Hugo’s formula is now fallen out of mode, yet his plays have accomplished their threescore years and ten.  It was Hugo who declared that there are three classes of theater-goers whom the playwright must please:  the crowd that demands action, the women who wish for emotion, and the thinkers who seek for character.  And it was Hugo’s early rival as a play-maker, the elder Dumas, who asserted that the only rules he knew for success upon the stage were to make the first act clear, the last act short, and all the acts interesting.  A dramatist who shall accept the formula which has been found satisfactory by his immediate contemporaries, and who shall succeed in making all the acts of his play interesting alike to the crowd, to the women, and to the thinkers, will be very likely to achieve literary merit without striving for it specifically.

For we cannot repeat too often that in the drama “literary merit” is a by-product,—­as it is in oratory also.  And we cannot assert too emphatically that the drama has an independent existence—­that it does not lie wholly within the domain of literature.  “The art of the drama,” so M. Emile Faguet has assured us, “touches all the other arts and includes them.”  The drama is not intended primarily to be read in the study; it is devised to be performed on the stage by actors before spectators.  It has a right, therefore, to avail itself of the aid of all other arts and to enlist them all in its service.  This is one of the reasons why those who have studied the secrets of this art are inclined to esteem it as the noblest and most powerful of them all.  As M. Faguet has declared, with that sympathetic understanding of the essential principles of the drama which is common enough in France and only too rare elsewhere—­“it is not contradictory to the definition of dramatic art that it can synthesize in space like painting, that it can synthesize in time like poetry, that it can synthesize outside of time and space like music, that it can unite all the arts without forcing them to interfere the one with the other, and, therefore, without taking from any one aught of its force or aught of its dignity; that it can unite them all in a vast, powerful, and harmonious synthesis embracing the whole of life and the whole of art.”

     (1903.)

IBSEN THE PLAYWRIGHT

I

One indisputable service has Ibsen rendered to the drama:  he has revealed again that it may be an incomparable instrument in the hands of a poet-philosopher who wishes to make people think, to awaken them from an ethical lethargy, to shock them into asking questions for which the complacent morality of the moment can provide no adequate answer.  In the final decades of the nineteenth century,—­when the novel was despotic in its overwhelming triumph over all the other forms of literary expression, and when arrogant