Dramatic Technique Part 37

Fundamentally, type characterization rests on a false premise, namely, that every human being may be adequately represented by some dominant characteristic or small group of closely related characteristics. All the better recent drama emphasizes the comic or tragic conflict in human beings caused by many contradictory impulses and ideas, some mutually exclusive, some negativing others to a considerable extent, some apparently dormant for a time, yet ready to spring into great activity at unforeseen moments. Ben Jonson carried the false idea to an extreme when he wrote of his "humour" comedies:

In every human body, The choler, melancholy, phlegm, and blood, By reason that they flow continually In some one part and are not continent, Receive the name of humours. Now thus far It may, by metaphor, apply itself Unto the general disposition: As when some one peculiar quality Doth so possess a man that it doth draw All his affects, his spirits and his powers, In his confluctions, all to run one way, This may be truly said to be a humour.[2]

Were Ben Jonson's physiology sound, we should have, not occasional cranks and neurotics as now, but a race of nothing else. Today modern medical science has proved the bad physiology of his words, and dramatists have followed its lead.

What gave the type drama its great hold, in the Latin comedy of Plautus and Terence, in Ben Jonson and other Elizabethans, what keeps it alive today in the less artistic forms--broad farce, pure melodrama--is fourfold. Type characterization, exhibiting a figure wholly in one aspect, or through a small group of closely related characteristics, is easy to understand. Secondly, it is both easy to create, and, as Ben Jonson's great following between 1605 and 1750 proves, even easier to imitate. Thirdly, farce and melodrama, indeed all drama depending predominantly on mere situation, may succeed, though lacking individualization of character, with any audience which, like the Roman or the Elizabethan, gladly hears the same stories or sees the same figures handled differently by different writers. Much in the plays of Reade, Tom Taylor, and Bulwer-Lytton[3] which pa.s.sed, in the mid-nineteenth century, for real life, depending as it did on a characterization which barely rose above type, was only thinly disguised melodrama. The recent increasing response of the public to better characterization in both farce and melodrama has tended to lift the former into comedy, the latter into story-play and tragedy. Just here appears a fourth reason for the popularity of characterization by types.

Though entertaining plays may be presented successfully with type characterization only, no dramatist with inborn or acquired ability to characterize, can hold consistently to types. Observation, interpretative insight, or a flash of sympathy will advance him now and again, as Jonson was advanced more than once, to real individualization of character. Contrast the thoroughly real Subtle, Face, and Doll of _The Alchemist_[4] with the types, Ananias and Sir Epicure Mammon; contrast the masterly, if very brief, characterization of Ursula in _Bartholomew Fair_[5] with the mere type of Zeal-of-the-Land Busy. An uncritical audience responding to the best characterization in a play, overlooks the merely typical quality of the other figures. That is, the long vogue of types upon the stage rests upon ease of comprehension, entire adequacy for some crude dramatic forms, ease of imitation, and a constant tendency in a dramatist of ability to rise to higher levels of characterization. Now that we are more and more dissatisfied with types in plays making any claim to realism, the keen distinction first laid down by Mr. William Archer in his _Play-Making_ becomes essential. If type presents a single characteristic or group of intimately related characteristics, "character drawing is the presentment of human nature in its commonly recognized, understood, and accepted aspects; psychology is, as it were, the exploration of character, the bringing of hitherto unsurveyed tracts within the circle of our knowledge and comprehension."[6] Mr. Galsworthy in _The Silver Box_ and _Justice_ Mr.

Archer regards as a drawer of character; in _Strife_[7] as a psychologist. He holds Sir Arthur Pinero a characterizer of great versatility who becomes a psychologist in some of his studies of feminine types--in Iris, in Letty, in the heroine of _Mid-Channel_.[8 ]

By this distinction, most good drama shows character drawing; only the great work, psychology.

Drama which does not rise above interest in its action rests, as has been said, on the idea that most people are simple, uncomplicated, and easy to understand. Great drama depends on a firm grasp and sure presentation of complicated character, but of course a dramatist has a perfect right to say that, though he knows his hero--Cyrano de Bergerac, for instance--may have had many characteristics, it is enough for the purpose of his play to represent the vanity, the audacity, and the underlying tenderness of the man. It is undeniable, too, that particular characteristics of ours may be so strong that other characteristics will not prevent them from taking us into sufficient dramatic complications to make a good play. In such a case, the dramatist who is not primarily writing for characterization will present the characteristics creating his desired situations, and let all others go. Conversely, he who cares most for characterization will try so to present even minor qualities that the perfect portrait of an individual will be recognized. Often, however, the happenings of a play may seem to an audience incompatible, that is, the character in one place may seem to contradict himself as presented elsewhere. Just here is where the psychologist in the dramatist, stepping to the front, must convince his audience that there is only a seeming contradiction. Otherwise, the play falls promptly to the level of simple melodrama or farce. That is, the character-drawer paints his portrait, knowing that, if it is well done, its life-likeness will at once be recognized. The psychologist, knowing that the life-likeness will not be readily admitted, by ill.u.s.trative action throws light on his character till his point is won. Our final judgment of characterization must depend on whether the author is obviously trying to present a completely rounded figure or only chosen aspects.

