[Footnote 4:  In my discussion of this point, I have rather simplified Aristotle’s position.  He appears to make action the essential element in tragedy and not merely the necessary vehicle of character.  “In a play,” he says, “they do not act in order to portray the characters, they include the characters for the sake of the action.  So that it is the action in it, i.e. its Fable or Plot, that is the end and purpose of the tragedy, and the end is everywhere the chief thing.  Besides this, a tragedy is impossible without action, but there may be one without character.” (Bywater’s Translation.) The last sentence is, in my view, the gist of the matter; the preceding sentences greatly overstate the case.  There was a lively controversy on the subject in the Times Literary Supplement in May, 1902.  It arose from a review of Mr. Phillips’s Paolo and Francesco, and Mr. Andrew Lang, Mr. Churton Collins, and Mr. A.B.  Walkley took part in it.]

[Footnote 5:  “Are the first beginnings of imaginative conception directed by the will?  Are they, indeed, conscious at all?  Do they not rather emerge unbidden from the vague limbo of sub-consciousness?” A.B.  Walkley, Drama and Life, p. 85.]

[Footnote 6:  Sardou kept a file of about fifty dossiers, each bearing the name of an unwritten play, and containing notes and sketches for it.  Dumas, on the other hand, always finished one play before he began to think of another.  See L’Annee Psychologique, 1894, pp. 67, 76.]

[Footnote 7:  “My experience is,” a dramatist writes to me, “that you never deliberately choose a theme.  You lie awake, or you go walking, and suddenly there flashes into your mind a contrast, a piece of spiritual irony, an old incident carrying some general significance.  Round this your mind broods, and there is the germ of your play.”  Again be writes:  “It is not advisable for a playwright to start out at all unless he has so felt or seen something, that he feels, as it matures in his mind, that he must express it, and in dramatic form.”]

CHAPTER III

DRAMATIC AND UNDRAMATIC

It may be well, at this point, to consider for a little what we mean when we use the term “dramatic.”  We shall probably not arrive at any definition which can be applied as an infallible touchstone to distinguish the dramatic from the undramatic.  Perhaps, indeed, the upshot may rather be to place the student on his guard against troubling too much about the formal definitions of critical theorists.

The orthodox opinion of the present time is that which is generally associated with the name of the late Ferdinand Brunetiere.  “The theatre in general,” said that critic, “is nothing but the place for the development of the human will, attacking the obstacles opposed to it by destiny, fortune, or circumstances.”  And again:  “Drama is a representation of the will of man in conflict with the mysterious powers or natural forces which limit and belittle us; it is one of us thrown living upon the stage, there to struggle against fatality, against social law, against one of his fellow-mortals, against himself, if need be, against the ambitions, the interests, the prejudices, the folly, the malevolence of those who surround him."[1]