Chapter 13

studio happy and serene, she leaves it broken-hearted; but the effect of the scene is not a whit greater because, in the two previous acts, we have been studiously deprived of the information that would have led us vaguely to anticipate it.

To sum up this question of secrecy: the current maxim, "Never keep a secret from your audience," would appear to be an over-simplification of a somewhat difficult question of craftsmanship. We may agree that it is often dangerous and sometimes manifestly foolish to keep a secret; but, on the other hand, there is certainly no reason why the playwright should blurt out all his secrets at the first possible opportunity. The true art lies in knowing just how long to keep silent, and just the right time to speak. In the first act of _Letty_, Sir Arthur Pinero gains a memorable effect by keeping a secret, not very long, indeed, but long enough and carefully enough to show that he knew very clearly what he was doing. We are introduced to Nevill Letchmere's bachelor apartments. Animated scenes occur between Letchmere and his brother-in-law, Letchmere and his sister, Letchmere and Letty, Marion and Hilda Gunning. It is evident that Letty dreams of marriage with Letchmere; and for aught that we see or hear, there is no just cause or impediment to the contrary. It is only, at the end of the very admirable scene between Letchmere and Mandeville that the following little passage occurs:

MANDEVILLE: ... At all events I _am_ qualified to tell her I'm fairly gone on her--honourably gone on her--if I choose to do it.

LETCHMERE: Qualified?

MANDEVILLE: Which is more than you are, Mr. Letchmere. I _am_ a single man; you ain't, bear in mind.

LETCHMERE: (_imperturbably_): Very true.

This one little touch is a masterpiece of craftsmanship. It would have been the most natural thing in the world for either the sister or the brother-in-law, concerned about their own matrimonial difficulties, to let fall some passing allusion to Letchmere's separation from his wife; but the author carefully avoided this, carefully allowed us to make our first acquaintance with Letty in ignorance of the irony of her position, and then allowed the truth to slip out just in time to let us feel the whole force of that irony during the last scene of the act and the greater part of the second act. A finer instance of the delicate grading of tension it would be difficult to cite.

One thing is certain; namely, that if a secret is to be kept at all, it must be worth the keeping; if a riddle is propounded, its answer must be pleasing and ingenious, or the audience will resent having been led to cudgel its brains for nothing. This is simply a part of the larger principle, before insisted on, that when a reasonable expectation is aroused, it can be baffled only at the author's peril. If the crux of a scene or of a whole play lie in the solution of some material difficulty or moral problem, it must on no account be solved by a mere trick or evasion. The dramatist is very ill-advised who sets forth with pomp and circumstance to perform some intellectual or technical feat, and then merely skirts round it or runs away from it. A fair proportion should always be observed between effort and effect, between promise and performance.

"But if the audience happens to misread the playwright's design, and form exaggerated and irrational expectations?" That merely means that the playwright does not know his business, or, at any rate, does not know his audience. It is his business to play upon the collective mind of his audience as upon a keyboard--to arouse just the right order and measure of anticipation, and fulfil it, or outdo it, in just the right way at just the right time. The skill of the dramatist, as distinct from his genius or inspiration, lies in the correctness of his insight into the mind of his audience.

* * * * *

[Footnote 1: For instance: "If you can get a word with him by pretending that you are his wife, tell him to hold his tongue until morning; _that will give me all the start I need_."]

[Footnote 2: In _The Idyll_, by Herr Egge, of which some account is given in Chapter X, the author certainly does right in not allowing the audience for a moment to share the hero's doubts as to the heroine's past. It would have been very easy for him to have kept the secret; but he takes the earliest opportunity of assuring us that her relations with Ringve were quite innocent.]

_BOOK IV_

THE END

_CHAPTER XVIII_

CLIMAX AND ANTICLIMAX

If it were as easy to write a good last act as a good first act, we should be able to reckon three masterpieces for every one that we can name at present. The reason why the last act should offer special difficulties is not far to seek. We have agreed to regard a play as essentially a crisis in the lives of one or more persons; and we all know that crises are much more apt to have a definite beginning than a definite end. We can almost always put our finger upon the moment--not, indeed, when the crisis began--but when we clearly realized its presence or its imminence. A chance meeting, the receipt of a letter or a telegram, a particular turn given to a certain conversation, even the mere emergence into consciousness of a previously latent feeling or thought, may mark quite definitely the moment of germination, so to speak, of a given crisis; and it is comparatively easy to dramatize such a moment. But how few crises come to a definite or dramatic conclusion! Nine times out of ten they end in some petty compromise, or do not end at all, but simply subside, like the waves of the sea when the storm has blown itself out. It is the playwright's chief difficulty to find a crisis with an ending which satisfies at once his artistic conscience and the requirements of dramatic effect.

And the difficulty becomes greater the nearer we approach to reality. In the days when tragedy and comedy were cast in fixed, conventional moulds, the playwright's task was much simpler. It was thoroughly understood that a tragedy ended with one or more deaths, a comedy with one or more marriages; so that the question of a strong or a weak ending did not arise. The end might be strongly or weakly led up to, but, in itself, it was fore-ordained. Now that these moulds are broken, and both marriage and death may be said to have lost their prestige as the be-all and end-all of drama, the playwright's range of choice is unlimited, and the difficulty of choosing has become infinitely greater. Our comedies are much more apt to begin than to end with marriage, and death has come to be regarded as a rather cheap and conventional expedient for cutting the knots of life.

From the fact that "the difficulty becomes greater the nearer we approach to reality," it further follows that the higher the form of drama, the more probable is it that the demands of truth and the requirements of dramatic effect may be found to clash. In melodrama, the curtain falls of its own accord, so to speak, when the handcuffs are transferred from the hero's wrists to the villain's. In an adventure-play, whether farcical or romantic, when the adventure is over the play is done. The author's task is merely to keep the interest of the adventure afoot until he is ready to drop his curtain. This is a point of craftsmanship in which playwrights often fail; but it is a point of craftsmanship only. In plays of a higher order, on the other hand, the difficulty is often inherent in the theme, and not to be overcome by any feat of craftsmanship. If the dramatist were to eschew all crises that could not be made to resolve themselves with specifically dramatic crispness and decisiveness, he would very seriously limit the domain of his art. Many excellent themes would be distorted and ruined by having an emphatic ending forced upon them. It is surely much better that they should be brought to their natural unemphatic ending, than that they should be either falsified or ignored.

I suggest, then, that the modern tendency to take lightly Aristotle's demand that the drama should have a "beginning, a middle, _and an end_," arises from the nature of things, and implies, not necessarily, nor even probably, a decline in craftsmanship, but a new intimacy of relation to life, and a new sincerity of artistic conscience. I suggest that the "weak last act," of which critics so often complain, is a natural development from which authors ought not, on occasion, to shrink, and of which critics ought, on occasion, to recognize the necessity. To elevate it into a system is absurd. There is certainly no more reason for deliberately avoiding an emphatic ending than for mechanically forcing one. But authors and critics alike should learn to distinguish the themes which do, from the themes which do not, call for a definite, trenchant solution, and should handle them, and judge them, in accordance with their inherent quality.

Let us, however, define our terms, and be sure that we know what we are talking about. By an "unemphatic ending" I am far from meaning a makeshift ending, an ending carelessly and conventionally huddled up. Nor do I mean an indecisive ending, where the curtain falls, as the saying goes, on a note of interrogation. An unemphatic ending, as I understand it, is a deliberate anticlimax, an idyllic, or elegiac, or philosophic last act, following upon a penultimate act of very much higher tension. The disposition to condemn such an ending off-hand is what I am here pleading against. It is sometimes assumed that the playwright ought always to make his action conclude within five minutes of its culmination; but for such a hard-and-fast rule I can find no sufficient reason. The consequences of a great emotional or spiritual crisis cannot always be worked out, or even foreshadowed, within so brief a space of time. If, after such a crisis, we are unwilling to keep our seats for another half-hour, in order to learn "what came of it all," the author has evidently failed to awaken in us any real interest in his characters.

A good instance of the unemphatic ending is the last act of Sir Arthur Pinero's _Letty_. This "epilogue"--so the author calls it--has been denounced as a concession to popular sentimentality, and an unpardonable anticlimax. An anticlimax it is, beyond all doubt; but it does not follow that it is an artistic blemish. Nothing would have been easier than not to write it--to make the play end with Letty's awakening from her dream, and her flight from Letchmere's rooms. But the author has set forth, not merely to interest us in an adventure, but to draw a character; and it was essential to our full appreciation of Letty's character that we should know what, after all, she made of her life. When Iris, most hapless of women, went out into the dark, there was nothing more that we needed to know of her. We could guess the sequel only too easily. But the case of Letty was wholly different. Her exit was an act of will, triumphing over a form of temptation peculiarly alluring to her temperament. There was in her character precisely that grit which Iris lacked; and we wanted to know what it would do for her. This was not a case for an indecisive ending, a note of interrogation. The author felt no doubt as to Letty's destiny, and he wanted to leave his audience in no doubt. From Iris's fate we were only too willing to avert our eyes; but it would have been a sensible discomfort to us to be left in the dark about Letty's.

This, then, I regard as a typical instance of justified anticlimax. Another is the idyllic last act of _The Princess and the Butterfly_, in which, moreover, despite its comparatively subdued tone, the tension is maintained to the end. A very different matter is the third act of _The Benefit of the Doubt_, already alluded to. This is a pronounced case of the makeshift ending, inspired (to all appearance) simply by the fact that the play must end somehow, and that no better idea happens to present itself. Admirable as are the other acts, one is almost inclined to agree with Dumas that an author ought not to embark upon a theme unless he foresees a better way out of it than this. It should be noted, too, that _The Benefit of the Doubt_ is a three-act play, and that, in a play laid out on this scale, a whole act of anticlimax is necessarily disproportionate. It is one thing to relax the tension in the last act out of four or five; quite another thing in the last act out of three. In other words, the culminating point of a four-or five-act play may be placed in the penultimate act; in a three-act play, it should come, at earliest, in the penultimate scene.[1]

In the works of Mr. Henry Arthur Jones we find several instances of the unemphatic last act--some clearly justified, others much less so. Among the former I unhesitatingly reckon the fourth act of _Mrs. Dane's Defence_. It would not have been difficult, but surely most inartistic, to huddle up the action in five minutes after Mrs. Dane's tragic collapse under Sir Daniel Carteret's cross-examination. She might have taken poison and died in picturesque contortions on the sofa; or Lionel might have defied all counsels of prudence and gone off with her in spite of her past; or she might have placed Lionel's hand in Janet's, saying: "The game is up. Bless you, my children. I am going into the nearest nunnery." As a matter of fact, Mr. Jones brought his action to its natural close in a quiet, sufficiently adroit, last act; and I do not see that criticism has any just complaint to make.

In recent French drama, _La Douloureuse_, already cited, affords an excellent instance of a quiet last act. After the violent and heartrending rupture between the lovers in the third act, we feel that, though this paroxysm of pain is justified by the circumstances, it will not last for ever, and Philippe and Hélène will come together again. This is also M. Donnay's view; and he devotes his whole last act, quite simply, to a duologue of reconciliation. It seems to me a fault of proportion, however, that he should shift his locality from Paris to the Riviera, and should place the brief duologue in a romantic woodland scene. An act of anticlimax should be treated, so to speak, as unpretentiously as possible. To invent an elaborate apparatus for it is to emphasize the anticlimax by throwing it into unnecessary relief.

This may be a convenient place for a few words on the modern fashion of eschewing emphasis, not only in last acts, but at every point where the old French dramaturgy demanded it, and especially in act-endings. _Punch_ has a pleasant allusion to this tendency in two suggested examination-papers for an "Academy of Dramatists":

A--FOR THE CLASSICAL SIDE ONLY. 1. What is a "curtain"; and how should it be led up to?

B--FOR THE MODERN SIDE ONLY. 1. What is a "curtain"; and how can it be avoided?

Some modern playwrights have fled in a sort of panic from the old "picture-poster situation" to the other extreme of always dropping their curtain when the audience least expects it. This is not a practice to be commended. One has often seen an audience quite unnecessarily chilled by a disconcerting "curtain." There should be moderation even in the shrinking from theatricality.

This shrinking is particularly marked, though I do not say it is carried too far, in the plays of Mr. Galsworthy. Even the most innocent tricks of emphasis are to him snares of the Evil One. He would sooner die than drop his curtain on a particularly effective line. It is his chief ambition that you should never discern any arrangement, any intention, in his work. As a rule, the only reason you can see for his doing thus or thus is his desire that you should see no reason for it. He does not carry this tendency, as some do, to the point of eccentricity; but he certainly goes as far as any one should be advised to follow. A little further, and you incur the danger of becoming affectedly unaffected, artificially inartificial.

