In a very different type of play, we find another example of the

ignoring of a dramatically obligatory scene. The author of that charming

fantasy, _The Passing of the Third Floor Back_, was long ago guilty of a

play named _The Rise of Dick Halward_, chiefly memorable for having

elicited from Mr. Bernard Shaw one of the most brilliant pages in

English dramatic criticism. The hero of this play, after an adventurous

youth in Mexico, has gone to the bar, but gets no briefs, and is

therefore unable to marry a lady who announces that no suitor need apply

who has less than £5000 a year. One fine day Dick receives from Mexico

the will of an old comrade, which purports to leave to him, absolutely,

half a million dollars, gold; but the will is accompanied by a letter,

in which the old comrade states that the property is really left to him

only in trust for the testator's long-lost son, whom Dick is enjoined to

search out and endow with a capital which, at 5 per cent, represents

accurately the desiderated £5000 a year. As a matter of fact (but this

is not to our present purpose), the long-lost son is actually, at that

moment, sharing Dick's chambers in the Temple. Dick, however, does not

know this, and cannot resist the temptation to destroy the old miner's

letter, and grab the property. We know, of course, that retribution is

bound to descend upon him; but does not dramatic effect imperatively

require that, for a brief space at any rate, he should be seen--with

whatever qualms of conscience his nature might dictate--enjoying his

ill-gotten wealth? Mr. Jerome, however, baulks us of this just

expectation. In the very first scene of the second act we find that the

game is up. The deceased miner wrote his letter to Dick seated in the

doorway of a hut; a chance photographer took a snap-shot at him; and on

returning to England, the chance photographer has nothing more pressing

to do than to chance upon the one man who knows the long-lost son, and

to show him the photograph of the dying miner, whom he at once

recognizes. By aid of a microscope, the letter he is writing can be

deciphered, and thus Dick's fraud is brought home to him. Now one would

suppose that an author who had invented this monstrous and staggering

concatenation of chances, must hope to justify it by some highly

dramatic situation, in the obvious and commonplace sense of the word. It

is not difficult, indeed, to foresee such a situation, in which Dick

Halward should be confronted, as if by magic, with the very words of the

letter he has so carefully destroyed. I am far from saying that this

scene would, in fact, have justified its amazing antecedents; but it

would have shown a realization on the author's part that he must at any

rate attempt some effect proportionate to the strain he had placed upon

our credulity. Mr. Jerome showed no such realization. He made the man

who handed Dick the copy of the letter explain beforehand how it had

been obtained; so that Dick, though doubtless surprised and disgusted,

was not in the least thunderstruck, and manifested no emotion. Here,

then, Mr. Jerome evidently missed a scene rendered obligatory by the law

of the maximum of specifically dramatic effect.

* * * * *

The third, or structural, class of obligatory scenes may be more briefly

dealt with, seeing that we have already, in the last chapter, discussed

the principle involved. In this class we have placed, by definition,

scenes which the author himself has rendered obligatory by seeming

unmistakably to lead up to them--or, in other words, scenes indicated,

or seeming to be indicated, by deliberately-planted finger-posts. It may

appear as though the case of Dick Halward, which we have just been

examining, in reality came under this heading. But it cannot actually be

said that Mr. Jerome either did, or seemed to, point by finger-posts

towards the obligatory scene. He rather appears to have been blankly

unconscious of its possibility.

We have noted in the foregoing chapter the unwisdom of planting

misleading finger-posts; here we have only to deal with the particular

case in which they seem to point to a definite and crucial scene. An

example given by M. Sarcey himself will, I think, make the matter

quite clear.

M. Jules Lemaître's play, _Révoltée_, tells the story of a would-be

intellectual, ill-conditioned young woman, married to a plain and

ungainly professor of mathematics, whom she despises. We know that she

is in danger of yielding to the fascinations of a seductive

man-about-town; and having shown us this danger, the author proceeds to

emphasize the manly and sterling character of the husband. He has the

gentleness that goes with strength; but where his affections or his

honour is concerned, he is not a man to be trifled with. This having

been several times impressed upon us, we naturally expect that the wife

is to be rescued by some striking manifestation of the husband's

masterful virility. But no such matter! Rescued she is, indeed; but it

is by the intervention of her half-brother, who fights a duel on her

behalf, and is brought back wounded to restore peace to the

mathematician's household: that man of science having been quite passive

throughout, save for some ineffectual remonstrances. It happens that in

this case we know just where the author went astray. Hélène (the wife)

is the unacknowledged daughter of a great lady, Mme. de Voves; and the

subject of the play, as the author first conceived it, was the relation

between the mother, the illegitimate daughter, and the legitimate son;

the daughter's husband taking only a subordinate place. But Lemaître

chose as a model for the husband a man whom he had known and admired;

and he allowed himself to depict in vivid colours his strong and

sympathetic character, without noticing that he was thereby upsetting

the economy of his play, and giving his audience reason to anticipate a

line of development quite different from that which he had in mind.

Inadvertently, in fact, he planted, not one, but two or three,

misleading finger-posts.

* * * * *

We come now to the fourth, or psychological, class of obligatory

scenes--those which are "required in order to justify some modification

of character or alteration of will, too important to be taken

for granted."

An obvious example of an obligatory scene of this class may be found in

the third act of _Othello_. The poet is bound to show us the process by

which Iago instils his poison into Othello's mind. He has backed

himself, so to speak, to make this process credible to us; and, by a

masterpiece of dexterity and daring, he wins his wager. Had he omitted

this scene--had he shown us Othello at one moment full of serene

confidence, and at his next appearance already convinced of Desdemona's

guilt--he would have omitted the pivot and turning--point of the whole

structure. It may seem fantastic to conceive that any dramatist could

blunder so grossly; but there are not a few plays in which we observe a

scarcely less glaring hiatus.

A case in point may be found in Lord Tennyson's _Becket_. I am not one

of those who hold Tennyson merely contemptible as a dramatist. I believe

that, had he taken to playwriting nearly half-a-century earlier, and

studied the root principles of craftsmanship, instead of blindly

accepting the Elizabethan conventions, he might have done work as fine

in the mass as are the best moments of _Queen Mary_ and _Harold_. As a

whole, _Becket_ is one of his weakest productions; but the Prologue and

the first act would have formed an excellent first and third act for a

play of wholly different sequel, had he interposed, in a second act, the

obligatory scene required to elucidate Becket's character. The historic

and psychological problem of Thomas Becket is his startling

transformation from an easy-going, luxurious, worldly statesman into a

gaunt ecclesiastic, fanatically fighting for the rights of his see, of

his order, and of Rome. In any drama which professes to deal (as this

does) with his whole career, the intellectual interest cannot but centre

in an analysis of the forces that brought about this seeming new-birth

of his soul. It would have been open to the poet, no doubt, to take up

his history at a later point, when he was already the full-fledged

clerical and ultramontane. But this Tennyson does not do. He is at pains

to present to us the magnificent Chancellor, the bosom friend of the

King, and mild reprover of his vices; and then, without the smallest

transition, hey presto! he is the intransigent priest, bitterly

combating the Constitutions of Clarendon. It is true that in the

Prologue the poet places one or two finger-posts--small, conventional

foreshadowings of coming trouble. For instance, the game of chess

between King and Chancellor ends with a victory for Becket, who says--

"You see my bishop

Hath brought your king to a standstill. You are beaten."

The symbolical game of chess is a well-worn dramatic device. Becket,

moreover, seems to feel some vague disquietude as to what may happen if

he accepts the archbishopric; but there is nothing to show that he is

conscious of any bias towards the intransigent clericalism of the later

act. The character-problem, in fact, is not only not solved, but is

ignored. The obligatory scene is skipped over, in the interval between

the Prologue and the first act.

One of the finest plays of our time--Sir Arthur Pinero's _Iris_--lacks,

in my judgment, an obligatory scene. The character of Iris is admirably

true, so far as it goes; but it is incomplete. The author seems to have

evaded the crucial point of his play--the scene of her installation in

Maldonado's flat. To perfect his psychological study, he was bound to

bridge the chasm between the Iris of the third act and the Iris of the

fourth. He builds two ends of the bridge, in the incident of the

cheque-book at the close of the one act, and in the state of hebetude in

which we find her at the opening of the other; but there remains a great

gap at which the imagination boggles. The author has tried to throw a

retrospective footway across it in Iris's confession to Trenwith in the

fifth act; but I do not find that it quite meets the case. It would no

doubt have been very difficult to keep the action within reasonable

limits had a new act taken the place of the existing fourth; but Sir

Arthur Pinero would probably have produced a completer work of art had

he faced this difficulty, and contrived to compress into a single last

act something like the matter of the existing fourth and fifth. It may

be that he deliberately preferred that Iris should give in narrative the

history of her decline; but I do not consider this a case in support of

that slight plea for impassioned narrative which I ventured to put forth

a few pages back. Her confession to Trenwith would have been far more

dramatic and moving had it been about one-fourth part as long and

one-fourth part as articulate.

* * * * *

Of the scene imposed by history or legend it is unnecessary to say very

much. We saw in Chapter IX that the theatre is not the place for

expounding the results of original research, which cast a new light on

historic character. It is not the place for whitewashing Richard III, or

representing him as a man of erect and graceful figure. It is not the

place for proving that Guy Fawkes was an earnest Presbyterian, that Nell

Gwynn was a lady of the strictest morals, or that George Washington was

incapable of telling the truth. The playwright who deals with Henry VIII

is bound to present him, in the schoolboy's phrase, as "a great

widower." William the Silent must not be a chatterbox, Torquemada a

humanitarian, Ivan the Terrible a conscientious opponent of capital

punishment. And legend has its fixed points no less than history. In the

theatre, indeed, there is little distinction between them: history is

legend, and legend history. A dramatist may, if he pleases (though it is

a difficult task), break wholly unfamiliar ground in the past; but where

a historic legend exists he must respect it at his peril.

From all this it is a simple deduction that where legend (historic or

otherwise) associates a particular character with a particular scene

that is by any means presentable on the stage, that scene becomes

obligatory in a drama of which he is the leading figure. The fact that

Shakespeare could write a play about King John, and say nothing about

Runnymede and Magna Charta, shows that that incident in constitutional

history had not yet passed into popular legend. When Sir Herbert Tree

revived the play, he repaired the poet's omission by means of an

inserted tableau. Even Shakespeare had not the hardihood to let Caesar

fall without saying, "The Ides of March are come" and "Et tu, Brute!"

