become popular throughout Paris within half-an-hour of its having left the composer’s desk, is guilty of a breach of plausibility on this plane.  So, too, if I were to make my hero enter Parliament for the first time, and rise in a single session to be Prime Minister of England—­there would be no absolute impossibility in the feat, but it would be a rather gross improbability of the second order.  On the third plane we come to psychological plausibility, the plausibility of events dependent mainly or entirely on character.  For example—­to cite a much disputed instance—­is it plausible that Nora, in A Doll’s House, should suddenly develop the mastery of dialectics with which she crushes Helmer in the final scene, and should desert her husband and children, slamming the door behind her?

It need scarcely be said that plausibility on the third plane is vastly the most important.  A very austere criticism might even call it the one thing worth consideration.  But, as a matter of fact, when we speak of plausibility, it is almost always the second plane—­the plane of uncharacteristic circumstance—­that we have in mind.  To plausibility of the third order we give a more imposing name—­we call it truth.  We say that Nora’s action is true—­or untrue—­to nature.  We speak of the truth with which the madness of Lear, the malignity of Iago, the race hatred of Shylock, is portrayed.  Truth, in fact, is the term which we use in cases where the tests to be applied are those of introspection, intuition, or knowledge sub-consciously garnered from spiritual experience.  Where the tests are external, and matters of common knowledge or tangible evidence, we speak of plausibility.

It would be a mistake, however, to imagine that because plausibility of the third degree, or truth, is the noblest attribute of drama, it is therefore the one thing needful.  In some forms of drama it is greatly impaired, or absolutely nullified, if plausibility of the second degree, its necessary preliminary, be not carefully secured.  In the case above imagined, for instance, of the young politician who should become Prime Minister immediately on entering Parliament:  it would matter nothing with what profundity of knowledge or subtlety of skill the character was drawn:  we should none the less decline to believe in him.  Some dramatists, as a matter of fact, find it much easier to attain truth of character than plausibility of incident.  Every one who is in the habit of reading manuscript plays, must have come across the would-be playwright who has a good deal of general ability and a considerable power of characterization, but seems to be congenitally deficient in the sense of external reality, so that the one thing he (or she) can by no means do is to invent or conduct an action that shall be in the least like any sequence of events in real life.  It is naturally difficult to give examples, for the plays composed under this curious limitation are apt to remain in manuscript, or to