should be seated at their ease.  It is also necessary, for reasons of effectiveness in presentation, that the faces of both parties to the conversation should be kept clearly visible to the audience.  In actual life, the two people would most naturally sit before a fire; but if a fireplace should be set in either the right or the left wall of the stage and two actors should be seated in front of it, the face of one of them would be obscured from the audience.  The producer therefore adopted the expedient of imagining a fireplace in the fourth wall of the room,—­the wall that is supposed to stretch across the stage at the line of the footlights.  A red-glow from the central lamps of the string of footlights was cast up over a brass railing such as usually bounds a hearth, and behind this, far forward in the direct centre of the stage, two chairs were drawn up for the use of the actors.  The right wall showed a window opening on the street, the rear wall a door opening on an entrance hall, and the left wall a door opening on a room adjacent; and in none of these could the fireplace have been logically set.  The unusual device of stage-direction, therefore, contributed to the verisimilitude of the set as well as to the convenience of the action.  The experiment was successful for the purposes of this particular piece; it did not seem to disrupt the attention of the audience; and the question, therefore, is suggested whether it might not, in many other plays, be advantageous to make imaginary use of the invisible fourth wall.

VII

THE FOUR LEADING TYPES OF DRAMA

I. TRAGEDY AND MELODRAMA

Tragedy and melodrama are alike in this,—­that each exhibits a set of characters struggling vainly to avert a predetermined doom; but in this essential point they differ,—­that whereas the characters in melodrama are drifted to disaster in spite of themselves, the characters in tragedy go down to destruction because of themselves.  In tragedy the characters determine and control the plot; in melodrama the plot determines and controls the characters.  The writer of melodrama initially imagines a stirring train of incidents, interesting and exciting in themselves, and afterward invents such characters as will readily accept the destiny that he has foreordained for them.  The writer of tragedy, on the other hand, initially imagines certain characters inherently predestined to destruction because of what they are, and afterward invents such incidents as will reasonably result from what is wrong within them.

It must be recognised at once that each of these is a legitimate method for planning a serious play, and that by following either the one or the other, it is possible to make a truthful representation of life.  For the ruinous events of life itself divide themselves into two classes—­the melodramatic and the tragic—­according as the element of chance or the element of character shows the upper hand in them.  It would be melodramatic for a man to slip by accident into the Whirlpool Rapids and be drowned; but the drowning of Captain Webb in that tossing torrent was tragic, because his ambition for preeminence as a swimmer bore evermore within itself the latent possibility of his failing in an uttermost stupendous effort.