Nero is bound to fiddle while Rome burns, or the audience will know the

reason why.[4] Historic criticism will not hear of the "Thou hast

conquered, Galilean!" which legend attributes to Julian the Apostate;

yet Ibsen not only makes him say it, but may almost be said to find in

the phrase the keynote of his world-historic drama. Tristram and Iseult

must drink a love-philtre or they are not Tristram and Iseult. It would

be the extreme of paradox to write a Paolo-and-Francesca play and omit

the scene of "Quel giorno più non vi leggemmo avante."

The cases are not very frequent, however, in which an individual

incident is thus imposed by history or legend. The practical point to be

noted is rather that, when an author introduces a strongly-marked

historical character, he must be prepared to give him at least one good

opportunity of acting up to the character which legend--the best of

evidence in the theatre--assigns to him. When such a personage is

presented to us, it ought to be at his highest potency. We do not

want to see--

"From Marlborough's eyes the tears of dotage flow,

And Swift expire, a driveller and a show."

If you deal with Napoleon, for instance, it is perfectly clear that he

must dominate the stage. As soon as you bring in the name, the idea, of

Napoleon Bonaparte, men have eyes and ears for nothing else; and they

demand to see him, in a general way, acting up to their general

conception of him. That was what Messrs. Lloyd Osbourne and Austin

Strong forgot in their otherwise clever play, _The Exile_. It is useless

to prove, historically, that at a given moment he was passive, supine,

unconscious, while people around him were eagerly plotting his escape

and restoration. That may have been so; but it is not what an audience

wants to see. It wants to see Napoleon Napoleonizing. For anomalies and

uncharacteristic episodes in Napoleon's career we must go to books; the

playhouse is not the place for them. It is true that a dramatist like

Mr. Bernard Shaw may, at his own risk and peril, set forth to give us a

new reading of Caesar or of Napoleon, which may or may not be

dramatically acceptable.[5] But this is not what Messrs. Osbourne and

Strong tried to do. Their Napoleon was the Napoleon of tradition--only

he failed to act "in a concatenation according."

There are a few figures in history--and Napoleon is one of them--which

so thrill the imagination that their mere name can dominate the stage,

better, perhaps, than their bodily presence. In _L'Aiglon_, by M.

Rostand, Napoleon is in fact the hero, though he lies dead in his

far-off island, under the Southern Cross. Another such figure is Abraham

Lincoln. In James Herne's sadly underrated play, _Griffith Davenport_,

we were always conscious of "Mr. Lincoln" in the background; and the act

in which Governor Morton of Indiana brought the President's instructions

to Davenport might fairly be called an obligatory scene, inasmuch as it

gave us the requisite sense of personal nearness to the master-spirit,

without involving any risk of belittlement through imperfections of

representation. There is a popular melodrama, passing in Palestine under

the Romans, throughout the course of which we constantly feel the

influence of a strange new prophet, unseen but wonder-working, who, if I

remember rightly, is personally presented to us only in a final tableau,

wherein he appears riding into Jerusalem amid the hosannas of the

multitude. The execution of _Ben Hur_ is crude and commonplace, but the

conception is by no means inartistic. Historical figures of the highest

rank may perhaps be best adumbrated in this fashion, with or without one

personal appearance, so brief that there shall be no danger of

anti-climax.

The last paragraph reminds us that the accomplished playwright shows his

accomplishment quite as much in his recognition and avoidance of the

_scène à ne pas faire_ as in his divination of the obligatory scene.

There is always the chance that no one may miss a scene demanded by

logic or psychology; but an audience knows too well when it has been

bored or distressed by a superfluous, or inconsequent, or wantonly

painful scene.

Some twenty years ago, in criticizing a play named _Le Maître d'Armes_,

M. Sarcey took the authors gravely to task, in the name of "Aristotle

and common sense," for following the modern and reprehensible tendency

to present "slices of life" rather than constructed and developed

dramas. Especially he reproached them with deliberately omitting the

_scène à faire_. A young lady is seduced, he says, and, for the sake of

her child, implores her betrayer to keep his promise of marriage. He

renews the promise, without the slightest intention of fulfilling it,

and goes on board his yacht in order to make his escape. She discovers

his purpose and follows him on board the yacht. "What is the scene,"

asks M. Sarcey--here I translate literally--"which you expect, you, the

public? It is the scene between the abandoned fair one and her seducer.

The author may make it in a hundred ways, but make it he must!" Instead

of which, the critic proceeds, we are fobbed off with a storm-scene, a

rescue, and other sensational incidents, and hear no word of what passes

between the villain and his victim. Here, I think, M. Sarcey is mistaken

in his application of his pet principle. Words cannot express our

unconcern as to what passes between the heroine and the villain on board

the yacht--nay, more, our gratitude for being spared that painful and

threadbare scene of recrimination. The plot demands, observe, that the

villain shall not relent. We know quite well that he cannot, for if he

did the play would fall to pieces. Why, then, should we expect or demand

a sordid squabble which can lead to nothing? We--and by "we" I mean the

public which relishes such plays--cannot possibly have any keen appetite

for copious re-hashes of such very cold mutton as the appeals of the

penitent heroine to the recalcitrant villain. And the moral seems to be

that in this class of play--the drama, if one may call it so, of

foregone character--the _scène à faire_ is precisely the scene to

be omitted.

In plays of a more ambitious class, skill is often shown by the

indication, in place of the formal presentment, even of an important

scene which the audience may, or might, have expected to witness in

full. We have already noted such a case in _The Wild Duck_: Ibsen knew

that what we really required to witness was not the actual process of

Gregers's disclosure to Hialmar, but its effects. A small, but quite

noticeable, example of a scene thus rightly left to the imagination

occurred in Mr. Somerset Maugham's first play, _A Man of Honour_. In the

first act, Jack Halliwell, his wife, and his sister-in-law call upon his

friend Basil Kent. The sister-in-law, Hilda Murray, is a rich widow; and

she and Kent presently go out on the balcony together and are lost to

view. Then it appears, in a scene between the Halliwells, that they

fully believe that Kent is in love with Mrs. Murray and is now proposing

to her. But when the two re-enter from the balcony, it is evident from

their mien that, whatever may have passed between them, they are not

affianced lovers; and we presently learn that though Kent is in fact

strongly attracted to Mrs. Murray, he considers himself bound in honour

to marry a certain Jenny Bush, a Fleet Street barmaid, with whom he has

become entangled. Many playwrights would, so to speak, have dotted the

i's of the situation by giving us the scene between Kent and Mrs.

Murray; but Mr. Maugham has done exactly right in leaving us to divine

it. We know all that, at this point, we require to know of the relation

between them; to have told us more would have been to anticipate and

discount the course of events.

A more striking instance of a scene rightly placed behind the scenes

occurs in M. de Curel's terrible drama _Les Fossiles_. I need not go

into the singularly unpleasing details of the plot. Suffice it to say

that a very peculiar condition of things exists in the family of the Duc

de Chantemelle. It has been fully discussed in the second act between

the Duke and his daughter Claire, who has been induced to accept it for

the sake of the family name. But a person more immediately concerned is

Robert de Chantemelle, the only son of the house--will he also accept it

quietly? A nurse, who is acquainted with the black secret, misbehaves

herself, and is to be packed off. As she is a violent woman, Robert

insists on dismissing her himself, and leaves the room to do so. The

rest of the family are sure that, in her rage, she will blurt out the

whole story; and they wait, in breathless anxiety, for Robert's return.

What follows need not be told: the point is that this scene--the scene

of tense expectancy as to the result of a crisis which is taking place

in another room of the same house--is really far more dramatic than the

crisis itself would be. The audience already knows all that the angry

virago can say to her master; and of course no discussion of the merits

of the case is possible between these two. Therefore M. de Curel is

conspicuously right in sparing us the scene of vulgar violence, and

giving us the scene of far higher tension in which Robert's father, wife

and sister expect his return, their apprehension deepening with every

moment that he delays.

We see, then, that there is such a thing as a false _scène à faire_--a

scene which at first sight seems obligatory, but is in fact much better

taken for granted. It may be absolutely indispensable that it should be

suggested to the mind of the audience, but neither indispensable nor

advisable that it should be presented to their eyes. The judicious

playwright will often ask himself, "Is it the actual substance of this

scene that I require, or only its repercussion?"

* * * * *

[Footnote 1: For example, in his criticism of Becque's _La Parisienne

(Quarante Ans de Théâtre_, VI, p. 364), he tells how, at the end of the

second act, one of his neighbours said to him, "Eh! bien, vous voilà

bien attrapé! Où est la _scène à faire_?" "I freely admit," he

continues, "that there is no _scène à faire_; if there had been no third

act I should not have been greatly astonished. When you make it your

business to recite on the stage articles from the _Vie Parisienne_, it

makes no difference whether you stop at the end of the second article or

at the end of the third." This clearly implies that a play in which

there is no _scène à faire_ is nothing but a series of newspaper

sketches. Becque, one fancies, might have replied that the scene between

Clotilde and Monsieur Simpson at the beginning of Act III was precisely

the _scène à faire_ demanded by the logic of his cynicism.]

[Footnote 2: I need scarcely direct the reader's attention to Mr.

Gilbert Murray's noble renderings of these speeches.]

[Footnote 3: Such a scene occurs in that very able play, _The Way the

Money Goes_, by Lady Bell.]

[Footnote 4: In Mr. Stephen Phillips's play he does not actually play on

the lyre, but he improvises and recites an ode to the conflagration.]

[Footnote 5: And, after all, Mr. Shaw does not run counter to the

legend. He exhibits Caesar and Napoleon "in their well-known attitudes":

only, by an odd metempsychosis, the soul of Mr. Shaw has somehow entered

into them.]

_CHAPTER XIV_

THE PERIPETY

In the Greek theatre, as every one knows, the _peripeteia_ or reversal

of fortune--the turning of the tables, as we might say--was a

clearly-defined and recognized portion of the dramatic organism. It was

often associated with the _anagnorisis_ or recognition. Mr. Gilbert

Murray has recently shown cause for believing that both these dramatic

"forms" descended from the ritual in which Greek drama took its

origin--the ritual celebrating the death and resurrection of the season

of "mellow fruitfulness." If this theory be true, the _peripeteia_ was

at first a change from sorrow to joy--joy in the rebirth of the

beneficent powers of nature. And to this day a sudden change from gloom

to exhilaration is a popular and effective incident--as when, at the end

of a melodrama, the handcuffs are transferred from the wrists of the

virtuous naval lieutenant to those of the wicked baronet, and, through

the disclosure of a strawberry-mark on his left arm, the lieutenant is

recognized as the long-lost heir to a dukedom and £50,000 a year.

