to invent or conduct an action that shall be in the least
like any sequence of events in real life. It is naturally difficult to
give examples, for the plays composed under this curious limitation are
apt to remain in manuscript, or to be produced for one performance, and
forgotten. There is, however, one recent play of this order which holds
a certain place in dramatic literature. I do not know that Mr. Granville
Barker was well-advised in printing _The Marrying of Anne Leete_ along
with such immeasurably maturer and saner productions as _The Voysey
Inheritance_ and _Waste_; but by doing so he has served my present purpose
in providing me with a perfect example of a play as to which we cannot
tell whether it possesses plausibility of the third degree, so
absolutely does it lack that plausibility of the second degree which is
its indispensable condition precedent.

Francisque Sarcey was fond of insisting that an audience would generally
accept without cavil any postulates in reason which an author chose to
impose upon it, with regard to events supposed to have occurred before
the rise of the curtain; always provided that the consequences deduced
from them within the limits of the play were logical, plausible, and
entertaining. The public will swallow a camel, he would maintain, in the
past, though they will strain at a gnat in the present. A classical
example of this principle is (once more) the _Oedipus Rex_, in which
several of the initial postulates are wildly improbable: for instance,
that Oedipus should never have inquired into the circumstances of the
death of Laius, and that, having been warned by an oracle that he was
doomed to marry his mother, he should not have been careful, before
marrying any woman, to ascertain that she was younger than himself.
There is at least so much justification for Sarcey's favourite
principle, that we are less apt to scrutinize things merely narrated to
us than events which take place before our eyes. It is simply a special
instance of the well-worn

"Segnius irritant animos demissa per aurem
Quam quae sunt oculis subjecta fidelibus."

But the principle is of very limited artistic validity. No one would
nowadays think of justifying a gross improbability in the antecedents of
a play by Ibsen or Sir Arthur Pinero, by Mr. Galsworthy or Mr. Granville
Barker, on the plea that it occurred outside the frame of the picture.
Such a plea might, indeed, secure a mitigation of sentence,