SOURCE: “According to Sarcey,” in The Drama and The Stage, Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1922, pp. 89-93.

In the following excerpt, Lewisohn deplores the kind of mechanical construction of which Thomas's plays, he argues, are a typical example.

It was during the two decades from 1870 to 1890 that Francisque Sarcey, with an amazing vigor and resourcefulness of mind, established the theory of the theatre as a mechanism, a puzzle, and a game. He abstracted his theory from the practice of Scribe and Sardou, stiffened and tightened it beyond the use of his models, and applied it to Sophocles and Shakespeare, Molière and Ibsen. This thing, he declared, was “of the theatre”; that was not. He insisted on the rigor of the game he had invented and reduced the creative art of the drama to a base, mechanic exercise. Since his theory deals exclusively with the effectiveness of one narrow...