1 f 
 
ajotneU InitterattH ffiibrarg 
 
 JItliata, S?m ^nrk 
 
 BOUGHT WITH THE INCOME OF THE 
 
 SAGE ENDOWMENT FUND 
 
 THE GIFT OF 
 
 HENRY W. SAGE 
 
 1891 
 
Cornell University Library 
 PN 1661.A67 
 
 Play-making 
 
 3 1924 026 078 448 
 
Cornell University 
 Library 
 
 The original of this book is in 
 the Cornell University Library. 
 
 There are no known copyright restrictions in 
 the United States on the use of the text. 
 
 http://www.archive.org/details/cu31924026078448 
 
PLAY-MAKING 
 
PLAY-MAKING 
 
 A MANUAL OF CRAFTSMANSHIP 
 
 BY 
 
 WILLIAM ARCHER 
 
 LONDON 
 
 CHAPMAN & HALL, Ltd. 
 
 1912 
 
TO 
 
 BRANDER MATTHEWS 
 
 GUIDE PHILOSOPHER AND FRIEND 
 
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 — in- 
 distinguishably 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 follow- 
 ing 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 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 BOOK I 
 
 PROLOGUE 
 
 PASE 
 
 I. Introductory 3 
 
 II. The Choice of a Theme 13 
 
 III. Dramatic and Undramatic 23 
 
 IV. The Routine of Composition 42 
 
 V Dramatis Personae . ' 58 
 
 BOOK II 
 
 the beginning 
 
 VI. The Point of Attack : Shakespeare and Ibsen . 67 
 
 VII. Exposition : its End and its Means .... 87 
 
 VIII. The First Act 102 
 
 IX. " Curiosity " and " Interest " 120 
 
 X. Foreshadowing, not Forestalling . . . .134 
 
 BOOK III 
 
 the middle 
 
 XI. Tension and its Suspension 145 
 
 'XII. Preparation : the Finger- Post 154 
 
 XIII. The Obligatory Scene 172 
 
 XIV. The Peripety 199 
 
 OCV. Probability, Chance, and Coincidence . . .210 
 
 XVI. Logic 225 
 
 XVII. Keeping a Secret 232 
 
X CONTENTS 
 
 BOOK IV 
 
 THE END 
 
 FAGS 
 
 XVIII. Climax and Anticlimax 245 
 
 XIX. Conversion 253 
 
 XX. Blind-Alley Themes— and Others ... .260 
 
 XXI. The Full Close 269 
 
 BOOK V 
 
 epilogue 
 
 XXII. Character and Psychology 
 XXIII. Dialogue and Details . 
 
 Bibliographical Note . 
 
 Index ... 
 
 285 
 293 
 313 
 317 
 
BOOK I 
 PROLOGUE 
 
PLAY-MAKING 
 
 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, any- 
 where 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-Tiim 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 tliat 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 him- 
 self did not so much dogmatize as analyse, classify, and 
 
 3 B 2 
 
4 PLAY-MAKING 
 
 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 trie Alex- 
 andrians as though they were unassailable dogmg| of art. 
 
 How comes it, then, that there is a constant iemand 
 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 do people instinctively assume 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 inter- 
 mediary 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 pos- 
 sessed 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 
 
INTRODUCTORY 5 
 
 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 am- 
 bition 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 
 
 ' It is against " technic " in this sense of the term that the hero of 
 Mr. Howells's admirable novel, The Story of a Flay, 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 clap- 
 trap, 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 ?ay it 
 interestingly. Such a denial would simply be the negation of the very 
 idea of art. 
 
6 PLAY-MAKING 
 
 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 pro- 
 blems 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 indivi- 
 duality 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 conven- 
 tionality 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 
 
INTRODUCTORY 7 
 
 about them ; but one may have a great love for an art, 
 and some insight into its principles and methods, with- 
 out 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 drama- 
 tists do not, as a matter of fact, take pupils or write 
 handbooks.^ 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. iOne 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 
 dramatTcl'orm : how to develop and marshal it in such 
 
 1 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." 
 
8 PLAY-MAKING 
 
 a way as best to seize and retain the interest of a thea- 
 trical 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 ex- 
 pression through the medium of the theatre without 
 some understanding of the peculiar art of dramatic con- 
 struction^ 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 
 mariy people with moderately developed and cultivable 
 faculty ; ^nd it is these who, I trust, may find some 
 profit in the following discussions.^ Let them not for- 
 get, 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 incom- 
 municable 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 rela- 
 tive to the audience to whom the story is to be told! 
 One must assuine an audience of a certain status and 
 
 1 It may, be hoped, too, that even the accomplished dramatist may 
 take some interest in qonsidering the reasons for things which he does, 
 or does not do, by instinct. 
 
INTRODUCTORY 9 
 
 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 aniaudience 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 intel- 
 ligent ' playgoers, who have combined to provide them- 
 selves 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 consider- 
 able 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 
 
 1 This is not a phrase of contempt. The would-be intelligent play- 
 goer is vastly to be preferred to the playgoer who makes a boast of his 
 unintelligence. 
 
lo PLAY-MAKING 
 
 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 intel- 
 lectual 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 follow- 
 ing pages ; and I believe that a playwright who despises 
 such an audience will do so to the detriment, not only 
 of his popularity and iprofits, but of the artistic quality 
 of his work. 
 
 Some people may exclaim : " Why should the dram- 
 atist 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; ^ but the drama has 
 
 1 In all the arts, however, the very idea of craftsmanship implies 
 
INTRODUCTORY ii 
 
 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 p(lace. "The public," it has been 
 well said, "constitutes the theatre." The moment a 
 playwright confines his work within the two to 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 limi- 
 tations ; 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.^ 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 dram- 
 atist 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, 
 t 
 
 some sort of external precipient, 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. 
 
 1 Let me guard against the possibility that this might be interpreted 
 as a sneer at The Dynasts — a great work by a great poet. 
 
12 PLAY-MAKING 
 
 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 compre- 
 hensible and interesting in a theatre. 
 
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 oi 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 ^5 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 phy 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 
 
 13 
 
14 PLAY-MAKING 
 
 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 vsrell 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.^ A good example 
 in English is A Pair of Spectacles, by Mr. Sydney 
 Grundy, founded on a play by Labiche. In tl^is bright 
 little comedy every incident and situation bears upon 
 the general theme, and pleases us, not by its probability, 
 bu^ 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 
 
 1 For instance, // ne faut jurer de rien, II faut qu'une parte soil 
 ouverte oufermie, Un bienfait n'est jamais perdu. There is also a laree 
 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. 
 
THE CHOICE OF A THEME 15 
 
 composition. Mr. Galsworthy's more delicate and un- 
 emphatic art eludes this danger, at any r?* . 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 ^h^proverbe, or to take care that, as in 
 Strife, it be not suffered to make its domination felt, 
 except as an afterthought.^ 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 them- 
 selves 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? Among 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 
 
 1 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. 
 
i6 PLAY-MAKING 
 
 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. 
 Heme 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 
 naturatUy 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 
 
THE CHOICE OF A THEME 17 
 
 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.^ 
 In the mind of the playwright figs grow from thistles, > 
 and a silk purse — perhaps a Foftunatus's purse — may 
 often be made from a sow's ear. The whole delicate 
 texture of Ibsen's DolVs 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 in- 
 dependent of character — which can be carried through 
 by a given number of ready-made puppets — is essenti- 
 ally 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 
 
 ' 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'ttne Sainte and L'InviUe — grew out 
 of one and the same initial idea, may be found in H Annie Psychologique, 
 1894, p. 121. 
 
 C 
 
i8 PLAY-MAKING 
 
 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 demonstra- 
 tion 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? 
 I Assuredly not. The skeleton is, in a sense, the funda- 
 mental 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 mis- 
 reading of Aristotle, ^ at any rate a perversion of reason, 
 
 1 In my discussion of this point, I have rather simplified Aristotle's 
 
THE CHOICE OF A THEME 
 
 Kj 
 
 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 playwriting 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 recol- 
 lection 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 dra- 
 matic 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. 
 
 position. He appears to make action the essential element in tragedy 
 antl 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 actipn. 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 Francesca, and 
 Mr. Andrew Lang, Mr. Churton Collins, and Mr. A. B. Walkley took 
 part in it. 
 
20 PLAY-MAKING 
 
 " 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, ran- 
 sacking the storehouse 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 unhkely quarter, clamors at the gates of 
 birth, and will not let us rest till it be clothed in 
 dramatic flesh and blood.^ 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.^ Occasion- 
 ally, 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.^ 
 
 The same principle holds good in the case of the 
 
 1 " 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. 
 
 2 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 V Annie Psychologique, 1894, pp. 67, 76. 
 
 3 " 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 he 
 vrrites : " 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 mi«d, 
 that he must express it, and in dramatic form." 
 
THE CHOICE OF A THEME 21 
 
 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 mean- 
 time 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 m'ay 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 Savonarola, 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 
 
22 PLAY-MAKING 
 
 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. 
 
Ill 
 
 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 
 Ferdijiand Brunetiere. "The theatre in general," said 
 that critic, " is nothing but the place for the develops 
 ment of the human will, attacking the obstacles opposed 
 to- it by destiny, fortune, or circumstances." And again : 
 'JitDrama is a representation of the will of man in con- 
 flict with the mysterious powers or natural forces which 
 limit and belittle us; it is one of us thrown living 
 upon the stage, thei:e 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." ^ j 
 
 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 
 
 1 Etudes Critiques, vol. vii. pp. 153 and 207. 
 23 
 
24 PLAY-MAKING 
 
 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. Aga- 
 memnon's doom is sealed from the outset, and she 
 merely carries out a pre-arranged plot. There is con- 
 test 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 pastj^in the 
 actual course of the tragedy he simply writhes under 
 one revelation after another of bygone error and un- 
 witting 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 pro- 
 tagonist — Othello to wit? There is no struggle, no 
 conflict, between him and lago. It is lago alone who 
 exerts any will; neither Othello nor Desdemona makes 
 the smallest fight. From the moment when lago 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 pre- 
 tend 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 Brunetifere 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 
 
DRAMATIC AND UNDRAMATIC 25 
 
 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 
 ia something quite different. 
 
 (jThe 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 Brunetifere'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 Andro- 
 maque, or Molifere's Tartufe, or Ibsen's Pretenders, or 
 Duma'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 
 
26 PLAY-MAKING 
 
 of equally telling forms of drama. No one can say that 
 the Balcony Scene in Romeo and Juliet is undramatic, or 
 the " Galeoto fii il libro " scene in Mr. Stephen Phillips s 
 Paolo and Francesco ; 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 appre- 
 ciable 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 possi- 
 bilityTT' 
 
 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 obser- 
 vation 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 medieval 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 " back-chat " of two " knock- 
 about comedians." Certainly there is nothing more tell- 
 ing 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 
 
DRAMATIC AND UNDRAMATIC 27 
 
 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 ^ 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 this 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 
 
 1 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 qui pro quo is dragged out. 
 
28 PLAY-MAKING 
 
 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 unattrac- 
 tive question whether a single act of brutality on the 
 part of a drunken husband ought to be held so unpar- 
 donable 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 ques- 
 tion 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 mis- 
 adventure 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 in- 
 adequate obstacle. A youth named Andrea has been 
 brought up in a monastery, and destined for the priest- 
 hood ; 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 hef he naturally falls in 
 love ; and the tragedy lies, or ought to lie, in the con- 
 flict between this earthly passion and his heavenly call- 
 ing and election. But the author has taken pains to 
 
DRAMATIC AND UNDRAMATIC 29 
 
 make the obstacle between Andrea and Ilaria thoroughly 
 unreal. The fact that Andrea has as yet taken no irrevo- 
 cable 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 priest- 
 hood, and had defied Heaven, and imperilled his im- 
 mortal 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 were 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 for- 
 gotten. 
 
 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 th^ 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; wnereas the drama gives us only the culminating 
 points— or shall we say the intersecting culminations ?— 
 two or three destinies. Some novelists have excelled 
 
30 PLAY-MAKING 
 
 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 "peri- 
 peties," 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 Middle- 
 march or Anna Kar^nine — as the conditions of the 
 Chinese theatre actually do — some dramatists, we cannot 
 doubt, would voluntarily renounce that license of pro- 
 lixity, in order to cultivate an art of concentraiion 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 Jaeing necessarily, or even probably, material 
 
 ''for drama. vHow, 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 mani- 
 
 \ festation 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, 
 
DRAMATIC AND UNDRAMATIC 31 
 
 small vicissitudes of hope and fear, small unpleasant- 
 nesses, 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 dramatizer. 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 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 
 
 > 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. 
 
32 PLAY-MAKING 
 
 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 Brunetifere 
 formula. Few American dramatists can resist the 
 temptation of showing some masterful financierfeverishly 
 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 Bjornson'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 in- 
 solvent, 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 
 
DRAMATIC AND UNDRAMATIC 33 
 
 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. _ Her e we have, I .repeat, a typically jkamatic 
 theme : a great crisis, brinpngfoutjtwid^^^maai^ 
 of charaH5rrTior^nlv-Tn~theJEan krupt himself, _but_j£ 
 those arouM trim; arrd'naturally unfolding itself through 
 a jgrfes of t hose lesser jm s'esrw'Incirwe call inte resfing" 
 and mo ving^ scenes. THe^ play is scarcely a greaT oneT" 
 partly Becauselts ending is perfunctory, partly because 
 Bjornson, 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 bank- 
 ruptcy, dramatic in its nature and treatment, and those 
 undramatic bankruptcies to which reference has been 
 made. In La Douloureuse, by Maurice Donnay, bank- 
 ruptcy 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!^ 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.^ 
 
 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 
 
 1 There is a somewhat similar incident in Clyde Fitch's play, The 
 Moth and the Flame. 
 
 2 Les Corbeflux, by Henry 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 otlier's hands. 
 
 D 
 
34 PLAY-MAKING 
 
 dramatic art that it should deal so largely in shocks to 
 the nerves,^nd 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 and 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 anticlimax, one may cite the 
 death of OtheUo. Shakespeare was faced by no easy 
 problem. Desdemona was dead, Emilia dead, lago 
 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 fore- 
 gone 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 unmistaj^ably than in his solution of this 
 
DRAMATIC AND UNDRAMATIC 
 
 problem. We all remember how, as he is being 
 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 medicinable 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 hand- 
 ling 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 re- 
 course to along 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 Grafl theatre. I am far 
 
36 PLAY-MAKING 
 
 from saying that it was a bad method: no mfethod is 
 bad which holds and moves an audience. But in this 
 case it would have had the disadvantage of concen- 
 trating attention on the narrator instead of on the child's 
 parents, on the mere event instead of on the emotions 
 4t 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 oppor- 
 tunity 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 reachj their ears, 
 until one cry comes home to them with terrible distinct- 
 ness, "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 un- 
 expectedness. That is how to do a thing dramatically.^ 
 1 "Dramatic" has recently become one of the most overworked 
 
DRAMATIC AND UNDRAMATIC 37 
 
 ijVnd 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 hum- 
 drum 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 Maetertijick, in his own practice, con- 
 stantly deals with cris§s,.^and often with violent and 
 startling ones^_Ji 
 
 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, 191 1, 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 pub- 
 lished 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 con- 
 tents 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.^ 
 
38 PLAY-MAKING 
 
 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 con- 
 ventional theatricalism ; and it has, at some points, 
 positively enlarged the domain of dramatic art. Any 
 movement is good which helps to free art Jjrom the 
 
 tyranny of a code of rules and definitions. CXhe only 
 really valid definition of the dramatic is : Any representa- 
 
 ?tion of imaginary personages which is capable of in- 
 
 Cteresting 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 con- 
 tent 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.^ 
 
 1 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 
 
DRAMATIC AND UNDRAMATIC 39 
 
 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 exaggera- 
 tion 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 
 
 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 
 shop-girl, 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 materia.1, 
 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. 
 