I am far from pleading for the conventional tableau at the end of each act, with all the characters petrified, as it were, in penny-plain-twopence-coloured attitudes. But it is certainly desirable that the fall of the curtain should not take an audience entirely by surprise, and even that the spectator should feel the moment to be rightly chosen, though he might be unable to give any reason for his feeling. Moreover--this may seem a super-subtlety, but one has seen it neglected with notably bad effect--a playwright should never let his audience expect the fall of a curtain at a given point, and then balk their expectancy, unless he is sure that he holds in reserve a more than adequate compensation. There is nothing so dangerous as to let a play, or an act, drag on when the audience feels in its heart that it is really over, and that "the rest is silence"--or ought to be. The end of Mr. Granville Barker's fine play, _The Voysey Inheritance_, was injured by the fact that, several minutes before the curtain actually fell, he had given what seemed an obvious "cue for curtain." I do not say that what followed was superfluous; what I do say is that the author ought to have been careful not to let us imagine that the colloquy between Edward and Alice was over when in fact it had still some minutes to run. An even more remarkable play, _The Madras House_, was ruined, on its first night, by a long final anticlimax. Here, however, the fault did not lie in awakening a premature expectation of the close, but in the fact that we somehow were more interested in the other characters of the play than in the pair who held the stage throughout the long concluding scene.

Once more I turn to _La Douloureuse_ for an instance of an admirable act-ending of the quiet modern type. The third act--the terrible peripety in the love of Philippe and Hélène--has run its agonizing course, and worked itself out. The old dramaturgy would certainly have ended the scene with a bang, so to speak--a swoon or a scream, a tableau of desolation, or, at the very least, a piece of tearful rhetoric. M. Donnay does nothing of the sort. He lets his lovers unpack their hearts with words until they are exhausted, broken, dazed with misery, and have nothing more to say. Then Hélène asks: "What o'clock is it?" Philippe looks at his watch: "Nearly seven." "I must be going"--and she dries her eyes, smoothes her hair, pulls herself together, in a word, to face the world again. The mechanical round of life re-asserts its hold upon them. "Help me with my cloak," she says; and he holds her mantle for her, and tucks in the puffed sleeves of her blouse. Then he takes up the lamp and lights her out--and the curtain falls. A model "curtain"!

* * * * *

[Footnote 1: The fact that a great poet can ignore such precepts with impunity is proved by the exquisite anticlimax of the third act of D'Annunzio's _La Gioconda_.]

_CHAPTER XIX_

CONVERSION

The reader may have noticed, possibly with surprise, that some of the stock terms of dramatic criticism occur but rarely in these pages, or not at all. One of them is _dénouement_. According to orthodox theory, I ought to have made the _dénouement_ the subject of a whole chapter, if not of a whole book. Why have I not done so?

For two reasons. The lesser, but not negligible, reason is that we possess no convenient English word for the unknotting or disentangling of a complication. Dénouement itself cannot be plausibly Anglicized, and no native word has as yet, by common consent, been accepted as its equivalent. I sometimes wish we could adopt, and print without italics, the excellent and expressive Greek word "lusis"; but I cannot, on my own responsibility, attempt so daring an innovation. The second and determining reason for not making the _dénouement_ one of the heads of my argument, is that, the play of intrigue being no longer the dominant dramatic form, the image of disentangling has lost some of its special fitness. It is only in a somewhat strained and conventional sense that the term _nodus_, or knot, can be applied to the sort of crisis with which the modern drama normally deals; and if we do not naturally think of the crisis as a knot, we naturally do not think of its close as an unknotting.

Nevertheless, there are frequent cases in which the end of a play depends on something very like the unravelling of a tangled skein; and still more often, perhaps, is it brought about through the loosening of some knot in the mind of one or more of the characters. This was the characteristic end of the old comedy. The heavy father, or cantankerous guardian, who for four acts and a half had stood between the lovers, suddenly changed his mind, and all was well. Even by our ancestors this was reckoned a rather too simple method of disentanglement. Lisideius, in Dryden's dialogue,[1] in enumerating the points in which the French drama is superior to the English notes that--

You never see any of their plays end with a conversion, or simple change of will, which is the ordinary way which our poets use to end theirs. It shew little art in the conclusion of a dramatick poem, when they who have hindered the felicity during the four acts, desist from it in the fifth, without some powerful cause to take them off their design.

The remark of Lisideius is suggested by a passage in Corneille, who instances, as an apt and artistic method of bringing about the conversion of a heavy father, that his daughter's lover should earn his gratitude by rescuing him from assassination!

Conversions, closely examined, will be found to fall into two classes: changes in volition, and changes in sentiment. It was the former class that Dryden had in mind; and, with reference to this class, the principle he indicates remains a sound one. A change of resolve should never be due to a mere lapse of time--to the necessity for bringing the curtain down and letting the audience go home. It must always be rendered plausible by some new fact or new motive: some hitherto untried appeal to reason or emotion. This rule, however, is too obvious to require enforcement. It was not quite superfluous so long as the old convention of comedy endured. For a century and a half after Dryden's time, hard-hearted parents were apt to withdraw their opposition to their children's "felicity" for no better reason than that the fifth act was drawing to a close. But this formula is practically obsolete. Changes of will, on the modern stage, are not always adequately motived; but that is because of individual inexpertness, not because of any failure to recognize theoretically the necessity for adequate motivation.

Changes of sentiment are much more important and more difficult to handle. A change of will can always manifest itself in action but it is very difficult to externalize convincingly a mere change of heart. When the conclusion of a play hinges (as it frequently does) on a conversion of this nature, it becomes a matter of the first moment that it should not merely be asserted, but proved. Many a promising play has gone wrong because of the author's neglect, or inability, to comply with this condition.

It has often been observed that of all Ibsen's thoroughly mature works, from _A Doll's House_ to _John Gabriel Borkman_, _The Lady from the Sea_ is the loosest in texture, the least masterly in construction. The fact that it leaves this impression on the mind is largely due, I think, to a single fault. The conclusion of the play--Ellida's clinging to Wangel and rejection of the Stranger--depends entirely on a change in Wangel's mental attitude, _of which we have no proof whatever beyond his bare assertion_. Ellida, in her overwrought mood, is evidently inclining to yield to the uncanny allurement of the Stranger's claim upon her, when Wangel, realizing that her sanity is threatened, says:

WANGEL: It shall not come to that. There is no other way of deliverance for you--at least I see none. And therefore--therefore I--cancel our bargain on the spot. Now you can choose your own path, in full--full freedom.

ELLIDA (_Gazes at him awhile, as if speechless_): Is this true--true--what you say? Do you mean it--from your inmost heart?

WANGEL: Yes--from the inmost depths of my tortured heart, I mean it.... Now your own true life can return to its--its right groove again. For now you can choose in freedom; and on your own responsibility, Ellida.

ELLIDA: In freedom--and on my own responsibility? Responsibility? This--this transforms everything.

--and she promptly gives the Stranger his dismissal. Now this is inevitably felt to be a weak conclusion, because it turns entirely on a condition of Wangel's mind of which he gives no positive and convincing evidence. Nothing material is changed by his change of heart. He could not in any case have restrained Ellida by force; or, if the law gave him the abstract right to do so, he certainly never had the slightest intention of exercising it. Psychologically, indeed, the incident is acceptable enough. The saner part of Ellida's will was always on Wangel's side; and a merely verbal undoing of the "bargain" with which she reproached herself might quite naturally suffice to turn the scale decisively in his favour. But what may suffice for Ellida is not enough for the audience. Too much is made to hang upon a verbally announced conversion. The poet ought to have invented some material--or, at the very least, some impressively symbolic--proof of Wangel's change of heart. Had he done so, _The Lady from the Sea_ would assuredly have taken a higher rank among his works.

Let me further illustrate my point by comparing a very small thing with a very great. The late Captain Marshall wrote a "farcical romance" named _The Duke of Killiecrankie_, in which that nobleman, having been again and again rejected by the Lady Henrietta Addison, kidnapped the obdurate fair one, and imprisoned her in a crag-castle in the Highlands. Having kept her for a week in deferential durance, and shown her that he was not the inefficient nincompoop she had taken him for, he threw open the prison gate, and said to her: "Go! I set you free!" The moment she saw the gate unlocked, and realized that she could indeed go when and where she pleased, she also realized that she had not the least wish to go, and flung herself into her captor's arms. Here we have Ibsen's situation transposed into the key of fantasy, and provided with the material "guarantee of good faith" which is lacking in _The Lady from the Sea_. The Duke's change of mind, his will to set the Lady Henrietta free, is visibly demonstrated by the actual opening of the prison gate, so that we believe in it, and believe that she believes in it. The play was a trivial affair, and is deservedly forgotten; but the situation was effective because it obeyed the law that a change of will or of feeling, occurring at a crucial point in a dramatic action, must be certified by some external evidence, on pain of leaving the audience unimpressed.

This is a more important matter than it may at first sight appear. How to bring home to the audience a decisive change of heart is one of the ever-recurring problems of the playwright's craft. In _The Lady from the Sea_, Ibsen failed to solve it: in _Rosmersholm_ he solved it by heroic measures. The whole catastrophe is determined by Rosmer's inability to accept without proof Rebecca's declaration that Rosmersholm has "ennobled" her, and that she is no longer the same woman whose relentless egoism drove Beata into the mill-race. Rebecca herself puts it to him: "How can you believe me on my bare word after to-day?" There is only one proof she can give--that of "going the way Beata went." She gives it: and Rosmer, who cannot believe her if she lives, and will not survive her if she dies, goes with her to her end. But the cases are not very frequent, fortunately, in which such drastic methods of proof are appropriate or possible. The dramatist must, as a rule, attain his end by less violent means; and often he fails to attain it at all.

A play by Mr. Haddon Chambers, _The Awakening_, turned on a sudden conversion--the "awakening," in fact, referred to in the title. A professional lady-killer, a noted Don Juan, has been idly making love to a country maiden, whose heart is full of innocent idealisms. She discovers his true character, or, at any rate, his reputation, and is horror-stricken, while practically at the same moment, he "awakens" to the error of his ways, and is seized with a passion for her as single minded and idealistic as hers for him. But how are the heroine and the audience to be assured of the fact? That is just the difficulty; and the author takes no effectual measures to overcome it. The heroine, of course, is ultimately convinced; but the audience remains sceptical, to the detriment of the desired effect. "Sceptical," perhaps, is not quite the right word. The state of mind of a fictitious character is not a subject for actual belief or disbelief. We are bound to accept theoretically what the author tells us; but in this case he has failed to make us intimately feel and know that it is true.[2]

In Mr. Alfred Sutro's play _The Builder of Bridges_, Dorothy Faringay, in her devotion to her forger brother, has conceived the rather disgraceful scheme of making one of his official superiors fall in love with her, in order to induce him to become practically an accomplice in her brother's crime. She succeeds beyond her hopes. Edward Thursfield does fall in love with her, and, at a great sacrifice, replaces the money the brother has stolen. But, in a very powerful peripety-scene in the third act, Thursfield learns that Dorothy has been deliberately beguiling him, while in fact she was engaged to another man. The truth is, however, that she has really come to love Thursfield passionately, and has broken her engagement with the other, for whom she never truly cared. So the author tells us, and so we are willing enough to believe--if he can devise any adequate method of making Thursfield believe it. Mr. Sutro's handling of the difficulty seems to me fairly, but not conspicuously, successful. I cite the case as a typical instance of the problem, apart from the merits or demerits of the solution.

It may be said that the difficulty of bringing home to us the reality of a revulsion of feeling, or a radical change of mental attitude, is only a particular case of the playwright's general problem of convincingly externalizing inward conditions and processes. That is true: but the special importance of a conversion which unties the knot and brings the curtain down seemed to render it worthy of special consideration.

* * * * *

[Footnote 1: _Of Dramatic Poesy_, ed. Arnold, 1903, p. 51.]

[Footnote 2: In Mr. Somerset Maugham's _Grace_ the heroine undergoes a somewhat analogous change of heart, coming to love the husband whom she has previously despised. But we have no difficulty in accepting her conversion, partly because its reasons are clear and fairly adequate, partly because there is no question of convincing the husband, who has never realized her previous contempt for him.]

_CHAPTER XX_

BLIND-ALLEY THEMES--AND OTHERS

A blind-alley theme, as its name imports, is one from which there is no exit. It is a problem incapable of solution, or, rather, of which all possible solutions are equally unsatisfactory and undesirable. The playwright cannot too soon make sure that he has not strayed into such a no-thoroughfare. Whether an end be comic or tragic, romantic or ironic, happy or disastrous, it should satisfy something within us--our sense of truth, or of beauty, or of sublimity, or of justice, or of humour, or, at the least or lowest, our cynical sense of the baseness of human nature, and the vanity of human aspirations. But a play which satisfies neither our higher nor our lower instincts, baffles our sympathies, and leaves our desires at fault between equally inacceptable alternatives--such a play, whatever beauties of detail it may possess, is a weariness of the spirit, and an artistic blunder.