Thus the old statement, "Know thyself," becomes for the dramatist "Know your characters as intimately as possible." Too many beginners in play-writing who care more for situation than for character, sketch in a figure with the idea that they may safely leave it to the actor to "fill out the part." When brought to book they say: "I felt sure the actor in his larger experience, catching my idea--you do think it was clearly stated, don't you?--would fill it out perfectly, and be glad of the freedom." Were modesty the real basis for this kind of work, there might be good in it; but what really lies behind it are two great foes of good dramatic writing: haste or incompetence. The interest and the delight of a dramatist in studying people should lie in accurate conveying to others of their contradictions, their deterioration or growth as time pa.s.ses, the outcropping of characteristics in them for which our observation has not prepared us. n.o.body who really cares for characterization wants somebody else to do it for him. n.o.body who has really entered into his characters thoroughly will for a moment be satisfied to sketch broad outlines and let the actor fill in details.

Rarely, however, does the self-deceived author of such slovenly work deceive his audience. It meets at their hands the condemnation it deserves. Such an author a.s.sumes that in all the parts of his play, actors of marked ability and keen intelligence will be cast. Only in the rarest cases does that happen. Many actors may not see the full significance of the outlines. Others, whether they see them or not, will develop a character so as to get as swiftly as possible effects not intended by the author but for which they, as actors, are specially famous. Such a playwright must, then, contend, except in specially fortunate circ.u.mstances, against possible dullness, indifference, and distortion. It is the merest common sense so to present characters that a cast of average ability, or a stage manager of no extraordinary imagination may understand and represent them with at least approximate correctness, rather than so to write that only a group of creative artists can do any justice to the play. Clear and definitive characterization never hampers the best actors: for actors not the best it is absolutely necessary unless intended values are to be blurred.

It frequently happens that a writer whose dialogue is good and who has enough dramatic situations finds himself unable to push ahead. He knows broadly what he wants a scene to be, but somehow cannot make his characters move freely and naturally in it. Above all, the minor transitional scenes prove strangely difficult to write. Of course a scene or act may be thus clogged because the writer is mentally f.a.gged.

If, when a writer certainly is not tired, or when, after rest, he cannot with two or three sustained attempts develop a scene, the difficulty is not far to seek. In real life do we surely find out about people at our first, second, or even third meeting? Only if the people are of the simplest and most self-revelatory kind. The difficulty in these clogged scenes usually is that the author is treating the situation as if it were not the creation of the people in it, and as if a skilful writer could force any group of people into any situation. As Mr. Galsworthy has pointed out, "character is situation."[9] The latter exists because someone is what he is and so has inner conflict, or clashes with another person, or with his environment. Change his character a little and the situation must change. Involve more people in it, and immediately their very presence, affecting the people originally in the scene, will change the situation. In the left-hand column of what follows, the Queen, though she has one speech, in no way affects the scene: the situation is treated for itself, and barely. In the right-hand column, the Queen becomes an individual whose presence affects the speeches of the King and Hamlet. Because she is what she is, Hamlet addresses to her some of the lines which in the first version he spoke to the King: result, a scene far more effective emotionally.

_King._ And now princely _King._ But now my Cosin Hamlet, Sonne Hamlet, and my sonne.

What meanes these sad and melancholy moodes? _Ham._ A little more than kin, For your intent going to and lesse then kind.

Wittenberg, Wee hold it most unmeet and _King._ How is it that the unconvenient, clowdes still hang on you.

Being the Joy and halfe heart _Ham._ Not so much my Lord, I am of your mother. too much in the sonne.

Therefore let mee intreat you stay in Court, _Queene._ Good Hamlet cast thy All Denmarkes hope our coosin nighted colour off and dearest Soone And let thine eye looke like a friend on Denmarke, Doe not forever with thy vailed lids Seeke for thy n.o.ble Father in the dust, Thou know'st 'tis common all that lives must die, Pa.s.sing through nature to eternitie.