But when, as soon happened in Greece, the forms appropriate to a

celebration of the death and resurrection of Dionysus came to be blent

with the tomb-ritual of a hero, the term _peripeteia_ acquired a special

association with a sudden decline from prosperity into adversity. In the

Middle Ages, this was thought to be the very essence and meaning of

tragedy, as we may see from Chaucer's lines:

"Tragedie is to seyn a certeyn storie,

As oldë bokës maken us memorie,

Of him that stood in gret prosperitee,

And is y-fallen out of heigh degree

Into miserie, and endeth wrecchedly."

Aristotle cites a good instance of a peripety--to Anglicize the

word--"where, in the _Lynceus_, the hero is led away to execution,

followed by Danaus as executioner; but, as the effect of the

antecedents, Danaus is executed and Lynceus escapes." But here, as in so

many other contexts, we must turn for the classic example to the

_Oedipus Rex_. Jocasta, hearing from the Corinthian stranger that

Polybus, King of Corinth, the reputed father of Oedipus, is dead, sends

for her husband to tell him that the oracle which doomed him to

parricide is defeated, since Polybus has died a natural death. Oedipus

exults in the news and triumphs over the oracles; but, as the scene

proceeds, the further revelations made by the same stranger lead Jocasta

to recognize in Oedipus her own child, who was exposed on Mount

Kithairon; and, in the subsequent scene, the evidence of the old

Shepherd brings Oedipus himself to the same crushing realization. No

completer case of _anagnorisis_ and _peripeteia_ could well be

conceived--whatever we may have to say of the means by which it is

led up to.[1]

Has the conception of the peripety, as an almost obligatory element in

drama, any significance for the modern playwright? Obligatory, of

course, it cannot be: it is easy to cite a hundred admirable plays in

which it is impossible to discover anything that can reasonably be

called a peripety. But this, I think, we may safely say: the dramatist

is fortunate who finds in the development of his theme, without

unnatural strain or too much preparation, opportunity for a great scene,

highly-wrought, arresting, absorbing, wherein one or more of his

characters shall experience a marked reversal either of inward

soul-state or of outward fortune. The theory of the peripety, in short,

practically resolves itself for us into the theory of the "great scene,"

Plays there are, many and excellent plays, in which some one scene

stands out from all the rest, impressing itself with peculiar vividness

on the spectator's mind; and, nine times out of ten, this scene will be

found to involve a peripety. It can do no harm, then, if the playwright

should ask himself: "Can I, without any undue sacrifice, so develop my

theme as to entail upon my leading characters, naturally and probably,

an experience of this order?"

The peripeties of real life are frequent, though they are apt to be too

small in scale, or else too fatally conclusive, to provide material for

drama. One of the commonest, perhaps, is that of the man who enters a

physician's consulting-room to seek advice in some trifling ailment, and

comes out again, half an hour later, doomed either to death or to some

calamity worse than death. This situation has been employed, not

ineffectively, by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, in the first act of a romantic

drama, _The Fires of Fate_; but it is very difficult to find any

dramatic sequel to a peripety involving mere physical disaster.[2] The

moral peripety--the sudden dissipation of some illusion, or defeat of

some imposture, or crumbling of some castle in the air--is a no less

characteristic incident of real life, and much more amenable to the

playwright's uses. Certainly there are few things more impressive in

drama than to see a man or woman--or a man and woman--come upon the

stage, radiant, confident, assured that

"God's in his heaven,

All's right with the world,"

and leave it crushed and desperate, after a gradual and yet swift

descent into Avernus. Such a scene is of the very marrow of drama. It is

a play within a play; a concentrated, quintessentiated crisis.

In the third act of _Othello_ we have a peripety handled with consummate

theatrical skill. To me--I confess it with bated breath--the

craftsmanship seems greatly superior to the psychology. Othello, when we

look into it, succumbs with incredible facility to Iago's poisoned

pin-pricks; but no audience dreams of looking into it; and there lies

the proof of Shakespeare's technical mastery. In the Trial Scene in _The

Merchant of Venice_ we have another great peripety. It illustrates the

obvious principle that, where the drama consists in a conflict between

two persons or parties, the peripety is generally a double one--the

sudden collapse of Shylock's case implying an equally sudden restoration

of Antonio's fortunes. Perhaps the most striking peripety in Ibsen is

Stockmann's fall from jubilant self-confidence to defiant impotence in

the third act of _An Enemy of the People_. Thinking that he has the

"compact majority" at his back, he assumes the Burgomaster's insignia of

office, and lords it over his incensed brother, only to learn, by blow

on blow of disillusionment, that "the compact majority" has ratted, that

he is to be deprived of his position and income, and that the commonest

freedom of speech is to be denied him. In _A Doll's House_ there are two

peripeties: Nora's fall from elation to despair in the first scene with

Krogstad, and the collapse of Helmer's illusions in the last scene

of all.

A good instance of the "great scene" which involves a marked peripety

occurs in Sardou's _Dora_, once famous in England under the title of

_Diplomacy_. The "scene of the three men" shows how Tékli, a Hungarian

exile, calls upon his old friend André de Maurillac, on the day of

André's marriage, and congratulates him on having eluded the wiles of a

dangerous adventuress, Dora de Rio-Zarès, by whom he had once seemed to

be attracted. But it is precisely Dora whom André has married; and,

learning this, Tékli tries to withdraw, or minimize, his imputation. For

a moment a duel seems imminent; but André's friend, Favrolles, adjures

him to keep his head; and the three men proceed to thrash the matter out

as calmly as possible, with the result that, in the course of

half-an-hour or so, it seems to be proved beyond all doubt that the

woman André adores, and whom he has just married, is a treacherous spy,

who sells to tyrannical foreign governments the lives of political

exiles and the honour of the men who fall into her toils. The crushing

suspicion is ultimately disproved, by one of the tricks in which Sardou

delighted; but that does not here concern us. Artificial as are its

causes and its consequences, the "scene of the three men," while it

lasts, holds us breathless and absorbed; and André's fall from the

pinnacle of happiness to the depth of misery, is a typical peripety.

Equally typical and infinitely more tragic is another postnuptial

peripety--the scene of the mutual confession of Angel Clare and Tess in

Mr. Hardy's great novel. As it stands on the printed page, this scene is

a superb piece of drama. Its greatness has been obscured in the English

theatre by the general unskilfulness of the dramatic version presented.

One magnificent scene does not make a play. In America, on the other

hand, the fine acting of Mrs. Fiske secured popularity for a version

which was, perhaps, rather better than that which we saw in England.

I have said that dramatic peripeties are not infrequent in real life;

and their scene, as is natural, is often laid in the law courts. It is

unnecessary to recall the awful "reversal of fortune" that overtook one

of the most brilliant of modern dramatists. About the same period,

another drama of the English courts ended in a startling and terrible

peripety. A young lady was staying as a guest with a half-pay officer

and his wife. A valuable pearl belonging to the hostess disappeared; and

the hostess accused her guest of having stolen it. The young lady, who

had meanwhile married, brought an action for slander against her quondam

friend. For several days the case continued, and everything seemed to be

going in the plaintiff's favour. Major Blank, the defendant's husband,

was ruthlessly cross-examined by Sir Charles Russell, afterwards Lord

Chief Justice of England, with a view to showing that he was the real

thief. He made a very bad witness, and things looked black against him.

The end was nearing, and every one anticipated a verdict in the

plaintiff's favour, when there came a sudden change of scene. The stolen

pearl had been sold to a firm of jewellers, who had recorded the numbers

of the Bank of England notes with which they paid for it. One of these

notes was produced in court, and lo! it was endorsed with the name of

the plaintiff.[3] In a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, the whole

edifice of mendacity and perjury fell to pieces. The thief was arrested

and imprisoned; but the peripety for her was less terrible than for her

husband, who had married her in chivalrous faith in her innocence.

Would it have been--or may it some day prove to be--possible to transfer

this "well-made" drama of real life bodily to the stage? I am inclined

to think not. It looks to me very much like one of those "blind alley"

themes of which mention has been made. There is matter, indeed, for most

painful drama in the relations of the husband and wife, both before and

after the trial; but, from the psychological point of view, one can see

nothing in the case but a distressing and inexplicable anomaly.[4] At

the same time, the bare fact of the sudden and tremendous peripety is

irresistibly dramatic; and Mr. Henry Arthur Jones has admitted that it

suggested to him the great scene of the unmasking of Felicia Hindemarsh

in _Mrs. Dane's Defence._

It is instructive to note the delicate adjustment which Mr. Jones found

necessary in order to adapt the theme to dramatic uses. In the first

place, not wishing to plunge into the depths of tragedy, he left the

heroine unmarried, though on the point of marriage. In the second place,

he made the blot on her past, not a theft followed by an attempt to

shift the guilt on to other shoulders, but an error of conduct, due to

youth and inexperience, serious in itself, but rendered disastrous by

tragic consequences over which she, Felicia, had no control. Thus Mr.

Jones raised a real and fairly sufficient obstacle between his lovers,

without rendering his heroine entirely unsympathetic, or presenting her

in the guise of a bewildering moral anomaly. Thirdly, he transferred the

scene of the peripety from a court of justice, with its difficult

adjuncts and tedious procedure, to the private study of a great lawyer.

At the opening of the scene between Mrs. Dane and Sir Daniel Carteret,

she is, no doubt, still anxious and ill-at-ease, but reasonably

confident of having averted all danger of exposure. Sir Daniel, too

(like Sir Charles Russell in the pearl suit), is practically convinced

of her innocence. He merely wants to get the case absolutely clear, for

the final confounding of her accusers. At first, all goes smoothly. Mrs.

Dane's answers to his questions are pat and plausible. Then she makes a

single, almost imperceptible, slip of the tongue: she says, "We had

governesses," instead of "I had governesses." Sir Daniel pricks up his

ears: "We? You say you were an only child. Who's we?" "My cousin and I,"

she answers. Sir Daniel thinks it odd that he has not heard of this

cousin before; but he continues his interrogatory without serious

suspicion. Then it occurs to him to look up, in a topographical

dictionary, the little town of Tawhampton, where Mrs. Dane spent her

youth. He reads the bald account of it, ending thus, "The living is a

Vicarage, net yearly value £376, and has been held since 1875 by"--and

he turns round upon her--"by the Rev. Francis Hindemarsh! Hindemarsh?"

Mrs. Dane: He was my uncle.

Sir Daniel: Your uncle?

Mrs. Dane: Sir Daniel, I've done wrong to hide from you that Felicia

Hindemarsh was my cousin.

Sir Daniel: Felicia Hindemarsh was your cousin!

Mrs. Dane: Can't you understand why I have hidden it? The whole

affair was so terrible.

And so she stumbles on, from one inevitable admission to another, until

the damning truth is clear that she herself is Felicia Hindemarsh, the

central, though not the most guilty, figure in a horrible scandal.

