Therefore carefully constructed five-act plays are very rare; and one has to put up with a lot of superfluous nonsense to get to the gist of the matter. Since I have recently read about twenty-five plays, among them one of four hundred pages with seventeen characters, I have been confirmed in certain suspicions about the reason for the lack of good drama. Every beginner seems to me to be able to write one good act; in that one he is true to life, every word is straightforward, and the action is honest. As soon as he embarks on the writing of long plays, every thing becomes labored, contrived, affected, and false. The two-act plays form a genre by themselves, but not a very happy one. It is the head and the tail, with the body missing; it is before and after the catastrophe, usually with a year between. Ordinarily the second act contains the moral lesson: this is how it goes if you do this and that in the first act. Most beautiful in construction are the three-act plays observing the unities of time and place, when the subject is a big one. For example, Ibsen's Ghosts should be compared with Rosmersholm which was found to be far too long. The taste of the period, this headlong, hectic period, seems to move toward the brief and expressive. Tolstoy's painful Power of Darkness at the Théâtre Libre proved incapable of keeping interest alive and even had to fall back on Franco-Russian politics for effect.

A scene, a quart d'heure, seems to be the type of play preferred by modern theatregoers, and it has an old history. For it can name as its origin (yes, why not?) the Greek tragedy which contains a concentrated event in a single act, if we regard the trilogy as three separate plays. But if we do not want to go way back to Paradise, we have in the eighteenth century a gentleman called Carmontelle, who was the first to cultivate on a large scale the genre he named Proverbes Dramatiques, of which he published ten volumes and is supposed to have left a hundred more in manuscript. The genre was later developed by Leclerq, attained its highest perfection in Musset's and Feuillet's well-known masterpieces—and more recently in Henry Becque's La Navette to form the transition to the fully executed one-act play, which may become the formula for the drama to come.

In the proverb one got the gist of the matter, the whole denouement, the battle of the souls, sometimes approaching tragedy in Musset, without having to be bothered by the clanging of arms or processions of supernumeraries. By means of a table and two chairs one could present the most powerful conflicts life has to offer; and in this type of art all the discoveries of modern psychology could, for the first time, be applied in popularized form.


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