as it were, in suspense.  The audience lets its attention revert to the affairs of real life; and it is quite willing, when the mimic world is once more revealed, to suppose that any reasonable space of time has elapsed while its thoughts were occupied with other matters.  It is much more difficult for it to accept a wholly imaginary lapse of time while its attention is centred on the mimic world.  Some playwrights have of late years adopted the device of dropping their curtain once, or even twice, in the middle of an act, to indicate an interval of a few minutes, or even of an hour—­for instance, of the time between “going in to dinner” and the return of the ladies to the drawing-room.  Sir Arthur Pinero employs this device with good effect in Iris; so does Mr. Granville Barker in Waste, and Mr. Galsworthy in The Silver Box.  It is certainly far preferable to that “ideal” treatment of time which was common in the French drama of the nineteenth century, and survives to this day in plays adapted or imitated from the French.

I remember seeing in London, not very long ago, a one-act play on the subject of Rouget de l’Isle.  In the space of about half-an-hour, he handed the manuscript of the “Marseillaise” to an opera-singer whom he adored, she took it away and sang it at the Opera, it caught the popular ear from that one performance, and the dying Rouget heard it sung by the passing multitude in the streets within about fifteen minutes of the moment when it first left his hands. (The whole piece, I repeat, occupied about half-an-hour; but as a good deal of that time was devoted to preliminaries, not more than fifteen minutes can have elapsed between the time when the cantatrice left Rouget’s garret and the time when all Paris was singing the “Marseillaise.”) This is perhaps an extreme instance of the ideal treatment of time; but one could find numberless cases in the works of Scribe, Labiche, and others, in which the transactions of many hours are represented as occurring within the limits of a single act.  Our modern practice eschews such licenses.  It will often compress into an act of half-an-hour more events than would probably happen in real life in a similar space of time, but not such a train of occurrences as to transcend the limits of possibility.  It must be remembered, however, that the standard of verisimilitude naturally and properly varies with the seriousness of the theme under treatment.  Improbabilities are admissible in light comedy, and still more in farce, which would wreck the fortunes of a drama purporting to present a sober and faithful picture of real life.