occurrences of the fable, not _coram populo_, as Horace has it, not in
the presence of the audience, but rather off stage. Nevertheless, these
exceptions can be explained without violating the general principle that
in a stage story it is always dangerous not to exhibit any action that
is vital to the play. And this compulsion, it will be evident, is a
restriction which may at times cripple the scope of the dramatist, while
yet it stimulates his skill to overcome the difficulty.

Summarizing the differences which go to make drama distinctive as a
story-telling form and distinguish it from other story molds: a play in
contrast with fiction tells its tale by word, act and scene in a rising
scale of importance, and within briefer time limits, necessitating a far
more careful selection of material, and a greater emphasis upon salient
moments in the handling of plot; and because of the device of act
divisions, with certain moments of heightened interest culminating in a
central scene and thus gaining in tension and intensity by this enforced
method of compression and stress; while losing the opportunity to
amplify and more carefully to delineate character. It gains as well
because the story comes by the double receipt of the eye and ear to a
theater audience some of whom at least, through illiteracy, might be
unable to appreciate the story printed in a book. The play thus is the
most democratic and popular form of story telling, and at the same time
is capable of embodying, indeed has embodied, the greatest creative
literature of various nations. And for a generation now, increasingly,
in the European countries and in English-speaking lands, the play has
begun to come into its own as an art form with unique advantages in the
way of wide appeal and cultural possibilities.

CHAPTER II

THE PLAY, A CULTURAL OPPORTUNITY

Certain remarks at the close of the preceding chapter hint at what is in
mind in giving a title to the present one. The play, this democratic
mode of story telling, attracting vast numbers of hearers and
universally popular because man is ever avid of amusement and turns
hungrily to such a medium as the theater to satisfy a deeply implanted
instinct for pleasure, can be made an experience to the auditor properly
to be included in what he would call his cultural opportunity. That is
to say, it can take its place among those civilizing agencies furnished
by the arts and letters, travel and the higher