Obligatory scenes of the first type—­those necessitated by the inherent logic of the theme—­can naturally arise only in plays to which a definite theme can be assigned.  If we say that woman’s claim to possess a soul of her own, even in marriage, is the theme of A Doll’s House, then evidently the last great balancing of accounts between Nora and Helmer is an obligatory scene.  It would have been quite possible for Ibsen to have completed the play without any such scene:  he might, for instance, have let Nora fulfil her intention of drowning herself; but in that case his play would have been merely a tragic anecdote with the point omitted.  We should have felt vague intimations of a general idea hovering in the air, but it would have remained undefined and undeveloped.  As we review, however, the series of Ibsen’s plays, and notice how difficult it is to point to any individual scene and say, “This was clearly the scene a faire,” we feel that, though the phrase may express a useful idea in a conveniently brief form, there is no possibility of making the presence or absence of a scene a faire a general test of dramatic merit.  In The Wild Duck, who would not say that, theoretically, the scene in which Gregers opens Hialmar’s eyes to the true history of his marriage was obligatory in the highest degree?  Yet Ibsen, as a matter of fact, does not present it to us:  he sends the two men off for “a long walk” together:  and who does not feel that this is a stroke of consummate art?  In Rosmersholm, as we know, he has been accused of neglecting, not merely the scene, but the play, a faire; but who will now maintain that accusation?  In John Gabriel Borhman, if we define the theme as the clash of two devouring egoisms, Ibsen has, in the third act, given us the obligatory scene; but he has done it, unfortunately, with an enfeebled hand; whereas the first and second acts, though largely expository, and even (in the Foldal scene) episodic, rank with his greatest achievements.

For abundant examples of scenes rendered obligatory by the logic of the theme, we have only to turn to the works of those remorseless dialecticians, MM.  Hervieu and Brieux.  In such a play as La Course du Flambeau, there is scarcely a scene that may not be called an obligatory deduction from the thesis duly enunciated, with no small parade of erudition, in the first ten minutes of the play.  It is that, in handing on the vital lampada, as Plato and “le bon poete Lucrece” express it, the love of the parent for the child becomes a devouring mania, to which everything else is sacrificed, while the love of the child for the parent is a tame and essentially selfish emotion, absolutely powerless when it comes into competition with the passions which are concerned with the transmission of the vital flame.  This theorem having been stated, what is the first obligatory scene?  Evidently one in which a mother shall refuse a second marriage, with a man whom she