skill.  Even the most unsophisticated audience realizes in some measure that the playwright is an artist presenting a picture of life under such-and-such assumptions and limitations, and appraises his skill by its own vague and instinctive standards.  As our culture increases, we more and more consistently adopt this attitude, and take pleasure in a playwright’s marshalling of material in proportion to its absolute skill, even if that skill no longer produces its direct and pristine effect upon us.  In many cases, indeed, our pleasure consists of a delicate blending of surprise with realized anticipation.  We foresaw, and are pleased to recognize, the art of the whole achievement, while details which had grown dim to us give us each its little thrill of fresh admiration.  Regarded in this aspect, a great play is like a great piece of music:  we can hear it again and again with ever-new realization of its subtle beauties, its complex harmonies, and with unfailing interest in the merits and demerits of each particular rendering.

But we must look deeper than this if we would fully understand the true nature of dramatic interest.  The last paragraph has brought us to the verge of the inmost secret, but we have yet to take the final step.  We have yet to realize that, in truly great drama, the foreknowledge possessed by the audience is not a disadvantage with certain incidental mitigations and compensations, but is the source of the highest pleasure which the theatre is capable of affording us.  In order to illustrate my meaning, I propose to analyse a particular scene, not, certainly, among the loftiest in dramatic literature, but particularly suited to my purpose, inasmuch as it is familiar to every one, and at the same time full of the essential qualities of drama.  I mean the Screen Scene in The School for Scandal.

In her “English Men of Letters” volume on Sheridan, Mrs. Oliphant discusses this scene.  Speaking in particular of the moment at which the screen is overturned, revealing Lady Teazle behind it, she says—­

  “It would no doubt have been higher art could the dramatist have
  deceived his audience as well as the personages of the play, and
  made us also parties in the surprise of the discovery.”

There could scarcely be a completer reversal of the truth than this “hopeless comment,” as Professor Brander Matthews has justly called it.  The whole effect of the long and highly-elaborated scene depends upon our knowledge that Lady Teazle is behind the screen.  Had the audience either not known that there was anybody there, or supposed it to be the “little French milliner,” where would have been the breathless interest which has held us through a whole series of preceding scenes?  When Sir Peter reveals to Joseph his generous intentions towards his wife, the point lies in the fact that Lady Teazle overhears; and this is doubly the case when he alludes to Joseph as a suitor for the hand