by conventional society.  It has dealt with courtesans (La Dame Aux Camelias), demi-mondaines (Le Demi-Monde), erring wives (Frou-Frou), women with a past (The Second Mrs. Tanqueray), free lovers (The Notorious Mrs. Ebbsmith), bastards (Antony; Le Fils Naturel), ex-convicts (John Gabriel Borkman), people with ideas in advance of their time (Ghosts), and a host of other characters that are usually considered dangerous to society.  In order that the dramatic struggle might be tense, the dramatists have been forced to strengthen the cases of their characters so as to suggest that, perhaps, in the special situations cited, the outcasts were right and society was wrong.  Of course it would be impossible to base a play upon the thesis that, in a given conflict between the individual and society, society was indisputably right and the individual indubitably wrong; because the essential element of struggle would be absent.  Our modern dramatists, therefore, have been forced to deal with exceptional outcasts of society,—­outcasts with whom the audience might justly sympathise in their conflict with convention.  The task of finding such justifiable outcasts has of necessity narrowed the subject-matter of the modern drama.  It would be hard, for instance, to make out a good case against society for the robber, the murderer, the anarchist.  But it is comparatively easy to make out a good case for a man and a woman involved in some sexual relation which brings upon them the censure of society but which seems in itself its own excuse for being.  Our modern serious dramatists have been driven, therefore, in the great majority of cases, to deal almost exclusively with problems of sex.

This necessity has pushed them upon dangerous ground.  Man is, after all, a social animal.  The necessity of maintaining the solidarity of the family—­a necessity (as the late John Fiske luminously pointed out) due to the long period of infancy in man—­has forced mankind to adopt certain social laws to regulate the interrelations of men and women.  Any strong attempt to subvert these laws is dangerous not only to that tissue of convention called society but also to the development of the human race.  And here we find our dramatists forced—­first by the spirit of the times, which gives them their theme, and second by the nature of the dramatic art, which demands a special treatment of that theme—­to hold a brief for certain men and women who have shuffled off the coil of those very social laws that man has devised, with his best wisdom, for the preservation of his race.  And the question naturally follows:  Is a drama that does this moral or immoral?