plication. Every word spoken is thus, besides its
immediate significance, a preparation for something ahead. It is a
continual temptation to a dramatist with a feeling for character (a gift
most admirable in itself) to do brushwork on some person of his play,
which, while it may illuminate the character as such, may involve
episodic treatment that will entirely mislead an audience into supposing
that the author has far more meaning in the action shown than he
intended. These false leads are of course always the enemies of unity
and to be all the more carefully guarded against in proportion to their
attraction. So attractive, indeed, is this lure into by-paths away from
the main path of progress that it is fairly astonishing to see how
often even veteran playwrights fall in love with some character,
disproportionately handle it, and invent unnecessary tangential
incidents in order to exhibit it. And, rather discouragingly, an
audience forgives episodic treatment and over-emphasis in the enjoyment
of the character, as such; willing to let the drama suffer for the sake
of a welcome detail.

In developing his story in this intermediate part of it, a more
insidious, all-pervasive lure is to be seen in the change in the very
type of drama intended at first, or clearly promised in act one. The
play may start out to be a comedy of character and then be deflected
into one where character is lost sight of in the interest of plot; or a
play farcical in the conditions given may turn serious on the
dramatist's hands. Or, worse yet, that which is a comedy in feeling and
drift, may in the course of the development become tragic in conclusion.
Or, once more, what begins for tragedy, with its implied seriousness of
interest in character and philosophy of life, may resolve itself, under
the fascination of plot and of histrionic effectivism, into melodrama,
with its undue emphasis upon external sensation and its correlative loss
in depth and artistry.

All these and still other permutations a play suffers in the sin
committed whenever the real type or genre of a drama, implied at the
start, is violated in the later handling. The history of the stage
offers many illustrations. In a play not far, everything considered,
from being the greatest in the tongue, Shakespeare's _Hamlet_, it may be
questioned if there be not a departure in the final act from the
emphasis placed upon psychology in the acts that lead up to it. The
character of the