a definite and more or less exciting plot.  Thus the late James A. Herne inserted into a charming idyllic picture of rural life, entitled Shore Acres, a melodramatic scene in a lighthouse, which was hopelessly out of key with the rest of the play.  The dramatist who knows any particular phase of life so thoroughly as to be able to transfer its characteristic incidents to the stage, may be advised to defy both critical and managerial prejudice, and give his tableau-play just so much of story as may naturally and inevitably fall within its limits.

One of the most admirable and enthralling scenes I ever saw on any stage was that of the Trafalgar Square suffrage meeting in Miss Elizabeth Robins’s Votes for Women.  Throughout a whole act it held us spellbound, while the story of the play stood still, and we forgot its existence.  It was only within a few minutes of the end, when the story was dragged in neck and crop, that the reality of the thing vanished, and the interest with it.

* * * * *

If an abstract theme be not an advisable starting-point, what is?  A character?  A situation?  Or a story?  On this point it would be absurd to lay down any rule; the more so as, in many cases, a playwright is quite unable to say in what form the germ of a play first floated into his mind.  The suggestion may come from a newspaper paragraph, from an incident seen in the street, from an emotional adventure or a comic misadventure, from a chance word dropped by an acquaintance, or from some flotsam or jetsam of phrase or fable that has drifted from the other end of history.  Often, too, the original germ, whatever it may be, is transformed beyond recognition before a play is done.[3] In the mind of the playwright figs grow from thistles, and a silk purse—­perhaps a Fortunatus’ purse—­may often be made from a sow’s ear.  The whole delicate texture of Ibsen’s Doll’s House was woven from a commonplace story of a woman who forged a cheque in order to redecorate her drawing-room.  Stevenson’s romance of Prince Otto (to take an example from fiction) grew out of a tragedy on the subject of Semiramis!

One thing, however, we may say with tolerable confidence:  whatever may be the germ of a play—­whether it be an anecdote, a situation, or what not—­the play will be of small account as a work of art unless character, at a very early point, enters into and conditions its development.  The story which is independent of character—­which can be carried through by a given number of ready-made puppets—­is essentially a trivial thing.  Unless, at an early stage of the organizing process, character begins to take the upper hand—­unless the playwright finds himself thinking, “Oh, yes, George is just the man to do this,” or, “That is quite foreign to Jane’s temperament”—­he may be pretty sure that it is a piece of mechanism he is putting together, not a drama with flesh and blood in it.  The difference between a live play and a dead one is that in the former the characters control the plot, while in the latter the plot controls the characters.  Which is not to say, of course, that there may not be clever and entertaining plays which are “dead” in this sense, and dull and unattractive plays which are “live.”