other actors on the stage; and therefore the method of drawing character by
comment, which is so useful for the novelist, is rarely employed by the
playwright except in the waste moments which precede the first entrance of
his leading figure. The Chorus Lady, in Mr. James Forbes's amusing study of
that name, is drawn chiefly through her way of saying things; but though
this method of delineation is sometimes very effective for an act or two,
it can seldom be sustained without a faltering of interest through a
full-grown four-act play. The novelist's expedient of delineating character
through mental analysis is of course denied the dramatist, especially in
this modern age when the soliloquy (for reasons which will be noted in a
subsequent chapter) is usually frowned upon. Sometimes, in the theatre, a
character may be exhibited chiefly through his personal effect upon the
other people on the stage, and thereby indirectly on the people in the
audience. It was in this way, of course, that Manson was delineated in Mr.
Charles Rann Kennedy's _The Servant in the House_. But the expedient is a
dangerous one for the dramatist to use; because it makes his work
immediately dependent on the actor chosen for the leading role, and may in
many cases render his play impossible of attaining its full effect except
at the hands of a single great performer. In recent years an expedient long
familiar in the novel has been transferred to the service of the
stage,--the expedient, namely, of suggesting the personality of a character
through a visual presentation of his habitual environment. After the
curtain had been raised upon the first act of _The Music Master_, and the
audience had been given time to look about the room which was represented
on the stage, the main traits of the leading character had already been
suggested before his first appearance on the scene. The pictures and
knickknacks on his mantelpiece told us, before we ever saw him, what manner
of man he was. But such subtle means as this can, after all, be used only
to reinforce the one standard method of conveying the sense of character in
drama; and this one method, owing to the conditions under which the