Chapter XIII (3)

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.