Great souls who suffer, either by the hand of Fate, or unjustly through the machinations of their enemies, win our sympathy for their sorrows and our admiration by their noble struggles.  If Fate dooms them, there may be no escape, and still we are content; but if they suffer by man’s design, there must be escape from sorrow and defeat through happiness to triumph—­for, if it were not so, they would not be great.  The heart of man demands that those he loves upon the stage succeed, or fail greatly, because the hero’s dreams are our dreams—­the hero’s life is ours, the hero’s sorrows are our own, and because they are ours, the hero must triumph over his enemies.

4.  The Law of the Drama

Thus, for the very reason that life is a conflict and because man’s heart beats quickest when he faces another man, and leaps highest when he conquers him, the essence of the dramatic is—­conflict.  Voltaire in one of his letters said that every scene in a play should represent a combat.  In “Memories and Portraits,” Stevenson says:  “A good serious play must be founded on one of the passionate cruces of life, where duty and inclination come nobly to the grapple.”  Goethe, in his “William Meister” says:  “All events oppose him [the hero] and he either clears and removes every obstacle out of his path, or else becomes their victim.”  But it was the French critic, Ferdinand Brunetiere, who defined dramatic law most sharply and clearly, and reduced it to such simple terms that we may state it in this one free sentence:  “Drama is a struggle of wills and its outcome.”

In translating and expounding Brunetiere’s theory, Brander Matthews in his “A Study of the Drama” condenses the French critic’s reasoning into these illuminating paragraphs: 

“It [the drama] must have some essential principle of its own.  If this essential principle can be discovered, then we shall be in possession of the sole law of the drama, the one obligation which all writers for the stage must accept.  Now, if we examine a collection of typical plays of every kind, tragedies and melodramas, comedies and farces, we shall find that the starting point of everyone of them is the same.  Some one central character wants something; and this exercise of volition is the mainspring of the action. . . .  In every successful play, modern or ancient, we shall find this clash of contending desires, this assertion of the human will against strenuous opposition of one kind or another.

“Brunetiere made it plain that the drama must reveal the human will in action; and that the central figure in a play must know what he wants and must strive for it with incessant determination. . . .Action in the drama is thus seen to be not mere movement or external agitation; it is the expression of a will which knows itself.