by the rhetorical Elizabethan form came to Shakespeare’s aid.  The modern dramatist is hampered by all sorts of reticences.  He has often to work rather in indirect suggestion than in direct expression.  He has, in short, to submit to a hundred hampering conditions from which Shakespeare was exempt; wherefore, even if he had Shakespeare’s genius, he would find it difficult to produce a very profound effect in a crisis worked out from first to last before the eyes of the audience.

Nevertheless, as before stated, such a crisis has a charm of its own.  There is a peculiar interest in watching the rise and development out of nothing, as it were, of a dramatic complication.  For this class of play (despite the Shakespearean precedents) a quiet opening is often advisable, rather than a strong einleitende Akkord.  “From calm, through storm, to calm,” is its characteristic formula; whether the concluding calm be one of life and serenity or of despair and death.  To my personal taste, one of the keenest forms of theatrical enjoyment is that of seeing the curtain go up on a picture of perfect tranquillity, wondering from what quarter the drama is going to arise, and then watching it gather on the horizon like a cloud no bigger than a man’s hand.  Of this type of opening, An Enemy of the People provides us with a classic example; and among English plays we may cite Mr. Shaw’s Candida, Mr. Barker’s Waste, and Mr. Besier’s Don, in which so sudden and unlooked-for a cyclone swoops down upon the calm of an English vicarage.  An admirable instance of a fantastic type may be found in Prunella, by Messrs. Barker and Housman.[2]

There is much to be said, however, in favour of the opening which does not present an aspect of delusive calm, but shows the atmosphere already charged with electricity.  Compare, for instance, the opening of The Case of Rebellious Susan, by Mr. Henry Arthur Jones, with that of a French play of very similar theme—­Dumas’s Francillon.  In the latter, we see the storm-cloud slowly gathering up on the horizon; in the former, it is already on the point of breaking, right overhead.  Mr. Jones places us at the beginning, where Dumas leaves us at the end, of his first act.  It is true that at the end of Mr. Jones’s act he has not advanced any further than Dumas.  The French author shows his heroine gradually working up to a nervous crisis, the English author introduces his heroine already at the height of her paroxysm, and the act consists of the unavailing efforts of her friends to smooth her down.  The upshot is the same; but in Mr. Jones’s act we are, as the French say, “in full drama” all the time, while in Dumas’s we await the coming of the drama, and only by exerting all his wit, not to say over-exerting it, does he prevent our feeling impatient.  I am not claiming superiority for either method; I merely point to a good example of two different ways of attacking the same problem.