This scene is worthy of study as an excellent type of what may be called

the judicial peripety, the crushing cross-examination, in which it is

possible to combine the tension of the detective story with no small

psychological subtlety. In Mr. Jones's scene, the psychology is obvious

enough; but it is an admirable example of nice adjustment without any

obtrusive ingenuity. The whole drama, in short, up to the last act is,

in the exact sense of the word, a well-made play--complex yet clear,

ingenious yet natural. In the comparative weakness of the last act we

have a common characteristic of latter-day drama, which will have to be

discussed in due course.

In this case we have a peripety of external fortune. For a

clearly-marked moral peripety we may turn to the great scene between

Vivie and her mother in the second act of _Mrs. Warren's Profession._

Whatever may be thought of the matter of this scene, its movement is

excellent. After a short, sharp opening, which reveals to Mrs. Warren

the unfilial dispositions of her daughter, and reduces her to whimpering

dismay, the following little passage occurs:

Mrs. Warren: You're very rough with me, Vivie.

Vivie: Nonsense. What about bed? It's past ten.

Mrs. Warren (passionately): What's the use of my going to bed? Do

you think I could sleep?

Vivie: Why not? I shall.

Then the mother turns upon the daughter's stony self-righteousness, and

pours forth her sordid history in such a way as to throw a searchlight

on the conditions which make such histories possible; until, exhausted

by her outburst, she says, "Oh, dear! I do believe I am getting sleepy

after all," and Vivie replies, "I believe it is I who will not be able

to sleep now." Mr. Shaw, we see, is at pains to emphasize his peripety.

Some "great scenes" consist, not of one decisive turning of the tables,

but of a whole series of minor vicissitudes of fortune. Such a scene is

the third act of _The Gay Lord Quex_, a prolonged and thrilling duel, in

which Sophy Fullgarney passes by degrees from impertinent exultation to

abject surrender and then springs up again to a mood of reckless

defiance. In the "great scene" of _The Thunderbolt_, on the other

hand--the scene of Thaddeus's false confession of having destroyed his

brother's will--though there is, in fact, a great peripety, it is not

that which attracts and absorbs our interest. All the greedy Mortimore

family fall from the height of jubilant confidence in their new-found

wealth to the depth of disappointment and exasperation. But this is not

the aspect of the scene which grips and moves us. Our attention is

centred on Thaddeus's struggle to take his wife's misdeed upon himself;

and his failure cannot be described as a peripety, seeing that it sinks

him only one degree lower in the slough of despair. Like the scene in

Mrs. Dane's Defence, this is practically a piece of judicial drama--a

hard-fought cross-examination. But as there is no reversal of fortune

for the character in whom we are chiefly interested, it scarcely ranks

as a scene of peripety.[5]

Before leaving this subject, we may note that a favourite effect of

romantic drama is an upward reversal of fortune through the

recognition--the _anagnorisis_--of some great personage in disguise.

Victor Hugo excelled in the superb gestures appropriate to such a scene:

witness the passage in _Hernani_, before the tomb of Charlemagne, where

the obscure bandit claims the right to take his place at the head of the

princes and nobles whom the newly-elected Emperor has ordered off to

execution:

Hernani:

Dieu qui donne le sceptre et qui te le donna

M'a fait duc de Segorbe et duc de Cardona,

Marquis de Monroy, comte Albatéra, vicomte

De Gor, seigneur de lieux dont j'ignore le compte.

Je suis Jean d'Aragon, grand maître d'Avis, né

Dans l'exil, fils proscrit d'un père assassiné

Par sentence du tien, roi Carlos de Castille.

* * * * *

(_Aux autres conjurés_)

Couvrons nous, grands d'Espagnol

(_Tous les Espagnols se couvrent_)

Oui, nos têtes, ô roi!

Ont le droit de tomber couvertes devant toi!

An effective scene of this type occurs in _Monsieur Beaucaire_, where

the supposed hairdresser is on the point of being ejected with contumely

from the pump-room at Bath, when the French Ambassador enters, drops on

his knee, kisses the young man's hand, and presents him to the astounded

company as the Duc d'Orléans, Comte de Valois, and I know not what

besides--a personage who immeasurably outshines the noblest of his

insulters. Quieter, but not less telling, is the peripety in _The Little

Father of the Wilderness_, by Messrs. Lloyd Osbourne and Austin Strong.

The Père Marlotte, who, by his heroism and self-devotion, has added vast

territories to the French possessions in America, is summoned to the

court of Louis XV, and naturally concludes that the king has heard of

his services and wishes to reward them. He finds, on the contrary, that

he is wanted merely to decide a foolish bet; and he is treated with the

grossest insolence and contempt. Just as he is departing in humiliation,

the Governor-General of Canada arrives, with a suite of officers and

Indians. The moment they are aware of Père Marlotte's presence, they all

kneel to him and pay him deeper homage than they have paid to the king,

who accepts the rebuke and joins in their demonstration.

A famous peripety of the romantic order occurs in _H.M.S. Pinafore_,

where, on the discovery that Captain Corcoran and Ralph Rackstraw have

been changed at birth, Ralph instantly becomes captain of the ship,

while the captain declines into an able-bodied seaman. This is one of

the instances in which the idealism of art ekes out the imperfections

of reality.

* * * * *

[Footnote 1: That great spiritual drama known as the Book of Job opens,

after the Prologue in Heaven, with one of the most startling of

peripeties.]

[Footnote 2: The first act of Mr. Gilbert Murray's _Carlyon Sahib_

contains an incident of this nature; but it can scarcely be called a

peripety, since the victim remains unconscious of his doom.]

[Footnote 3: For the benefit of American readers, it may be well to

state that the person who changes a Bank of England note is often asked

to write his or her name on the back of it. It must have been in a

moment of sheer aberration that the lady in question wrote her

own name.]

[Footnote 4: M. Bernstein, dishing up a similar theme with a piquant

sauce of sensuality, made but a vulgar and trivial piece of work of it.]

[Footnote 5: One of the most striking peripeties in recent English drama

occurs in the third act of The Builder of Bridges, by Mr. Alfred Sutro.]

_CHAPTER XV_

PROBABILITY, CHANCE, AND COINCIDENCE

Aristotle indulges in an often-quoted paradox to the effect that, in

drama, the probable impossible is to be preferred to the improbable

possible. With all respect, this seems to be a somewhat cumbrous way of

stating the fact that plausibility is of more importance on the stage

than what may be called demonstrable probability. There is no time, in

the rush of a dramatic action, for a mathematical calculation of the

chances for and against a given event, or for experimental proof that

such and such a thing can or cannot be done. If a thing seem plausible,

an audience will accept it without cavil; if it, seem incredible on the

face of it, no evidence of its credibility will be of much avail. This

is merely a corollary from the fundamental principle that the stage is

the realm of appearances; not of realities, where paste jewels are at

least as effective as real ones, and a painted forest is far more sylvan

than a few wilted and drooping saplings, insecurely planted upon

the boards.

That is why an improbable or otherwise inacceptable incident cannot be

validly defended on the plea that it actually happened: that it is on

record in history or in the newspapers. In the first place, the

dramatist can never put it on the stage as it happened. The bare fact

may be historical, but it is not the bare fact that matters. The

dramatist cannot restore it to its place in that intricate plexus of

cause and effect, which is the essence and meaning of reality. He can

only give his interpretation of the fact; and one knows not how to

calculate the chances that his interpretation may be a false one. But

even if this difficulty could be overcome; if the dramatist could prove

that he had reproduced the event with photographic and cinematographic

accuracy, his position would not thereby be improved. He would still

have failed in his peculiar task, which is precisely that of

interpretation. Not truth, but verisimilitude, is his aim; for the stage

is the realm of appearances, in which intrusive realities become unreal.

There are, as I have said, incalculable chances to one that the

playwright's version of a given event will not coincide with that of the

Recording Angel: but it may be true and convincing in relation to human

nature in general, in which case it will belong to the sphere of great

art; or, on a lower level, it may be agreeable and entertaining without

being conspicuously false to human nature, in which case it will do no

harm, since it makes no pretence to historic truth. It may be objected

that the sixteenth-century public, and even, in the next century, the

great Duke of Marlborough, got their knowledge of English history from

Shakespeare, and the other writers of chronicle-plays. Well, I leave it

to historians to determine whether this very defective and, in great

measure, false vision of the past was better or worse than none. The

danger at any rate, if danger there was, is now past and done with. Even

our generals no longer go to the theatre or to the First Folio for their

history. The dramatist may, with an easy conscience, interpret historic

fact in the light of his general insight into human nature, so long as

he does not so falsify the recorded event that common knowledge cries

out against him.[1]

Plausibility, then, not abstract or concrete probability, and still less

literal faithfulness to recorded fact, is what the dramatist is bound to

aim at. To understand this as a belittling of his art is to

misunderstand the nature of art in general. The plausibility of bad art

is doubtless contemptible and may be harmful. But to say that good art

must be plausible is only to say that not every sort of truth, or every

aspect of truth, is equally suitable for artistic representation--or, in

more general terms, that the artist, without prejudice to his allegiance

to nature, must respect the conditions of the medium in which he works.

Our standards of plausibility, however, are far from being invariable.

To each separate form of art, a different standard is applicable. In

what may roughly be called realistic art, the terms plausible and

probable are very nearly interchangeable. Where the dramatist appeals to

the sanction of our own experience and knowledge, he must not introduce

matter against which our experience and knowledge cry out. A very small

inaccuracy in a picture which is otherwise photographic will often have

a very disturbing effect. In plays of society in particular, the

criticism "No one does such things," is held by a large class of

playgoers to be conclusive and destructive. One has known people despise

a play because Lady So-and-so's manner of speaking to her servants was

not what they (the cavillers) were accustomed to. On the other hand, one

has heard a whole production highly applauded because the buttons on a

particular uniform were absolutely right. This merely means that when an

effort after literal accuracy is apparent, the attention of the audience

seizes on the most trifling details and is apt to magnify their

importance. Niceties of language in especial are keenly, and often

unjustly, criticized. If a particular expression does not happen to be

current in the critic's own circle, he concludes that nobody uses it,

and that the author is a pedant or a vulgarian. In view of this

inevitable tendency, the prudent dramatist will try to keep out of his

dialogue expressions that are peculiar to his own circle, and to use

only what may be called everybody's English, or the language undoubtedly

current throughout the whole class to which his personage belongs.

