In one of his conversations with Eckermann, Goethe declared that Byron had not known how to meet the charge of levying on the earlier poets.  The German sage asserted that the English bard should have been far bolder in his own defence, and far franker also.  Byron should have said:  “What is there, is mine; and whether I got it from a book or from life, is of no consequence; the only point is, whether I have made a right use of it.”  And then Goethe added that in one of the Waverley novels Scott had appropriated a scene from ‘Egmont’; “and he had a right to do so; and because he did it well, he deserves praise.”  Goethe seemed to think that the privilege of using again what had been invented by another was justified only when the later author improved on the earlier, or at least attained to an equal level.  He noted that Scott had taken Mignon in ‘Wilhelm Meister’ as the model of Fenella in ’Peveril of the Peak’—­“but whether with equal judgment is another question.”

Goethe was wise enough to know that human invention is finite and that the number of possible effects is limited.  He once told Eckermann and Soret that the Italian playwright, Gozzi, had asserted the existence of only thirty-six possible tragic situations, and that Schiller had taken much trouble in trying to prove that there were more, only in the end to find himself unable to gather even so many as Gozzi had collected.  “It is almost impossible, in the present day,” commented Goethe, “to find a situation which is thoroly new.  Only the manner of looking at it can be new, and the art of treating it and representing it.”

Unfortunately, we have not Gozzi’s list of the three dozen situations, nor Schiller’s smaller catalog to compare with it.  Gerard de Nerval—­that strangest figure of a strange period—­considered the matter anew in the fervid days of French romanticism, and decided that there were in reality only twenty-four typical situations available for the theater; but his classification has also failed to come down to us.  However, in the last decade of the nineteenth century an ingenious Frenchman, M. Georges Polti, accepting the number originally proposed by Gozzi, examined the plots of several thousand plays, classified the result of his arduous investigation, and published a little book of two hundred pages on the ‘36 Situations Dramatiques.’

Highly interesting as is M. Polti’s book, there is not a little difficulty in grasping the theory upon which he has assorted his immense collection into exactly three dozen divisions.  The logic of his grouping is not immediately apparent, as it would have been had he taken the passions, for instance, as the several foundations.  His first situation, for example, is that which we find in one of the earliest of Greek plays, the ‘Suppliants.’  M. Polti entitles it ‘To Implore,’ and he indicates varying possible subdivisions:  (A1) Fugitives imploring shelter against their enemies, as in the tragedy of AEschylus, the second act of