Chapter XIII (2)

It need scarcely be said that a misleading finger-post is carefully to be avoided, except in the rare cases where it may be advisable to beget a momentary misapprehension on the part of the audience, which shall be almost instantly corrected in some pleasant or otherwise effective fashion.[5] It is naturally difficult to think of striking instances of the misleading finger-posts; for plays which contain such a blunder are not apt to survive, even in the memory. A small example occurs in a clever play named _A Modern Aspasia_ by Mr. Hamilton Fyfe. Edward Meredith has two households: a London house over which his lawful wife, Muriel, presides; and a country cottage where dwells his mistress, Margaret, with her two children. One day Muriel's automobile breaks down near Margaret's cottage, and, while the tyre is being repaired, Margaret gives her visitor tea, neither of them knowing the other. Throughout the scene we are naturally wondering whether a revelation is to occur; and when, towards the close, Muriel goes to Margaret's room, "to put her hat straight," we have no longer any doubt on the subject. It is practically inevitable that she should find in the room her husband's photograph, or some object which she should instantly recognize as his, and should return to the stage in full possession of the secret. This is so probable that nothing but a miracle can prevent it: we mentally give the author credit for bringing about his revelation in a very simple and natural way; and we are proportionately disappointed when we find that the miracle has occurred, and that Muriel returns to the sitting-room no wiser than she left it. Very possibly the general economy of the play demanded that the revelation should not take place at this juncture. That question does not here concern us. The point is that, having determined to reserve the revelation for his next act, the author ought not, by sending Muriel into Margaret's bedroom, to have awakened in us a confident anticipation of its occurring there and then. A romantic play by Mr. J. B. Fagan, entitled _Under Which King?_ offers another small instance of the same nature. The date is 1746; certain despatches of vast importance have to be carried by a Hanoverian officer from Moidart to Fort William. The Jacobites arrange to drug the officer; and, to make assurance doubly sure, in case the drug should fail to act, they post a Highland marksman in a narrow glen to pick him off as he passes. The drug does act; but his lady-love, to save his military honour, assumes male attire and rides off with the despatches. We hear her horse's hoofs go clattering down the road; and then, as the curtain falls, we hear a shot ring out into the night. This shot is a misleading finger-post. Nothing comes of it: we find in the next act that the marksman has missed! But marksmen, under such circumstances, have no business to miss. It is a breach of the dramatic proprieties. We feel that the author has been trifling with us in inflicting on us this purely mechanical and momentary "scare." The case would be different if the young lady knew that the marksman was lying in ambush, and determined to run the gantlet. In that case the incident would be a trait of character; but, unless my memory deceives me, that is not the case. On the stage, every bullet should have its billet--not necessarily in the person aimed at, but in the emotions or anticipations of the audience. This bullet may, indeed, give us a momentary thrill of alarm; but it is dearly bought at the expense of subsequent disillusionment.

We have now to consider the subject of over-preparation, too obtrusive preparation, mountainous preparation leading only to a mouse-like effect. This is the characteristic error of the so-called "well-made play," the play of elaborate and ingenious intrigue. The trouble with the well-made play is that it is almost always, and of necessity, ill-made. Very rarely does the playwright succeed in weaving a web which is at once intricate, consistent, and clear. In nineteen cases out of twenty there are glaring flaws that have to be overlooked; or else the pattern is so involved that the mind's eye cannot follow it, and becomes bewildered and fatigued. A classical example of both faults may be found in Congreve's so-called comedy _The Double-Dealer_. This is, in fact, a powerful drama, somewhat in the Sardou manner; but Congreve had none of Sardou's deftness in manipulating an intrigue. Maskwell is not only a double-dealer, but a triple--or quadruple-dealer; so that the brain soon grows dizzy in the vortex of his villainies. The play, it may be noted, was a failure.

There is a quite legitimate pleasure to be found, no doubt, in a complex intrigue which is also perspicuous. Plays such as Alexandre Dumas's _Mademoiselle de Belle-Isle_, or the pseudo-historical dramas of Scribe-_Adrienne Lecouvreur, Bertrand et Raton, Un Verre d'Eau, Les Trois Maupin,_ etc.--are amusing toys, like those social or military tableaux, the figures of which you can set in motion by dropping a penny in the slot. But the trick of this sort of "preparation" has long been found out, and even unsophisticated audiences are scarcely to be thrilled by it. We may accept it as a sound principle, based on common sense and justified by experience, that an audience should never be tempted to exclaim, "What a marvellously clever fellow is this playwright! How infinitely cleverer than the dramatist who constructs the tragi-comedy of life."