It may be here pointed out that there are three different planes on

which plausibility may or may not, be achieved. There is first the

purely external plane, which concerns the producer almost as much as the

playwright. On this plane we look for plausibility of costume, of

manners, of dialect, of general environment. Then we have plausibility

of what may be called uncharacteristic event--of such events as are

independent of the will of the characters, and are not conditioned by

their psychology. On this plane we have to deal with chance and

accident, coincidence, and all "circumstances over which we have no

control." For instance, the playwright who makes the "Marseillaise"

become popular throughout Paris within half-an-hour of its having left

the composer's desk, is guilty of a breach of plausibility on this

plane. So, too, if I were to make my hero enter Parliament for the first

time, and rise in a single session to be Prime Minister of

England--there would be no absolute impossibility in the feat, but it

would be a rather gross improbability of the second order. On the third

plane we come to psychological plausibility, the plausibility of events

dependent mainly or entirely on character. For example--to cite a much

disputed instance--is it plausible that Nora, in _A Doll's House_,

should suddenly develop the mastery of dialectics with which she crushes

Helmer in the final scene, and should desert her husband and children,

slamming the door behind her?

It need scarcely be said that plausibility on the third plane is vastly

the most important. A very austere criticism might even call it the one

thing worth consideration. But, as a matter of fact, when we speak of

plausibility, it is almost always the second plane--the plane of

uncharacteristic circumstance--that we have in mind. To plausibility of

the third order we give a more imposing name--we call it truth. We say

that Nora's action is true--or untrue--to nature. We speak of the truth

with which the madness of Lear, the malignity of Iago, the race hatred

of Shylock, is portrayed. Truth, in fact, is the term which we use in

cases where the tests to be applied are those of introspection,

intuition, or knowledge sub-consciously garnered from spiritual

experience. Where the tests are external, and matters of common

knowledge or tangible evidence, we speak of plausibility.

It would be a mistake, however, to imagine that because plausibility of

the third degree, or truth, is the noblest attribute of drama, it is

therefore the one thing needful. In some forms of drama it is greatly

impaired, or absolutely nullified, if plausibility of the second degree,

its necessary preliminary, be not carefully secured. In the case above

imagined, for instance, of the young politician who should become Prime

Minister immediately on entering Parliament: it would matter nothing

with what profundity of knowledge or subtlety of skill the character was

drawn: we should none the less decline to believe in him. Some

dramatists, as a matter of fact, find it much easier to attain truth of

character than plausibility of incident. Every one who is in the habit

of reading manuscript plays, must have come across the would-be

playwright who has a good deal of general ability and a considerable

power of characterization, but seems to be congenitally deficient in the

sense of external reality, so that the one thing he (or she) can by no

means do is to invent or conduct an action that shall be in the least

like any sequence of events in real life. It is naturally difficult to

give examples, for the plays composed under this curious limitation are

apt to remain in manuscript, or to be produced for one performance, and

forgotten. There is, however, one recent play of this order which holds

a certain place in dramatic literature. I do not know that Mr. Granville

Barker was well-advised in printing _The Marrying of Anne Leete_ along

with such immeasurably maturer and saner productions as _The Voysey

Inheritance_ and _Waste_; but by doing so he has served my present purpose

in providing me with a perfect example of a play as to which we cannot

tell whether it possesses plausibility of the third degree, so

absolutely does it lack that plausibility of the second degree which is

its indispensable condition precedent.

Francisque Sarcey was fond of insisting that an audience would generally

accept without cavil any postulates in reason which an author chose to

impose upon it, with regard to events supposed to have occurred before

the rise of the curtain; always provided that the consequences deduced

from them within the limits of the play were logical, plausible, and

entertaining. The public will swallow a camel, he would maintain, in the

past, though they will strain at a gnat in the present. A classical

example of this principle is (once more) the _Oedipus Rex_, in which

several of the initial postulates are wildly improbable: for instance,

that Oedipus should never have inquired into the circumstances of the

death of Laius, and that, having been warned by an oracle that he was

doomed to marry his mother, he should not have been careful, before

marrying any woman, to ascertain that she was younger than himself.

There is at least so much justification for Sarcey's favourite

principle, that we are less apt to scrutinize things merely narrated to

us than events which take place before our eyes. It is simply a special

instance of the well-worn

"Segnius irritant animos demissa per aurem

Quam quae sunt oculis subjecta fidelibus."

But the principle is of very limited artistic validity. No one would

nowadays think of justifying a gross improbability in the antecedents of

a play by Ibsen or Sir Arthur Pinero, by Mr. Galsworthy or Mr. Granville

Barker, on the plea that it occurred outside the frame of the picture.

Such a plea might, indeed, secure a mitigation of sentence, but never a

verdict of acquittal. Sarcey, on the other hand, brought up in the

school of the "well-made" play, would rather have held it a feather in

the playwright's cap that he should have known just where, and just how,

he might safely outrage probability [2]. The inference is that we now

take the dramatist's art more seriously than did the generation of the

Second Empire in France.

This brings us, however, to an important fact, which must by no means be

overlooked. There is a large class of plays--or rather, there are

several classes of plays, some of them not at all to be despised--the

charm of which resides, not in probability, but in ingenious and

delightful improbability. I am, of course, not thinking of sheer

fantasies, like _A Midsummer Night's Dream_, or _Peter Pan_, or _The

Blue Bird_. They may, indeed, possess plausibility of the third order,

but plausibility of the second order has no application to them. Its

writs do not run on their extramundane plane. The plays which appeal to

us in virtue of their pleasant departures from probability are romances,

farces, a certain order of light comedies and semi-comic melodramas--in

short, the thousand and one plays in which the author, without

altogether despising and abjuring truth, makes it on principle

subsidiary to delightfulness. Plays of the _Prisoner of Zenda_ type

would come under this head: so would Sir Arthur Pinero's farces, _The

Magistrate_, _The Schoolmistress_, _Dandy Dick_; so would Mr. Carton's

light comedies, _Lord and Lady Algy_, _Wheels within Wheels_, _Lady

Huntworth's Experiment_; so would most of Mr. Barrie's comedies; so

would Mr. Arnold Bennett's play, _The Honeymoon_. In a previous chapter

I have sketched the opening act of Mr. Carton's _Wheels within Wheels_,

which is a typical example of this style of work. Its charm lies in a

subtle, all-pervading improbability, an infusion of fantasy so delicate

that, while at no point can one say, "This is impossible," the total

effect is far more entertaining than that of any probable sequence of

events in real life. The whole atmosphere of such a play should be

impregnated with humour, without reaching that gross supersaturation

which we find in the lower order of farce-plays of the type of

_Charlie's Aunt_ or _Niobe_.

* * * * *

Plausibility of development, as distinct from plausibility of theme or

of character, depends very largely on the judicious handling of chance,

and the exclusion, or very sparing employment, of coincidence. This is a

matter of importance, into which we shall find it worth while to look

somewhat closely.

It is not always clearly recognized that chance and coincidence are by

no means the same thing. Coincidence is a special and complex form of

chance, which ought by no means to be confounded with the everyday

variety. We need not here analyse chance, or discuss the philosophic

value of the term. It is enough that we all know what we mean by it in

common parlance. It may be well, however, to look into the etymology of

the two words we are considering. They both come ultimately, from the

Latin "cadere," to fall. Chance is a falling-out, like that of a die

from the dice-box; and coincidence signifies one falling-out on the top

of another, the concurrent happening of two or more chances which

resemble or somehow fit into each other. If you rattle six dice in a box

and throw them, and they turn up at haphazard--say, two aces, a deuce,

two fours, and a six--there is nothing remarkable in this falling out.

But if they all turn up sixes, you at once suspect that the dice are

cogged; and if that be not so--if there be no sufficient cause behind

the phenomenon--you say that this identical falling-out of six separate

possibilities was a remarkable coincidence. Now, applying the

illustration to drama, I should say that the playwright is perfectly

justified in letting chance play its probable and even inevitable part

in the affairs of his characters; but that, the moment we suspect him of

cogging the dice, we feel that he is taking an unfair advantage of us,

and our imagination either cries, "I won't play!" or continues the game

under protest.

Some critics have considered it a flaw in Shakespeare's art that the

catastrophe of _Romeo and Juliet_ should depend upon a series of

chances, and especially on the miscarriage of the Friar's letter to

Romeo. This is not, I think, a valid criticism. We may, if we are so

minded, pick to pieces the course of action which brought these chances

into play. The device of the potion--even if such a drug were known to

the pharmacopoeia--is certainly a very clumsy method of escape from the

position in which Juliet is placed by her father's obstinacy. But when

once we have accepted that integral part of the legend, the intervention

of chance in the catastrophe is entirely natural and probable. Observe

that there is no coincidence in the matter, no interlinking or

dovetailing of chances. The catastrophe results from the hot-headed

impetuosity of all the characters, which so hurries events that there is

no time for the elimination of the results of chance. Letters do

constantly go astray, even under our highly-organized system of

conveyance; but their delay or disappearance seldom leads to tragic

results, because most of us have learnt to take things calmly and wait

for the next post. Yet if we could survey the world at large, it is

highly probable that every day or every hour we should somewhere or

other find some Romeo on the verge of committing suicide because of a

chance misunderstanding with regard to his Juliet; and in a certain

percentage of cases the explanatory letter or telegram would doubtless

arrive too late.

We all remember how, in Mr. Hardy's _Tess_, the main trouble arises from

the fact that the letter pushed under Angel Clare's door slips also

under the carpet of his room, and so is never discovered. This is an

entirely probable chance; and the sternest criticism would hardly call

it a flaw in the structure of the fable. But take another case: Madame X

has had a child, of whom she has lost sight for more than twenty years,

during which she has lived abroad. She returns to France, and

immediately on landing at Bordeaux she kills a man who accompanies her.

The court assigns her defence to a young advocate, and this young

advocate happens to be her son. We have here a piling of chance upon

chance, in which the long arm of coincidence[3] is very apparent. The

coincidence would have been less startling had she returned to the place

where she left her son and where she believed him to be. But no! she

left him in Paris, and it is only by a series of pure chances that he

happens to be in Bordeaux, where she happens to land, and happens to

shoot a man. For the sake of a certain order of emotional effect, a

certain order of audience is willing to accept this piling up of

chances; but it relegates the play to a low and childish plane of art.

The _Oedipus Rex_, indeed--which meets us at every turn--is founded on

an absolutely astounding series of coincidences; but here the conception

of fate comes in, and we vaguely figure to ourselves some malignant

power deliberately pulling the strings which guide its puppets into such

abhorrent tangles. On the modern view that "character is destiny," the

conception of supernatural wire-pulling is excluded. It is true that

amazing coincidences do occur in life; but when they are invented to

serve an artist's purposes, we feel that he is simplifying his task

altogether beyond reason, and substituting for normal and probable

development an irrelevant plunge into the merely marvellous.

