eclines 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!"

* * * * *

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