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to indicate a change of scene, whereas in foreign drama it merely refers
to the exit or entrance of a character, so that a different number of
persons is on the stage.

But there are, of course, deeper, more organic qualities than these
external attributes of a play. The stern limits of time in the
representation of the stage story--little more than two hours, "the two
hours traffic of the stage" mentioned by Shakespeare--necessitates
telling the story with emphasis upon its salient points; only the high
lights of character and event can be advantageously shown within such
limits. Hence the dramatic story, as the adjective has come to show,
indicates a story presenting in a terse and telling fashion only the
most important and exciting things. To be dramatic is thus to be
striking, to produce effects by omission, compression, stress and
crescendo. To be sure, recent modern plays can be named in plenty which
seem to violate this principle; but they do so at their peril, and in
the history of drama nothing is plainer than that the essence of good
play-making lies in the power to seize the significant moments of the
stage story and so present them as to grip the interest and hold it with
increasing tension up to a culminating moment called the climax.

Certain advantages and certain limitations follow from these
characteristics of a play. For one thing, the drama is able to focus on
the really interesting, exciting, enthralling moments of human doings,
where a novel, for example, which has so much more leisure to accomplish
its purpose to give a picture of life, can afford to take its time and
becomes slower, and often, as a result, comparatively prolix and
indirect. This may not be advisable in a piece of fiction, but it is
often found, and masterpieces both of the past and present illustrate
the possibility; the work of a Richardson, a Henry James, a Bennett. But
for a play this would be simply suicide; for the drama must be more
direct, condensed and rapid. And just in proportion as a novel adopts
the method of the play do we call it dramatic and does it win a general
audience; the story of a Stevenson or a Kipling.

Again, having in mind the advantages of the play, the stage story is
both heard and seen, and important results issue from this fact. The
play-story is actually seen instead of seen by the eye of the
imagination through the appeal of the printed page; or indirectly again,
if one hears a narrativ