[Footnote 4:  There is a somewhat similar incident in Clyde Fitch’s play, The Moth and the Flame.]

[Footnote 5:  Les Corbeaux, by Henri Becque, might perhaps be classed as a bankruptcy play, though the point of it is that the Vigneron family is not really bankrupt at all, but is unblushingly fleeced by the partner and the lawyer of the deceased Vigneron, who play into each other’s hands.]

[Footnote 6:  “Dramatic” has recently become one of the most overworked words in the vocabulary of journalism.  It constantly appears, not only in the text of the picturesque reporter, but in head-lines and on bulletin-boards.  When, on July 20, 1911, Mr. Asquith wrote to Mr. Balfour to inform him that the King had guaranteed the creation of peers, should it prove necessary for the passing of the Parliament Bill, one paper published the news under this head-line:  “DRAMATIC ANNOUNCEMENT BY THE PRIME MINISTER,” and the parliamentary correspondent of another paper wrote:  “With dramatic suddenness and swiftness, the Prime Minister hurled his thunderbolt at the wavering Tory party yesterday.”  As a matter of fact, the letter was probably not “hurled” more suddenly or swiftly than the most ordinary invitation to dinner:  nor can its contents have been particularly surprising to any one.  It was probably the conclusiveness, the finality, of the announcement that struck these writers as “dramatic.”  The letter put an end to all dubiety with a “short, sharp shock.”  It was, in fact, crisp.  As a rule, however, “dramatic” is employed by the modern journalist simply as a rather pretentious synonym for the still more hackneyed “startling.”]

[Footnote 7:  As a specimen, and a successful specimen, of this new technic, I may cite Miss Elizabeth Baker’s very interesting play, Chains.  There is absolutely no “story” in it, no complication of incidents, not even any emotional tension worth speaking of.  Another recent play of something the same type, The Way the Money Goes, by Lady Bell, was quite thrilling by comparison.  There we saw a workman’s wife bowed down by a terrible secret which threatened to wreck her whole life—­the secret that she had actually run into debt to the amount of L30.  Her situation was dramatic in the ordinary sense of the word, very much as Nora’s situation is dramatic when she knows that Krogstad’s letter is in Helmer’s hands.  But in Chains there is not even this simple form of excitement and suspense.  A city clerk, oppressed by the deadly monotony and narrowness of his life, thinks of going to Australia—­and doesn’t go:  that is the sum and substance of the action.  Also, by way of underplot, a shopgirl, oppressed by the deadly monotony and narrowness of her life, thinks of escaping from it by marrying a middle-aged widower—­and doesn’t do it.  If any one had told the late Francisque Sarcey, or the late Clement Scott, that a play could be made out of this slender material, which should hold an audience absorbed through four acts, and stir them to real enthusiasm, these eminent critics would have thought him a madman.  Yet Miss Baker has achieved this feat, by the simple process of supplementing competent observation with a fair share of dramatic instinct.]