in Defoe’s narrative.  In a Platonic dialogue, in Paradise Lost, in John Gilpin, there is a struggle of will against obstacles; there is none in Hannele, which, nevertheless, is a deeply-moving drama.  Such a struggle is characteristic of all great fiction, from Clarissa Harlowe to The House with the Green Shutters; whereas in many plays the struggle, if there be any at all, is the merest matter of form (for instance, a quite conventional love-story), while the real interest resides in something quite different.

The plain truth seems to be that conflict is one of the most dramatic elements in life, and that many dramas—­perhaps most—­do, as a matter of fact, turn upon strife of one sort or another.  But it is clearly an error to make conflict indispensable to drama, and especially to insist—­as do some of Brunetiere’s followers—­that the conflict must be between will and will.  A stand-up fight between will and will—­such a fight as occurs in, say, the Hippolytus of Euripides, or Racine’s Andromaque, or Moliere’s Tartufe, or Ibsen’s Pretenders, or Dumas’s Francillon, or Sudermann’s Heimat, or Sir Arthur Pinero’s Gay Lord Quex, or Mr. Shaw’s Candida, or Mr. Galsworthy’s Strife—­such a stand-up fight, I say, is no doubt one of the intensest forms of drama.  But it is comparatively rare at any rate as the formula of a whole play.  In individual scenes a conflict of will is frequent enough; but it is, after all, only one among a multitude of equally telling forms of drama.  No one can say that the Balcony Scene in Romeo and Juliet is undramatic, or the “Galeoto fu il libro” scene in Mr. Stephen Phillips’s Paolo and Francesca; yet the point of these scenes is not a clash, but an ecstatic concordance, of wills.  Is the death-scene of Cleopatra undramatic?  Or the Banquet scene in Macbeth?  Or the pastoral act in The Winter’s Tale?  Yet in none of these is there any conflict of wills.  In the whole range of drama there is scarcely a passage which one would call more specifically dramatic than the Screen Scene in The School for Scandal; yet it would be the veriest quibbling to argue that any appreciable part of its effect arises from the clash of will against will.  This whole comedy, indeed, suffices to show the emptiness of the theory.  With a little strain it is possible to bring it within the letter of the formula; but who can pretend that any considerable part of the attraction or interest of the play is due to that possibility?

The champions of the theory, moreover, place it on a metaphysical basis, finding in the will the essence of human personality, and therefore of the art which shows human personality raised to its highest power.  It seems unnecessary, however, to apply to Schopenhauer for an explanation of whatever validity the theory may possess.  For a sufficient account of the matter, we need go no further than the simple psychological