(3) The author himself may have rendered it obligatory by seeming
unmistakably to lead up to it.
(4) It may be required in order to justify some modification of
character or alteration of will, too important to be taken for granted.
(5) It may be imposed by history or legend.
These five classes of obligatory scenes may be docketed, respectively,
as the Logical, the Dramatic, the Structural, the Psychological, and the
Historic. M. Sarcey generally employed the term in one of the first
three senses, without clearly distinguishing between them. It is,
indeed, not always easy to determine whether the compulsion (assuming it
to exist at all) lies in the very essence of the theme or situation, or
only in the author's manipulation of it.
Was Sarcey right in assuming such a compulsion to be a constant and
dominant factor in the playwright's craft? I think we shall see reason
to believe him right in holding that it frequently arises, but wrong if
he went the length of maintaining that there can be no good play without
a definite _scene a faire_--as eighteenth-century landscape painters are
said to have held that no one could be a master of his art till he knew
where to place "the brown tree.
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