s; the reader, unaware of the outcome of
events, has a pleasing sense of curiosity and a stimulating desire to
know the end. He reads on, under the prick of this desire. The novelist
keeps him more or less in the dark, and in so doing fans the flame of
interest. What will be the fate of the hero? Will the heroine escape
from the impending doom? Will the two be mated before the Finis is
written? Such are the natural questions in a good novel, in spite of all
our modern overlaying of fiction with subtler psychologic suggestions.

But the stage story is different. The audience from the start is taken
into the dramatist's confidence; it is allowed to know something that is
not known to the _dramatis personae_ themselves; or, at least, not known
to certain very important persons of the story, let us say, the hero and
heroine, to give them the simple old-fashioned description. And the
audience, taken in this flattering way into the playwright's secret,
finds its particular pleasure in seeing how the blind puppets up on the
stage act in an ignorance which if shared by the spectators would
qualify, if not destroy, the special kind of excitement they are
enjoying.

Just why this difference between play and novel exists is a nice
question not so easily answered; that it does exist, nobody who has
thought upon the subject can doubt. Occasionally, it is true, successful
plays are written in apparent violation of this principle. That
eminently skillful and effective piece of theater work, Bernstein's _The
Thief_, is an example; a large part of the whole first act, if not all
of it, takes place without the spectator suspecting that the young wife,
who is the real thief, is implicated in the crime. Nevertheless, such
dramas are the exception. Broadly speaking, sound dramaturgy makes use
of the principle of knowing cooeperation of the audience in the plot, and
always will; if for no other reason, because the direct stage method of
showing a story makes it impracticable to hoodwink those in the
auditorium and also perhaps because the necessary compression of events
in a play would make the suddenness of the discovery on the part of the
audience that they had been fooled unpleasant: an unpleasantness, it may
be surmised, intensified by the additional fact that the fooling has
been done in the presence of others--their fellow theater-goers. The
quickness of the effects possible to the stage and inability of the
playwright to use repetiti