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 Lemaitre's play, _Revoltee_, tells the story of a would-be
intellectual, ill-conditioned young woman, married to a plain and
ungainly professo