly distant and
+indirect, that the dramatist who should always hold the fear of Mrs.
+Craigie's aphorism consciously before his eyes would unnecessarily
+fetter and restrict himself. Even the driest scientific proposition may,
+under special circumstances, become electrical with drama. The statement
+that the earth moves round the sun does not, in itself, stir our pulses;
+yet what playwright has ever invented a more dramatic utterance than
+that which some one invented for Galileo: "E pur si muove!"? In all
+this, to be sure, I am illustrating, not confuting, Mrs. Craigie's
+maxim. I have no wish to confute it, for, in the largest interpretation,
+it is true; but I suggest that it is true only when attenuated almost
+beyond recognition, and quite beyond the point at which it can be of any
+practical help to the practical dramatist. He must rely on his instinct,
+not numb and bewilder it by constantly subjecting it to the dictates of
+hard-and-fast aesthetic theory.
+
+We shall scarcely come much nearer to helpful truth than the point we
+have already reached, in the principle that all dialogue, except the
+merely mechanical parts--the connective tissue of the play--should
+consist either of "mots de caractere" or of "mots de situation." But if
+we go to French critics for this principle, do not let us go to French
+dramatists for models of practice. It is part of the abiding insularity
+of our criticism that the same writers who cannot forgive an English
+dramatist what they conceive to be a stilted turn of phrase, will pass
+without remark, if not with positive admiration, the outrageously
+rhetorical style which is still prevalent in French drama. Here, for
+instance, is a quite typical passage from _Le Duel_, by M. Henri
+Lavedan, an author of no small repute; and it would be easy to find even
+more magniloquent tirades in the works of almost any of his
+contemporaries. I translate from the concluding scene between the Abbe
+and the Duchess:
+
+  THE ABBE: "In our strange life, there are sometimes unexpected and
+  decisive moments, sovereign, though we know not why. We feel it,
+  that is all!--fulgurant moments, which throw, as it were, a flash of
+  lightning upon our destinies, like those meteors which shine forth
+  from time to time in the heavens, and of which none can say what
+  their purple signifies, whether it be a cataclysm or an apotheosis.
+  Well, it appears to me that we, you and I, are now face to face with
+  one of these moments!"
+
+  THE DUCHESS: "So I, too, believe."
+
+  THE ABBE: "We must take care, then, that it be an apotheosis. That
+  is why I want--Mon Dieu, madame! how shall I say it to you? Where
+  shall I go to find the chosen words, the words of pure gold, of
+  diamonds, the immaculate words that are worthy of us? All that you
+  are, all that you are worth, I know, and I alone know. You have
+  opened, that I might read it, the book of hours that is your mind. I
+  am in no wise disquieted about you or your future; yet, that I may
+  be fully reassured before we part, I wish, I wish you to tell me, to
+  declare to me, that you are at this very moment in absolute repose,
+  calm as a lake."
+
+And so Monsieur l'Abbe goes on for another page. If it be said that this
+ornate eloquence is merely professional, I reply that his brother, the
+atheist doctor, and the Duchess herself, are quite as copious in their
+rhetoric, and scarcely less ornate.
+
+It is a mistake to suppose that "literary merit" can be imparted to
+drama by such flagrant departures from nature; though some critics have
+not yet outgrown that superstition. Let the playwright take to heart an
+anecdote told by Professor Matthews in his _Inquiries and Opinions_--an
+anecdote of a New England farmer, who, being asked who was the architect
+of his house, replied: "Oh, I built that house myself; but there's a man
+coming down from Boston next week to put on the architecture." Better no
+style at all than style thus plastered on.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+What is to be said of the possibilities of blank verse as a dramatic
+medium? This is a thorny question, to be handled with caution. One can
+say with perfect assurance, however, that its possibilities are
+problematical, its difficulties and dangers certain.
+
+To discuss the question whether drama in verse is in its very nature
+nobler than drama in prose would lead us away from craftsmanship into
+the realm of pure aesthetics. For my own part, I doubt it. I suspect
+that the drama, like all literature, took its rise in verse, for the
+simple reason that verse is easier to make--and to memorize--than prose.
