construction; and it is to the experimental application of these laws to
a particular play that I ask your attention. The learned professors of
Harvard University know much more about them than I do, so far as a
study of dramatic literature, from the outside, can give them that
knowledge; and the great modern authorities on the subject--Hallam,
Lessing, Schlegel and many others--are open to the students of Harvard
in her library; or, rather, shall I say, they lie closed on its shelves.
But I invite you today to step into a little dramatic workshop, instead
of a scientific library; and to see an humble workman in the craft,
trying, with repeated experiments--not to elucidate the laws of dramatic
construction, but to obey them, exactly as an inventor (deficient, it
may be, in all scientific knowledge) tries to apply the general laws of
mechanics to the immediate necessities of the machine he is working out
in his mind. The moment a professor of chemistry has expressed a
scientific truth, he must illustrate it at once by an experiment, or the
truth will evaporate. An immense amount of scientific truth is
constantly evaporating, for want of practical application; the air above
every university in the world is charged with it. But what are the laws
of dramatic construction? No one man knows much about them. As I have
already reminded you, they bear about the same relation to human
character and human sympathies as the laws of nature bear to the
material universe. When all the mysteries of humanity have been solved,
the laws of dramatic construction can be codified and clearly explained;
not until then. But every scientific man can tell you a little about
nature, and every dramatist can tell you a little about dramatic truth.
A few general principles have been discovered by experiment and
discussion. These few principles can be brought to your attention. But
after you have learned all that has yet been learned by others, the
field of humanity will still lie before you, as the field of nature lies
before the scientist, with millions of times more to be discovered, by