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 piщ 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
_scиne а 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 Maоtre 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
_scиne а 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 _scиne а 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