40 PLAY-MAKING 
 
 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 drarnatic 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 ;^ 
 
 only it happens to be entirely natural and probable, and 
 
 emmer^^_^^^s^me~cd,^^£S£l£X^ Ought we, then, to 
 
 despiseitBecause of the element it has in common with 
 
 the picture-poster situation of preposterous melodrama ? 
 
 ' 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 
 
DRAMATIC AND UNDRAMATIC 41 
 
 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. 
 
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 im- 
 portant 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 mechani- 
 cally 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. 
 
 42 
 
THE ROUTINE OF COMPOSITION 43 
 
 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 compo- 
 sition 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 consider- 
 able 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 Mis- 
 alliance, he has sedulously concealed the fact — to the 
 detriment of the plays. ^ 
 
 1 Sardou wrote careful and detailed scenarios, Dumas Jils held it a 
 waste of time to do so. PaiUeron 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 ithe balance of the play, in myl 
 head; but this, of course, does not depend entirely on entrances and| 
 exits." Mr. Henry Arthur Jones says : " I know the leading scenes, and I 
 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 
 
44 PLAY-MAKING 
 
 The scenario or skeleton is so manifestly the natural 
 groundwork of a dramatic performance, that the play- 
 wrights of the Italian commedia deWarte wrote nothing 
 more than a scheme of scenes, and left the actors to do 
 the rest. The same practice prevailed in early Eliza- 
 bethan 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 sixt^nth and seven- 
 teenth centuries, both in England andHn 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 play- 
 wrights 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 
 1 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 
 
 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." 
 
THE ROUTINE OF COMPOSITION 45 
 
 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 un- 
 expected developments, the less characters they. ^ 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 person- 
 ages, 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 Xnat line with an ease 
 and freedom which seems to its possessor preternatural 
 and almost uncanny.^ 
 
 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 character will every now and then seem 
 
 * A friend of the late Clyde Fitch writes \<j ine : " Fitch was often .. 
 astonished at the way in which bis characters developed. He tried to 
 make them do certain things : they did others." 
 
 2 This account of the matter seems to find support in a statement 
 by M. Frangois 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 tight rein on 
 his more instinctive mental processes. See L'Annh Psychologiqm, 1894, 
 p. 120. 
 
 3 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_, 
 
46 PLAY-MAKING 
 
 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 relation- 
 ship 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. * 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. 
 flbsen had written large portions of the play now 
 known to us as Rosmersholm before he decided that 
 
 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." 
 
 1 " 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 buddenly 
 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." 
 
THE ROUTINE OF COMPOSITION 47 
 
 Rebecca should not be married to Rosmer. He also~i 
 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-writ- 
 ing; 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 mechan- 
 ism. 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.^ 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 
 
 ' The manuscripts of Dumas fits are said to contain, as a rule, about 
 four times as much matter as the printed play ! (Parigot : Gdnie et 
 MUier, p. 243.) This probably means, however, that he preserved 
 tentative and ultimately rejected scenes, which most playwrights destroy 
 as they go along. 
 
48 PLAY-MAKING 
 
 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-con- 
 fident of his dramatic calling and election. There may 
 be authors who can write vital plays, as Shakespeare is 
 said (on rather poor evidence) ^ 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 geo- 
 metrical 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.? But for that very reason, despite their un- 
 doubted intellectual power, M. Hervieu's dramas com- 
 mand our respect rather than our enthusiasm. The , 
 dramatist should aim at being logical without seeming so.^ 
 ^ It is sometimes said that a playwright ought to 
 construct his play backwards, and even to write his last 
 'act first.* This doctrine belongs to the period of the 
 
 1 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. 
 
 2 Since writing this I have learnt that my conjecture is correct, at 
 any rate as regards some of M. Hervieu's plays. 
 
 2 See Chapters XIII and XVI. 
 
 4 This view is expressed with great emphasis by Dumasyf/j 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. 
 
THE ROUTINE OF COMPOSITION 49 
 
 well-made play, when climax was regarded as the one 
 thing needful in dramatic art, and anticlimax as the un- 
 forgivable 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.^ 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 com- 
 plaint that " the last act is weak " is not always or neces- 
 sarily 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.^ 
 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 con- 
 vention, 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 
 
 1 See Chapter XVIII. 
 
 2 See Chapter XX. 
 
so PLAY-MAKING 
 
 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.^ 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 pro- 
 cess 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, justwhere each character 
 is, whether He is standing on the hearthrug and She 
 sitting on the settee, or vice versd ? 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 
 
 1 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 i is as 
 right as I can make it. Indeed, whenlan 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. 
 
THE ROUTINE OF COMPOSITION 51 
 
 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 back- 
 ground 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 " posi- 
 tions " of their characters. The question is : at what 
 stage of the process of composition ought this visualiza- 
 tion 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 no.te- 
 books, which he produced from his pocket whenevet* 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 mannikins 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.^ It may happen, indeed, that some natural 
 phenomenon, some property or piece of furniture, is 
 
 > One is not surprised to learn that Sardou " did his stage-manage- 
 ment as he went along," and always knew exactly the position of his 
 characters from moment to moment. 
 
52 , PLAY-MAKING 
 
 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, Molifere 
 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 evcfl 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 ^ possible and eflfective. 
 Few things, ii;deed, 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. Kven when a mechanical effect can be pro- 
 duced 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 
 
 ' And aurally, it may be added. Sarcey comments on the impossi- 
 bility 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. 
 
THE ROUTINE OF COMPOSITION 53 
 
 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 illumina- 
 tion 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- 
 
54 PLAY-MAKING 
 
 directions the abhorrent jargon of the early nineteenth 
 century. When one comes across a manuscript be- 
 spattered 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 be- 
 ginners 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 ter- 
 minology 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. i 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 ; 
 
THE ROUTINE OF COMPOSITION si 
 
 and when the play comes to be printed, the general 
 reader is merely bewildered and annoyed by techni- 
 calities, 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 gossipping 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 con- 
 temporaries. 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 
 
56 PLAY-MAKING 
 
 as completely as may be in their own proper medium of 
 dramatic action and dialogue. You cannot with im- 
 punity 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 eas^'^y surpass him as dramatists. By adopt- 
 ing 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 
 bought 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 detri- 
 ment 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 
 
THE ROUTINE OF COMPOSITION 57 
 
 mental vision. And here I may mention a principle, 
 based on more than mere convenience, which some play- 
 wrights 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. 
 
DRAMATIS PERSONA E 
 
 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 ulti- 
 mately 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 oi 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 tenlperament 
 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 
 
 58 
 
DRAMATIS PERSONAE S9 
 
 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 effected 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 xinsuited to the physical con- 
 ditions 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 char- 
 acters, 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. Ih a subtle comedy, or a psycho- 
 logical 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 c^ Bergerac there are 
 
6o PLAY-MAKING 
 
 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; ^r^jG-kosts 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 con- 
 sciously place th^ir "comedy in a realm of convention, 
 but generally c(/nsidered 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.^ 
 
 ' 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 em- 
 ployed. For the rest, the Greek habit of nomenclature made it possible 
 
 ) 
 
DRAMATIS PERSONAE 6i 
 
 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, Sor- 
 dido, and Fallace. After the Restoration, Jonson, Beau- 
 mont 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 rein- 
 forced 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 trans- 
 formation was completed about the middle of the nine- 
 teenth 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 
 
 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. 
 
62 PLAY-MAKING 
 
 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 dram- 
 atists are habitually happy in their nomenclature, others 
 much less so. Ibsen would often change a name thfee 
 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 playv 
 the traditional list of " Dramatis Personae." BjSrnson, 
 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 inde- 
 pendently 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 
 
DRAMATIS PERSONAE 63 
 
 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 conversa- 
 tional 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." 
 
BOOK II 
 THE BEGINNING 
 
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 pro- 
 position, the fact is that playwrights are more than 
 sufficiently apt to ignore or despise the rule.^ Especi- 
 ally is there a tendency to rebel against the require- 
 ment 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. 
 
 la life there are no such things as beginnings. Even 
 a man's birth is a quite arbitrary ppint at which to 
 launch his biography; for the determining factors in 
 his career are to be found in persons, events, and con- 
 ditions that existed before he was ever thought of. For 
 
 1 Writing of Le Supplice cPune 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." 
 
 67 
 
68 PLAY-MAKING 
 
 the biographer, however, and for the novelist as a 
 writer of fictitious biography, birth forms a good con- 
 ventional starting-point. He can give a chapter or so 
 to " Ancestry," and then relate the adventures of his 
 hero from the cradle onwards. Butdhe dramatist, as| 
 we have seen, deals, not with protracted sequences of j 
 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 curtair^?^ 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 atten- 
 tion 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 ante- 
 cedent 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 hfs various 
 themes. Of his comedies, all except one .begin with a 
 simple conversation, showing a state of affairs from 
 
THE POINT OF ATTACK 69 
 
 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 techni- 
 cally 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 situatibn 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 ficti- 
 tious 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 Shyloek, and shown disapproval of his 
 business methods, can scarcely be regarded as a pre- 
 liminary 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 
 
70 PLAY-MAKING 
 
 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 circum- 
 stance 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 PetriSchio — begins, de- 
 velops, and ends before our very eyes. In The Winter's 
 Tale, a brief conversation between Camillo and Archi- 
 damus 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 
 
THE POINT OF ATTACK 71 
 
 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. 1 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 con- 
 temporary Wintet'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 
 
 I 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. 
 
72 PLAY-MAKING 
 
 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 w^at the 
 V 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 con- 
 temporary, 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.^ 
 
 In the opening scene of Othello it is true that some 
 talk passes between lago and Roderigo before they 
 raise the alarm and awaken Brabantio ; but it is care- 
 1 See Chapter XII. 
 
THE POINT OF ATTACK 73 
 
 fully non-expository talk ; it expounds nothing but lago'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 compre- 
 hensible. 
 
 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 con- 
 summate 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 
 • ■ r^-nf Shakespeare's unrivalled masterpieces of dramatic 
 craftsmanship. One could pretty safely wager that if 
 
74 PLAY-MAKING 
 
 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 ; where- 
 upon 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 Fortin- 
 bras 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 com- 
 mentators, 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.^ The real exposition 
 — ior Hamlei 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.^ 
 
 ' 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. 
 
 2 I omit all speculation as to the form which the story assumed in 
 the Ur-Hamlei. We have no evidence on the point; and, as xy.fj^J'. 
 was no doubt free to remodel the material as he thought fit, even in 
 following his original he was making a deliberate artistic choice. 
 
THE POINT OF ATTACK 75 
 
 Hamlet the Younger was to be the protagonist : the 
 interest of the play was to centre in his mental pro- 
 cesses. 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, an<i 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.^ 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 
 
 1 Shakespeare committed it in Romeo and Juliet, where 1. he made 
 Friar Laurence, in the concluding scene, re-tell 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. 
 
76 PLAY-MAKING 
 
 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, beforethe 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 ^ 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. Neverthe- 
 less, the very obviousness of the considerations involved 
 makes this a good example of the importance of dis- 
 covering 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, 
 
 ' 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. 
 
THE POINT OF ATTACK ;; 
 
 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, present- 
 ing 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 .^ustav 
 Frey tag, in his Technik des Dramas, happily entitles an 
 emt&iiencte 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 
 th^e 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 for- 
 gotten, 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 deal- 
 ing. 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 
 
78 PLAY-MAKING 
 
 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 com- 
 parable 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 pro- 
 duction, and surveying the whole series of his subse- 
 quent works in which he had Stage presentation directly 
 
THE POINT OF ATTACK 79 
 
 in view/ 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 ante- 
 cedents to be stated ; neither turns upon any disclosure 
 of bygone events or emotions. We are, indeed, afi"orded 
 brief glimpses into the past both of Stensgaard and of 
 Stockmann; but the glimpses are incidental and in- 
 essential. 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, ajeu d' esprit, 
 one might almost say, though th&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 har- 
 monized. 
 
 Going a little more into detail, we find in Ibsen's 
 work an extraordinary progress in the art of so unfold- 
 ing the drama of the past as to make the gradual revela- 
 tion 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 Hiordis demanded of the man who should be her 
 mate — t^iis crucial revelation is brought about in a scene 
 
 1 This excludes Love's Comedy, Brand, Peer Gynt, and Emperor and 
 Galilean. 
 
8o PLAY-MAKING 
 
 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 situa- 
 tion. I am not holding up The Vikings as a great master- 
 piece ; it has many weaknesses both of substance and of 
 method ; but in this particular art of indistinguishablyl 
 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 narra- 
 tives, 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 rela- 
 tions 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 T6n- 
 nesen'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 
 
THE POINT OF ATTACK 8i 
 
 " 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 tlae function, in fact, 
 
 of the First, Second, and Third Gentlemen, so common 
 
 in Elizabethan and pseudo-Elizabethan plays.^ 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.^ 
 
 When we turn to his next play, A DoWs 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 ^ of the 
 
 1 See, for example, King Henry VIII., Act IV., and the opening 
 scene of Tennyson's Qtteen Mary. 
 
 2 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 disin- 
 terested 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. 
 
 ^ It is perhaps worth noting that Gabriele d'Annunzio, in La Gioconda, 
 reverts to, and outdoes, the French classic convention, by giving us three 
 
 G 
 
82 PLAY-MAKING 
 
 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 housewives of the 
 sewing-bee in Pillars of Society should have been a 
 stranger to the town, so was it 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 equi- 
 
 actors and four confidants. The play consists of a crisis in three lives, 
 passively, though sympathetically, contemplated by what is in eifect 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. 
 
THE POINT OF ATTACK 83 
 
 librium between the drama of the past and the drama 
 of the present. The drama of the past is almost every- 
 thing, 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 exposi-, 
 tion 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 ts the 
 drama. TJ[ie persons who are tearing the veils from the 
 past, and/qi; 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 ^ 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 dispropor- 
 tionately meagre. None the less, or all the more, is it 
 
 1 Dryden, in his £ssay of Dramatic Poesy, represents this method as 
 being characteristic of Greek tragedy as a whole. The tragic poets, 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." (Ed. Arnold, 1903, 
 p. 21.) Dryden seems to think that the method was forced upon thera 
 by " the rule of time." 
 
84 PLAY-MAKING 
 
 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 ^ 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 consum- 
 mate mastery.^ 
 
 '> 
 
 ' It is a rash enterprise to reconstruct Ibsen, but one cannot help 
 wondering how he would have planned A DolPs Home 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 
 
THE POINT OF ATTACK 85 
 
 Rosmersholm is so obviously nothing but the catas-.^ 
 trophe 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 go minutely into the remaining plays. 
 Hedda Gabler is perhaps that in which a sound pro- 
 portion between the past and the present is most suc- 
 cessfully 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 circum- 
 stances 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 sub- 
 sequent 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 
 
 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. 
 
86 PLAY-MAKING 
 
 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. 
 
VII 
 
 EXPOSITION : ITS END AND ITS MEANS 
 
 We have passed in rapid survey the practices of Shake- 
 speare 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 advan- 
 tage of the fact to give your play animated and rapid 
 movement. 
 
