ence actively desire the information to be conveyed to them.
Especially is it essential that the audience should know clearly who are
the subjects of the discussion or narrative--that they should not be
mere names to them. It is a grave flaw in the construction of Mr.
Granville Barker's otherwise admirable play _Waste_, that it should open
with a long discussion, by people whom we scarcely know, of other people
whom we do not know at all, whose names we may or may not have noted on
the playbill.

Trebell, Lord Charles Cantelupe, and Blackborough ought certainly to
have been presented to us in the flesh, however briefly and summarily,
before we were asked to interest ourselves in their characters and the
political situation arising from them.

There is, however, one limitation to this principle. A great effect is
sometimes attained by retarding the entrance of a single leading figure
for a whole act, or even two, while he is so constantly talked about as
to beget in the audience a vivid desire to make his personal
acquaintance. Thus Moliere's Tartufe does not come on the stage until
the third act of the comedy which bears his name. Ibsen's John Gabriel
Borkman is unseen until the second act, though (through his wife's ears)
we have already heard him pacing up and down his room like a wolf in his
cage. Dubedat, in _The Doctor's Dilemma_, is not revealed to us in the
flesh until the second act. But for this device to be successful, it is
essential that only one leading character[5] should remain unseen, on
whom the attention of the audience may, by that very fact, be riveted.
In _Waste_, for instance, all would have been well had it suited Mr.
Barker's purpose to leave Trebell invisible till the second act, while
all the characters in the first act, clearly presented to us, canvassed
him from their various points of view. Keen expectancy, in short, is the
most desirable frame of mind in which an audience can be placed, so long
as the expectancy be not ultimately disappointed. But there is no less
desirable mental attitude than that of straining after gleams of
guidance in an expository twilight.

The advantage of a staccato opening--or, to vary the metaphor, a brisk,
highly aerated introductory passage--is clearly exemplified in _A Doll's
House_. It would have been quite possible for Ibsen to have sent up his
curtain upon Nora and Mrs. Linden seated comfortably before the stove,
and exchanging confidences as to their res