of a mot de situation by carefully calculated repetition. And the trick of the catchword, mechanical as it is, can be varied adroitly. In "Lady Windermere's Fan," for example, a young girl, whom we see taking part in the general conversation, and after a while wooed and finally engaged to be married, is never heard to say anything except "Yes, mamma.

As for the mots de caractère, there is no need to say much, for examples will spring swiftly to the minds of all lovers of Molière and of Shakspere. Falstaff abounds in them: "I think the devil will not have me damned, lest the oil that is in me should set hell on fire," which is a mot d'esprit as well as a mot de caractère. Indeed, it would not be difficult to pick speeches out of Falstaff's which combine the merits of the mot d'esprit, the mot de situation, and the mot de caractère. And the characteristics of all three types are united also in the speech of Sir Peter to his wife in one of the famous quarrel scenes of the "School for Scandal,” when Lady Teazle says: "I should think you would like to have your wife thought a woman of taste"; and the husband explosively retorts: "Taste! Zounds! madam, you had no taste when you married me!"

CHAPTER VII

TRADITIONS AND CONVENTIONS

Tragedy or comedy, every stage-play is, in a certain sense, only a tissue of conventions. It is a convention to compact into a few hours of time the whole drama of an existence or the duration of the catastrophe which historically brought it to an end; it is a convention to lend to the persons of this play the language of verse or even that of a prose which is generally neither their maternal tongue nor the speech of their condition. -F. BRUNETIÈRE, Histoire de la littérature française classique.

I

As the dramatist writes for the theater of his own time, he begins always by accepting the theatrical traditions which he finds established, and as he seeks to interest the spectators, he has no hesitation in utilizing the conventions which he finds in favor with his audiences. Art exists only when the artist in his search for truth is allowed to depart from the mere facts of life. Painting "steals but a glance of time," and represents as motionless that which we know to be vibrating with movement. Sculpture is not only motionless, it is also monochrome; and the sculptor transmutes into the uniformity of marble or bronze the varied hues of the human figure and sometimes even the variegated tints of customary costume. To deny to the painter or to the sculptor the privilege of thus ignoring the accidental facts of life, is to refuse him the right to delight us with his work. Strictly speaking, of course, the immobility of a picture or of a statue is not "natural"; but unless

we grant at once this departure from nature, we deny ourselves the enjoyment of painting and of sculpture. Underlying every one of the arts, there is a kindred departure from " nature," which we must tolerate before we can give ourselves up to the pleasure which that art offers us. Even in the primitive ballad, we find the characters talking in rime, which was never the practice of mortal man. But we like rime, in its proper place, and we gladly allow the lyrist to assume that he is setting before us beings who are wont to express themselves in rime as well as in meter.

A convention is thus seen to be a denial of the actual fact, known to us all, a denial which we permit for our own profit. In most of the arts, we have accepted these necessary conventions so completely that we are wholly unconscious that they authorize the artist to be “unnatural.” We are so constituted that what is familiar tends to be received as right and proper - in a word, as rational. But what is familiar to us is not necessarily familiar to others; and the American Indians, when they first saw a portrait in profile, used to ask where the other side of the face was, a question which would never occur to any of us, accustomed as we are to frequent the picture galleries. Indeed, we are so familiar with the art of the draftsman that we recognize a portrait in black ink on white paper, or in white chalk on a blackboard, although we have none of us either a black or a white line around our faces.

The conventions which underlie each of the arts are permanent, for without them the art could not exist. They are tacit agreements between the artist and the public that if he shall be authorized to ignore certain of the mere facts, he will do his best to present the truth

as he sees it. A convention is an implied contract between two parties; and neither party has a right to violate the conditions of the treaty. It is the convention of opera, for instance, that there exists a race of human beings, whose natural speech is song; and the operagoer has no right, therefore, to object to the deathsong of Tristan on the ground that a dying man would not have the physical strength to sing for half an hour on his death-bed. It is the refusal of Tolstoy to abide by this implicit contract which invalidates his contemptuous attack on the opera. So the convention which underlies pantomime is that there exists a race of human beings, whose natural speech is gesture, and who are able to employ it to express all those emotions which the rest of us would translate into spoken words. To be willing to accept this contract is a condition precedent to our enjoyment of pantomime. We may, if we choose, refuse to be parties to this agreement; but then there is nothing for us to do but to keep out of the theater whenever a pantomime is represented, as Tolstoy should have kept away when an opera was performed.

Besides these permanent conventions which are the basis of each of the several arts, we can discern others which are temporary and accidental, accepted in only certain places and only for certain periods, but not prerequisite to the existence of the art. For example, in the wall-paintings of the royal tombs of Egypt, men are depicted in ruddy brown and women in pale yellow, while the Pharaoh is always very much larger in proportion than are his subjects. So in the Pompeian pictures of mythological themes, the less important figures are painted upon a smaller scale. Tem

porary conventions of this sort are due sometimes to special conditions. A sculptor who intends to reproduce his clay model in bronze can rely upon the firm supports to be concealed inside that metal; but if he expects to make a statue of marble he has to introduce something, a falling drapery or an arbitrary column, which will add strength to the ankles, where the marble would be most fragile. There are even Roman sculptures, in which the body of a horse is frankly sustained by a wholly impossible trunk of a tree projecting up from the ground into the belly of the animal.

II

The drama, being an art, has its necessary conventions, like all the other arts; and it has also its temporary and accidental conventions, often due to special circumstances of a particular theater. The necessary conventions of the drama are the result of three conditions of theatrical performance. The first of these is that the dramatist has at his disposal only a limited time two or three hours at the most; and he is therefore compelled to select rigorously the vital elements of his theme and to compact his dialogue out of all resemblance to the ample and repetitious speech of ordinary life. The second and the third are the obligation so to handle his story that everything done on. the stage can be seen by the spectators in the theater, and that everything said on the stage can be heard by the audience. The playgoer wants to have as much as possible packed into the "two hours' traffic of the stage"; he wants also to see everything and to hear everything; and he is therefore ready to grant to the