This is what we inevitably exclaim as we watch Victorien Sardou, in whom French ingenuity culminated and caricatured itself, laying the foundations of one of his labyrinthine intrigues. The absurdities of "preparation" in this sense could scarcely be better satirized than in the following page from Francisque Sarcey's criticism of _Nos Intimes_ (known in English as _Peril_)--a page which is intended, not as satire, but as eulogy--

At the sixth performance, I met, during the first interact, a man of
infinite taste who ... complained of the lengthiness of this first
act: "What a lot of details," he said, "which serve no purpose, and
had better have been omitted! What is the use of that long story
about the cactus with a flower that is unique in all the world? Why
trouble us with that dahlia-root, which M. Caussade's neighbour has
thrown over the garden wall? Was it necessary to inflict on us all
that talk about the fox that plays havoc in the garden? What have we
to do with that mischievous beast? And that Tolozan, with his
endless digressions! What do we care about his ideas on love, on
metempsychosis, on friendship, etc.? All this stuff only retards
the action."

"On the contrary," I replied, "all this is just what is going to
interest you. You are impatient of these details, because you are
looking out for the scenes of passion which have been promised you.
But reflect that, without these preparations, the scenes of passion
would not touch you. That cactus-flower will play its part, you may
be sure; that dahlia-root is not there for nothing; that fox to
which you object, and of which you will hear more talk during two
more acts, will bring about the solution of one of the most
entertaining situations in all drama."

M. Sarcey does not tell us what his interlocutor replied; but he might have said, like the hero of _Le Réveillon_: "Are you sure there is no mistake? Are you defending Sardou, or attacking him?"

For another example of ultra-complex preparation let me turn to a play by Mr. Sydney Grundy, entitled _The Degenerates_. Mr. Grundy, though an adept of the Scribe school, has done so much strong and original work that I apologize for exhuming a play in which he almost burlesqued his own method; but for that very reason it is difficult to find a more convincing or more deterrent example of misdirected ingenuity. The details of the plot need not be recited. It is sufficient to say that the curtain has not been raised ten minutes before our attention has been drawn to the fact that a certain Lady Saumarez has her monogram on everything she wears, even to her gloves: whence we at once foresee that she is destined to get into a compromising situation, to escape from it, but to leave a glove behind her. In due time the compromising situation arrives, and we find that it not only requires a room with three doors,[6] but that a locksmith has to be specially called in to provide two of these doors with peculiar locks, so that, when once shut, they cannot be opened from inside except with a key! What interest can we take in a situation turning on such contrivances? Sane technic laughs at locksmiths. And after all this preparation, the situation proves to be a familiar trick of theatrical thimble-rigging: you lift the thimble, and instead of Pea A, behold Pea B!--instead of Lady Saumarez it is Mrs. Trevelyan who is concealed in Isidore de Lorano's bedroom. Sir William Saumarez must be an exceedingly simple-minded person to accept the substitution, and exceedingly unfamiliar with the French drama of the 'seventies and 'eighties. If he had his wits about him he would say: "I know this dodge: it comes from Sardou. Lady Saumarez has just slipped out by that door, up R., and if I look about I shall certainly find her fan, or her glove, or her handkerchief somewhere on the premises." The author may object that such criticism would end in paralysing the playwright, and that, if men always profited by the lessons of the stage, the world would long ago have become so wise that there would be no more room in it for drama, which lives on human folly. "You will tell me next," he may say, "that I must not make groundless jealousy the theme of a play, because every one who has seen Othello would at once detect the machinations of an Iago!" The retort is logically specious, but it mistakes the point. It would certainly be rash to put any limit to human gullibility, or to deny that Sir William Saumarez, in the given situation, might conceivably be hoodwinked. The question is not one of psychology but of theatrical expediency: and the point is that when a situation is at once highly improbable in real life and exceedingly familiar on the stage, we cannot help mentally caricaturing it as it proceeds, and are thus prevented from lending it the provisional credence on which interest and emotion depend.

An instructive contrast to _The Degenerates_ may be found in a nearly contemporary play, _Mrs. Dane's Defence_, by Mr. Henry Arthur Jones. The first three acts of this play may be cited as an excellent example of dexterous preparation and development. Our interest in the sequence of events is aroused, sustained, and worked up to a high tension with consummate skill. There is no feverish overcrowding of incident, as is so often the case in the great French story-plays--_Adrienne Lecouvreur_, for example, or _Fédora_. The action moves onwards, unhasting, unresting, and the finger-posts are placed just where they are wanted.

The observance of a due proportion between preparation and result is a matter of great moment. Even when the result achieved is in itself very remarkable, it may be dearly purchased by a too long and too elaborate process of preparation. A famous play which is justly chargeable with this fault is _The Gay Lord Quex_. The third act is certainly one of the most breathlessly absorbing scenes in modern drama; but by what long, and serpentine, and gritty paths do we not approach it! The elaborate series of trifling incidents by means of which Sophy Fullgarney is first brought from New Bond Street to Fauncey Court, and then substituted for the Duchess's maid, is at no point actually improbable; and yet we feel that a vast effort has been made to attain an end which, owing to the very length of the sequence of chances, at last assumes an air of improbability. There is little doubt that the substructure of the great scene might have been very much simpler. I imagine that Sir Arthur Pinero was betrayed into complexity and over-elaboration by his desire to use, as a background for his action, a study of that "curious phase of modern life," the manicurist's parlour. To those who find this study interesting, the disproportion between preliminaries and result may be less apparent. It certainly did not interfere with the success of the play in its novelty; but it may very probably curtail its lease of life. What should we know of _The School for Scandal_ to-day, if it consisted of nothing but the Screen Scene and two laborious acts of preparation?