_Ham._ I Maddam, it is common.

_Quee._ If it be

Why seemes it so perticuler with thee.

_Ham._ Seemes Maddam, nay it is, I know not seemes, _Ham._ My lord, 'tis not Tis not alone my incky cloake the sable sute I weare: coold mother No nor the teares that still Nor customary suites of solembe stand in my eyes, blacke Nor the distracted haviour in Nor windie suspiration of forst the visage, breath Nor all together mixt with No, nor the fruitfull river in outward semblance, the eye, Is equall to the sorrow of my Nor the dejected havior of the heart, visage Him have I lost I must of force Together with all formes moodes, forgoe, chapes of griefe These but the ornaments and That can denote me truely, these sutes of woe. indeede seeme, For they are actions that a man might play But I have that within which pa.s.ses showe These but the trappings and the suites of woe.

_King._ This shewes a loving _King._ Tis sweete and care in you, Sonne Hamlet, commendable in your nature But you must thinke your father Hamlet, lost a father, To give these mourning duties That father dead, lost his, and to your father, so shalbe untill the But you must knowe your Generall ending. Therefore father lost a father, cease laments, That father lost, lost his, and It is a fault gainst heaven, the surviver bound fault gainst the dead, In fillial obligation for some A fault gainst nature, and tearme in reasons To do obsequious sorrowe, but Common course most certaine, to persever None lives on earth, but hee In obstinate condolement, is a is borne to die. course Of impious stubbornes ... etc.

_Que._ Let not thy mother _Quee._ Let not thy mother loose her praiers Hamlet, loose her prayers Hamlet, Stay here with us, go not to I pray thee stay with us, goe Wittenberg. not to Wittenberg

_Ham._ I shall in all my best _Ham._ I shall in all my best obay you madam. obay you madam.[10]

Inexperienced dramatists too often forget that a character who is simply one of several in a scene may not act as he would alone.

Mr. Macready's Bentevole is very fine in its kind. It is natural, easy, and forcible. Indeed, we suspect some parts of it were too natural, that is, that Mr. Macready thought too much of what his feelings might dictate in such circ.u.mstances, rather than of what the circ.u.mstances must have dictated to him to do. We allude particularly to the half significant, half hysterical laugh and distorted jocular leer, with his eyes towards the persons accusing him of the murder, when the evidence of his guilt comes out. Either the author did not intend him to behave in this manner, or he must have made the other parties on the stage interrupt him as a self-convicted criminal.[11]

Stevenson clearly recognized this truth:

I have had a heavy case of conscience of the same kind about my Braxfield story. Braxfield--only his name is Hermiston--has a son who is condemned to death; plainly there is a fine tempting fitness about this; and I meant he was to hang. But now, on considering my minor characters, I saw there were five people who would--in a sense who must--break prison and attempt his rescue. They are capable, hardy folks, too, who might very well succeed. Why should they not, then?

Why should not young Hermiston escape clear out of the country? and be happy if he could with his--But soft! I will betray my secret or my heroine.[12]

When a scene clogs, don't hold the pen waiting for the impulse to write: don't try to write at all. Study the situation, not for itself, but for the people in it. "The Dramatist who depends his characters to his plot," says Mr. Galsworthy, worthy, "instead of his plot to his characters, ought himself to be depended."[13] If a thorough knowledge of the characters in the particular situation does not bring a solution, study them as the scene relates itself to what must precede in characterization. More than once a dramatist has found that he could not compose some scene satisfactorily till he had written carefully the previous history of the important character or characters. The detailed knowledge thus gained revealed whether or not the characters could enter the desired situation, and if so, how. Pailleron, author of _Le Monde ou l'on s'ennuie_ declared that, in his early drafts, he always had three or four times the material in regard to his _dramatis personae_ ultimately used by him.

Intimate knowledge of his characters is the only safe foundation for the ambitious playwright. It is well-nigh useless to ask managers and actors to pa.s.s finally on a mere statement of a situation or group of situations, without characterization. All they can say is: "Bring me this again as an amplified scenario, or a play, which shows me to what extent the people you have in mind give freshness of interest to this story, which has been used again and again in the drama of different nations, and I will tell you what I will do for you." Reduce any dramatic masterpiece to simple statement of its plot and the story will seem so trite as hardly to be worth dramatization. For instance: a man of jealous nature, pa.s.sionately in love with his young wife, is made by the lies and trickery of a friend to believe that his wife has been intriguing with another of his friends. The fact is that the calumniator slanders because he thinks his abilities have not been properly recognized by the husband and he has been repulsed by the wife. In a fury of jealousy the husband kills his innocent wife and then himself.