Of the abuse of coincidence, I have already given a specimen in speaking

of _The Rise of Dick Halward_ (Chapter XII). One or two more examples

may not be out of place. I need not dwell on the significance of the

fact that most of them occur in forgotten plays.

In _The Man of Forty_, by Mr. Walter Frith, we find the following

conjuncture of circumstances: Mr. Lewis Dunster has a long-lost wife and

a long-lost brother. He has been for years in South Africa; they have

meanwhile lived in London, but they do not know each other, and have

held no communication. Lewis, returning from Africa, arrives in London.

He does not know where to find either wife or brother, and has not the

slightest wish to look for them; yet in the first house he goes to, the

home of a lady whose acquaintance he chanced to make on the voyage, he

encounters both his wife and his brother! Not quite so startling is the

coincidence on which _Mrs. Willoughby's Kiss_, by Mr. Frank Stayton, is

founded. An upper and lower flat in West Kensington are inhabited,

respectively, by Mrs. Brandram and Mrs. Willoughby, whose husbands have

both been many years absent in India. By pure chance the two husbands

come home in the same ship; the two wives go to Plymouth to meet them,

and by pure chance, for they are totally unacquainted with each other,

they go to the same hotel; whence it happens that Mrs. Willoughby,

meeting Mr. Brandram in a half-lighted room, takes him for her husband,

flies to his arms and kisses him. More elaborate than either of these is

the tangle of coincidences in Mr. Stuart Ogilvie's play, _The

White Knight_--

Giulietta, the ward of David Pennycuick, goes to study singing at Milan.

Mr. Harry Rook, Pennycuick's most intimate friend, meets her by chance

in Milan, and she becomes his mistress, neither having the least idea

that the other knows Pennycuick. Then Viscount Hintlesham, like

Pennycuick, a dupe of Rook's, meets her by chance at Monte Carlo and

falls in love with her. He does not know that she knows Rook or

Pennycuick, and she does not know that he knows them. Arriving in

England, she finds in the manager, the promoter, and the chairman of the

Electric White Lead Company her guardian, her seducer, and her lover.

When she comes to see her guardian, the first person she meets is her

seducer, and she learns that her lover has just left the house. Up to

that moment, I repeat, she did not know that any one of these men knew

any other; yet she does not even say, "How small the world is!"[4]

Surely some such observation was obligatory under the circumstances.

Let us turn now to a more memorable piece of work; that interesting play

of Sir Arthur Pinero's transition period, _The Profligate_. Here the

great situation of the third act is brought about by a chain of

coincidences which would be utterly unthinkable in the author's maturer

work. Leslie Brudenell, the heroine, is the ward of Mr. Cheal, a

solicitor. She is to be married to Dunstan Renshaw; and, as she has no

home, the bridal party meets at Mr. Cheal's office before proceeding to

the registrar's. No sooner have they departed than Janet Preece, who has

been betrayed and deserted by Dunstan Renshaw (under an assumed name)

comes to the office to state her piteous case. This is not in itself a

pure coincidence; for Janet happened to come to London in the same train

with Leslie Brudenell and her brother Wilfrid; and Wilfrid, seeing in

her a damsel in distress, recommended her to lay her troubles before a

respectable solicitor, giving her Mr. Cheal's address. So far, then, the

coincidence is not startling. It is natural enough that Renshaw's

mistress and his betrothed should live in the same country town; and it

is not improbable that they should come to London by the same train, and

that Wilfrid Brudenell should give the bewildered and weeping young

woman a commonplace piece of advice. The concatenation of circumstances

is remarkable rather than improbable. But when, in the next act, not a

month later, Janet Preece, by pure chance, drops in at the Florentine

villa where Renshaw and Leslie are spending their honeymoon, we feel

that the long arm of coincidence is stretched to its uttermost, and that

even the thrilling situation which follows is very dearly bought. It

would not have been difficult to attenuate the coincidence. What has

actually happened is this: Janet has (we know not how) become a sort of

maid-companion to a Mrs. Stonehay, whose daughter was a school-friend of

Leslie's; the Stonehays have come to Florence, knowing nothing of

Leslie's presence there; and they happen to visit the villa in order to

see a fresco which it contains. If, now, we had been told that Janet's

engagement by the Stonehays had resulted from her visit to Mr. Cheal,

and that the Stonehays had come to Florence knowing Leslie to be there,

and eager to find her, several links would have been struck off the

chain of coincidence; or, to put it more exactly, a fairly coherent

sequence of events would have been substituted for a series of

incoherent chances. The same result might no doubt have been achieved in

many other and neater ways. I merely indicate, by way of illustration, a

quite obvious method of reducing the element of coincidence in the case.

The coincidence in _The Second Mrs. Tanqueray_, by which Ellean meets

and falls in love with one of Paula's ex-lovers, has been very severely

criticized. It is certainly not one of the strong points of the play;

but, unlike the series of chances we have just been examining, it places

no excessive strain on our credulity. Such coincidences do occur in real

life; we have all of us seen or heard of them; the worst we can say of

this one is that it is neither positively good nor positively bad--a

piece of indifferent craftsmanship. On the other hand, if we turn to

_Letty_, the chance which, in the third act, leads Letchmere's party and

Mandeville's party to choose the same restaurant, seems to me entirely

justified. It is not really a coincidence at all, but one of those

everyday happenings which are not only admissible in drama, but

positively desirable, as part of the ordinary surface-texture of life.

Entirely to eliminate chance from our representation of life would be a

very unreasonable austerity. Strictly speaking, indeed, it is

impossible; for even when we have worked out an unbroken chain of

rational and commensurate causes and effects, it remains a chance, and

an unlikely chance, that chance should not have interfered with it.

All the plays touched upon in the last four paragraphs are in intention

realistic. They aim, that is to say, at a literal and sober

representation of life. In the other class of plays, which seek their

effect, not in plodding probability, but in delightful improbability,

the long arm of coincidence has its legitimate functions. Yet even here

it is not quite unfettered. One of the most agreeable coincidences in

fiction, I take it, is the simultaneous arrival in Bagdad, from

different quarters of the globe, of three one-eyed calenders, all blind

of the right eye, and all, in reality, the sons of kings. But it is to

be noted that this coincidence is not a crucial occurrence in a story,

but only a part of the story-teller's framework or mechanism--a device

for introducing fresh series of adventures. This illustrates the

Sarceyan principle above referred to, which Professor Brander Matthews

has re-stated in what seems to me an entirely acceptable form--namely,

that improbabilities which may be admitted on the outskirts of an

action, must be rigidly excluded when the issue is joined and we are in

the thick of things. Coincidences, in fact, become the more improbable

in the direct ratio of their importance. We have all, in our own

experience, met with amazing coincidences; but how few of us have ever

gained or lost, been made happy or unhappy, by a coincidence, as

distinct from a chance! It is not precisely probable that three

brothers, who have separated in early life, and have not heard of one

another for twenty years, should find themselves seated side by side at

an Italian _table-d'hôte_; yet such coincidences have occurred, and are

creditable enough so long as nothing particular comes of them. But if a

dramatist were to make these three brothers meet in Messina on the eve

of the earthquake, in order that they might all be killed, and thus

enable his hero (their cousin) to succeed to a peerage and marry the

heroine, we should say that his use of coincidence was not strictly

artistic. A coincidence, in short, which coincides with a crisis is

thereby raised to the _n_th power, and is wholly inacceptable in serious

art. Mr. Bernard Shaw has based the action of _You Never Can Tell_ on

the amazing coincidence that Mrs. Clandon and her children, coming to

England after eighteen years' absence, should by pure chance run

straight into the arms, or rather into the teeth, of the husband and

father whom the mother, at any rate, only wishes to avoid. This is no

bad starting-point for an extravaganza; but even Mr. Shaw, though a

despiser of niceties of craftsmanship, introduces no coincidences into

serious plays such as _Candida_ or _The Doctor's Dilemma_.

* * * * *

[Footnote 1: The malignant caricature of Cromwell in W.G. Wills'

_Charles_ I did not, indeed, prevent the acceptance of the play by the

mid-Victorian public; but it will certainly shorten the life of the one

play which might have secured for its author a lasting place in dramatic

literature. It is unimaginable that future generations should accept a

representation of Cromwell as

"A mouthing patriot, with an itching palm,

In one hand menace, in the other greed."]

[Footnote 2: It is only fair to say that Sarcey drew a distinction

between antecedent _events_ and what he calls "postulates of character."

He did not maintain that an audience ought to accept a psychological

impossibility, merely because it was placed outside the frame of the

picture. See _Quarante Ans de Théâtre_, vii, p. 395.]

[Footnote 3: This phrase, which occurs in Mr. Haddon Chambers's romantic

melodrama, _Captain Swift_, was greeted with a burst of laughter by the

first-night audience; but little did we then think that Mr. Chambers was

enriching the English language. It is not, on examination, a

particularly luminous phrase: "the three or four arms of coincidence"

would really be more to the point. But it is not always the most

accurate expression that is fittest to survive.]

[Footnote 4: The abuse of coincidence is a legacy to modern drama from

the Latin comedy, which, again, was founded on the Greek New Comedy. It

is worth noting that in the days of Menander the world really was much

smaller than it is to-day, when "thalassic" has grown into "oceanic"

civilization. Travellers in those days followed a few main routes; half

a dozen great seaports were rendezvous for all the world; the

slave-trade was active, and kidnappings and abductions with the

corresponding meetings and recognitions were no doubt frequent. Thus

such a plot as that of the _Menaechmi_ was by no means the sheer

impossibility which Shakespeare made it by attaching indistinguishable

Dromios to his indistinguishable Antipholuses. To reduplicate a

coincidence is in fact to multiply it by a figure far beyond my

mathematics. It may be noted, too, that the practice of exposing

children, on which the _Oedipus_, and many plays of Menander, are

founded, was common in historic Greece, and that the hapless children

were generally provided with identification-tokens _gnorismata_.]

_CHAPTER XVI_

LOGIC

The term logic is often very vaguely used in relation to drama. French

writers especially, who regard logic as one of the peculiar faculties of

their national genius, are apt to insist upon it in and out of season.

But, as we have already seen, logic is a gift which may easily be

misapplied. It too often leads such writers as M. Brieux and M. Hervieu

to sacrifice the undulant and diverse rhythms of life to a stiff and

symmetrical formalism. The conception of a play as the exhaustive

demonstration of a thesis has never taken a strong hold on the

Anglo-Saxon mind; and, though some of M. Brieux's plays are much more

than mere dramatic arguments, we need not, in the main, envy the French

their logician-dramatists.