A too obvious preparation is very apt to defeat its end by begetting a perversely quizzical frame of mind in the audience. The desired effect is discounted, like a conjuring trick in which the mechanism is too transparent. Let me recall a trivial but instructive instance of this error. The occasion was the first performance of _Pillars of Society_ at the Gaiety Theatre, London--the first Ibsen performance ever given in England. At the end of the third act, Krap, Consul Bernick's clerk, knocks at the door of his master's office and says, "It is blowing up to a stiff gale. Is the _Indian Girl_ to sail in spite of it?" Whereupon Bernick, though he knows that the _Indian Girl_ is hopelessly unseaworthy, replies, "The _Indian Girl_ is to sail in spite of it." It had occurred to someone that the effect of this incident would be heightened if Krap, before knocking at the Consul's door, were to consult the barometer, and show by his demeanour that it was falling rapidly. A barometer had accordingly been hung, up stage, near the veranda entrance; and, as the scenic apparatus of a Gaiety matinée was in those days always of the scantiest, it was practically the one decoration of a room otherwise bare almost to indecency. It had stared the audience full in the face through three long acts; and when, at the end of the third, Krap went up to it and tapped it, a sigh of relief ran through the house, as much as to say, "At last! so _that_ was what it was for!"--to the no small detriment of the situation. Here the fault lay in the obtrusiveness of the preparation. Had the barometer passed practically unnoticed among the other details of a well-furnished hall, it would at any rate have been innocent, and perhaps helpful. As it was, it seemed to challenge the curiosity of the audience, saying, "I am evidently here with some intention; guess, now, what the intention can be!" The producer had failed in the art which conceals art.

Another little trait from a play of those far-past days illustrates the same point. It was a drawing-room drama of the Scribe school. Near the beginning of an act, some one spilt a bottle of red ink, and mopped it up with his (or her) handkerchief, leaving the handkerchief on the escritoire. The act proceeded from scene to scene, and the handkerchief remained unnoticed; but every one in the audience who knew the rules of the game, kept his eye on the escritoire, and was certain that that ink had not been spilt for nothing. In due course a situation of great intensity was reached, wherein the villain produced a pistol and fired at the heroine, who fainted. As a matter of fact he had missed her; but her quick-witted friend seized the gory handkerchief, and, waving it in the air, persuaded the villain that the shot had taken deadly effect, and that he must flee for his life. Even in those days, such an unblushing piece of trickery was found more comic than impressive. It was a case of preparation "giving itself away."

A somewhat later play, _The Mummy and the Humming Bird_, by Mr. Isaac Henderson, contains a good example of over-elaborate preparation. The Earl of Lumley, lost in his chemical studies with a more than Newtonian absorption, suffers his young wife to form a sentimental friendship with a scoundrel of an Italian novelist, Signor D'Orelli. Remaining at home one evening, when Lady Lumley and a party of friends, including D'Orelli, have gone off to dine at a restaurant, the Earl chances to look out of the window, and observes an organ-grinder making doleful music in the snow. His heart is touched, and he invites the music-monger to join him in his study and share his informal dinner. The conversation between them is carried on by means of signs, for the organ-grinder knows no English, and the Earl is painfully and improbably ignorant of Italian. He does not even know that Roma means Rome, and Londra, London. This ignorance, however, is part of the author's ingenuity. It leads to the establishment of a sort of object-speech, by aid of which the Earl learns that his guest has come to England to prosecute a vendetta against the man who ruined his happy Sicilian home. I need scarcely say that this villain is none other than D'Orelli; and when at last he and the Countess elope to Paris, the object-speech enables Giuseppe to convey to the Earl, by aid of a brandy-bottle, a siphon, a broken plate, and half-a-crown, not only the place of their destination, but the very hotel to which they are going. This is a fair example of that ingenuity for ingenuity's sake which was once thought the very essence of the playwright's craft, but has long ago lost all attraction for intelligent audiences.

