lends dignity to dramatic story-telling—­to observe and portray human character.  This is the aim and end of all serious drama; and it will be apt to appear as though, in the following pages, this aim and end were ignored.  In reality it is not so.  If I hold comparatively mechanical questions of pure craftsmanship to be worth discussing, it is because I believe that only by aid of competent craftsmanship can the greatest genius enable his creations to live and breathe upon the stage.  The profoundest insight into human nature and destiny cannot find valid expression through the medium of the theatre without some understanding of the peculiar art of dramatic construction.  Some people are born with such an instinct for this art, that a very little practice renders them masters of it.  Some people are born with a hollow in their cranium where the bump of drama ought to be.  But between these extremes, as I said before, there are many people with moderately developed and cultivable faculty; and it is these who, I trust, may find some profit in the following discussions.[3] Let them not forget, however, that the topics treated of are merely the indispensable rudiments of the art, and are not for a moment to be mistaken for its ultimate and incommunicable secrets.  Beethoven could not have composed the Ninth Symphony without a mastery of harmony and counterpoint; but there are thousands of masters of harmony and counterpoint who could not compose the Ninth Symphony.

The art of theatrical story-telling is necessarily relative to the audience to whom the story is to be told.  One must assume an audience of a certain status and characteristics before one can rationally discuss the best methods of appealing to its intelligence and its sympathies.  The audience I have throughout assumed is drawn from what may be called the ordinary educated public of London and New York.  It is not an ideal or a specially selected audience; but it is somewhat above the average of the theatre-going public, that average being sadly pulled down by the myriad frequenters of musical farce and absolutely worthless melodrama.  It is such an audience as assembles every night at, say, the half-dozen best theatres of each city.  A peculiarly intellectual audience it certainly is not.  I gladly admit that theatrical art owes much, in both countries, to voluntary organizations of intelligent or would-be intelligent[4] playgoers, who have combined to provide themselves with forms of drama which specially interest them, and do not attract the great public.  But I am entirely convinced that the drama renounces its chief privilege and glory when it waives its claim to be a popular art, and is content to address itself to coteries, however “high-browed.”  Shakespeare did not write for a coterie:  yet he produced some works of considerable subtlety and profundity.  Moliere was popular with the ordinary parterre of his day:  yet his plays have endured for over two centuries, and the end of their vitality does not seem