Complexities of kinship are, of course, not the only complexities which should, so far as possible, be avoided.  Every complexity of relation or of antecedent circumstance is in itself a weakness, which, if it cannot be eliminated, must, so to speak, be lived down.  No dramatic critic, I think, can have failed to notice that the good plays are those of which the story can be clearly indicated in ten lines; while it very often takes a column to give even a confused idea of the plot of a bad play.  Here, then, is a preliminary test which may be commended to the would-be playwright, in order to ascertain whether the subject he is contemplating is or is not a good one:  can he state the gist of it in a hundred words or so, like the “argument” of a Boccaccian novella?  The test, of course, is far from being infallible; for a theme may err on the side of over-simplicity or emptiness, no less than on the side of over-complexity.  But it is, at any rate, negatively useful:  if the playwright finds that he cannot make his story comprehensible without a long explanation of an intricate network of facts, he may be pretty sure that he has got hold of a bad theme, or of one that stands sorely in need of simplification.[6]

It is not sufficient, however, that a first act should fulfil Dumas’s requirement by placing the situation clearly before us:  it ought also to carry us some way towards the heart of the drama, or, at the very least, to point distinctly towards that quarter of the horizon where the clouds are gathering up.  In a three-act play this is evidently demanded by the most elementary principles of proportion.  It would be absurd to make one-third of the play merely introductory, and to compress the whole action into the remaining two-thirds.  But even in a four- or five-act play, the interest of the audience ought to be strongly enlisted, and its anticipation headed in a definite direction, before the curtain falls for the first time.  When we find a dramatist of repute neglecting this principle, we may suspect some reason with which art has no concern.  Several of Sardou’s social dramas begin with two acts of more or less smart and entertaining satire or caricature, and only at the end of the second or beginning of the third act (out of five) does the drama proper set in.  What was the reason of this?  Simply that under the system of royalties prevalent in France, it was greatly to the author’s interest that his play should fill the whole evening.  Sardou needed no more than three acts for the development of his drama; to have spread it out thinner would have been to weaken and injure it; wherefore he preferred to occupy an hour or so with clever dramatic journalism, rather than share the evening, and the fees, with another dramatist.  So, at least, I have heard his practice explained; perhaps his own account of the matter may have been that he wanted to paint a broad social picture to serve as a background for his action.