That might be recognized as the story of any one of fifty French, German, Italian, English, or American plays of the last hundred years.

It is, of course, the story of _Oth.e.l.lo_--a masterpiece because Shakespeare knew Oth.e.l.lo, Iago, Desdemona, and Ca.s.sio so intimately that by their interplay of character upon character they shape every scene perfectly. In other words, though a striking dramatic situation is undoubtedly dramatic treasure trove, whether it can be developed into anything fresh and contributive depends on a careful study of the people involved. What must they be to give rise to such a situation--not each by himself, but when brought together under the conditions of the scene?

Even if a writer knows this, he must work backward into the earlier history of his people before he can either move through the particular scene or go forward into other scenes which should properly result from it.

Far too often plays are planned in this way. A writer thinks of some setting that will permit him a large amount of local color--a barroom, a dance hall, the wharf of an incoming ocean liner. Recognizing or not that most of this local color is unessential to the real action of the play, he does see that one or two incidents which are necessary and striking may be set against this background. Knowing broadly, how he wants to treat the scene, instead of studying the main and minor characters in it till he knows them so intimately that he can select from a larger amount of material than he can possibly use, he moves, not where the characters lead him, but whither, _vi et armis_, he can drive them. Rarely to him will come the delightful dilemma, so commonly experienced by the dramatist who really cares for character, when he must choose between what he was going to do and the scene as developed by the creatures of his imagination who, as they become real, take the scene away from him and shape it to vastly richer results.[14] When the dramatist interested only in situation shapes the acts preceding his most important scene, he searches simply for conditions of character which will permit this important scene to follow. Result: earlier acts, largely of exposition and talk, or of ill.u.s.trative action slight and unconvincing because characters forced into a crucial situation can hardly reveal how they brought themselves to it. There is no middle way for the dramatist who seeks truth in characterization. Given a situation, either it must grow naturally out of the characters in it, or the people originally in the mind of the author must be remodeled till they fit naturally into the situation. In the latter case, all that precedes and follows the central situation must be re-worked, not as the dramatist may wish, but as the remodeled characters permit. A critic met a well-known dramatist on the Strand. The dramatist looked worried.

"What's the matter," queried the critic, "anything gone wrong?" "Yes.

You remember the play I told you about, and that splendid situation for my heroine?" "Yes. Well?" "Well! She won't go into it, confound her, do the best I can." "Why make her?" "Why? Because if I don't there's an end to that splendid situation." "Well?" "Oh, that's just why I'm bothered.

I don't want to give in, I don't want to lose that situation; but she's right, of course she's right, and the trouble is I know I've got to yield."

At first sight the problem may seem different in an historical play, for here a writer is not creating incident but is often baffled by the amount of material from which he must select,--happenings that seem equally dramatic, speeches that cry out to be transferred to the stage, and delightful bits of ill.u.s.trative action. Yet, whether his underlying purpose is to convey an idea, depict a character, or tell a story, how can he decide which bits among his material make the best ill.u.s.trative action before he has minutely studied the important figures? Above all others, the dramatist working with history is subject to the principles of characterization already laid down. Lessing stated the whole case succinctly:

Only if he chooses other and even opposed characters to the historical, he should refrain from using historical names, and rather credit totally unknown personages with well-known facts than invent characters to well-known personages. The one mode enlarges our knowledge or seems to enlarge it and is thus agreeable. The other contradicts the knowledge that we already possess and is thus unpleasant. We regard the facts as something accidental, as something that may be common to many persons; the characters we regard as something individual and intrinsic. The poet may take any liberties he likes with the former so long as he does not put the facts into contradiction with the characters; the characters he may place in full light but he may not change them, the smallest change seems to destroy their individuality and to subst.i.tute in their place other persons, false persons, who have usurped strange names and pretend to be what they are not.[15]

There is, however, a contrasting danger to insufficient characterization. Any one profoundly interested in character may easily fill a scene with delicate touches which nevertheless swell the play to undue length. When careful examination of a play which is too long makes obvious that no act or scene can be spared in whole or in part, and that the dialogue is nowhere wordy or redundant, watch the best characterized scenes to discover whether something has not been conveyed by two strokes rather than one. If so, choose the better. Watch the scenes also lest delicate and sure touches of characterization may have been included which, delightful though they be, are not absolutely necessary to our understanding of the character. If so, select what most swiftly yet clearly gives the needed information. Over-detail in characterization is the reason why certain modern plays have sagged, or hitched their way to a conclusion, instead of producing the effect desired by the author.