We may take it as a rule that any scene which requires an obviously purposeful scenic arrangement is thereby discounted. It may be strong enough to live down the disadvantage; but a disadvantage it is none the less. In a play of Mr. Carton's, _The Home Secretary_, a paper of great importance was known to be contained in an official despatch-box. When the curtain rose on the last act, it revealed this despatch-box on a table right opposite a French window, while at the other side of the room a high-backed arm-chair discreetly averted its face. Every one could see at a glance that the romantic Anarchist was going to sneak in at the window and attempt to abstract the despatch-box, while the heroine was to lie perdue in the high-backed chair; and when, at the fated moment, all this punctually occurred, one could scarcely repress an "Ah!" of sarcastic satisfaction. Similarly, in an able play named Mr. and Mrs. Daventry, Mr. Frank Harris had conceived a situation which required that the scene should be specially built for eavesdropping.[7] As soon as the curtain rose, and revealed a screen drawn halfway down the stage, with a sofa ensconced behind it, we knew what to expect. Of course Mrs. Daventry was to lie on the sofa and overhear a duologue between her husband and his mistress: the only puzzle was to understand why the guilty pair should neglect the precaution of looking behind the screen. As a matter of fact, Mrs. Daventry, before she lay down, switched off the lights, and Daventry and Lady Langham, finding the room dark, assumed it to be empty. With astounding foolhardiness, considering that the house was full of guests, and this a much frequented public room, Daventry proceeded to lock the door, and continue his conversation with Lady Langham in the firelight. Thus, when the lady's husband came knocking at the door, Mrs. Daventry was able to rescue the guilty pair from an apparently hopeless predicament, by calmly switching on the lights and opening the door to Sir John Langham. The situation was undoubtedly a "strong" one; but the tendency of modern technic is to hold "strength" too dearly purchased at such reckless expense of preparation.

There are, then, very clear limits to the validity of the Dumas maxim that "The art of the theatre is the art of preparations." Certain it is that over-preparation is the most fatal of errors. The clumsiest thing a dramatist can possibly do is to lay a long and elaborate train for the ignition of a squib. We take pleasure in an event which has been "prepared" in the sense that we have been led to desire it, and have wondered how it was to be brought about. But we scoff at an occurrence which nothing but our knowledge of the tricks of the stage could possibly lead us to expect, yet which, knowing these tricks, we have foreseen from afar, and resented in advance.

* * * * *

[Footnote 1: _Of Dramatic Poesy,_ ed. Arnold, 1903, p. 60.]

[Footnote 2: _The World_, December 20, 1899.]

[Footnote 3: At the end of the first act of _Lady Inger of Ostraat_, Ibsen evidently intends to produce a startling effect through the sudden appearance of Olaf Skaktavl in Lady Inger's hall. But as he has totally omitted to tell us who the strange man is, the incident has no meaning for us. In 1855 Ibsen had all his technical lessons yet to learn.]

[Footnote 4: The fact that Mr. Phillips should have deemed such a foreshadowing necessary shows how instinctively a dramatist feels that the logic of his art requires him to assume that his audience is ignorant of his fable. In reality, very few members of the first-night audience, or of any other, can have depended on old Angela's vaticination for the requisite foresight of events. But this does not prove Angela to be artistically superfluous.]

[Footnote 5: See pp. 118, 240.]

[Footnote 6: There is no special harm in this: the question of exits and entrances and their mechanism is discussed in Chapter XXIII.]

[Footnote 7: This might be said of the scene of the second act of _The Benefit of the Doubt_; but here the actual stage-topography is natural enough. The author, however, is rather over-anxious to emphasize the acoustic relations of the two rooms.]

_CHAPTER XIII_

THE OBLIGATORY SCENE

I do not know whether it was Francisque Sarcey who invented the phrase _scène à faire_; but it certainly owes its currency to that valiant champion of the theatrical theatre, if I may so express it. Note that in this term I intend no disrespect. My conception of the theatrical theatre may not be exactly the same as M. Sarcey's; but at all events I share his abhorrence of the untheatrical theatre.

What is the _scène à faire_? Sarcey has used the phrase so often, and in so many contexts, that it is impossible to tie him down to any strict definition. Instead of trying to do so, I will give a typical example of the way in which he usually employs the term.

In _Les Fourchambault_, by Emile Augier, the first act introduces us to the household of a merchant, of Havre, who has married a wealthy, but extravagant woman, and has a son and daughter who are being gradually corrupted by their mother's worldliness. We learn that Fourchambault, senior, has, in his youth, betrayed a young woman who was a governess in his family. He wanted to marry her, but his relations maligned her character, and he cast her off; nor does he know what has become of her and her child. In the second act we pass to the house of an energetic and successful young shipowner named Bernard, who lives alone with his mother. Bernard, as we divine, is secretly devoted to a young lady named Marie Letellier, a guest in the Fourchambault house, to whom young Leopold Fourchambault is paying undesirable attentions. One day Bernard casually mentions to his mother that the house of Fourchambault is on the verge of bankruptcy; nothing less than a quarter of a million francs will enable it to tide over the crisis. Mme. Bernard, to her son's astonishment, begs him to lend the tottering firm the sum required. He objects that, unless the business is better managed, the loan will only postpone the inevitable disaster. "Well, then, my son," she replied, "you must go into partnership with M. Fourchambault." "I! with that imbecile!" he exclaims. "My son," she says gravely, and emphatically, "you must--it is your duty--I demand it of you!" "Ah!" cries Bernard. "I understand--he is my father!"

After ecstatically lauding this situation and the scenes which have led up to it, M. Sarcey continues--

When the curtain falls upon the words "He is my father," I at once
see two _scènes à faire_, and I know that they will be _faites_: the
scene between the son and the father whom he is to save, the scene
between Bernard and his half-brother Leopold, who are in love with
the same woman, the one dishonourably and the other secretly and
nobly. What will they say to each other? I have no idea. But it is
precisely this _expectation mingled with uncertainly_ that is one of
the charms of the theatre. I say to myself, "Ah, they will have an
encounter! What will come of it?" And that this is the state of mind
of the whole audience is proved by the fact that when the two
characters of the _scènes à faire_ stand face to face, a thrill of
anticipation runs round the whole theatre.

