These five classes of obligatory scenes may be docketed, respectively, as the Logical, the Dramatic, the Structural, the Psychological, and the Historic.  M. Sarcey generally employed the term in one of the first three senses, without clearly distinguishing between them.  It is, indeed, not always easy to determine whether the compulsion (assuming it to exist at all) lies in the very essence of the theme or situation, or only in the author’s manipulation of it.

Was Sarcey right in assuming such a compulsion to be a constant and dominant factor in the playwright’s craft?  I think we shall see reason to believe him right in holding that it frequently arises, but wrong if he went the length of maintaining that there can be no good play without a definite scene a faire—­as eighteenth-century landscape painters are said to have held that no one could be a master of his art till he knew where to place “the brown tree.”  I remember no passage in which Sarcey explicitly lays down so hard and fast a rule, but several in which he seems to take it for granted.[1]

It may be asked whether—­and if so, why—­the theory of the obligatory scene holds good for the dramatist and not for the novelist?  Perhaps it has more application to the novel than is commonly supposed; but in so far as it applies peculiarly to the drama, the reason is pretty clear.  It lies in the strict concentration imposed on the dramatist, and the high mental tension which is, or ought to be, characteristic of the theatrical audience.  The leisurely and comparatively passive novel-reader may never miss a scene which an audience, with its instincts of logic and of economy keenly alert, may feel to be inevitable.  The dramatist is bound to extract from his material the last particle of that particular order of effect which the stage, and the stage alone, can give us.  If he fails to do so, we feel that there has been no adequate justification for setting in motion all the complex mechanism of the theatre.  His play is like a badly-designed engine in which a large part of the potential energy is dissipated to no purpose.  The novelist, with a far wider range of effects at his command, and employing no special mechanism to bring them home to us, is much more free to select and to reject.  He is exempt from the law of rigid economy to which the dramatist must submit.  Far from being bound to do things in the most dramatic way, he often does wisely in rejecting that course, as unsuited to his medium.  Fundamentally, no doubt, the same principle applies to both arts, but with a wholly different stringency in the case of the drama.  “Advisable” in the novelist’s vocabulary is translated by “imperative” in the dramatist’s.  The one is playing a long-drawn game, in which the loss of a trick or two need not prove fatal; the other has staked his all on a single rubber.

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