There are in literature two conspicuous examples of the blind-alley theme--two famous plays, wherein two heroines are placed in somewhat similar dilemmas, which merely paralyse our sympathies and inhibit our moral judgment. The first of these is _Measure for Measure_. If ever there was an insoluble problem in casuistry, it is that which Shakespeare has here chosen to present to us. Isabella is forced to choose between what we can only describe as two detestable evils. If she resists Angelo, and lets her brother die, she recoils from an act of self-sacrifice; and, although we may coldly approve, we cannot admire or take pleasure in her action. If, on the other hand, she determines at all costs to save her brother's life, her sacrifice is a thing from which we want only to avert the mind: it belongs to the region of what Aristotle calls to _miaron_, the odious and intolerable. Shakespeare, indeed, confesses the problem insoluble in the fact that he leaves it unsolved--evading it by means of a mediaeval trick. But where, then, was the use of presenting it? What is the artistic profit of letting the imagination play around a problem which merely baffles and repels it? Sardou, indeed, presented the same problem, not as the theme of a whole play, but only of a single act; and he solved it by making Floria Tosca kill Scarpia. This is a solution which, at any rate, satisfies our craving for crude justice, and is melodramatically effective. Shakespeare probably ignored it, partly because it was not in his sources, partly because, for some obscure reason, he supposed himself to be writing a comedy. The result is that, though the play contains some wonderful poetry, and has been from time to time revived, it has never taken any real hold upon popular esteem.

The second glaring instance of a blind-alley theme is that of _Monna Vanna_. We have all of us, I suppose, stumbled, either as actors or onlookers, into painful situations, which not even a miracle of tact could possibly save. As a rule, of course, they are comic, and the agony they cause may find a safety-valve in laughter. But sometimes there occurs some detestable incident, over which it is equally impossible to laugh and to weep. The wisest words, the most graceful acts, are of no avail. One longs only to sink into the earth, or vanish into thin air. Such a situation, on the largest possible scale, is that presented in _Monna Vanna_. It differs from that of _Measure for Measure_ in the fact that there can be no doubt as to the moral aspect of the case. It is quite clear that Giovanna ought to sacrifice herself to save, not one puling Claudio, but a whole city full of men, women, and children. What she does is absolutely right; but the conjuncture is none the less a grotesque and detestable one, which ought to be talked about and thought about as little as possible. Every word that is uttered is a failure in tact. Guido, the husband, behaves, in the first act, with a violent egoism, which is certainly lacking in dignity; but will any one tell me what would be a dignified course for him to pursue under the circumstances? The sage old Marco, too--that fifteenth-century Renan--flounders just as painfully as the hot-headed Guido. It is the fatality of the case that "he cannot open his mouth without putting his foot in it"; and a theme which exposes a well-meaning old gentleman to this painful necessity is one by all means to be avoided. The fact that it is a false alarm, and that there is no rational explanation for Prinzivalle's wanton insult to a woman whom he reverently idolizes, in no way makes matters better.[1] Not the least grotesque thing in the play is Giovanna's expectation that Guido will receive Prinzivalle with open arms because he has--changed his mind. We can feel neither approval nor disapproval, sympathy nor antipathy, in such a deplorable conjunction of circumstances. All we wish is that we had not been called upon to contemplate it.[2] Maeterlinck, like Shakespeare, was simply dallying with the idea of a squalid heroism--so squalid, indeed, that neither he nor his predecessor had the courage to carry it through.

Pray observe that the defect of these two themes is not merely that they are "unpleasant." It is that there is no possible way out of them which is not worse than unpleasant: humiliating, and distressing. Let the playwright, then, before embarking on a theme, make sure that he has some sort of satisfaction to offer us at the end, if it be only the pessimistic pleasure of realizing some part of "the bitter, old and wrinkled truth" about life. The crimes of destiny there is some profit in contemplating; but its stupid vulgarities minister neither to profit nor delight.

* * * * *

It may not be superfluous to give at this point a little list of subjects which, though not blind-alley themes, are equally to be avoided. Some of them, indeed, are the reverse of blind-alley themes, their drawback lying in the fact that the way out of them is too tediously apparent.

At the head of this list I would place what may be called the "white marriage" theme: not because it is ineffective, but because its effectiveness is very cheap and has been sadly overdone. It occurs in two varieties: either a proud but penniless damsel is married to a wealthy parvenu, or a woman of culture and refinement is married to a "rough diamond." In both cases the action consists of the transformation of a nominal into a real marriage; and it is almost impossible, in these days, to lend any novelty to the process. In the good old _Lady of Lyons_ the theme was decked in trappings of romantic absurdity, which somehow harmonized with it. One could hear in it a far-off echo of revolutionary rodomontade. The social aspect of the matter was emphasized, and the satire on middle-class snobbery was cruelly effective. The personal aspect, on the other hand--the unfulfilment of the nominal marriage--was lightly and discreetly handled, according to early-Victorian convention. In later days--from the time of M. George Ohnet's _Maître de Forges_ onwards--this is the aspect on which playwrights have preferred to dwell. Usually, the theme shades off into the almost equally hackneyed _Still Waters Run Deep_ theme; for there is apt to be an aristocratic lover whom the unpolished but formidable husband threatens to shoot or horsewhip, and thereby overcomes the last remnant of repugnance in the breast of his haughty spouse. In _The Ironmaster_ the lover was called the Duc de Bligny, or, more commonly, the Dook de Bleeny; but he has appeared under many aliases. In the chief American version of the theme, Mr. Vaughn Moody's _Great Divide_, the lover is dispensed with altogether, being inconsistent, no doubt, with the austere manners of Milford Corners, Mass. In one of the recent French versions, on the other hand--M. Bernstein's _Samson_--the aristocratic lover is almost as important a character as the virile, masterful, plebeian husband. It appears from this survey--which might be largely extended--that there are several ways of handling the theme; but there is no way of renewing and deconventionalizing it. No doubt it has a long life before it on the plane of popular melodrama, but scarcely, one hopes, on any higher plane.

Another theme which ought to be relegated to the theatrical lumber-room is that of patient, inveterate revenge. This form of vindictiveness is, from a dramatic point of view, an outworn passion. It is too obviously irrational and anti-social to pass muster in modern costume. The actual vendetta may possibly survive in some semi-barbarous regions, and Grangerfords and Shepherdsons (as in Mark Twain's immortal romance) may still be shooting each other at sight. But these things are relics of the past; they do not belong to the normal, typical life of our time. It is useless to say that human nature is the same in all ages. That is one of the facile axioms of psychological incompetence. Far be it from me to deny that malice, hatred, spite, and the spirit of retaliation are, and will be until the millennium, among the most active forces in human nature. But most people are coming to recognize that life is too short for deliberate, elaborate, cold-drawn revenge. They will hit back when they conveniently can; they will cherish for half a lifetime a passive, an obstructive, ill-will; they will even await for years an opportunity of "getting their knife into" an enemy. But they have grown chary of "cutting off their nose to spite their face"; they will very rarely sacrifice their own comfort in life to the mere joy of protracted, elaborate reprisals. Vitriol and the revolver--an outburst of rage, culminating in a "short, sharp shock"--these belong, if you will, to modern life. But long-drawn, unhasting, unresting machination, with no end in view beyond an ultimate unmasking, a turn of the tables--in a word, a strong situation--this, I take it, belongs to a phase of existence more leisurely than ours. There is no room in our crowded century for such large and sustained passions. One could mention plays--but they are happily forgotten--in which retribution was delayed for some thirty or forty years, during which the unconscious object of it enjoyed a happy and prosperous existence. These, no doubt, are extreme instances; but cold-storage revenge, as a whole, ought to be as rare on the stage as it is in real life. The serious playwright will do well to leave it to the melodramatists.

A third theme to be handled with the greatest caution, if at all, is that of heroic self-sacrifice. Not that self-sacrifice, like revenge, is an outworn passion. It still rages in daily life; but no audience of average intelligence will to-day accept it with the uncritical admiration which it used to excite in the sentimental dramas of last century. Even then--even in 1869--Meilhac and Halévy, in their ever-memorable _Froufrou_, showed what disasters often result from it; but it retained its prestige with the average playwright--and with some who were above the average--for many a day after that. I can recall a play, by a living English author, in which a Colonel in the Indian Army pleaded guilty to a damning charge of cowardice rather than allow a lady whom he chivalrously adored to learn that it was her husband who was the real coward and traitor. He knew that the lady detested her husband; he knew that they had no children to suffer by the husband's disgrace; he knew that there was a quite probable way by which he might have cleared his own character without casting any imputation on the other man. But in a sheer frenzy of self-sacrifice he blasted his own career, and thereby inflicted far greater pain upon the woman he loved than if he had told the truth or suffered it to be told. And twenty years afterwards, when the villain was dead, the hero still resolutely refused to clear his own character, lest the villain's widow should learn the truth about her wholly unlamented husband. This was an extravagant and childish case; but the superstition of heroic self-sacrifice still lingers in certain quarters, and cannot be too soon eradicated. I do not mean, of course, that self-sacrifice is never admirable, but only that it can no longer be accepted as a thing inherently noble, apart from its circumstances and its consequences. An excellent play might be written with the express design of placing the ethics of self-sacrifice in their true light. Perhaps the upshot might be the recognition of the simple principle that it is immoral to make a sacrifice which the person supposed to benefit by it has no right to accept.

Another motive against which it is perhaps not quite superfluous to warn the aspiring playwright is the "voix du sang." It is only a few years since this miraculous voice was heard speaking loud and long in His Majesty's Theatre, London, and in a play by a no less modern-minded author than the late Clyde Fitch. It was called _The Last of the Dandies_,[3] and its hero was Count D'Orsay. At a given moment, D'Orsay learned that a young man known as Lord Raoul Ardale was in reality his son. Instantly the man of the world, the squire of dames, went off into a deliquium of tender emotion. For "my bo-ô-oy" he would do anything and everything. He would go down to Crockford's and win a pot of money to pay "my boy's" debts--Fortune could not but be kind to a doting parent. In the beautiful simplicity of his soul, he looked forward with eager delight to telling Raoul that the mother he adored was no better than she should be, and that he had no right to his name or title. Not for a moment did he doubt that the young man would share his transports. When the mother opposed his purpose of betraying her secret, he wept with disappointment. "All day," he said, "I have been saying to myself: When that sun sets, I shall hear him say, 'Good-night, Father!'" He postulated in so many words the "voix du sang," trusting that, even if the revelation were not formally made, "Nature would send the boy some impulse" of filial affection. It is hard to believe--but it is the fact--that, well within the present century, such ingenuous nonsense as this was gravely presented to the public of a leading theatre, by an author of keen intelligence, who, but for an unhappy accident, would now be at the zenith of his career. There are few more foolish conventions than that of the "voix du sang." Perhaps, however, the rising generation of playwrights has more need to be warned against the opposite or Shawesque convention, that kinship utters itself mainly in wrangling and mutual dislike.

Among inherently feeble and greatly overdone expedients may be reckoned the oath or promise of secrecy, exacted for no sufficient reason, and kept in defiance of common sense and common humanity. Lord Windermere's conduct in Oscar Wilde's play is a case in point, though he has not even an oath to excuse his insensate secretiveness. A still clearer instance is afforded by Clyde Fitch's play _The Girl with the Green Eyes_. In other respects a very able play, it is vitiated by the certainty that Austin ought to have, and would have, told the truth ten times over, rather than subject his wife's jealous disposition to the strain he puts upon it.

It would not be difficult to prolong this catalogue of themes and motives that have come down in the world, and are no longer presentable in any society that pretends to intelligence. But it is needless to enter into further details. There is a general rule, of sovereign efficacy, for avoiding such anachronisms: "Go to life for your themes, and not to the theatre." Observe that rule, and you are safe. But it is easier said than done.

* * * * *

[Footnote 1: I have good reason for believing that, in M. Maeterlinck's original scheme, Prinzivalle imposed no such humiliating condition. Giovanna went of her own motive to appeal to his clemency; and her success was so complete that her husband, on her return, could not believe that it had been won by avowable means. This is a really fine conception--what a pity that the poet departed from it!]

[Footnote 2: Much has been made of the Censor's refusal to license _Monna Vanna_; but I think there is more to be said for his action in this than in many other cases. In those countries where the play has succeeded, I cannot but suspect that the appeal it made was not wholly to the higher instincts of the public.]

