There are a few figures in history—­and Napoleon is one of them—­which so thrill the imagination that their mere name can dominate the stage, better, perhaps, than their bodily presence.  In L’Aiglon, by M. Rostand, Napoleon is in fact the hero, though he lies dead in his far-off island, under the Southern Cross.  Another such figure is Abraham Lincoln.  In James Herne’s sadly underrated play, Griffith Davenport, we were always conscious of “Mr. Lincoln” in the background; and the act in which Governor Morton of Indiana brought the President’s instructions to Davenport might fairly be called an obligatory scene, inasmuch as it gave us the requisite sense of personal nearness to the master-spirit, without involving any risk of belittlement through imperfections of representation.  There is a popular melodrama, passing in Palestine under the Romans, throughout the course of which we constantly feel the influence of a strange new prophet, unseen but wonder-working, who, if I remember rightly, is personally presented to us only in a final tableau, wherein he appears riding into Jerusalem amid the hosannas of the multitude.  The execution of Ben Hur is crude and commonplace, but the conception is by no means inartistic.  Historical figures of the highest rank may perhaps be best adumbrated in this fashion, with or without one personal appearance, so brief that there shall be no danger of anti-climax.

The last paragraph reminds us that the accomplished playwright shows his accomplishment quite as much in his recognition and avoidance of the scene a ne pas faire as in his divination of the obligatory scene.  There is always the chance that no one may miss a scene demanded by logic or psychology; but an audience knows too well when it has been bored or distressed by a superfluous, or inconsequent, or wantonly painful scene.

Some twenty years ago, in criticizing a play named Le Maitre d’Armes, M. Sarcey took the authors gravely to task, in the name of “Aristotle and common sense,” for following the modern and reprehensible tendency to present “slices of life” rather than constructed and developed dramas.  Especially he reproached them with deliberately omitting the scene a faire.  A young lady is seduced, he says, and, for the sake of her child, implores her betrayer to keep his promise of marriage.  He renews the promise, without the slightest intention of fulfilling it, and goes on board his yacht in order to make his escape.  She discovers his purpose and follows him on board the yacht.  “What is the scene,” asks M. Sarcey—­here I translate literally—­“which you expect, you, the public?  It is the scene between the abandoned fair one and her seducer.  The author may make it in a hundred ways, but make it he must!” Instead of which, the critic proceeds, we are fobbed off with a storm-scene, a rescue, and other sensational incidents, and hear no word of what passes between the villain and his victim.  Here, I think, M.