+Primitive peoples felt with Goethe--though not quite in the same
+sense--that "art is art because it is not nature." Not merely for
+emotional, but for all sorts of literary, expression, they demanded a
+medium clearly marked off from the speech of everyday life. The drama
+"lisped in numbers, for the numbers came." Even of so modern a writer
+(comparatively) as Shakespeare, it would scarcely be true to say that he
+"chose" verse as his medium, in the same sense in which Ibsen chose
+prose. He accepted it just as he accepted the other traditions and
+methods of the theatre of his time. In familiar passages he broke away
+from it; but on the whole it provided (among other advantages) a
+convenient and even necessary means of differentiation between the mimic
+personage and the audience, from whom he was not marked off by the
+proscenium arch and the artificial lights which make a world apart of
+the modern stage.
+
+And Shakespeare so glorified this metrical medium as to give it an
+overwhelming prestige. It was extremely easy to write blank verse after
+a fashion; and playwrights who found it flow almost spontaneously from
+their pens were only too ready to overlook the world-wide difference
+between their verse and that of the really great Elizabethans. Just
+after the Restoration, there was an attempt to introduce the rhymed
+couplet as the medium for heroic plays; but that, on the other hand, was
+too difficult to establish itself in general use. Tragedy soon fell back
+upon the fatally facile unrhymed iambic, and a reign of stilted, stodgy
+mediocrity set in. There is nothing drearier in literature than the
+century-and-a-half of English tragedy, from Otway to Sheridan Knowles.
+One is lost in wonder at the genius of the actors who could infuse life
+and passion into those masterpieces of turgid conventionality. The
+worship of the minor Elizabethans, which began with Lamb and culminated
+in Swinburne, brought into fashion (as we have seen) a spasmodic rather
+than a smoothly rhetorical way of writing, but did not really put new
+life into the outworn form. It may almost be called an appalling fact
+that for at least two centuries--from 1700 to 1900--not a single
+blank-verse play was produced which lives, or deserves to live,[2] on
+the stage of to-day.
+
+I have thus glanced at the history of the blank-verse play because I
+believe that it can never revive until we clearly realize and admit that
+it is, and has been for a century, thoroughly dead, while, for a century
+before that again, it was only galvanized into a semblance of life by a
+great school of rhetorical acting. The playwright who sets forth with
+the idea that, in writing a poetical drama, he is going to continue the
+great Elizabethan tradition, is starting on a wild-goose chase. The
+great Elizabethan tradition is an incubus to be exorcised. It was
+because Mr. Stephen Phillips was not Elizabethanizing, but clothing a
+vital and personal conception of drama in verse of very appealing
+lyrical quality, that some of us thought we saw in _Paolo and Francesca_
+the dawn of a new art. Apparently it was a false dawn; but I still
+believe that our orientation was right when we looked for the daybreak
+in the lyric quarter of the heavens. The very summits of Shakespeare's
+achievement are his glorious lyrical passages. Think of the exquisite
+elegiacs of Macbeth! Think of the immortal death-song of Cleopatra! If
+verse has any function on the stage, it is that of imparting lyric
+beauty to passionate speech. For the mere rhetorical "elevation" of
+blank verse we have no use whatever. It consists in saying simple things
+with verbose pomposity. But should there arise a man who combines
+highly-developed dramatic faculty with great lyric genius, it is quite
+possible that he may give us the new poetic drama for which our
+idealists are sighing. He will choose his themes, I take it, from
+legend, or from the domain of pure fantasy--themes which can be steeped
+from first to last in an atmosphere of poetry, as _Tristan und Isolde_
+is steeped in an atmosphere of music. Of historic themes, I would
+counsel this hypothetical genius to beware. If there are any which can
+fittingly be steeped in a lyric atmosphere, they are to be sought on the
+outskirts of history, or in the debatable land between history and
+legend. The formula of Schiller can no more be revived than the formula
+of Chapman or of Rowe. That a new historic drama awaits us in the
+future, I have little doubt; but it will be written in prose. The idea
+that the poetry of drama is to be sought specifically in verse has long
+ago been exploded by Ibsen and Maeterlinck and D'Annunzio and Synge. But
+there are, no doubt, themes which peculiarly lend themselves to
+lyrico-dramatic treatment, and we shall all welcome the poet who
+discovers and develops them.
