A play manifestly suggested by a theme of temporary interest will often have a great but no less temporary success.  For instance, though there was a good deal of clever character-drawing in An Englishman’s Home, by Major du Maurier, the theme was so evidently the source and inspiration of the play that it will scarcely bear revival.  In America, where the theme was of no interest, the play failed.

It is possible, no doubt, to name excellent plays in which the theme, in all probability, preceded both the story and the characters in the author’s mind.  Such plays are most of M. Brieux’s; such plays are Mr. Galsworthy’s Strife and Justice.  The French plays, in my judgment, suffer artistically from the obtrusive predominance of the theme—­that is to say, the abstract element—­over the human and concrete factors in the composition.  Mr. Galsworthy’s more delicate and unemphatic art eludes this danger, at any rate in Strife.  We do not remember until all is over that his characters represent classes, and his action is, one might almost say, a sociological symbol.  If, then, the theme does, as a matter of fact, come first in the author’s conception, he will do well either to make it patently and confessedly dominant, as in the proverbe, or to take care that, as in Strife, it be not suffered to make its domination felt, except as an afterthought.[2] No outside force should appear to control the free rhythm of the action.

The theme may sometimes be, not an idea, an abstraction or a principle, but rather an environment, a social phenomenon of one sort or another.  The author’s primary object in such a case is, not to portray any individual character or tell any definite story, but to transfer to the stage an animated picture of some broad aspect or phase of life, without concentrating the interest on any one figure or group.  There are theorists who would, by definition, exclude from the domain of drama any such cinematograph-play, as they would probably call it; but we shall see cause, as we go on, to distrust definitions, especially when they seek to clothe themselves with the authority of laws.  Tableau-plays of the type here in question may even claim classical precedent.  What else is Ben Jonson’s Bartholomew Fair?  What else is Schiller’s Wallensteins Lager?  Amongst more recent plays, Hauptmann’s Die Weber and Gorky’s Nachtasyl are perhaps the best examples of the type.  The drawback of such themes is, not that they do not conform to this or that canon of art, but that it needs an exceptional amount of knowledge and dramaturgic skill to handle them successfully.  It is far easier to tell a story on the stage than to paint a picture, and few playwrights can resist the temptation to foist a story upon their picture, thus marring it by an inharmonious intrusion of melodrama or farce.  This has often been done upon deliberate theory, in the belief that no play can exist, or can attract playgoers, without