play is dull and fatiguing to witness, their attention strays away from it and they have time to go back to its arbitrary foundation. And then they rise up in their wrath and denounce the foolishness of the author who dared to suppose that they could ever be interested in anything built upon an absurdity so flagrant.

art

CHAPTER X

THE ANALYSIS OF A PLAY

Back of every art product there is a conception, vaguely or definitely present in the artist's mind. Upon the character of this conception or content depends the significance of the work of art; its formal beauty depends upon the artist's skill to express his thought or feeling in the particular medium he has chosen. Content and form are therefore most intimately related in the artist's personality. He can express nothing through the concrete medium of his particular whether it be a pigment or clay or a harmony of musical sounds or a succession of words unless it has first passed through the lens of his own nature. It is always difficult, and in a certain sense unnatural, to make a sharp separation between the elements of content and form. The artist himself rarely attempts it. He "thinks in color" or feels in terms of musical sound. The finer the work of art, the more indissolubly are the elements fused through the personality of the artist. And yet it is often of the greatest value to the student to attempt this separate analysis, to distinguish what has gone into the work of art from the external form in which it is clothed. - BLISS PERRY, A Study of Prose Fiction.

I

WHEN we have witnessed the performance of a play in the theater, or when we have read it in the library, making the imaginative effort needful to visualize its action, we find ourselves either liking it or disliking it. We have an opinion as to its merits and its demerits; but we may not be able to formulate this opinion to our satisfaction or to bring forward the several reasons which have led us to it. We may wish to analyze the emotions we have experienced and to find justification for the faith that is in us. If the play pleased us, we

want to know why it pleased us. We may even go further and desire also to know whether our pleasure was legitimate or not. What was the source of it? Is the play really as good as it seemed to us? We may have felt that here was a drama that we ought to like, and yet that it did not interest us; and in that case, was the fault in the play or in us? On the other hand, we may have enjoyed it, having all the while a sneaking suspicion that it was not really worthy of our approval. In short, what are the proper tests to apply that we may each of us be assured of our own judgment?

The beginning of wisdom is honesty with ourselves. Our own impressions must always be the basis of our opinions, or we are certain to be insincere and to weaken our grasp on reality. First of all, did this play interest us? If so, why? If it did not, why did it not? Interest is something that can easily be gaged. If the play was actually seen in the theater, when did our attention begin to flag? If it was only read in the library, when did we fail to visualize the action and begin to skip as though in haste to be done with it? Just here, use can be made of a device which may seem a little pedantic at first sight, but which is in fact practical and helpful. We can make a diagram of the interest aroused in us as the play progressed, drawing a single line which shall rise with our increased attention, which shall run on a level when our attention slackens, and which shall droop when we admit ourselves to be bored.

This diagram of interest will mark and measure the path we have traveled. It is a visible record of our impressions, and it gives us a tangible foundation for further inquiry. It is wholly distinct from the artificial

pyramid which Freytag exploited in his "Technic of the Drama"; and it has no relation to the needlessly complicated figures which have been devised to elucidate (or to obscure) Shakspere's plot-making. It is simplicity itself, and yet it serves to bring before us graphically the immediate effect of the play upon ourselves.

As the dramatist has carefully to attend to his exposition in the first act, to introduce his several characters, to inform us as to their past lives and as to their present desires, and, in a word, to get his machinery started, we need not be surprised if the line of interest is almost level in the earlier scenes. But it ought to begin to rise before the end of the first act. And it ought not to droop again until toward the end of the last act, flattening a little perhaps when the spectators are at last able to foresee just how the story is going to turn out. In a wellmade modern play in three acts, the line of interest, broken into three pieces, is not likely to vary greatly from this:

DIAGRAM A.

This diagram would represent exactly the increasing interest the average spectator would take in such a play, if he had kept his finger on his pulse, so to speak. A similar but unbroken line would serve to indicate the interest taken by the audience at the performance of a great Greek tragedy, except that it would rise more sharply and that it might fall off more emphatically

toward the end, since the delicate artistic perception of the Greeks led them to relax the tension after the culminating moment. Here is the diagram of interest of the "Edipus the King" of Sophocles:

DIAGRAM B.

"Whether it can be artistic," so Professor Bradley has declared, "to end any serious scene whatever at the point of greatest tension seems doubtful, but surely it is little short of barbarous to drop the curtain on the last dying words, it may be, the last convulsion, of a tragic hero. In tragedy, the Elizabethan practice, like the Greek, was to lower the pitch of emotion from this point by a few quiet words . . . and so to restore the audience to common life, 'in calm of mind, all passion spent.""

or,

There is a modern play, akin to this masterpiece of the Greek drama, in its somber gloom and in its inexorable inevitability. This is Ibsen's "Ghosts"; but the Scandinavian playwright refused to relax the tension at the end. He even prolonged it beyond the limits of the play, leaving us wondering what happened after the final curtain fell. So we may represent its line of interest thus:

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DIAGRAM C.