The question whether a legato or a staccato opening be the more desirable must be decided in accordance with the nature and opportunities of each theme.  The only rule that can be stated is that, when the attention of the audience is required for an exposition of any length, some attempt ought to be made to awaken in advance their general interest in the theme and characters.  It is dangerous to plunge straight into narrative, or unemotional discussion, without having first made the audience actively desire the information to be conveyed to them.  Especially is it essential that the audience should know clearly who are the subjects of the discussion or narrative—­that they should not be mere names to them.  It is a grave flaw in the construction of Mr. Granville Barker’s otherwise admirable play Waste, that it should open with a long discussion, by people whom we scarcely know, of other people whom we do not know at all, whose names we may or may not have noted on the playbill.

Trebell, Lord Charles Cantelupe, and Blackborough ought certainly to have been presented to us in the flesh, however briefly and summarily, before we were asked to interest ourselves in their characters and the political situation arising from them.

There is, however, one limitation to this principle.  A great effect is sometimes attained by retarding the entrance of a single leading figure for a whole act, or even two, while he is so constantly talked about as to beget in the audience a vivid desire to make his personal acquaintance.  Thus Moliere’s Tartufe does not come on the stage until the third act of the comedy which bears his name.  Ibsen’s John Gabriel Borkman is unseen until the second act, though (through his wife’s ears) we have already heard him pacing up and down his room like a wolf in his cage.  Dubedat, in The Doctor’s Dilemma, is not revealed to us in the flesh until the second act.  But for this device to be successful, it is essential that only one leading character[5] should remain unseen, on whom the attention of the audience may, by that very fact, be riveted.  In Waste, for instance, all would have been well had it suited Mr. Barker’s purpose to leave Trebell invisible till the second act, while all the characters in the first act, clearly presented to us, canvassed him from their various points of view.  Keen expectancy, in short, is the most desirable frame of mind in which an audience can be placed, so long as the expectancy be not ultimately disappointed.  But there is no less desirable mental attitude than that of straining after gleams of guidance in an expository twilight.