But, though the presence of logic should never be forced upon the

spectator's attention, still less should he be disturbed and baffled by

its conspicuous absence. If the playwright announces a theme at all: if

he lets it be seen that some general idea underlies his work: he is

bound to present and develop that idea in a logical fashion, not to

shift his ground, whether inadvertently or insidiously, and not to

wander off into irrelevant side-issues. He must face his problem

squarely. If he sets forth to prove anything at all, he must prove that

thing and not some totally different thing. He must beware of the

red-herring across the trail.

For a clear example of defective logic, I turn to a French

play--Sardou's _Spiritisme_. Both from internal and from external

evidence, it is certain that M. Sardou was a believer in

spiritualism--in the existence of disembodied intelligences, and their

power of communicating with the living. Yet he had not the courage to

assign to them an essential part in his drama. The spirits hover round

the outskirts of the action, but do not really or effectually intervene

in it. The hero's _belief_ in them, indeed, helps to bring about the

conclusion; but the apparition which so potently works upon him is an

admitted imposture, a pious fraud. Earlier in the play, two or three

trivial and unnecessary miracles are introduced--just enough to hint at

the author's faith without decisively affirming it. For instance:

towards the close of Act I Madame d'Aubenas has gone off, nominally to

take the night train for Poitiers, in reality to pay a visit to her

lover, M. de Stoudza. When she has gone, her husband and his guests

arrange a séance and evoke a spirit. No sooner have preliminaries been

settled than the spirit spells out the word "O-u-v-r-e-z." They open the

window, and behold! the sky is red with a glare which proves to proceed

from the burning of the train in which Madame d'Aubenas is supposed to

have started. The incident is effective enough, and a little creepy; but

its effect is quite incommensurate with the strain upon our powers of

belief. The thing is supposed to be a miracle, of that there can be no

doubt; but it has not the smallest influence on the course of the play,

except to bring on the hurry-scurry and alarm a few minutes earlier than

might otherwise have been the case. Now, if the spirit, instead of

merely announcing the accident, had informed M. d'Aubenas that his wife

was not in it--if, for example, it had rapped out "Gilberte chez

Stoudza"--it would have been an honest ghost (though indiscreet), and we

should not have felt that our credulity had been taxed to no purpose. As

it is, the logical deduction from M. Sardou's fable is that, though

spirit communications are genuine enough, they are never of the

slightest use; but we can scarcely suppose that that was what he

intended to convey.

It may be said, and perhaps with truth, that what Sardou lacked in this

instance was not logic, but courage: he felt that an audience would

accept episodic miracles, but would reject supernatural interference at

a determining crisis in the play. In that case he would have done better

to let the theme alone: for the manifest failure of logic leaves the

play neither good drama nor good argument. This is a totally different

matter from Ibsen's treatment of the supernatural in such plays as _The

Lady from the Sea_, _The Master Builder_ and _Little Eyolf_. Ibsen, like

Hawthorne, suggests without affirming the action of occult powers. He

shows us nothing that is not capable of a perfectly natural explanation;

but he leaves us to imagine, if we are so disposed, that there may be

influences at work that are not yet formally recognized in physics and

psychology. In this there is nothing illogical. The poet is merely

appealing to a mood, familiar to all of us, in which we wonder whether

there may not be more things in heaven and earth than are crystallized

in our scientific formulas.

It is a grave defect of logic to state, or hint at, a problem, and then

illustrate it in such terms of character that it is solved in advance.

In _The Liars_, by Mr. Henry Arthur Jones, there is an evident

suggestion of the problem whether a man is ever justified in rescuing a

woman, by means of the Divorce Court, from marital bondage which her

soul abhors. The sententious Sir Christopher Deering argues the matter

at great length: but all the time we are hungering for him to say the

one thing demanded by the logic of the situation: to wit: "Whatever the

abstract rights and wrongs of the case, this man would be an imbecile to

elope with this woman, who is an empty-headed, empty-hearted creature,

incapable either of the passion or of the loathing which alone could

lend any semblance of reason to a breach of social law." Similarly, in

_The Profligate_, Sir Arthur Pinero no doubt intended us to reflect upon

the question whether, in entering upon marriage, a woman has a right to

assume in her husband the same purity of antecedent conduct which he

demands of her. That is an arguable question, and it has been argued

often enough; but in this play it does not really arise, for the husband

presented to us is no ordinary loose-liver, but (it would seem--for the

case is not clearly stated) a particularly base and heartless seducer,

whom it is evidently a misfortune for any woman to have married. The

authors of these two plays have committed an identical error of logic:

namely, that of suggesting a broad issue, and then stating such a set of

circumstances that the issue does not really arise. In other words, they

have from the outset begged the question. The plays, it may be said,

were both successful in their day. Yes; but had they been logical their

day might have lasted a century. A somewhat similar defect of logic

constitutes a fatal blemish in _The Ideal Husband_, by Oscar Wilde.

Intentionally or otherwise, the question suggested is whether a single

flaw of conduct (the betrayal to financiers of a state secret) ought to

blast a political career. Here, again, is an arguable point, on the

assumption that the statesman is penitent and determined never to repeat

his misdeed; but when we find that this particular statesman is prepared

to go on betraying his country indefinitely, in order to save his own

skin, the question falls to the ground--the answer is too obvious.

It happened some years ago that two plays satirizing "yellow journalism"

were produced almost simultaneously in London--_The Earth_ by Mr. James

B. Fagan, and _What the Public Wants_ by Mr. Arnold Bennett. In point of

intellectual grasp, or power of characterization, there could be no

comparison between the two writers; yet I hold that, from the point of

view of dramatic composition, _The Earth_ was the better play of the

two, simply because it dealt logically with the theme announced, instead

of wandering away into all sorts of irrelevances. Mr. Bennett, to begin

with, could not resist making his Napoleon of the Press a native of the

"Five Towns," and exhibiting him at large in provincial middle-class

surroundings. All this is sheer irrelevance; for the type of journalism

in question is not characteristically an outcome of any phase of

provincial life. Mr. Bennett may allege that Sir Charles Worgan had to

be born somewhere, and might as well be born in Bursley as anywhere

else. I reply that, for the purposes of the play, he need not have been

born anywhere. His birthplace and the surroundings of his boyhood have

nothing to do with what may be called his journalistic psychology, which

is, or ought to be, the theme of the play. Then, again, Mr. Bennett

shows him dabbling in theatrical management and falling in

love--irrelevances both. As a manager, no doubt, he insists on doing

"what the public wants" (it is nothing worse than a revival of _The

Merchant of Venice_) and thus offers another illustration of the results

of obeying that principle. But all this is beside the real issue. The

true gravamen of the charge against a Napoleon of the Press is not that

he gives the public what it wants, but that he can make the public want

what _he_ wants, think what _he_ thinks, believe what _he_ wants them to

believe, and do what _he_ wants them to do. By dint of assertion,

innuendo, and iteration in a hundred papers, he can create an apparent

public opinion, or public emotion, which may be directed towards the

most dangerous ends. This point Mr. Bennett entirely missed. What he

gave us was in reality a comedy of middle-class life with a number of

incidental allusions to "yellow" journalism and kindred topics. Mr.

Fagan, working in broader outlines, and, it must be owned, in cruder

colours, never strayed from the logical line of development, and took us

much nearer the heart of his subject.

A somewhat different, and very common, fault of logic was exemplified in

Mr. Clyde Fitch's last play, _The City_. His theme, as announced in his

title and indicated in his exposition, was the influence of New York

upon a family which migrates thither from a provincial town. But the

action is not really shaped by the influence of "the city." It might

have taken practically the same course if the family had remained at

home. The author had failed to establish a logical connection between

his theme and the incidents supposed to illustrate it.[1]

Fantastic plays, which assume an order of things more or less exempt

from the limitations of physical reality, ought, nevertheless, to be

logically faithful to their own assumptions. Some fantasies, indeed,

which sinned against this principle, have had no small success. In

_Pygmalion and Galatea_, for example, there is a conspicuous lack of

logic. The following passage from a criticism of thirty years ago puts

my point so clearly that I am tempted to copy it:

As we have no scientific record of a statue coming to life, the

probable moral and intellectual condition of a being so created is

left to the widest conjecture. The playwright may assume for it any

stage of development he pleases, and his audience will readily grant

his assumption. But if his work is to have any claim to artistic

value, he must not assume all sorts of different stages of

development at every second word his creation utters. He must not

make her a child in one speech, a woman of the world in the next,

and an idiot in the next again. Of course, it would be an extremely

difficult task clearly to define in all its bearings and details the

particular intellectual condition assumed at the outset, and then

gradually to indicate the natural growth of a fuller consciousness.

Difficult it would be, but by no means impossible; nay, it would be

this very problem which would tempt the true dramatist to adopt such

a theme. Mr. Gilbert has not essayed the task. He regulates

Galatea's state of consciousness by the fluctuating exigencies of

dialogue whose humour is levelled straight at the heads of the old

Haymarket pit.

To indicate the nature of the inconsistencies which abound in every

scene, I may say that, in the first act, Galatea does not know that she

is a woman, but understands the word "beauty," knows (though Pygmalion

is the only living creature she has ever seen) the meaning of agreement

and difference of taste, and is alive to the distinction between an

original and a copy. In the second act she has got the length of knowing

the enormity of taking life, and appreciating the fine distinction

between taking it of one's own motive, and taking it for money. Yet the

next moment, when Leucippe enters with a fawn he has killed, it appears

that she does not realize the difference between man and the brute

creation. Thus we are for ever shifting from one plane of convention to

another. There is no fixed starting-point for our imagination, no

logical development of a clearly-stated initial condition. The play, it

is true, enjoyed some five-and-twenty years of life; but it certainly

cannot claim an enduring place either in literature or on the stage. It

is still open to the philosophic dramatist to write a logical _Pygmalion

and Galatea_.

* * * * *

[Footnote 1: I am here writing from memory, having been unable to obtain

a copy of _The City_; but my memory is pretty clear.]

_CHAPTER XVII_

KEEPING A SECRET

It has been often and authoritatively laid down that a dramatist must on

no account keep a secret from his audience. Like most authoritative

maxims, this one seems to require a good deal of qualification. Let us

look into the matter a little more closely.

