ll these condensed
and selected minutiae of a meal stand for the real thing; once more art
is rearranging life, under severe pressure. If those interested will
test with watch in hand the actual time allowed for the banquet in _A
Parisian Romance_, so admirably envisaged by the late Richard Mansfield,
or the famous Thanksgiving dinner scene in _Shore Acres_, fragrantly
associated with the memory of the late James A. Herne, they will
possibly be surprised at the brevity of such representations.

Because of this necessary compression, a scale of time has to be adopted
which shall secure an effect of actualness by a cunning obeyance of
proportion; the reduction of scale is skillful, and so the result is
congruous. And it is plain that fiction may take more time if it so
desires in such scenes; although even in the novel the actual time
consumed by a formal dinner would be reproduced by the novelist at great
risk of boring his reader.

Again, with disadvantages in mind, it might be asserted that the stage
story suffers in that some of the happenings involved in the plot must
perforce transpire off stage; and when this is so there is an inevitable
loss of effect, inasmuch as it is of the nature of drama, as has been
noted, to show events, and the indirect narrative method is to be
avoided as undramatic. Tyros in play-writing fail to make this
distinction; and as a generalization it may be stated that whenever
possible a play should show a thing, rather that state it. "Seeing is
believing," to repeat the axiom. Yet a qualifier may here be made, for
in certain kinds of drama or when a certain effect is striven for the
indirect method may be powerfully effective. The murder in _Macbeth_
gains rather than loses because it takes place outside the scene;
Maeterlinck in his earlier Plays for Marionettes, so called, secured
remarkable effects of suspense and tension by systematically using the
principle of indirection; as where in _The Seven Princesses_ the
princesses who are the particular exciting cause of the play are not
seen at all by the audience; the impression they make, a great one,
comes through their effect upon certain characters on the stage and this
heightens immensely the dramatic value of the unseen figures. We may
point to the Greeks, too, in illustration, who in their great folk
dramas of legend regularly made use of the principle of indirect
narration when the aim was to put before the vast audiences the terrible