 87 
 
88 PLAY-MAKING 
 
 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 Divorgons, Sir Arthur Pinero's Gay 
 Lord Quex, Mr. Shaw's DeviVs Disciple, Oscar Wilde's 
 Importance of Being Earnest, Mr. Galsworthy's S«7z'er 5ox 
 .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 suffer- 
 ing 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 con- 
 ditions, it is difficult to produce a play of very complex 
 psychological, moral, or emotional substance, in which 
 
EXPOSITION: ITS END AND ITS MEANS 89 
 
 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 character- 
 ization, 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 cha- 
 racter-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 astonish- 
 ing minuteness and truth; but this does not imply 
 
90 PLAY-MAKING 
 
 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 \yhich 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.^ Yet again, 
 the social position and environment of the great Shake- 
 spearean 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 expres- 
 sion. He has, in short, to submit to a hundred ham- 
 pering 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 A kkord. 
 " From calm, through storm, to calm," is its character- 
 istic formula ; whether the concluding calm be one of 
 life and serenity pr 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 
 ' See Chapter XXIII. 
 
EXPOSITION: ITS END AND ITS MEANS 91 
 
 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. ^ 
 
 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 
 
 1 Henry Becque's two i best-known plays aptly exemplify the two types 
 of opening. In Les Corbeaux we have almost an entire act of calm 
 domesticity in wliTch the only hint of coming trouble is an allusion to 
 Vigneron's attacks of vertigo. In La Parisipme 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, voilk men 
 mari ! " — and we find that the two are not husband and wife, but wife 
 and lover. 
 
92 PLAY-MAKING 
 
 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 in- 
 separable 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, 
 syphon 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 
 
EXPOSITION: ITS END AND ITS MEANS 93 
 
 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 ; bufin 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 pre- 
 liminaries 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 dis- 
 missed, 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 tRe 
 playwrights of to-da£) 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 candi- 
 date for Parliament, and bringing on a reporter to 
 interview his private secretary. The incident is 
 
94 PLAY-MAKING 
 
 perfectly natural and probable ; all one can say of it is 
 that it is perhaps an over-simplification of the dramatist's 
 task.^ 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 EUean, 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 Drumhile, 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 announce- 
 ment 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 pur- 
 posely 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 
 
 ' 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. 
 
EXPOSITION: ITS END AND ITS MEANS 95 
 
 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 
 EUean 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 con- 
 veyed 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 
 hypercriticism which objects to an exposition so 
 natural and probable as that of The Second Mrs. Tan- 
 queray, simply on the ground that certain characters are 
 introduced for the purpose of conveying certain infor- 
 mation. 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 
 
96 PLAY-MAKING 
 
 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 
 thelgsser 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 pro- 
 cesses, 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 pos- 
 sible, 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.^ 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 pre- 
 liminary personagesr* Take, for instance, the case of 
 
 The Second Mrs. Tanqueray. It would have been theo- 
 retically possible for Sir Arthur Pinero to have given 
 
 'In that charming comedy, Rosemary, by Messrs. Parker and Carson, 
 there is a gap of fifty years between the last act and its predecessor j 
 but the so-called last act is only an " epi-monologue." 
 
EXPOSITION: ITS END AND ITS MEANS 97 
 
 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 EUean ; 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 cha- 
 racters. 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 intro- 
 ductory 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 ail-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 
 
 H 
 
98 PLAY-MAKING 
 
 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 
 Wqy, 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 unemo- 
 tional 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 narra- 
 tive — 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 
 an4 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 per- 
 sonal acquaintance.) Thus Moli^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 The 
 
EXPOSITION: ITS END AND ITS MEANS 99 
 
 Doctof'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^ 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 
 schoolfellows. 
 
 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 impos- 
 sible for a playwright to raise his curtain upon his 
 leading character or characters, because the actor- 
 manager would thus be baulked of his carefully 
 
 1 Or at most two closely connected characters : for instance, a 
 husband and wife. 
 
100 PLAY-MAKING 
 
 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 punc- 
 tually 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. Tan- 
 queray, 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, he 
 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 
 
EXPOSITION: ITS END AND ITS MEANS loi 
 
 late-comer who misses it deprives himself of a prelim- 
 inary 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 ^et 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.?' 
 
VIII 
 
 THE FIRST ACT 
 
 Both in 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 J believe to be a 
 complete npiisreading 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 representa- 
 tion, 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 theo- 
 rists, 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 
 
THE FIRST ACT 103 
 
 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 examin- 
 ing 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 
 
104 PLAY-MAKING 
 
 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 whimsi- 
 calities 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 archi- 
 tecture, 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 
 
THE FIRST ACT los 
 
 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' trafifick of the stage"; but in 
 many cases a whole day, or even more, must ibe under- 
 stood 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.^ 
 Even he, however, subjects the events which take place 
 behind the scenes to a good deal of "ideal" com- 
 pression. 
 
 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 
 
 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. 
 
io6 PLAY-MAKING 
 
 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 I'acte n'existait pas, il 
 
 faudrait I'inventer " ; but as a matter of fact it has 
 
THE FIRST ACT 107 
 
 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 in- 
 dicate 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 A Iphonse, 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 nomi- 
 nally 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.^ But in trjith the three-act 
 division ought no more to be elp^ated into an absolute 
 rule than the five-act division. CjWe have seen that a'l 
 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 thjere 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 
 
 ' 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. 
 
io8 PLAY-MAKING 
 
 nine, or ten acts, but that there will be only the four 
 conventional interacts in the course of the evening. 
 C3rhe 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,^ 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.* Roughly, 
 indeedjCan 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 
 
 ' 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. 
 
 ^ 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 main- 
 tained that a true dramatic artist could only profit by the greater 
 flexibility of his medium. 
 
THE FIRST ACT 109 
 
 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 houi* — for 
 instance, of the time between "going in to dinner" and 
 the return of the ladies to the drawing-room.l 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 I'lsle. 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 multi- 
 tude 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 
 
no PLAY-MAKING 
 
 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. Improba- 
 bilities are admissible in light comedy, and still more in 
 farce, which would wreck the fortunes of a drama pur- 
 porting 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 vsensation to be got out of 
 three or four comparatively brief experiences, suited to 
 our powers of perception, than out of one protracted 
 1 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 ? 
 
THE FIRST ACT in 
 
 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 Haunt- 
 ing 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 insani- 
 tary 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 dis- 
 covered 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 con- 
 fidence, and learns that he will have the 
 Compact Majority, not at, but on, his 
 back. 
 
112 PLAY-MAKING 
 
 ACT IV.— The Compact Majority on the War- 
 path. — The crowd, finding that its im- 
 mediate 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 relation- 
 ships, 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 bne'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. 
 
THE FIRST ACT 113 
 
 In Pillars of Society Ibsen goes as far as any play- 
 wright 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 
 Tonnesen ; (c) a cousin, Hilmar TOnnesen. 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 improb- 
 able 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 
 
114 PLAY-MAKING 
 
 of Johan and Betty ; ^ 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 intro- 
 duced 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 oi 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. Lemaltre'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 circum- 
 stance 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 com- 
 
 ^ He was, in the first draft ; and Lona Hessel was only a distant 
 relative of Bernick's. 
 
THE FIRST ACT iiS 
 
 mended 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 empti- 
 ness, 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. ^J> 
 
 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 compress 
 the whole action into the remaining two-third;^. But 
 even in a four- or five-act play, the interest of the 
 audience ought to be strongly enlisted, and its anticipa- 
 tion 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 
 
 1 The Greeks, who knew most things, knew the value of manageable 
 dimensions and simple structure in a work of art, and had g^ word to 
 express that combination of qualities — the word eusynopton. 
 
ii6 PLAY-MAKING 
 
 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 a^;count of the 
 matter niay 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 anticlimax. Tf 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 interesfinsufficiently 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 
 
THE FIRST ACT 117 
 
 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 im- 
 possible 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 pro- 
 blems 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-Tonnesen 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 
 re-appearance 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 know- 
 ledge 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 objec- 
 tively, 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 dis- 
 secting room, nor has the theatrical audience anything 
 in common with a class I of students dispassionately 
 
ii8 PLAY-MAKING 
 
 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 prin- 
 ciple of the playwright's art — namely, that, with certain 
 doubtful exceptions in the case of historical themgs, 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 oi 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 revela- 
 tion of Bernick's treachery, first to Johan, second to 
 
THE FIRST ACT 119 
 
 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 con^ 
 sideration. 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 im- 
 perfection 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 un- 
 impaired. 
 
 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. 
 
IX 
 
 The paradox of dramatic theory is this : while our aim 
 is, of course, to write plays which shall achieve im- 
 mortality, 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 
 
 1 20 
 
"CURIOSITY" AND "INTEREST" 121 
 
 dominating an audience to which his theme is entirely 
 unknown,^ and so coming triumphant through his first- 
 night ordeal. This principle is subject to a certain quali- 
 fication 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 repre- 
 sented 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.^ 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, 
 
 ' The view that the dramatist has only to think of pleasing himself is 
 elsewhere dealt with. See p. 10. 
 
 ^ 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 unbiassed, 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. 
 
122 PLAY-MAKING 
 
 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 
 rufifianly 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 
 tumbrils 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 per- 
 formed 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. i 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 
 
 * 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 ! " 
 
"CURIOSITY" AND "INTEREST" 123 
 
 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 oi Little Mary, what was meant by that ever- 
 recurring expression, and probably relied to some 
 extent on an effect of amused surprise when the dis- 
 closure 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 true, 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." ^ These are the things 
 which theatrical gossip, printed and oral, most industri- 
 ously disseminates. The fine details of a plot are much 
 less easily conveyed and legs likely to be remembered. 
 
 * 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. 
 
124 PLAY-MAKING 
 
 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 
 
 jvith 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.^ 
 
 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 isUt 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 remem- 
 bered 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 abso- 
 lutely 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 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. - 
 
"CURIOSITY" AND "INTEREST" 125 
 
 the only logical course, and address himself to a spec- 
 tator 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 dis- 
 counted 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 
 farj astray. ( Experience shows us that dramatic interest 
 is entirely distinct from mere curiosity, and survive^ 
 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 advan- 
 tage by aid of a well-ordered fable. In a picture, I take 
 
126 PLAY-MAKING 
 
 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, there- 
 fore, 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 
 
"CURIOSITY" AND "INTEREST" 127 
 
 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 foreknow- 
 ledge 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 
 fs 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 par- 
 ticular 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 
 
128 PLAY-MAKING 
 
 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 disillusion- 
 ment 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 
 
"CURIOSITY" AND "INTEREST" 129 
 
 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 dis- 
 covered 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 play- 
 goer 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,"^ let us try 
 to discover of what elements that pleasure is composed. 
 It is, no doubt, somewhat complex. For one thing, we 
 
 1 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. 
 
 K 
 
,i3o PLAY-MAKING 
 
 have pleasure in meeting old friends. Sir Peter, Lady 
 Tfeazle, 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 recogni- 
 tion 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 play- 
 goer 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 recogni- 
 tion 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 deUcacy 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 
 
"CURIOSITY" AND "INTEREST" 131 
 
 Lady Teazle's presence behind the screen. But this, 
 
 we saw, is precisely the reverse of the truth : the 
 lole interest of the scene arises from our knowledge 
 
 Lady Teazle's presence. Had Sheridan fallen into 
 rs. Oliphant's mistake, the little shock of surprise 
 lich the first-night audience would have felt when the 
 reen was thrown down would have been no com- 
 nsation at all for the comparative tameness and 
 intlessness of the preceding passages. Thus we see 
 at the greater part of our pleasure arises precisely 
 )m the fact that we know what Sir Peter and Charles 
 I not know, or, in other words, that we have a clear 
 iion of all the circumstances, relations, and implica- 
 )ns of a certain conjuncture of affairs, in which two, 
 
 least, of the persons concerned are ignorantly and 
 indly moving towards issues of which they do not 
 earn. We are, in fact, in the position of superior 
 telligences contemplating, with miraculous clairvoy- 
 ice, the stumblings and fumblings of poor blind mortals 
 raying through the labyrinth of life. Our seat in the 
 eatre is like a throne on the Epicurean Olympus, 
 tience we can view with perfect intelligence, but with- 
 it participation or responsibility, the intricate reactions^ 
 
 human destiny. And this sense of superiority does 
 »t pall upon us. When Othello comes on the scene, 
 diant and confident in Desdemona's love, our know- 
 dge of the fate awaiting him makes him a hundred 
 nes more interesting than could any mere curiosity as 
 
 what was about to happen. It is our prevision of 
 ora's exit at the end of the last act that lends its 
 amatic poignancy to her entrance at the beginning of 
 e first. 
 
 There is nothing absolutely new in this theory.^ 
 
 '■ I myself expressed it in slightly different terms nearly ten years ago. 
 Juriosity," I said, " is the accidental relish of a single night ; whereas 
 ! essential and abiding pleasure of the theatre lies in foreknowledge. 
 
 relation to the characters in the drama, the audience are as gods, 
 king before and after. Sitting in the theatre, we taste, for a moment, the 
 ry of omniscience. With vision unsealed, we watch the gropings of 
 
132 PLAY-MAKING 
 
 "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 fore- 
 knowledge 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. U 
 suggest that the theorists have hitherto dwelt far too 
 much on curiosity^ — which may be defined as the 
 interest of ignorance — and far too little on the feeling 
 of superiority, of clairvoyance, with which we contem- 
 plate 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 
 
 purblind mortals after happiness, and smile at their stumblings, their • 
 blunders, their futile quests, their misplaced exultations, their ground- 
 less 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." 
 
 ' 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.' 
 
"CURIOSITY" AND "INTEREST" 133 
 
 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 higher and more 
 abiding forms of interest. 
 
X 
 
 FORESHADOWING,. NOT FORESTALLING 
 
 We return now to the point at which the foregoing dis- 
 quisition—it is not a digression— became necessary. 
 We had arrived at the general principle that the play- 
 wright's chief aim in his first act ought to be to arouse 
 and carry forward the interest of the audience^i 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 prelimin- 
 aries clearly and crisply, and let issue be joined with- 
 out 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 interest- 
 ing, which have exhausted any interest they ever pos- 
 sessed, 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 a- abusing 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-con- 
 struction lies in giving to each act an individuality and 
 interest of its own, without so rounding it off as to 
 
 ^34 
 
FORESHADOWING, NOT FORESTALLING 135 
 
 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 withi 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 
 
136 PLAY-MAKING 
 
 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 Winder- 
 mere's Fan, the heroine, Lady Windermere, has learnt 
 that her husband has of late been seen to call very fre- 
 quently 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 some- 
 thing 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 extraordin- 
 
FORESHADOWING, NOT FORESTALLING 137 
 
 arily 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 pro- 
 duced 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 Winder- 
 mere 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 funda- 
 mental, and the true artist is the last to despise it.^. 
 
 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 
 
 1 That great story-teller, Alexander Dumas ^ire, chose a straight- 
 forward 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-Mdgrin, 
 beckons to his henchman and says, as the curtain falls, " Qu'on me 
 cherche les mimes hommes qui ont assassini Dugast ! " 
 
138 PLAY-MAKING 
 
 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 him- 
 self at home in the flat ; so he presently goes off, leaving 
 the new-comer 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 burglar- 
 iously employed, Lord Eric enters, and cannot refrain 
 from a slight expression of surprise. The lady takes the 
 situation with humorous calmness, they fall into con- 
 versation, 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 the 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 lyoung, 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 
 
FORESHADOWING, NOT FORESTALLING 139 
 
 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 for- 
 ward, 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 
 
HO PLAY-MAKING 
 
 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 his 
 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 im- 
 portance. 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 f aire — 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 
 6bme 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."^ 
 
 ' 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 
 
FORESHADOWING, NOT FORESTALLING 141 
 
 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 adven- 
 ture 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 AUingham ; 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 forshadowing without fore- 
 stalling 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 
 
 fostered anticipation of an important scene. See Chapters XVII. and 
 XXI. 
 
