But between 1870 and 1920 there was a startling change; the drama made a new departure; and this is the third reason why the Old Comedies have been cast out of our twentieth century theaters. The new departure was the result of two influences, working simultaneously. One of these influences was internal; it was the rapid advance of the so-called realistic movement, of which Balzac was the pioneer in the novel and of which the younger Dumas was the pioneer in the play. It is easy for us to see now that Balzac and Dumas were both of them on occasion ultra-romanticist; but none the less were they more realistic than their immediate predecessors had been. They tried to present life as they saw it with their own eyes, animated by an unquenchable desire to deal with it frankly and honestly. Balzac spent himself in the effort to be exact and to relate all his myriad characters to the background before which each of them had posed for him; and Dumas was almost as strenuous in his demand for veracity. The other influence was external; it was the gradual modification of the ground-plan of the playhouse, a modification which resulted at last in the picture-frame stage to which we are now accustomed and to which all the plays of this century are necessarily adjusted. In size and in shape the theater for which Reade and Taylor composed ‘Masks and Faces’ was very like the theater for which Sheridan had composed the ‘School for Scandal,’ three-quarters of a century earlier; and it was very unlike the theater for which Sir Arthur Pinero composed ‘Mid-Channel,’ nearly three-quarters of a century after. The theater of Reade and Taylor, and of Sheridan also, was a large building with a stage which projected in a curve into the auditorium, so that the proscenium boxes were in the rear of the footlights. This stage was only dimly lighted,—in Sheridan’s time with oil-lamps and in Reade and Taylor’s with gas-jets. The curve into the orchestra, far beyond the curtain, was known as the apron; and the most significant episodes of the play had to be acted out on this apron, remote from the scenery, because it was only when he was close to the footlights that the changing expression on the performer’s face could be seen by the spectators. As the actor on the stage was in intimate association with the audience, the playwrights did not hesitate to give him confidential asides and explanatory soliloquies to be delivered directly at the neighborly spectators; and they also provided him with the lofty rhetoric and the artfully articulated set speeches not inappropriate to a platform orator.