This, then, is the obligatory scene as Sarcey generally understands it--a scene which, for one reason or another, an audience expects and ardently desires. I have italicized the phrase "expectation mingled with uncertainty" because it expresses in other terms the idea which I have sought to convey in the formula "foreshadowing without forestalling." But before we can judge of the merits of M. Sarcey's theory, we must look into it a little more closely. I shall try, then, to state it in my own words, in what I believe to be its most rational and defensible form.

An obligatory scene is one which the audience (more or less clearly and consciously) foresees and desires, and the absence of which it may with reason resent. On a rough analysis, it will appear, I think, that there are five ways in which a scene may become, in this sense, obligatory:

(1) It may be necessitated by the inherent logic of the theme.

(2) It may be demanded by the manifest exigencies of specifically dramatic effect.

(3) The author himself may have rendered it obligatory by seeming unmistakably to lead up to it.

(4) It may be required in order to justify some modification of character or alteration of will, too important to be taken for granted.

(5) It may be imposed by history or legend.

These five classes of obligatory scenes may be docketed, respectively, as the Logical, the Dramatic, the Structural, the Psychological, and the Historic. M. Sarcey generally employed the term in one of the first three senses, without clearly distinguishing between them. It is, indeed, not always easy to determine whether the compulsion (assuming it to exist at all) lies in the very essence of the theme or situation, or only in the author's manipulation of it.

Was Sarcey right in assuming such a compulsion to be a constant and dominant factor in the playwright's craft? I think we shall see reason to believe him right in holding that it frequently arises, but wrong if he went the length of maintaining that there can be no good play without a definite _scène à faire_--as eighteenth-century landscape painters are said to have held that no one could be a master of his art till he knew where to place "the brown tree." I remember no passage in which Sarcey explicitly lays down so hard and fast a rule, but several in which he seems to take it for granted.[1]

It may be asked whether--and if so, why--the theory of the obligatory scene holds good for the dramatist and not for the novelist? Perhaps it has more application to the novel than is commonly supposed; but in so far as it applies peculiarly to the drama, the reason is pretty clear. It lies in the strict concentration imposed on the dramatist, and the high mental tension which is, or ought to be, characteristic of the theatrical audience. The leisurely and comparatively passive novel-reader may never miss a scene which an audience, with its instincts of logic and of economy keenly alert, may feel to be inevitable. The dramatist is bound to extract from his material the last particle of that particular order of effect which the stage, and the stage alone, can give us. If he fails to do so, we feel that there has been no adequate justification for setting in motion all the complex mechanism of the theatre. His play is like a badly-designed engine in which a large part of the potential energy is dissipated to no purpose. The novelist, with a far wider range of effects at his command, and employing no special mechanism to bring them home to us, is much more free to select and to reject. He is exempt from the law of rigid economy to which the dramatist must submit. Far from being bound to do things in the most dramatic way, he often does wisely in rejecting that course, as unsuited to his medium. Fundamentally, no doubt, the same principle applies to both arts, but with a wholly different stringency in the case of the drama. "Advisable" in the novelist's vocabulary is translated by "imperative" in the dramatist's. The one is playing a long-drawn game, in which the loss of a trick or two need not prove fatal; the other has staked his all on a single rubber.

* * * * *

Obligatory scenes of the first type--those necessitated by the inherent logic of the theme--can naturally arise only in plays to which a definite theme can be assigned. If we say that woman's claim to possess a soul of her own, even in marriage, is the theme of _A Doll's House_, then evidently the last great balancing of accounts between Nora and Helmer is an obligatory scene. It would have been quite possible for Ibsen to have completed the play without any such scene: he might, for instance, have let Nora fulfil her intention of drowning herself; but in that case his play would have been merely a tragic anecdote with the point omitted. We should have felt vague intimations of a general idea hovering in the air, but it would have remained undefined and undeveloped. As we review, however, the series of Ibsen's plays, and notice how difficult it is to point to any individual scene and say, "This was clearly the _scène à faire_," we feel that, though the phrase may express a useful idea in a conveniently brief form, there is no possibility of making the presence or absence of a _scène à faire_ a general test of dramatic merit. In _The Wild Duck_, who would not say that, theoretically, the scene in which Gregers opens Hialmar's eyes to the true history of his marriage was obligatory in the highest degree? Yet Ibsen, as a matter of fact, does not present it to us: he sends the two men off for "a long walk" together: and who does not feel that this is a stroke of consummate art? In _Rosmersholm_, as we know, he has been accused of neglecting, not merely the scene, but the play, _à faire_; but who will now maintain that accusation? In _John Gabriel Borhman_, if we define the theme as the clash of two devouring egoisms, Ibsen has, in the third act, given us the obligatory scene; but he has done it, unfortunately, with an enfeebled hand; whereas the first and second acts, though largely expository, and even (in the Foldal scene) episodic, rank with his greatest achievements.