[Footnote 3: I am not sure what was the precise relationship of this play to the same author's _Beau Brummel_. D'Orsay's death scene was certainly a repetition of Brummel's.]

_CHAPTER XXI_

THE FULL CLOSE

In an earlier chapter, I have tried to show that a certain tolerance for anticlimax, for a fourth or fifth act of calm after the storm of the penultimate act, is consonant with right reason, and is a practically inevitable result of a really intimate relation between drama and life. But it would be a complete misunderstanding of my argument to suppose that I deny the practical, and even the artistic, superiority of those themes in which the tension can be maintained and heightened to the very end.

The fact that tragedy has from of old been recognized as a higher form than comedy is partly due, no doubt, to the tragic poet's traditional right to round off a human destiny in death. "Call no man happy till his life be ended," said Sophocles, quoting from an earlier sage; and it needed no profundity of wisdom to recognize in the "happy ending" of comedy a conventional, ephemeral thing. But when, after all the peripeties of life, the hero "home has gone and ta'en his wages," we feel that, at any rate, we have looked destiny squarely in the face, without evasion or subterfuge. Perhaps the true justification of tragedy as a form of art is that, after this experience, we should feel life to be, not less worth living, but greater and more significant than before.

This is no place, however, for a discussion of the aesthetic basis of tragedy in general.[1] What is here required, from the point of view of craftsmanship, is not so much a glorification of the tragic ending, as a warning against its facile misuse. A very great play may, and often must, end in death; but you cannot make a play great by simply killing off your protagonist. Death is, after all, a very inexpensive means of avoiding anticlimax. Tension, as we saw, is symbolized in the sword of Damocles; and it can always be maintained, in a mechanical way, by letting your hero play about with a revolver, or placing an overdose of chloral well within your heroine's reach. At the time when the English drama was awaking from the lethargy of the 'seventies, an idea got abroad that a non-sanguinary ending was always and necessarily inartistic, and that a self-respecting playwright must at all hazards kill somebody before dropping his curtain. This was an extravagant reaction against the purely commercial principle that the public would not, on any terms, accept a tragic ending. As a matter of fact, the mortality was not very great; for managers were resolute in the old belief, and few dramatists had the courage or authority to stand up against them. But I have often heard playwrights lamenting their inability to massacre the luckless children of their fancy, who, nine times out of ten, had done nothing to incur such a doom. The real trouble was that death seemed to be the only method of avoiding anticlimax.

It is a very sound rule that, before you determine to write a tragedy, you should make sure that you have a really tragic theme: that you can place your hero at such odds with life that reconciliation, or mere endurance, would be morally base or psychologically improbable. Moreover, you must strike deep into character before you are justified in passing capital sentence on your personages. Death is a disproportionate close for a commonplace and superficially-studied life. It is true that quite commonplace people do die; indeed, they preponderate in the bills of mortality; but death on the stage confers a sort of distinction which ought not to be accorded without due and sufficient cause. To one god in particular we may apply the Horatian maxim, "Nec deus intersit, nisi dignus vindice nodus."

In German aesthetic theory, the conception _tragische Schuld_--"tragic guilt"--plays a large part. It descends, no doubt, from the Aristotelian maxim that a tragic hero must neither be too good nor too bad; but it also belongs to a moralizing conception, which tacitly or explicitly assumes that the dramatist's aim ought to be "to justify the ways of God to man." In these days we look at drama more objectively, and do not insist on deciding in what degree a man has deserved death, if only we feel that he has necessarily or probably incurred it. But in order that we may be satisfied of this, we must know him intimately and feel with him intensely. We must, in other words, believe that he dies because he cannot live, and not merely to suit the playwright's convenience and help him to an effective "curtain."

As we review the series of Ibsen's modern plays, we cannot but feel that, though he did not shrink from death, he never employed it, except perhaps in his last melancholy effort, as a mere way of escape from a difficulty. In five out of his thirteen modern plays, no one dies at all.[2] One might even say six: for Oswald, in _Ghosts_, may live for years; but I hold it as only fair to count the death of his mind as more than equivalent to bodily death. Solness, on the plane of literal fact, dies by an accident; on the plane of symbolic interpretation, he dies of the over-great demands which Hilda makes upon his "sickly conscience." Little Eyolf's death can also be regarded from a symbolic point of view; but there is no substantial reason to think of it otherwise than as an accident. John Gabriel Borkman dies of heart seizure, resulting from sudden exposure to extreme cold. In the case of Solness and Borkman, death is a quite natural and probable result of the antecedent conditions; and in the case of Eyolf, it is not a way out of the action, but rather the way into it. There remain the three cases of suicide: Rebecca and Rosmer, Hedda Gabler, and Hedvig. I have already, in Chapter XIX, shown how the death of Rebecca was the inevitable outcome of the situation--the one conclusive proof of her "ennoblement"--and how it was almost equally inevitable that Rosmer should accompany her to her end. Hedda Gabler was constitutionally fated to suicide: a woman of low vitality, overmastering egoism, and acute supersensitiveness, placed in a predicament which left her nothing to expect from life but tedium and humiliation. The one case left--that of Hedvig--is the only one in which Ibsen can possibly be accused of wanton bloodshed. Björnson, in a very moving passage in his novel, _The Paths of God_, did actually, though indirectly, make that accusation. Certainly, there is no more heartrending incident in fiction; and certainly it is a thing that only consummate genius can justify. Ibsen happened to possess that genius, and I am not far from agreeing with those who hold _The Wild Duck_ to be his greatest work. But for playwrights who are tempted to seek for effects of pathos by similar means, one may without hesitation lay down this maxim: Be sure you are an Ibsen before you kill your Hedvig.

This analysis of Ibsen's practice points to the fact--for such I believe it to be--that what the modern playwright has chiefly to guard against is the temptation to overdo suicide as a means of cutting the dramatic knot. In France and Germany there is another temptation, that of the duel;[3] but in Anglo-Saxon countries it scarcely presents itself. Death, other than self-inflicted, is much less tempting, and less apt to be resorted to in and out of season. The heroine, whether virtuous or erring, who dies of consumption, has gone greatly out of vogue. A broken heart is no longer held to be necessarily fatal. The veriest tyro realizes that death by crude accident is inadmissible as a determining factor in serious drama; and murder is practically (though not absolutely) relegated to the melodramatic domain. The one urgent question, then, is that of the artistic use and abuse of suicide.

The principle is pretty plain, I think, that it ought to be the artist's, as it is the man's, last resort. We know that, in most civilized countries, suicide is greatly on the increase. It cannot be called an infrequent incident in daily life. It is certain, too, that the motives impelling to it are apt to be of a dramatic nature, and therefore suited to the playwright's purposes. But it is, on the other hand, such a crude and unreasoning means of exit from the tangle of existence that a playwright of delicate instincts will certainly employ it only under the strongest compulsion from his artistic conscience.

Sir Arthur Pinero has three suicides on his record, though one of them was, so to speak, nipped in the bud. In _The Profligate_, as presented on the stage, Dunstan Renshaw changed his mind before draining the fatal goblet; and in this case the stage version was surely the right one. The suicide, to which the author still clings in the printed text, practically dates the play as belonging to the above-mentioned period of rebellion against the conventional "happy ending," when the ambitious British dramatist felt that honour required him to kill his man on the smallest provocation.[4] Nearly a quarter of a century has passed since then, and the disproportion between such a play and such a catastrophe is now apparent to everyone. It is not that we judge Renshaw's delinquencies to be over-punished by death--that is not the question. The fact is simply that the characters are not large enough, true enough, living enough--that the play does not probe deep enough into human experience--to make the august intervention of death seem other than an incongruity. The suicide of Paula Tanqueray, though it, too, has been much criticized, is a very different matter. Inevitable it cannot be called: if the play had been written within the past ten years, Sir Arthur would very likely have contrived to do without it. But it is, in itself, probable enough: both the good and the bad in Paula's character might easily make her feel that only the dregs of life remained to her, and they not worth drinking. The worst one can say of it is that it sins against the canon of practical convenience which enjoins on the prudent dramatist strict economy in suicide. The third case, Zoe Blundell's leap to nothingness, in that harsh and ruthless masterpiece, _Mid-Channel_, is as inevitable as anything can well be in human destiny. Zoe has made a miserable and hopeless muddle of her life. In spite of her goodness of heart, she has no interests and no ideals, apart from the personal satisfactions which have now been poisoned at their source. She has intervened disastrously in the destinies of others. She is ill; her nerves are all on edge; and she is, as it were, driven into a corner, from which there is but one easy and rapid exit. Here is a case, if ever there was one, where the end is imposed upon the artist by the whole drift of his action. It may be said that chance plays a large part in the concatenation of events--that, for instance, if Leonard Ferris had not happened to live at the top of a very high building, Zoe would not have encountered the sudden temptation to which she yields. But this, as I have tried to show above, is a baseless complaint. Chance is a constant factor in life, now aiding, now thwarting, the will. To eliminate it altogether would be to produce a most unlifelike world. It is only when the playwright so manipulates and reduplicates chance as to make it seem no longer chance, but purposeful arrangement, that we have the right to protest.

Another instance of indisputably justified suicide may be found in Mr. Galsworthy's _Justice_. The whole theme of the play is nothing but the hounding to his end of a luckless youth, who has got on the wrong side of the law, and finds all the forces of society leagued against him. In Mr. Granville Barker's _Waste_, the artistic justification for Trebell's self-effacement is less clear and compulsive. It is true that the play was suggested by the actual suicide, not of a politician, but of a soldier, who found his career ruined by some pitiful scandal. But the author has made no attempt to reproduce the actual circumstances of that case; and even if he had reproduced the external circumstances, the psychological conditions would clearly have eluded him. Thus the appeal to fact is, as it always must be, barred. In two cases, indeed, much more closely analogous to Trebell's than that which actually suggested it--two famous cases in which a scandal cut short a brilliant political career--suicide played no part in the catastrophe. These real-life instances are, I repeat, irrelevant. The only question is whether Mr. Barker has made us feel that a man of Trebell's character would certainly not survive the paralysing of his energies; and that question every spectator must answer for himself. I am far from answering it in the negative. I merely suggest that the playwright may one day come across a theme for which there is no conceivable ending but suicide, and may wish that he had let Trebell live, lest people should come to regard him as a spendthrift of self-slaughter.

The suicide which brings to a close Mr. Clyde Fitch's very able play, _The Climbers_, stands on a somewhat different level. Here it is not the protagonist who makes away with himself, nor is his destiny the main theme of the play. Mr. Fitch has painted a broad social picture, in which, if there is any concentration of interest, it is upon Blanche and Warden. Sterling's suicide, then, though it does in fact cut the chief knot of the play, is to be regarded rather as a characteristic and probable incident of a certain phase of life, than as the culmination of a spiritual tragedy. It has not the artistic significance, either good or bad, that it would have if the character and destiny of Sterling were our main concernment.

* * * * *

The happy playwright, one may say, is he whose theme does not force upon him either a sanguinary or a tame last act, but enables him, without troubling the coroner, to sustain and increase the tension up to the very close. Such themes are not too common, but they do occur. Dumas found one in _Denise_, and another in _Francillon_, where the famous "Il en a menti!" comes within two minutes of the fall of the curtain. In _Heimat_ (Magda) and in _Johannisfeuer_, Sudermann keeps the tension at its height up to the fall of the curtain. Sir Arthur Pinero's _Iris_ is a case in point; so are Mr. Shaw's _Candida_ and _The Devil's Disciple_; so is Mr. Galsworthy's _Strife_. Other instances will no doubt occur to the reader; yet he will probably be surprised to find that it is not very easy to recall them.

For this is not, in fact, the typical modern formula. In plays which do not end in death, it will generally be found that the culminating scene occurs in the penultimate act, and that, if anticlimax is avoided, it is not by the maintenance of an unbroken tension, by its skilful renewal and reinforcement in the last act. This is a resource which the playwright will do well to bear in mind. Where he cannot place his "great scene" in his last act, he should always consider whether it be not possible to hold some development in reserve whereby the tension may be screwed up again--if unexpectedly, so much the better. Some of the most successful plays within my recollection have been those in which the last act came upon us as a pleasant surprise. An anticlimax had seemed inevitable; and behold! the author had found a way out of it.

