[Footnote 2:  The World, December 20, 1899.]

[Footnote 3:  At the end of the first act of Lady Inger of Ostraat, Ibsen evidently intends to produce a startling effect through the sudden appearance of Olaf Skaktavl in Lady Inger’s hall.  But as he has totally omitted to tell us who the strange man is, the incident has no meaning for us.  In 1855 Ibsen had all his technical lessons yet to learn.]

[Footnote 4:  The fact that Mr. Phillips should have deemed such a foreshadowing necessary shows how instinctively a dramatist feels that the logic of his art requires him to assume that his audience is ignorant of his fable.  In reality, very few members of the first-night audience, or of any other, can have depended on old Angela’s vaticination for the requisite foresight of events.  But this does not prove Angela to be artistically superfluous.]

[Footnote 5:  See pp. 118, 240.]

[Footnote 6:  There is no special harm in this:  the question of exits and entrances and their mechanism is discussed in Chapter XXIII.]

[Footnote 7:  This might be said of the scene of the second act of The Benefit of the Doubt; but here the actual stage-topography is natural enough.  The author, however, is rather over-anxious to emphasize the acoustic relations of the two rooms.]

CHAPTER XIII

THE OBLIGATORY SCENE

I do not know whether it was Francisque Sarcey who invented the phrase scene a faire; but it certainly owes its currency to that valiant champion of the theatrical theatre, if I may so express it.  Note that in this term I intend no disrespect.  My conception of the theatrical theatre may not be exactly the same as M. Sarcey’s; but at all events I share his abhorrence of the untheatrical theatre.

What is the scene a faire?  Sarcey has used the phrase so often, and in so many contexts, that it is impossible to tie him down to any strict definition.  Instead of trying to do so, I will give a typical example of the way in which he usually employs the term.

In Les Fourchambault, by Emile Augier, the first act introduces us to the household of a merchant, of Havre, who has married a wealthy, but extravagant woman, and has a son and daughter who are being gradually corrupted by their mother’s worldliness.  We learn that Fourchambault, senior, has, in his youth, betrayed a young woman who was a governess in his family.  He wanted to marry her, but his relations maligned her character, and he cast her off; nor does he know what has become of her and her child.  In the second act we pass to the house of an energetic and successful young shipowner named Bernard, who lives alone with his mother.  Bernard, as we divine, is secretly devoted to a young lady named Marie Letellier, a guest in the Fourchambault house, to whom young Leopold Fourchambault is paying undesirable attentions.