For ultimate convincingness no play can rise above the level of its characterization. The playwright who works for only momentary success may doubtless depend upon the onward rush of events, in a play of strong emotion, to blind his audience to lack of motivation in his characters.

John Fletcher is the great leader of these opportunists of the theatre.

Evadne, in _The Maid's Tragedy_,[16] killing the King, is a very different woman from the Evadne who gladly became his mistress. Nor are the reproaches and exhortations of her brother Melantius powerful enough to change a woman of her character so swiftly and completely. An audience, absorbed in the emotion of the moment, may overlook such faults of characterization in the theatre. As it reviews the play in calmer mood, however, it ranks it, no matter how poetic as a whole or how well characterized in particular scenes, not as a drama which interprets life, but as mere entertainment. Even perfect characterization of some figures, when the chief are mere puppets, cannot make us accept the play as more than pure fiction. In Thomas Heywood's _A Woman Killed with Kindness_ and _English Traveler_,[17] if the erring wives and their lovers were only as well characterized as the fine-spirited husbands, the servants, and youths like Young Geraldine, the plays might hold the stage today. Doubtless the actor's art in the days of Elizabeth and James gave to villains like Wendoll and women like Mrs. Frankford enough verisimilitude to make the plays far more convincing than they are in the reading. But try as we may, we cannot understand from the text either of these characters. Their motivation is totally inadequate; that is, their conduct seems not to grow out of their characters. Rather, they are the creatures of any situation into which the dramatist wishes to thrust them.

This need of motivation may be fundamental, that is, the characters may seem to an audience unconvincing from the start; or may be evident in some insufficiently explained change, transition in character; or may appear only in the last scene of the play, where characters. .h.i.therto consistent are made to act in a way which seems to the audience improbable. When Nathaniel Rowe produced his _Ambitious Stepmother_ in 1700, Charles Gildon bitterly attacked it as unconvincing in its very fundamentals.

_Mirza_ is indeed a Person of a peculiar Taste; for a Cunning Man to own himself a Rogue to the Man he shou'd keep in ignorance, and whom he was to work to his ends, argues little pretence to that Name; but he laughs at _Honesty_, and professes himself a Knave to one he wou'd have honest to him....

In the second Act, he talks of _Memnon's_ having recourse to Arms, of which Power we have not the least Word in the first: All that we know is, that he returns from Banishment on a day of Jubilee, when all was Safe and Free....[18]

For similar reasons, Mr. Eaton criticises unfavorably _The Fighting Hope_:

One of the best (or the worst) examples of false ethics in such a play is furnished by _The Fighting Hope_, produced by Mr. Belasco in the Autumn of 1908, and acted by Miss Blanche Bates. In this play a man, Granger, has been jailed, his wife and the world believe for another man's crime. The other man, Burton Temple, is president of the bank Granger has been convicted of robbing. A district attorney, hot after men higher up, is about to reopen the case. It begins to look bad for Temple. Mrs. Granger, disguised as a stenographer, goes to his house to secure evidence against him. What she secures is a letter proving that not he, but her husband, was after all the criminal.

Of course this letter is a knockout blow for her. She realizes that the "father of her boys" is a thief, that the man she would send to jail (and with whom you know the dramatist is going to make her finally fall in love) is innocent. Still, in her first shock, her instinct to protect the "father of her boys" persists, and she burns the letter.

So far, so good, but Mrs. Granger is represented as a woman of fine instincts and character. That she should persist in cooler blood in her false and immoral supposition that her boys' name will be protected or their happiness preserved--to say nothing of her own--by the guilt of two parents instead of one, is hard to believe. Yet that is exactly what the play asks you to believe, and it asks you to a.s.sume that here is a true dilemma. A babbling old housekeeper, whose chief use in the house seems to be to help the plot along, after the manner of stage servants, tells Mrs. Granger that she must not atone for her act by giving honest testimony in court, that of course she must let an innocent man go to jail, to "save her boys' name."