+
+One warning let me add, in no uncertain voice. If you choose to write a
+blank-verse play, write it in blank verse, and not in some nondescript
+rhythm which is one long series of jolts and pitfalls to the sensitive
+ear. Many playwrights have thought by this means to escape from the
+monotony of blank verse; not one (that I ever heard of) has achieved
+even temporary success. If you cannot save your blank verse from
+monotony without breaking it on the wheel, that merely means that you
+cannot write blank verse, and had better let it alone. Again, in spite
+of Elizabethan precedent, there is nothing more irritating on the modern
+stage than a play which keeps on changing from verse to prose and back
+again. It gives the verse-passages an air of pompous self-consciousness.
+We seem to hear the author saying, as he shifts his gear, "Look you now!
+I am going to be eloquent and impressive!" The most destructive fault a
+dramatist can commit, in my judgment, is to pass, in the same work of
+art, from one plane of convention to another.[3]
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+We must now consider for a moment the question--if question it can be
+called--of the soliloquy and the aside. The example of Ibsen has gone
+far towards expelling these slovenlinesses from the work of all
+self-respecting playwrights. But theorists spring up every now and then
+to defend them. "The stage is the realm of convention," they argue. "If
+you accept a room with its fourth wall removed, which nothing short of
+an earthquake could render possible in real life, why should you jib at
+the idea--in which, after all, there is nothing absolutely
+impossible--that a man should utter aloud the thoughts that are passing
+through his mind?"
+
+It is all a question, once more, of planes of convention. No doubt there
+is an irreducible minimum of convention in all drama; but how strange is
+the logic which leaps from that postulate to the assertion that, if we
+admit a minimum, we cannot, or ought not to, exclude a maximum! There
+are plays which do not, and there are plays which do, set forth to give
+as nearly as possible an exact reproduction of the visual and auditory
+realities of life. In the Elizabethan theatre, with its platform stage
+under the open sky, any pictorial exactness of reproduction was clearly
+impossible. Its fundamental conditions necessitated very nearly[4] a
+maximum of convention; therefore such conventions as blank verse and the
+soliloquy were simply of a piece with all the rest. In the theatre of
+the eighteenth century and early nineteenth, the proscenium arch--the
+frame of the picture--made pictorial realism theoretically possible. But
+no one recognized the possibility; and indeed, on a candle-lit stage, it
+would have been extremely difficult. As a matter of fact, the
+Elizabethan platform survived in the shape of a long "apron," projecting
+in front of the proscenium, on which the most important parts of the
+action took place. The characters, that is to say, were constantly
+stepping out of the frame of the picture; and while this visual
+convention maintained itself, there was nothing inconsistent or jarring
+in the auditory convention of the soliloquy. Only in the last quarter of
+the nineteenth century did new methods of lighting, combined with new
+literary and artistic influences, complete the evolutionary process, and
+lead to the withdrawal of the whole stage--the whole dramatic
+domain--within the frame of the picture. It was thus possible to reduce
+visual convention to a minimum so trifling that in a well-set "interior"
+it needs a distinct effort of attention to be conscious of it at all. In
+fact, if we come to think of it, the removal of the fourth wall is
+scarcely to be classed as a convention; for in real life, as we do not
+happen to have eyes in the back of our heads, we are never visually
+conscious of all four walls of a room at once. If, then, in a room that
+is absolutely real, we see a man who (in all other respects) strives to
+be equally real, suddenly begin to expound himself aloud, in good, set
+terms, his own emotions, motives, or purposes, we instantly plump down
+from one plane of convention to another, and receive a disagreeable jar
+to our sense of reality. Up to that moment, all the efforts of author,
+producer, and actor have centred in begetting in us a particular order
+of illusion; and lo! the effort is suddenly abandoned, and the illusion
+shattered by a crying unreality. In modern serious drama, therefore, the
+soliloquy can only be regarded as a disturbing anachronism.[5]
+
+The physical conditions which tended to banish it from the stage were
+reinforced by the growing perception of its artistic slovenliness. It
+was found that the most delicate analyses could be achieved without its
+aid; and it became a point of honour with the self-respecting artist to
+accept a condition which rendered his material somewhat harder of
+manipulation, indeed, but all the more tempting to wrestle with and
+overcome. A drama with soliloquies and asides is like a picture with
+inscribed labels issuing from the mouths of the figures. In that way,
+any bungler can reveal what is passing in the minds of his personages.