142 PLAY-MAKING 
 
 interest as we feel at the end of the first act is vague 
 and unfocussed. 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. 
 
BOOK III 
 
 THE MIDDLE 
 
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 vesti- 
 bule 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 open- 
 ing paragraphs of Chapter VIII ; but we may now look 
 into it a little more closely. 
 
 What is the characteristic of a fine piece of architec- 
 ture ? Manifestly an organic relation, a carefuHy-planned 
 
 145 L 
 
146 PLAY-MAKING 
 
 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 Rosmerskolm 
 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 with- 
 
TENSION AND ITS SUSPENSION 147 
 
 out 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 con- 
 siderable 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 sensa- 
 tion with which we contemplate a great piece of archi- 
 tecture, 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 sa:id to 
 be " constructed." Construction means dramatic archi- 
 tecture, 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, contem- 
 plation ; 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. 
 
148 PLAY-MAKING 
 
 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 
 
 jhe 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 audi- 
 ence. 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 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 suflfer 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 
 
TENSION AND ITS SUSPENSION 149 
 
 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 
 Doctor 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 wTien it was the 
 fashion to give each act a sub-title ; and one of its acts is 
 
ISO PLAY-MAKING 
 
 headed "The Sword of Datnocles." 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 some one's head : and 
 when once we are confident that it will fall at the fated 
 moment, we do not mind having our attention momen- 
 tarily 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 dQubly 
 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.' 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 
 
 " This method of heightening the tension would have been somewhat 
 analogous to that employed by Oscar Wilde in Lady Windermere's 
 instmctiong to her butler, cited on p. 137. 
 
TENSION AND ITS SUSPENSION 151 
 
 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 DolVs 
 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 ga|hered impetus to the 
 main actjon 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 KroU, 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 text-book. 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, revela- 
 tion, 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 
 
152 PLAY-MAKING 
 
 enlisted the curiosity of his audience on 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 develop- 
 ment 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.* 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 
 
 ^ 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 thsprimum 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. 
 
TENSION AND ITS SUSPENSION 153 
 
 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 begmning. 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. 
 
XII 
 
 PREPARATION : THE FINGER-POST 
 
 We shall find, on looking into it, that most of the tech- 
 nical 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 vaid^; " You will find it infinitely 
 pleasing," says Dryden,^ " 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, con- 
 sidered very advanced and daring. The primary mean- 
 ing 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 hus- 
 band, on discovering that his wife has had an intrigue 
 before their marriage, and that a little girl whom she 
 ' Of Dramatic Poesy, ed. Arnold, 1903, p. 60. 
 154 
 
PREPARATION: THE FINGER-POST 155 
 
 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 1S73 ; but Dumas had so "pre- 
 pared " the coup de thedtre that it passed with very slight 
 difficulty on the first night, and with none at all at sub- 
 sequent performances and revivals. How had he " pre- 
 pared " 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 this 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 per- 
 suasion, we have not to decide between this and the 
 opposite, or Shawesque, principle of shocking and start- 
 ling 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. 
 
iS6 PLAY-MAKING 
 
 Reverting, now, to the domain of pure craftsmanship, 
 can we agree 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 
 Idivine 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 prepara- 
 tions 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} 
 
 ... 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 antici- 
 pation 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 ; 
 
 ' The World, December 20, 1899. 
 
PREPARATION: THE FINGER-POST 157 
 
 and those who have not read the book cannot possibly 
 guess that this mock marriage, instantly and ceremoni- 
 ously dissolved, can have any ulterior effect upon the 
 fortunes of any one concerned. Thus, the whole scene, 
 however curious in itself, seems motiveless and result- 
 less. 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 inklmg of what 
 was preparing. It is capital drama when we come to 
 it, really human, really tragic. The arbitrary prohibi- 
 tions of the Mosaic law have no religious or moral 
 force either for David or for Hannah. They feel ^t 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 
 unskilfi4 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 
 
158 PLAY-MAKING 
 
 of no tension in the earlier acts of this play, because we 
 have not jjeen 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 charac- 
 teristic 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 elucida- 
 tions 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.^ 
 
 ^ 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 
 
PREPARATION: THE FINGER-POST 159 
 
 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 per- 
 verse 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. ! 
 
 us who the strange man is, the incident has no meaning for us. In 
 1855 Ibsen had all his technical lessons yet to learn. 
 
i6o PLAY-MAKING 
 
 In the ancient, and in the modern romantic, drama, 
 oracles, portents, prophecies, horoscopes and such-like 
 intromissions of the supernatural afforded a very con- 
 venient 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, in- 
 ward 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 
 B,rabantiosay- ^ y,,^ i.^^ 
 
 " 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 re- 
 search." 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. 
 
PREPARATION: THE FINGER-POST i6i 
 
 I merely point to it as a conspicuous example of the 
 use of the finger-post.^ 
 
 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 misapprehen- 
 sion on the part of the audience, which shall be almost 
 instantly corrected in some pleasant or otherwise 
 effective fashion.^ It is naturally difficult to think of 
 striking instances of the misleading finger-post; 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 Modem 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 bi^ks down near Margaret's 
 " cottage, and, while thq^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 
 
 1 The fact that Mr. Phillips should have deemed such a foreshadow- 
 ing necessary shows how in stinctively a dra matist feels t ^ ^t the lo gic of 
 his art requires him to assume that his audiehce^isjgnorant Qf,Jug_ fable. . 
 In reality, very few rrienibers of tfie first-night audience, or of any other, 
 can have depended on old Angela's vaticination for the requisite fore- 
 sight of events. But this does not prove Angela to be artistically 
 superfluous. 
 
 2 See pp. 140, 279- 
 
 M 
 
i62 PLAY-MAKING 
 
 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 in- 
 stance 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 gauntlet. 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 
 
PREPARATION: THE FINGER-POST 163 
 
 dearly bought at the expense of subsequent disillu- 
 sionment. 
 
 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 ivortex 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 ! 
 
1 64 PLAY-MAKING 
 
 How infinitely cleverer than the dramatist who con- 
 structs 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 " prepara- 
 tion" in this sense could scarcely be better satirized 
 than in the following page from Francisque Sarcey's 
 criticism of Nos Initmes (known in English as PenT) — 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 lengthinesses 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 ithe 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 enter- 
 taining situations in all drama." 
 
 M. Sarcey does not tell us what his interlocutor 
 replied ; but he might have said, like the hero of Le 
 Rdveillon: "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 
 
PREPARATION : THE FINGER-POST 165 
 
 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 situa- 
 tion, 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,^ 
 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 exceed- 
 ingly 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 paralyzing the playwright, and 
 that, if men always profited. by the lessons of the stage, 
 
 ' There is no special harm in this : the question of exits and entrances 
 and their mechanism is discussed in Chapter XXIII. 
 
i66 PLAY-MAKING 
 
 the world would long ago have become so wise that 
 there would be uo 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 
 lago!" The retort is logically specious, but it mis- 
 takes the point. It would certainly be rash to put any 
 limit to human guUibility, 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 in- 
 terest 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 pre- 
 paration 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 elabo- 
 rate 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 ! 
 
PREPARATION: THE FINGER-POST 167 
 
 The elaborate series of trifling incidents by means of 
 which Sophy FuUgarney 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 back- 
 ground 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 cer- 
 tainly 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 
 enH by begetting a perversely quizzical fi-ame of mind 
 in the audience. The desired effect is discounted,"like 
 a conjuring trick in which the mechanism is too trans- 
 parent; 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 some one that the effect of this incident 
 would be heightened if Krap, before knocking at the 
 Consul's door, were to consult the barometer, and shpw 
 by his demeanour that it was falling rapidly. A barometer 
 
i68 PLAY-MAKING 
 
 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 traitlFrom 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 Hum- 
 
PREPARATION: THE FINGER-POST 169 
 
 ming 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 syphon, a broken plate, and half-a-crown, not 
 only the place of their destination, but the very hotel 
 to jvhich 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 
 
170 PLAY-MAKING 
 
 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 armchair 
 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.^ As soon 
 as the curtain rose, and revealed a screen drawn half- 
 way 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 pre- 
 caution 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 astound- 
 ing 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 reck- 
 less expense of preparation. 
 
 ' 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. 
 
PREPARATION: THE FINGER-POST 171 
 
 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 occur- 
 rence which nothing but our knowledge of the tricks of 
 the stage could possibly lead us to expect, yet which, 
 knowing these tricks, we ha.ve foreseen from afar, and 
 resented in advance. -• 
 
XIII 
 
 THE OBLIGATORY SCENE 
 
 I DO not know whether it was Francisque Sarcey who. 
 invented the phrase scene d /aire ; 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. 
 
 r What is the^ sc^ne d /aire ? 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 cor- 
 -rupted by their mother's worldiness. 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 Four- 
 chambault is paying undesirable attentions. One day 
 
 172 
 
THE OBLIGATORY SCENE 173 
 
 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 
 replies, " you must go into partnership with M. Four- 
 chambault." " 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 uncertainty 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 scene 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-^Ta 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 
 
174 PLAY-MAKING 
 
 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 
 (niore 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 : — 
 
 (i) 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 obliga- 
 tory by seeming unmistakably to lead up to it. 
 
 (4) It may be required in order to justify some modi- 
 fication 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 
 docketted, 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 sdneafaire — 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 dosvn so hard and fast 
 
THE OBLIGATORY SCENE ^ 175 
 
 a rule, but several in which he seems to take it for 
 granted.^ 
 
 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 appli- 
 cation 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 par- 
 ticular 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 mechanisnri 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 
 
 1 For example, in his criticism of Becque's La Parisienne {Quaranie 
 Ans de Thidtre, VI, p. 364), he tells how, at the end of the second act, 
 one of his neighbours said to him, "Eh bien ! vous violk bien attrap^ ! 
 Ou est la scfene k faire ? " "I freely admit," he continues, " that there is 
 Txo scene d, 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 ck 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 & faire demanded by 
 the logic of his cynicism. 
 
i;6 PLAY-MAKING 
 
 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 neces- 
 sitated 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 oT 
 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 sdne dfaire" 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 sdne d 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 
 
THE OBLIGATORY SCENE 177 
 
 know, he has been accused of neglecting, not merely 
 the scene, but the play, dfaire; but who will now main- 
 tain that accusation ? In John Gabriel Borkman, if 
 we define the theme as the clash of two devouring 
 egoisms, Ibsen has, in the third act, given us the obli- 
 gatory 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 1 greatest achieve- 
 ments. 
 
 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 po^te Lucr^ce " express 
 it, the love of the parent for the child becomes a devour- 
 ing mania, to which everything else is sacrificed, while 
 the love of the child for the parent is a tame and essen- 
 tially 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 ; 
 
178 PLAY-MAKING 
 
 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 hus- 
 band 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 
 Trots 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 
 
THE OBLIGATORY SCENE 179 
 
 a corresponding scene beetwen 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 for 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 symmetri- 
 cally 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 allure- 
 ment that have brought them together. Julie then deter- 
 mines 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 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 
 
i8o PLAY-MAKING 
 
 obvious patterns. The obligatory scene which is im- 
 posed 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 atti- 
 tudes towards life, this sententious thrashing-out of the 
 situation was inevitable. So, too, in Mrs. Warren's Pro- 
 fession, 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 con- 
 test 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 com- 
 paratively 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 expect- 
 ing 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 
 
THE OBLIGATORY SCENE i8i 
 
 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 misunder- 
 standings 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"! 
 
 Tina 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 diffi- 
 cult by the hieratic trappings of the actors, and was alto- 
 gether 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 fireJJ) 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 H. ; 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 
 
 > I need scarcely direct the reader's attention to Mr. Gilbert Murray's 
 noble renderings of these speeches. 
 
i82 PLAY-MAKING 
 
 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 £$ note — and for others 
 ruin.* 
 
 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 
 
 ^ Such a scene occurs in that very able play, The Way the Money 
 Goes, by Lady Bell. 
 
THE OBLIGATORY SCENE 183 
 
 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 " un- 
 dramatic" the reader may refer back to Chapter III. 
 Here I need only give one or two particular illustra- 
 tions. 
 
 It will be remembered that one of the scenes a /aire 
 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, 
 
184 PLAY-MAKING 
 
 compromised by Leopold's conduct, has left the Four- 
 chambault 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 con- 
 fidence by making the scene thoroughly and speci- 
 fically 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. Humphrey 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 
 
THE OBLIGATORY SCENE 185 
 
 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 conversa- 
 tion 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 piade 
 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 
 
i86 PLAY-MAKING 
 
 truth must be told. It would have been a painful, 
 a delicate, a difficult scene, but it was the obliga- 
 tory 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 head- 
 ing. 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 Pass- 
 ing 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 ;£'5ooo a year. One fine 
 day Dick receives from Mexico the will of an old com- 
 rade, 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 s per cent, represents 
 accurately the desiderated ;£^Sooo a year. As a matter 
 
THE OBLIGATORY SCENE i8; 
 
 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 return- 
 ing 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 stagger- 
 ing 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 eff'ect pro- 
 portionate 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, 
 
i88 PLAY-MAKING 
 
 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 thait we have 
 already, in the last chapter, discussed the principle 
 involved. C 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, RivoUee, tells the story of 
 a would-be intellectual, ill-conditioned young woman, 
 married to a plain and ungainly professor of mathe- 
 matics, 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 are 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 
 
THE OBLIGATORY SCENE 189 
 
 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 hus- 
 band 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 lago 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 
 
190 PLAY-MAKING 
 
 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 iproblem 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 Tenijy- 
 son 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 intransigeant 
 priest, bitterly combating the Constitutions of Claren- 
 don. 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 — 
 
THE OBLIGATORY SCENE 191 
 
 " 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 intransigeant 
 clericalism of the later act. The character-problem, in 
 fact, is not only not solved, but is ignored. The obliga- 
 tory 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 psycho- 
 logical 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 com- 
 pleter work of art had he faced this difficulty, and con- 
 trived 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 con- 
 sider 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 
 
192 PLAY-MAKING 
 
 have been far more dramatic and moving had it been 
 about one-fourth part as long and one-fourth part as 
 articulate. 
 
 t 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 Wash- 
 ington was incapable of telling the truth. The play- 
 wright 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, Torque- 
 made 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 Runymede 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 ! " 
 
THE OBLIGATORY SCENE 193 
 
 Nero is bound to fiddle while Rome burns, or the 
 audience will know the reason why.^ 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-Fran- 
 cesca play and omit the scene of " Quel giorno piu non 
 vi leggemmo avante." 
 
 The cases are not very frequent, however, in which 
 an indivijjual incident is thus imposed by history or 
 legend. CThe practical point to be noted is rather that, I 
 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 per- 
 fectly clear that he must dominate the stage. As soon 
 as you bring in the name, the idea, of Napoleon Bona- 
 parte, 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 
 
 1 In Mr. Stephen Phillips's play he does not actually play on the 
 lyre, but he improvises and recites an ode to the conflagration. 
 
 O 
 
194 PLAY-MAKING 
 
 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.^ 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 LAiglon, 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 Heme's sadly 
 underrated play, Griffith Davenport, we were always con- 
 scious 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 pre- 
 sented 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 adum- 
 
 * 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. 
 