For abundant examples of scenes rendered obligatory by the logic of the theme, we have only to turn to the works of those remorseless dialecticians, MM. Hervieu and Brieux. In such a play as _La Course du Flambeau_, there is scarcely a scene that may not be called an obligatory deduction from the thesis duly enunciated, with no small parade of erudition, in the first ten minutes of the play. It is that, in handing on the _vital lampada_, as Plato and "le bon poète Lucrèce" express it, the love of the parent for the child becomes a devouring mania, to which everything else is sacrificed, while the love of the child for the parent is a tame and essentially selfish emotion, absolutely powerless when it comes into competition with the passions which are concerned with the transmission of the vital flame. This theorem having been stated, what is the first obligatory scene? Evidently one in which a mother shall refuse a second marriage, with a man whom she loves, because it would injure the prospects and wound the feelings of her adored daughter. Then, when the adored daughter herself marries, the mother must make every possible sacrifice for her, and the daughter must accept them all with indifference, as mere matters of course. But what is the final, triumphant proof of the theorem? Why, of course, the mother must kill her mother to save the daughter's life! And this ultra-obligatory scene M. Hervieu duly serves up to us. Marie-Jeanne (the daughter) is ordered to the Engadine; Sabine (the mother) is warned that Madame Fontenais (the grandmother) must not go to that altitude on pain of death; but, by a series of violently artificial devices, things are so arranged that Marie-Jeanne cannot go unless Madame Fontenais goes too; and Sabine, rather than endanger her daughter's recovery, does not hesitate to let her mother set forth, unwittingly, to her doom. In the last scene of all, Marie-Jeanne light-heartedly prepares to leave her mother and go off with her husband to the ends of the earth; Sabine learns that the man she loved and rejected for Marie-Jeanne's sake is for ever lost to her; and, to complete the demonstration, Madame Fontenais falls dead at her feet. These scenes are unmistakably _scènes à faire_, dictated by the logic of the theme; but they belong to a conception of art in which the free rhythms of life are ruthlessly sacrificed to the needs of a demonstration. Obligatory scenes of this order are mere diagrams drawn with ruler and compass--the obligatory illustrations of an extravagantly over-systematic lecture.

M. Brieux in some of his plays (not in all) is no less logic-ridden than M. Hervieu. Take, for instance, _Les Trois Filles de M. Dupont_: every character is a term in a syllogism, every scene is dictated by an imperious craving for symmetry. The main theorem may be stated in some such terms as these: "The French marriage system is immoral and abominable; yet the married woman is, on the whole, less pitiable than her unmarried sisters." In order to prove this thesis in due form, we begin at the beginning, and show how the marriage of Antonin Mairaut and Julie Dupont is brought about by the dishonest cupidity of the parents on both sides. The Duponts flatter themselves that they have cheated the Mairauts, the Mairauts that they have swindled the Duponts; while Antonin deliberately simulates artistic tastes to deceive Julie, and Julie as deliberately makes a show of business capacity in order to take in Antonin. Every scene between father and daughter is balanced by a corresponding scene between mother and son. Every touch of hypocrisy on the one side is scrupulously set off against a trait of dishonesty on the other. Julie's passion for children is emphasized, Antonin's aversion from them is underlined. But lest he should be accused of seeing everything in black, M. Brieux will not make the parents altogether detestable. Still holding the balance true, he lets M. Mairaut on the one side, and Madame Dupont on the other, develop amiable impulses, and protest, at a given moment, against the infamies committed and countenanced by their respective spouses. And in the second and third acts, the edifice of deception symmetrically built up in the first act is no less symmetrically demolished. The parents expose and denounce each other's villainies; Julie and Antonin, in a great scene of conjugal recrimination, lay bare the hypocrisies of allurement that have brought them together. Julie then determines to escape from the loathsome prison-house of her marriage; and this brings us to the second part of the theorem. The title shows that Julie has two sisters; but hitherto they have remained in the background. Why do they exist at all? Why has Providence blessed M. Dupont with "three fair daughters and no more"? Because Providence foresaw exactly the number M. Brieux would require for his demonstration. Are there not three courses open to a penniless woman in our social system--marriage, wage-earning industry, and wage-earning profligacy? Well, M. Dupont must have one daughter to represent each of these contingencies. Julie has illustrated the miseries of marriage; Caroline and Angèle shall illustrate respectively the still greater miseries of unmarried virtue and unmarried vice. When Julie declares her intention of breaking away from the house of bondage, her sisters rise up symmetrically, one on either hand, and implore her rather to bear the ills she has than to fly to others that she knows not of. "Symmetry of symmetries, all is symmetry" in the poetics of M. Brieux. But life does not fall into such obvious patterns. The obligatory scene which is imposed upon us, not by the logic of life, but by the logic of demonstration, is not a _scène à faire_, but a _scène à fuir_.