+But the glorious problem of the modern playwright is to make his
+characters reveal the inmost workings of their souls without saying or
+doing anything that they would not say or do in the real world.[6]
+
+There are degrees, however, even in the makeshift and the slovenly; and
+not all lapses into anachronism are equally to be condemned. One thing
+is so patent as to call for no demonstration: to wit, that the aside is
+ten times worse than the soliloquy. It is always possible that a man
+might speak his thought, but it is glaringly impossible that he should
+speak it so as to be heard by the audience and not heard by others on
+the stage. In French light comedy and farce of the mid-nineteenth
+century, the aside is abused beyond even the license of fantasy. A man
+will speak an aside of several lines over the shoulder of another person
+whom he is embracing. Not infrequently in a conversation between two
+characters, each will comment aside on every utterance of the other,
+before replying to it. The convenience of this method of proceeding is
+manifest. It is as though the author stood by and delivered a running
+commentary on the secret motives and designs of his characters. But it
+is such a crying confession of unreality that, on the English-speaking
+stage, at any rate, it would scarcely be tolerated to-day, even in
+farce. In serious modern drama the aside is now practically unknown. It
+is so obsolete, indeed, that actors are puzzled how to handle it, and
+audiences what to make of it. In an ambitious play produced at a leading
+London theatre about ten years ago, a lady, on leaving the stage,
+announced, in an aside, her intention of drowning herself, and several
+critics, the next day, not understanding that she was speaking aside,
+severely blamed the gentleman who was on the stage with her for not
+frustrating her intention. About the same time, there occurred one of
+the most glaring instances within my recollection of inept
+conventionalism. The hero of the play was Eugene Aram. Alone in his room
+at dead of night, Aram heard Houseman breaking open the outside shutters
+of the window. Designing to entrap the robber, what did he do? He went
+up to the window and drew back the curtains, with a noise loud enough to
+be heard in the next parish. It was inaudible, however, to Houseman on
+the other side of the shutters. He proceeded with his work, opened the
+window, and slipped in, Aram hiding in the shadow. Then, while Houseman
+peered about him with his lantern, not six feet from Aram, and actually
+between him and the audience, Aram indulged in a long and loud monologue
+as to whether he should shoot Houseman or not, ending with a prayer to
+heaven to save him from more blood-guiltiness! Such are the childish
+excesses to which a playwright will presently descend when once he
+begins to dally with facile convention.
+
+An aside is intolerable because it is _not_ heard by the other person on
+the stage: it outrages physical possibility. An overheard soliloquy, on
+the other hand, is intolerable because it _is_ heard. It keeps within
+the bounds of physical possibility, but it stultifies the only logical
+excuse for the soliloquy, namely, that it is an externalization of
+thought which would in reality remain unuttered. This point is so clear
+that I need not insist upon it.
+
+Are there, in modern drama, any admissible soliloquies? A few brief
+ejaculations of joy, or despair, are, of course, natural enough, and no
+one will cavil at them. The approach of mental disease is often marked
+by a tendency to unrestrained loquacity, which goes on even while the
+sufferer is alone; and this distressing symptom may, on rare occasions,
+be put to artistic use. Short of actual derangement, however, there are
+certain states of nervous surexcitation which cause even healthy people
+to talk to themselves; and if an author has the skill to make us realize
+that his character is passing through such a crisis, he may risk a
+soliloquy, not only without reproach, but with conspicuous psychological
+justification. In the third act of Clyde Fitch's play, _The Girl with
+the Green Eyes_, there is a daring attempt at such a soliloquy, where
+Jinny says: "Good Heavens! why am I maudling on like this to myself out
+loud? It's really nothing--Jack will explain once more that he can't
+explain"--and so on. Whether the attempt justified itself or not would
+depend largely on the acting. In any case, it is clear that the author,
+though as a rule somewhat lax in his craftsmanship, was here aiming at
+psychological truth.