THE OBLIGATORY SCENE 195 
 
 brated in this fashion, with or without one personal 
 appearance, so brief that th«;re shall be no danger of 
 anticlimax. 
 
 The last paragraph reminds us that the accomplished 
 playwright shows his accomplishment quite as much 
 in his recognition and avoidance of the sdne 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 Mattre 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 scMe a faire. A young lady 
 is seduced, he says, and, for the sake of her child, im- 
 plores 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 yachts-nay, 
 more, our gratitude for being spared that painful and 
 
196 PLAY-MAKING 
 
 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 sckne 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 present- 
 ment, 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 see 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 
 
THE OBLIGATORY SCENE 197 
 
 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 Due 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 con- 
 cerned 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 conspicu- 
 ously 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 
 sc^ne afaire^a. scene which at first sight seems obligatory, 
 
198 PLAY-MAKING 
 
 but is in fact much 'better taken for granted. It may 
 be absolutely indispensable that it should be sug- 
 gested to the mind of the audience, but neither indis- 
 pensable nor advisable that it should be presented to 
 their eyes. The judicious playwright will often ask him- 
 self, " Is it the actual substance of this scene that I 
 require, or only its repercussion ? " 
 
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 fruit- 
 fulness." 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 melo- 
 drama, 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 ;^so,coo 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 : — 
 
 199 
 
200 PLAY-MAKING 
 
 " Tragedie is to sQyn 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 execu- 
 tioner ; 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 hi-m 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 reve- 
 lations 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 — what- 
 ever we may have to say of the means by which it is 
 led up to."^ 
 
 v^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 
 
 -jnore of his characters shall experience a marked 
 
 ' That great spiritual drama known as the Book of Job, opens, after 
 the Prologue in Heaven, with one of the most startling of peripeties. 
 
THE PERIPETY 201 
 
 reversal either of inward- soul-state or of outward 
 fortune. The theory of the peripety, in short, practi- 
 cally 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 spec- 
 tator'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,v 
 without any undue sacrifice, so develop my theme as to 
 entail upon my leading characters, naturally and prob- 
 ably, an experience of this order ?"J^> 
 
 The peripeties of real life are frequent, though they 
 are apt to be too small in scale, or elso too fatally con- 
 clusive, 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 ineffec- 
 tively, 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.^ 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 amen- 
 able 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 
 
 • 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. 
 
202 PLAY-MAKING 
 
 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 lago'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 Shy- 
 lock'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 
 Pffple. 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 Andr6 de Maurillac, on the day 
 of Andre's marriage, and congratulates him on having 
 eluded the wiles of a dangerous adventuress, Dora de 
 Rio-ZarSs, by whom he had once seemed to be attracted. 
 But it is precisely Dora whom Andre has married ; and, 
 
THE PERIPETY 203 
 
 learning this, Tekli tries to, withdraw, or minimize, his 
 imputation. For a moment a duel seems imminent ; but 
 Andre's friend, FavroUes, 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 crush- 
 ing 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 
 post-nuptial peripety — the scene of the mutual confes- 
 sion 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 
 
204 PLAY-MAKING 
 
 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 num- 
 bers 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.^ 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.'' 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 
 
 1 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. 
 
 ^ M. Bernstein, dishing up a similar theme with a piquant sauce of 
 sensuality, made but a vulgar and trivial piece of work of it. 
 
THE PERIPETY 205 
 
 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 reason- 
 ably 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 
 
2o6 PLAYiMAKING 
 
 a Vicarage, net yearly value £^6, 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 admis- 
 sion 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 smajl psy- 
 chological 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. 
 
THE PERIPETY 207 
 
 Mrs. Warren (passionately) : What's the use of my 
 going to bed ? Do you think L 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 con- 
 ditions 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 FuUgarney 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.^ 
 
 1 One of the most striking peripeties in recent English drama occurs 
 in the third act of The Builder of Bridges, by Mr. Alfred Sutro. 
 
208 PLAY-MAKING 
 
 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 due de Segorbe et due 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 I'exil, fils proscrit d'un pere assassin^ 
 Par sentence du tien, roi Carlos de Castille. 
 * * • 
 
 (Aux autres conjurh) 
 Couvrons nous, grands d'Espagne ! — 
 {Tous les Espagnols se couvrent) 
 
 Oui, nos tfites, 6 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 Due 
 d'Orl6ans, 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 
 Pfere 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 
 
THE PERIPETY 209 
 
 naturally concludes that the king has heard of his ser- 
 vices and wishes to reward them. He finds, on the con- 
 trary, 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 P^re 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 1 
 Corcoran and Ralph Rackstraw have been changed at 
 birth, Ralph instantly becomes captain of the ship, while 
 the captain declines into an able-badied seaman. This 
 is one of the instances in which the idlolism of art ekes^ 
 out the imperfections of reality. 
 
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 
 I saplings, insecurely planted upon the boacds. 
 
 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 interpre- 
 tation of the fact ; and one knows not how to calculate 
 the chances that his interpretation may be a false one. 
 
PROBABILITY, CHANCE, COINCIDENCE 211 
 
 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 play- 
 wright'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 pre- 
 tence 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 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." 
 
212 PLAY-MAKING 
 
 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 doubt- 
 less 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 con- 
 clusive 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 import- 
 ance. 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 
 
PROBABILITY, CHANCE, COINCIDENCE 213 
 
 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 through- 
 out the whole class to which his personage belongs. 
 C 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 un- 
 characteristic events — 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. COn 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 DolVs 
 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 con- 
 sideration. But, as a matter of fact, when we speak of 
 plausibility, it is almost always the second plane — the 
 
214 PLAY-MAKING 
 
 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 lago, the race-hatred of Shylock, is por- 
 ' trayed. 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 
 
PROBABILITY, CHANCE, COINCIDENCE 215 
 
 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 immeasur- 
 ably maturer and saner productions as The Vqysey 
 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 abso- 
 lutely 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 impro- 
 bability in the antecedents of a play by Ibsen or Sir 
 
2i6 PLAY-MAKING 
 
 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.^ 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 "Nighfs 
 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, LorJ and 
 Lady Algy, Wheels within Wheels, Lady Huntworth's 
 
 ' It is only fair to say that Sarcey drew a distinction between ante- 
 cedent 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 Th'edtre, vii., p. 395. 
 
PROBABILITY, CHANCE, COINCIDENCE 217 
 
 Experiment; so would most of Mr. Barrie's come- 
 dies ; so would Mr, Arnold Bennett's play, The Honey- 
 moon. 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 plausi- 
 bility of theme or of character, depends very largely on 
 the judicious handling of chance, and the exclusion, or 
 very sparing employment, of coincidence,J> 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. Coin- 
 cidence is a special and complex form of chance, which 
 ought by no means to be confounded with the every- 
 day 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 par- 
 lance. 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 
 
2i8 PLAY-MAKING 
 
 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 pheno- 
 menon — 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 Shake- 
 speare'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 inter- 
 vention 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 
 
PROBABILITY, CHANCE, COINCIDENCE 219 
 
 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 coin- 
 cidence ^ 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 con- 
 ception of fate comes in, and we vaguely figure to our- 
 selves some malignant power deliberately pulling the 
 
 1 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 js fittest to survive. 
 
220 PLAY-MAKING 
 
 strings which guide its puppets into such abhorrent 
 tangles. On the modern view that "character is des- 
 tiny," 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 alto- 
 gether 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, return- 
 ing 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 coin- 
 cidence 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 
 
PROBABILITY, CHANCE, COINCIDENCE 221 
 
 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 ! " ^ 
 
 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 Erudenell, 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 
 
 ' 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 sea^ports 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 
 XhaX oi \h& Menaechmi wias 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 is 
 founded, was common in historic Greece ; and that they were generally 
 provided with identification-tokens {gnorismata). 
 
222 PLAY-MAKING 
 
 bridal party meets at Mr. Cheal's office before proceed- 
 ing 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 affliction, 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 honey- 
 moon, 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 
 
PROBABILITY, CHANCE, COINCIDENCE 223 
 
 chances. The same result might no doubt have been 
 achieved in many other and neater ways. I merely 
 indicate, by way of il^stration, 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 justi- 
 fied. It is not really a coincidence at all, but one of 
 those everyday happenings which are not only admis- 
 sible in drama, but positively desirable, as part of the 
 ordinary surface-texture of life. Entirely to eliminate 
 chance frotn 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 para- 
 graphs 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 plod- 
 ding 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 
 
224 PLAY-MAKING 
 
 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 dis- 
 tinct 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, andj are 
 credible 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 co- 
 incidence was not strictly artistic. A coincidence, in 
 short, which coincides with a crisis is thereby raised to 
 the M* 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 extrava- 
 ganza ; 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. 
 
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 
 misagplifid. It too oftenireadrs^uch 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 demonstra- 
 tion 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 
 
 225 Q 
 
226 PLAY-MAKING 
 
 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 commu- 
 nicating 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 con- 
 clusion ; 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 in- 
 stance : 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 " Gil- 
 berte 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 
 
LOGIC 227 
 
 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 diflferent 
 matter from Ibsen's treatment of the supernatural in 
 such plays as The Lady from the Sea, The Master \Builder 
 and Little Eyolf. Ibsen, likle Hawthorne, suggests with- 
 out 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 
 
228 PLAY-MAKING 
 
 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 satiriz- 
 ing " yellow journalism " were produced almost simul- 
 taneously 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 com- 
 position, The Earth was the better play of the two, simply 
 
LOGIC 229 
 
 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 — irre- 
 levances 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 prin- 
 ciple. 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 
 
230 PLAY-MAKING 
 
 logic was exemplified in Mr. Clyde Fitch's last play, 
 The City. His theme, as announced in his title and 
 indicated in his expositioh, was the influence of New 
 York upon a family which migrates thither from a pro- 
 vincial 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 supppsed to illus- 
 trate it.^ 
 
 ( 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 successT) 
 In Pygmalion and Galatea, for example, there is a con- 
 spicuous 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 develop- 
 ment 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 par- 
 ticular 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 1 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 thb 
 
 ' I am here writing from memory, having been unable to obtain a 
 copy of The City; but my memory is pretty clear. 
 
LOGIC 231 
 
 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 under- 
 stands 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. 
 
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 on5 
 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 con- 
 structed, 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 
 
 232 
 
KEEPING A SECRET 233 
 
 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, un- 
 worthy 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 know- 
 ledge, 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 
 
234 PLAY-MAKING 
 
 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 — inaccept- 
 able, 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. Tt may, 
 be said with perfect confidence that it is useless to keep 
 
KEEPING A SECRET 235 
 
 a secret which, when revealed, is certain to disappoint | 
 the audience, and to make it feel that it has been trifled t 
 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 interfest 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 Devits 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 thp 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 
 
236 PLAY-MAKING 
 
 aipurposeless 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 mis- 
 understand 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, "^ 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. Whitewash- 
 ing 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" dis- 
 closure, 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 
 
 ^ 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." 
 
KEEPING A SECRET 237 
 
 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.^ 
 
 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 
 
 ' 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. 
 
238 PLAY-MAKING 
 
 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 seetas 
 to be no obstacle between the lovers with whom (from 
 the author's point of view) we are supposed to sympa- 
 thize. 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 Helfene 
 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. Hel^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, Heldne'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 Helfene'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 ex- 
 changed between Gotte and H6lfene 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. 
 
KEEPING A SECRET 239 
 
 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 know- 
 ledge. 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 antici- 
 pate, it. 
 
 CTo sum up this question of secrecy : the curre;it 
 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 some- 
 times 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 
 
240 PLAY-MAKING 
 
 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 craftsman- 
 ship. It would have been the most natural thing in the 
 world for either the sister or the brother-in-law, con- 
 cerned 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 reason- 
 able 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 diffi- 
 culty or moral problem, it must ion no account be 
 solved by a mere trick or evasion. The dramatist is 
 very ill-advised who sets forth with pomp and circum- 
 stance to perform some intellectual or technical feat, and 
 then merely skirts round it or runs away from it. A 
 
KEEPING A SECRET 241 
 
 fair proportion should always be observed between 
 effort and effect, between promise and performance. 
 
 " But if the audience happens to misread the play- 
 wright's design, and form exaggerated and irrational 
 expectations ? " That merely means that the play- 
 wright 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 antici- 
 pation, 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. 
 
BOOK IV 
 THE END 
 
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 that 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 con- 
 clusion ! 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 
 
 345 
 
246 PLAY-MAKING 
 
 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 foreordained. 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 imore 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 
 
CLIMAX AND ANTICLIMAX 247 
 
 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 develop- 
 ment 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 deliber- 
 ately 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 qualityTy ^y^^ 
 
 Let us, however, define our terms, and be sure that 
 we know what we are talking about. By an "unem- 
 phatic 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 interroga- 
 tion. An unemphatic ending, as I understand it, is a 
 deliberate anticlimax, an idyllic, or elegiac, or philo- 
 sophic 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. 
 
248 PLAY-MAKING 
 
 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 unpardon- 
 able 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 had set forth, not merely to interest us in an 
 adventure, but to draw a character ; and it was essential 
 to our ifull 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 main- 
 tained to the end. A very different matter is the third 
 act of The Benefi,t of the Doubt, already alluded to. Thi3 
 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 
 
CLIMAX AND ANTICLIMAX 249 
 
 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.^ 
 
 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 
 
 * 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. 
 
250 PLAY-MAKING 
 
 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 anticliinax 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. 
 
 I. What is a " curtain " ; and how should it be led 
 up to? 
 
 B — For the Modern Side Only. 
 
 I. 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 
 
CLIMAX AND ANTICLIMAX 251 
 
 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 aifectedly unaffected, 
 artificially inartificial. 
 
 (j[ 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 
 supersubtlety, but one has seen it neglected with notably 
 bad efi"ect — 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 
 Vqysey 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 through-] 
 out the long concluding scene. * 
 
 Once more I turn to La Douloureuse for an instance 
 of an admirable act-ending of the quiet modern typ& 
 The third act — the terrible peripety in the love of 
 
252 PLAY-MAKING 
 
 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, puUs 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 " ! 
 
XIX 
 
 CONVERSION 
 
 The reader may have noticed, possibly with surprise, 
 
 that some of the stock terms of dramatic criticism occur 
 
 -an, 
 
 but. rarely in these pages, or not at all. One of them is 
 d^nouemerit. 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 
 dinouement 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 un-knotting. 
 
 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 
 
 253 
 
254 PLAY-MAKING 
 
 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,^ 
 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 con- 
 version, or simple change of will, which is the ordinary 
 way which our poets use to end theirs. It shews 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 h^avy 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 of volition, and changes of 
 I sentiment.'; It was the former class that Dry den 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 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, how- 
 ever, 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 
 
 '■ Of Dramatic Poesy, ed. Arnold, 1903, p. 51. 
 
CONVERSION 255 
 
 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 exter- 
 nalize 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 — 
 EUida'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 m 
 tortured heart, I mean it. . . . Now your own true li 
 
256 PLAY-MAKING 
 
 can return to its — its right groove again. For now you 
 can choose in freedom ; and on your own responsibility, 
 EUida 
 
 Ellida: In freedom — and on my own responsi- 
 bility ? Responsibility ? This — this transforms every- 
 thing. 
 
 — 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 
 EUida's will was always on Wangel's side ; and a merely 
 verbal undoing of the " bargain " with which she re- 
 proached 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 
 
CONVERSION 257 
 
 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 Romersholm has " en- 
 nobled " 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, 
 
 s 
 
2S8 PLAY-MAKING 
 
 a noted Don Juan, has been idly making love to a 
 country maiden, whose heart is full of innocent ideal- 
 isms. 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.^ 
 
 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 accom- 
 plice 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 
 
 * In Mr. Somerset Maugham's Grace, the heroine undergoes a some- 
 what 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. 
 
