dramatic parable by Mr. Jerome K. Jerome deals with
the moral regeneration of eleven people, who are living in a Bloomsbury
boarding-house, through the personal influence of a Passer-by, who is the
Spirit of Love incarnate; and this effect is accomplished in a succession
of dialogues, in which the Stranger talks at length with one boarder after
another. It is necessary, for reasons of reality, that in each of the
dialogues the Passer-by and his interlocutor should be seated at their
ease. It is also necessary, for reasons of effectiveness in presentation,
that the faces of both parties to the conversation should be kept clearly
visible to the audience. In actual life, the two people would most
naturally sit before a fire; but if a fireplace should be set in either the
right or the left wall of the stage and two actors should be seated in
front of it, the face of one of them would be obscured from the audience.
The producer therefore adopted the expedient of imagining a fireplace in
the fourth wall of the room,--the wall that is supposed to stretch across
the stage at the line of the footlights. A red-glow from the central lamps
of the string of footlights was cast up over a brass railing such as
usually bounds a hearth, and behind this, far forward in the direct centre
of the stage, two chairs were drawn up for the use of the actors. The right
wall showed a window opening on the street, the rear wall a door opening on
an entrance hall, and the left wall a door opening on a room adjacent; and
in none of these could the fireplace have been logically set. The unusual
device of stage-direction, therefore, contributed to the verisimilitude of
the set as well as to the convenience of the action. The experiment was
successful for the purposes of this particular piece; it did not seem to
disrupt the attention of the audience; and the question, therefore, is
suggested whether it might not, in many other plays, be advantageous to
make imaginary use of the invisible fourth wall.

VII

THE FOUR LEADING TYPES OF DRAMA

I. TRAGEDY AND MELODRAMA

Tragedy and melodrama are alike in this,--that each exhibits a set of
characters struggling vainly to avert a predetermined doom; but in this
essential point they differ,--that whereas the characters in melodrama are
drifted to disaster in spite of themselves, the characters in tragedy go
down to destruction because of themselves. In tragedy the characters
determine and control th