alled _Macbeth_ a fine example of
psychologic tragedy in the true sense.

Or take a well-known modern play, _Camille:_

I. A young man loves and lives with a member of the demi-monde.

II. His father pleads with her to give him up, for his own sake.

III. What will she do?

It will be observed that the way the lady of the camellias answers the
question is the revelation of her character; so that the play again,
although its story interest is sufficient, is primarily a character
study, surrounded by Dumas fils with a rich atmosphere of understanding
sympathy and with sentiment that to a later taste becomes
sentimentality.

_The School for Scandal_ might be stated in this way:

I. An old husband brings his gay but well-meaning wife to town.

II. Her innocent love of fun involves her in scandal.

III. Will the two be reconciled, and how?

Ibsen's _A Doll's House_ may be thus expressed in a proposition:

I. A young wife has been babified by her husband.

II. Experiences open her eyes to the fact that she is not educated to be
either wife or mother.

III. She leaves her husband until he can see what a woman should be in
the home: a human being, not a doll.

These examples will serve to show what is meant by proposition and
indicate more definitely the central purpose of the dramatic author and
the technical demand made upon him. Be assured that under whatever
varied garb of attraction in incident, scene and character, this
underlying stern architectural necessity abides, and a drama's inability
to reduce itself thus to a formula is a confession that in the
structural sense the building is lop-sided and insecure, or, worse, that
there is no structure there at all: nothing, so to put it, but a front
elevation, a mere architect's suggestion.

As the spectator breathlessly enjoys the climax and watches to see that
unknotting of the knot which gives the French word _denouement_
(unknotting) its meaning, he will notice that the intensity of the
climactic effect is not derived alone from action and word; but that
largely effective in the total result is the picture made upon the
stage, in front of the background of setting which in itself has
pictorial quality, by the grouped characters as the curtain falls.

This effect, conventionally called a _situation_, is for the eye as well
as for the ear and the brain,--better, the heart. It would be an
unfortunate limitation to our theater culture if we did not comprehen