CONVERSION 259 
 
 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. 
 
 (Xt 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 exter- 
 nalizing 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. 
 
XX 
 
 BLIND-ALLEY THEMES — AND OTHERS 
 
 A BLIND-ALLEY thcmc, 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 alterna- 
 tives — 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 paralyze 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. It 
 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 
 
 260 
 
BLIND-ALLEY THEMES— AND OTHERS 261 
 
 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 insoltible in the fact that he leaves it un- 
 solved — evading it by means of a medieval 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 baflfles 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. Shake- 
 speare 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 
 difi'ers 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 cityful of 
 men, women, and children. What she does is absolutely 
 
262 PLAY-MAKING 
 
 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 cir- 
 cumstances ? 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 gentle- 
 man 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.^ 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 deplor- 
 able conjunction of circumstances. All we wish is that 
 we had not been called upon to contemplate it.^ Maeter- 
 linck, 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 
 
 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 ! 
 
 " Much has been made of the Censor's refusal to license Monna 
 Vannaj 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. 
 
BLIND-ALLEY THEMES— AND OTHERS 263 
 
 is no possible way out of them which is not worse than 
 unpleasant : humiliating, and distressing. Let the play- 
 wright, 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 con- 
 templating; 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 sells herself to a 
 wealthy parvenu, or a woman of culture and refinement 
 is mated with 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 Bear in it a far-off echo of revolu- 
 tionary 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 Mmtre de Forges onwards — this is 
 the aspect on which playwrights have preferred to 
 dwell. Usually, the theme shades off into the almost 
 
264 PLAY-MAKING 
 
 equally hackneyed Still Waters Run Deep theme; for 
 there is apt to be an aristocratic lover whom the un- 
 polished 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 Due 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 deconventi©nalizing 
 it. No doubt it has a long life before it on the plane 
 of popular melodrama, but scarcely, one hopes, on any 
 higher plane, 
 f 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 dra- 
 matic point of view, an outworn passion. It is too 
 obviously irrational and anti-social to pass muster in 
 modern costume^y* The actual vendetta may possibly 
 survive in some semi-barbarous regions, and Granger- 
 fords 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 millen- 
 nium, among the most active forces in human nature. 
 But most people are coming to recognize that life is too 
 
BLIND-ALLEY THEMES-AND OTHERS 265 
 
 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 ma- 
 chination, with no end in view beyond an ultimate 
 unmasking, a turning 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 for- 
 gotten — 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 melodrattiatists. 
 ( A third theme to be handled with the greatest 
 caution, if at all, is that of heroic self-sacrifice. Not 
 that self-sacrifi<;e^ 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 Haldvy, 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 
 
266 PLAY-MAKING 
 
 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 conse- 
 quences. 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^ 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 
 
 1 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. 
 
BLIND-ALLEY THEMES— AND OTHERS 26; 
 
 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 beau- 
 tiful 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 
 
268 PLAY-MAKING 
 
 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 tbe world, 
 and are no longer presentable in any society that pre- 
 tends 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. 
 
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 argu- 
 ment to suppose that I deny the practical, and even the 
 artistic, superiority of those themes in which the tension 
 can be ipaintained 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 recog- 
 nize 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, iwithout 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 befoc,^ 
 
 This is no place, however, for a discussion of the 
 aesthetic basis of tragedy in general.^ What is here 
 required, from the point of view of craftsmanship, is not 
 so much a glorification of the tragic ending, as a 
 
 1 The reader who wishes to pursue the theme may do so to excellent 
 advantage in Professor Bradley's Shakespearean Tragedy. 
 
 269 
 
270 PLAY-MAKING 
 
 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 
 reklly tragic theme : that you can place your hero at 
 such odds with life that reconciliation, or mere endur- 
 ance, would be morally base or psychologically im- 
 probable. Moreover, you must strike deep into 
 character before you are justified in passing capital 
 sentence on your personages. Death is a dispropor- 
 tionate 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 
 
THE FULL CLOSE 2;i 
 
 and sufficient caused To one god in particular we may 
 apply the Horatian maxim, "Nee deus intersit, nisi 
 dignus vindice nodus."/ 
 
 In German aesthetic theory, the conception of 
 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 in- 
 curred it. But in order that we may be satisfied of 
 this, we must know him intimately and feel with him 
 intensely, v 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 diffi- 
 culty. In five out of his thirteen modern plays, no one 
 dies at all.^ 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 
 
 ' 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. 
 
2;3 PLAY-MAKING 
 
 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 pre- 
 dicament 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, i BjSrnson, in a 
 very moving passage in his novel. The Pat^s 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.J) 
 
 This analysis of Ibsen's practice points to the fact — 
 for such I believe it to be — that what the modern play- 
 wright 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;^ but in Anglo-Saxon countries it 
 
 ' 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 /ils, in his preface to Hilotse Paranguet, 
 
THE FULL CLOSE 273 
 
 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 impel- 
 ling to it are apt to be of a dramatic nature, and there- 
 fore 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 
 
 condemns the duel as a dramatic expedient. " Not to mention," he says, 
 " the fact that it has been much overdone, 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 Due 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. 
 
 T 
 
2;4 PLAY-MAKING 
 
 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.^ 
 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 every one. 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 incon- 
 gruity. 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 woijld 
 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 satisfac- 
 tions 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 
 
 1 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. 
 
THE FULL CLOSE 275 
 
 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 repro- 
 duce 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 po- 
 litical 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 
 
2;6 PLAY-MAKING 
 
 survive the paralyzing 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 culmina- 
 tion 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 lagt 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 "II 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 DeviPs 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. 
 
THE FULL CLOSE 2;; 
 
 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 penulti- 
 mate 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 cul- 
 minates in the great scene between Nina and Hilary 
 Jesson in the third act ; yet we await with eager anti- 
 cipation 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. 
 
278 PLAY-MAKING 
 
 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 fib- 
 bing. Mr. Fitch here showed good technical insight 
 marred by over-hasty execution. That Becky should be 
 tempted to employ her old methods, and should over- 
 come 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 ; buf 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, 
 
THE FULL CLOSE 279 
 
 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 reso- 
 lutely 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 — 
 
 iThe afternoon sun strikes his figure. At his ap- 
 pearance 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 applaud- 
 ing enthusiastically ; and— as Phil in vain raises his hand 
 
280 PLAY-MAKING 
 
 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.^ 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 unendur- 
 ably cynical ; a more agreeable third act was condemned 
 as an anticlimax ; and for some time the play was pre- 
 sented 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 ineifectually. But it would be foolish to make a 
 system of such an expedient. It is, after all, an eva- 
 sion, 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 Helmer. At the 
 end of it, he came up to me, in a state of high excitement. 
 
 1 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 
 
THE FULL CLOSE 281 
 
 " 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 ^rs^.'" 
 
BOOK V 
 EPILOGUE 
 
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 pene- 
 trate,.and to reproduce character can neither be acquired 
 nor regulated by theoretical recommendations. In- 
 directly, 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, njean 
 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. 
 
 i^_What is character? For the practical purposes of 
 the dramatist, it may be defined as a complex of in- 
 tellectual, emotional, and nervous habits. Some of 
 these habits are innate and temperamental — habits 
 
 285 
 
286 PLAY-MAKING 
 
 formed, no doubt, by far-off ancestors.^ But this dis- 
 tinction 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 con- 
 sistent 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 faitfi? It was, indeed— as Dryden pointed out 
 in a passage quoted- above ^ — 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 enoble- 
 ment 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 
 
 rind? 
 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 
 
 1 If this runs counter to the latest biological orthodoxy, I am sorry. 
 Habits are at any rate transmissible by imitation, if not otherwise. 
 
 2 Chapter XIX. 
 
CHARACTER AND PSYCHOLOGY 287 
 
 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 film. 
 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. \ 
 
 (llhe 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 i 
 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 thaCj) 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 
 
288 PLAY-MAKING 
 
 form : Is " psychology " simply a mere 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 every-day 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 
 
CHARACTER AND PSYCHOLOGY 289 
 
 range of our comprehension, and co-ordinated with 
 other mental phenomena which we can and do under- 
 stand. 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 super- 
 ficial 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 ; psycho-! 
 logy 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 Molifere— in 
 spite of Alceste and Don Juan — is characteristically a 
 
 u 
 
290 PLAY-MAKING 
 
 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 intransigeant 
 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 blame- 
 worthy, not wholly beyond the range of our sympathies. 
 There are few greater achievements of psychology. 
 'Among the playwrights of to-day, 1 should call Mr. 
 Granville Barker above all things a psychologist. It 
 is his instinct to venture into untrodden fields of char- 
 acter, or, at any rate, to probe deeply into phenomena 
 Jwhich 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 psycho- 
 logist in Strife, a character-drawer in The Silver Box 
 and Justice. Sir Arthur Pinero, a character-drawer of 
 
CHARACTER AND PSYCHOLOGY 291 
 
 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 psycho- 
 logy. 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 in 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 pro- 
 cesses 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 
 
292 PLAY-MAKING 
 
 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 oppor- 
 tunities 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. 
 
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 thcv 
 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 meta- 
 morphoses, 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 
 
 293 
 
294 PLAY-MAKING 
 
 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 Restora- 
 tion, 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 bril- 
 liantly 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 conven- 
 tion 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 dulness 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, 
 
DIALOGUE AND DETAILS 295 
 
 re-asserted 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 appro- 
 priateness 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 " mar- 
 riages 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 profli- 
 gate? 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 spring- 
 ing 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 
 
296 PLAY-MAKING 
 
 of evolution lay between them, instead of barely twenty 
 years. 
 
 The convention of wit-at-any-price is indeed, mori- 
 bund ; 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 Con- 
 greve-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 com- 
 prehensible 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 " Vul- 
 garity 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 
 
DIALOGUE AND DETAILS 29; 
 
 examples of each class : but as their characteristic is to 
 fade when uprooted from the soil in which they grow, i 
 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 in- 
 fluence have reached the stage; not one has held it. 
 But we find in some recent writing a qualified recrudes- 
 cence 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 fascinatiofc^ <^o 
 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 disas- 
 trous. I need not go into particulars ; for no play of 
 which the dialogue places a constant strain on the intel- 
 lectual 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' lan- 
 guage— 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 Englishj 
 
298 PLAY-MAKING 
 
 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 preciosity are generally symptoms of 
 an exaggerated dread of the commonplace. The writer 
 of dramatic prose has, indeed, a very difificult task if he 
 is to achieve style without deserting nature. Perhaps 
 it would be more accurate to say that the diflficulty 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 
 r^rriSect 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,^ while Synge wrote in a language which 
 
 ' 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 1 — as liberty to pay and receive visits to and 
 
DIALOGUE AND DETAILS 299 
 
 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 — or 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, prospec- 
 tive, 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 con- 
 cerned, 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 
 
 from whom I please ; to write and receive letters, without interrogatories 
 or wry faces on your part ; to wear what I please ; and choose conversa- 
 tion 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 acquain- 
 tances ; or to be intimate with fools because they may be your relatives. 
 . . . These articles subscribed, if I cqntinue 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. 
 
300 PLAY-MAKING 
 
 driest scientific proposition may, under special cir- 
 cumstances, become electrical with drama The state- 
 ment 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 
 ^esthetic 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 
 iTwe 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 
 
DIALOGUE AND DETAILS 301 
 
 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 I'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 pro- 
 blematical, its difficulties and dangers certain. 
 
302 ■ PLAY-MAKING 
 
 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 ve-rse. is easier to make — and to 
 memorize — than prose. I'rimitive 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 num- 
 bers, 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, frtom 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 ex- 
 tremely 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 
 
DIALOGUE AND DETAILS 303 
 
 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 ail 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,^ 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 play- 
 wright 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 Shakes- 
 peare'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 
 
 ' From the fact that I do not make an' exception in favour of The 
 Blot in the Scutcheon or Strafford, 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. 
 
304 PLAY-MAKING 
 
 to passionate speech. For the mere rhetorical " eleva- 
 tion " of blank verse we have no use whatever. It 
 censists 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 out- 
 skirts 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 bla;nk- 
 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. 
 
DIALOGUE AND DETAILS 305 
 
 It gives the verse-passages an air of pompous self-con- 
 sciousness. 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.^ 
 
 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 conven- 
 tion. 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 
 
 1 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 move- 
 ment 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. 
 
3o6 PLAY-MAKING 
 
 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 pic- 
 torial exactness of reproduction was clearly impossible. 
 Its fundamental conditions necessitated very nearly ^ 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 theoreti- 
 cally possible. But no one recognized the possi- 
 bility ; 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 incon- 
 sistent 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 evolu- 
 tionary 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 con- 
 vention 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. 
 
 ^ Not quite. The drama of some Oriental peoples recognises con- 
 ventions which the Elizabethans did not admit. 
 
DIALOGUE AND DETAILS 307 
 
 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 to 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.'- 
 
 The physical conditions which tended to banish it 
 from the stage were reinforced by the growing per- 
 ception 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.^ 
 
 1 A conversation on the telephone often provides a convenient and 
 upito-date substitute for a soliloquy; but that is an expedient which 
 ought not to be abused. 
 
 ^ The soliloquy is often, not only slovenly, but a gratuitous and 
 unnecessary slovenliness. In Les Cdrbeaux, by Henry Becque, pro- 
 duced in 1889, there occur two soliloquies — one by Teissier (Act ii., 
 Scenes), the other by Madame de Saint-Genis (Act iii., Scene 10) — 
 either or both of which could be omitted without leaving any sensible 
 gap. The latter is wholly superfluous, the former conveys some informa- 
 tion which might have been taken for granted, and could, in any case, 
 
PLAY-MAKING 
 
 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 utter- 
 ance 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 un- 
 reality 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 un- 
 known. 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, not understand- 
 ing 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 
 
 have been conveyed without difficulty in some other way. Yet Becque 
 was, in his day, regarded as a quite advanced technician. 
 
DIALOGUE AND DETAILS 309 
 
 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 
 lie begins to dally with facile convention. 
 
 An aside is intolerable because it is not heard by the 
 other persons on the stage : it outrages physical possi- 
 bility.'' An overheard soliloquy, on the other hand, is 
 intolerable because it is heard. It keeps within Jlx#- 
 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 soli- 
 loquies ? 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 
 
3IO PLAY-MAKING 
 
 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 justi- 
 fied 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 soli- 
 loquy. 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 com- 
 munication 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 
 
DIALOGUE AND DETAILS 311 
 
 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 technic, 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 some- 
 times 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. 
 
 Similarly, because the forged will and the lost "mar- 
 riage lines " have been rightly relegated to melodrama, 
 Cis there any reason why we should banish from the 
 "stage every form of written document ? Mr. Bernard 
 
312 PLAY-MAKING 
 
 Shaw, in an article celebrating the advent of the new 
 technic, once wrote, " Nowadays an actor cannot open a 
 letter or toss off somebody else's glass of poison with- 
 out having to face a brutal outburst of jeering." What 
 an extravagance to bracket as equally exploded absurdi- 
 ties 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 distri- 
 bution 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 for- 
 gotten letter or bundle of letters is not an infrequent 
 incident of daily life. Why should it be tabu on the 
 stage ? Because a 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. 
 
BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE 
 
 It is, of course, needless to indicate editions of the English classical 
 plays, from Shakespeare to Tennyson, cited in the foregoing pages. 
 French and German plays, too, can always be easily procured — 
 except, perhaps, one or two of Sardou's. But it is sometimes hard 
 to ascertain whether a recent English or American play has or has 
 not been published. It seemed advisable, therefore, to draw up 
 the following list for the guidance of students, and to include in it 
 some translations of foreign works : — 
 
 Aeschylus 
 
 Agamemnon, see TTie House of Atretis, translated by E. D. A. 
 Morshead. London: Macmillan, 1901. 
 
 Gabriele d'Annunzio 
 
 Gioeonda, translated by Arthur Symons. London : Heinemann, 
 1901. 
 
 F. Anstey 
 
 The Brass Bottle. London: Heinemann, 19 11. 
 
 Elizabeth Baker 
 
 Chains. London : Sidgwick and Jackson, 191 1. 
 
 H. Granville Barker 
 
 Three Plays : The Marrying of Anne Leete — The Voysey Inherit- 
 ance — Waste. London : Sidgwick and Jackson, 1909. 
 
 The Madras House. London ; Sidgwick and Jackson, 191 1. 
 
 Prunella (with Laurence Housman). London : A. H. Bullen, 
 1906. 
 
 Lady Bell 
 
 The Way the Money Goes. London : Sidgwick and Jackson, 
 1910. 
 
 Arnold Bennett 
 
 What the Public Wants. London: Frank Palmer, 1910. 
 The Honeymoon, published in McChtris Magazine, New York, 
 1911. 
 
 313 
 
314 PLAY-MAKING 
 
 Rudolf Besier 
 
 Don. London : T. F. Unwin. 
 
 BjORNSTJERNE BjORNSON 
 
 A Bankruptcy. No English translation. German translation 
 Ein Failissemmt, Reclam's Universal-Biblidthek. 
 
 R. C. Carton 
 
 Dramatic Works in course of publication. London and New 
 York : French. 
 
 C. Haddon Chambers 
 
 Captain Swift. London and New York: French, 1902. 
 The Awakening. London: Heineman, 1902. 
 
 Euripides 
 
 Hippolytus and Medea, translated by Gilbert Murray. London : 
 George Allen. 
 
 James Bernard Fagan 
 
 The Prayer of the Sword. London : Brimley Johnson, 1904. 
 The Earth. London : T. F. Unwin. 
 
 Clyde Fitch 
 
 Beau Brummel. New York : John Lane, 1908. 
 
 The Climbers, 1906. 
 
 The Girl with the Green Eyes, 1905. 
 
 The Truth, 1907. 
 
 John Galsworthy 
 
 Plays : The Silver Box— Joy — Strife. London : Duckworth, 
 
 1909. New York : Scribner. 
 Justice. London : Duckworth, 1910. New York : Scribner. 
 
 Sir William S. Gilbert 
 
 Pygmalion and Galatea : Original Plays. London: Chattoand 
 Windus. 
 
 Sydney Grundy 
 
 A Pair of Spectacles. London and New York : French, 1899. 
 
 Gerhart Hauptmann 
 
 Hannele, translated by William Archer. London : Heinemann, 
 
 1907. 
 The Weavers, translated by Mary Morison, London: Heine- 
 mann, 1911. 
 
 "John Oliver Hobbes" 
 
 The Ambassador. London : T. F. Unwin, 1892. 
 
 The Wisdom of the Wise. London : T. F. Unwin, 1901. 
 
 New York : Macmillan. 
 
BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE 315 
 
 ''Anthony Hope" 
 
 The Adventure of Lady Ursula. New York : R. H. Russell, 
 1898. 
 
 Henrik Ibsen 
 
 Dramatic Works: Collected Edition. London: Heinemann, 
 New York : Scribner. 
 J. K. Jerome 
 
 The Passing of the Third Floor Back. London : Hurst and 
 Blackettj 1910. 
 
 Henry Arthur Jones 
 
 Plays published in London and New York : Macmillan. 
 Maurice Maeterlinck 
 
 Monna Vanna, translated by Alfred Sutro. London : George 
 Allen, 1904. 
 
 W. Somerset Maugham 
 
 A Man of Honour. London : Heinemann. 
 WitLiAM Vaughn Moody 
 
 The Great Divide. New York : Macmillan, 1909. 
 
 The Faith Healer (Revised Edition). ^ New York : Macmillan, 
 1910. 
 Gilbert Murray 
 
 Carlyon Sahib. London: Heinemann, 1900. 
 
 Sir Arthur Pinero 
 
 Plays published in London : Heinemann. In New York, W. H. 
 Baker & Co. 
 
 Elizabeth Robins 
 
 Votes for Women. London : Mills and Boon, 1909. 
 
 George Bernard Shaw 
 
 Plays published in London : Constable, New York : Brentano. 
 
 Edward Sheldon 
 
 The Nigger. New York : Macmillan, 1910. 
 
 Sophocles 
 
 Oedipus, Kingof Thebes, translated by Gilbert Murray. London : 
 George Allen, igii. 
 
 Alfred Sutro 
 
 The Builder of Bridges. London and New York : French, 1909. 
 
 ' The remarks in the text (p. 291) were based on the first edition, 
 published by Houghton, Mifflin, 1909. I did not know of the revised 
 edition until this book was in type. 
 
3i6 PLAY-MAKING 
 
 Oscar Wilde 
 
 Collected Works. London : Methuen. 
 
 Lady IVindermer^s Min, 5th editioa. London: Methuen, 191 1. 
 
 A Woman of no Importance, London: John Lane, 1894. 
 
 The Ideal Husband. London: Smithers, 1899, 
 
 The Importance of Being Earnest. London; Smithers, 1899. 
 
 Israel Zangwill 
 
 The War God. London: Heinemann, 191 1. 
 
INDEX 
 
 Act-division, The, 102-112 
 
 Act-structure, 106, no, 134 
 
 Action V. Character, 1 8 
 
 Adrienne Lecouvreur, 163, 166 
 
 Adventure of Lady Ursula, The, 147 
 
 Aeschylus, 24, 132, 181 
 
 Agamemnon, 24, 132, i8l 
 
 Agatha, 184 
 
 L'Aiglon, 194 
 
 Albery, Janles, 295 
 
 Ambassador, The, 94, 299 
 
 Amoureuse, 107 
 
 "Anagnorisis," 199, 208 
 
 Andromaque, 25 
 
 Anna Karenine, 30 
 
 D'Annunzio, 81, 249, 304 
 
 Anstejr, F., 278 
 
 Anticlimax, 34, 49, 195, 247-252 
 
 Antony and Cleopatra, 26, 289, 303 
 
 Aristotle, 3, 18, 67, 107, 200, 210, 247, 
 
 261 
 Asides, 305, 308 
 As you Like It, 13, 24, 69 
 Augier, 172, 183 
 Awakening, The, 257 
 
 B 
 
 Baker, Elizabeth, 38 
 Bankruptcy, A, 32 1 
 
 , Barker, H. Granville, 43, 50, 91, 98,. 
 99, 109, 146, 2iS,2l6, 251, 275, 290 
 Barrie, J. M., 31, 123, 216, 217 
 Bartholomew Fair, 15 
 Beau Brummel, 266 
 Becket, 190 , 
 
 Becque, 33, S9, 91, 107, 17S, 307 
 Bell, Lady, 38, 182 
 Bella Donna, 288, 296, 291 
 Benefit of the Doubt, The, 92, 107, 141, 
 
 159. 170, 248 
 Ben-Hur, 194 
 
 Bennett Arnold, 217, 228, 278 
 Bernstein, 204, 264 
 
 Bertrand et Raton, 163 
 Besier, Rudolf, 91 ■^ 
 
 kKBjornson, 32, 62 . 
 
 Blanchette, 280 
 Blank-verse, 21, 301-305 
 Blind-alley Themes, 49, 204, 260-263 
 Blot in the Scutcheon, The, 303 
 Y^lue Bird, The, 216 1 
 
 Boucicault, Dion, 61, 294 I 
 
 Bradley, Andrew, 269 
 Brand, 79, 290 
 Brass Bottle, The, 278 
 Brebis de Panurge, Les, 14 
 Brieux, 13, 14, 178, 225, 280, 291 
 Browning, 303 
 Bruneti^re, 23-29, 32, 84 
 Builder of Bridges, The, 207, 258 
 Byron, H. J., 295 
 
 Candida, 25, 40, 91, 107, 180, 224, 276 
 
 Captain Swift, 219 
 
 Carlyon Sahib, 201 
 
 Carrying-forward interest, 134-142, 186 
 
 Carson, Murray, 96 
 
 Carton, R. C, 137, 169, 216 
 
 Case of Rebellious Susan, The, 91 
 
 Caste, 13, 62, 107 
 
 Chains, 38 
 
 Chambers, Haddon, 219, 257 
 
 Chance, 217, 275 
 
 Chapman, 304 
 
 Character, 8, 17, 45, 89, 132, 185, 285- 
 292 ; more vital than action, 18 ; de- 
 velopment in, 286 
 
 Characters, essential and auxiliary, 58 
 
 Charles L, 2il 
 
 Charlie's Aunt, 217 
 
 Chasse aux Corbeaux, La, 14 
 
 Children of the Ghetto, 156 
 
 Choice between alternatives, 40 
 
 Chorus, 81, 105 
 
 Cigale chez les Fourmis, La, 14 
 
 City, The, 230 
 
 Clarissa Harlowe, 25 
 
 317 
 
318 
 
 INDEX 
 
 Climax, 34, 49, 245-252 
 
 Climbers, The, 92, 276 
 
 Coincidence, 94, 187, 217 ; long arm 
 
 of, 219 
 Collins, J. Churton, 19 
 Comedy of Errors, The, 221 
 " Commedia dell' arte," 44 
 Confidants, 81 
 
 Conflict, Brunetiire's theory of, 23-29 
 Congreve, 13, 163, 294, 298 
 Convention, Planes of, 305-307 
 Conversion, 254-259 
 Corheaux, Les, 33, 91, 307 
 Coriolanus, 40, 77 
 Course dti Flambeau, La, 177 
 Craigie, Mrs., 94, 299 
 Crisis essence of drama, 29-33, '°^> '"7 
 Crisis, growth and subsidence of, 245 
 Crispness of touch, 33-37, 39 
 Curei, F. de, 17, 45, 197, 291 
 Curiosity, 34, 120-133 
 "Curtains," 250, 233 
 Cyrafio de Bergerac, 59 
 
 Dandy Dick, 2i6 
 
 Death as solution, 270 
 
 Death of Ivan Ilytch, The, 25 
 
 Degenerates, The, 165 
 
 Denise, 276 
 
 "Denouement," 253 
 
 Demi's Disciple, The, 88, 235, 276 
 
 Dialogue, 212, 293-301 
 
 Dickens, 31 
 
 Diplomacy, 202 
 
 Divorfons! 88 
 
 Doctor's Dilemma, The, 99, 103, 224 
 
 DolPs Home, A, 17, 39, 42, 78, 81, 84, 
 
 99, 100, 107, 131, 151, 176, 202, 
 
 213, 271, 280, 287 
 Don, 91 
 Don yuan, 289 
 Donnay, 33, 138, 250, 252 
 Don Quixote, 18 
 Dora, 202 
 
 Double Dealer, The, 163 
 Douloureuse, La, 33, 138, 250, 252 
 Doyle, Sir Arthur, 201 
 Dramatic and undramatic, 23, 76, 182- 
 
 188 
 Dryden, 83, 152, 154, 254, 286 
 Duel, Le, 300 
 Duels, 272 
 
 Duke of KilliekranHe, The, 256 
 Dumas yf/f, 20, 25, 43, 47, 48, 67, 91, 
 
 107, 112, 154, 272, 276 
 Dumas /^y^, 88, 112, 115, 137, 163 
 Du Matirier, Major, 14 
 Dynasts, The, n 
 
 Earth, The, 228 
 
 Edward II., 181 
 
 Egge, Peter, 139, 151, 237 
 
 "Einleitende Akkord," 71-78, 90, 93 
 
 Eliot, George, 55 
 
 Emperor and Galilean, 79, 193 
 
 Enemy of the People, An, 60, 79, 84, 
 
 91, III, 149, 202, 277, 290 
 Englishman's Home, An, 14 
 L'Enigme, 233 
 Entrances, 43, 311 
 L'Envers d'une Sainte, 17 
 " Erregende Moment," 116-119, 148 
 Essay of Dramatic Poesy, 83, 152, 
 
 154. 254 
 Etherege, 294 
 L'Etrangire, 300 
 Euphuism, 293 
 
 Euripides, 25, 69, 77, 81, 105, l8l 
 " Eusynopton," 115 
 Exile, The, 193 
 Exits, 43, 311 
 Expectancy, 99, 197 
 Exposition, 71, 74-86, 93-96 
 Extempore acting, 44 
 
 F 
 
 Fagan, James B., 28, 162, 228, 288, 
 
 291 
 Faith Healer, The, 291 
 Falstaff, 18, 75, 289 
 Farquhar, 294 
 Fidora, 166 
 Fielding, 55 
 
 " Fingering of the dramatist," The, 36 
 .,J[i"itch, Clyde, 33, 45, 92, 108, 230,. 266, 
 267, 276, 278, 291, 309 
 Fires of Fate, The, 201 
 Ford, 297 
 
 Foreshadowing, 72, 135-142 
 Fos sites, Les, 197 
 Fourchambault, Les, 172, 183 
 Francillon, 25, 107, 276 
 Freytag, 77, 116, 145, 148 
 Frith, Walter, 220, 237 
 From Ibsen's Workshop, 42 
 Froufrou, 265 
 Fyfe, Hamilton, 161 
 
 G 
 
 ^Galsworthy, John, 14, 25, 43, 88, 92, 
 107, 109, 216, 250, 27i;, 276, 290 
 Gay Lord Quex, The, 24, 60, 67, 72, 
 82, 107, 271 
 
INDEX 
 
 319 
 
 Genealogies, 112 
 
 Getting Married, 13, 43, 102-106 
 
 Ghosts, 24, 60j 67, 72, 82, 107, 271 
 
 Gilbert, Sir W. S., Z09, 230 
 
 Gioconda, La, 81, 249 
 
 Girl with the Green Eyes, The, liil, 
 
 if)\, 309 
 Goldsmith, 88, 294 
 Gorky, 15 
 Grace, 258, 277 
 Great Divide, The, 28, 264 
 Griffith Davenport, 194 
 Grundy, Sydney, 14, 164 
 
 H 
 
 Halevy, 265 
 
 ffamlet, 25, 58, 69, 73, 90, 104, 122, 
 
 15a 289 — - 
 
 Hannell^^^ 
 
 "Happy ending," 49, 135 
 Hardy, Thomas, 11, 31, 203, ZI9 
 Harold, 190 
 Harris, Frank, 170 
 Hauptmann, 15, 25, 146, 291 
 Hedda Gabler, 13, 20, 78, 83, 104, 272, 
 
 290 
 Heimat, 25, 276 
 Heminge and Condell, 48 
 Henderson, Isaac, 169 
 Henri III. et sa Cour, 137 
 Her Advocate, 237 
 Hemani, 208 
 Heme, James A., 16, 194 
 Hervieu, 48, 177, 225, 232, 291 
 Hichens, R., z88, 291 
 Hippolytus, 25, 181 
 His House in Order, 40, 93, 97, 277 
 Historicaldrama, 21, 121, 192-195, 211 
 H.M.S. Pinafore, 209 
 Home Secretary., The, 169 
 Honeymoon, The, 217, 278 
 Hope, Anthony, 147, 216 
 Horace, 4, 30, 107 
 House Opposite, The,^% 
 House with the Green Shutters, The, 31 
 Housman, Laurence, 91 
 HoweUs, W.D.,S 
 Hugo, Victor, 208 
 
