Sarcey is mistaken in his application of his pet principle.  Words cannot express our unconcern as to what passes between the heroine and the villain on board the yacht—­nay, more, our gratitude for being spared that painful and threadbare scene of recrimination.  The plot demands, observe, that the villain shall not relent.  We know quite well that he cannot, for if he did the play would fall to pieces.  Why, then, should we expect or demand a sordid squabble which can lead to nothing?  We—­and by “we” I mean the public which relishes such plays—­cannot possibly have any keen appetite for copious re-hashes of such very cold mutton as the appeals of the penitent heroine to the recalcitrant villain.  And the moral seems to be that in this class of play—­the drama, if one may call it so, of foregone character—­the scene a faire is precisely the scene to be omitted.

In plays of a more ambitious class, skill is often shown by the indication, in place of the formal presentment, even of an important scene which the audience may, or might, have expected to witness in full.  We have already noted such a case in The Wild Duck:  Ibsen knew that what we really required to witness was not the actual process of Gregers’s disclosure to Hialmar, but its effects.  A small, but quite noticeable, example of a scene thus rightly left to the imagination occurred in Mr. Somerset Maugham’s first play, A Man of Honour.  In the first act, Jack Halliwell, his wife, and his sister-in-law call upon his friend Basil Kent.  The sister-in-law, Hilda Murray, is a rich widow; and she and Kent presently go out on the balcony together and are lost to view.  Then it appears, in a scene between the Halliwells, that they fully believe that Kent is in love with Mrs. Murray and is now proposing to her.  But when the two re-enter from the balcony, it is evident from their mien that, whatever may have passed between them, they are not affianced lovers; and we presently learn that though Kent is in fact strongly attracted to Mrs. Murray, he considers himself bound in honour to marry a certain Jenny Bush, a Fleet Street barmaid, with whom he has become entangled.  Many playwrights would, so to speak, have dotted the i’s of the situation by giving us the scene between Kent and Mrs. Murray; but Mr. Maugham has done exactly right in leaving us to divine it.  We know all that, at this point, we require to know of the relation between them; to have told us more would have been to anticipate and discount the course of events.

A more striking instance of a scene rightly placed behind the scenes occurs in M. de Curel’s terrible drama Les Fossiles.  I need not go into the singularly unpleasing details of the plot.  Suffice it to say that a very peculiar condition of things exists in the family of the Duc de Chantemelle.  It has been fully discussed in the second act between the Duke and his daughter Claire, who has been induced to accept it for the sake of the family name.