_An Enemy of the People_ may perhaps be placed in this class, though, as before remarked, the last act is almost an independent comedy. Had the play ended with the fourth act, no one would have felt that anything was lacking; so that in his fifth act, Ibsen was not so much grappling with an urgent technical problem, as amusing himself by wringing the last drop of humour out of the given situation. A more strictly apposite example may be found in Sir Arthur Pinero's play, _His House in Order_. Here the action undoubtedly culminates in the great scene between Nina and Hilary Jesson in the third act; yet we await with eager anticipation the discomfiture of the Ridgeley family; and when we realize that it is to be brought about by the disclosure to Filmer of Annabel's secret, the manifest rightness of the proceeding gives us a little shock of pleasure. Mr. Somerset Maugham, again, in the last act of _Grace_, employs an ingenious device to keep the tension at a high pitch. The matter of the act consists mainly of a debate as to whether Grace Insole ought, or ought not, to make a certain painful avowal to her husband. As the negative opinion was to carry the day, Mr. Maugham saw that there was grave danger that the final scene might appear an almost ludicrous anticlimax. To obviate this, he made Grace, at the beginning of the act, write a letter of confession, and address it to Claude; so that all through the discussion we had at the back of our mind the question "Will the letter reach his hands? Will the sword of Damocles fall?" This may seem like a leaf from the book of Sardou; but in reality it was a perfectly natural and justified expedient. It kept the tension alive throughout a scene of ethical discussion, interesting in itself, but pretty clearly destined to lead up to the undramatic alternative--a policy of silence and inaction. Mr. Clyde Fitch, in the last act of _The Truth_, made an elaborate and daring endeavour to relieve the mawkishness of the clearly-foreseen reconciliation between Warder and Becky. He let Becky fall in with her father's mad idea of working upon Warder's compassion by pretending that she had tried to kill herself. Only at the last moment did she abandon the sordid comedy, and so prove herself (as we are asked to suppose) cured for ever of the habit of fibbing. Mr. Fitch here showed good technical insight marred by over-hasty execution. That Becky should be tempted to employ her old methods, and should overcome the temptation, was entirely right; but the actual deception attempted was so crude and hopeless that there was no plausibility in her consenting to it, and no merit in her desisting from it.

In light comedy and farce it is even more desirable than in serious drama to avoid a tame and perfunctory last act. Very often a seemingly trivial invention will work wonders in keeping the interest afoot. In Mr. Anstey's delightful farce, _The Brass Bottle_, one looked forward rather dolefully to a flat conclusion; but by the simple device of letting the Jinny omit to include Pringle in his "act of oblivion," the author is enabled to make his last scene quite as amusing as any of its predecessors. Mr. Arnold Bennett, in _The Honeymoon_, had the audacity to play a deliberate trick on the audience, in order to evade an anticlimax. Seeing that his third act could not at best be very good, he purposely put the audience on a false scent, made it expect an absolutely commonplace ending (the marriage of Flora to Charles Haslam), and then substituted one which, if not very brilliant, was at least ingenious and unforeseen. Thus, by defeating the expectation of a superlatively bad act, he made a positively insignificant act seem comparatively good. Such feats of craftsmanship are entertaining, but too dangerous to be commended for imitation.

In some modern plays a full close is achieved by the simple expedient of altogether omitting the last act, or last scene, and leaving the end of the play to the imagination. This method is boldly and (I understand) successfully employed by Mr. Edward Sheldon in his powerful play, _The Nigger_. Philip Morrow, the popular Governor of one of the Southern States, has learnt that his grandmother was a quadroon, and that consequently he has in him a much-attenuated strain of African blood. In the Southern States, attenuation matters nothing: if the remotest filament of a man's ancestry runs back to Africa, he is "a nigger all right." Philip has just suppressed a race-riot in the city, and, from the balcony of the State Capitol, is to address the troops who have aided him, and the assembled multitude. Having resolutely parted from the woman he adores, but can no longer marry, he steps out upon the balcony to announce that he is a negro, that he resigns the Governorship, and that henceforth he casts in his lot with his black brethren. The stage-direction runs thus--

The afternoon sun strikes his figure. At his appearance a shout goes up--long, steady, enthusiastic cheering; and, after a moment, the big regimental band begins playing, very slowly, "My Country, 'tis of Thee." ... All the people in the room are smiling and applauding enthusiastically; and--as Phil in vain raises his hand for silence, and the band crashes through the National Anthem, and the roar of voices still rises from below--

THE CURTAIN FALLS.

One does not know whether to praise Mr. Sheldon for having adroitly avoided an anticlimax, or to reproach him with having unblushingly shirked a difficulty. To my sense, the play has somewhat the air of a hexameter line with the spondee cut off.[5] One _does_ want to see the peripety through. But if the audience is content to imagine the sequel, Mr. Sheldon's craftsmanship is justified, and there is no more to be said. M. Brieux experienced some difficulty in bringing his early play, _Blanchette_, to a satisfactory close. The third act which he originally wrote was found unendurably cynical; a more agreeable third act was condemned as an anticlimax; and for some time the play was presented with no third act at all. It did not end, but simply left off. No doubt it is better that a play should stop in the middle than that it should drag on tediously and ineffectually. But it would be foolish to make a system of such an expedient. It is, after all, an evasion, not a solution, of the artist's problem.

An incident which occurred during the rehearsals for the first production of _A Doll's House_, at the Novelty Theatre, London, illustrates the difference between the old, and what was then the new, fashion of ending a play. The business manager of the company, a man of ripe theatrical experience, happened to be present one day when Miss Achurch and Mr. Waring were rehearsing the last great scene between Nora and Helmar. At the end of it, he came up to me, in a state of high excitement. "This is a fine play!" he said. "This is sure to be a big thing!" I was greatly pleased. "If this scene, of all others," I thought, "carries a man like Mr. Smith off his feet, it cannot fail to hold the British public." But I was somewhat dashed when, a day or two later, Mr. Smith came up to me again, in much less buoyant spirits. "I made a mistake about that scene," he said. "They tell me it's the end of the _last_ act--I thought it was the end of the _first_!"

* * * * *

[Footnote 1: The reader who wishes to pursue the theme may do so to excellent advantage in Professor Bradley's _Shakespearean Tragedy_.]

[Footnote 2: It is true that in _A Doll's House_, Dr. Rank announces his approaching demise: but he does not actually die, nor is his fate an essential part of the action of the play.]

[Footnote 3: The duel, even in countries whose customs permit of it, is essentially an inartistic end; for it leaves the catastrophe to be decided either by Chance or Providence--two equally inadmissible arbiters in modern drama. Alexandre Dumas _fils_, in his preface to _Héloïse Paranquet_, condemns the duel as a dramatic expedient. "Not to mention," he says, "the fact that it has been much over-done, we are bound to recognize that Providence, in a fit of absence of mind, sometimes suffers the rascal to kill the honest man. Let me recommend my young colleagues," he proceeds, "never to end a piece which pretends to reproduce a phase of real life, by an intervention of chance." The recommendation came rather oddly from the dramatist who, in _L'Etrangère_, had disposed of his "vibrion," the Duc de Septmonts, by making Clarkson kill him in a duel. Perhaps he did not reckon _L'Etrangère_ as pretending to reproduce a phase of real life. A duel is, of course, perfectly admissible in a French or German play, simply as part of a picture of manners. Its stupid inconclusiveness may be the very point to be illustrated. It is only when represented as a moral arbitrament that it becomes an anachronism.]

[Footnote 4: I am glad to see, from Mr. Malcolm Salaman's introduction to the printed play, that, even in those days of our hot youth, my own aesthetic principles were less truculent.]

[Footnote 5: This image is sometimes suggested by an act-ending which leaves a marked situation obviously unresolved. The curtain should never be dropped at such a point as to leave the characters in a physical or mental attitude which cannot last for more than a moment, and must certainly be followed, then and there, by important developments. In other words, a situation ought not to be cut short at the very height of its tension, but only when it has reached a point of--at any rate momentary--relaxation.]

_BOOK V_

EPILOGUE

_CHAPTER XXII_

CHARACTER AND PSYCHOLOGY

For the invention and ordering of incident it is possible, if not to lay down rules, at any rate to make plausible recommendations; but the power to observe, to penetrate, and to reproduce character can neither be acquired nor regulated by theoretical recommendations. Indirectly, of course, all the technical discussions of the previous chapters tend, or ought to tend, towards the effective presentment of character; for construction, in drama of any intellectual quality, has no other end. But specific directions for character-drawing would be like rules for becoming six feet high. Either you have it in you, or you have it not.

Under the heading of character, however, two points arise which may be worth a brief discussion: first, ought we always to aim at development in character? second, what do we, or ought we to, mean by "psychology"?

It is a frequent critical complaint that in such-and-such a character there is "no development": that it remains the same throughout a play; or (so the reproach is sometimes worded) that it is not a character but an invariable attitude. A little examination will show us, I think, that, though the critic may in these cases be pointing to a real fault, he does not express himself quite accurately.

What is character? For the practical purposes of the dramatist, it may be defined as a complex of intellectual, emotional, and nervous habits. Some of these habits are innate and temperamental--habits formed, no doubt, by far-off ancestors.[1] But this distinction does not here concern us. Temperamental bias is a habit, like another, only somewhat older, and, therefore, harder to deflect or eradicate. What do we imply, then, when we complain that, in a given character, no development has taken place? We imply that he ought, within the limits of the play, to have altered the mental habits underlying his speech and actions. But is this a reasonable demand? Is it consistent with the usual and desirable time-limits of drama? In the long process of a novel, there may be time for the gradual alteration of habits: in the drama, which normally consists of a single crisis, any real change of character would have to be of a catastrophic nature, in which experience does not encourage us to put much faith. It was, indeed--as Dryden pointed out in a passage quoted above[2]--one of the foibles of our easy-going ancestors to treat character as practically reversible when the time approached for ringing down the curtain. The same convention survives to this day in certain forms of drama. Even Ibsen, in his earlier work, had not shaken it off; witness the sudden ennoblement of Bernick in _Pillars of Society_. But it can scarcely be that sort of "development" which the critics consider indispensable. What is it, then, that they have in mind?

By "development" of character, I think they mean, not change, but rather unveiling, disclosure. They hold, not unreasonably, that a dramatic crisis ought to disclose latent qualities in the persons chiefly concerned in it, and involve, not, indeed, a change, but, as it were, an exhaustive manifestation of character. The interest of the highest order of drama should consist in the reaction of character to a series of crucial experiences. We should, at the end of a play, know more of the protagonist's character than he himself, or his most intimate friend, could know at the beginning; for the action should have been such as to put it to some novel and searching test. The word "development" might be very aptly used in the photographic sense. A drama ought to bring out character as the photographer's chemicals "bring out" the forms latent in the negative. But this is quite a different thing from development in the sense of growth or radical change. In all modern drama, there is perhaps no character who "develops," in the ordinary sense of the word, so startlingly as Ibsen's Nora; and we cannot but feel that the poet has compressed into a week an evolution which, in fact, would have demanded many months.

The complaint that a character preserves the same attitude throughout means (if it be justified) that it is not a human being at all, but a mere embodiment of two or three characteristics which are fully displayed within the first ten minutes, and then keep on repeating themselves, like a recurrent decimal. Strong theatrical effects can be produced by this method, which is that of the comedy of types, or of "humors." But it is now generally, and rightly, held that a character should be primarily an individual, and only incidentally (if at all) capable of classification under this type or that. It is a little surprising to find Sarcey, so recently as 1889, laying it down that "a character is a master faculty or passion, which absorbs all the rest.... To study and paint a character is, therefore, by placing a man in a certain number of situations, to show how this principal motive force in his nature annihilates or directs all those which, if he had been another man, would probably have come into action." This dogma of the "ruling passion" belongs rather to the eighteenth century than to the close of the nineteenth.

* * * * *

We come now to the second of the questions above propounded, which I will state more definitely in this form: Is "psychology" simply a more pedantic term for "character-drawing"? Or can we establish a distinction between the two ideas? I do not think that, as a matter of fact, any difference is generally and clearly recognized; but I suggest that it is possible to draw a distinction which might, if accepted, prove serviceable both to critics and to playwrights.