 Ibsen, 9, 13, 17, 20, 24, 2S, 32. 3S. 39. 
 40, 42, 46, so, 52, 58, 62, 67, 71, 72, 
 77-86, 98, 99, 100, 102, 107, III, 
 113, 116, 141, 146, 149. iSii 158, 
 167, 176, 193, 196, 202, 213, 227, 
 2SS, 257. 271, 277, 286, 287, 290, 
 302, 304 
 
 Ideal Husband, The, 228 
 Idyll, The, 139, ijl, 237 
 // Jaut qu^une parte soit owverte ou 
 
 fermie, 14 
 // nefautjurer de rien, 14 
 Importance of Being Mamest, The, 88, 
 
 107 
 Impossible eiFects, 52 
 Interest, 120-133 > carrying forward of, 
 
 134-142 
 Invention of story, 19 
 VIniiitie, 17 
 
 Iris, 48, 109, 146, 191, 276, 291 
 Ironmaster, The, 2.(1^ 
 Irony, 132, 157, 237, 238, 240 r^' 
 Irving, Sir Henry, IZ2 
 
 Jerome, J. K., 186, 220 
 Johannisfeuer, 107, 276 
 John Gabriel B<^kman, 58, 85, 96, 177, 
 
 271, 290 -' 
 yohn Gilpin, 25 
 "John Oliver Hobbes," 94, 299 
 Jones, Henry Arthur, 
 
 108, 166, 180, 204, 
 
 29s 
 Jonson, Ben, 15, 61 
 Julius Caesar, 26, 77, J92 
 Justice, 14, 27s, 290 
 
 :s," 94, 299 V 
 
 r. 17. 43. 46. 91.] 
 4, 227, 236, 249,1 
 
 K 
 
 King Henry VIII., 81 
 
 King John, 1 92 
 
 King Lear, 25, 73, 89, 181, 214, 289 
 
 King Richard II., 289 
 
 King Richard III., 3, 100 
 
 Kinship, complexities of, 113 
 
 Knowles, Sheridan, 303 
 
 Labiche, 109 
 
 Lady from the Sea, The, 40, 58. 82, 
 
 227, 25s 
 Lady Huntworth's Experiment, 216 
 Lfldy Inger of Ostraat, 158 
 Lady of Lyons, The, 263 
 ■fLady Windermeri s Fan, 136, 1 50, 234, 
 267, 296 
 Lamb, 60, 297, 303 
 Landon, Perceval, 92 
 Lang, Andrew, 19 
 Last of the Dandies, The, 266 
 
320 
 
 INDEX 
 
 Lavedan, 300 
 
 League of Youth, The, 32, 79, 80, 142 
 
 Lemaltre, Jules, 1 14, 188 
 
 Letters, 310, 312 
 
 Letty, 223, 239, 248, 291 
 
 Liars, The, 227 ^ 
 
 Little Dorrit, 31 
 
 Littk Eyolf, 35, 42,^52,85, 107, 114, 
 
 116, 227, 271 
 Little Father of the Wilderness, The, 
 
 208 
 Little Mary, 123 
 Logic, 48, 177-180, 225-231 
 London Assurance, 61, 294 
 " Long arm of coincidence," 219 
 Lord and Lady Algy, 216 
 Lov^s Comedy, 79 
 Lowell, 48 
 Lyly, 293 
 Lytton, Bulwer, 61, 263, 294 
 
 M 
 
 Macbeth, 26, 72, ill, 122, 150, 160, 
 
 289. 303 
 
 McEvoy, Charles, 147 
 
 Madame X., 219 
 
 Mademoiselle de Belle-Isle, 88, 163 
 r^adras House, The, 146, 251 
 *Maeterlinck, 37, 2l6, 261, 304 
 
 Magda, 25, 276 
 
 Magistrate,, The, 141, 216 
 
 MaStre d'Armes, Le, 195 
 
 Mattre de Forges, Le, 263 
 
 Makeshift endings, 49, 247 
 
 Man of Forty, The, 220 
 
 Man of Honor, A, ig6 
 
 Marlowe, 181 
 
 Marrying of Anne Leete, The, 215 
 
 Marshall, Robert, 256 
 
 Masta- Builder, The, 78, 82, 85, 107, 
 227, 271 
 
 Materniti, 13 
 
 Matthews, i^rander, 128, 224, 301 
 
 Maugham, Somerset, 196, 258, 277 
 
 Mayor of Casterbridge, The, ^l 
 
 Measure for Measure, 260 
 
 Medea, 181 
 
 Meilhac, 265 
 
 Menaechmi, 221 
 
 Menander, 221 
 
 Merchaift of Venice, The, 69, 149, 202, 
 214, 289 
 
 Meredith, George, 297 
 
 " Messenger-speech," 35, 181 
 ^I'Michael ^nd his Lost Angel, 180 
 
 Mid-ChAnnel, 274, 291, 295 
 
 Middlemarck, 30 
 
 Midsummer Nights Dream, A, 2 16 
 
 Misalliance, 43 
 Misanthrope, Le, 289 
 Mr. and Mrs. Daventry, 170 
 Mrs. Dane's Defence, i66, 204, 249 
 Mrs. Warren's Profession, 180, 20^ 
 Mrs. Willoughby's IS^ -20 " 
 
 Modern Aspasia, A, 161 
 Molifere, 9, 13, 25, 52, 98, 289 
 Money, 61, 294 
 Monna Vanna, 261 
 Monsieur Alphonse, 107, 154 
 Monsieur Beaucaire, 208 
 ^Jiloody, William Vaughn. 28, 264, 291 
 Moth and the Flame, The, 33 
 Much ado about Nothing, 70 
 Mummy and the Humming-Bird, The, 
 
 169 
 Murray, Gilbert, 181, 199, 201 
 Musset, A. de, 10 
 
 N 
 
 Narrative, 181, 191 
 Nachtasyl, 15 
 Nero, 193 
 Newcomes, The, 31 
 Nigger, The, 279 
 Niohe, 217 
 Nomenclature, 60 
 Nos Intimes, 164 
 
 O 
 
 Obstacle essential to drama, 27 
 Obstacle, inadequate, 185, 238 
 Oedipus Rex, 24, 72, 100, 103-^051 200, 
 
 215, 219 
 Ogilvie, Stuart, 221 
 Ohnet, 263 
 L£)liplmnt, Mrs., 127, 130 
 Only Way^The, 98 
 Osbourne, Lloyd, 193, 208 
 OthellOi- 1%, 24, 34, 72, 87, 89, 131, 
 
 160, 166, 189, 202, 214 
 Otway, 302 
 Over-jjreparation, 163 
 
 Failleron, 43 
 
 Pair of Spectacles, A, 14 
 
 Pcuilo and, Francesca, 19, 26, 160, 303 
 
 Paradise Lost, 25 
 
 Parisienne, La, 59, 91, 107, 175 
 
 Parker, Louis N., 96, 184 
 
 Passing of the Third Floor Back, 186 
 
 Peer Gynt, 18, 60, 79, 290 
 
INDEX 
 
 321 
 
 Peril, 164 
 
 - Peripety, 30, 199-209, 239 
 Peter Pan, 216 
 Phillips, Stephen, 19, 26, 160, 193, 
 
 ¥3 . . 
 
 Pictuie-poster situation, 39 
 PiUars of Society, Si|p79, 80, 82, 113, 
 
 117, 141, 167, 286 
 ^nero. Sir Arthur, 25, 40, 43, 45, 48, 
 
 50, 88, 92-97, 100, 102, 107, 108, 
 
 109, 141, 146, 149, IS9. i66. 170. 
 
 191, 207, 216, 221, 228, 239, 248, 
 
 273, 276. 277, 290, 29s 
 Platform Stage, 306 
 Plausibility, 210 ; its three planes, 213 
 Flautus, 221 
 
 Porto-Riche, G. de, 107, 271 
 Pot-BouiUe, 52 
 Porwer of Darkness, T/u, 182 
 Prayer of the Sword, The, 28 
 Preparation, 154-160 
 Pretetiders, The, 25, 78, 80, 290 
 Prince Otto, 17 
 Princess and the Butterfly, The, 159, 
 
 248 
 Princesse Georges, La, 48 
 Prisoner ofZenda, The, 98, 216 
 Probability, no, 2io 
 Profligate, The, 149, 221, 328, 273, 295 
 Prologues, 69, 77, 81, 97 
 Prunella, 91 
 
 Psychology, 234, 288-292 
 Pygmalion and Galatea, 230 
 
 Queen Mary, 81, 190, 303 
 " Quiproquo," 27 
 
 Raciiie, 25, 59, 290 
 Raffles, 122, 147 
 ^ed Robe, The, 147 
 Revenge theme, 264 
 RSvolUe, 188 
 Rivals, The, 88 
 
 Rise of Dick Hahvard, The, i86, 220 
 Robertson, T. W., 13, 6i, 107, 293, 
 
 294 
 Robins, Elizabeth, 16 
 Robinson Crusoe, 25 
 Mameo and Juliet, 13, 26, 72, 75, 78, 
 
 160, 218, 289 
 Rosemary, gfi 
 Rosmersholm, 46, 58, 60, 72, 78, 79, 
 
 84, 87, 119, 146, 151, 2S7, 272. 89° 
 Rostdnd, 59, 194 
 R6we, 304 
 "'Ranning-fi?e plays,'' 146 
 
 Samson, 264 
 
 Sarcey, 39, 52, 155, 164, 171-17S. 183, 
 
 188, 195, 215, 224, 287 
 Sardou, 20, 43, 51, 88, llj, 163, 164, 
 
 2p2, 225, 261 
 
 Satisfactory ending, 159 
 
 Scenarios, 43 
 
 Scene, changes of, 108 
 
 "Sceneafeire," 140, 172-195; logical, 
 
 176 ; dramatic, 181 ; structural, 188 ; 
 
 psychological, 189 ; historic, 192 
 " Scene i fuir," 180, 195 
 Schiller, 15, 304 
 School for Scandal, The, 26, 52, 127- 
 
 131. 167 
 Schoolmistress, The, 141, 216 
 Scott, Clement, 39 
 Scribe, 109, 163, 168 
 A Second Mrs. Tanqueray, The, 94, 96, 
 
 100, 223, 274 
 Secrecy^ oath of, 267 
 Secrets, 124, 132, 232-241 
 Self-sacrifice theme, 265 
 Shakespeare, 3, 9, 13, 24, 26, 34, 48, 
 
 58, 61, 68-77, 102. 107. "I, 149. 
 
 150, 160, 189, 192, 202, 214, 216, 
 
 218, 221, 260, 289, 302, 303 
 Shakesperean Tragedy, 269 
 Shaw, George Bernard, 25, 40, 43, 55, 
 
 88, 91, 99. 102-106, 107, 147, 155, 
 
 i8d, 186, 194, 206, 224, 235, 276, 
 
 290, 312 ■^ 
 Sheldon, Edward, 279 
 Sheridan, 26, 52, 88, 127, 294 
 Sherlock Sblmes, 147 
 She Sloops to Conquer, 88 
 Shore Acres, 16 
 
 Silver Box, The,?&, 92, 107, 109,290 
 Single-adventure plays, 88, 141 
 Soliloquy, 3, 21, 90, 305-310 
 Sophocles, 24, 72, 100, 200, 215, 219, 
 
 269 
 Spirhisme, 225 
 Stage-directions, 54 
 Stage-management, 50 
 Stayton, Frank, 220 
 Steele, 294 
 " Steigerung," 145 
 Stevenson, R. L., 17 
 " Stichomythia," 26, 305 
 Still Waters Run Deep, 264 
 Story-telling, 137 
 Strafford, 303 
 Str^e, 14, 25, 276, 290 
 Strong, Austin, 193, 208 
 l«»6udermann, 107, 276, 291 
 Suicide, 272 
 Supernatural, the, 226, 227 
 
 Y 
 
32- 
 
 INDEX 
 
 SuppUce d'une Femmc, Le, 67 
 
 Sttpplices, loj 
 
 Surprise, 34, 123, 128, 131, 232 
 
 Suspense, 34, 39. (See Tension) 
 
 Sutro, Alfred, 43, 50, 108, 207, 258 
 
 Swinburne, 303 
 
 Synge, J. M., 298, 304 
 
 Tableau-plays, 15 
 
 Taming of the Shrew, The, 70, 88 
 
 Tartufe, Le, \% 25, 52, 98 
 
 Technik des Dramas, 77 
 
 Tempest, Thf, 69, 71, 76 
 
 Tennyson, 81, igo, 303 
 
 Tension, 148-153, 237, 240, 270 
 
 Tess 0' the Durbervihcs, 203, 219 
 
 Thackeray, 31, 55, 61 
 
 Theatricali.sm, 38-40, j7, 250 
 
 Thunderbolt, The, 96, 207 
 
 Time, "ideal " treattiient of, 105, log ; 
 unity of, 193-105 
 
 Tolstoy, 25, 182 
 
 Tosea, La, 261 
 
 " Tragische Schuld," 271 
 
 Tree, Sir Herbert, I92 
 
 Tristan und Isolde, 304 
 
 Triumph of the Philistines, The, 180 
 
 Trois Filles de M. Dupont, Les, 178 
 
 Trois Mtmpin, Les, 163 
 JTruth, The, 278, 291 
 " Twelfth Night, 70 
 
 U 
 
 Un Uenfait ^est jamais perdu, 14 
 Underplot, 152 
 Under which King, 162 
 Unities, the three, 96, 103, io5 
 Unity of time, 103-105 
 
 Varibrugh, 294 
 f'errfd'M'iu, Un, 163 
 
 Vikings at Helgeland, The, 78, 79 
 
 ' ' Voix du sang, "266 
 
 Voleur, Le, 204 
 
 ^■''otes for Women, i6 
 
 Voysey Inheritance, 7^he, 215, 251 
 
 Walkley, A. ii., tg, 20 
 
 Wallensleins Li',<^er,„i^ 
 
 Ward, Mrs. Humphry, 1V4 
 
 War- God, The, 305 
 
 Waste, 91, 98, 99, ro9, 215, 275 , 
 
 Wayof the World, The, 13. 298' 
 
 Way the Money Goes, The, H, iga 
 
 Weber, Die, I J, 146 
 
 Webster, 297 
 
 Wedekind, 291 
 
 "Well-made play," The, 4'^, 163, 204, 
 
 206, 216 
 What the Public Wants, 22rf 
 Wheels within Wheels, 137, 21 1 
 When We Dead Awaken, 85 
 White Knight, The, 221 
 " White marriage " theme, ^6-^ 
 Whitewashing Julia, 236 
 Wild Duck, The, 42, 53, 79, 84, 17$^ 
 
 196, 272, 290 » ' i 
 
 4.-Wilde, Oscar, 88, 107, 136, 150,228, 
 
 234, 267, 296, 298 
 Will against will, 26 
 Will and chance, 185 
 Wills, W. G., 211 
 Winter's l^ale, T/ie, 26, 70 
 Wisdom of the Wise, The, 2:io 
 Woman of no Importance, A, 2q5 
 Worst Woman in London, Th^, i J5 
 
 Vou Never Can Teil, 224 
 
 Zangwill, Israel, 156, 305 
 Zola, 52 
 
 THE END 
 
 PRINTED BY WILLIAM CLOWES AND SONS, LIMITED, LONDOK AND Bf COLES.