+
+A word must be said as to a special case of the soliloquy--the letter
+which a person speaks aloud as he writes it, or reads over to himself
+aloud. This is a convention to be employed as sparingly as possible; but
+it is not exactly on a level with the ordinary soliloquy. A letter has
+an actual objective existence. The words are formulated in the
+character's mind and are supposed to be externalized, even though the
+actor may not really write them on the paper. Thus the letter has, so to
+speak, the same right to come to the knowledge of the audience as any
+other utterance. It is, in fact, part of the dialogue of the play, only
+that it happens to be inaudible. A soliloquy, on the other hand, has no
+real existence. It is a purely artificial unravelling of motive or
+emotion, which, nine times out of ten, would not become articulate at
+all, even in the speaker's brain or heart. Thus it is by many degrees a
+greater infraction of the surface texture of life than the spoken
+letter, which we may call inadvisable rather than inadmissible.
+
+Some theorists carry their solicitude for surface reality to such an
+extreme as to object to any communication between two characters which
+is not audible to every one on the stage. This is a very idle pedantry.
+The difference between a conversation in undertones and a soliloquy or
+aside is abundantly plain: the one occurs every hour of the day, the
+other never occurs at all. When two people, or a group, are talking
+among themselves, unheard by the others on the stage, it requires a
+special effort to remember that, as a matter of fact, the others
+probably do hear them. Even if the scene be unskilfully arranged, it is
+not the audibility of one group, but the inaudibility of the others,
+that is apt to strike us as unreal.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+This is not the only form of technical pedantry that one occasionally
+encounters. Some years ago, a little band of playwrights and would-be
+playwrights, in fanatical reaction against the Sardou technique, tried
+to lay down a rule that no room on the stage must ever have more than
+one door, and that no letter must ever enter into the mechanism of a
+play. I do not know which contention was the more ridiculous.
+
+Nothing is commoner in modern house-planning than rooms which have at
+least two doors and a French window. We constantly see rooms or halls
+which, if transported to the stage, would provide three or four
+entrances and exits; and this is even more true of the "central heated"
+houses of America than of English houses. The technical purists used
+especially to despise the French window--a harmless, agreeable and very
+common device. Why the playwright should make "one room one door" an
+inexorable canon of art is more than human reason can divine. There are
+cases, no doubt, in which probability demands that the dramatist should
+be content with one practicable opening to his scene, and should plan
+his entrances and exits accordingly. This is no such great feat as might
+be imagined. Indeed a playwright will sometimes deliberately place a
+particular act in a room with one door, because it happens to facilitate
+the movement he desires. It is absurd to lay down any rule in the
+matter, other than that the scene should provide a probable locality for
+whatever action is to take place in it. I am the last to defend the old
+French farce with its ten or a dozen doors through which the characters
+kept scuttling in and out like rabbits in a warren. But the fact that we
+are tired of conventional laxity is no good reason for rushing to the
+other extreme of conventional and hampering austerity.
+
+Similarly, because the forged will and the lost "marriage lines" have
+been rightly relegated to melodrama, is there any reason why we should
+banish from the stage every form of written document? Mr. Bernard Shaw,
+in an article celebrating the advent of the new technique, once wrote,
+"Nowadays an actor cannot open a letter or toss off somebody else's
+glass of poison without having to face a brutal outburst of jeering."
+What an extravagance to bracket as equally exploded absurdities the
+opening of a letter and the tossing off of the wrong glass of poison!
+Letters--more's the pity--play a gigantic part in the economy of modern
+life. The General Post Office is a vast mechanism for the distribution
+of tragedy, comedy, melodrama, and farce throughout the country and
+throughout the world. To whose door has not Destiny come in the disguise
+of a postman, and slipped its decree, with a double rat-tat, into the
+letter-box? Whose heart has not sickened as he heard the postman's
+footstep pass his door without pausing? Whose hand has not trembled as
+he opened a letter? Whose face has not blanched as he took in its
+import, almost without reading the words? Why, I would fain know, should
+our stage-picture of life be falsified by the banishment of the postman?