So far as I can see, the strongest reason against keeping a secret is

that, try as you may, you cannot do it. This point has already been

discussed in Chapter IX, where we saw that from only one audience can a

secret be really hidden, a considerable percentage of any subsequent

audience being certain to know all about it in advance. The more

striking and successful is the first-night effect of surprise, the more

certainly and rapidly will the report of it circulate through all strata

of the theatrical public. But for this fact, one could quite well

conceive a fascinating melodrama constructed, like a detective story,

with a view to keeping the audience in the dark as long as possible. A

pistol shot might ring out just before the rise of the curtain: a man

(or woman) might be discovered in an otherwise empty room, weltering in

his (or her) gore: and the remainder of the play might consist in the

tracking down of the murderer, who would, of course, prove to be the

very last person to be suspected. Such a play might make a great

first-night success; but the more the author relied upon the mystery for

his effect, the more fatally would that effect be discounted at each

successive repetition.

One author of distinction, M. Hervieu, has actually made the experiment

of presenting an enigma--he calls the play _L'Enigme_--and reserving the

solution to the very end. We know from the outset that one of two

sisters-in-law is unfaithful to her husband, and the question is--which?

The whole ingenuity of the author is centred on keeping the secret, and

the spectator who does not know it in advance is all the time in the

attitude of a detective questing for clues. He is challenged to guess

which of the ladies is the frail one; and he is far too intent on this

game to think or care about the emotional process of the play. I myself

(I remember) guessed right, mainly because the name Giselle seemed to me

more suggestive of flightiness than the staid and sober Leonore,

wherefore I suspected that M. Hervieu, in order to throw dust in our

eyes, had given it to the virtuous lady. But whether we guess right or

wrong, this clue-hunting is an intellectual sport, not an artistic

enjoyment. If there is any aesthetic quality in the play, it can only

come home to us when we know the secret. And the same dilemma will

present itself to any playwright who seeks to imitate M. Hervieu.

The actual keeping of a secret, then--the appeal to the primary

curiosity of actual ignorance--may be ruled out as practically

impossible, and, when possible, unworthy of serious art. But there is

also, as we have seen, the secondary curiosity of the audience which,

though more or less cognizant of the essential facts, instinctively

assumes ignorance, and judges the development of a play from that point

of view. We all realize that a dramatist has no right to trust to our

previous knowledge, acquired from outside sources. We know that a play,

like every other work of art, ought to be self-sufficient, and even if,

at any given moment, we have, as a matter of fact, knowledge which

supplements what the playwright has told us, we feel that he ought not

to have taken for granted our possession of any such external and

fortuitous information. To put it briefly, the dramatist must formally

_assume_ ignorance in his audience, though he must not practically _rely

upon_ it. Therefore it becomes a point of real importance to determine

how long a secret may be kept from an audience, assumed to have no

outside knowledge, and at what point it ought to be revealed.

When _Lady Windermere's Fan_ was first produced, no hint was given in

the first act of the fact that Mrs. Erlynne was Lady Windermere's

mother; so that Lord Windermere's insistence on inviting her to his

wife's birthday reception remained wholly unexplained. But after a few

nights the author made Lord Windermere exclaim, just as the curtain

fell, "My God! What shall I do? I dare not tell her who this woman

really is. The shame would kill her." It was, of course, said that this

change had been made in deference to newspaper criticism; and Oscar

Wilde, in a characteristic letter to the _St. James's Gazette_, promptly

repelled this calumny. At a first-night supper-party, he said--

"All of my friends without exception were of the opinion that the

psychological interest of the second act would be greatly increased

by the disclosure of the actual relationship existing between Lady

Windermere and Mrs. Erlynne--an opinion, I may add, that had

previously been strongly held and urged by Mr. Alexander.... I

determined, consequently, to make a change in the precise moment of

revelation."

It is impossible to say whether Wilde seriously believed that

"psychology" entered into the matter at all, or whether he was laughing

in his sleeve in putting forward this solemn plea. The truth is, I

think, that this example cannot be cited either for or against the

keeping of a secret, the essential fact being that the secret was such a

bad and inacceptable one--inacceptable, I mean, as an explanation of

Lord Windermere's conduct--that it was probably wise to make a clean

breast of it as soon as possible, and get it over. It may be said with

perfect confidence that it is useless to keep a secret which, when

revealed, is certain to disappoint the audience, and to make it feel

that it has been trifled with. That is an elementary dictate of

prudence. But if the reason for Lord Windermere's conduct had been

adequate, ingenious, such as to give us, when revealed, a little shock

of pleasant surprise, the author need certainly have been in no hurry to

disclose it. It is not improbable (though my memory is not clear on the

point) that part of the strong interest we undoubtedly felt on the first

night arose from the hope that Lord Windermere's seemingly unaccountable

conduct might be satisfactorily accounted for. As this hope was futile,

there was no reason, at subsequent performances, to keep up the pretence

of preserving a secret which was probably known, as a matter of fact, to

most of the audience, and which was worthless when revealed.

In the second act of _The Devil's Disciple_, by Mr. Bernard Shaw, we

have an instance of wholly inartistic secrecy, which would certainly be

condemned in the work of any author who was not accepted in advance as a

law unto himself. Richard Dudgeon has been arrested by the British

soldiers, who mistake him for the Reverend Anthony Anderson. When

Anderson comes home, it takes a very long time for his silly wife,

Judith, to acquaint him with a situation that might have been explained

in three words; and when, at last, he does understand it, he calls for a

horse and his boots, and rushes off in mad haste, as though his one

desire were to escape from the British and leave Dudgeon to his fate. In

reality his purpose is to bring up a body of Continental troops to the

rescue of Dudgeon; and this also he might (and certainly would) have

conveyed in three words. But Mr. Shaw was so bent on letting Judith

continue to conduct herself idiotically, that he made her sensible

husband act no less idiotically, in order to throw dust in her eyes, and

(incidentally) in the eyes of the audience. In the work of any other

man, we should call this not only an injudicious, but a purposeless and

foolish, keeping of a secret. Mr. Shaw may say that in order to develop

the character of Judith as he had conceived it, he was forced to make

her misunderstand her husband's motives. A development of character

obtained by such artificial means cannot be of much worth; but even

granting this plea, one cannot but point out that it would have been

easy to keep Judith in the dark as to Anderson's purpose, without

keeping the audience also in the dark, and making him behave like a

fool. All that was required was to get Judith off the stage for a few

moments, just before the true state of matters burst upon Anthony. It

would then have been perfectly natural and probable that, not foreseeing

her misunderstanding, he should hurry off without waiting to explain

matters to her. But that he should deliberately leave her in her

delusion, and even use phrases carefully calculated to deceive both her

and the audience,[1] would be, in a writer who professed to place reason

above caprice, a rather gross fault of art.

Mr. Henry Arthur Jones's light comedy, _Whitewashing Julia_, proves that

it is possible, without incurring disaster, to keep a secret throughout

a play, and never reveal it at all. More accurately, what Mr. Jones does

is to pretend that there is some explanation of Mrs. Julia Wren's

relations with the Duke of Savona, other than the simple explanation

that she was his mistress, and to keep us waiting for this

"whitewashing" disclosure, when in fact he has nothing of the sort up

his sleeve, and the plain truth is precisely what the gossips of

Shanctonbury surmise. Julia does not even explain or justify her conduct

from her own point of view. She gives out that "an explanation will be

forthcoming at the right moment"; but the right moment never arrives.

All we are told is that she, Julia, considers that there was never

anything degrading in her conduct; and this we are asked to accept as

sufficient. It was a daring policy to dangle before our eyes an

explanation, which always receded as we advanced towards it, and proved

in the end to be wholly unexplanatory. The success of the play, however,

was sufficient to show that, in light comedy, at any rate, a secret may

with impunity be kept, even to the point of tantalization.[2]

Let us now look at a couple of cases in which the keeping of a secret

seems pretty clearly wrong, inasmuch as it diminishes tension, and

deprives the audience of that superior knowledge in which lies the irony

of drama. In a play named _Her Advocate_, by Mr. Walter Frith (founded

on one of Grenville Murray's _French Pictures in English Chalk_), a K.C.

has fallen madly in love with a woman whose defence he has undertaken.

He believes passionately in her innocence, and, never doubting that she

loves him in return, he is determined to secure for her a triumphant

acquittal. Just at the crucial moment, however, he learns that she loves

another man; and, overwhelmed by this disillusion, he has still to face

the ordeal and plead her cause. The conjuncture would be still more

dramatic if the revelation of this love were to put a different

complexion on the murder, and, by introducing a new motive, shake the

advocate's faith in his client's innocence. But that is another matter;

the question here to be considered is whether the author did right in

reserving the revelation to the last possible moment. In my opinion he

would have done better to have given us an earlier inkling of the true

state of affairs. To keep the secret, in this case, was to place the

audience as well as the advocate on a false trail, and to deprive it of

the sense of superiority it would have felt in seeing him marching

confidently towards a happiness which it knew to be illusory.

The second case is that of _La Douloureuse_, by M. Maurice Donnay.

Through two acts out of the four an important secret is so carefully

kept that there seems to be no obstacle between the lovers with whom

(from the author's point of view) we are supposed to sympathize. The

first act is devoted to an elaborate painting of a somewhat revolting

phase of parvenu society in Paris. Towards the end of the act we learn

that the sculptor, Philippe Lauberthie, is the lover of Hélène Ardan, a

married woman; and at the very end her husband, Ardan, commits suicide.

This act, therefore, is devoted, not, as the orthodox formula goes, to

raising an obstacle between the lovers, but rather to destroying one. In

the second act there still seems to be no obstacle of any sort. Hélène's

year of widowhood is nearly over; she and Philippe are presently to be

married; all is harmony, adoration, and security. In the last scene of

the act, a cloud no bigger than a man's hand appears on the horizon. We

find that Gotte des Trembles, Hélène's bosom friend, is also in love

with Philippe, and is determined to let him know it. But Philippe

resists her blandishments with melancholy austerity, and when the

curtain falls on the second act, things seem to be perfectly safe and in

order. Hélène a widow, and Philippe austere--what harm can Gotte

possibly do?

The fact is, M. Donnay is carefully keeping a secret from us. Philippe

is not Hélène's first lover; her son, Georges, is not the child of her

late husband; and Gotte, and Gotte alone, knows the truth. Had we also

been initiated from the outset (and nothing would have been easier or

more natural--three words exchanged between Gotte and Hélène would have

done it) we should have been at no loss to foresee the impending drama,

and the sense of irony would have tripled the interest of the

intervening scenes. The effect of M. Donnay's third act is not a whit

more forcible because it comes upon us unprepared. We learn at the

beginning that Philippe's austerity has not after all been proof against

Gotte's seductions; but it has now returned upon him embittered by

remorse, and he treats Gotte with sternness approaching to contumely.

She takes her revenge by revealing Hélène's secret; he tells Hélène that

he knows it; and she, putting two and two together, divines how it has

come to his knowledge. This long scene of mutual reproach and remorseful

misery is, in reality, the whole drama, and might have been cited in