Mr. Bernard Shaw, in some sense the Brieux of the English theatre, is not a man to be dominated by logic, or by anything else under the sun. He has, however, given us one or two excellent examples of the obligatory scene in the true and really artistic sense of the term. The scene of Candida's choice between Eugene and Morell crowns the edifice of _Candida_ as nothing else could. Given the characters and their respective attitudes towards life, this sententious thrashing-out of the situation was inevitable. So, too, in _Mrs. Warren's Profession_, the great scene of the second act between Vivie and her mother is a superb example of a scene imposed by the logic of the theme. On the other hand, in Mr. Henry Arthur Jones's finely conceived, though unequal, play, _Michael and his Lost Angel_, we miss what was surely an obligatory scene. The play is in fact a contest between the paganism of Audrie Lesden and the ascetic, sacerdotal idealism of Michael Feversham. In the second act, paganism snatches a momentary victory; and we confidently expect, in the third act, a set and strenuous effort on Audrie's part to break down in theory the ascetic ideal which has collapsed in practice. It is probable enough that she might not succeed in dragging her lover forth from what she regards as the prison-house of a superstition; but the logic of the theme absolutely demands that she should make the attempt. Mr. Jones has preferred to go astray after some comparatively irrelevant and commonplace matter, and has thus left his play incomplete. So, too, in _The Triumph of the Philistines_, Mr. Jones makes the mistake of expecting us to take a tender interest in a pair of lovers who have had never a love-scene to set our interest agoing. They are introduced to each other in the first act, and we shrewdly suspect (for in the theatre we are all inveterate match-makers) that they are going to fall in love; but we have not the smallest positive evidence of the fact before we find, in the second act, that misunderstandings have arisen, and the lady declines to look at the gentleman. The actress who played the part at the St. James's Theatre was blamed for failing to enlist our sympathies in this romance; but what actress can make much of a love part which, up to the very last moment, is all suspicion and jealousy? Fancy _Romeo and Juliet_ with the love-scenes omitted, "by special request!"

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In a second class, according to our analysis, we place the obligatory scene which is imposed by "the manifest exigencies of specifically dramatic effect." Here it must of course be noted that the conception of "specifically dramatic effect" varies in some degree, from age to age, from generation to generation, and even, one may almost say, from theatre to theatre. Scenes of violence and slaughter were banished from the Greek theatre, mainly, no doubt, because rapid movement was rendered difficult by the hieratic trappings of the actors, and was altogether foreign to the spirit of tragedy; but it can scarcely be doubted that the tragic poets were the less inclined to rebel against this convention, because they extracted "specifically dramatic effects" of a very high order out of their "messenger-scenes." Even in the modern theatre we are thrilled by the description of Hippolytus dragged at his own chariot wheel, or Creusa and Creon devoured by Medea's veil of fire.[2] On the Elizabethan stage, the murder of Agamemnon would no doubt have been "subjected to our faithful eyes" like the blinding of Gloucester or the suffocation of Edward II; but who shall say that there is less "specifically dramatic effect" in Aeschylus's method of mirroring the scene in the clairvoyant ecstasy of Cassandra? I am much inclined to think that the dramatic effect of highly emotional narrative is underrated in the modern theatre.

Again, at one class of theatre, the author of a sporting play--is bound to exhibit a horse-race on the stage, or he is held to have shirked his obligatory scene. At another class of theatre, we shall have a scene, perhaps, in a box in the Grand Stand, where some Lady Gay Spanker shall breathlessly depict, from start to finish, the race which is visible to her, but invisible to the audience. At a third class of the theatre, the "specifically dramatic effect" to be extracted from a horse-race is found in a scene in a Black-Country slum, where a group of working-men and women are feverishly awaiting the evening paper which shall bring them the result of the St. Leger, involving for some of them opulence--to the extent, perhaps, of a £5 note--and for others ruin.[3]

The difficulty of deciding that any one form of scene is predestined by the laws of dramatic effect is illustrated in Tolstoy's grisly drama, _The Power of Darkness_. The scene in which Nikita kills Akoulina's child was felt to be too horrible for representation; whereupon the author wrote an alternative scene between Mitritch and Anna, which passes simultaneously with the murder scene, in an adjoining room. The two scenes fulfil exactly the same function in the economy of the play; it can be acted with either of them, it might be acted with both; and it is impossible to say which produces the intenser or more "specifically dramatic effect."

The fact remains, however, that there is almost always a dramatic and undramatic, a more dramatic and a less dramatic, way of doing a thing; and an author who allows us to foresee and expect a dramatic way of attaining a given end, and then chooses an undramatic or less dramatic way, is guilty of having missed the obligatory scene. For a general discussion of what we mean by the terms "dramatic" and "undramatic" the reader may refer back to Chapter III. Here I need only give one or two particular illustrations.

