certain despatches of vast importance have to be carried by a Hanoverian officer from Moidart to Fort William.  The Jacobites arrange to drug the officer; and, to make assurance doubly sure, in case the drug should fail to act, they post a Highland marksman in a narrow glen to pick him off as he passes.  The drug does act; but his lady-love, to save his military honour, assumes male attire and rides off with the despatches.  We hear her horse’s hoofs go clattering down the road; and then, as the curtain falls, we hear a shot ring out into the night.  This shot is a misleading finger-post.  Nothing comes of it:  we find in the next act that the marksman has missed!  But marksmen, under such circumstances, have no business to miss.  It is a breach of the dramatic proprieties.  We feel that the author has been trifling with us in inflicting on us this purely mechanical and momentary “scare.”  The case would be different if the young lady knew that the marksman was lying in ambush, and determined to run the gantlet.  In that case the incident would be a trait of character; but, unless my memory deceives me, that is not the case.  On the stage, every bullet should have its billet—­not necessarily in the person aimed at, but in the emotions or anticipations of the audience.  This bullet may, indeed, give us a momentary thrill of alarm; but it is dearly bought at the expense of subsequent disillusionment.

We have now to consider the subject of over-preparation, too obtrusive preparation, mountainous preparation leading only to a mouse-like effect.  This is the characteristic error of the so-called “well-made play,” the play of elaborate and ingenious intrigue.  The trouble with the well-made play is that it is almost always, and of necessity, ill-made.  Very rarely does the playwright succeed in weaving a web which is at once intricate, consistent, and clear.  In nineteen cases out of twenty there are glaring flaws that have to be overlooked; or else the pattern is so involved that the mind’s eye cannot follow it, and becomes bewildered and fatigued.  A classical example of both faults may be found in Congreve’s so-called comedy The Double-Dealer.  This is, in fact, a powerful drama, somewhat in the Sardou manner; but Congreve had none of Sardou’s deftness in manipulating an intrigue.  Maskwell is not only a double-dealer, but a triple—­or quadruple-dealer; so that the brain soon grows dizzy in the vortex of his villainies.  The play, it may be noted, was a failure.

There is a quite legitimate pleasure to be found, no doubt, in a complex intrigue which is also perspicuous.  Plays such as Alexandre Dumas’s Mademoiselle de Belle-Isle, or the pseudo-historical dramas of Scribe-Adrienne Lecouvreur, Bertrand et Raton, Un Verre d’Eau, Les Trois Maupin, etc.—­are amusing toys, like those social or military tableaux, the figures of which you can set in motion by dropping a penny in the slot.  But the trick of this sort of “preparation” has long been found out, and even unsophisticated audiences are scarcely to be thrilled by it.  We may accept it as a sound principle, based on common sense and justified by experience, that an audience should never be tempted to exclaim, “What a marvellously clever fellow is this playwright!  How infinitely cleverer than the dramatist who constructs the tragi-comedy of life.”