be produced for one performance, and forgotten.  There is, however, one recent play of this order which holds a certain place in dramatic literature.  I do not know that Mr. Granville Barker was well-advised in printing The Marrying of Anne Leete along with such immeasurably maturer and saner productions as The Voysey Inheritance and Waste; but by doing so he has served my present purpose in providing me with a perfect example of a play as to which we cannot tell whether it possesses plausibility of the third degree, so absolutely does it lack that plausibility of the second degree which is its indispensable condition precedent.

Francisque Sarcey was fond of insisting that an audience would generally accept without cavil any postulates in reason which an author chose to impose upon it, with regard to events supposed to have occurred before the rise of the curtain; always provided that the consequences deduced from them within the limits of the play were logical, plausible, and entertaining.  The public will swallow a camel, he would maintain, in the past, though they will strain at a gnat in the present.  A classical example of this principle is (once more) the Oedipus Rex, in which several of the initial postulates are wildly improbable:  for instance, that Oedipus should never have inquired into the circumstances of the death of Laius, and that, having been warned by an oracle that he was doomed to marry his mother, he should not have been careful, before marrying any woman, to ascertain that she was younger than himself.  There is at least so much justification for Sarcey’s favourite principle, that we are less apt to scrutinize things merely narrated to us than events which take place before our eyes.  It is simply a special instance of the well-worn

  “Segnius irritant animos demissa per aurem
  Quam quae sunt oculis subjecta fidelibus.”

But the principle is of very limited artistic validity.  No one would nowadays think of justifying a gross improbability in the antecedents of a play by Ibsen or Sir Arthur Pinero, by Mr. Galsworthy or Mr. Granville Barker, on the plea that it occurred outside the frame of the picture.  Such a plea might, indeed, secure a mitigation of sentence, but never a verdict of acquittal.  Sarcey, on the other hand, brought up in the school of the “well-made” play, would rather have held it a feather in the playwright’s cap that he should have known just where, and just how, he might safely outrage probability [2].  The inference is that we now take the dramatist’s art more seriously than did the generation of the Second Empire in France.