Let me illustrate my meaning by an example. In _Bella Donna_, by Messrs. Robert Hichens and James B. Fagan, we have a murder-story of a not uncommon or improbable type. A woman of very shady reputation marries an amiable idealist who is infatuated with her. She naturally finds his idealism incomprehensible and his amiability tedious. His position as heir-presumptive to a peerage is shattered by the birth of an heir-apparent. She becomes passionately enamoured of an Egyptian millionaire; and she sets to work to poison her husband with sugar-of-lead, provided by her oriental lover. How her criminal purpose is thwarted by a wise Jewish physician is nothing to the present purpose. In intent she is a murderess, no less than Lucrezia Borgia or the Marquise de Brinvilliers. And the authors have drawn her character cleverly enough. They have shown her in the first act as a shallow-souled materialist, and in the later acts as a vain, irritable, sensual, unscrupulous creature. But have they given us any insight into her psychology? No, that is just what they have not done. They have assigned to her certain characteristics without which cruel and cold-blooded murder would be inconceivable; but they have afforded us no insight into the moral conditions and, mental processes which make it, not only conceivable, but almost an everyday occurrence. For the average human mind, I suppose, the psychology of crime, and especially of fiendish, hypocritical murder-by-inches, has an undeniable fascination. To most of us it seems an abhorrent miracle; and it would interest us greatly to have it brought more or less within the range of our comprehension, and co-ordinated with other mental phenomena which we can and do understand. But of such illumination we find nothing in _Bella Donna_. It leaves the working of a poisoner's mind as dark to us as ever. So far as that goes, we might just as well have read the report of a murder-trial, wherein the facts are stated with, perhaps, some superficial speculation as to motive, but no attempt is made to penetrate to underlying soul-states. Yet this is surely the highest privilege of art--to take us behind and beneath those surfaces of things which are apparent to the detective and the reporter, the juryman and the judge.

Have we not here, then, the distinction between character-drawing and psychology? Character-drawing is the presentment of human nature in its commonly-recognized, understood, and accepted aspects; psychology is, as it were, the exploration of character, the bringing of hitherto unsurveyed tracts within the circle of our knowledge and comprehension. In other words, character-drawing is synthetic, psychology analytic. This does not mean that the one is necessarily inferior to the other. Some of the greatest masterpieces of creative art have been achieved by the synthesis of known elements. Falstaff, for example--there is no more brilliant or more living character in all fiction; yet it is impossible to say that Shakespeare has here taken us into previously unplumbed depths of human nature, as he has in Hamlet, or in Lear. No doubt it is often very hard to decide whether a given personage is a mere projection of the known or a divination of the unknown. What are we to say, for example, of Cleopatra, or of Shylock, or of Macbeth? Richard II, on the other hand, is as clearly a piece of psychology as the Nurse in _Romeo and Juliet_ is a piece of character-drawing. The comedy of types necessarily tends to keep within the limits of the known, and Molière--in spite of Alceste and Don Juan--is characteristically a character-drawer, as Racine is characteristically a psychologist. Ibsen is a psychologist or he is nothing. Earl Skule and Bishop Nicholas, Hedda Gabler and John Gabriel Borkman are daring explorations of hitherto uncharted regions of the human soul. But Ibsen, too, was a character-drawer when it suited him. One is tempted to say that there is no psychology in Brand--he is a mere incarnation of intransigent idealism--while Peer Gynt is as brilliant a psychological inspiration as Don Quixote. Dr. Stockmann is a vigorously-projected character, Hialmar Ekdal a piece of searching psychology. Finally, my point could scarcely be better illustrated than by a comparison--cruel but instructive --between Rebecca in _Rosmersholm_ and the heroine in _Bella Donna_. Each is, in effect, a murderess, though it was a moral, not a mineral, poison that Rebecca employed. But while we know nothing whatever of Mrs. Armine's mental processes, Rebecca's temptations, struggles, sophistries, hesitations, resolves, and revulsions of feeling are all laid bare to us, so that we feel her to be no monster, but a living woman, comprehensible to our intelligence, and, however blameworthy, not wholly beyond the range of our sympathies. There are few greater achievements of psychology.

Among the playwrights of to-day, I should call Mr. Granville Barker above all things a psychologist. It is his instinct to venture into untrodden fields of character, or, at any rate, to probe deeply into phenomena which others have noted but superficially, if at all. Hence the occasional obscurity of his dialogue. Mr. Shaw is not, primarily, either a character-drawer or a psychologist, but a dealer in personified ideas. His leading figures are, as a rule, either his mouthpieces or his butts. When he gives us a piece of real character-drawing, it is generally in some subordinate personage. Mr. Galsworthy, I should say, shows himself a psychologist in _Strife_, a character-drawer in _The Silver Box_ and _Justice_. Sir Arthur Pinero, a character-drawer of great versatility, becomes a psychologist in some of his studies of feminine types--in Iris, in Letty, in the luckless heroine of _Mid-Channel_. Mr. Clyde Fitch had, at least, laudable ambitions in the direction of psychology. Becky in _The Truth_, and Jinny in _The Girl with the Green Eyes_, in so far as they are successfully drawn, really do mean a certain advance on our knowledge of feminine human nature. Unfortunately, owing to the author's over-facile and over-hasty method of work, they are now and then a little out of drawing. The most striking piece of psychology known to me in American drama is the Faith Healer in William Vaughn Moody's drama of that name. If the last act of _The Faith Healer_ were as good as the rest of it, one might safely call it the finest play ever written, at any rate in the English language, beyond the Atlantic. The psychologists of the modern French stage, I take it, are M. de Curel and M. de Porto-Riche. MM. Brieux and Hervieu are, like Mr. Shaw, too much concerned with ideas to probe very deep into character. In Germany, Hauptmann, and, so far as I understand him, Wedekind, are psychologists, Sudermann, a vigorous character-drawer.

It is pretty clear that, if this distinction were accepted, it would be of use to the critic, inasmuch as we should have two terms for two ideas, instead of one popular term with a rather pedantic synonym. But what would be its practical use to the artist, the craftsman? Simply this, that if the word "psychology" took on for him a clear and definite meaning, it might stimulate at once his imagination and his ambition. Messrs. Hichens and Fagan, for example, might have asked themselves--or each other--"Are we getting beneath the surface of this woman's nature? Are we plucking the heart out of her mystery? Cannot we make the specific processes of a murderess's mind clearer to ourselves and to our audiences?" Whether they would have been capable of rising to the opportunity, I cannot tell; but in the case of other authors one not infrequently feels: "This man could have taken us deeper into this problem if he had only thought of it." I do not for a moment mean that every serious dramatist should always be aiming at psychological exploration. The character-drawer's appeal to common knowledge and instant recognition is often all that is required, or that would be in place. But there are also occasions not a few when the dramatist shows himself unequal to his opportunities if he does not at least attempt to bring hitherto unrecorded or unscrutinized phases of character within the scope of our understanding and our sympathies.

* * * * *

[Footnote 1: If this runs counter to the latest biological orthodoxy, I am sorry. Habits are at any rate transmissible by imitation, if not otherwise.]

[Footnote 2: Chapter XIX.]

_CHAPTER XXIII_

DIALOGUE AND DETAILS

The extraordinary progress made by the drama of the English language during the past quarter of a century is in nothing more apparent than in the average quality of modern dialogue. Tolerably well-written dialogue is nowadays the rule rather than the exception. Thirty years ago, the idea that it was possible to combine naturalness with vivacity and vigour had scarcely dawned upon the playwright's mind. He passed and repassed from stilted pathos to strained and verbal wit (often mere punning); and when a reformer like T.W. Robertson tried to come a little nearer to the truth of life, he was apt to fall into babyish simplicity or flat commonness.

Criticism has not given sufficient weight to the fact that English dramatic writing laboured for centuries--and still labours to some degree--under a historic misfortune. It has never wholly recovered from the euphuism--to use the word in its widest sense--of the late sixteenth century. The influence of John Lyly and his tribe is still traceable, despite a hundred metamorphoses, in some of the plays of to-day and in many of the plays of yesterday. From the very beginnings of English comedy, it was accepted as almost self-evident that "wit"--a factitious, supererogatory sparkle--was indispensable to all dialogue of a non-tragic order. Language was a newly discovered and irresistibly fascinating playground for the fancy. Conversation must be thick-strewn with verbal quibbles, similes, figures, and flourishes of every description, else it was unworthy to be spoken on the stage. We all know how freely Shakespeare yielded to this convention, and so helped to establish it. Sometimes, not always, his genius enabled him to render it delightful; but in most of the Elizabethans--though it be heresy to say so--it is an extremely tedious mannerism. After the Restoration, when modern light talk came into being in the coffee-houses, the fashion of the day, no doubt, favoured a straining after wit; so that the playwrights were in some measure following nature--that very small corner of nature which they called "the town"--in accepting and making a law of the Elizabethan convention. The leading characters of Restoration comedy, from Etherege to Vanbrugh, are consciously and almost professionally wits. Simile and repartee are as indispensable a part of a gentleman's social outfit as his wig or his rapier. In Congreve the word "wit" is almost as common as the thing. When Farquhar made some movement towards a return to nature, he was rewarded with Pope's line, which clings like a burr to his memory--

"What pert, low dialogue has Farquhar writ."

If eighteenth-century comedy, as a whole, is not brilliantly written, it is for lack of talent in the playwrights, not for lack of desire or intention. Goldsmith, like Farquhar and Steele, vaguely realized the superiority of humour to wit; but he died too early to exercise much influence on his successors. In Sheridan the convention of wit reasserted itself triumphantly, and the scene in which Lady Teazle, Mrs. Candour, and the rest of the scandalous college sit in a semicircle and cap malicious similes, came to be regarded as an unapproachable model of comedy dialogue. The convention maintained itself firmly down to the days of _Money_ and _London Assurance_, the dullness of the intervening period being due, not to any change of theory, but to sheer impotence of practice. T.W. Robertson, as above mentioned, attempted a return to nature, with occasional and very partial success; but wit, with a dash of fanciful sentiment, reasserted itself in James Albery; while in H.J. Byron it degenerated into mere punning and verbal horse-play. I should not be surprised if the historian of the future were to find in the plays of Mr. Henry Arthur Jones the first marked symptoms of a reaction--of a tendency to reject extrinsic and fanciful ornament in dialogue, and to rely for its effect upon its vivid appropriateness to character and situation. In the early plays of Sir Arthur Pinero there is a great deal of extrinsic ornament; especially of that metaphor-hunting which was one of the characteristic forms of euphuism. Take this, for example, from _The Profligate_. Dunstan Renshaw has expressed to Hugh Murray the opinion that "marriages of contentment are the reward of husbands who have taken the precaution to sow their wild oats rather thickly"; whereupon the Scotch solicitor replies--

HUGH MURRAY: Contentment! Renshaw, do you imagine that there is no autumn in the life of a profligate? Do you think there is no moment when the accursed crop begins to rear its millions of heads above ground; when the rich man would give his wealth to be able to tread them back into the earth which rejects the foul load? To-day you have robbed some honest man of a sweet companion!

DUNSTAN RENSHAW: Look here, Mr. Murray--!

HUGH MURRAY: To-morrow, next week, next month, you may be happy--but what of the time when those wild oats thrust their ears through the very seams of the floor trodden by the wife whose respect you will have learned to covet! You may drag her into the crowded streets--there is the same vile growth springing up from the chinks of the pavement! In your house or in the open, the scent of the mildewed grain always in your nostrils, and in your ears no music but the wind's rustle amongst the fat sheaves! And, worst of all, your wife's heart a granary bursting with the load of shame your profligacy has stored there! I warn you--Mr. Lawrence Kenward!

If we compare this passage with any page taken at random from _Mid-Channel_, we might think that a century of evolution lay between them, instead of barely twenty years.

The convention of wit-at-any-price is, indeed, moribund; but it is perhaps not quite superfluous, even now, to emphasize the difference between what the French call the "mot d'auteur" and the "mot de situation." The terms practically explain themselves; but a third class ought to be added--the "mot de caractère." The "mot d'auteur" is the distinguishing mark of the Congreve-Sheridan convention. It survives in full vigour--or, shall one say, it sings its swan-song?--in the works of Oscar Wilde. For instance, the scene of the five men in the third act of _Lady Windermere's Fan_ is a veritable running-fire of epigrams wholly unconnected with the situation, and very slightly related, if at all, to the characters of the speakers. The mark of the "mot d'auteur" is that it can with perfect ease be detached from its context. I could fill this page with sayings from the scene in question, all perfectly comprehensible without any account of the situation. Among them would be one of those; profound sayings which Wilde now and then threw off in his lightest moods, like opals among soap-bubbles. "In the world," says Dumby, "there are two tragedies. One is not getting what one wants, and the other is getting it." This may rank with Lord Illingworth's speech in _A Woman of No Importance_: "All thought is immoral. Its very essence is destruction. If you think of anything you kill it. Nothing survives being thought of." When we hear such sayings as these--or the immortal "Vulgarity is the behaviour of other people"--we do not enquire too curiously into their appropriateness to character or situation; but none the less do they belong to an antiquated conception of drama.

It is useless to begin to give specimens of the "mot de caractère" and "mot de situation." All really dramatic dialogue falls under one head or the other. One could easily pick out a few brilliantly effective examples of each class: but as their characteristic is to fade when uprooted from the soil in which they grow, they would take up space to very little purpose.

