cease to persecute her; and if you ask by what right I do so, I reply that I am in fact your elder brother, that I have saved our father from ruin, that I am henceforth the predominant partner in his business, and that, if you do not behave yourself, I shall see that your allowance is withdrawn, and that you have no longer the means to lead an idle and dissolute life.”  This would have been an ungracious but not unnatural way of going about the business.  Had Augier chosen it, we should have had no right to complain on the score of probability; but it would have been evident to the least imaginative that he had left the specifically dramatic opportunities of the scene entirely undeveloped.  Let us now see what he actually did.  Marie Letellier, compromised by Leopold’s conduct, has left the Fourchambault house and taken refuge with Mme. Bernard.  Bernard loves her devotedly, but does not dream that she can see anything in his uncouth personality, and imagines that she loves Leopold.  Accordingly, he determines that Leopold shall marry her, and tells him so.  Leopold scoffs at the idea; Bernard insists; and little by little the conflict rises to a tone of personal altercation.  At last Leopold says something slighting of Mile.  Letellier, and Bernard—­who, be it noted, has begun with no intention of revealing the kinship between them—­loses his self-control and cries, “Ah, there speaks the blood of the man who slandered a woman in order to prevent his son from keeping his word to her.  I recognize in you your grandfather, who was a miserable calumniator.”  “Repeat that word!” says Leopold.  Bernard does so, and the other strikes him across the face with his glove.  For a perceptible interval Bernard struggles with his rage in silence, and then:  “It is well for you,” he cries, “that you are my brother!”

We need not follow the scene in the sentimental turning which it then takes, whereby it comes about, of course, that Bernard, not Leopold, marries Mile.  Letellier.  The point is that Augier has justified Sarcey’s confidence by making the scene thoroughly and specifically dramatic; in other words, by charging it with emotion, and working up the tension to a very high pitch.  And Sarcey was no doubt right in holding that this was what the whole audience instinctively expected, and that they would have been more or less consciously disappointed had the author baulked their expectation.

An instructive example of the failure to “make” a dramatically obligatory scene may be found in Agatha by Mrs. Humphry Ward and Mr. Louis Parker.  Agatha is believed to be the child of Sir Richard and Lady Fancourt; but at a given point she learns that a gentleman whom she has known all her life as “Cousin Ralph” is in reality her father.  She has a middle-aged suitor, Colonel Ford, whom she is very willing to marry; but at the end of the second act she refuses him, because she shrinks from the idea, on the one hand, of concealing the truth from him, on the other hand,