not made eye-witnesses of a vital incident which the inexpert dramatist has chosen to bring about behind closed doors or during one of the intermissions between the acts. Sarcey insisted that here was a certain test of the born playwrights, of the artists who have an instinctive mastery of the theater, that they have always an unerring intuition as to the meetings which the spectators will expect to see.

Now, what are the essential scenes without which a play will fail to impress the audience? What are these scenes which must be shown in action? Obviously, they are the scenes in which we can see the struggle of contending wills. They are the episodes wherein the dramatic conflict enters on its acutest stage, the interviews wherein there is the actual collision of the several resolves, the clash of volition against volition. They are those wherein "passion must appear upon the scene and utter its last word,” borrow Stevenson's apt phrase. Thus we see that Sarcey's theory links itself logically with Brunetière's. The essential characteristic of the drama is that it deals with the human will; and a play therefore loses interest for the audience when the playwright fails to let us see for ourselves the acute crisis of this clash of contending determinations.

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Brunetière and Sarcey derived their theories from observation of the practice of the great dramatists; and there is no difficulty in adducing illustrations from the masterpieces of the drama in support of these theories. All the great dramatists, ancient and modern, have done instinctively what Brunetière and Sarcey declared to be necessary. In the "Agamemnon," for example, Eschylus lets the murder of his chief character take

place out of sight, for that is only the inevitable consequence of the meeting of Agamemnon and Clytemnestra which he sets before us. In "Macbeth," Shakspere shows us the guilty determination of Macbeth and Lady Macbeth just before the murder of Duncan, which is itself all the more impressive because it is not shown. In "Othello," we are made witnesses of the working of the poison of jealousy in Othello, as this is distilled by Iago.

In "Tartuffe," Molière puts before us the attempt which the sanctimonious rogue makes upon the virtue of Elmire; just as Sheridan sets on the stage the assault of Joseph upon Lady Teazle. In the “Doll's House," Ibsen lets us hear all that Nora has to say after she has discovered the depths of her husband's pettiness. The expert playwright of every age has been aware that spectators are interested only in what they can see for themselves and that they remain but tepidly attentive to what is told them. It is the special privilege of the theater that it can make a visible appeal, with all the impressiveness of the thing actually seen and not merely narrated. And it is only at his peril that the playwright fails to profit by this privilege.

The validity of the principles laid down by Brunetière and by Sarcey we can all of us test for ourselves when we analyze the impression made upon us in the theater. If we have found ourselves languid and bored, we have only to analyze the conduct of the story to discover the cause of our dumb dissatisfaction and to assure ourselves that the playwright failed to present before us the essential scenes of the essential struggle. On the other hand, when a play, tragedy or comedy,

melodrama or farce, has held our attention, a little analysis will reveal to us that this is because the dramatist has made us spectators of the scenes that must be treated to bring out the full value of the clash of contending volitions.

CHAPTER VI

A CHAPTER OF DEFINITIONS

A country may be overrun by an armed force, but it is only conquered by the establishment of fortresses. Words are the fortresses of thought. They enable us to realize our dominion over what we have already overrun in thought; to make every intellectual conquest the basis of operations for others still beyond. - SIR WILLIAM HAMILTON, Lectures in Metaphysics and Logic.

IN the mechanic arts, and in the market-place, the need of new words is met by the swift selection of the term nearest at hand, ill-chosen it may be, but filling an immediate want and thereby at once justifying its use. For example, in the art of electricity, their convenience forced promptly into circulation such a misbegotten word as "cablegram” and such a startling combination as "separately excited boosters." But in the library and in the lecture room, higher standards obtain, and the rough-and-ready methods of the machine shop are unacceptable. As a result of our squeamishness in the manufacture of the new terms needed, and in consequence also of the difficulty in winning general acceptance for those which we do venture to make, the vocabulary of criticism lacks many a word which it ought to have. For instance, there is no satisfactory way of distinguishing the true short-story from the casual narrative which happens to be brief, although it might have been long. And there is no single word for that most precious gift to humanity

known as the sense-of-humor, the negative quality which prevents a man from taking himself too seriously, and which is often lacking even in those who possess abundantly the positive quality known as humor.

In the liberal arts, wherein emotion dominates and individuality is all-important, we cannot hope for the exact vocabulary of the sciences, wherein fact rules. and the personal equation is cautiously eliminated. Horse-power, foot-tons, kilowatts, — these are all terms of precision absolutely independent of the user's own feelings, whereas tragedy, romance, imagination are all words which may call up different ideas in the mind of every individual writer and reader. A writer cannot make sure that any reader will take any one of the words in the same sense that he himself employs it. Professor Gummere, tracing the history of the popular ballad, had to devote many of his early pages to the definition of the type itself, pointing out clearly just what he holds it to be. Probably he would be the first to admit that he has no right to impose all the elements of his definition upon every other historian of literature who shall hereafter consider the subject; and certainly the other historians would be emphatic in denying his claim if he had insisted on it. In like manner, we find the opening chapter of Professor Thorndike's illuminating history of English tragedy occupied by the author's effort to arrive at a definition of the type, as it arose in Greece and as it has developed in Great Britain.

There is an advantage in insisting upon resolute definitions. Even if scientific precision is not to be hoped for, every writer gains by the sturdy struggle to