SCENE 4. _Blandinet, Henriette, Leonce, then Joseph [a servant]._
A scene of some fourteen brief speeches follows, when:
(_They start to go out, Tiburce appears._)
(_Blandinet goes over to left with Leonce._)
_Henriette, who sat down after the entrance of Tiburce, and took up her work again, rises immediately on the exit of Blandinet, folding her work._
_Tiburce._ (_Approaching her hesitatingly._) You are not working any longer, Aunt.... It's done already? (_Henriette bows to him frigidly and goes out at right._)
What this French use of the word "scene" leads to, when logically carried out so that even servants entering or leaving the stage create a scene, the following from Act IV of _George Barnwell_, will show:
_Thorowgood._ Order the groom to saddle the swiftest horse, and prepare himself to set out with speed!--An affair of life and death demands his diligence. (_Exit Servant._)
_Thorowgood._ For you, whose behavior on this occasion I have no time to commend as it deserves, I must ingage your farther assistance. Return and observe this Millwood till I come. I have your directions, and will follow you as soon as possible. (_Exit Lucy._)
_Thorowgood._ Trueman, you I am sure would not be idle on this occasion. (_Exit_.)
_Trueman._ He only who is a friend can judge of my distress. (_Exit._)[20]
This French division of scenes is, of course, made for the convenience of the dramatist as he composes and for the reader, not for the actor or the audience. Though somewhat copied in the past by English authors, it is now rejected by most stages. Even French dramatists are breaking away from it. Memory of this French usage, however, still affects popular speech: when we speak of any part of an act in which two or more people are on stage, we are very likely to call it their "scene" no matter whether they have come on in a changed setting or not. Obviously if _scene_ is to correspond with _setting_, we need another word for what in our practice is the same as the older French _scene_.
Not only do necessary changes in setting make proportioning material into acts and within acts difficult, but the time question also raises many problems. It may be troublesome within the act, between the acts, and at the opening of the play. In the final soliloquy of _Faustus_ (p. 35), an hour is supposed to elapse in some thirty lines. Though the Elizabethan, in a case like this, was ready to assist the dramatist, today we are so conscious of time spaces that practically all stage clocks are temporarily out of order, lest they mark too distinctly the discrepancy between pretended and real time.[21] The novelist, in a few lines, tells us of many happenings in a considerable space of time, or writes: "Thus, in idle talk, a full hour passed," and we do not query the supposed passage of time. On the stage, however, when one gossip says to another: "I must be off. I meant to stop a minute, and I have gossiped an hour," auditors who recognize perfectly that the two people have not talked ten minutes are likely to laugh derisively. As has been pointed out,[22] this time difficulty has made it practically impossible to dramatize satisfactorily Stevenson's _The Sire de Maletroit's Door_. The swiftly-moving simple story demands the one-act form, but certain marked changes in feeling, convincing enough when they are said to come after ten or twelve hours of strong emotion, become, when they are seen to occur after twenty minutes to an hour, unconvincing. The central situation may be used, but for success on the stage the story must be so re-told that the marked changes in feeling are convincing even when seen. A dilemma results: lapses of time are handled more easily in three or four acts than in one act; the moment _The Sire de Maletroit's Door_ is re-cast into three or four acts, it needs so much padding as to lose nearly all its original values.