[Footnote 8:  If the essence of drama is crisis, it follows that nothing can be more dramatic than a momentous choice which may make or mar both the character and the fortune of the chooser and of others.  There is an element of choice in all action which is, or seems to be, the product of free will; but there is a peculiar crispness of effect when two alternatives are clearly formulated, and the choice is made after a mental struggle, accentuated, perhaps, by impassioned advocacy of the conflicting interests.  Such scenes are Coriolanus, v. 3, the scene between Ellida, Wangel, and the Stranger in the last act of The Lady from the Sea, and the concluding scene of Candida.]

CHAPTER IV

THE ROUTINE OF COMPOSITION

As no two people, probably, ever did, or ever will, pursue the same routine in play-making, it is manifestly impossible to lay down any general rules on the subject.  There are one or two considerations, however, which it may not be wholly superfluous to suggest to beginners.

An invaluable insight into the methods of a master is provided by the scenarios and drafts of plays published in Henrik Ibsen’s Efterladte Skrifter.  The most important of these “fore-works,” as he used to call them, have now been translated under the title of From Ibsen’s Workshop (Scribner), and may be studied with the greatest profit.  Not that the student should mechanically imitate even Ibsen’s routine of composition, which, indeed, varied considerably from play to play.  The great lesson to be learnt from Ibsen’s practice is that the play should be kept fluid or plastic as long as possible, and not suffered to become immutably fixed, either in the author’s mind or on paper, before it has had time to grow and ripen.  Many, if not most, of Ibsen’s greatest individual inspirations came to him as afterthoughts, after the play had reached a point of development at which many authors would have held the process of gestation ended, and the work of art ripe for birth.  Among these inspired afterthoughts may be reckoned Nora’s great line, “Millions of women have done that”—­the most crushing repartee in literature—­Hedvig’s threatened blindness, with all that ensues from it, and Little Eyolf’s crutch, used to such purpose as we have already seen.

This is not to say that the drawing-up of a tentative scenario ought not to be one of the playwright’s first proceedings.  Indeed, if he is able to dispense with a scenario on paper, it can only be because his mind is so clear, and so retentive of its own ideas, as to enable him to carry in his head, always ready for reference, a more or less detailed scheme.  Go-as-you-please composition may be possible for the novelist, perhaps even for the writer of a one-act play, a mere piece of dialogue; but in a dramatic structure of any considerable extent, proportion, balance, and the interconnection of parts are so essential that