To return to our immediate topic, the poet who essays dramatic composition on mere abstract impulse, because other poets have done so, or because he is told that it pays, is only too likely to produce willy-nilly a “closet drama.”  Let him beware of saying to himself, “I will gird up my loins and write a play.  Shall it be a Phaedra, or a Semiramis, or a Sappho, or a Cleopatra?  A Julian, or an Attila, or a Savanarola, or a Cromwell?” A drama conceived in this reach-me-down fashion will scarcely have the breath of life in it.  If, on the other hand, in the course of his legendary, romantic, or historical reading, some character should take hold upon his imagination and demand to be interpreted, or some episode should, as it were, startle him by putting on vivid dramatic form before his mind’s eye, then let him by all means yield to the inspiration, and try to mould the theme into a drama.  The real labour of creation will still lie before him; but he may face it with the hope of producing a live play, not a long-drawn rhetorical anachronism, whether of the rotund or of the spasmodic type.

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[Footnote 1:  For instance, Il ne faut jurer de rien.  Il faut qu’une porte soit ouverte ou fermee.  Un bienfait n’est jamais perdu. There is also a large class of pieces of which the title, though not itself a proverb, makes direct allusion to some fable or proverbial saying:  for example, Les Brebis de Panurge, La Chasse aux Corbeaux, La Cigale chez les Fourmis.]

[Footnote 2:  I learn, on the best authority, that I am wrong, in point of fact, as to the origin of Strife.  The play arose in Mr. Galsworthy’s mind from his actually having seen in conflict the two men who were the prototypes of Anthony and Roberts, and thus noted the waste and inefficacy arising from the clash of strong characters unaccompanied by balance.  It was accident that led him to place the two men in an environment of capital and labour.  In reality, both of them were, if not capitalists, at any rate on the side of capital.  This interesting correction of fact does not invalidate the theory above stated.]

[Footnote 3:  Mr. Henry Arthur Jones writes to me:  “Sometimes I start with a scene only, sometimes with a complete idea.  Sometimes a play splits into two plays, sometimes two or three ideas combine into a concrete whole.  Always the final play is altered out of all knowledge from its first idea.”  An interesting account of the way in which two very different plays by M. de Curel:  L’Envers d’une Sainte and L’Invitee,—­grew out of one and the same initial idea, may be found in L’Annee Psychologique, 1894, p. 121.]