But there is another historic influence, besides that of euphuism, which has been hurtful, though in a minor degree, to the development of a sound style in dialogue. Some of the later Elizabethans, and notably Webster and Ford, cultivated a fashion of abrupt utterance, whereby an immensity of spiritual significance--generally tragic--was supposed to be concentrated into a few brief words. The classic example is Ferdinand's "Cover her face. Mine eyes dazzle. She died young," in _The Duchess of Malfy_. Charles Lamb celebrated the virtues of this pregnant, staccato style with somewhat immoderate admiration, and thus helped to set a fashion of spasmodic pithiness in dialogue, which too often resulted in dense obscurity. Not many plays composed under this influence have reached the stage; not one has held it. But we find in some recent writing a qualified recrudescence of the spasmodic manner, with a touch of euphuism thrown in. This is mainly due, I think, to the influence of George Meredith, who accepted the convention of wit as the informing spirit of comedy dialogue, and whose abnormally rapid faculty of association led him to delight in a sort of intellectual shorthand which the normal mind finds very difficult to decipher. Meredith was a man of brilliant genius, which lent a fascination to his very mannerisms; but when these mannerisms are transferred by lesser men to a medium much less suited to them--that of the stage--the result is apt to be disastrous. I need not go into particulars; for no play of which the dialogue places a constant strain on the intellectual muscles of the audience ever has held, or ever will hold, a place in living dramatic literature. I will merely note the curious fact that English--my own language--is the only language out of the three or four known to me in which I have ever come across an entirely incomprehensible play. I could name English plays, both pre-Meredithian and post-Meredithian, which might almost as well be written in Chinese for all that I can make of them.

Obscurity and precocity are generally symptoms of an exaggerated dread of the commonplace. The writer of dramatic prose has, indeed, a very difficult task if he is to achieve style without deserting nature. Perhaps it would be more accurate to say that the difficulty lies in getting criticism to give him credit for the possession of style, without incurring the reproach of mannerism. How is one to give concentration and distinction to ordinary talk, while making it still seem ordinary? Either the distinction will strike the critics, and they will call it pompous and unreal, or the ordinariness will come home to them, and they will deny the distinction. This is the dramatist's constant dilemma. One can only comfort him with the assurance that if he has given his dialogue the necessary concentration, and has yet kept it plausibly near to the language of life, he has achieved style, and may snap his fingers at the critics. Style, in prose drama, is the sifting of common speech.

It is true, however, that, with equal concentration and equal naturalness, one man may give his work a beauty of cadence and phrasing which another man may entirely miss. Two recent writers of English dramatic prose have stood out from their fellows in respect of the sheer beauty of their style--I need scarcely name Oscar Wilde and J.M. Synge. But Wilde's dialogue can by no means be called free from mannerism,[1] while Synge wrote in a language which had a music of its own, even before his genius took hold of it.

It does not seem very profitable to try to concentrate into a definition the distinctive qualities of dramatic dialogue. The late Mrs. Craigie ("John Oliver Hobbes") attempted to do so in the preface to a charming play, _The Ambassador_; and the result at any rate the sequel--was that her next play, _The Wisdom of the Wise_, was singularly self-conscious and artificial. She found in "emotion" the test of dramatic quality in any given utterance. "Stage dialogue," she says, "may or may not have many qualities, but it must be emotional." Here we have a statement which is true in a vague and general sense, untrue in the definite and particular sense in which alone it could afford any practical guidance. "My lord, the carriage waits," may be, in its right place, a highly dramatic speech, even though it be uttered with no emotion, and arouse no emotion in the person addressed. What Mrs. Craigie meant, I take it, was that, to be really dramatic, every speech must have some bearing, direct or indirect, prospective, present, or retrospective, upon individual human destinies. The dull play, the dull scene, the dull speech, is that in which we do not perceive this connection; but when once we are interested in the individuals concerned, we are so quick to perceive the connection, even though it be exceedingly distant and indirect, that the dramatist who should always hold the fear of Mrs. Craigie's aphorism consciously before his eyes would unnecessarily fetter and restrict himself. Even the driest scientific proposition may, under special circumstances, become electrical with drama. The statement that the earth moves round the sun does not, in itself, stir our pulses; yet what playwright has ever invented a more dramatic utterance than that which some one invented for Galileo: "E pur si muove!"? In all this, to be sure, I am illustrating, not confuting, Mrs. Craigie's maxim. I have no wish to confute it, for, in the largest interpretation, it is true; but I suggest that it is true only when attenuated almost beyond recognition, and quite beyond the point at which it can be of any practical help to the practical dramatist. He must rely on his instinct, not numb and bewilder it by constantly subjecting it to the dictates of hard-and-fast aesthetic theory.

We shall scarcely come much nearer to helpful truth than the point we have already reached, in the principle that all dialogue, except the merely mechanical parts--the connective tissue of the play--should consist either of "mots de caractère" or of "mots de situation." But if we go to French critics for this principle, do not let us go to French dramatists for models of practice. It is part of the abiding insularity of our criticism that the same writers who cannot forgive an English dramatist what they conceive to be a stilted turn of phrase, will pass without remark, if not with positive admiration, the outrageously rhetorical style which is still prevalent in French drama. Here, for instance, is a quite typical passage from _Le Duel_, by M. Henri Lavedan, an author of no small repute; and it would be easy to find even more magniloquent tirades in the works of almost any of his contemporaries. I translate from the concluding scene between the Abbé and the Duchess:

THE ABBÉ: "In our strange life, there are sometimes unexpected and decisive moments, sovereign, though we know not why. We feel it, that is all!--fulgurant moments, which throw, as it were, a flash of lightning upon our destinies, like those meteors which shine forth from time to time in the heavens, and of which none can say what their purple signifies, whether it be a cataclysm or an apotheosis. Well, it appears to me that we, you and I, are now face to face with one of these moments!"

THE DUCHESS: "So I, too, believe."

THE ABBÉ: "We must take care, then, that it be an apotheosis. That is why I want--Mon Dieu, madame! how shall I say it to you? Where shall I go to find the chosen words, the words of pure gold, of diamonds, the immaculate words that are worthy of us? All that you are, all that you are worth, I know, and I alone know. You have opened, that I might read it, the book of hours that is your mind. I am in no wise disquieted about you or your future; yet, that I may be fully reassured before we part, I wish, I wish you to tell me, to declare to me, that you are at this very moment in absolute repose, calm as a lake."

And so Monsieur l'Abbé goes on for another page. If it be said that this ornate eloquence is merely professional, I reply that his brother, the atheist doctor, and the Duchess herself, are quite as copious in their rhetoric, and scarcely less ornate.

It is a mistake to suppose that "literary merit" can be imparted to drama by such flagrant departures from nature; though some critics have not yet outgrown that superstition. Let the playwright take to heart an anecdote told by Professor Matthews in his _Inquiries and Opinions_--an anecdote of a New England farmer, who, being asked who was the architect of his house, replied: "Oh, I built that house myself; but there's a man coming down from Boston next week to put on the architecture." Better no style at all than style thus plastered on.

* * * * *

What is to be said of the possibilities of blank verse as a dramatic medium? This is a thorny question, to be handled with caution. One can say with perfect assurance, however, that its possibilities are problematical, its difficulties and dangers certain.

To discuss the question whether drama in verse is in its very nature nobler than drama in prose would lead us away from craftsmanship into the realm of pure aesthetics. For my own part, I doubt it. I suspect that the drama, like all literature, took its rise in verse, for the simple reason that verse is easier to make--and to memorize--than prose. Primitive peoples felt with Goethe--though not quite in the same sense--that "art is art because it is not nature." Not merely for emotional, but for all sorts of literary, expression, they demanded a medium clearly marked off from the speech of everyday life. The drama "lisped in numbers, for the numbers came." Even of so modern a writer (comparatively) as Shakespeare, it would scarcely be true to say that he "chose" verse as his medium, in the same sense in which Ibsen chose prose. He accepted it just as he accepted the other traditions and methods of the theatre of his time. In familiar passages he broke away from it; but on the whole it provided (among other advantages) a convenient and even necessary means of differentiation between the mimic personage and the audience, from whom he was not marked off by the proscenium arch and the artificial lights which make a world apart of the modern stage.

And Shakespeare so glorified this metrical medium as to give it an overwhelming prestige. It was extremely easy to write blank verse after a fashion; and playwrights who found it flow almost spontaneously from their pens were only too ready to overlook the world-wide difference between their verse and that of the really great Elizabethans. Just after the Restoration, there was an attempt to introduce the rhymed couplet as the medium for heroic plays; but that, on the other hand, was too difficult to establish itself in general use. Tragedy soon fell back upon the fatally facile unrhymed iambic, and a reign of stilted, stodgy mediocrity set in. There is nothing drearier in literature than the century-and-a-half of English tragedy, from Otway to Sheridan Knowles. One is lost in wonder at the genius of the actors who could infuse life and passion into those masterpieces of turgid conventionality. The worship of the minor Elizabethans, which began with Lamb and culminated in Swinburne, brought into fashion (as we have seen) a spasmodic rather than a smoothly rhetorical way of writing, but did not really put new life into the outworn form. It may almost be called an appalling fact that for at least two centuries--from 1700 to 1900--not a single blank-verse play was produced which lives, or deserves to live,[2] on the stage of to-day.

I have thus glanced at the history of the blank-verse play because I believe that it can never revive until we clearly realize and admit that it is, and has been for a century, thoroughly dead, while, for a century before that again, it was only galvanized into a semblance of life by a great school of rhetorical acting. The playwright who sets forth with the idea that, in writing a poetical drama, he is going to continue the great Elizabethan tradition, is starting on a wild-goose chase. The great Elizabethan tradition is an incubus to be exorcised. It was because Mr. Stephen Phillips was not Elizabethanizing, but clothing a vital and personal conception of drama in verse of very appealing lyrical quality, that some of us thought we saw in _Paolo and Francesca_ the dawn of a new art. Apparently it was a false dawn; but I still believe that our orientation was right when we looked for the daybreak in the lyric quarter of the heavens. The very summits of Shakespeare's achievement are his glorious lyrical passages. Think of the exquisite elegiacs of Macbeth! Think of the immortal death-song of Cleopatra! If verse has any function on the stage, it is that of imparting lyric beauty to passionate speech. For the mere rhetorical "elevation" of blank verse we have no use whatever. It consists in saying simple things with verbose pomposity. But should there arise a man who combines highly-developed dramatic faculty with great lyric genius, it is quite possible that he may give us the new poetic drama for which our idealists are sighing. He will choose his themes, I take it, from legend, or from the domain of pure fantasy--themes which can be steeped from first to last in an atmosphere of poetry, as _Tristan und Isolde_ is steeped in an atmosphere of music. Of historic themes, I would counsel this hypothetical genius to beware. If there are any which can fittingly be steeped in a lyric atmosphere, they are to be sought on the outskirts of history, or in the debatable land between history and legend. The formula of Schiller can no more be revived than the formula of Chapman or of Rowe. That a new historic drama awaits us in the future, I have little doubt; but it will be written in prose. The idea that the poetry of drama is to be sought specifically in verse has long ago been exploded by Ibsen and Maeterlinck and D'Annunzio and Synge. But there are, no doubt, themes which peculiarly lend themselves to lyrico-dramatic treatment, and we shall all welcome the poet who discovers and develops them.

One warning let me add, in no uncertain voice. If you choose to write a blank-verse play, write it in blank verse, and not in some nondescript rhythm which is one long series of jolts and pitfalls to the sensitive ear. Many playwrights have thought by this means to escape from the monotony of blank verse; not one (that I ever heard of) has achieved even temporary success. If you cannot save your blank verse from monotony without breaking it on the wheel, that merely means that you cannot write blank verse, and had better let it alone. Again, in spite of Elizabethan precedent, there is nothing more irritating on the modern stage than a play which keeps on changing from verse to prose and back again. It gives the verse-passages an air of pompous self-consciousness. We seem to hear the author saying, as he shifts his gear, "Look you now! I am going to be eloquent and impressive!" The most destructive fault a dramatist can commit, in my judgment, is to pass, in the same work of art, from one plane of convention to another.[3]

* * * * *

We must now consider for a moment the question--if question it can be called--of the soliloquy and the aside. The example of Ibsen has gone far towards expelling these slovenlinesses from the work of all self-respecting playwrights. But theorists spring up every now and then to defend them. "The stage is the realm of convention," they argue. "If you accept a room with its fourth wall removed, which nothing short of an earthquake could render possible in real life, why should you jib at the idea--in which, after all, there is nothing absolutely impossible--that a man should utter aloud the thoughts that are passing through his mind?"

