They
are, so to speak, safer and easier than other forms and methods. But it
is the part of original genius to override the dictates of experience,
and nothing in these pages is designed to discourage original genius
from making the attempt." We have already seen, indeed, that in a
certain type of play--the broad picture of a social phenomenon or
environment--it is preferable that no attempt should be made to depict a
marked crisis. There should be just enough story to afford a plausible
excuse for raising and for lowering the curtain.[7]
Let us not, however, seem to grant too much to the innovators and the
quietists. To say that a drama should be, or tends to be, the
presentation of a crisis in the life of certain characters, is by no
means to insist on a mere arbitrary convention. It is to make at once an
induction from the overwhelming majority of existing dramas, and a
deduction from the nature and inherent conditions of theatrical
presentation. The fact that theatrical conditions often encourage a
violent exaggeration of the characteristically dramatic elements in life
does not make these elements any the less real or any the less
characteristically dramatic.
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