y in the author's manipulation of it.

Was Sarcey right in assuming such a compulsion to be a constant and
dominant factor in the playwright's craft? I think we shall see reason
to believe him right in holding that it frequently arises, but wrong if
he went the length of maintaining that there can be no good play without
a definite _scene a faire_--as eighteenth-century landscape painters are
said to have held that no one could be a master of his art till he knew
where to place "the brown tree." I remember no passage in which Sarcey
explicitly lays down so hard and fast a rule, but several in which he
seems to take it for granted.[1]

It may be asked whether--and if so, why--the theory of the obligatory
scene holds good for the dramatist and not for the novelist? Perhaps it
has more application to the novel than is commonly supposed; but in so
far as it applies peculiarly to the drama, the reason is pretty clear.
It lies in the strict concentration imposed on the dramatist, and the
high mental tension which is, or ought to be, characteristic of the
theatrical audience. The leisurely and comparatively passive
novel-reader may never miss a scene which an audience, with its
instincts of logic and of economy keenly alert, may feel to be
inevitable. The dramatist is bound to extract from his material the last
particle of that particular order of effect which the stage, and the
stage alone, can give us. If he fails to do so, we feel that there has
been no adequate justification for setting in motion all the complex
mechanism of the theatre. His play is like a badly-designed engine in
which a large part of the potential energy is dissipated to no purpose.
The novelist, with a far wider range of effects at his command, and
employing no special mechanism to bring them home to us, is much more
free to select and to reject. He is exempt from the law of rigid economy
to which the dramatist must submit. Far from being bound to do things in
the most dramatic way, he often does wisely in rejecting that course, as
unsuited to his medium. Fundamentally, no doubt, the same principle
applies to both arts, but with a wholly different stringency in the case
of the drama. "Advisable" in the novelist's vocabulary is translated by
"imperative" in the dramatist's. The one is playing a long-drawn game,
in which the loss of a trick or two need not prove fatal; the other has
staked his all on a single rubber.

* * * *