right.  You come to the third act, and somehow it won’t go at all.  You battle with it for weeks in vain; and then it suddenly occurs to you, ’Why, I see what’s wrong!  It’s that confounded scene where the man finds the will under the sofa!  Out it must come!’ You cut it out, and at once all goes smooth again.  But you have thrown overboard the great effect that first tempted you.”]

[Footnote 6:  The manuscripts of Dumas fils are said to contain, as a rule, about four times as much matter as the printed play! (Parigot:  Genie et Metier, p. 243).  This probably means, however, that he preserved tentative and ultimately rejected scenes, which most playwrights destroy as they go along.]

[Footnote 7:  Lowell points out that this assertion of Heminge and Condell merely shows them to have been unfamiliar with the simple phenomenon known as a fair copy.]

[Footnote 8:  Since writing this I have learnt that my conjecture is correct, at any rate as regards some of M. Hervieu’s plays.]

[Footnote 9:  See Chapters XIII and XVI.]

[Footnote 10:  This view is expressed with great emphasis by Dumas fils in the preface to La Princesse Georges.  “You should not begin your work,” he says, “until you have your concluding scene, movement and speech clear in your mind.  How can you tell what road you ought to take until you know where you are going?” It is perhaps a more apparent than real contradiction of this rule that, until Iris was three parts finished, Sir Arthur Pinero intended the play to end with the throttling of Iris by Maldonado.  The actual end is tantamount to a murder, though Iris is not actually killed.]

[Footnote 11:  See Chapter XVIII.]

[Footnote 12:  See Chapter XX.]

[Footnote 13:  Most of the dramatists whom I have consulted are opposed to the principle of “roughing out” the big scenes first, and then imbedding them, as it were, in their context.  Sir Arthur Pinero goes the length of saying:  “I can never go on to page 2 until I am sure that page 1 is as right as I can make it.  Indeed, when an act is finished, I send it at once to the printers, confident that I shall not have to go back upon it.”  Mr. Alfred Sutro says:  “I write a play straight ahead from beginning to end, taking practically as long over the first act as over the last three.”  And Mr. Granville Barker:  “I always write the beginning of a play first and the end last:  but as to writing ’straight ahead’—­it sounds like what one may be able to do in Heaven.”  But almost all dramatists, I take it, jot down brief passages of dialogue which they may or may not eventually work into the texture of their play.]

[Footnote 14:  One is not surprised to learn that Sardou “did his stage-management as he went along,” and always knew exactly the position of his characters from moment to moment.]

[Footnote 15:  And aurally, it may be added.  Sarcey comments on the impossibility of a scene in Zola’s Pot Bouille in which the so-called “lovers,” Octave Mouret and Blanche, throw open the window of the garret in which they are quarrelling, and hear the servants in the courtyard outside discussing their intrigue.  In order that the comments of the servants might reach the ears of the audience, they had to be shouted in a way (says M. Sarcey) that was fatal to the desired illusion.]