ting as he
goes along--that the action, like the child's fantastic serpentine of
blocks, might at any moment take a turn in any possible direction
without falsifying its antecedents or our expectations. No part of it is
necessarily involved in any other part. If the play were found too long
or too short, an act might be cut out or written in without
necessitating any considerable readjustments in the other acts. The play
is really a series of episodes,

"Which might, odd bobs, sir! in judicious hands,
Extend from here to Mesopotamy."

The episodes may grow out of each other plausibly enough, but by no
pre-ordained necessity, and with no far-reaching interdependence. We
live, in such plays, from moment to moment, foreseeing nothing, desiring
nothing; and though this frame of mind may be mildly agreeable, it
involves none of that complexity of sensation with which we contemplate
a great piece of architecture, or follow the development of a
finely-constructed drama. To this order belong many cape-and-sword plays
and detective dramas--plays like _The Adventure of Lady Ursula_, _The
Red Robe_, the Musketeer romances that were at one time so popular, and
most plays of the _Sherlock Holmes_ and _Raffles_ type. But pieces of a
more ambitious order have been known to follow the same formula--some of
the works, for instance, of Mr. Charles McEvoy, to say nothing of Mr.
Bernard Shaw.

We may take it, I think, that the architectural analogy holds good of
every play which can properly be said to be "constructed." Construction
means dramatic architecture, or in other words, a careful
pre-arrangement of proportions and interdependencies. But to carry
beyond this point the analogy between the two arts would be fantastic
and unhelpful. The one exists in space, the other in time. The one seeks
to beget in the spectator a state of placid, though it may be of
aspiring, contemplation; the other, a state of more or less acute
tension. The resemblances between music and architecture are, as is well
known, much more extensive and illuminating. It might not be wholly
fanciful to call music a sort of middle term between the two other arts.

A great part of the secret of dramatic architecture lies in the one word
"tension." To engender, maintain, suspend, heighten and resolve a state
of tension--that is the main object of the dramatist's craft.

What do we mean by tension? Clearly a stretching out, a stretching
forward, of the mind. Tha