It is all a question, once more, of planes of convention. No doubt there is an irreducible minimum of convention in all drama; but how strange is the logic which leaps from that postulate to the assertion that, if we admit a minimum, we cannot, or ought not to, exclude a maximum! There are plays which do not, and there are plays which do, set forth to give as nearly as possible an exact reproduction of the visual and auditory realities of life. In the Elizabethan theatre, with its platform stage under the open sky, any pictorial exactness of reproduction was clearly impossible. Its fundamental conditions necessitated very nearly[4] a maximum of convention; therefore such conventions as blank verse and the soliloquy were simply of a piece with all the rest. In the theatre of the eighteenth century and early nineteenth, the proscenium arch--the frame of the picture--made pictorial realism theoretically possible. But no one recognized the possibility; and indeed, on a candle-lit stage, it would have been extremely difficult. As a matter of fact, the Elizabethan platform survived in the shape of a long "apron," projecting in front of the proscenium, on which the most important parts of the action took place. The characters, that is to say, were constantly stepping out of the frame of the picture; and while this visual convention maintained itself, there was nothing inconsistent or jarring in the auditory convention of the soliloquy. Only in the last quarter of the nineteenth century did new methods of lighting, combined with new literary and artistic influences, complete the evolutionary process, and lead to the withdrawal of the whole stage--the whole dramatic domain--within the frame of the picture. It was thus possible to reduce visual convention to a minimum so trifling that in a well-set "interior" it needs a distinct effort of attention to be conscious of it at all. In fact, if we come to think of it, the removal of the fourth wall is scarcely to be classed as a convention; for in real life, as we do not happen to have eyes in the back of our heads, we are never visually conscious of all four walls of a room at once. If, then, in a room that is absolutely real, we see a man who (in all other respects) strives to be equally real, suddenly begin to expound himself aloud, in good, set terms, his own emotions, motives, or purposes, we instantly plump down from one plane of convention to another, and receive a disagreeable jar to our sense of reality. Up to that moment, all the efforts of author, producer, and actor have centred in begetting in us a particular order of illusion; and lo! the effort is suddenly abandoned, and the illusion shattered by a crying unreality. In modern serious drama, therefore, the soliloquy can only be regarded as a disturbing anachronism.[5]

The physical conditions which tended to banish it from the stage were reinforced by the growing perception of its artistic slovenliness. It was found that the most delicate analyses could be achieved without its aid; and it became a point of honour with the self-respecting artist to accept a condition which rendered his material somewhat harder of manipulation, indeed, but all the more tempting to wrestle with and overcome. A drama with soliloquies and asides is like a picture with inscribed labels issuing from the mouths of the figures. In that way, any bungler can reveal what is passing in the minds of his personages. But the glorious problem of the modern playwright is to make his characters reveal the inmost workings of their souls without saying or doing anything that they would not say or do in the real world.[6]

There are degrees, however, even in the makeshift and the slovenly; and not all lapses into anachronism are equally to be condemned. One thing is so patent as to call for no demonstration: to wit, that the aside is ten times worse than the soliloquy. It is always possible that a man might speak his thought, but it is glaringly impossible that he should speak it so as to be heard by the audience and not heard by others on the stage. In French light comedy and farce of the mid-nineteenth century, the aside is abused beyond even the license of fantasy. A man will speak an aside of several lines over the shoulder of another person whom he is embracing. Not infrequently in a conversation between two characters, each will comment aside on every utterance of the other, before replying to it. The convenience of this method of proceeding is manifest. It is as though the author stood by and delivered a running commentary on the secret motives and designs of his characters. But it is such a crying confession of unreality that, on the English-speaking stage, at any rate, it would scarcely be tolerated to-day, even in farce. In serious modern drama the aside is now practically unknown. It is so obsolete, indeed, that actors are puzzled how to handle it, and audiences what to make of it. In an ambitious play produced at a leading London theatre about ten years ago, a lady, on leaving the stage, announced, in an aside, her intention of drowning herself, and several critics, the next day, not understanding that she was speaking aside, severely blamed the gentleman who was on the stage with her for not frustrating her intention. About the same time, there occurred one of the most glaring instances within my recollection of inept conventionalism. The hero of the play was Eugene Aram. Alone in his room at dead of night, Aram heard Houseman breaking open the outside shutters of the window. Designing to entrap the robber, what did he do? He went up to the window and drew back the curtains, with a noise loud enough to be heard in the next parish. It was inaudible, however, to Houseman on the other side of the shutters. He proceeded with his work, opened the window, and slipped in, Aram hiding in the shadow. Then, while Houseman peered about him with his lantern, not six feet from Aram, and actually between him and the audience, Aram indulged in a long and loud monologue as to whether he should shoot Houseman or not, ending with a prayer to heaven to save him from more blood-guiltiness! Such are the childish excesses to which a playwright will presently descend when once he begins to dally with facile convention.

An aside is intolerable because it is _not_ heard by the other person on the stage: it outrages physical possibility. An overheard soliloquy, on the other hand, is intolerable because it _is_ heard. It keeps within the bounds of physical possibility, but it stultifies the only logical excuse for the soliloquy, namely, that it is an externalization of thought which would in reality remain unuttered. This point is so clear that I need not insist upon it.

Are there, in modern drama, any admissible soliloquies? A few brief ejaculations of joy, or despair, are, of course, natural enough, and no one will cavil at them. The approach of mental disease is often marked by a tendency to unrestrained loquacity, which goes on even while the sufferer is alone; and this distressing symptom may, on rare occasions, be put to artistic use. Short of actual derangement, however, there are certain states of nervous surexcitation which cause even healthy people to talk to themselves; and if an author has the skill to make us realize that his character is passing through such a crisis, he may risk a soliloquy, not only without reproach, but with conspicuous psychological justification. In the third act of Clyde Fitch's play, _The Girl with the Green Eyes_, there is a daring attempt at such a soliloquy, where Jinny says: "Good Heavens! why am I maudling on like this to myself out loud? It's really nothing--Jack will explain once more that he can't explain"--and so on. Whether the attempt justified itself or not would depend largely on the acting. In any case, it is clear that the author, though as a rule somewhat lax in his craftsmanship, was here aiming at psychological truth.

A word must be said as to a special case of the soliloquy--the letter which a person speaks aloud as he writes it, or reads over to himself aloud. This is a convention to be employed as sparingly as possible; but it is not exactly on a level with the ordinary soliloquy. A letter has an actual objective existence. The words are formulated in the character's mind and are supposed to be externalized, even though the actor may not really write them on the paper. Thus the letter has, so to speak, the same right to come to the knowledge of the audience as any other utterance. It is, in fact, part of the dialogue of the play, only that it happens to be inaudible. A soliloquy, on the other hand, has no real existence. It is a purely artificial unravelling of motive or emotion, which, nine times out of ten, would not become articulate at all, even in the speaker's brain or heart. Thus it is by many degrees a greater infraction of the surface texture of life than the spoken letter, which we may call inadvisable rather than inadmissible.

Some theorists carry their solicitude for surface reality to such an extreme as to object to any communication between two characters which is not audible to every one on the stage. This is a very idle pedantry. The difference between a conversation in undertones and a soliloquy or aside is abundantly plain: the one occurs every hour of the day, the other never occurs at all. When two people, or a group, are talking among themselves, unheard by the others on the stage, it requires a special effort to remember that, as a matter of fact, the others probably do hear them. Even if the scene be unskilfully arranged, it is not the audibility of one group, but the inaudibility of the others, that is apt to strike us as unreal.

* * * * *

This is not the only form of technical pedantry that one occasionally encounters. Some years ago, a little band of playwrights and would-be playwrights, in fanatical reaction against the Sardou technique, tried to lay down a rule that no room on the stage must ever have more than one door, and that no letter must ever enter into the mechanism of a play. I do not know which contention was the more ridiculous.

Nothing is commoner in modern house-planning than rooms which have at least two doors and a French window. We constantly see rooms or halls which, if transported to the stage, would provide three or four entrances and exits; and this is even more true of the "central heated" houses of America than of English houses. The technical purists used especially to despise the French window--a harmless, agreeable and very common device. Why the playwright should make "one room one door" an inexorable canon of art is more than human reason can divine. There are cases, no doubt, in which probability demands that the dramatist should be content with one practicable opening to his scene, and should plan his entrances and exits accordingly. This is no such great feat as might be imagined. Indeed a playwright will sometimes deliberately place a particular act in a room with one door, because it happens to facilitate the movement he desires. It is absurd to lay down any rule in the matter, other than that the scene should provide a probable locality for whatever action is to take place in it. I am the last to defend the old French farce with its ten or a dozen doors through which the characters kept scuttling in and out like rabbits in a warren. But the fact that we are tired of conventional laxity is no good reason for rushing to the other extreme of conventional and hampering austerity.

Similarly, because the forged will and the lost "marriage lines" have been rightly relegated to melodrama, is there any reason why we should banish from the stage every form of written document? Mr. Bernard Shaw, in an article celebrating the advent of the new technique, once wrote, "Nowadays an actor cannot open a letter or toss off somebody else's glass of poison without having to face a brutal outburst of jeering." What an extravagance to bracket as equally exploded absurdities the opening of a letter and the tossing off of the wrong glass of poison! Letters--more's the pity--play a gigantic part in the economy of modern life. The General Post Office is a vast mechanism for the distribution of tragedy, comedy, melodrama, and farce throughout the country and throughout the world. To whose door has not Destiny come in the disguise of a postman, and slipped its decree, with a double rat-tat, into the letter-box? Whose heart has not sickened as he heard the postman's footstep pass his door without pausing? Whose hand has not trembled as he opened a letter? Whose face has not blanched as he took in its import, almost without reading the words? Why, I would fain know, should our stage-picture of life be falsified by the banishment of the postman? Even the revelation brought about by the discovery of a forgotten letter or bundle of letters is not an infrequent incident of daily life. Why should it be tabu on the stage? Because the French dramatist, forty years ago, would sometimes construct a Chinese-puzzle play around some stolen letter or hidden document, are we to suffer no "scrap of paper" to play any part whatever in English drama? Even the Hebrew sense of justice would recoil from such a conclusion. It would be a case of "The fathers have eaten sour grapes, and other people's children must pay the penalty." Against such whimsies of reactionary purism, the playwright's sole and sufficient safeguard is a moderate exercise of common sense.

* * * * *

[Footnote 1: So, too, with the style of Congreve. It is much, and justly, admired; but who does not feel more than a touch of mannerism in such a passage as this?--

MILLAMANT: "... Let us never visit together, nor go to a play together; but let us be very strange and well-bred: let us be as strange as if we had been married a great while; and as well-bred as if we were not married at all."

MIRABELL: "Have you any more conditions to offer? Hitherto your demands are pretty reasonable."

MILLAMANT: "Trifles!--as liberty to pay and receive visits to and from whom I please; to write and receive letters, without interrogatories or wry faces on your part; to wear what I please; and choose conversation with regard only to my own taste; to have no obligation upon me to converse with wits that I don't like because they are your acquaintances; or to be intimate with fools because they may be your relatives.... These articles subscribed, if I continue to endure you a little longer, I may by degrees dwindle into a wife."

This is very pretty prose, granted; but it is the prose of literature, not of life.]

[Footnote 2: From the fact that I do not make an exception in favour of _The Blot in the Scutcheon_ or _Stratford_, I must leave the reader to draw what inference he pleases. On the other hand, I believe that a reconstruction of Tennyson's _Queen Mary_, with a few connecting links written in, might take a permanent place in the theatre.]

[Footnote 3: Mr. Israel Zangwill, in his symbolic play, _The War-God_, has put blank verse to what I believe to be a new use, with noteworthy success. He writes in very strict measure, but without the least inversion or inflation, without a touch of Elizabethan, or conventionally poetic, diction. He is thus enabled to use the most modern expressions, and even slang, without incongruity; while at the same time he can give rhetorical movement to the speeches of his symbolic personages, and, in passages of argument, can achieve that clash of measured phrase against measured phrase which the Greeks called "stichomythy," and which the French dramatist sometimes produces in rapid rapier play with the Alexandrine. Mr. Zangwill's practice is in absolute contradiction of the principle above suggested that blank verse, to be justified in drama, ought to be lyrical. His verse is a product of pure intellect and wit, without a single lyric accent. It is measured prose; if it ever tries to be more, it fails. I think, then, that he has shown a new use for blank verse, in rhetorico-symbolic drama. But it is no small literary feat to handle the measure as he does.]

[Footnote 4: Not quite. The drama of some Oriental peoples recognizes conventions which the Elizabethans did not admit.]

[Footnote 5: A conversation on the telephone often provides a convenient and up-to-date substitute for a soliloquy; but that is an expedient which ought not to be abused.]

[Footnote 6: The soliloquy is often not only slovenly, but a gratuitous and unnecessary slovenliness. In _Les Corbeaux_, by Henry Becque, produced in 1889, there occur two soliloquies--one by Teissier (Act ii,