It would be much more sensible should Mrs. Granger here strike the immoral old lady, instead of saving her blows for her cur of a husband, in the last act, who, after all, was the "father of her boys." But she listens to her. She appears actually in doubt not only as to which course she will pursue, but which she should pursue. She is intended by the dramatist as a pitiable object because on the one hand she feels it right to save an innocent man (whom she has begun to love), and on the other feels it her duty to save her sons' happiness by building their future on a structure of lies and deceit. And she reaches a solution, not by reasoning the tangle out, not by any real thought for her boys, their general moral welfare, not by any attention to principles, but simply by discovering that her husband has been s.e.xually unfaithful to her. Further, he becomes a cad and charges her with infidelity. Then she springs upon him and beats him with her fists, which is not the most effective way of convincing an audience that she was a woman capable of being torn by moral problems.

Of course as the play is written, there is no moral problem. The morality is all of the theatre. It belongs to that strange world behind the proscenium, wherein we gaze, and gazing sometimes utter chatter about "strong situations," "stirring climaxes," and the like, as people hypnotized. There might have been a moral problem if Mrs.

Granger, before she discovered her husband's guilt, had been forced to fight a rising tide of pa.s.sion for Temple in her own heart. There might have been a moral problem after the discovery and her first hasty, but natural, destruction of the letter, if she had felt that her desire to save Temple was prompted by a pa.s.sion still illicit, rather than by justice. But no such real problems were presented. The lady babbles eternally of "saving her boys' good name," while you are supposed to weep for her plight. Unless you have checked your sense of reality in the cloak room, you scorn her perceptions and despise her standards. How much finer had she continued to love her husband! But he, after all, was only the "father of her boys."[19]

It is insufficiently motivated characterization which Mr. Eaton censures in _The n.i.g.g.e.r_:

Obviously, the emotional interest in this play is--or should be, rather--in the tragedy of the proud, ambitious Morrow, who wakes suddenly to find himself a "n.i.g.g.e.r," an exile from his home, and hopes, from his sweetheart and his dreams. Yet, as Mr. Sheldon has written it, and as it was played by Mr. Guy Bates Post in the part of Morrow, and by the other actors, the play is most poignant in its moments of sheer theatrical appeal, almost of melodrama, such as the suspense of the cross-examination of the old mammy and her cry of revelation, or the pursuit of the fugitive in act one. Between his interest in the suspense of his story and in the elucidation of the broader aspects of the negro question in the South, Mr. Sheldon neglected too much his chief figure, as a human being. Unless the figures live and suffer for the audience, unless their personal fate is followed, their minds and hearts felt as real, the naturalistic drama of contemporary life can have but little value, after all. That is what makes its technique so difficult and so baffling. From the moment when Morrow learned of his birth, he became a rather nebulous figure, not suffering so much as listening to theories which were only said by the dramatist to have altered his character and point of view.[20]

Perhaps it would be more strictly accurate to say that the comment on _The n.i.g.g.e.r_ points to inadequate treatment of character changing as the play progresses. The favorite place of many so-called dramatists for a change of character is in their vast silences between the acts. There, the authors expect us to believe that marked and necessary changes take place. They show us in clear-cut dramatic action the good character before he became bad and after he has become bad, but for proof that the changes took place, we must look off stage in the _entr'acte_. Read _Lady Bountiful_ and note that between the last and the next to the last acts large changes have taken place in the main characters. _Iris_ would be a far greater play than it is could we have seen how its central figure pa.s.ses from the taking of the check book to the state of mind which makes her accept Maldonado's apartment. Contrast with these plays the thoroughly motivated change in the Sergeant of _The Rising of the Moon_ or of Nora in _A Doll's House_.

Where American plays too frequently break down is in what may be called the logic of character. Even when actions have been properly motivated up to the last act or scene, this is handled in such a way as rather to please the audience than to grow inevitably out of what has preceded.

Rumor has it that when _Secret Service_ was produced in one of the central cities of New York State, the hero at the end chose his country rather than the girl. The public, with that fine disregard in the theatre for the values it places on action outside, disapproved.

Promptly, the ending was so changed that the two lovers could be started on that sure road to happiness ever after which all men know an engagement is--upon the stage. In a play such as _Secret Service_, planned primarily to entertain, such a s.h.i.+ft may be pardonable, but even in such a case it must be done with skill if it is not to jar. _The Two Gentlemen of Verona_ in some fifty lines at its close shows Proteus madly in love with Silvia, and Valentine longing for her also; Valentine threatening the life of Proteus when he discovers the latter's perfidy, but forgiving him instantly when Proteus merely asks pardon; and Proteus, when he discovers that the page who has been following him is Julia, turning instantly away from Silvia to her. Here is faulty characterization in two respects: each change is not sufficiently motived; each does not accord with the characterization of Proteus and Valentine in the earlier scenes.