"Segnius irritant animos demissa per aurem Quam quae sunt oculis subjecta fidelibus."
But the principle is of very limited artistic validity. No one would nowadays think of justifying a gross improbability in the antecedents of a play by Ibsen or Sir Arthur Pinero, by Mr. Galsworthy or Mr. Granville Barker, on the plea that it occurred outside the frame of the picture. Such a plea might, indeed, secure a mitigation of sentence, but never a verdict of acquittal. Sarcey, on the other hand, brought up in the school of the "well-made" play, would rather have held it a feather in the playwright's cap that he should have known just where, and just how, he might safely outrage probability [2]. The inference is that we now take the dramatist's art more seriously than did the generation of the Second Empire in France.
This brings us, however, to an important fact, which must by no means be overlooked. There is a large class of plays--or rather, there are several classes of plays, some of them not at all to be despised--the charm of which resides, not in probability, but in ingenious and delightful improbability. I am, of course, not thinking of sheer fantasies, like _A Midsummer Night's Dream_, or _Peter Pan_, or _The Blue Bird_. They may, indeed, possess plausibility of the third order, but plausibility of the second order has no application to them. Its writs do not run on their extramundane plane. The plays which appeal to us in virtue of their pleasant departures from probability are romances, farces, a certain order of light comedies and semi-comic melodramas--in short, the thousand and one plays in which the author, without altogether despising and abjuring truth, makes it on principle subsidiary to delightfulness. Plays of the _Prisoner of Zenda_ type would come under this head: so would Sir Arthur Pinero's farces, _The Magistrate_, _The Schoolmistress_, _Dandy Dick_; so would Mr. Carton's light comedies, _Lord and Lady Algy_, _Wheels within Wheels_, _Lady Huntworth's Experiment_; so would most of Mr. Barrie's comedies; so would Mr. Arnold Bennett's play, _The Honeymoon_. In a previous chapter I have sketched the opening act of Mr. Carton's _Wheels within Wheels_, which is a typical example of this style of work. Its charm lies in a subtle, all-pervading improbability, an infusion of fantasy so delicate that, while at no point can one say, "This is impossible," the total effect is far more entertaining than that of any probable sequence of events in real life. The whole atmosphere of such a play should be impregnated with humour, without reaching that gross supersaturation which we find in the lower order of farce-plays of the type of _Charlie's Aunt_ or _Niobe_.