+Even the revelation brought about by the discovery of a forgotten letter
+or bundle of letters is not an infrequent incident of daily life. Why
+should it be tabu on the stage? Because the French dramatist, forty
+years ago, would sometimes construct a Chinese-puzzle play around some
+stolen letter or hidden document, are we to suffer no "scrap of paper"
+to play any part whatever in English drama? Even the Hebrew sense of
+justice would recoil from such a conclusion. It would be a case of "The
+fathers have eaten sour grapes, and other people's children must pay the
+penalty." Against such whimsies of reactionary purism, the playwright's
+sole and sufficient safeguard is a moderate exercise of common sense.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+[Footnote 1: So, too, with the style of Congreve. It is much, and
+justly, admired; but who does not feel more than a touch of mannerism in
+such a passage as this?--
+
+  MILLAMANT: "... Let us never visit together, nor go to a play
+  together; but let us be very strange and well-bred: let us be as
+  strange as if we had been married a great while; and as well-bred as
+  if we were not married at all."
+
+  MIRABELL: "Have you any more conditions to offer? Hitherto your
+  demands are pretty reasonable."
+
+  MILLAMANT: "Trifles!--as liberty to pay and receive visits to and
+  from whom I please; to write and receive letters, without
+  interrogatories or wry faces on your part; to wear what I please;
+  and choose conversation with regard only to my own taste; to have no
+  obligation upon me to converse with wits that I don't like because
+  they are your acquaintances; or to be intimate with fools because
+  they may be your relatives.... These articles subscribed, if I
+  continue to endure you a little longer, I may by degrees dwindle
+  into a wife."
+
+This is very pretty prose, granted; but it is the prose of literature,
+not of life.]
+
+[Footnote 2: From the fact that I do not make an exception in favour of
+_The Blot in the Scutcheon_ or _Stratford_, I must leave the reader to
+draw what inference he pleases. On the other hand, I believe that a
+reconstruction of Tennyson's _Queen Mary_, with a few connecting links
+written in, might take a permanent place in the theatre.]
+
+[Footnote 3: Mr. Israel Zangwill, in his symbolic play, _The War-God_,
+has put blank verse to what I believe to be a new use, with noteworthy
+success. He writes in very strict measure, but without the least
+inversion or inflation, without a touch of Elizabethan, or
+conventionally poetic, diction. He is thus enabled to use the most
+modern expressions, and even slang, without incongruity; while at the
+same time he can give rhetorical movement to the speeches of his
+symbolic personages, and, in passages of argument, can achieve that
+clash of measured phrase against measured phrase which the Greeks called
+"stichomythy," and which the French dramatist sometimes produces in
+rapid rapier play with the Alexandrine. Mr. Zangwill's practice is in
+absolute contradiction of the principle above suggested that blank
+verse, to be justified in drama, ought to be lyrical. His verse is a
+product of pure intellect and wit, without a single lyric accent. It is
+measured prose; if it ever tries to be more, it fails. I think, then,
+that he has shown a new use for blank verse, in rhetorico-symbolic
+drama. But it is no small literary feat to handle the measure as
+he does.]
+
+[Footnote 4: Not quite. The drama of some Oriental peoples recognizes
+conventions which the Elizabethans did not admit.]
+
+[Footnote 5: A conversation on the telephone often provides a convenient
+and up-to-date substitute for a soliloquy; but that is an expedient
+which ought not to be abused.]
+
+[Footnote 6: The soliloquy is often not only slovenly, but a gratuitous
+and unnecessary slovenliness. In _Les Corbeaux_, by Henry Becque,
+produced in 1889, there occur two soliloquies--one by Teissier (Act ii,
+Scene 3), the other by Madame de Saint-Genis (Act in, Scene 10)--either
+or both of which could be omitted without leaving any sensible gap. The
+latter is wholly superfluous, the former conveys some information which
+might have been taken for granted, and could, in any case, have been
+conveyed without difficulty in some other way. Yet Becque was, in his
+day, regarded as a quite advanced technician.]
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Play-Making, by William Archer
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