ingenuity.  In perfecting the formula of the “well-made play” Scribe may have taken hints from Beaumarchais, especially from the final act of the ‘Marriage of Figaro’; and he had found his profit also in a study of the methods of the melodrama, which had been elaborated in the theaters of the Parisian boulevards at the beginning of the nineteenth century, and which had been imitated already by Hugo and the elder Dumas.  At its best, the “well-made play” was an amusing piece of mechanism, a clockwork toy which had a mere semblance of life, but which did precisely what its maker had constructed it to do.

The piece put together according to this formula was sufficient to itself, with its wheels within wheels; and its maker had no need of style or of poetry, of psychology or of philosophy.  So long as the playwright was content to be a playwright only and did not aspire to be a dramatist with his own views of life, the formula was satisfactory enough; but when the younger Dumas and Augier came on the stage they wanted to put a broader humanity into their plays, and they could make room for this only by simplifying the machinery.  Yet, while they were delivering each his own message, they accepted the model of the “well-made play”; and it is to this that we may ascribe the artificiality we begin to discern even in such masterpieces of dramaturgic craftsmanship as the ‘Gendre de M. Poirier’ and the ‘Demi-monde.’

Upon Ibsen also the influence of Scribe is as obvious as it is upon Augier and Dumas fils.  The earliest of his social dramas, the ’League of Youth’ and the ‘Pillars of Society’ are composed according to the formula of the “well-made play,” with its leisurely exposition, its intricate complications of recoiling intrigue, its ingeniously contrived conclusion.  If we compare the ‘League of Youth’ with Scribe’s ’Bertrand et Raton,’ or with Sardou’s ‘Rabagas’; if we compare the ’Pillars of Society’ with Dumas’s ‘Etrangere,’ or Augier’s ‘Effrontes’ we cannot fail to find a striking similarity of structure.  Set even ’A Doll’s House’ by the side of any one of a dozen contemporary French comedies, and it is easy to understand why Sarcey declared that play to be Parisian in its construction,—­up to the moment of Nora’s revolt and self-assertion, so contrary to the social instinct of the French.  And this explains also why it was that Ibsen, as Herr Lindau has told us, made little or no impression on the German dramatists until after the appearance of ‘Ghosts,’ altho the preceding plays had been acted frequently in the German theaters.  The scenes of these early plays are laid in Norway, it is true, and the characters are all Norwegian, and altho it is easy enough for us, to-day, with our knowledge of what Ibsen has become, to find in them the personal equation of the author, still he was then frankly continuing the French tradition of stage-craft, with a willing acceptance of the formula of the “well-made play” and with no effort after novelty in his dramaturgic method.  Not until he brought forth the ‘Ghosts’ is there any overt assertion of his stalwart and aggressive personality.