on no doubt also enter in the result. The
novelist can return, explain, dwell upon the causes of the reader's
readjustment to changed characters or surprising turns of circumstance;
the dramatist must go forthright on and make his strokes tell for once
and for all.

Be this as it may, the theater story, as a rule, by a tradition which in
all probability roots in an instinct and a necessity, invites the
listener to be a sort of eavesdropper, to come into a secret and from
this vantage point watch the perturbations of a group of less-knowing
creatures shown behind the footlights: he not only sees, but oversees.
As an outcome of this trait, results follow which also set the play in
contrast with the other ways of story telling. The playwright should not
deceive his audience either in the manipulation of characters or
occurrences. Pleasurable as this may be in fiction, in the theater it is
disastrous. The audience, disturbed in its superior sense of knowledge,
sitting as it were like the gods apart and asked suddenly, peremptorily,
to reconstruct its suppositions, is baffled and then irritated. This is
one of several reasons why, in the delineation of character on the
stage, it is of very dubious desirability to spring a surprise; making
the seeming hero turn out a villain or the presumptive villain blossom
into a paragon of all the virtues: as Dickens does in _Our Mutual
Friend_; in that case, to the added zest of the reader. The risk in
subtilizing stage character lies just here. Persons shown so fleetingly
in a few selected moments of their whole lives, after the stage fashion,
must be seen in high relief, if they are to be clearly grasped by the
onlookers. Conceding that in actual life folk in general are an
indeterminate gray rather than stark black and white, it is none the
less necessary to use primary colors, for the most part, in painting
them, in order that they may be realized. Here again we encounter the
limitations of art in depicting life, and its difference therefrom. In a
certain sense, therefore, stage characters must be more primitive, more
elemental, as well as elementary, than the characters in novels, a
thought we shall have occasion to come back to, from another angle,
later on.

Equally is it true that good technic forbids the false lead: any hint or
suggestion which has the appearance of conducting on to something to
come later in the play, which shall verify and fortify the previous
allusion or im