It will be remembered that one of the _scènes à faire_ which M. Sarcey foresaw in _Les Fourchambault_ was the encounter between the two brothers; the illegitimate Bernard and the legitimate Leopold. It would have been quite possible, and quite natural, to let the action of the play work itself out without any such encounter; or to let the encounter take place behind the scenes; but this would have been a patent ignoring of dramatic possibilities, and M. Sarcey would have had ample reason to pour the vials of his wrath on Augier's head. He was right, however, in his confidence that Augier would not fail to "make" the scene. And how did he "make" it? The one thing inevitable about it was that the truth should be revealed to Leopold; but there were a dozen different ways in which that might have been effected. Perhaps, in real life, Bernard would have said something to this effect: "Young man, you are making questionable advances to a lady in whom I am interested. I beg that you will cease to persecute her; and if you ask by what right I do so, I reply that I am in fact your elder brother, that I have saved our father from ruin, that I am henceforth the predominant partner in his business, and that, if you do not behave yourself, I shall see that your allowance is withdrawn, and that you have no longer the means to lead an idle and dissolute life." This would have been an ungracious but not unnatural way of going about the business. Had Augier chosen it, we should have had no right to complain on the score of probability; but it would have been evident to the least imaginative that he had left the specifically dramatic opportunities of the scene entirely undeveloped. Let us now see what he actually did. Marie Letellier, compromised by Leopold's conduct, has left the Fourchambault house and taken refuge with Mme. Bernard. Bernard loves her devotedly, but does not dream that she can see anything in his uncouth personality, and imagines that she loves Leopold. Accordingly, he determines that Leopold shall marry her, and tells him so. Leopold scoffs at the idea; Bernard insists; and little by little the conflict rises to a tone of personal altercation. At last Leopold says something slighting of Mile. Letellier, and Bernard--who, be it noted, has begun with no intention of revealing the kinship between them--loses his self-control and cries, "Ah, there speaks the blood of the man who slandered a woman in order to prevent his son from keeping his word to her. I recognize in you your grandfather, who was a miserable calumniator." "Repeat that word!" says Leopold. Bernard does so, and the other strikes him across the face with his glove. For a perceptible interval Bernard struggles with his rage in silence, and then: "It is well for you," he cries, "that you are my brother!"

We need not follow the scene in the sentimental turning which it then takes, whereby it comes about, of course, that Bernard, not Leopold, marries Mile. Letellier. The point is that Augier has justified Sarcey's confidence by making the scene thoroughly and specifically dramatic; in other words, by charging it with emotion, and working up the tension to a very high pitch. And Sarcey was no doubt right in holding that this was what the whole audience instinctively expected, and that they would have been more or less consciously disappointed had the author baulked their expectation.

An instructive example of the failure to "make" a dramatically obligatory scene may be found in _Agatha_ by Mrs. Humphry Ward and Mr. Louis Parker. Agatha is believed to be the child of Sir Richard and Lady Fancourt; but at a given point she learns that a gentleman whom she has known all her life as "Cousin Ralph" is in reality her father. She has a middle-aged suitor, Colonel Ford, whom she is very willing to marry; but at the end of the second act she refuses him, because she shrinks from the idea, on the one hand, of concealing the truth from him, on the other hand, of revealing her mother's trespass. This is not, in itself, a very strong situation, for we feel the barrier between the lovers to be unreal. Colonel Ford is a man of sense. The secret of Agatha's parentage can make no real difference to him. Nothing material--no point of law or of honour--depends on it. He will learn the truth, and all will come right between them. The only point on which our interest can centre is the question how he is to learn the truth; and here the authors go very far astray. There are two, and only two, really dramatic ways in which Colonel Ford can be enlightened. Lady Fancourt must realize that Agatha is wrecking her life to keep her mother's secret, and must either herself reveal it to Colonel Ford, or must encourage and enjoin Agatha to do so. Now, the authors choose neither of these ways: the secret slips out, through a chance misunderstanding in a conversation between Sir Richard Fancourt and the Colonel. This is a typical instance of an error of construction; and why?--because it leaves to chance what should be an act of will. Drama means a thing done, not merely a thing that happens; and the playwright who lets accident effect what might naturally and probably be a result of volition, or, in other words, of character, sins against the fundamental law of his craft. In the case before us, Lady Fancourt and Agatha--the two characters on whom our interest is centred--are deprived of all share in one of the crucial moments of the action. Whether the actual disclosure was made by the mother or by the daughter, there ought to have been a great scene between the two, in which the mother should have insisted that, by one or other, the truth must be told. It would have been a painful, a delicate, a difficult scene, but it was the obligatory scene of the play; and had we been allowed clearly to foresee it at the end of the second act, our interest would have been decisively carried forward. The scene, too, might have given the play a moral relevance which in fact it lacks. The readjustment of Agatha's scheme of things, so as to make room for her mother's history, might have been made explicit and partly intellectual, instead of implicit, inarticulate and wholly emotional.

This case, then, clearly falls under our second heading. We cannot say that it is the logic of the theme which demands the scene, for no thesis or abstract idea is enunciated. Nor can we say that the course of events is unnatural or improbable; our complaint is that, without being at all less natural, they might have been highly dramatic, and that in fact they are not so.