en if this difficulty could be overcome; if the dramatist could prove
that he had reproduced the event with photographic and cinematographic
accuracy, his position would not thereby be improved. He would still
have failed in his peculiar task, which is precisely that of
interpretation. Not truth, but verisimilitude, is his aim; for the stage
is the realm of appearances, in which intrusive realities become unreal.
There are, as I have said, incalculable chances to one that the
playwright's version of a given event will not coincide with that of the
Recording Angel: but it may be true and convincing in relation to human
nature in general, in which case it will belong to the sphere of great
art; or, on a lower level, it may be agreeable and entertaining without
being conspicuously false to human nature, in which case it will do no
harm, since it makes no pretence to historic truth. It may be objected
that the sixteenth-century public, and even, in the next century, the
great Duke of Marlborough, got their knowledge of English history from
Shakespeare, and the other writers of chronicle-plays. Well, I leave it
to historians to determine whether this very defective and, in great
measure, false vision of the past was better or worse than none. The
danger at any rate, if danger there was, is now past and done with. Even
our generals no longer go to the theatre or to the First Folio for their
history. The dramatist may, with an easy conscience, interpret historic
fact in the light of his general insight into human nature, so long as
he does not so falsify the recorded event that common knowledge cries
out against him.[1]

Plausibility, then, not abstract or concrete probability, and still less
literal faithfulness to recorded fact, is what the dramatist is bound to
aim at. To understand this as a belittling of his art is to
misunderstand the nature of art in general. The plausibility of bad art
is doubtless contemptible and may be harmful. But to say that good art
must be plausible is only to say that not every sort of truth, or every
aspect of truth, is equally suitable for artistic representation--or, in
more general terms, that the artist, without prejudice to his allegiance
to nature, must respect the conditions of the medium in which he works.

Our standards of plausibility, however, are far from being invariable.
To each separate form of art, a different standard is applicable. In
what may roughly be called realistic art,